Ability (Omnibus) (2 page)

Being able to fight aliens, have business meetings, or sit in the middle of a movie scene as it played around you was the pinnacle of personal entertainment. But like with the old, original Google, the company that encouraged open-source experimentation, the hacker and hobby crowds were in a race to come up with the most interesting, most resourceful, most useful ways to utilize the new technology. Brian used his H-Vis to monitor times, temperatures, mix ratios, and the local police scanners while cooking the products. Garret was still trying to figure out how to make them work around his learning induction theory.

A motion detector alert went off in his peripheral vision. Brian switched his H-Vis feed to the security cameras placed along the long driveway leading to the cook house. Torrino Cavalera and his
assistant
Jesus, no last name that Brian knew of and had never bothered to ask about, drove up the gravel road in a newer Cadillac. A 2042 model, his H-Vis confirmed. Brian checked the cooling racks to see if the thick Hi-Pex glass trays were ready to have their contents extracted, knowing they were because of the status feed in his H-Vis app but still wanting to verify by touch and sight. No matter how good technology was, he believed, it was never as accurate nor as high quality as human hands-on crafting. Garret always laughed at him for his ‘Luddite’ views, but Garret’s attempts at growing top-end hydroponic marijuana were never as good as Brian’s simple organic garden weed.

The three deadbolts on the house’s reinforced front door turned, one after another, and the two businessmen stepped in.
Scratch that
, Brian thought. O
ne businessman, one thug
. He looked at the perpetual lock of curly hair plastered to Jesus’ temple, the origination of his nickname of ‘Squiggles.’ He’d decided, after meeting Jesus the first time, that the man would probably give a Columbian necktie to anyone he heard calling him Squiggles, even the great and talented Brian Carter, master dope chef.

“Hola, Brian,” Torrino greeted him with an outstretched hand, which Brian shook after taking off his thick gloves. “Jesus says hello as well, but of course he says it silently.”

Torrino grinned at his bodyguard. Jesus gave Brian a steely-eyed look before flaring his nostrils and wandering farther into the house, but not far enough to where he couldn’t keep an untrusting eye on Brian while the two men took care of business.

“I got it up to forty-eight pounds tonight, Mr. Cavalera,” Brian boasted as Torrino ran his hands slowly over the soft edges of the Hi-Pex glassware on the racks.

“I’m impressed, Brian,” Torrino replied. “It’s a shame you are not working for us full-time.” He shook his head as if sad about it.

“You know I’d like to, but…college, friends, a social life, all that stuff.”

Brian was always careful about what he said to his clients, especially when the question of him becoming an exclusive cook for one of them came up. He assumed that he was properly diplomatic, since his face hadn’t ended up on a digital milk carton or as the top news story when they pulled bits of him from a shallow grave in the west Texas scrub.

“Speaking of money,” Torrino said, pulling out two envelopes stuffed with untraceable hundred credit notes. “Fifty thousand, and a little bonus, because you’ve increased not only the yield, but the ‘oomph’ factor as well, according to our customers.”

“Yeah, I think I found a good combo, a new
trick,
in a way,” Brian said with pride.

“Whatever it is, keep doing it. Mr. Benitez would also like to inquire as to your ability to produce Co-Q.” Torrino pronounced the name ‘coke,’ emphasizing the ‘Q’ sound. Co-Q, a relatively new street drug that combined the euphoria of cocaine with the tranquilizing power of quaaludes, had exploded in popularity quickly. The mental and emotional addiction was much stronger than the physical addiction, which made it a drug that brought in repeat customers. Often, since the effect only lasted a few hours. At fifty credits per dose, it was a long-term money maker.

Brian smiled at the gangster. “Branching out, eh?”

“We have to offer variety to coax our competitors’ customers away.” Torrino chuckled.

“Yeah, I can do that. Do you need the list of chems and such, or…?”

“Like always, we’ll bring you what you need, so you only have to worry about being the chef,” Torrino joked.

Jesus had wandered back into the ‘kitchen’ to begin loading the hard crystallized product into sealed vacuum bags. He gave Brian a weird smile at the chef joke. Brian imagined it was the same smile Jesus gave his victims before slicing their necks open or genitals off.

“As always, keep the
change
,” Torrino said, referring to the leftover ingredients from the cook. He shook Brian’s hand on his way out to the car. “Take care my friend, and be safe.”

As they pulled out, Brian reflected for a moment how he’d gotten involved cooking meth for two different Mexican drug lords, MDMA for a German gangster out of Milwaukee, and Crash for the Russians in New York City. He was always amazed by the fact that when he told all of them he was just a cook, and wouldn’t be anyone’s exclusive chef, they accepted it without too much grumbling. He had a good thing going. His small but impressive lab had been custom-built in a modified house, surrounded by eight acres of trees and dense thistle. It was completely paid for and as anonymous as one could be in the middle of Austin’s outer ring.

He cooked for a fee, a much safer business model than getting involved with any of the other operations that went on in the drug trade. Brian didn’t worry about the fact that his clients were often at war with each other, whether over customers, turf, or profits. His reputation and his neutrality were respected enough by all parties for them to agree to leave him out of their disputes. One of the agreements had been that the cook house and surrounding five miles were neutral zones, to be used by all parties. It wouldn’t be good for his business, nor theirs, to have gun battles or robberies happening the instant a pickup vehicle pulled out onto T-329. It wouldn’t do to have it go on a block or two away, nor even two miles away. If anyone wanted Brian’s services, five miles was the limit. He wanted to be able to finish college without a felony conviction or a eulogy at his funeral.

CHAPTER 2

May, 2043

Garret sat in front of his three monitors, staring at the center screen in concentration, occasionally glancing to the left or right for a second or two before returning his attention to the middle. His Game Theory project was progressing, but at a snail’s pace. He thought he had the induction technique modeled as well as he could get it, but getting the induction to be successfully retained by the brain was still a bust.

He’d spent the last week having smoke-outs with his neuroscience buddies, trying to pick their brains for the missing link. Most of them would get high and expound on chemical traits, or protein receptors, or synapse responses, completely missing the point of his goal. A few were interested to the point that they would engage in lively conversation, but it almost always turned to heated debate over some theory or fact.

During his alone time, which seemed to be less than ever these days with a full class load on top of the think-tank sessions and the partying, Garret would try to think his way through the problem. Around the problem. Under the problem. Thanks to his roommate’s ability to generate the best dope money could buy, and some that money couldn’t buy when Brian only made a small test batch, the partying had taken precedence in his schedule.

The problem, other than too much partying, was that he had finally progressed to the point where an induction session would be retained in his memory for about thirty seconds before fading in a quick decay. It had excited him at first, and it was wildly amusing to be able to speak fluent Japanese, or juggle eggs, or understand and interpret raw data from the Large Hadron Collider project in Switzerland for half a minute.

Then it became depressing. After three months of no progress, and only a month left before his project was due, Garret Stewart was filled with a paralyzing, unfamiliar fear of the possibility that he might fail to complete the project, flunk the course, and fail out of school. He loved to party, and he loved the college girls and their willingness to take their clothes off after he impressed them with his quirky experiments and his ability to score the best dope in the country. He also loved to solve problems. And money. Who didn’t like money? If he could just figure out where he was running into a wall…

Garret gave himself the luxury of fantasizing about the day he perfected his induction learning technique. He imagined only a fraction of the uses it would have to the human population, announcing them in his mind as if he were hawking them on a late night webfomercial.
Want to learn how to fix your vehicle? Induce your brain with Module 167-A5: Car Repair - Hydrogen Engines. Need to know how the enemy’s T-G5 heavy tank works once you’ve captured one? Have HQ upload the Funang T-G5 Tracked Heavy Combat Unit - Operations & Fire Control module to you via Sat-Com. Want to learn how to cook authentic Indian cuisine? There’s a module for that
.

He imagined partnering with someone like Google, who gave away their H-Vis lenses to anyone that could come up with the fifty credits. They made their fortune in the software that was sold through licensing, as well as their own virtual storefront for in-house application development. Garret would mirror their business model, charging fifty credits for mundane things like cooking or music lessons. He could probably get away with charging a couple hundred credits for more advanced learning modules such as small engine maintenance and first-aid. He knew the real money came from corporations and the government.
Especially
the military.

Corporations would pay millions to license a technique that could be flashed to their unskilled workforce to make them skilled at one particular task. Assembly line learning for assembly line production. Governments would spend hundreds of millions for any number of applications they could think of. If New New Orleans needed yet another savior after their almost yearly hurricanes, an entire segment of the population could be flashed with the proper engineering techniques to repair and rebuild the levee systems.

The school system would become almost obsolete overnight with the ability to flash an entire school year’s lesson to a student in a few minutes. The graduation rate would soar to at least 99.999%, and all but those with the most severe learning disabilities would be able to pass any subject test put before them. Garret even imagined that the technique would eventually be able to correct, or at least lessen, such disabilities.

But it was the military applications that fascinated and excited Garret more than any others. The Air Force and Navy would spend billions to develop an induction flight training system. The Marines and Army would spend billions to make better and more specialized soldiers that could perform multiple tasks, with the ability to learn new ones within a few minutes of flashing. The Pentagon would spend trillions to keep the technology out of the hands of every other government on the planet, and make trillions more from the governments the United States deemed friendly enough to license diluted versions of the technology to.

The front door to the small apartment opened, interrupting Garret from his fantasy of success. Brian and Derry walked in, Brian making a bee line to his desk, Derry doing her usual of plopping on the ancient beanbag chair that no one could remember buying or bringing into the apartment.

“What’s on the slate for tonight?” Brian asked him.

“Ah, you know. Staring at columns of data, and then some porn when you leave or go to your room,” Garret answered.

“What kind of porn?” Derry asked, giving him a sly eye.

“Straight porn, shit you wouldn’t like,” he said.

It was an old joke between them from the first time Garret had met her. He had been blasted out of his mind, and kept calling her ‘Dykee’ instead of Derry. Even after she punched him in the mouth hard enough to loosen two of his front teeth.

“Har har,” was her reply, but with a wink and a smile.

Garret and Derry had been partners for a time, but like most college relationships, it hadn’t lasted more than a couple of months. That didn’t stop them from occasionally finding each other on lonely nights, or during an Ecstasy binge. Derry and Brian had also had their time together, and also occasionally sought each other out for sexual release with no strings attached.

“I got some new stuff I cooked up. I want to give it a whirl. Dez is down with it, what about you? Want to flip the fuck out for about eight hours?” Brian asked his roommate.

“Does a robot shit bolts in a car factory?” Garret countered with a huge grin.

“I do believe that to be an accurate assessment of the situation,” Brian answered with a deadpan seriousness, dropping a small purple pill into Garret’s hand.

Garret popped it into his mouth and took a drink of whatever neon substance he was into this week. Moon Squeeze, or Radiation Milk, or some other marketable name that translated to
has a ton of caffeine and tastes like heaven
. When Derry started giggling, he shot her a look, then back to Brian. He squinted and took a closer look at Brian’s eyes. There was almost no pupil, just the green iris surrounded by white sclera with very few blood vessels. When he looked over at Derry again, her eyes were the same.