Ability (Omnibus) (7 page)

“What’s going to happen to the world when you start putting this out there? Do you have a plan for that? Are you just going to upload the modules to YouTube and have Brian distribute as much dope as he can make? Don’t you think Brian’s ‘friends’ will want to try to make some money from it? Don’t you think when they find out, they are going to want you two dipshits to work for them and only them, making them modules that deal with things like ‘how to steal more money,’ or ‘how to dispose of bodies,’ or whatever the mafia does these days?

“The government? You think they aren’t going to hear about your little business and get involved? You think you are going to make royalties and get rich when they learn your little trip and induction routine can instantly teach people anything they want to learn that a module has been made about? You should make a module that teaches what happens when they make you disappear and force you to work in some underground lab for the rest of your life, or until you are no longer useful because they’ve tortured the drug formula from Brian, and your induction code from you,” she finished with disgust.

After staring them down for at least a minute, she added, “What about all the religious crazies that will use this to their advantage? Remember what fundamentalist religions have already done for us.”

Brian and Garret both knew she was talking about Tel Aviv, and the smoking, radioactive crater that was a result of religion gone too far into the extreme. And the eight capitals of the largest, Islamic-dominated countries that paid the price of revenge for it.

CHAPTER 6

December, 2043

Derry didn’t speak to either of them for almost three weeks. She wouldn’t return their calls, their texts, or their messages. Brian missed her company the most. He’d ramped up production for his clients to six nights per week to meet their increasing demand, and he missed the feel of her soft skin under the covers of his bed. Garret missed her because as much as he derided her opinions and sniped at her with little comments and criticisms, he was in love with her. It was a tricky situation, compounded by her aloofness when it came to sexual partners and by the fact that his best friend, roommate, and partner was in love with her as well.

Within a week, they attempted to tell her that they’d had a serious sit-down and hashed out a plan. Brian would keep working on his refinement of the Receiver drug, while Garret would build new induction modules and convert current ones to the H-Vis format. Two weeks after she had erupted at them, they’d had another breakthrough. Switching to the H-Vis format shortened the module loop time to fifteen minutes for complex inductions. More importantly, some of the more pronounced psychotropic effects of Receiver could be toned down without affecting the drug’s ability to open the mind to accept the inductions.

After the third week, Derry allowed them to apologize for being stubborn, overstimulated, greedy, altruistic half-wits. When Brian filled her in on their progress, her first question was to ask if they’d formed a plan. Garret admitted they hadn’t actually progressed that far yet, brushing the concern away quickly with a wave of his hand. His words soon ran together in excitement as he fleshed out the details of some of their advances that Brian had briefly touched on. She became enraged, demanding that she be put in charge of
The Plan
while they worked on bringing the two components together in an efficient, permanent package.

The Plan would detail how they were going to effectively distribute the drug and the learning modules when everything was in place. The Plan would determine when Receiver was in its final revision, and what kinds and how many of the induction modules would be made. The three of them would also attempt to figure out the logistics of mass saturation, along with the necessary safeguard protocols to protect them from the blowback that was sure to come, and work that necessary contingency into The Plan.

Derry was sure, and finally convinced the two boys, that the instant they put the video on YouTube, it would get shut down. It might last as long as an hour, she argued, or it might only last ten seconds before being wiped. The Plan had to consider this and utilize as many distribution channels as possible. Their planning, she continued, must be based around the assumption that government suits or corporate thugs definitely
would
trace it all back to them. They needed to have a fail-safe in place to make sure that when such an eventuality happened, the recipe and the modules would begin quietly seeding all over the world, from thousands of random devices, denying any single agency sole possession of either component.

Everyone on the planet knew, or at least believed, that once something got on the net, it was impossible to eradicate. It was true, for the most part, but only if the item in question had been seeded to enough users across the world to guarantee that it would live on through multiple eradication attempts by governments, security outfits, and service providers. If seeded long enough for it to permeate every corner of the internet, not even propaganda campaigns warning of the dangers to life or liberty, if caught with whatever song, video, document, or program the powers that be didn’t want law-abiding citizens to know about, could slow its momentum. If they only loaded it to YouTube and it only amassed a thousand views, it was unlikely to propagate very far before the authorities showed up to confiscate every user’s personal computer and tablet. Including the ones in Brian and Garret’s apartment.

However, if they uploaded it to YouTube, U-Vid, VidCasa, and the dozens of other video sharing networks, along with seeding it on N-Torrent networks, the FireFly sharing networks that were all the rage with teenagers, and even the old Usenet newsgroups for the
geriatric
crowd, there was a ninety-nine percent chance that it would hit critical saturation stage within twenty-four hours. All they needed was one hour of seeding before it would be too late for authorities, or anyone else on the planet, to stop its proliferation.

The broken cog in the machine was the Receiver drug. It would take but a few taps of a tablet or keystrokes on a computer to send the induction modules on their way to devices all over the planet. Delivering a drug that was unknown to everyone but the three of them, manufactured with tightly-restricted chemicals, was the insurmountable problem. Brian left that to Derry to figure out. When she asked him how many doses he could produce in a typical month, she wasn’t impressed with the answer of “about five hundred…maybe.”

“There has to be a way to make more than that,” she complained.

“If I could get unlimited access to Lyborsol, Hydrathanol, and some disulfomine without, you know, alerting authorities, I could probably make hundreds of thousands per month,” Brian sighed.

“Is there no way to substitute components from something cheaper or more easily available?” she asked.

“I doubt there is a sub for Lyborsol, but the other stuff I could extract from commercially available substances that contain it. The Hydrathanol might be a bit of an issue, as it is sort of new, and fairly toxic. In a real lab, I could make it without too much trouble. But my own little ‘lab’ at the house isn’t set up for manufacturing raw chemicals or creating complex, large-scale reactions.” He shrugged. “It will be a bit of work to get it, but nothing impossible. The problem though is the difference between pocket meth and pure meth.”

“Pocket meth?” she asked, unfamiliar with the term as well as most of the non-hallucinogenic street drugs.

Cocaine, meth, Crash, none of that appealed to Derry. She liked her acid trips and bean rolls…and real mushrooms whenever she could actually find that rarity. Texas ranchers didn’t look too kindly on high school and college kids picking through their pastures for ‘dope,’ and it wasn’t worth the hassle or the expense of trying to grow them, even if an earthen basement and all of the right equipment were available.

“Yeah, pocket meth is this crap you can make in your own bathroom or kitchen. You take some really nasty ingredients that you can buy at the drug store and cleaning supply places, a few pill packs of pseudoephedrine from Canada or Mexico, and ‘cook’ it all up in about fifteen minutes with a thick-walled glass container. Except you don’t really cook it, since it doesn’t require heat. The chemical reaction from the mix does all the cooking. If you do it wrong, you’ll die when you smoke or shoot it, if you aren’t already dead from the fumes or chemical burns when it explodes in your face while mixing it.

“My shit, on the other hand, is purified, extremely potent, and pharmaceutical-grade. Except the drug companies don’t make the stuff I make. And even if they did for legit medical reasons, because of the constant practice and refinement I’ve had, I doubt they’d make it as pure or as strong as mine. I’m sure they eventually would, with their thousands of R&D engineers and unlimited funds for lab time, chemicals, whatever.

“The point is, I can’t reproduce Lyborsol, and it’s the main factor in how Receiver unlocks the memory areas of the hippocampus and temporal lobe. I’ve tried making batches without the Lyborsol, but the induction doesn’t stick, and the trip itself is very, very unpleasant. If I had a pro lab and some assistants, I could probably synthesize it. I’m too far into the revisions of the drug to back all the way out and try to get this one specific effect from some other compound. Again…a lab and assistants, and this wouldn’t be a problem.” Brian looked down at his feet.

“Okay. We’ll figure something out, I’m sure.” She put down the tablet that she’d been typing notes into.

“That’s it? Just ‘okay?’”

“What else can I do, Brian? You’re the chemist. The ‘cooker.’ I’m a stupid Lit major that always gets ranked out when I try to talk about science with you or Garret.”

“You aren’t stupid, Derry,” he said. He moved out of his computer chair and into the beanbag chair with her. “You were the one who got us to stop being stupid. You were…
are
the voice of reason. What we are going to do is probably destructive. Is it a good idea to maybe give humanity a big evolutionary push without any of the small, sometimes tedious steps between major jumps in technology or biology?”

“You know how I feel about that,” she said. “But it’s going to happen one way or another. I’m just in it to make sure we try and do it with the least amount of heartache.”

“What if you can’t?” he asked, wrapping an arm around her.

“I can at least say I tried.”

*****

February, 2044

“Check this out,” Garret said the instant Brian walked in the door.

“Let me get my ass in the door, man.” Brian laughed. “I need a beer. And a bowl.”

“Fuck that, man. Sit your ass down and check this out,” Garret demanded, handing Brian the pipe when he sat down in the computer chair.

“What am I supposed to be checking out?” Brian asked through a cloud of smoke.

“Just check this out. What language do you want to learn the most?”

“Klingon?” Brian joked. Garret didn’t crack a smile. “Okay. Uh…how about Blackfoot or Cherokee, Native American?”

“Har har,” Garret said. “Be serious, dammit. This is going to blow your jock off.”

“All right. How about Japanese?”

“What’s with you and Japanese?” Garret asked with a frown. He’d been hoping Brian would say Russian or Sanskrit. Something exotic. Half the world spoke Japanese these days.

“Fine. What should I learn to speak? Just pick something. You’re harshing my buzz.”

Garret loaded up the Japanese Language H-Vis module, set it to sync with Brian’s H-Vis contacts, gave Brian a smile, and hit Play. Brian’s body tensed, jerked in his seat for three seconds, then relaxed. After thirty seconds, he looked up at Garret, wondering if the module had crashed before finishing. Garret gave him a toothy grin and motioned the command for the video on the left monitor to play. He patted Brian on the head, then walked into the kitchen to make a sandwich.

Garret was leaning against the counter in the tiny kitchen, eating his peanut butter and banana sandwich, a favorite from the beginning of his venture into solid foods at age two, when Brian rounded the half-wall divider of the living room.

“Holy shit!” Brian said. “I just watched a half hour of Tokyo-2 News and understood everything. Even context. I could even read the text! I can still read the text!”

“I know,” Garret said, chewing on a mouthful of sandwich.

“Tell me what you did. How long does it last without the Receiver? Have you tried it with Receiver?”

Brian fired off the questions to him with growing excitement. In all of their previous experiments, retaining an induction without the drug had been a struggle at best. Garret had extended the retention period up to seven minutes without the chemical enhancement, but that had required looping the module for at least thirty minutes.

“Calm down, old man,” Garret said, chewing slowly on purpose. He was back to torturing Brian in ways that only good friends could get away with.

Brian growled at him and tried to snatch the sandwich away, but Garret anticipated it and deftly threw up a fancy Taekwondo block with his other arm. He finished off the sandwich and took a swig of homebrew beer that their neighbors had given them, a present for procuring some free weed and a couple of pirated holos.

“So…” Garret smiled. “I figured out something interesting. I found that it imprints into the brain’s memory with increased efficiency if I strobe the image stream and data stream at certain frequencies. Not speed up or down how fast the images and data display, but actually strobe them on-off. Like one second they are on the holo, the next they are gone. And so on. It really messes with your eyes, especially through H-Vis, but as you just found out, it’s quite effective.” He beamed with exaggerated pride.