Inform. Addicts Read online

  Misaki knew that keeping this egotistical fool talking would buy her some time. She had already grasped a knife sharp shard of glass, cutting her own hand slightly in the process. Before Aldous could react, the fragment had penetrated his chin and passed clean through his tongue.

  “Bithf,” he attempted to scream in blind rage, or speechless rage in this case, as he threw Misaki through the open window.

  Her body hit the outside wall of the pyramid with a jolt, and Misaki felt almost certain she would die, as she clawed at the slippery exterior of the mega structure. Fortunately, her fingers got a firm grasp on the lining of a window not far below that of Aldous’s own room. Looking up through the eye-burning rain drops, she could see the culprit had already taken his gun back in hand, and had it trained in her direction. He wasn’t taking any chances that a slide down the pyramid and into the bay would do the trick.

  Then his head exploded. A fine spray of red, all too human, blood mingled with the mist of that evening’s storm. His body was pulled from view, and Kaori emerged shortly thereafter with an improvised bed sheet rope in haul. Misaki groaned in pain as she was pulled back to the safety of the late Aldous’s room.

  “Thanks,” Misaki managed between short breaths, as she put her hand on Kaori’s shoulder. “You saved all of us.” She nodded towards the linguist’s makeshift nursery.

  “Well, it seemed like the motherly thing to do.” Kaori laughed.

  Stratum 3: “Glutton01111001”

  With the rainy season hitting Japan’s western artificial island chain a week ahead of schedule, as automated climate engineers could have a sick sense of humor, Apsu Bell found himself` uncomfortably unprepared for the evening’s downpour. The goggle jacket that now chafed against his underarms (he regretted wearing a tank top beneath it) had also done little in way of keeping his watery surroundings at bay. He cursed himself for buying from an alleged World War III surplus store in the New American Republic. After all, the West didn’t allow that kind of clothing anyway. Some fully organic sweat shop kid from the southern territories probably put it together with plans found in the Fabric.

  Having decided to kick back in a fully autonomous maid café, Apsu had the perfect view of the Sea of Japan from his dinner table, though he chose to download Diogenes Laërtius’s Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers and sift through his Fabric tuft on subliminal advertising by way of his mind’s eye instead of admiring the watery deep. Even the musicality of the waves breaking on the seashore and the amiable shrieking of the artificially grown albatrosses floating above the docks did not register with his mind, as he had the natural sound carrying organs in his ears “muted” and the device on his cochlear nerve set to send the pleasures of his play list directly to his brain without the messiness of sound wave based hearing. “Dive Into Your Body” by TM Network accompanied Apsu in his self-generating mental movie.

  YOU HAVE ONE UNHEARD MESSAGE FROM ZACHARY HEIMIN, an automated female voice spoke inside Apsu Bell’s head. BEEP: “Hi Apsu. I tried calling you, but you didn’t answer. I’m guessing you are wrapped up in your work in the Fabric again. If you could give me a call when you get this message, that would be great…bye.” END OF MESSAGE.

  “Zach, what’s the situation…nothing too bad I hope?” Apsu called his contact.

  “No, I was picking up some herbs for my wife’s eczema,” Mr. Heimin thought back. “There’s a traffic jam on 4th, so I wanted to let you know I’ll be a few minutes late. Apparently some hacker who goes by GABA screwed with the traffic control system.”

  “I’ll see you soon.”

  Apsu turned his mind’s eye to a Fabric tuft on the potential of neuro-linguistic programming, deciding to give it the benefit of the doubt for the moment. Even if NLP turned out to be nothing more than a pseudoscience, he had the skills to market its capabilities to corporations interested in such training. When Mr. Heimin arrived, he showed no surprise at seeing his associate’s thousand-yard stare. He knew the youth well enough to recognize his commitment to searching the Fabric.

  “You know, I’m not entirely sure as to why you chose such a scenic local as The Pink Lotus Café for our meetings,” Heimin thought to the entranced individual before him.

  “Any trouble getting the goods from Seilenos?” Apsu thought back, the nanotube matrix in his brain starting to get a little warm. Carrying on a telepathic conversation, downloading a Fabric file and reading the contents of a tuft could only take place in the mind of someone with as many upgrades as this young man.

  “You gonna give me your full attention?” Heimin thought with a mental sigh.

  “Of course.” Apsu’s eyes suddenly blinked and looked like those of a present human being again. “Having a talk with my favorite drug dealer demands all of my concentration.”

  “How’s Ataraxia doing?” Zach mentally asked.

  “Mother is quite fine.” Apsu pointed at the “back bracket” that rounded his shoulders and helped support his massive head. “She didn’t approve of my recent upgrade, but she’ll get over it.”

  “This is your third surgery. Being a fourteen year old, you probably can’t receive any more AB (artificial brain) material for a while yet, right?”

  “Yes.” Apsu rolled his eyes. “The human brain supposedly doesn’t stop developing until one is about 25 years of age, though new neurons crop up all the time. Legally speaking, I can’t expand my AB further until I’ve hit that crucial age.”

  “Well, you have to admit,” Zachary thought more quickly than usual, since he saw an autonomous waitress approaching, ready to take his order, “it’s probably better for you to learn how to use the brain you were born with before you worry about artificial enhancements.”

  “I’m surprised my mother divorced you,” Apsu harshly inflected his thought. “You two would make a terrific couple of worry warts.”

  “I’ll have some Hōjicha,” Zachary spoke aloud to the android, which looked like a woman from one of Kitagawa Utamaro’s bijin-ga.

  “Wow, that seems like an expensive drink for you,” Apsu thought to his stepfather mockingly. “You must be selling cognistim to a lot more innocent young men than me?”

  “No, you’re about the only baka glued to the Fabric enough to need a stimulant 24/7,” Zachary thought back.

  “Baka huh? You know you’ve been throwing around a lot of old age phrases as of late.”

  “Article 48 of the Treaty of Chengdu means very little to me.” Zachary sighed outwardly. “Neither side of World War III was in the right, but I do wonder sometimes if the world would be a better place if NATO had lost and the Russo-Sino-Iranian Alliance had won. At least we wouldn’t be forced to learn and speak in English. It’s sapping our culture away.”

  “And yet our nation aided NATO during that time.” Apsu grinned. “No use crying over spilled milk. Power fluctuates over time, and all a person can do is find ways to come out on top.”

  “Is that what you obsess over in the Fabric – power?”

  Apsu leaned closer, as if his thoughts would come across more clearly when his head rested in closer proximity to his conversation partner. He had an ecstatic look in his eye, with the kind of gleam that came into a Gyotaku enthusiast’s own eyes when he or she caught one of the giant, mutated kinmedai near the territory of the sunken nuclear submarine HMS Boundless.

  “As you know, my specialty is subliminal advertising. I’ve downloaded a great deal of material on the means to influence peoples’ buying decisions. Have you ever heard of the United States research on a weapon called MEDUSA before the formation of the NAR?”

  “I can’t say that I have,” Zachary mentally replied, as the waitress returned with his tea.

  “MEDUSA stood for Mob Excess Deterrent Using Silent Audio, and the general idea was to take the microwave auditory effect, or Frey effect as you may have heard it called, and use it as a weapon. In theory, one could irradiate peoples’ heads with a specific frequency of microwave radiation to the point that they started ‘hea
ring’ irritating sounds inside their skulls.”

  “Lovely.” Zachary cast his stepson a disapproving glance as he took another sip of tea. “Have you found some way to use such an ethically questionable device for your own benefit?”

  “Unfortunately MEDUSA seemed to have hit a roadblock in the early days of this century,” Apsu continued. “It seems the Western powers ran into difficulties nailing down the right set of pulses for their system. After all, they didn’t want to cook the brains of the weapon’s victims. Apparently the Active Denial System (ADS), or human toaster as I like to call it, had a better reception from the military.

  However, the idea of the ‘Voice of God’ weapon gained some traction around the beginning of the World War III. NAR scientists tried out some new techniques on the prisoners in Guantánamo Bay. Since the government knew war with the Russo-Sino-Iranian Alliance was imminent, they found the idea of a device that could send ‘commands from Allah’ to the minds of Muslim soldiers a promising avenue of development.”

  “Have you been delving into the Deep Fabric?” Zach asked cautiously.

  “Where else would I get this kind of information?” Apsu rolled his eyes.

  “Well…did they succeed?”

  “The ‘Voice of God’ weapon did have partial success in the form of nanomachine dispersal techniques. Project PASITHEA found that nanomachines could be designed to form a ‘cloud’ around a group of people and alter the sound waves surrounding the enemy, producing a whisper, as if from a god. Rather than using a hallucinatory effect, the NAR found this method far more practical.

  In actual combat, the technique had mixed results. Convictions regarding religious ideologies are more heavily ingrained in the human consciousness than any other leaning – political or economic ideals for example. A Muslim cannot be convinced that Allah has suddenly relayed a message to him, desiring a retreat from the enemy or betrayal of brothers in arms, without his established dogmas getting in the way.”

  Heimin visibly squirmed in his seat. Apsu realized his stepfather just wanted to give him the drugs and get out of there, but the youth couldn’t curb his desire to share newfound knowledge. After all, what good was all his research if others did not have the chance to recognize his brilliance?

  “However, if the nanomachines produced by Project PASITHEA were used for some other purpose, say advertising, the subjects being ‘attacked’ would already have lowered defenses. If you are standing in a checkout aisle and want to buy a pack of cigarettes, a faint whisper urging you to make the purchase could make all the difference.”

  “That seems despicable.” Zachary finished his tea. “Please tell me you would never consider taking such actions yourself?”

  “You’d be surprised what is available in the Deep Fabric.” Apsu looked out the window to his left. “Spice 250 glide bombs, rent-a-terrorists, killer hybrots and now PASITHEA nanomachines. I saved enough EDs (electronic dollars) that purchasing the latter wasn’t difficult.”

  “Do you mean to tell me that you already have such a dangerous technology in your hands?” Zachary visibly quivered.

  “Are you familiar with the term apotheosis? Historically, men of great power and renown become deified after their lives end by friends and followers. One of Leibniz’s quotes that I first read in Bourdieu’s Distinction suggested that ‘we are automatons in three-quarters of what we do.’ I have observed the patterns that shape public opinion in this world, and it is my intention to control these powers until I can achieve mastery over the elites who will, in turn, control the masses for me. One should always have a goal to strive for from a young age, and fate has given me an ambitious objective. I will be deified in the annals of history.”

  “You should, um, probably think more deeply about what you’re suggesting before taking action.” Zachary slid a knapsack full of cognistim to his stepson. “What you’re experiencing is an addiction far more deadly than any neural stimulant I could ever sell you. Controls established on other peoples’ lives…it’s that kind of stuff that makes up forbidden knowledge.”

  “Nothing is forbidden.” Apsu mentally accessed his bank account and transferred the agreed number of EDs to his dealer. “In the NAR, the government moved mass opinion through the ‘infotainment’ its citizens consumed daily. Movies, news casting, literature, church services and video games all worked in tandem to prepare the general public for World War III. When it hit, no one was surprised. When I ascend into the ultimate seat of power, no one will bat an eyelash. In that day, you’ll be glad that you’re my favorite stepdad, even if you aren’t Mom’s current boy toy.”

  ***

  As much as he hated attending school, Apsu knew when to blend in with “the collective” and when to triumphantly state his individuality. Shoving his way past the morning’s exhausted students, hunched over like the dolorous workers from that Fritz Lang movie, the youth lamented that amongst the many bright minds in junior high only a few had the perspicuity to see past the daily grind and appreciate the power they could have with the abandonment of a few morals. Of course, being able to afford a nanotube matrix installation along with extensive upgrades did not hurt Apsu either.

  Horus Groop understood Apsu’s sentiments perfectly, which in part explained why they both despised each other. While Horus used thuggish tactics and an openly violent charisma to motivate a handful of bullies to help him throw around the frailer of the student body for the sake of “excess yen,” Apsu manipulated the hearts and minds of the human heard threw the school paper (a bit of a misnomer considering the periodical went totally digital over two decades before). As is often the case amongst boys going through puberty, resentment developed between the “intellectual elitist” and the “physical specimen.” If the two of them did not war over the same turf, they probably would have been the best of friends.

  “So that’s why you’ve been absent so long,” Horus called to his nemesis from amongst the throng of jostling bodies, letting the boy he held aloft by his school uniform flee to the safety of a nearby classroom. “You had another surgery, huh? As if you didn’t look ugly enough already.”

  He who knows when he can fight and when he cannot, will be victorious,[1] Apsu thought to himself. Remaining silent, he proceeded to his science class.

  Takeru Takagi had provided Apsu with more knowledge of physics than the youth had ever hoped to obtain, but the two of them actually got along quite well. It was because of their close relationship that Apsu chose to carefully cover his tracks when accessing the Fabric during class time, for the sake of Mr. Takagi’s feelings. The Servian Fire Wall used by educational institutions worldwide possessed at least sixteen exploitable holes in its defenses. Using a Helepolis virus, he quickly delved into a useful session of research on television’s ability to hypnotize viewers into an alpha state and also the ways in which memes shape public opinion.

  Just as he finished deleting the beads that connected his search through the various tufts in the Fabric, Apsu received a mental message from his instructor asking him to pay attention to the holographic film and to see him after class. The youth reluctantly watched the documentary detailing the relationship between physics and the various methods, such as LIDAR sensors, used by archaeologists to investigate and create a 3D map of the ruins of the collapsed geofront at Sapporo. While he certainly found it a more entertaining way to spend physics class than pouring over the gratuitous volumes he mentally downloaded for the cost of the school system’s inflated prices, Apsu found little in the way of knowledge useful for controlling the general public, or GP as he liked to call them, in this presentation. Unless…I can find a way to disconnect people from their history as a form of social control, he thought to himself.

  After his fellow students, including his girlfriend Eriko, had left the room, Apsu approached Mr. Takagi with the best feigned humility he could manage, though the squeaking of his ill-fitting uwabaki on the polished floor gave an air of ridiculousness to the boy.

  “Your studies h
ave been slacking as of late,” Mr. Takagi said with clear disappointment in his taffeta smooth voice. “For someone who has had so many brain modifications, you pay very little attention to what I’m trying to teach you. Now I know physics isn’t your favorite subject, but the Global Standardized Education Act demands that you have to learn this material at some point. If you don’t pass the HRTs, you’ll never get into a university, and I don’t want that to happen to you.”

  Mr. Takagi adjusted his decades old glasses, a gesture that Apsu had learned to interpret as a sign of agitation. Both of them wished to avoid such conversations as this one.

  “I understand your concern,” Apsu groaned.

  “Here’s a quote I’ve been carrying around with me lately.” Takagi placed a rolled up piece of archaic, cellulose based paper in Apsu’s hands. “I think someone with a thirst for knowledge will appreciate it.”

  The boy thanked him and left without reading the contents of his small gift.

  ***

  A light classical theme played over the speakers in the classroom during lunch, though Apsu paid little heed to it. The holographic projector nearest his table played NHK World’s news on the “Crisis in Angola.”

  “NAR troops invaded Lubango this morning and formally declared martial law. Protesters continue to assert that the assassination of the late President of Angola, Abdi Biobaku, had all the makings of the NAR’s imperialistic policies. The New American Republic put him in power in the first place, and rioters are confident they removed him when he refused to permit the establishment of a naval training base along Coatinha beach. Prime Minister Kiyomi Miyamoto has yet to make a statement on the New American Republic’s policies in Africa.

  In other news, studies show that artificial brain implants increase the chances of having an aneurysm by fourteen percent. Wizen Incorporated, the world’s largest AB manufacturer has accused researchers Bolin Zhū and Ruka Ito of fraudulence; however –”