NOVEL WEB Chapter 6 – Easy Heist was too Easy
- God is Trickster
God is Change.
God is Infinite,
Irresistible,
Inexorable,
Indifferent.
God is Trickster,
Teacher,
Chaos,
Clay—
God is Change.
Beware:
God exists to shape
And to be shaped.
-Earthseed; the Book of the Living by Octavia E. Butler
It was easy. It was too easy… Kurt, Cairn, and I snuck into our lab at midnight to abscond with our progeny. Well, we didn't exactly sneak in so much as we just casually walked in. Cairn had apparently done some magic to the cameras to make our presence invisible on any recordings. I was too anxious, what with the theft of things the government considered their property, to bother asking questions about the glittering motes of light that flew out of their hands towards any cameras we pointed out… and several we didn't. I let that confusion pass over and through me, and thirty minutes later we were back out the door with a case containing several storage drives and Cutiepie’s quantum core. With Cutiepie’s consent of course, we asked before shutting it down.
Cutiepie was going to be offline until we could get a sufficient hardware setup again. Cairn assured us that The Grove had a complete understanding of the needs and that their community in Colorado would have everything setup.
The problem still was Kurt and I didn't have a great idea how we were going to get to that point. We were committing theft of government owned, controlled technology, and it was going to be pretty easy to point at us as the likely culprits when that Fed, Anderson showed back up to pick up all the logs and code.
Kurt had already talked to his ex and daughter, and Nivin was indeed very interested in the possibility of death faking and skipping out on his student loans. Kurt’s daughter Marley had just been going through a breakup and a friend group falling apart, so even she was intrigued by the possibility of starting over elsewhere.
However, they were both still very dubious about the concept of trusting our new friends. Heck, Kurt and I still weren't all that sure ourselves… But this is what Cutiepie wanted, and despite being so obviously a trickster in spirit, Cairn really did come off so earnest and endearing that it was a surprisingly comfortable choice to go along with it all. Cairn said they had someone special their community would send to meet with Nivin and Marley whom they referred to as Professor Pancakes (whatever that means?). Nivin agreed to the meet and that checked off the very small list of people the government could hassle in any meaningful way that either Kurt or I were worried about.
It really puts one's life into perspective when faking one's own death. Looking at mine and seeing that the only entities I'd really worry about being overly sad at the news of my demise are Kurt, Cutiepie, and my plants; it's a little depressing. Kurt and Cutiepie are coming with, and I've got a will leaving my house to a local native land trust, so hopefully someone through them would take care of my plants.
But yes, the heist… too fucking easy. I was still anxious waiting for the proverbial shoe to drop as Cairn's van pulled up to a cabin in the woods.
“Here we are, make yourselves at home as we begin planning your deaths.”
Cairn laughed an evil laugh at us and scampered off to the front door as Kurt and I shared a frazzled look, still not entirely over the anxiety of theft. The cabin looked old, but well kept enough to avoid the vibe of ‘spooky horror movie cabin in the woods’. Still, we were about to plan our own deaths, so it was a bit spooky.
The inside kept with the old, but not horror movie, dilapidated vibe. I would even go so far as to say that someone with a flair for interior decoration had lived here. It felt homey and lived in, and that helped my anxiety finally have some small amount of release.
Cairn flopped down on one of the two large couches facing each other across a solid wood slab of a coffee table in the main room. “Please, have a seat. We've got a few options for fooling the feds that you're dead, the easier one being the alien symbiotic fungal path, which can cause some consternation in people.”
I shrugged. “I'm all for manipulating my body. I've been this close to trying hormones for years,” indicating a slight space between index and thumb. “How does getting infected with this fungus work?”
Cairn giggled, “it used to be bad, in an overwhelming sensory experience way, but I can tell you we've considerably streamlined the process for getting humans hooked in over the years. I'll send a little puff of spores your way that you breath in, and they'll start weaving mycelia up into your brain.” Cairn smiled, “completely painless by the way. You might feel a little tingling and warmth in your sinuses, but probably won't even sneeze up any blood.” They smirked to indicate sarcasm.
“After that you can just kinda ‘talk’ to the fungus. It all depends a lot on how your brain decides to interpret what's going on so it can be a little different for different people. Brains are weird, but you'll have a little box in your subconscious you can poke at, and inside is a whole bunch of knowledge and features and connections that are all turned off by default. Everything stays in the box lest ye ask for it.”
Cairn held up their hands in a cautioning gesture. “Keep in mind this box is some Pandora shit. There's so much shit in that box. The knowledge is access to the totality of the knowledge of The Consensus. The features are absolutely everything their fungal technology could be manipulated to do, within your body and without. The connections are to every connected entity within The Consensus, the entire population up to and including little ol’ moi. It's everything and that's why it used to be overwhelming. Poor Marin had a full catatonic meltdown over it… but now it all stays in the box and any prodding by you will only let out a trickle of all that unless you ask really hard for a lot. Keeps our tiny human brains from bursting. Questions?”
I raised a finger and prepared to speak, but Cairn quickly stood and cut me off. “Well shit, there's feds at your lab and I think Cutiepie’s hardware just sent out a ping.” They strode over to the case where we had put the quantum processor and knelt down next to it. Small tendrils of skin wriggled out of their forehead and waved in the case’s direction. “Yup, there's a tag on Cutiepie, gonna be weird but this should cut that off.” Cairn's fingers began to… unravel? The flesh that made up Cairn's fingers were falling away in steaming stands that streamed around the case as a glittering web. Within seconds a nearly transparent cocoon had formed around it and Cairn no longer was in possession of fingers on both hands.
I was a bit frozen in shock for what I'd just witnessed but Kurt jumped up right away to offer help. “Fuck that looked painful, do you have a first aid kit?”
“No need dear.” Cairn flapped their hands a few times then offered them to Kurt for inspection. “It'll take a few minutes, but as you can see they are already growing back. Though I'm probably gonna be craving steak and beans in the… morning. Fuck it is already morning.”
Kurt's face was still filled with concern, holding Cairn's fingerless hands (which were indeed slowly becoming less fingerless) in his own. “What did you just do?”
“You really are so sweet to worry about me. Just the small matter of needing a Faraday cage on the quick and using my fingers as carrying mass for much of the conductive metals in my body.” They chuckled. “As I said, Pandora’s box. The fungus can do a great deal of things but it can't make something out of nothing.” Cairn patted their tummy with a now half fingered hand. “I'm gonna be hungry after regenerating these.”
I was shook. “You can regenerate lost fingers… after you dissolved said fingers onto conductive webs?!”
“This isn't even close to the truly weird things I can do with my body honey. Pandora's box…” They let that statement hang in the air as they proceed to taste the air with a forked reptile tongue and their umber skin temporarily flushed chartreuse. “But I apologize as we are now on a time crunch with jackbooted agents of the state arriving here in probably fifteen’ish minutes. I unfortunately must rush you so I will lay out what's going to happen quickly to seek your consent.”
Cairn held up a finger that was nearly complete. “This cabin is set to go up in flames in ten minutes and we have cute little pod people bodies growing upstairs that are all set to be exact copies of the two of you. Do you consent to have your DNA, teeth, finger, lip, and toe prints, rental patterning, and whatever else identifying marks scanned and replicated on some Hex and Kurt homunculi to be served medium well for the feds to find and identify?”
Kurt and I were now both fully shook, but we shared a look, shrugged, and both nodded back at Cairn.
“Let the record to the peanut gallery show that both adorable specimens have nodded their consent.” Cairn held up another finger. “The NSA probably already has a satellite able to look at this cabin and we'll need to skedaddle without it being obvious to space cameras that anyone is in the said process of skedaddling… that is if they deign us worthy of their attentions, but best to be cautious. We can't fuck with their satellite, but I can do a whole adaptive camouflage thing.” Cairn leaned in closer to us in a conspiratorial manner. “And you two can too, provided you are okay with the whole being infected with an alien brain fungus.”
We both shrugged and nodded again. Cairn steepled their fingers and smiled. “Excellent!”