a wheezing sigh of pneumatically driven gases. The boy reeked of a familiar
oil and hot battery smell that the old man had not noticed in years.
The veteran locked eyes with the small boy and his armored body began
to quake. He unconsciously fingered the scars on his face with one hand as
he lifted his boot from the old man’s back.
The old man rolled over and grunted, “Run, boy!”
But the boy did not run.
“What’s this?” asked the younger officer, unfazed. “Your Dutch wife?”
The officer popped his impact baton to full length and stood towering over
the boy. He leaned down and looked directly into the boy’s eye cameras.
“Hey there, toaster oven,” said the officer quietly. “Think you’re human?”
These words confused the boy, who said nothing.
“Watch out!” came a strangled cry from the veteran. He stood with his knees
bent and his left palm extended defensively. His other elbow jutted out awkwardly as he fumbled for his gun. “That is unspecked hardware!” he shouted hoarsely.
“Could be anything. Could be military grade. Back away from it!”
The younger officer looked at the veteran uncertainly.
The boy took a hesitant step forward. “What did you say to me?” he
asked. His voice was the low, tortured croak of a rusty gate. He reached for
the officer with a trembling, three-fingered hand. “Hey,” he said.
The officer turned and instinctively swung his impact baton. It thumped
against the boy’s chest and discharged like a crack of lightning. The blow
charred the boy’s tee shirt and tore a chunk out of his polyurethane chest-
piece, revealing a metal ribcage frame riddled with slots for hardware and
housing a large, warm, rectangular battery. The boy sat heavily on the
ground, puzzled.
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THE NOSTALGIST
Looking around in a daze, he saw that the old man was horrified. The boy
mustered a servo-driven smile that pulled open a yawning hole in his cheek. The old man took a shuddering breath and buried his face in the crook of his elbow.
And the boy suddenly understood.
He looked down at his mangled body. A single vertiginous bit of
information lurched through his consciousness and upended all knowledge
and memory: Not a boy. He remembered the frightened looks of the
slidewalk pedestrians. He remembered long hours spent playing cards with
the old man. And finally he came to remember the photograph of the blond
boy that hung on a plastic hook near the door of the gonfab. At this memory,
the boy felt deeply ashamed.
No, no, no, no. I cannot think of these things, he told himself. I must be calm and brave now.
The boy rose unsteadily to his feet and adopted a frozen stance. Standing
perfectly still removed uncertainty. It made mentals in physical space
simpler, more accurate, and much, much faster. The old man had taught
the boy how to do this, and they had practiced it together many times.
Ignoring the commands of his veteran partner, the young officer swung
his impact baton again. The sparking cudgel followed a simple, visible
trajectory. The boy watched a blue rotational vector emerge from the man’s
actuated hip, and neatly stepped around his stationary leg. The officer
realized what had happened, but it was too late: the boy already stood
behind him. The man’s hair smells like cigarettes, thought the boy; and then he shoved hard between the officer’s shoulder blades.
The officer pitched forward lightly, but the LEEX resisted and jerked
reflexively backward to maintain its balance. The force of this recoil
snapped the officer’s spine somewhere in his lower back. Sickeningly, the
actuated legs walked away, dragging the unconscious top half of the officer
behind them, his limp hands scraping furrows in the dirt.
The boy heard a whimpering noise and saw the veteran standing with his
gun drawn. A line visible only to the boy extended from the veteran’s right
eye, along the barrel of the pistol, and to a spot on the boy’s chest over his
pneumatic heart.
Carefully, the boy rotated sideways to minimize the surface area of his
body available to the veteran’s weapon. Calm and brave.
369
DANIEL H. WILSON
A pull trajectory on the veteran’s trigger finger announced an incoming
bullet. Motors squealed and the boy’s body violently jerked a precise distance
in space. The bullet passed by harmlessly, following its predicted trajectory. An echoing blast resounded from the blank-walled buildings. The veteran stood
for a moment, clutched his sweating face with his free hand, turned, and fled.
“Grandpa!” said the boy, and rushed over to help.
But the old man would not look at him or take his hand; his face was filled
with disgust and fear and desperation. Blindly, the old man shoved the boy
away and began scrabbling in his pockets, trying frantically to put his new
Eyes™ and Ears™ back on. The boy tried to speak, but stopped when he heard
his own coarse noise. Uncertain, he reached out, as if to touch the old man on
the shoulder, but did not. After a few long seconds, the boy turned and hobbled away, alone.
The old man grasped the cool, black handrail of the slidewalk with his right
hand. He curled his left hand under his chin, pulling his woolen coat tight.
Finally, he limped to the decelerator strip and stepped off. He had to pause
and breathe slowly three times before he reached the house.
Inside the dim gonfab, he hung his coat on a transparent plastic hook. He
wet his rough hands from a suspended water bag and placed cool palms over
his weathered face.
Without opening his Eyes™, he said “You may come out.”
Metal rings supporting a curtained partition screeched apart and the boy
emerged into a shaft of yellow dome light. The ragged wound in his cosmetic
chest carapace gaped obscenely. His dilated mechanical irises audibly
spiraled down to the size of two pinpricks, and the muted light illuminated
a few blond hairs clinging anemone-like to his scalded plastic scalp. He was
clutching the photograph of the blond boy and crying and had been for
some time, but there was no sign of this on his crudely sculpted face.
The old man saw the photograph.
“I am sorry,” he said, and embraced the boy. He felt an electrical actuator
poking rudely through the child’s tee shirt, like a compound fracture.
“Please,” he whispered. “I will make things the way they were before.”
But the boy shook his head. He looked up into the old man’s watery blue
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THE NOSTALGIST
Eyes™. The room was silent except for the whirring of a fan. Then, very
deliberately, the boy slid the glasses from the old man’s face, leaving the Ears™.
The old man looked at the small, damaged machine with tired eyes full of
love and sadness. When the thing spoke, the shocking hole opened in its
cheek again and the old man heard the clear, piping voice of a long-dead
little boy.
“I love you, Grandpa,” it said.
And these words were as true as sunlight.
With deft fingers, the boy-thing reached up and pressed a button at the
base of its own knobbed metal spine. There was a win
ding-down noise as all
the day’s realization and shame and understanding faded away into
nothingness.
The boy blinked slowly and his hands settled down to his sides. He could
not remember arriving, and he looked around in wonder. The gonfab was
silent. The boy saw that he was holding a photograph of himself. And then
the boy noticed the old man.
“Grandpa?” asked the boy, very concerned. “Have you been crying?”
The old man did not answer. Instead, he closed his eyes and turned away.
371
LIFE IN THE ANTHROPOCENE
By Paul Di Filippo
This story is indebted to Gaia Vince and her article in
New Scientist , “Surviving in a Warmer World.”
1. SOLAR GIRDLE EMERGENCY
Aurobindo Bandjalang got the emergency twing through his vib on the
morning of August 8, 2121, while still at home in his expansive bachelor’s
digs. At 1LDK, his living space was three times larger than most unmarried
individuals enjoyed, but his high-status job as a Power Jockey for New
Perthpatna earned him extra perks.
While a short-lived infinitesimal flock of beard clippers grazed his face,
A.B. had been showering and vibbing the weather feed for Reboot City
Twelve: the more formal name for New Perthpatna.
Sharing his shower stall but untouched by the water, beautiful weather idol
Midori Mimosa delivered the feed.
“Sunrise occurred this morning at three-oh-two A.M. Max temp projected to
be a comfortable, shirtsleeves thirty degrees by noon. Sunset at ten-twenty-
nine P.M. this evening. Cee-oh-two at four-hundred-and-fifty parts per million, a significant drop from levels at this time last year. Good work, Rebooters!”
The new tweet/twinge/ping interrupted both the weather and A.B.’s
ablutions. His vision greyed out for a few milliseconds as if a sheet of smoked glass had been slid in front of his MEMS contacts, and both his left palm and
the sole of his left foot itched: Attention Demand 5.
A.B.’s boss, Jeetu Kissoon, replaced Midori Mimosa under the sparsely
downfalling water: a dismaying and disinvigorating substitution. But A.B.’s
virt-in-body operating system allowed for no squelching of twings tagged
AD4 and up. Departmental policy.
Kissoon grinned and said, “Scrub faster, A.B. We need you here yesterday.
I’ve got news of face-to-face magnitude.”
“What’s the basic quench?”
“Power transmission from the French farms is down by one percent. Sat
photos show some kind of strange dust accumulation on a portion of the
PAUL DI FILIPPO
collectors. The on-site kybes can’t respond to the stuff with any positive
remediation. Where’s it from, why now, and how do we stop it? We’ve got to
send a human team down there, and you’re heading it.”
Busy listening intently to the bad news, A.B. had neglected to rinse properly.
Now the water from the low-flow showerhead ceased, its legally mandated
interval over. He’d get no more from that particular spigot till the evening.
Kissoon disappeared from A.B.’s augmented reality, chuckling.
A.B. cursed with mild vehemence and stepped out of the stall. He had to
use a sponge at the sink to finish rinsing, and then he had no sink water left
for brushing his teeth. Such a hygienic practice was extremely old-fashioned,
given self-replenishing colonies of germ-policing mouth microbes, but A.B.
relished the fresh taste of toothpaste and the sense of righteous manual self-
improvement. Something of a twentieth-century recreationist, Aurobindo.
But not this morning.
Outside A.B.’s 1LDK: his home corridor, part of a well-planned, spacious,
senses-delighting labyrinth featuring several public spaces, constituting the
one-hundred-and-fiftieth floor of his urbmon.
His urbmon, affectionately dubbed “The Big Stink”: one of over a hundred
colossal, densely situated high-rise habitats that amalgamated into New
Perthpatna.
New Perthpatna: one of over a hundred such Reboot Cities sited across the
habitable zone of Earth, about twenty-five percent of the planet’s landmass,
collectively home to nine billion souls.
A.B. immediately ran into one of those half-million souls of the Big Stink:
Zulqamain Safranski.
Zulqamain Safranski was the last person A.B. wanted to see.
Six months ago, A.B. had logged an ASBO against the man.
Safranski was a parkour. Harmless hobby—if conducted in the approved
sports areas of the urbmon. But Safranski blithely parkour’d his ass all over
the common spaces, often bumping into or startling people as he ricocheted
from ledge to bench. After a bruising encounter with the aggressive urban
bounder, A.B. had filed his protest, attaching AD tags to already filed but
overlooked video footage of the offenses. Not altogether improbably, A.B.’s
complaint had been the one to tip the scales against Safranski, sending him
via police trundlebug to the nearest Sin Bin, for a punitively educational stay.
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LIFE IN THE ANTHROPOCENE
But now, all too undeniably, Safranski was back in New Perthpatna, and
instantly in A.B.’s chance-met (?) face.
The buff, choleric, but laughably diminutive fellow glared at A.B., then
said, spraying spittle upward, “You just better watch your ass night and day,
Bang-a-gong, or you might find yourself doing a lâché from the roof without really meaning to.”
A.B. tapped his ear and, implicity, his implanted vib audio pickup. “Threats
go from your lips to the ears of the wrathful Ekh Dagina—and to the ASBO
Squad as well.”
Safranski glared with wild-eyed malice at A.B., then stalked off, his planar
butt muscles, outlined beneath the tight fabric of his mango-colored plugsuit,
somehow conveying further ire by their natural contortions.
A.B. smiled. Amazing how often people still forgot the panopticon nature
of life nowadays, even after a century of increasing immersion in and
extension of null-privacy. Familiarity bred forgetfulness. But it was best to
always recall, at least subliminally, that everyone heard and saw everything
equally these days. Just part of the Reboot Charter, allowing a society to
function in which people could feel universally violated, universally
empowered.
At the elevator banks closest to home, A.B. rode up to the two-hundred-
and-first floor, home to the assigned space for the urbmon’s Power
Administration Corps. Past the big active mural depicting drowned Perth,
fishes swimming round the BHP Tower. Tags in the air led him to the workpod
that Jeetu Kissoon had chosen for the time being.
Kissoon looked good for ninety-seven years old: he could have passed for
A.B.’s slightly older brother, but not his father. Coffee-bean skin, snowy
temples, laugh lines cut deep, only slightly counterbalanced by somber eyes.
When Kissoon had been born, all the old cities still existed, and many,
many animals other than goats and chickens flourished. Kissoon had seen
the cities abandoned, and the Big Biota Crash, as well as the whole Reboot.
Hard for young A.B. to conceive. The man was a walking history lesson. A.B.
tried to ho
nor that.
But Kissoon’s next actions soon evoked a yawp of disrespectful protest from
the younger man.
“Here are the two other Jocks I’ve assigned to accompany you.”
375
PAUL DI FILIPPO
Interactive dossiers hung before A.B.’s gaze. He two-fingered through them
swiftly, growing more stunned by the second. Finally he burst out: “You’re
giving me a furry and a keek as helpers?”
“Tigerishka and Gershon Thales. They’re the best available. Live with
them, and fix this glitch.”
Kissoon stabbed A.B. with a piercing stare, and A.B. realized this meatspace
proximity had been demanded precisely to convey the intensity of Kissoon’s
next words.
“Without power, we’re doomed.”
2. 45TH PARALLEL BLUES
Jet-assisted flight was globally interdicted. Not enough resources left to support regular commercial or recreational aviation. No military anywhere with a need
to muster its own air force. Jet engines too harmful to a stressed atmosphere.
And besides, why travel?
Everywhere was the same. Vib served fine for most needs.
The habitable zone of Earth consisted of those lands—both historically
familiar and newly disclosed from beneath vanished icepack—above the 45th
parallel north, and below the 45th parallel south. The rest of the Earth’s
landmass had been desertified or drowned: sand or surf.
The immemorial ecosystems of the remaining climactically tolerable
territories had been devastated by Greenhouse change, then, ultimately and
purposefully, wiped clean. Die-offs, migratory invaders, a fast-forward churn
culminating in an engineered ecosphere. The new conditions supported no
animals larger than mice, and only a monoculture of GM plants.
Giant aggressive hissing cockroaches, of course, still thrived.
A portion of humanity’s reduced domain hosted forests specially designed
for maximum carbon uptake and sequestration. These fast-growing, long-
lived hybrid trees blended the genomes of eucalyptus, loblolly pine, and
poplar, and had been dubbed “eulollypops.”
The bulk of the rest of the land was devoted to the crops necessary and
sufficient to feed nine billion people: mainly quinoa, kale, and soy, fertilized by human wastes. Sugarbeet plantations provided feedstock for bio-polymer
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