production.
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And then, on their compact footprints, the hundred-plus Reboot Cities,
ringed by small but efficient goat and chicken farms.
Not a world conducive to sightseeing Grand Tours.
On each continent, a simple network of maglev trains, deliberately held to
a sparse schedule, linked the Reboot Cities (except for the Sin Bins, which
were sanitarily excluded from easy access to the network). Slow but luxurious
aerostats serviced officials and businessmen. Travel between continents
occurred on SkySail-equipped water ships. All travel was predicated on
state-certified need.
And when anyone had to deviate from standard routes—such as a trio of
Power Jockeys following the superconducting transmission lines south to
France—they employed a trundlebug.
Peugeot had designed the first trundlebugs over a century ago, the Ozones.
Picture a large rolling drum fashioned of electrochromic biopoly, featuring
slight catenaries in the lines of its body from end to end. A barrel-shaped
compartment suspended between two enormous wheels large as the cabin
itself. Solid-state battery packs channeled power to separate electric motors.
A curving door spanned the entire width of the vehicle, sliding upward.
Inside, three seats in a row, the center one commanding the failsafe manual
controls. Storage behind the seats.
And in those seats:
Aurobindo Bandjalang working the joystick with primitive recreationist
glee and vigor, rather than vibbing the trundlebug.
Tigerishka on his right and Gershon Thales on his left.
A tense silence reigned.
Tigerishka exuded a bored professionalism only slightly belied by a gently
twitching tailtip and alertly cocked tufted ears. Her tigrine pelt poked out
from the edges of her plugsuit, pretty furred face and graceful neck the largest bare expanse.
A.B. thought she smelled like a sexy stuffed toy. Disturbing.
She turned her slit-pupiled eyes away from the monotonous racing
landscape for a while to gnaw delicately with sharp teeth at a wayward cuticle
around one claw.
Furries chose to express non-inheritable parts of the genome of various
extinct species within their own bodies, as a simultaneous expiation of guilt
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and celebration of lost diversity. Although the Vaults at Reboot City
Twenty-nine (formerly Svalbard, Norway) safely held samples of all the
vanished species that had been foolish enough to compete with humanity
during this Anthropocene Age, their non-human genomes awaiting some
far-off day of re-instantiation, that sterile custody did not sit well with
some. The furries wanted other species to walk the earth again, if only by
partial proxy.
In contrast to Tigerishka’s stolid boredom, Gershon Thales manifested a
frenetic desire to maximize demands on his attention. Judging by the swallow-
flight motions of his hands, he had half a dozen virtual windows open, upon
what landscapes of information A.B. could only conjecture. (He had tried
vibbing into Gershon’s eyes, but had encountered a pirate privacy wall. Hard
to build team camaraderie with that barrier in place, but A.B. had chosen not
to call out the man on the matter just yet.)
No doubt Gershon was hanging out on keek fora. The keeks loved to
indulge in endless talk.
Originally calling themselves the “punctuated equilibriumists,” the cult
had swiftly shortened their awkward name to the “punk eeks,” and then to
the “keeks.”
The keeks believed that after a long period of stasis, the human species had
reached one of those pivotal Darwinian climacterics that would launch the
race along exciting if unpredictable new vectors. What everyone else viewed
as a grand tragedy—implacable and deadly climate change leading to the Big
Biota Crash—they interpreted as a useful kick in humanity’s collective pants.
They discussed a thousand, thousand schemes intended to further this leap,
most of them just so much mad vaporware.
A.B. clucked his tongue softly as he drove. Such were the assistants he had
been handed, to solve a crisis of unknown magnitude.
Tigerishka suddenly spoke, her voice a velvet growl. “Can’t you push this
bug any faster? The cabin’s starting to stink like simians already.”
New Perthpatna occupied the site that had once hosted the Russian city
of Arkhangelsk, torn down during the Reboot. The closest malfunctioning
solar collectors in what had once been France loomed 2800 kilometers
distant. Mission transit time: an estimated thirty-six hours, including
overnight rest.
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“No, I can’t. As it is, we’re going to have to camp at least eight hours for the batteries to recharge. The faster I push us, the more power we expend, and the
longer we’ll have to sit idle. It’s a calculated tradeoff. Look at the math.”
A.B. vibbed Tigerishka a presentation. She studied it, then growled in
frustration.
“I need to run! I can’t sit cooped up in a smelly can like this for hours at a
stretch! At home, I hit the track every hour.”
A.B. wanted to say, I’m not the one who stuck those big-cat codons in you, so don’t yell at me! But instead he notched up the cabin’s HVAC and chose a polite response. “Right now, all I can do is save your nose some grief. We’ll
stop for lunch, and you can get some exercise then. Can’t you vib out like old
Gershon there?”
Gerson Thales stopped his air haptics to glare at A.B. His lugubrious voice
resembled wet cement plopping from a trough. “What’s that comment
supposed to imply? That I’m wasting my time? Well, I’m not. I’m engaged in
posthuman dialectics at Saltation Central. Very stimulating. You two should
try to expand your minds in a similar fashion.”
Tigerishka hissed. A.B. ran an app that counted to ten for him using gently
breaking waves to time the calming sequence.
“As mission leader, I don’t really care how anyone passes the travel time.
Just so long as you all perform when it matters. Now how about letting me
enjoy the drive.”
The “road” actually required little of A.B.’s attention. A wide border of
rammed earth, kept free of weeds by cousins to A.B.’s beard removers, the
road paralleled the surprisingly dainty superconducting transmission line
that powered a whole city. It ran straight as modern justice toward the solar
collectors that fed it. Shade from the rows of eulollypops planted alongside
cut down any glare and added coolness to their passage.
Coolness was a desideratum. The further south they traveled, the hotter
things would get. Until, finally, temperatures would approach fifty degrees at
many points of the Solar Girdle. Only their plugsuits would allow the Power
Jockeys to function outside under those conditions.
A.B. tried to enjoy the sensations of driving, a recreationist pastime he
seldom got to indulge. Most of his work day consisted of indoor maintenance
and monitoring, optimization of supply and demand, the occasional high-level
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debugging. Humans possessed a fluidity of response and insight no kybes could
yet match. A field expedition marked a welcome change of pace from this
indoor work. Or would have, with comrades more congenial.
A.B. sighed, and kicked up their speed just a notch.
After traveling for nearly five hours, they stopped for lunch, just a bit north of where Moscow had once loomed. No Reboot City had ever been erected
in its place, more northerly locations being preferred.
As soon as the wide door slid upward, Tigerishka bolted from the cabin.
She raced laterally off into the endless eulollypop forest, faster than a baseline human. Thirty seconds later, a rich, resonant, hair-raising caterwaul of
triumph made both A.B. and Gershon Thales jump.
Thales said drily, “Caught a mouse, I suppose.”
A.B. laughed. Maybe Thales wasn’t such a stiff.
A.B. jacked the trundlebug into one of the convenient stepdown charging
nodes in the transmission cable designed for just such a purpose. Even an hour’s topping up would help. Then he broke out sandwiches of curried goat salad. He
and Thales ate companionably. Tigerishka returned with a dab of overlooked
murine blood at the corner of her lips, and declined any human food.
Back in the moving vehicle, Thales and Tigerishka reclined their seats and
settled down to a nap after lunch, and their drowsiness soon infected A.B.
He put the trundlebug on autopilot, reclined his own seat, and soon was fast
asleep as well.
Awaking several hours later, A.B. discovered their location to be nearly
atop the 54th parallel, in the vicinity of pre-Crash Minsk.
The temperature outside their cozy cab registered a sizzling thirty-five,
despite the declining sun.
“We’ll push on toward Old Warsaw, then call it a day. That’ll leave just a
little over eleven hundred klicks to cover tomorrow.”
Thales objected. “We’ll get to the farms late in the day tomorrow—too late
for any useful investigation. Why not run all night on autopilot?”
“I want us to get a good night’s rest without jouncing around. And besides,
all it would take is a tree freshly down across the road, or a new sinkhole to
ruin us. The autopilot’s not infallible.”
Tigerishka’s sultry purr sent tingles through A.B.’s scrotum. “I need to work
out some kinks myself.”
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Night halted the trundlebug. When the door slid up, furnace air blasted
the trio, automatically activating their plugsuits. Sad old fevered planet.
They pulled up their cowls and felt relief.
Three personal homeostatic pods were decanted, and popped open upon
vibbed command beneath the allée. They crawled inside separately to eat
and drop off quickly to sleep.
Stimulating caresses awakened A.B. Hazily uncertain what hour this was
that witnessed Tigerishka’s trespass upon his homeopod, or whether she had
visited Thales first, he could decisively report in the morning, had such a
report been required by Jeetu Kissoon and the Power Administration Corps,
that she retained enough energy to wear him out.
3. THE SANDS OF PARIS
The vast, forbidding, globe-encircling desert south of the 45th parallel
depressed everyone in the trundlebug. A.B. ran his tongue around lips that
felt impossibly cracked and parched, no matter how much water he sucked
from his plugsuit’s kamelbak.
All greenery gone, the uniform trackless, and silent wastes baking under the
implacable sun brought to mind some alien world that had never known human
tread. No signs of the mighty cities that had once reared their proud towers
remained, nor any traces of the sprawling suburbs, the surging highways. What
had not been disassembled for reuse elsewhere had been buried.
On and on the trundlebug rolled, following the superconductor line, its
enormous wheels operating as well on loose sand as on rammed earth.
A.B. felt anew the grievous historical impact of humanity’s folly upon the
planet, and he did not relish the emotions. He generally devoted little
thought to that sad topic.
An utterly modern product of his age, a hardcore Rebooter through and
through, Aurobindo Bandjalang was generally happy with his civilization. Its
contorted features, its limitations and constraints, its precariousness, and its default settings he accepted implicitly, just as a child of trolls believes its troll mother to be utterly beautiful.
He knew pride in how the human race had managed to build a hundred
new cities from scratch and shift billions of people north and south in only
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half a century, outracing the spreading blight and killer weather. He enjoyed
the hybrid multicultural mélange that had replaced old divisions and rivalries, the new blended mankind. The nostalgic stories told by Jeetu Kissoon and
others of his generation were entertaining fairy tales, not the chronicle of any lost Golden Age. He could not lament what he had never known. He was too
busy keeping the delicate structures of the present day up and running, and
happy to be so occupied.
Trying to express these sentiments and lift the spirits of his comrades, A.B.
found that his evaluation of Reboot civilization was not universal.
“Every human of this fallen Anthropocene age is shadowed by the myriad
ghosts of all the other creatures they drove extinct,” said Tigerishka, in a
surprisingly poetic and somber manner, given her usual blunt and
unsentimental earthiness. “Whales and dolphins, cats and dogs, cows and
horses—they all peer into and out of our sinful souls. Our only shot at
redemption is that someday, when the planet is restored, our coevolved
partners might be re-embodied.”
Thales uttered a scoffing grunt. “Good riddance to all that nonsapient
genetic trash! Homo sapiens is the only desirable endpoint of all evolutionary
lines. But right now, the dictatorial Reboot has our species locked down in a
dead end. We can’t make the final leap to our next level until we get rid of
the chaff.”
Tigerishka spat, and made a taunting feint toward her coworker across
A.B.’s chest, causing A.B. to swerve the car and Thales to recoil. When the
keek realized he hadn’t actually been hurt, he grinned with a sickly
superciliousness.
“Hold on one minute,” said A.B. “Do you mean that you and the other
keeks want to see another Crash?”
“It’s more complex than that. You see—”
But A.B.’s attention was diverted that moment from Thales’s explanation.
His vib interrupted with a Demand Four call from his apartment.
Vib nodes dotted the power transmission network, keeping people online
just like at home. Plenty of dead zones existed elsewhere, but not here,
adjacent to the line.
A.B. had just enough time to place the trundlebug on autopilot before his
vision was overlaid with a feed from home.
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The security system on his apartment had registered an unauthorized entry.
Inside his 1LDK, an optical distortion the size of a small human moved
around, spraying something si
milar to used cooking oil on A.B.s furniture.
The hands holding the sprayer disappeared inside the whorl of distortion.
A.B. vibbed his avatar into his home system. “Hey, you! What the fuck are
you doing?!”
The person wearing the invisibility cape laughed, and A.B. recognized the
distinctive crude chortle of Zulqamain Safranski.
“Safranski! Your ass is grass! The ASBOs are on their way!”
Unable to stand the sight of his lovely apartment being desecrated,
frustrated by his inability to take direct action himself, A.B. vibbed off.
Tigerishka and Thales had shared the feed, and commiserated with their
fellow Power Jock. But the experience soured the rest of the trip for A.B., and he stewed silently until they reached the first of the extensive constructions
upon which the Reboot Cities relied for their very existence.
The Solar Girdle featured a tripartite setup, for the sake of security of supply.
First came the extensive farms of solar updraft towers: giant chimneys that
fostered wind flow from base to top, thus powering their turbines.
Then came parabolic mirrored troughs that followed the sun and pumped
heat into special sinks, lakes of molten salts, which in turn ran different
turbines after sunset.
Finally, serried ranks of photovoltaic panels generated electricity directly.
These structures, in principle the simplest and least likely to fail, were the
ones experiencing difficulties from some kind of dust accretion.
Vibbing GPS coordinates for the troublespot, A.B. brought the trundlebug
up to the infected photovoltaics. Paradoxically, the steady omnipresent
whine of the car’s motors registered on his attention only when he had
powered them down.
Outside the vehicle’s polarized plastic shell, the sinking sun glared like the
malign orb of a cyclops bent on mankind’s destruction.
When the bug-wide door slid up, dragon’s breath assailed the Power Jocks.
Their plugsuits strained to shield them from the hostile environment.
Surprisingly, a subdued and pensive Tigerishka volunteered for camp duty.
As dusk descended, she attended to erecting their intelligent shelters and
getting a meal ready: chicken croquettes with roasted edamame.
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A.B. and Thales sluffed through the sand for a dozen yards to the nearest
infected solarcell platform. The keek held his pocket lab in gloved hand.
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