MOM

by Collin Piprell

  “You're looking good,” Cisco tells her.

  Eddie Eight pouts. “What about me?” His jock strap, all he wears, bulges absurdly. He poses, and his oiled thighs and calves also bulge. “Me, me, me. Me‐me‐me‐meemeeeeeeee.” Eddie Eight sings it. “I'm hot,” he adds.

  Sissie turns with sullen vanity to display two more Brand Me!'s on her trim buttocks.

  “My God.” Joy sighs and cuddles Toot, her 'pet. “Is that your true avatar?”

  “Sequoya Joy Bean has a fat butt,” says Toot in a squeaky voice well suited to pissing a person off. According to Joy, Toot comes from a long line of Toots stretching back to bio clones, the first of these a backup for the dearly beloved lap companion of Milly Honeysuckle Bean, Sequoya Joy Bean's grandmother.

  “My little Tootsie‐Wootsie.” Joy stands and even as she does so her butt slims right down, maybe erring on the side of anorexic. “I need more exercise. Can't you practice OmniStrike with me, Cisco? I mean just sometime, okay?”

  Like Sissie, Joy is basically naked. In her case, however, she's wrapped like a psychedelic mummy in clear tape with trains of tiny red, green and gold lights that race around and around, many of them clockwise, others counter‐clockwise, like an impossibly intricate commuter system on the verge of meltdown. The whole is surely designed to swathe her in a scintillating cocoon of security so she won't fall apart right then and there, her main concern in this life. Nevertheless, she is clearly fragging.

  “Cisco, my friend. Look at this.” Eddie Eight's jockstrap squirms. “I want to play; do you want to play?”

  “Whatcha got in there, Eddie?” Sissie jeers. “A pet?”

  “Yeah.” Eddie Eight clutches at himself. “A one‐eyed trouser snake.”

  Joy's light‐trains zip every which way with indignation. “You're disgusting,” she says.

  “What about you, O Joyous One? I'll bet you stuff little Toot down your panties soon as you switch your tank off.”

  “Asshole,” Joy says.

  “Bad word,” Toot advises her.

  “I don't know why you worry about everything all the time.” Eddie Eight looks concerned. “You're not even real.”

  “Eddie Eight, you're an asshole.”

  “You're nothing but an ebee. You must know that, on some level. But you've got no idea who's running you.”

  “Eddie!” Sissie is briefly diverted from her own misery. “You're the worst…the worst…”

  “Asshole.” Joy says it again. She's weeping, her face, the only part of her that isn't wrapped, scrunched up and red. Her wrapping has turned gray and opaque, and even more she resembles a mummy—an unhappy one. Toot looks like he'd bite Eddie if he could, though it isn't clear which end of the pet Eddie should watch out for.

  A graffito has appeared in the tank; Joy hasn't noticed it yet:

  I think, therefore you are—if I feel like it

  “Or what about this?” says Eddie Eight. “You might be the only real live person left. The Wet One. Yeah, and the rest of us are ebees generated by MOM just to keep you company. Think about it.”

  Toot stands in Joy's lap to lick tears from her cheeks.

  These girls should have been candidates for compulsory opout long ago. How do they maintain appearances? Cisco smiles and checks his own HQ, which reads 2.8 and falling. He smiles even harder.

  “You're unreal,” Sissie tells Eddie Eight.

  “No, I'm not,” he answers. “I'm as real as it gets. But that's the thing, isn't it? You don't know. Nobody knows. Joy's an ebee, an unpleasantly hysterical one, I might add. And you, Sissie. What do you think you are? Eh? Hey, Cisco. You listening?”

  He isn't. Not really. He's looking out his window.

  “Little sister, here? A subdominant alter. And guess who's the repressed dominant? Think about it, my friend. You don't want to play? You've got your feminine side, Sissie's broadband big brother, and you're afraid of it. You go and project Sissie here, and just look at her. She's withering on the vine, fine young thing that she could be.”

  “Joy, honey,” Sissie tells her. “You're no ebee. Why do you even listen to this droner noid?”

  Eddie Eight applauds wildly. “Wow! A telep alter after my own heart,” he says.

  Sissie might be missing from Cisco's own ID, but Sissie told him long ago that she had checked with the Lode and Cisco was there, safely part of her personal inventory.

  •

  “Hey!” Eddie Eight intrudes again, in gleeful possession of hot gossip. “I almost forgot. Have I got news for you.” Eddie always has news, nearly always concerning recent or impending catastrophe. And generally it's total horseshit. “Listen up,” says Eddie Eight in lugubrious tones, at the same time sneering delightedly. “Lars King. He's dead.”

  Cisco snorts and says, “Get serious.”

  “No, no. It's true. Somebody killed him. Got right into his apartment and everything. Bare hands, man. Real time in mondoland; no second chances. No playing dead. Now tell me this: who could kill Lars King with his bare hands?”

  It's worse than usual. Nothing new, Eddie Eight's raves, but this one's getting to Cisco more than they normally do. He offs himself. Blanks the holotank; neutralizes the holoport. Goodbye Yunnan, hello mondoland. This is as offline as it gets. In fact, it invites hassles with MOM. A nagging session, at least. Maybe even a peptalk, which is worse. But Cisco needs time with himself. Some distance on things.

  He looks. The woman in his locket is expressionless.

  Chronicle

  Lars King is dead. And I guess the Kid killed him, though MOM hasn't done a thing about it. I don't believe the Kid himself accepts the fact. Not yet. Anyway, it wasn't his fault; I know that. And I know it's going to hurt real bad once he can bring himself to admit what's happened.

  Modern medicine can fix almost anything except that. Being dead, I mean. They came up with the medibots back about forty years ago, partly to look after the Mars astronauts. If one of those guys came up sick, it might take eighteen months to get him back. So they needed a way of taking care of them on the road. Cancer was the main worry, what with all that radiation in outer space. Mind you, now it's almost as bad down here on Earth. And that's only one of the things that'll get you. There's this matter of getting dissed by the blurs, for one. Disassemblers. Not that it could hurt much more than a good beer and tequila hangover. But you wouldn't know about that. Darn it. We've got no more hangovers. Or coral reefs, or forests, or real dogs, or kids, or a lot of things.

  This diet I'm on, I pass these things that look like rabbit pellets, clean and dry and all the same so they don't look like crap at all. It may have started with Ellie, my second wife, feeding me this stuff they called co‐enzyme Q10. I took that stuff every day for years, along with garlic capsules and fish oil and suchlike. I also had this doctor. He told me I had to cut down on the red meat, give it up, even, and get my calorie intake down to sixteen hundred a day. An ideal diet if you wanted to live forever, which I didn't necessarily. But I went ahead with it anyway. Nearly starved my butt off for a while there. And I had to water my bourbon down till there was no way to tell it wasn't tap water, which it probably was when Ellie mixed it. Gosh. But I must say I started to feel friskier than I had in years. In fact, it got to the point Ellie said she was thinking of taking me off the co‐enzyme Q10 and maybe putting saltpeter in my porridge besides.

  That was a few years before they came up with nanomedicine, and before you knew it I was getting a complete overhaul. I hardly got used to having my own computer—a “PC”—when next thing I know I got a trillion of 'em or so inside me. Computers, I mean. In fact, after my last checkup they told me my liver was as good as it had been when I was a kid of fifty. Whatever. The medibots have overhauled my tired old carcass till it's nearly good as new, and maybe better. I used to be as busted up as your average rodeo rider. Little mishaps on the oil rigs from time to time, or in the bars. A car crash or two. One time Nance, my first wife, clobbered me sort of accidentally with a blunt obje
ct when I happened to be standing at the top of the stairs. You know the kind of thing.

  They'd love to have those little 'bots go in there and ream out my brain, now that they got the liver fixed up. Though what you need a good liver for these days I don't know; you can't even get a decent drink. But they need permission before they can fix your brain, and I got enough brain left I won't let them mess with mine. It works good enough as it is; I don't care what you say. I won't have any gangs of 'bots friggin' around in there doing I don't know what. They tell me there's some “atrophy.” Well, so be it. Better men than me lived with some atrophy in their brains, even a few US presidents I can think of. Back when we had presidents.

  George Bush Sr. was still president when Nance and I got married. I met Ellie and married her and all towards the end of George Bush Jr.'s debacle. I'm sorry Nance and I never had a kid together. But Ellie and I did have a boy. I believe Nance's passing nearly killed me, but I am purely grateful that I got to be with Ellie afterwards. And to be a father.

  Even though, through no fault of our own, things were to go as bad as they did.

  And it looks to be getting worse.

  •

  We need to help each other, those of us who are left. Cisco's got Dee Zu, and you'd have never found a finer young filly even back when there were still billions of women on Earth. She's a regular firecracker. Not only that, she's a straight shooter, as uncomplicated as any woman can ever get. Her standard response to life is to laugh and get on with living it. A regular glutton for experience—libido on a hair trigger, from what I hear. I don't know if Cisco realizes just what he's got there. She makes me think of Ellie, of the way the younger Ellie must have been back before I met her. Dee Zu's like a young Ellie full of joy, without all the pain and so on. And there's Cisco carrying on like there's lots more where she came from.

  I wouldn't mind talking to the Kid right now, but I see it's the crack of dawn over there. Of course it doesn't really matter what time of day it is, the way things are, but I can't reset my internal clock. At least night still falls at the same time it used to. That much hasn't changed.

  •

  It's six‐thirty‐five p.m. I just looked at my watch—Ellie's present for my sixtieth birthday, still keeping perfect time after all these years. This is what they call an anachronism, something that's out of its proper place in time. Me, for example. An anomaly and an anachronism both. Nobody needs a watch, since no one measures time that way anymore. We don't even have weeks. Only Worldsdays and Mondays. Mondomondo days, where we have to make do with the same old world God gave us before we frigged it all up. Of course a lot of people think the Worlds are better than the original. In fact, they get downright uncomfortable when they're closed.

  But who am I to talk? Here I sit, all wound up about a chance to see what's left of Ellie.

  And on a Monday, if can you believe that.

  Monday

  Cisco recalls holding a book in his hands. He was reading something. Or somebody was reading it to him. A dream, perhaps. Particles of rage wink in and out of a general emotional rawness. For a moment he recollects a sudden clean fragrance, a sunny green burst deep inside him. Promise of renewal. Then it's gone. Cisco is back. He's at home on a Monday, tank open and full of mallsters.

  “You and me, my friend.” Eddie Eight, barbell braced across his shoulders, is performing toe raises. He isn't looking at Cisco; he's staring down at the play of muscle and sinew in his own massively overdeveloped legs. “Let's rock. You and me, okay? I can be the girl, no problem.”

  “Cisco,” Sissie breaks in from the other side of the tank before Eddie Eight can get any more explicit, something you can bet he's about to do. “Why don't you just block this droner? This dipzoid. I've really got to talk to you. Now.”

  “Sissie,” Cisco says. “Hi.” What he wants to do is connect with Sky. He needs to see her now.

  “I'm opping out, brother.” Sissie says. “I mean it this time. I'm gone.”

  Meanwhile Eddie Eight keeps up the background chorus. “Maybe a nice ménage à trois. I don't think I've tried a brother‐and‐sister act before. Wait… Oh, my. Yes, I did. Once upon a time, back in…”

  “Eddie Eight?” Cisco says.

  “Yes?”

  “Go fuck yourself.” Cisco keeps smiling.

  “Not my first choice.”

  “Bad word.” Toot looks up at Joy and snuffles indignantly. “Naughty.”

  Sissie says, “What are you looking at, anyway? There's nothing out there. Switch on your holoport, for God's sake. Don't look.”

  Talking to his sister leaves Cisco disoriented. Changes of persona are strung together on one long, relentless gripe about how boring life is and how she's going to op out any minute now. He drifts away, telling himself to listen; it could be serious. But Sissie is an endless loop no matter how many avatars she adopts, the same stuff over and over; and she never pays any attention to anything he tells her. “Sissie,” Cisco interrupts. “Don't op out. We'll talk later, okay?” He gives her a big smile and turns back to the window.

  Lars King is dead. And Cisco killed him. That stark reality registers as less real than a lot of Worlds. He needs to talk to Dee Zu, but she's shunning him, and not because he has murdered his best friend; it's more serious than that. He stands accused of seeing another woman. As for Sky, he can only wait, it seems. Just as he awaits news of his own offlining.

  Outside, the PlagueBot has erected something novel, the other side of where the flitter rested earlier. A rectangular gray structure. A big one, like a billboard. It's blank. Cisco asks his WalkAbout about the bot billboard. No data, the scroll tells him.

  •

  Eddie Eight is back. “Your sister, my friend. I like your sister. Sissie, you know?”

  “Don't mess with her,” Cisco replies. “She's screwed up enough without your help.”

  “Hey, man. Sissie is source code. She's so wacky. Rare stuff, man. Like you. Family, hey?”

  “Stay away from her.”

  “You know I only want her because she's your sister. Really I want you.

  Whaddayasay, hey? Be anybody you want. I'll be a woman, okay? You've never seen my Tamara avatar. Tamara, Teenage Tyrant on a Trampoline. Whoa.”

  “What in hell have you been reading, Eddie Eight?”

  “Okay. First thing: I didn't read any Proust.”

  “Me neither.”

  The reading group is assembling. Eddie Eight is always present; he never misses a chance to kibitz. Joy practically lives her Mondays in the tank anyway. Sissie likewise. Normally Dee Zu would be there. And Lars King. Leary is religious about attendance. But even Leary is mostly writing, although he does keep quoting old books, so maybe he's reading after all. Nobody else is reading anything. Not really. Proust is just a standing joke.

  “I read some of the first chapter.” Leary bellows with laughter. “Again. I must've read those same pages twenty times in the last fifty years. Ellie first introduced me to Proust.”

  They've all heard this before.

  “Proust. Wow! Zigabites. Rest of your life.”

  “No bite to it, only gums.”

  “Gum away on a fat book.”

  “Waste of time; no bites.”

  Joy sums it up: “Proust isn't fun. It's unhappy. I read one sentence. By the time I get to the end, I can't remember the start; I have to read it all over again.”

  “You can't remember your first name by the time you finish reading to your last,” suggests Eddie Eight. “Give us a break.”

  Cisco looks out his window. Looks for slowjoes. Anything.

  Chronicle

  Me and this locket, two things in my apartment that aren't foglet assemblies. The portrait inside the locket? It's like what we used to call a wiggle picture. You turned it in the light one way, and it was Jesus Christ; you turned it the other way, and it was the Devil. This woman, on the other hand, has three moods, and it doesn't matter which way you turn the picture. One expression, I can't recal
l ever seeing it on her face in real life, puts me in mind of a schoolmarm who's found a toad in her desk. She's got a neutral expression as well, and a smile. Her smile. The way I remember it. Aside from saving the world, keeping this woman's portrait happy is my main mission in life these days. I try to keep her smiling.

  Gosh. What am I thinking of? Can't let the Kid see this. Not yet. Screen? Delete back to the first mention of “locket.” You check that now. It's gone, right? And yo, apartment, bump the temperature up another three degrees. There isn't a lot of time left, and I need to get acclimatized.

  Screen! Delete that last sentence, darn it. Yes, I want it warmer; but delete the “acclimatized” stuff.

  Monday

  “It's Monday, mallsters!” Eddie Eight squawks. “Time for a reality check.”

  Today he's blue. Electric blue from spiky hair to high‐heeled sneakers, pumped and oily, coruscating against a bright orange bat‐wing cape. “Is everybody happy?” He smirks demonically.

  “Maxhappiest.” Cisco counters with a smile so broad it hurts. “Couldn't be better.” As usual, taking his cue from Leary, he wears his natural persona, what Eddie Eight refers to as his “pure vanilla puke” avatar. Though judging by what the mirror showed him, he can't be sure what the others are really seeing—if his own digiscreen can lie to him, what are the chances they're also getting cosmeticized versions of people in the tank?

  “Get real.” Sissie extrudes into the holotank alongside Eddie. She's dull blue, surrounded by a paler blue aura. A theme Monday. She isn't smiling. “We're supposed to stay maxhappy. But how are we supposed to do that? It's Monday all the time. MOM's gone crazy.”

  “You get real, Sis. MOM's a machine, so how can it be crazy? And it isn't Monday all the time.” Cisco is disgusted, listening to himself. He sounds like any other mallster, nothing better to do than bitch and moan and wait for the Worlds to open, never mind he can look forward to Mondays for reasons the others don't have. But Sissie's doing what she can to qualify for compulsory orderly departure. She keeps saying she's going to op out; the next thing she knows, she'll have no choice.