MOM

by Collin Piprell

  A graffito appears—an oldie but a goody:

  Is your pet watching you?

  Then it changes:

  Matrisigh drools, OK!

  Who or what was “matrisigh”? Only on Mondays do you ever see this stuff. But it's becoming more common. You'd think MOM would do something about it. The unease is back, this non‐specific dread deep in Cisco's gut. It's with him too often these days. Mostly on Mondays. Outside has renewed its assault on the malls in a variety of inscrutable and increasingly sophisticated ways. True. But the PlagueBot is too stupid to worry about. And the GameBoys, lusty nihilists all, are long gone. Pyschoneurotherapeutic advances, along with natural attrition, finally fixed their wagon. Mall integrity, according to CMNN, is stronger than it's ever been. Never mind Eddie Eight says CMNN is nothing but MOM propaganda. In any case, by now the code underlying MOM and the malls has evolved so far beyond human comprehension that hacking the system is impossible. What's he worried about? That's right. So where are the graffiti coming from?

  “Not seeing much of Dee Zu these days, are you?” Eddie Eight says. Cisco fights the urge to kick him in the throat. “Your ever‐lovin' childhood sweetheart and all? Nice guy. Kills his best friend only because he comes visiting, and next he dumps his best girl. What's happening, man? What are you trying to tell us? Then along comes Monday and where's old Cisco the Kid? Nowhere to be found. Maybe hiding under the bed.”

  “I'm not in the mood, Eddie.”

  “Three little test pilots,” sings Eddie Eight, a lunatic, “sit‐ting on a wall. Then one more pi‐lot takes a lit‐tle fall.”

  Lars King is dead. That leaves Dee Zu and Cisco. Two little test pilots.

  There's a new graffito:

  Dissed or blissed, nobody gets out of the malls alive.

  •

  Cisco has recovered part of a blankout. Like dream fragments. In fact, at first he thought he was dreaming. Then, for a moment, he believed that a telep had somehow wandered out of the holotank. The truth was nearly as incredible. It was a wet invasion. The first‐ever wet visitor to his apartment, and Cisco killed him. Lars King came on like a berserker. Cisco's body had reacted faster than his mind, fortunately, or he would now be the dead one. He struck back on autopilot. A waking dream, it was over before Cisco was fully conscious. Lars lay on the floor in Cisco's apartment, bleeding from nose, mouth, and ears. Dead. It was a Monday. Cisco's pet Smoke was there, watching. As always.

  They were told that mall security was absolute these days, yet Lars King had breached Cisco's apartment. How? And why? And why had MOM so quickly brushed the whole matter under the rug? Little formality attended Lars King's disposal. The DisposAll trundled out with efficient decorum to diss and vacuum the body. Given the volume of litter at hand, it first asked, “Permission to cycle waste?” Cisco's long‐time friend, colleague, and chief OmniStrike opponent simply disappeared, beginning with the face and head and then the arms and legs and, finally, the trunk, still clad in a VitaSkin jumpsuit.

  Sissie figures in these memories, but only uncertainly, as though Cisco might have dreamed that part later. He might have dreamed the whole thing, come to that, except for the fact that Lars King was indeed dead.

  It still feels unreal. The whole episode felt less dramatic than the many ebee killings he has engaged in. The impact of wet flesh on wet flesh lacked the crispness, the positive contact of OmniStrike encounters. It had all been rather matter‐of‐fact and dim. Dimensionless. But this fact remains: Lars King is dead, and Cisco killed him.

  •

  Outside the mall, a high overcast imposes a nacreous gray pall smudged with orange. A bleary sunhole wears a pink and blue rainbow halo for a few moments, suffusing the air itself with a dirty pink glow. Even at maximum magnification, you can barely see the ruins of the Millennium Mall where they poke up out of the water. The sea is highlighted with a sickly sheen. Not a slowjoe in sight. It's awful.

  Eddie Eight is right, of course. It's strange that Cisco could kill his best friend, a fellow test pilot, and remain fully enabled. But if you're caught trespassing the Worlds on a Monday, you're busted. Big time. And he hasn't been caught, which is also strange. It does seem, however, that he's being punished in other, petty ways. The rationing, for example, is bullshit. The Dolls can construct anything they want to right from the atoms up. If your arteries start to clog, the medibots can ream them out fast enough. MOM simply doesn't want him eating peanut butter. Maybe she's making some point. It. Maybe it's making a point. Surely the mall operations manager is going beyond its mandate, here. MOM is only a machine, after all.

  “Okay, Doll.” Cisco decides, not very seriously, to give it another try. “I'll take next Tuesday's peanut butter and banana sandwich ration now.”

  “When is 'Tuesday'?”

  Leary likes to call them dumb blondes. Talking heads sitting there in holoboxes above spaces where legions of tiny bots assemble anything you can negotiate. Whatever. They're connected to the Lode, so the damned things should know what Tuesdays are. What they used to be.

  “Hey, Kid?” Leary's telep materializes around his grin like the Cheshire Cat in reverse.

  “What?” Cisco says. “And what are you grinning at?”

  “Never mind. Gosh. You ever try peanut butter and dill pickle?”

  “No.”

  “You should try it.”

  Chronicle

  The Kid's not too happy with MOM these days. His Doll is rationing the peanut butter and banana sandwiches.

  Here we've got the Worlds' ace test pilot, number one now that Lars King is gone, and his Doll is telling him what he can and can't eat. Mind you the Kid eats peanut butter and banana sandwiches pretty well every day, I guess, so maybe he does need talking to. In some ways he is still a kid.

  I can't recall exactly when MOM first appeared on the scene. It started out as mall operations manager, a glorified quartermaster looking after inventories and so on, ensuring nobody was going hungry or bored. Coordinating security systems. I'm calling MOM “it.” That's because I'm trying not to think of this machine the way almost everybody does. As a kind of intelligent lifeform. Way back, of course, they discovered that computers had to have a sex if we were going to feel comfortable with 'em. The whole darned Thaniya Plaza building was female, for example, just judging by its voice. And the fact the elevators were so slow. Anyway, in most minds MOM is female, rightly enough, I guess. Whatever. It's hard not to call it “her.” And in many ways she does get more and more motherly as time goes on.

  By now MOM is taking a hand in nearly everything. After the happy gang, the fundamentalist Maxies, started running the government, MOM took to monitoring our HQs. Soon we had to watch our CQs as well. Then security problems got so complicated, what with the blurs and the PlagueBot and so on, that the Maxies couldn't handle things. In fact nobody could. Except maybe MOM. Next thing you knew, MOM also took over management of the Worlds. There wasn't anybody else left who could do that job either. And this problem of the Mondays—that's a management decision, but not one that any of us mallsters understand. Mondoland reminds me of a force‐seven hangover, or thereabouts. I'm still alive, but only firing on two cylinders. And Sissie and Joy are right. No question, Mondays are coming more often. Plus they're getting longer. All in all, I reckon, these days they make a less welcome change.

  We'd all be claustrophobic nutcases if it wasn't for the Worlds. Not so long ago, you could spend pretty much your whole life in them. In fact some people did. Puts me in mind of lab rats. You gave 'em the choice of little shocks to their pleasure centers or else food and drink, and they'd take the shocks every time. Right till they starved to death. Same thing with the Worlds and a lot of mallsters. Some of 'em needed full‐time nursing, IV lunches and everything. Next thing we had the opout centers. And maybe that's why MOM came up with Mondays—maybe she figures we need a reality check from time to time. But as Eddie Eight likes to say, “What's really real?” and why do we need these doses of mondoland?

>   Officially, what we're looking at on Mondays is “minimax”—minimum maintenance, maximum security. “Lockdown” comes closer to it. Like Eddie Eight says, what we've got here is a gated community, and the gatekeeper's calling the shots. At least most of the time. Aside from these little anomalies. The Monday worlding, for example.

  Strike that last sentence… A sentence fragment? Darn it. I don't care if it's a sentence fragment. Strike it.

  And now we've got this tendency for Worlds pilots to show up dead in the apartments. Murdered. Or take the ones that came for me. In my own place. Twice. That was hard to figure. I sure didn't want to kill those youngsters—and they were the last ESSEA mallsters I ever heard from—but even at my age the basic instincts kick in.

  Anyway, the point is this: if MOM can't even provide security, then what are we trading our freedom for?

  •

  It's Monday, and here I am, a prisoner in my own apartment, waiting for Worldsday so I can meet up with old Brian at Boon Doc's.

  I haven't been to Boon Doc's Bar in ages. That place used to be a second home to me. Now I just find it depressing. To tell the truth, I can't abide any part of Bangkok World. It's really nothing like the way things used to be, though it is same‐same enough to hurt. All us old geezers, not so many of us now, wallowing in a swamp of nostalgia. Never mind. If I want to talk to Brian, I've got to go to Boon Doc's.

  You won't find me hanging around with Brian either, unless there's a darned good reason. Which is something I guess you could say I've got, given I'm trying to save the friggin' world. That's the real world, okay? Not that I've got much chance of success and, even if I do, I'm not sure anybody should be pleased on that account.

  But there's no two ways about it, Brian and the Kid need to meet. And soon. The sooner the better. But first I've got to sort things out with Brian.

  WYSIWYG

  The detail in these Worlds is purely amazing, even in shabby, half‐finished editions like Bangkok Old Handland.

  —Leary

  Worldsday

  Leary slams his whiskey glass down on the table. “Darn it, Hal,” he says. “You died.”

  Hal takes a break from nuzzling Ann's tummy. “That's right,” he replies.

  “A massive stroke, I heard. Now you tell me, how the heck did they fix that?”

  “Never asked.” Hal removes his hand from Ann's bottom, giving her G‐string a snap in passing, and reaches for his beer. “I was dead, wasn't I?”

  Brian the Evil Canadian spins his wheelchair and chortles. Gurgles, more like it. “He doesn't appear all that dead now, does he?” he asks Leary. “And unlike you and me, he hasn't changed a bit.”

  Hal Stobie gave up drinking forever on the seventeenth of December 1999. “No more hangovers,” he said. Leary remembers the occasion clearly, because Hal then died of a stroke on the eighteenth of December 1999, which happened to be Leary's fifty‐fifth birthday, and what was supposed to be Leary's birthday party turned into an epic wake. So seriously did the city's barflies mourn Hal's passing, in fact, that one of them dropped dead of a heart attack in the middle of proceedings, and the morning after many others reckoned he was the lucky one.

  Boom, Noi, and Keeow are deployed at the far end of the barroom in the battered black vinyl window seat. Boom is brushing Noi's glossy black mane, the neon jungle outside penetrating the frosted glass to lend Noi a rosy‐blue‐golden halo. Keeow, on the forlorn lookout for customers, peers out through a clear porthole. Big Toy sits by the cash register, saucer and shot glass in front of her. And it's good that Hal unhands Ann, because now Dinky Toy comes back in off the street carrying a greasy bag fashioned of newspaper, her whole manner broadcasting suspicion. It was only ten minutes ago, after all, that she and Hal descended together, beaming, from the upstairs room.

  Dinky Toy is one of the few remaining wets among the girls, and this is her genuine telep. Most of the staff are mere ebees. But Dinky Toy is the real deal, at least ninety years old, though she claims she's only eighty‐two. A couple of the telep dancers have to be around eighty. “Little Noi?” Brian likes to say. “Or Keeow? They've got enough experience between them to rock your socks off, especially if you take the two of them together. They still can't dance, mind you.”

  Dinky Toy is always beautiful these days, and she's always popular. But Leary remembers the days when she used to sit quietly, arms crossed, left side turned to the wall. One night when she was celebrating her betrothal to a new man, not Hal, several party balloons full of hydrogen exploded after her fiancé du jour popped one of them with a cigar. Dinky Toy leaned, laughing, right into the blast. Her scars are gone now, and her eyebrow is back, the one on the left. The delicate fingers of her right hand, smooth and finely tapered, are no longer clutched with scar tissue. Her erstwhile suitor fled the scene before the first pain of the burns faded.

  But all that happened long after she first met Hal. Back in the old days Hal had been her main beau for a time, one of the good ones, never mind he also eventually disappeared without leaving so much as a postcard in his wake. And Dinky Toy latched on to him from the moment he walked in off the street again, never mind he'd been gone sixty years. Not just another of Dinky Toy's many failed romances, then, Hal is special. The only one to return from the dead and present himself for another tour of duty.

  Dinky Toy gives Ann a look. Then she gives Hal a considerably fonder one. Plopping herself down on his lap, she says: “Go ahead, tilac. Darling. Have fun. I fix it so they have to freeze you again.”

  Leary scowls at Hal, daring him to be alive. “I hear they never managed to bring even one of you cryos back.”

  “Well, here I am, living proof that's a crock. Twice as fit as the day I checked out.”

  “That was back in 1999, as I recall,” says Brian, wheeling his chair over close enough to get his hand on Ann's recently abandoned butt. She leans this butt against Brian's shoulder and musses with the fringe of white hair haloing his moon face. “Just short of the Millennium celebrations, which might've killed you anyway. All worried the Y2K bug was going to fuck the whole world up, and then you go and keel over dead of a stroke. Right in the middle of showing sweet little Ann, here, how to do the Wah‐Watusi. Over there in that very go‐go cage. You always did have style.”

  This Ann is only an ebee. “You buy me co‐la,” she suggests, responding to the sound of her name.

  Not the least evidence of Hal's style was his foresight in taking some of his ill‐gotten gains from working offshore in the Arabian Gulf and putting down the deposit that got him ear‐marked for cryogenic preservation in the event he died conveniently close to the necessary facilities. Which he did, so they flew Hal's carcass straight down from Bangkok to Singapore, along with a shipment of tiger prawns on ice.

  “Actually we're all dead.” Brian leans his face into Ann's belly and slides a hand up under her halter top. “And gone to heaven.”

  Heaven, more commonly known as Boon Doc's Bar, stinks of Leary's Sheik of Araby aftershave. The sensory palette also includes the cloying aroma of fried grasshoppers, scent of ancient cigar smoke, roach powder, and other homey and authentic means of inducing measures of comfort and, sometimes, acute nostalgia in the true Bangkok Worlders, of whom remain at most half a dozen on the planet. From the little shrine high up the wall near the ceiling there wafts a delicate fragrance of jasmine flowers and incense, accented by the tang of ammonia from the toilet at the back. Leary stares at the wet spot where Brian has left beer smeared across Om's midriff, and he reflects on how little things have changed over the decades, and how little difference there is, in fact, between the old Boon Doc's and the GR version.

  “No thanks.” Hal waives Dinky Toy's offer of a fried bug. She always complains about the taste of GR grasshoppers, but here she is, crunching away, a big spiny bit protruding from the corner of her mouth. “Not so good,” she mumbles, extracting the leg and flicking it onto the floor.

  “GR grasshoppers, GR beer, GR sex,” says Brian. “Non
e of it's what it should be. Hey‐hey, Dinky Toy.” Brian gurgles with obscene hilarity, a busted sewer pipe. “Let's do it face2face. Just for old times' sake, eh? Wet sex.”

  Money talks. Bullshit walks.

  Leary eyes the yellowed hand‐written sign stuck on the mirror behind the bar, where it has proclaimed its wisdom for seven decades. “Don't need money any more,” he says. “Not here in heaven. But we still get the flapdoodle, and that's a fact.”

  “Face2face.” Brian licks his lips. “Belly2belly.”

  “Nobody want see your face, Brian,” Dinky Toy tells him. “Or your big belly or…” “

  Yeah? Or my big what?”

  “Everybody know you only like to look. And other things. No good.”

  “What, you think Hal does it better? C'mon, doesn't Kinky Toy want to play?”

  “Never go wit' you. Hal good man. Not like you.”

  “My, my. Old Kinky Toy. Been working on your English, what is it now, seventy years? It's really coming along, eh?” Brian goes hargle‐hargle. He's laughing.

  “Why don't you let up on our Dinky Toy.” Leary looks disgusted. “How much Thai do you speak?”

  “The same old Leary,” says Hal. “Best buddies with all the girls. But that was the end of it. Never take them out. Not even short‐time. Hey, but what's the harm now?”

  Leary shakes his head. He still has issues with the cryo business. “I seem to recall,” he says to Hal, “they did an autopsy on you. I remember that because I heard they found just one kidney. Strangest thing. The one was all you ever had.”

  “Dealt a short hand right from the start.”

  “What you talk about?” Dinky Toy wants to know. She puts her arms around Hal, shielding her loved one from whatever slings and arrows this strange new world might choose to hurl at him.