MOM

by Collin Piprell

  “And are you trying to tell me that these cryo outfits survived all the stuff that's happened over the years? Even if they did, you expect me to believe they actually moved their operations, lock, stock and frozen cocks, into the mall? 'Peckers,' I mean to say. I don't friggin' think so.”

  “I'm here, aren't I?”

  Leary turns away from him and speaks to Brian: “This is your doing. I can smell it.”

  “Me?”

  “No way this is Hal. Never heard of a cryo brought back alive.”

  “Wait a minute!” Hal says.

  But Leary doesn't favor Hal with so much as a glance, much less a reply.

  “What are you trying to tell me?” Hal says, astonishment dawning. “You're saying I must still be dead?”

  “I do believe that's what he's getting at,” Brian tells him, deadpan. “Holy shit, eh?” Hal gives Ann and Keeow looks of enormous regret and bestows a big hug on Dinky Toy. “That's bad news,” he says. “Here I was, just getting started.” Then he insubstantiates. Dinky Toy falls to the seat with a thud, bereft, banging her elbow on the back of the chair.

  “Gosh,” says Leary, who has turned, despite himself, to catch the last part of this performance. “Darn it!” He wipes his glass across his forehead and then whams it down on the table.

  “Ha‐ha!” Brian says, with a triumphant spin of his chair. “Had you going, didn't I?”

  “Hal…” Dinky Toy is in shock. “Hal was Brian?”

  “That's right,” Leary tells her. “Nothing but Brian having fun. Trying on a new avatar.”

  Dinky Toy crumples. “No,” she says.

  Brian snickers, does his little wheelchair dance.

  “Brian?” Dinky Toy's voice ascends the scale of outrage. “Brian? You are Hal?”

  She gets up and punches him in the head.

  “Jesus Christ!” Brian splutters, trying to say “ow, ow,” and laugh at the same time.

  Simulated pain is optional in the Worlds, but once you opt for it, you take your lumps. And what does “simulated” really mean? If pain hurts, it hurts.

  “You son of a bitch.” Dinky Toy's accents are so immaculate they suggest she has indeed been working long and hard on her English language. “I kill you!”

  “Brian, you are beyond doubt the ugliest sonofagun I've ever had the misfortune to meet.” Leary's forearms rest either side of his glass, his gnarled, be‐scarred fingers, no hint of qubital cosmeticization, clasped the way ancient tree roots embrace a rock.

  “C'mon. It was only a little GR fun. Safe sex, old buddy. And Kinky Toy, she just did it all. Wow! Never knew the difference between her one true love, her bejesus betrothed, and yours truly the Legless Wonder. So once again we have to ask: What's really real?”

  “Not same‐same Hal,” says Dinky Toy. “Not same.”

  Brian laughs even harder. “Lucky I had my parking brake on; that punch might have put me out in the street.”

  GR tears are indistinguishable from any others, under the circumstances, and Leary stands over Dinky Toy muttering reassurances in her ear. “Never mind, kid. The guy's a psycho. Forget about it. Yeah, Hal was a good man. But that was a long time ago. Everything was a long time ago. Never mind, okay? Darn it.” And so on.

  “You buy me co‐la,” Ann says, attracted to all the emotional generosity.

  •

  Even knowing what he knows of Brian, Leary is amazed. Not only was he juggling two telep avatars at once, but one of them had been upstairs doing things that didn't bear thinking about with Dinky Toy while the other was downstairs being one of the boys. Hard to see how it was done. Especially for a wet master who, according to what Dinky Toy is telling them now, is operating with a serious hardware handicap.

  “No good,” she says, full of disdain. “Too small. Ducks go hungry.”

  Something ugly ripples across Brian's face. Then he laughs. “Another good thing, in the Worlds,” he tells Leary. “Feeding the ducks isn't a problem these days. You get a GR knife taking a GR dick, and some GR babe, no matter how pissed off she might be, feeding it to a GR duck, why, it's no big deal. GR dicks, a dime a dozen.”

  “Same‐same GR dickheads.” Leary picks up the bag that had contained Dinky Toy's grasshoppers and straightens it out. “Still can't get over it,” he says to no one in particular. “GR fried grasshoppers that go crunch, and I've got GR grease all over myself.”

  “What part of it do you find so difficult?” Brian asks, with his standard sneer for lesser mortals.

  The bag is folded from the Bangkok Post's Nite Owl column for Friday the seventeenth of December 1999. It reports Foodland's price for canned Dinty Moore beef stew is up, and a fresh batch of farm girls are down from the Northeast to dance naked at the Queen's Castle. “But, I don't give a hoot,” it says by way of signing off. The Nite Owl's signature. Leary never ceases to be amazed at the detail in these Worlds, even shabby, half‐finished editions like Bangkok Old Handland. “Darn it.” Leary's tone conveys equal measures of admiration and annoyance, these being the only emotions he means to reveal at this time. “I thought nobody but MOM could manage that kind of thing. Juggling two avatars that smoothly.”

  “Easier than you might think. Commoner, too.”

  “And you had Hal right down to a tee.”

  “Read the manual, old buddy. All you have to do is read the manual.”

  Of course there is no manual. Even if there was, nobody would be able to read it except MOM. It had all started with breeder software evolving away on an exponential curve till, before you knew it, only the software itself knew how it worked. Or what it was actually doing. Or why.

  “Go easy, old buddy. You hardly ever come around to Boon Doc's any more, always complaining that nothing new ever happens. I just thought I'd liven things up. No harm in that, eh?”

  Leary looks down at the page of newspaper again. One item in the Nite Owl's column stands out in bold:

  Cisco the Kid's in town.

  Word has it he's got business with Brian the Evil Canadian. 'Nuff said.

  Hiding his amazement—how did old Brian pull that off?—Leary turns to him and says, “Talk about livening things up. I believe the Kid's ready. You going to meet him or not?”

  “Yeah. I might like to meet the boy again. Cisco the Kid. Why, there was a time I was almost like a daddy to him.” Brian laughs.

  He's just a telep, so Leary doesn't hit him. Anyway, if Brian goes for the deal Leary has in mind, maybe he'll get what's coming to him soon enough.

  Messages

  Sometimes you start to think they're cosmeticizing the whole world. Who are 'they'? Good question.

  —Leary

  Somebody's using us as weapons; they're using us to do things. Bad things.

  —Dee Zu

  “I've got news.” Joy is clearly excited.

  Sissie suppresses a yawn. “Wow,” she says.

  “I'm channeling MOM.” Joy is naked and, perhaps hoping to enhance her conductive properties, bright silver from top to toe. “Can you believe it?” She taps herself on the head. “MOM's telling me what to say.”

  “And what to think, too.” Eddie Eight is happy to encourage paranoia wherever he can. “All of us. She's telling everybody what to think. And what to do. You must have heard? The medibots are now authorized to perform psychoneurotherapeutic reconstruction, with or without the subject's knowledge or consent. Call it stealth PR.”

  Cisco feels tired. “So MOM's moved right in upstairs, has she?” As down as he is, he smiles. But Joy is hurt, so he also says, “Only kidding. She couldn't have found a nicer channel.” Cisco smiles a lot these days; he also practices speaking well of others. Speaking well of things in general. This, he believes, keeps both happiness and connectivity quotients elevated. His HQ and his CQ. Unrelenting happiness isn't enough to keep you off the shitlist these days. You also have to be connected. And never mind the incessant babblerap.

  “She wants us all to know that she's on our side. She would never do anything
to hurt us.” Joy munches on a big bar of what looks like chocolate.

  “How do you know she's a she?” Even as he speaks, Cisco wonders why he's getting involved in this.

  “MOM just feels like a woman. Caring. Loving.”

  Leary adopts a pained expression. “Nurturing,” he says.

  “Yeah.” He laughs. He rubs a glass across his forehead and then sips at it as though it were poison.

  “So what does MOM want to tell us?” Eddie Eight smirks. “Eh?” Eddie never laughs. He sneers. Unless something strikes him as unusually funny or ridiculous, and then he smirks, just as he does now.

  Joy reads it as a smile. “She's so proud of all of us. She wants us to know that she'll always take care of us. We will always be happy.”

  “That's it?”

  “Take me to your leader,” says Sissie. Indignation sometimes makes her more articulate. “When you've got a message for humankind…”

  “What's wrong with you?” Joy asks.

  “Ask this nurturing bitch about Mondays, why don't you?”

  Joy is shocked. She puts her silver hands to her silver temples, maybe to discourage MOM from absconding in the face of such blasphemy. Then she takes to shoving handfuls of popcorn into her silver maw.

  “Pretty soon it's always going to be Monday, and then where will we be?” Sissie switches to a featureless avatar resembling a gracile slowjoe, and fluoresces shocking pink, purple and turquoise in rapid succession before settling on a dull blue. Her voice emerges from nowhere, since she no longer has a mouth, nowhere to put the goodies.

  “Aw, c'mon.” Leary smiles. “Never mind your Mondays, we all think of MOM as a guardian spirit. Kind of like a real mother. At times, anyway.”

  “That is so right, Leary.” Joy brightens. “Sometimes I feel you and I are on the exact same channel.”

  “'Inline together.'” Eddie Eight sings a line from the old pop song. “'On the same wave.'”

  “I think it's more than that. It's like we're the same person. Only you're the masculine side, and I'm the feminine. You know?”

  “Gosh friggin' darn it.”

  “Hey‐hey!” says Eddie Eight. “I was also talking to MOM. You know what she told me?”

  “Go piss up a rope?” Cisco guesses.

  “No. MOM told me that Joy's also channeling Leary. Yeah. Right from the year 2000.”

  “Yes! Because he has a message for us people living here today.” Joy is now riding Eddie Eight's wave.

  Leary fumes. “Hang on a minute, here.”

  “Yes! At times I feel I know you so well. I can feel you up here.” Joy taps her head in roughly the same spot she earlier located MOM.

  Eddie Eight loves this. “What we're looking at here is Joy channeling a Leary avatar, who in this case is just Joy's masculine side. Get it?”

  Joy doesn't. She appears totally confused. But then she does get it, and her jubilation evaporates. Eddie Eight's on his favorite topic again, how everybody and everything is falling apart. Disintegrating. Joy's chief fear in this life.

  “MOM is a machine.” Cisco says, forgetting to smile. “Just a machine.” His HQ is falling, and his CQ can't be far behind as he moves to close his holotank.

  Then he holds off as Dee Zu bubbles up into the tank. “Cheer up, Kid. Monday will soon be over.”

  She's smiling at him just as though nothing's happened. That's good.

  Worldsday

  Cisco and Dee Zu are having furious sex in a jam of golf balls.

  This was her idea. Legs pushing, Cisco arches his body to thrust back at Dee Zu, thousands of hard little orbs digging at him. Every acupressure point in the soles of his feet registers contact. His face, his limbs, every part of his torso, and every node in his energy body receives attention.

  “This is excellent,” she says. “Yeah.”

  Their teleps are coupled, suspended weightless in a spherical volume stuffed full of hard rubber balls except that there is also room for Cisco and Dee Zu and a bit more to move. No up, no down. No one on top, no one on the bottom. Every time they move, the balls dig at every bit of their bodies. Overlying that level of sensation, they are palpated all over as, stimulating quick tides in the golf ball jam, the membrane‐wall of this World pulses in time to Dee Zu's breathing.

  They're repairing their relationship. Cisco is making amends. Whatever. A cessation of hostilities on Dee Zu's part has led by easy stages to this Worlds encounter.

  She breathes faster and deeper, squeezing little Cisco and squeezing big Cisco too. “I've got another idea.” She lies still against him, and then a sweet‐sour‐spice fragrance is followed by a tingling balm. Golf balls and teleps alike glisten with scented oil. Dee Zu clasps him, arms and legs, and she's bucking faster and faster towards her release.

  Right now, however, Cisco craves another kind of release. The pulsing membrane that encloses their World is translucent, pearlescent, and sufficient light leaks in around the mass of balls that Cisco can sense a larger universe out there. But it is nevertheless confining, and he has had a bad moment or two. Sudden slippings away from himself, flashes of anger upon his return. He sparks now, rams at Dee Zu with extra force. She moans and clasps him even tighter. His ribs ache. He tries to work Dee Zu closer to a wall, nearer the light. He tells himself he will not use his console, will not interfere with the worlding. But he does ask her for more light. “I want to see you,” he says.

  The balls turn transparent. Then Dee Zu makes another adjustment and they become faintly tinged with colors—blue, gold, orange, pink, red—and the oil adds subtle iridescences. The lovers hang suspended, at one with each other inside a knobbly sphere of light made solid. “What a good idea.” Dee Zu congratulates him, and then adds drizadrone to the sensory feast, music both relaxing and stimulating.

  For now Cisco is pretty happy, even if the massage oil does taste awful. His claustrophobia subdued, he's left just feeling guilty. Although he isn't sure why. It might be that he believes he's cheating on Sky. Or maybe he's bothered by the fact he's fantasizing about Sky while having sex with Dee Zu.

  “Oh, yes!” says Du Zee. “Yes.”

  “Sky!” Cisco responds.

  Dee Zu freezes. “What?” she asks him. “What did you say?”

  He's overwhelmed by an impulse to rewind events. Unfortunately the Worlds, unless otherwise specified from the outset, proceed according to conventional rules of cause and effect and time, and what's done is done.

  “I can't believe you said that.”

  No rewind, no undo.

  Monday

  Cisco feels unclean. His last test World, he has learned, the one following the golf ball jam with Dee Zu, had been designed by Eddie Eight.

  Private Parts World works best with large numbers of participants. You get anarchic herds of six‐legged duplex sex organs like giant battering rams in front, enormous weird catchers' mitts behind, all bumbling around blind in a meadow, senseless except for something like seven square meters of skin outside and another seven square meters inside, all of it loaded with protopathic sensors, the most ancient, most sensual means of touch. At least Eddie Eight hadn't been a contiguous part of the train; if he had been, for sure he would have let Cisco know about it.

  Now Cisco is back in his apartment. Eddie Eight and Sissie are in his tank, just hanging out. “Herds of drooling, double‐ended slit‐schlongs,” says Eddie Eight. “Like something out of a Daliesque acid dream, nudging each another in search of a fit. Makes you feel good all over. Once you connect. Especially when you get connected fore and aft, choo‐choo train‐style, inside and out. Fifty‐megaton orgasms.” Eddie reckons the anonymity is part of the kick. “So you don't know who's who, eh?” He leers, reaching deep into his arsenal for this pass at a smile. Cisco also hears a quick gurgle of laughter, but Eddie Eight never laughs.

  Cisco nods and smiles back. The surface of his brain sizzles under a shower of delicate chimes. “Drizzle and drone, bro,” Sissie says. The music has induced a state of r
apt attention, and Cisco smiles in Sissie's direction, paying her no real mind.

  Drizadrone is the latest variant of what Leary calls elevator music. A subliminal excitement swells to emerge as a single tone that drones and drones higher to the verge of pain before dying to reveal yet a different tone droning up like a second searchlight piercing, on a different vector, the musical space. A third tone rises faster than the first two, and now the three of them rise and fall and sweep back and forth across a space defined partly, now, by bursts of drum‐thud ack‐ack and a tinkly storm of sizzlers. A space fractured by the sudden barrage of babble from Eddie Eight and Sissie.

  “You come to my house, Cisco's baby sister, and I make you sap‐happy. Never mind it's Monday.”

  “Go fuck yourself,” Cisco says. Then he shivers, and realizes that his apartment is cold. “Turn up the heat!” he instructs his apartment. He looks down and sees that the woman in his locket is scowling.

  Chronicle

  My Ellie doesn't smile much these days. The Ellie in my locket, I mean. Quantum memocubes are supposed to be stable, but I have to wonder if all the data are still okay.

  Gosh, I've got to watch that. Hey, screen, you scratch that last part. About Ellie and the locket. Deep‐six it. C'mon. You know what I mean. Delete it.

  •

  Funny thing. I used to know how high Mount Everest was. And I used to have at least fifty phone numbers in my head. No need any more. I can ask MOM. But no matter how I try, I can't remember all on my own how high that darned mountain is. (I am a hundred and thirteen years old, mind you, and, so I'm told, suffering a touch of brain atrophy; for one thing I tend to repeat myself.) And of course we don't have telephone numbers anymore, or telephones either, so it doesn't matter I can't recollect any of them. Besides which, all the people whose numbers I used to remember are long dead and gone.

  What the heck, these days I can't remember what I had for breakfast, so what does any of it matter? And look at all we know today. Any one of us. All we have to do is ask. Everything anybody ever knew, nearly, is tucked away somewhere in MOM's databases, the Lode, and she can pop any part of it up in about a nanosecond. How high is Mount Everest? No problem. How many properties does a quark have, and why is one of them called “charm”? Just ask, and Bob's your uncle. Other questions take longer. For example, when did technology sell us the Brooklyn Bridge, and why did nobody say no?