MOM

by Collin Piprell

  Chronicle

  Appearances rule, OK! What Ellie liked to call the Cosmetic Imperative.

  Take that time Bangkok hosted an international bankers' convention. They declared a two‐day public holiday because they didn't want rush‐hour traffic making them look bad, and they built a huge fence to block off unsightly slums festering away too close to the conference center. Or take the women construction workers who used to wear long‐sleeved shirts buttoned up and balaclava masks under broad‐brimmed bamboo hats—better all sweated up than turned “black” in the sun.

  There's another one of Ellie's laws: “There's no instinct more primal in Thailand than the urge to look good.”

  Maybe we're looking at the flipside of the Cosmetic Imperative, here. Or a more subtle version of the same. MOM or somebody tinkering with what we think we see, fixing things up the way she wants us to see them, for reasons we can't even guess at.

  Yo, screen? Scratch all that right back to the beginning. I'd as soon not get treated for paranoid schizophrenia, thank you.

  But you have to wonder what happened to Africa. Could be it was one of those virus attacks on the Lode back when. Or maybe, just maybe, MOM or somebody, something, is tidying up. Sanding a few rough edges off our world.

  Mondoland is hard enough to take as it is. And like Eddie Eight says, how do we know what we see out the window is what's actually there? The Kid has this idea his digiscreen is lying to him. The holoports could as easily do the same. Do we really know what's out there? Or even in here, come to that. Could it be that MOM has legislated the Cosmetic Imperative for one and all?

  •

  Hey, Doll. Can you fix me some jerky? Yeah, yeah. I know. Lean jerky. Low friggin' fat jerky. What the heck. It doesn't have to taste good, it only has to get me from A to B. Some for now, and some for the stash.

  You'd better strike that. Back to where I said “Hey, Doll.” Delete it. No, no. Not you, Doll. I want the jerky. You, 'screen. Delete all my talk about the stuff. And the stash. Got that?

  Dream

  “Look out your window,” Dee Zu says. She's there with him in his apartment.

  “Hey, I'm sorry, okay?” Sorry he killed her. He feels he should say more. “Really sorry.”

  “Never mind that. Look out your window.”

  Cisco knows he isn't supposed to look, but he does. It's a scene from hell. A line of giant mushroom clouds stand on the horizon to the east, webs of lightning at play all around them. A towering gray wall of sea rushes towards ESUSA, still several kilometers distant, but approaching fast.

  “Do you see it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is it real?”

  “I don't know.”

  Dream

  This Ellie, reconstituted from what few data remain in the Lode, is a ghost. Just enough of a presence to help with the Kid's therapy. But Leary mourns her gradual thinning, the progressive absence of an Alzheimer's victim going the way of Africa.

  It's odd. The Worlds are off‐limits on Mondays; trespassing is almost a capital offense. Quickest way there is to get offlined. All that, yet here it is a Monday and he's in Ellie's World on the sly, along with part of the Kid. And this lady Sky, whoever she might be. Leary knows she's been with Cisco and still he doesn't hear boo from MOM. MOM doesn't seem to know Sky exists, much less that she's spending Mondays in the Worlds.

  “Leary?” Ellie's back. Like a signal wavering in and out on an old crystal radio set.

  She looks at him with all the old sweetness, and Leary aches at its seductive deceit.

  “Let's do it now,” she says. “Okay? Here in the garden.”

  Leary doesn't answer. He can't bring himself to play even that much of the game.

  Ellie steps closer. She hauls up the front of her dress and shows him her nakedness. She has Leary's full attention, now. Her sudden focus, her alertness, is eerier than her previous absence has ever been. So is the voice, when she says: “You're a weird fucker, old buddy.”

  “Brian.”

  “The one and only. And I want you to come visit. A wet encounter. Got it? The boy'll be there as well.”

  Leary hammers his telep fist down on the GR table hard enough to splinter the wood. “Aren't you ever going to let it friggin' rest?”

  “She's mine, old buddy.” The Ellie‐Brian thing stands, cups its breasts through the loose cotton shift and squeezes, moaning. “I've been bleeding what's left of her from the Lode. Though there wasn't much there to start, was there?”

  Leary trembles with a terrible violence suppressed by the knowledge that this is just a telep. And the fact that it still looks like Ellie.

  “So shit or get off the pot. Okay, old buddy? You and the boy bring me the rest of her. Do you understand? Those are my terms. Non‐negotiable.”

  This monstrous Ellie grabs the boy version of the Kid by the shoulders and kisses him hard on the mouth, the child struggling to avoid its tongue.

  “In the flesh.” Ellie leaves off kissing to giggle. To gurgle, more like it.

  Leary can't stand up. He tries to bring his fist down on the table, hard, but it cringes away. This tells him this isn't a World; he's in mondoland. Then he awakens, drenched in sweat and heart thudding, to find Rexy standing by the sleeping platform, watching.

  Chronicle

  I guess Brian knows it. Given the chance, I'd kill him.

  Gosh. Maybe you'd better scratch that.

  On second thought, to heck with it. Let it ride. I don't care who reads this, the way things are.

  Funny thing. We used to be drinking buddies. The kind that sit in the same bar too many nights and drink too much and talk a lot of hooey. Never mind we came from completely different backgrounds. That was back before Ellie. Before what Brian did to her. And what he did to my son. But what can you do to a telep? Dinky Toy gave it her best shot, socked it to him as hard as she could, and Brian only got a big kick out of it. He wants to bring Ellie back. That's the one bargaining chip we've got. And I'll use it. Just to get close enough. At the same time I'll make sure he never gets his Ellie. My Ellie. I'd die to get her back. But not that way.

  He thinks he's safe. But he isn't. Not by a long shot. I'll do my part to send him straight to Hell. Even if I have to go with him. And the Kid's good. I'm counting on him. We're counting on him.

  I don't care who knows it. It's time for them to meet.

  Monday

  OFFICIAL NOTICE.

  Greetings, Cisco Smith, Citizen ZEZQ112 of Eastern Seaboard (United Securistats of America) Mall.

  Mall Operations Management has registered multiple attempts by Citizen ZEZQ112 at unauthorized Worlds access. Further trespass will be penalized as per the letter of the law promulgated under the Constitution of the United Malls.

  Please acknowledge.

  “Acknowledged,” says Cisco, smiling wildly, hoping maybe to expunge all record of his indiscretions. He has once again been barred entry to his cradle. Big surprise. But this time MOM has issued a formal warning.

  In fact, Cisco is relieved. There's no mention of his actual transgressions with Sky. No mention of Lars either, come to that. Or Dee Zu. It looks as though he's getting away with murder. He's swept with sorrow.

  •

  Joy and Sissie are babblerapping away in his tank.

  “All gain, yeah? No pain.”

  “HQ ten‐plus,” says Sissie, the familiar one, not the capable Sissie of Cisco's dreamlike invasion of Dee Zu's apartment.

  “Then you get Mondays.”

  “Joke.”

  “Mondays suck.”

  “HQ zilch.”

  “The big draggy donut.”

  “'Be everyone you can be,' they tell us.” “Then they close the Worlds.”

  “Mondays.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Sucks.”

  “Yeah.”

  “MOM's all fucked up.” Sissie isn't happy.

  Cisco moves to the living room to have a look, maybe boost his CQ.

  Sissie's fa
ce fills her sector of the holotank. Cisco recoils. At first, he doesn't recognize it as human, much less as belonging to his kid sister. It's been flayed. The bulging eyeballs—naked, mad‐goggling direct extensions of the brain—start out of her head with cosmic indignation.

  “Sissie,” he says. “What the hell?”

  Traceries of blue vein and red artery pump hot sorrow; slick purple meat flexes and clenches, the struts and strings all hard at work. But Sissie's face lacks the fine tuning that skin provides. The expressive surface is missing. But qubital avatars don't need lips to speak, and her teeth snap off bits of unmodulated anger. “I'm opping out,” she says.

  A familiar fatigue threatens to sap Cisco's reserve of wellness. “Don't op out,” he tells her. “Okay?”

  “Lars King is dead.” More qubital magic—her voice is expressive in a way her face can't be. “Now Dee Zu is dead too. Don't you care?”

  Of course he cares. But you have to keep these things at a distance.

  “Somebody killed Dee Zu. Any one of us could be next.” Her tendons twitch, the muscles shimmer and writhe. Sissie now stands life‐size. Her arms and shoulders are encrusted with scar tissue, a carapace of rough weals and scabs like armor. Other than that, she wears nothing but a thong. A few of the raw furrows run parallel, part of some inchoate pattern, but most of it looks like the work of a madman or two with axes and branding irons.

  Cisco smiles. Monday experiments have demonstrated that smiling can raise his official HQ by at least two points. So he aims a big smile at the tank. He smiles and he smiles. The tank extrudes Eddie Eight, as large as life, to stand between Sissie and Joy. “Don't overdo it, my friend,” he tells Cisco. “You'll sprain your face.”

  “All this stuff, Sis.” Cisco turns his smile back on Sissie. “What do you want to say?”

  “There's no magic.” Her voice sounds all the more desolate for the fact her face remains impassive.

  “You look great,” Cisco says again.

  “I mean, one minute I'm a god. The next I'm…”

  “A mallster,” Eddie Eight suggests. “Aren't you proud? The glorious culmination of human history.”

  Cisco smiles. “Give it a rest, Eddie.”

  “Hey, Joy,” says Eddie Eight. “I've been thinking.”

  “What, Eddie Eight?” Joy asks, grateful anyone would start a conversation with her. Even Eddie Eight.

  “I don't think you're an ebee after all.”

  Joy cuddles Toot, looks thrilled at the news.

  “No, I believe you're a foglet assembly. Okay? And you're just waiting for a special cue before you diss yourself.”

  Joy's face begins to crumple.

  “Close your tank,” Sissie tells her. “Don't listen.”

  “That's it,” Eddie Eight continues. “I'll bet it's Toot. It could come any time. Toot's going to say something, maybe 'Kazam!' and there you'll be, nothing but a pile of dust awaiting further instruction. Maybe Toot will use the bits to build the Great Dane of his dreams, figuring on the best piece of ass ever.”

  Joy is blubbering. She dumps Toot off her lap.

  Cisco can't stand it; he closes his tank.

  There's movement on his periphery, and he looks. A creature with tentacles and a bulbous head is detaching itself from the sofa to slide towards the coffee table. According to Cisco's HIID this is an octopus, what used to be the most intelligent of the invertebrates. The thing his HIID wouldn't identify when he was worlding underwater with Sky. The patch of coral with tentacles. The octopus rears up to gaze at Cisco with one great eye; then it disappears without trace into the table. Jesus Christ. Never a dull moment.

  Current wisdom suggests these anomalies reflect random glitches in the master program. Maybe. But they might also suggest some droll intelligence at work. Leary calls them gremlins. If you listen to Eddie Eight, which nobody in his right mind would, they echo the slowjoes Outside. It is odd, though, two octopuses in two cycles, when Cisco has never had anything to do with an octopus before. Eddie Eight claims coincidences are guff. At other times, mind you, he says it's all coincidental, and there's no such thing as cause and effect.

  “The slowjoes,” Joy likes to say. “That's the PlagueBot dreaming.”

  And maybe it's MOM dreaming that gives them the majigs and all the other anomalies inside the mall. A miniature slowjoe rises out of Cisco's coffee table, waves its arms around, and then settles back in.

  Chronicle

  Excuse me a minute.

  Doll? Hi. Yeah, it's me. You were maybe expecting somebody else? Fix me a T‐bone steak, lots of fat on the edges, seared till it's nice and brown. And I'll take two fingers of bourbon, straight up. No ice. Okay, only joking. Give me a near beer and a big bowl of brown rice, uncooked. That's right. Uncooked. You want healthy? I'll give you healthy… Hey! Get away from there. Frig off.

  My DisposAll just tried to recycle my stash, doesn't matter how often I tell it to stay the heck out of there. Darned thing's worse than my old girlfriend Mona.

  Strike everything I said about my stash. Including the brown rice.

  Monday

  Breach… breach… breach…

  NORTHWEST QUADRANT SECTOR 9 UNDER ATTACK

  This is no way to wake up on a Monday. But the shrill alarm ceases even before the headline disappears, and aromas of coffee and toasted peanut butter‐and‐banana sandwich begin to waft from Cisco's Doll. She's letting him have a sandwich. Maybe to ease the threat of being offed. Cisco sips coffee and eats as he scans the newscreen without much interest. Part of the northern quadrant was breached, this first morning of the current Monday. It has already been contained. Cisco finishes his breakfast and opens the tank, even as he tells himself he shouldn't.

  “Contained?” Eddie Eight is wide awake and right into things. “Of course MOM is going to tell us that. What else can she tell us? Kiss our asses goodbye?”

  “You can kiss my ass, Eddie Eight, and say goodbye.” Sissie's face tells you she has reconsidered that proposition even as she utters it.

  Eddie Eight puckers up, makes obscene kissing noises. Then he says, “Outside is instant death. There's nothing out there for us anymore. Not these days. But no problem. Not so long as we've got our Worlds. Better blissed than dissed, am I right? Or maybe not.” He squats on his heels and bounces exuberantly. “But I'm gonna give you the it‐doesn't‐really‐matter natter. Doesn't matter how many mallsters in the cage. Long as they're happy. Yeah?”

  For all its rap‐happy drive, there's a retro tinge to Eddie Eight's patter. Sometimes Cisco feels as though he's listening to two different people at the same time. Maybe more.

  “Yeah, but. Notice there's almost nobody inline anymore? It's because there's nobody offline either. Clear as can be. So how many mallsters are we actually talking about, eh?”

  “Happy Monday,” Cisco says, beaming.

  “Mondomondo Day.” This morning Sissie is being a wraith. No more than a sad smudge, a shifting nebula in the tank. It's disconcerting to watch this apparition ingest what looks like a piece of dry toast. “Yay.”

  “We're all fucked,” says Eddie Eight with a big happy sneer. “Outside, you're dissed before you can say ouch. Inside, you get to explore the outranges of your own psyche. Hey‐hey. The cognitive badlands. What's the diff? Dissed in here or dissed out there. Same‐same. And it's coming soon. The Proteant Enigmass. To a world near you. MOM's losing control. The mall's crashing, my friends.”

  Sissie twists, a troubled column of mist, nearly insubstantiates. “Mondays are too real. They're so real it's unreal. I can't take it.”

  “I don't feel good.” Joy has joined them. “It's like I feel a crump coming on. Like the whole world's going down.”

  “Have you noticed?” Eddie Eight asks. “How many people are down? Crashing out. They're going nuts, or they're just going. Vanishing. The whole system is crashing. MOM's going down. And how long do you think you can make it without your MOM? Eh?” Eddie Eight whines “Mommy, mommy, mommy” and then w
inks out of the tank.

  There's a new graffito:

  The Malls Go Down

  From the folks who brought you Shaky's Last Stand

  “Who's Shaky? I don't understand.”

  “Don't worry about it, Joy,” Cisco tells her. “

  But what does it mean?”

  “It's only somebody screwing around.” Cisco doesn't know how he's doing these things, but now he's got an idea, at least, who it is that's doing them. He guesses Brian could have been the last human MOM after all.

  •

  Breach… breach… breach…

  Unbelievably shrill.

  South Central 16 alert. Sector breach.

  “That's my sector!” Joy is freaking. “That's my sector.”

  Emergency procedures… emergency procedures…

  Eddie Eight sneers delightedly. “Yeah, right. Emergency procedures: head between knees, kiss ass goodbye.”

  Listening to muffled noises from outside his apartment, Cisco believes he also hears a dirty gurgle, something like laughter.

  “Ready for it? MOM's going nuts. The Big Den Mother in the Sky. The next thing, she's going to open the malls to the Outside. Or kill the force‐field shields and turn the satrays on us. But what does it matter? She could poison our food anyway, or introduce nerve gas; maybe have cryptomajigs strangle us in our sleep. That's the flip side of all the bread and circuses. We're entirely at MOM's mercy. And she's going berserk.”

  Everybody mills around in the tank, stirred by the sense of impending doom.

  Even Leary. But he's wavering. An earlier announcement forecast iffy satellite transmission due to ionospheric disturbances plus heavy smogbot cover. And the interference is working both ways. “It's like I'm seeing you all in funhouse mirrors. I'm outta here.” Leary's telep elongates till it's ridiculously skinny, undulates wildly, and then vanishes.

  Sissie is also wavering, starting to flicker in and out in much the way Leary did, even though her wet master is right next door instead of on the opposite side of the planet. But Cisco's attention is distracted by Joy. Her avatar flashes through a series of bright colors and then dulls to reveal a naked fat woman of about twenty years.

  “Are you okay?” Cisco asks her. “Joy?”