MOM

by Collin Piprell

  “Wow! Smoked 'em good, didn't we? Fried their asses. Bunch of dreckad‐worshipping shitheads. They would have been a real find, supposing we had any anthropologists in the house. But we don't have, so they were basically nothing but a liability.”

  “Those were people,” Leary says.

  “Yeah, well. Call them what you like. I call it clearcut crowd control. Thank your lucky stars for this little hangover from the Troubles. Extreme anti‐GameBoy measures.

  “But we'd better hope MOM didn't notice the power surge. If she knows we're down here, we'll get treated to something that makes a laser bath seem like Vic Tanny's.”

  “Tell me, just how does a tinpot crock of spare parts such as yourself come to know all this stuff?”

  “I don't look like much, I know. Grufflegruffle. But I get around. Speaking of which, we need to move our asses. There's an airlock back that way.”

  Leary is happy to be able to tell Rexy that the medibots have already fixed his knee. But it is hot, as he also mentions. He looks, and the lady in his locket is smiling.

  Outside

  “Get in!” Smoke is saying. “Get in.”

  They resemble pre‐suspension field cradles, two of them sitting there side by side. But Cisco recognizes them for what they are. Intercontinental ballistic pods.

  “Go,” Smoke says. “Go.” One pod is open, and Cisco's 'pet is impatient. ESUSA is collapsing. “Don't look back.” A quick transposition and she's inside.

  Cisco looks back. Amid the chaos he sees something move back from the platform into a corridor. Someone, or something, is following them. It can't be Toot; whatever it is, it's too big.

  The pod activates as he gets in. The console lights up; the cockpit canopy slides shut with a solid snick. Not much bigger than Cisco to start with, the cockpit now shrinks in on him till it fits like a glove. Smoke is down there in the dark somewhere on the other side of Cisco's feet.

  •

  Buried alive. The trick is distancing himself from the horror without losing himself to a blankout. A fine line. He flickers back and forth, quantum dither awaiting resolution. The potentially obliterative brew includes the enormity of being Outside mixed with the ugly dread of confinement. Plus the natural fear at having no idea where he's going or what he's going to encounter once there. This could involve more than a simple wet encounter with Sky. “Trust me,” she tells him. Sure. But he tries to think of it as an adventure. He is excited. After all, he's Outside. He's going somewhere. Not someplace in some World, but elsewhere in this very world where he and his locket aren't the only non‐foglet assemblies. As long as Cisco can remember, he's heard tales of Leary's exploits in the “real world.” Now he's out there himself. Mondoland. But he has to ask again. “Smoke,” he says. “Where are we going?”

  “Use this time well,” she replies. Again, she sounds like Sky. “Make yourself stronger. And try to relax.”

  Despite himself, Cisco laughs.

  •

  Cisco breathes slowly and evenly. He tells himself this is frig all, recalls Dee Zu's laugh at its wildest in the face of adversity. He tries to appropriate these parts of his friends. Before he can stop himself, he recalls Lars King's unshakeable good humor. The viewport screen is right there in front of him. He selects a side‐rear view, and swings it to the inside of the curve as they sweep away in a direction the instruments say is east.

  Extending for kilometers, an enormous glass and steel palisade stands on two‐hundred‐meter pillars. It looks as though some behemoth has torn great bites out of it, the wounds sealed with gobs of dull metallic solder. He zooms in to watch an army of slowjoes waving their arms at the ruined mall. But none of it appears any realer than the holos from his apartment window. The real drama lies elsewhere, inside himself.

  The epic scene recedes behind and he swings the view ahead to reveal nothing but empty sky rapidly darkening. The sense of confinement returns, threatens to overwhelm him. Flames of anger flicker invitingly from a pit of oblivion. He looks around but sees nothing. Abruptly, he is tilted vertical and another jolt rams him back into his cocoon. The acceleration is awful. He feels the skin crawling off his face; he can't breathe. He blacks out.

  •

  He's back. But he wants to be elsewhere, anywhere except here, sealed inside this coffin. He begins to flicker in and out. Right on the edge. He needs to focus. There's an overhead console. He selects “View,” and gazes up into a black void. The sparks are stars, not merely something in his own head. He selects “Roll” and right away feels the shift, as though he were in weightless OmniStrike. No up, no down, even though his proprioceptors register a one‐hundred‐and‐eighty‐degree reorientation. That, he can handle. No problem. What's more difficult is the revised view. He's staring down at Earth from an altitude that clearly shows the planet's spherical nature. The sense of falling is overpowering. He closes the view. The pod closes in on him. He opens the view again and copes with it.

  He has experienced worse in the Worlds. But this is no World. It's very different, feeling these things and knowing he's powerless to change the given circumstances. Nor can he bail. The horror of his situation swells deep in his guts. Then he sees that he can bail.

  And he does. He bails right out. Surrenders himself.

  •

  Some time later he's back, still raging. Given no way to vent his fury, confined to this cockpit, he begins to slip away from himself again. But this time he fights it. It's as though he has been dreaming. Surely he couldn't have fallen asleep, not under these circumstances. Yet he recalls fragments of a childhood. Glimpses of a woman. The woman in the locket? And a man. A strong man. Reassuring. His father? And other people. Some of them himself. One of them not somebody nice. Then another voice. Sky's? “Use this time to make yourself stronger.” Then yet another, neither Smoke nor Sky. It's Sissie. “Listen to me!” She's imploring him. He can almost see her. He can almost feel her. As though her image, ill‐defined, is merging, only unsuccessfully, with his body. An appalling dissonance. Badly tuned doppelgängers trying to inhabit the same space. A space also swarming with dream echoes of tunnels and coffins and voracious singularities.

  “Please, Cisco. Listen.” The near‐apparition is still with him. But there's no time to listen to her whining now. At least this can't be her standard Monday moan.

  Wondering at himself, once again he laughs. Sort of.

  “Okay, bro'. Laugh.” Sissie is still there. “But stay with me, okay?”

  Outside

  Right now she's as high as you can get and still claim to be on planet Earth. She's riding shotgun. Her pod uses shadow technology to anticipate remote sensing devices and then evade them by qubitally assimilating itself to another object, in this case the all‐but‐identical pod ahead of hers. If Cisco's approach is being monitored, and you can bet it is, they should see only one target.

  “Do not worry,” Toot says, cute as always. “Totally no problem.”

  The pod gets even smaller. “Don't talk for a while, okay?” she tells the 'pet. She can handle the cramped space. Though Cisco has never admitted it to her, she's aware of his claustrophobia. She can appreciate the strength of will needed to submit to the smothering confinement of a mondo pod. She, on the other hand, hates heights. She looks down. Way down to where patches of continent and sea, mostly sea, appear through cloud cover. If this were a World, she would have the comfort of knowing she could bail, any time she wanted, to the security of cradle and apartment. But she's in mondoland, way up here, nowhere to escape to. Even if she were in a World there'd be nowhere to bail to; the mall and her apartment no longer exist. This knowledge inspires new slivers of dread.

  She thinks of Tor and, barring a twinge of guilt, that's some comfort. He has told her they'll meet, wherever it is she's going. That both reassures her and warms her belly with incongruous thoughts. Tor applies a quality of worlding that she'd never suspected was possible, not to mention the sex, which swings, in the course of a single Monday tryst, fr
om lyrically abstract through crude and juicy to totally bizarre. She feels a stab of guilt. But Cisco is really a different matter. Another ballgame.

  Mr Just Have to Distance Yourself. Mr Cool. Mr Stone Cold Dead as a Democrat, if he isn't careful. Of course, barring a miracle they're all going to be dead soon anyway. But, as she once read in Leary's manuscript: “You just have to keep on keepin' on. And that's the friggin' fact of the matter.” And where's Leary right now? She hopes he's still okay. She hopes everybody's okay. All three of them, or so. Four, counting Tor, or maybe five, though Sky remains little more than a rumor. The human race.

  “I have confidence in you,” Tor has said. “And I have confidence in Cisco. Yes. He has a way in, and you can slipstream him.” Her HIID says that “slipstream” is similar to but not the same as, “riding on someone's coattails,” and less similar to “hitchhiking.” This leaves her none the wiser and not much more comfortable with things as they stand.

  She has to accept Tor's promise on faith. And, although she can't see it and must also accept this proposition on faith, Cisco's pod is hurtling along through the stratosphere somewhere ahead of her. Does he know where they're headed? Or why?

  Outside

  MOM has the pods on qubital wires. They fly on autopilot. These delivery systems are vestiges of when there were still material exchanges between the malls—even wet exchanges, once upon a time, in the interests of gene pool diversity.

  The viewport is still open, but the fear of falling recedes. Instead, Cisco finds himself possessed by a godlike sense of omnipotence, the feeling he's master of all he surveys. Almost as absurdly, he looks for Africa. If he were higher, maybe he could see it. Or perhaps the whole continent, as surely as the qubital version, has been expunged from mondoland.

  Earth has been blasted by catastrophe upon catastrophe and reduced, from this altitude, to gray uniformity. Except for one feature. When he zooms the view, he sees that all the land surface is crackled with irregular five‐ and six‐sided cells extending many kilometers on a side, like the drought‐baked mud Cisco has seen in historical pictures, but in this case crazed on a gigantic scale. He has no idea what could have caused it.

  His proprioceptors signal an abrupt change of altitude. The pod has gone into a dive.

  •

  They're plunging now, the G‐forces dragging at Cisco. The nose‐cone view of developments presents a remnant landmass amid the vast sea. He sees a huge silvery structure perched atop gigantic stilts. It looks much like ESUSA, from here, except that waves are smashing up against ESSEA's seaward legs. So now he knows at least where he's being delivered. The mall stands inside one dreary seaside cell on the crackled surface, half its territory invaded by water. About the time he reckons they're going to crash, the nose pulls up and they rise again in a tight turn, leaving his stomach somewhere behind. The pod goes this way and that, does circles, figure eights, a long straight run, and a couple of loop‐the‐loops, finally flying directly into a hazy sunhole before making another abrupt, swooping descent. Again, too many Gs of force threaten to rip the face off his skull. Cisco stays glued to the nose‐cone cam, preferring this to confinement in his metal‐composite coffin. Even with the view of Outside, he feels himself flicker, from time to time. He senses the place of escape, a hidey‐hole at once inside himself and someplace else. Almost surrenders to it. Pulls back.

  The pod veers. Only a few hundred meters from the ground, it swoops out over water and then back to soar over the land. Cisco thinks he knows their direction now. They're headed north. Again, he sees that the whole gray earth is covered with the crackled pattern. He glimpses something else, a scene he knows can't exist, an area of green, textured like forest.

  The pod slows and begins a descent. It goes into another wildly erratic, evasive course before performing a quick roll and, Cisco believes, a turn back the way they came. Then it hurtles along, fifty meters off the ground, down a corridor defined by gray dunes on one side and rugged stone outcrops cloaked with green rising on the other. This is obviously an illusion; there can't be green hills here, rugged or otherwise. Deep down, Cisco still suspects this is a World. Straight ahead, a stony highway extends straight to the horizon, which is a ridge a few kilometers away. The “highway” looks like bedrock.

  He needs to take control. He turns from viewport to console and tries to triangulate, using satellites and the coordinates for ESSEA and ESUSA, but something's wrong. According to his console readings, he's here, wherever that is, and he's also everywhere else.

  Proprioceptors, those of the inner ear and bowel prominent among them, register more last‐minute flight‐path changes. Then “up” becomes “down,” there's a roar of retro‐thrusters, and he's squeezed into his harness so hard his eyes pop. His internal attitude and speed monitors—exquisitely sensitive, tuned to imminent annihilation—tell him he's instead swinging feet first in gentle descent. Which is a relief. There's a thud, and all apparent motion ceases.

  They've landed. He wonders what it feels like to be dissed.

  •

  He emerges to find himself still under a crumpled tent of silvery Hylar. It's hot beneath the chute. Its insulating properties retain the heat of the pod, baked by re‐entry. He lifts it and peeks out. It's even hotter outside. The reflective canopy is shielding him from the sun, which glares through a fuzzy white halo. Anyway, he's still here. Wherever that might be. Neither internal nor eternal oblivion has claimed him. He looks down and sees his locket. Further confirmation this is indeed mondoland and not merely some bizarre World. He opens it to find the lady smiling. Go figure.

  Smoke stands a few meters away, scanning their bleak surrounds in three hundred and sixty degrees. Cisco releases the lines and rolls the chute up tight. He folds it into a wad and, Eddie Eight‐style, shoves it down the front of his tunic.

  Nowhere can he see the green patch he spotted from the pod. He does glimpse the blurry assimilation of his pod by the landscape though, and for a moment he thinks he has also spotted another pod in the hazy background, up on high ground together with a human figure. Going by its general shape and manner it could be Dee Zu, if she weren't dead.

  Then the area is obscured by a swirl of dust, a local breeze, for there's no wind where Cisco stands. When the dust clears, any new features have been erased. Scenic conformity rules, OK! He almost laughs at the thought of this slogan, the impulse dampened by a fleeting sense of loss, near‐nostalgia for ESUSA. But there's no way back now even if there were anywhere to return to. Nowhere to go except forward. Supposing he isn't dissed, an outcome he judges already overdue.

  It's hot and still. Nevertheless, a dune just ahead stirs. Then it stirs again, and a shaggy dustdevil rises to wobble towards them, firming as it approaches. A slowjoe. Lacking a better response, Cisco crouches defensively and, back arched, Smoke takes a station in front of him. The emergent slowjoe takes on harder edges. One more reported advantage of the Hylar chute: its super‐reflective surface slows recognition by the blurs. This may be no more than another urban myth; nevertheless, Cisco starts pulling out the sheet, hoping he has time to crawl back into his tent. Then something else materializes out of a dune right beside them. No standard slowjoe, its head is oddly formed, with long, ear‐like appendages flopping to either side. This creature is disheveled quite generally, bits of it tending to flap. It gestures at the other slowjoe, as though tossing something. Almost immediately, the first one melts back into the landscape. The second hobbles right up to where Smoke stands poised to attack.

  “We're late!” it says, its voice at once high‐pitched and jittery yet muffled as though by a pillow.

  “What?” Cisco has no more intelligent response.

  “We're late. Oh, dear. We're going to be late.”

  Cisco looks at Smoke. For the first time since they left his apartment, and however blank her featureless silver face remains, the 'pet seems at a loss.

  This oddly frayed slowjoe sounds mechanical. Clicking and clanking in a muted sort
of way, the thing reaches into a flapping bit hanging off its side, maybe a pouch. It turns to the four compass directions to strew handfuls of dust, muttering all the while as though incanting. The creature turns and addresses Cisco directly. “Tame blurs,” it says. At least Cisco thinks that's what he hears. Whatever. The dust underfoot is transformed. Within seconds, the three of them—Cisco, Smoke, and slowjoe—stand on a ten‐meter‐square stretch of roadway pointing what Cisco believes is due north. The spongy surface resembles an OmniStrike training mat.

  “Tsk,” goes the slowjoe creature. “We are late, you know.” Clanking and squeaking, it sets off with a limping, half‐hopping gait. It stops to look back and, realizing that Cisco and Smoke aren't following, waves them on. “Come,” it says. “Follow me. Quickly!”

  Looking back, they decide to follow, and quickly.

  A wind comes up, blowing across their line of march. Behind them, the road dissolves, breaking up into wind‐drift, already leaving a wake of tiny dunes. The ravening threat of chaos keeps pace behind while, ahead of them, the dunes melt away before the ever‐extending progress of this royal road, their conveyor. The dunes part, as though they're following Moses in that old story about people escaping through a sea that drowned their pursuers.

  But Cisco fears that all his own enemies lie ahead. He wonders where Sky is.

  “Sky?” he calls. But neither Smoke nor the slowjoe responds.

  •

  Everything has a soft‐focus anonymity. The prospect resembles a badly modeled, early‐'30s landscape template, partly assembled and then abandoned. Their conveyor keeps pace with them, disappearing behind even as it extends ahead. This is no walk in the park, but Outside clearly isn't as dangerous as the views from the mall suggested. The mallsters have been fed an edited version of mondoland.

  He has spotted the green oasis again. From higher ground, and when air‐borne dust permits, it appears ahead of them, sometimes nearer, sometimes farther. But it can't be more than a few kilometers away. Whatever it is, they seem to be headed in that direction.