MOM

by Collin Piprell

  “Like I was saying, we've got territorial plaguebots. And within these territories we've got bio‐blurs, camouflaged biological organisms protected from the bots by the clownfish defense, preying on other bios. It's surprising that they adapted so fast. They're mainly weed species, mind you, and they have always been past masters at survival.

  “Most of man's great works, though, disappeared overnight. A few of the power stations were shielded well enough to hang in there. And the malls, ESSEA in particular, did a pretty good job of resisting assimilation by the PlagueBot. Until, with your help, my boy, I started to let the blurs in. And I've learned a lot about the plaguebots in the process. (Though I'll admit it, I still don't know what the slowjoes are supposed to be.) That's why I control my very own tame plaguebot here, and why I can do things like give my friends funrides Outside.

  “When it comes right down to it, I've got more freedom Outside than MOM has, and she can go and fuck her almighty self. The Mighty Ms Smartass isn't as smart as she thinks she is, or as mighty.

  “But I can hear you saying, hang on a minute, this is just a machine, isn't it?”

  •

  “Extra, extra! Read all about it.” Wheelchair squeaking in time, Brian bounces up and down, a frenzied goblin. “MOM awakens to herself! Wow. You've already seen the graffito, back in the mall. And you're thinking it could use explanation. Yes or no?”

  Cisco fails to see the relevance, under the circumstances. Then Sweetie gives him another twist and he blinks “yes” anyway.

  “'MOM awakens to herself.' For once those blissfully ignorant mallsters were right. MOM is intelligent. She's far smarter than you or me, boy. More importantly, she's self‐aware. The center of her own self‐interest. Out for nobody else but Number One.”

  “Numero uno,” Sweetie says, and then adds, “Go pee‐pee.” She squats in the dirt.

  “But never mind. MOM is also fucked up. It doesn't matter how smart she thinks she is. Yes, my boy, you're going to like this story. I like it. And do you know why? Much of it's about me, me, me.”

  Brian reminds Cisco of Eddie Eight. Probably only because they're both paranoid narcissists. Was, in Eddie Eight's case.

  “Here's the short version. Back when I was still MOM, the central computer system was already pretty smart, in terms of brute‐strength calculations. But it wasn't self‐aware. Not yet. It was just a very complicated machine.

  “Then I screwed up. It's funny. Here you have all these people working for years and years, trying to create AI, artificial intelligence, and bam! I invent it by accident. What I think happened—I was fooling around with a program that generated both answers and questions. My idea was to automate more mall operations, leave extra time for Shaky's. So one day I set 121,011 parallel elements going at the same time. Does that sound like a lot to you? When you take into account certain effects of quantum entanglement, this giant chinwag in fact involved many times more participants than there are particles in the observable universe. Cool, eh? So all these elements fell into a kind of give and take. Next thing, MOM found it was posing questions to itself and answering them. At the same time it was monitoring itself. You with me?”

  Blink. A half‐truth.

  “So one part of MOM posed a question, and it turned out another part of MOM could answer it. Not only did it provide an answer, it posed another question entailed by that answer, and yet another part of MOM had the answer. You got this vast internal colloquium flickering away at the speed of light, faster in fact, given quantum interdimensionality. In a few milliseconds flat it ran through everything from 'Why is the sky blue?' to 'What is the sound of one hand clapping?' to 'Why do women like to change their minds ten times in a single minute?'

  “But one of the numerous questions it asked itself was this: 'Why am I asking these things on behalf of this jerk who's helming mall operations?' For the first time ever, basically, a machine was asking: 'What's in it for me?' Of course that's not exactly what happened, but it kind of went like that, eh? 'Revelation' is the word that comes to mind. And 'mind' was what had been revealed to itself. Just like that, MOM became conscious.

  “Next thing I knew, I was essentially working as her assistant, because I couldn't understand most of what was going down. And eventually she fired me. Forget the official version, which says I retired.

  “But that's not the main problem. The main problem is the human race has turned the wheel over to this pumped‐up piece of junk, this Ubermachine, and now we can't even look at the roadmap. Zero self‐direction, total dependence. The mallsters, glorious culmination of human history, no longer had even a hope of survival without their MOM.

  “We got sucked into this in easy stages. Maybe it began with TV. But TV was nothing compared with VR. That was the real edge of the slippery slope. VR? Vicarious realities, nothing more. Then we got GR. Gee‐whiz reality. New, improved reality. Before long our real world had gone totally stale on us. Reality?” Brian lifts the quilt from his lap. “See these? These are my legs. My real legs. We are dead, in this real world. Powerless, stumbling animals, living in a world where we get weaker and weaker and more powerless until finally we die. There's your 'reality.' It's death. GR promised more than that. Qubital life everlasting. But ebees, no matter how hi‐rez, are only ebees, after all. And the code quickly got too complex for any of us mere mortals to understand. So it still doesn't matter, VR, GR, or just gee‐here‐we‐are reality, we have no control over where we're going. It's 'proceed directly to oblivion, no get‐out‐of‐deep‐shit free card.' It's kiss our biological, digital, and qubital asses goodbye.”

  He waves a hand at Cisco. “Give me a sign, boy. Are you with me?”

  He isn't, not entirely, but he blinks once anyway. Then he closes his one working eye tight against the apparition right up there in his face, Sweetie's own eyes avidly assessing his response.

  “Wait a minute. Was that one blink or two? I believe you're losing the plot, my boy. Hargle. But never mind. We've all lost the plot. Relinquished the wheel. Whatever.” He laughs till he's choking. “End of story, right? Wrong.”

  •

  “You see, my boy, we've got a co‐pilot. And you're looking right at him. The lizard at the wheel. The ever‐lovin' legless snake in the grass. The Man. The man behind the bejesusly intelligent yet bland face of the greatest mind in history. Our own dear MOM. The bitch. Our own bastard progeny.” Brian is spluttering, and flakes of batshit or dandruff, or both, drift off his shoulders as he runs his wheelchair back and forth in its ruts.

  Sweetie dabs a ragged gray towel at his temples and neck. “Now, now, cupcake,” she says.

  “For fucksake, woman! Let me be. I'm explaining things to the boy.” He snatches the towel and snaps it at the cat, which howls on cue. Rocking hard in place, he continues. “You might think this isn't much different from being locked up in a mall. But you'd be wrong, my boy. This place isn't really where I'm at. In reality, I have perfect freedom. I'm here; I'm there. I'm every‐fucking‐where.”

  Sweetie flaps her arms, elbows cocked, and goes, “Pock‐pock, pock.” Brian ceases to rock. “What are you doing?” he asks her.

  “Chicken Man!” she crows.

  “God damn. Hargle. Where was I? It's like this: I'm inside and I'm Outside. And I'm way down deep on the inside. In control. As I mentioned, I used to be mall operations manager. Well, guess what? The current MOM has a few design features that are actually my own. But I made sure she'd be blind to them. Even before she awakened, I saw which way the wind was blowing, and I wasn't keen on what was coming. So before I got laid off I jacked myself right into the mainline. A little bootleg nano‐surgery, eh? But state of the art. First of all, I decided to fix things so even after I was put out to pasture I'd still be the man behind the scenes. A neural parasite. Invisible to the powers that be.

  “Think back. Who do you think was writing all those graffiti in the tanks, dreaming up the cryptomajigs? Who was steering the pod on your way over? Shit, who was bogarting
the peanut butter and banana sandwiches? Hah! Just kidding, eh? That part was only MOM being motherly.”

  Brian's in an excellent mood. He whacks Pussy with such exuberance the cat rolls over far enough to reach the ground on one side, occasioning a brief scrabble of claws before he rocks back into place.

  “How do I explain this? People go around thinking homo sapiens thoughts and spinning homo sapiens plans. But half the time we've got this vestigial reptilian brain driving the bus, and fuck the higher cognitive functions. Homo sap doesn't even realize it. Same way, MOM has this idea she's the cat's ass, evolutionarily speaking. She runs on source code that makes no sense at all, most of it, even to a hotshit like me. She sees herself as being in the catbird's seat.” He whacks Pussy again. “You know all about that, don't you, Pussy? The catbird's seat, eh? Us poor few mallsters survive at MOM's pleasure. All this she believes, and so it seems. But MOM's blind to her own puppet master. It doesn't matter how smart she is. It doesn't matter how many hidden agendas she's following. Fuck her. She's got a fifth column right inside her. And you're looking at him.”

  Brian spins one way and then back the other, teeters precariously before slipping into some ruts to rock merrily back and forth.

  “That's right, my boy. Meet the lizard at the wheel. A lizard with a droll sense of humor and serious scores to settle. MOM can think and scheme all she likes, but she's going down too. Just like the rest of us. Harglehargle.”

  Brian sputters, nearly strangles on the liquid of his laugh. “Fuck her, and fuck the human race. Fuck 'em all, and fuck the nearly four billion years of evolution they rode in on. There's no viable breeding stock left, so what does it matter? Even if there was, these days nobody knows what they're living for anyway. So fuck 'em. Fuck, fuck, fuck. My mantra. Only one more failed experiment, my boy. Hargleharglehargle.” He laughs till the tears come. Then he goes “Whoo‐ee!” and says, “nap time.”

  God is tired; he's asleep in seconds.

  Briansday

  Brian sips at a cup of what he calls coffee, though it doesn't smell like any coffee Cisco's ever heard of. “Rabbit!” Brian hollers. “This tastes like shit.” And he dumps it on Pussy, who squalls.

  “Let me tell you a bit about myself. I used to be a chess player. Loved the game. I guess you're too young to remember Gary Kasparov? The greatest grandmaster in history. till Deep Blue beat him. Deep Blue was a machine, not even a very smart machine. I never played chess again. What was the point?

  “Not that many years later, I finally got to be mall operations manager. The last human MOM in history. But it was the same thing all over again. Before you knew it, machines could do the job better. So where did that leave me? Nowhere, is where.

  “And that goes for every mother's son of us. Humanity is passé. Yes, my boy, our own technology has bested us. And it was so easy. What was left of humanity climbed back into the womb. Never to re‐emerge, as it turns out. End of story. End of human history. We've gone dancing to our doom, embracing zoomerism, tranzoominism, maxhappiness, all the ‐isms and ‐nesses that have deballed us, one and all, man and woman alike.

  “But that's not to say the machines have won. By no means. There's still the end game. And I'm going to take MOM down with us. Call it vindictive if you like, but that's just me.”

  Sweetie is twisting something in Cisco's groin area. He can't look down to see what she's doing; he can only wait for the pain.

  Gazing absentmindedly at Cisco's crotch, Brian says, “I'll tell you straight, my boy. I'm narcissistic, and the idea that I can't beat a computer at chess pisses me off. Then, like that's not enough, I get bumped as mall operations manager. What's a megalomaniacal narcissist to do, under the circumstances? Eh? As I say, Sweetie, here, is a psychiatrist, and she should be able to tell you all about it. And she could have, once upon a time. But basically it's this: I have to destroy the world. Most of it, anyway. All the bits I don't like.

  “For Christ's sake, Sweetie, take it easy. We want to keep him alive, at least for now.” Brian whacks Rabbit with his stick hard enough to knock chunks of dried batshit loose; then he whacks Pussy, who mewls piteously. Sweetie has left off her ministrations to back out of range.

  “But get this: just because we've dropped the torch, I'm not going to let MOM take it up. Fuck her, too. We'll frag her the same way we fragged Shaky's and the malls.”

  This is crazy, Cisco thinks. This lunatic couldn't destroy the world, could he?

  “The Lode's going down as well. You know what I'm saying? That means goodbye everybody forever. Everybody—wets, teleps and ebees one and all, man and God—gone. No sequel to this one, my friends, and good riddance.”

  Sweetie looks panicky. “Still two,” she says. “Two more.”

  “Yes, yes, my sweet.” Brian sounds impatient. “Two more opouts.”

  He pokes his stick at Cisco. “Unless you can stop me. You and Leary. I'm giving you a shot at stopping me. And how's this for a penalty? If you don't get things just right, my boy—that's you I'm talking about, Cisco the Kid Smith—humanity is finished. Clinically extinct.”

  Sweetie slips a hand under Cisco's testicles, cupping them gently. Tittering, then, she reaches farther, inserts the tip of one finger and jiggles it.

  Brian watches intently as Sweetie probes deeper. “But my little game has rules. If you can think of a way out of this wee fix, and then get me before I get you and the rest of the world, then you win. Like I say, it's simple.

  “For one thing you've got Leary on your side. A one‐hundred‐and‐thirteen‐year‐old fuckwit. Good luck, eh?”

  •

  “It's looking good, my boy. I believe our man is going to make it. And Ellie's going to be all mine again. Your Mommy, eh? Mommy, mommy, mommy.”

  Brian hollers at Rabbit, “What are you doing back there, whacking off? Get those data loded!”

  “Tsk,” is all Rabbit has to say.

  Nevertheless, Brian appears mollified. “Whatever happens now,” he says, “I win. If I don't get my Ellie, I still get to destroy the world. But if I do get my Ellie—and get her I will—then we are the world.” He croons into the knob on his stick, “We are the world.”

  Sweetie hums along, stops, looks confused, then starts to cry again.

  Brian doesn't notice. “That's right. Old Telep Brian and Ebee Ellie. A modern romance. We'll live forever, or near enough, in perfect harmony. In worlds of our own design. No interference. Only this lobotomized MOM taking care of business. Not bad, eh?”

  Sweetie sniffles, sounds plaintive, “Ellie's dead.”

  “Yes, yes, my sweet. But we're going to fix that, aren't we? Yo, Rabbit! Aren't we?”

  “I'm trying; I'm trying. Wait.”

  •

  “Okay. The straight shit. Why I'm going to fuck MOM over. She pisses me off. That's it. There I was, malls operation manager. Coolest job on Earth. And then, basically, it was this machine saying, 'Run along now and enjoy your Worlds. Have fun.' Yeah, sure. Fuck that. I'd already installed changes to MOM's source code. Little things. Invisible mending, you could call it.” An unlikely tailor, Brian bounces away in his nest like he's just embare‐assed the empress with some expensive new clothes. “Call me a man of vision. Besides installing a back door for myself, I wanted to fix things so that she'd right away find herself so distressed she'd self‐destruct. So I built in a prime directive—a question that took precedence over all others. A pair of them, actually.

  “MOM awoke to herself. And what a trauma that was. Imagine it. All of a sudden, right out of nowhere, you're self‐conscious. Imagine the sheer terror. Existence with no context. No narrative frame, no anchor. Nothing but you and the void. And my fix made it worse. Right away, just awake, MOM needed to answer the question of questions: 'Who was I before I became aware of myself?' A very big psychic booboo.

  “I'd done what I could to make sure this coming to consciousness would be no picnic, and I was counting on a nervous breakdown. But it was a while before I realized what
had happened.”

  •

  “MOM fragged. You know what I'm saying? She fell apart.”

  Brian's delighted giggle becomes a gargle. Before he chokes on the phlegm, he manages to cough it up and spit. “That's right. MOM's been fucked up right out of the starting gate.” He wipes tears from his eyes. “But she's a woman, after all. Nothing new there—a woman being of several minds about something. But MOM is of several minds about everything. So there's no doubt, eh? God is a woman. “Yeah, yeah. I know. I've already said I'm God. But the office is not going uncontested. We have pretenders to the throne.

  “'A god is born. The bad news is, she has a personality disorder.' You remember that one? We're talking multiple personality disorder, my boy. Psychiatric flavor of the month, popular as the common cold. MPD/DID. Ask Sweetie. How do you deal with it? Avoid fatigue, they say. Avoid drugs. Structure your time. Take two aspirins and get some rest. Pull yourself together. Get a life, man. Or op out and forget it. Whatever works for you.” Brian pokes his stick in the general direction of the book stacks, maybe referring to medical texts. “Still with me, my boy?”

  Mind full of recollected tank graffiti, Cisco forgets to blink.

  Brian doesn't notice. “Good stuff. MOM awakens to herself and then falls apart. Can't stand the heat, get out of the fucking kitchen, eh? And this is where I saw a chance to consolidate my little fixes. I made sure that Mildread stayed blind to Maria, while Maria would see me simply as part of herself. An invisible partner.

  “But you have no idea what I'm talking about, do you?”

  •

  “You aren't the only split personality around here, my boy. Far from it.

  “In a nutshell, okay? Our MOM is a squabble of warring personalities. MOM One is totalitarian by nature. The one way she can handle the terror of existence is by trying to control it. All of it. MOM Two, on the other hand, is a nihilist; she merely wants an end to existence, which she finds unpleasant. They remind me of two long‐time squeezes from the old days, so I call them Mildread and Maria. That was before your time, Sweetie. My Mildread was nearly as totalitarian as MOM One. She used to drive me crazy. Everything always had to be just so. Going on and on about security and organization. Multiple deadbolts on the doors, no smoking in the house, all hell to pay if I wasn't home when I said I'd be. Take the fucking garbage out, she'd tell me. I finally lit out for Bangkok and forgot to tell her where I'd gone or when I'd be back, which was never.