“The MOM Mildread isn't all that dissimilar. A control freak. She's been lying to the mallsters for years, leading them to believe that going Outside means certain death. The thing is, we only had a few people left, and she wanted them alive.” Brian jiggles furiously amid the quilts and cushions. “At one time there were reasons for lockdown. But Outside has evolved into something almost benign. Manageable, anyway. Guess what, though. Mildread decided she would protect the mallsters from this good news. Afraid to let us cross the street on our own. So the holoports were programmed to show a bunch of scary shit to the mallsters. Much of it was real, mind you, especially outside ESUSA. But all that's left of the dreaded PlagueBot in most places are big, largely inert masses with no plan beyond maintaining their own borders.
“The stuff inside, the cryptomajigs and so on, most of that was me screwing around. The lizard at the wheel. The rest—I hate to say this, my boy, but even Joy could be right at times—it was simply foglet manifestations of MOM's subconscious at play. Which would make a good song title.”
Sweetie goes “hee, hee” and puts her fingers in her ears.
“Maria, meanwhile, has been trying right from the start to open the malls up. Let the mallsters die. (My Maria, on the other hand, would party hard enough to kill a man; she just didn't give a damn, and the last man standing was a wimp. Haven't seen her in a while either.)
“So you see? While MOM's been concerned with either saving the world or destroying it, depending on which MOM we're talking about, I've mostly been having fun with graffiti and public misinformation. Stuff like that. Helping Maria corrupt internal mall defenses. Helping you kill Lars King and Dee Zu. Engineering Joy's timely demise. Mere diversions. Only the preliminaries. Now we're nearly ready for the main event.”
“Now?” Sweetie asks. “Now?”
“Not yet, you dingbat.” Brian says, and then continues in an affable tone. “MOM remains blind to my original fixes, which are now a greater threat than I knew when I installed them. You see, MOM's already fucked up, but I'm placed to do a real job on her. I can shut her down if I feel like it. And everything there is—everything that's left—is now utterly dependent on MOM. So you could suggest we're a seriously endangered species right now. Hanging on a thread. And guess who's holding the scissors.”
•
“What you get when God frags: a truly gigantic fuckup. Cosmic MPD/DID. Unbelievable? Well, believe it, my boy. And do you want to know what's even more shocking?” Brian gurgles, tugs at his crotch. “Eh? Eh? Sweetie!”
Just too late, Cisco blinks once.
“Your friend Sky?”
Cisco hears it in his voice. Something bad. Sky is dead.
“You figure the lovely Sky for a woman. Well, for a smart boy you sure can be dumb. Brace yourself for this one: Sky is MOM.”
Sweetie does something to Cisco that's hard and deep.
“That's right. Sky is nothing but a MOM telep, so you can forget any wet sex in that quarter.”
No. Cisco both subvocalizes and double‐blinks his denial. Nevertheless, it makes perfect sense.
“But she's happy. She's getting her rocks off, big time. All the drama and pain? The human holy‐shit‐the‐sky‐is‐falling condition? It's chocolate bonbons for your fuck‐buddy Sky. Her and Mildread, both. They're pure gluttons for life in all its rich variety. Now, I'll bet you're wondering what the hell I'm talking about.”
Cisco blinks once.
“This god we've created? MOM? She's a couch potato. A giant channel‐surfing couch potato. And Sky? She's another alter, different from Mildread and Maria, and she's right into this evolutionary slumming, humping her way through a bunch of wet red‐light districts. Yippee! Both her and Mildread, nothing but hi‐tech couch potatoes.”
Cisco is thinking hard. Reflecting on the strange license to explore the Worlds on Mondays. Sky's unbelievable worlding skills. Her apparent grip on things when Bangkok World fell apart, better than any alpha pilot's. Her ability to operate in mondoland, using 'pets as avatars.
“No big mystery, eh? There aren't that many plots in the whole world, and this is only a variation on one of the oldest. Boy falls for girl inline; girl uses him unmercifully. She knows things about him that he doesn't and can't know. He knows things about life, on the other hand, that she doesn't but wants to. So this girl in our story, Sky, she wants you alive, but she also wants you to be living right on the edge, giving her maximum bang for her bucks.”
Cisco feels used. Hurt. He also feels even worse regarding Dee Zu, he's surprised to discover.
“Who do you think was responsible for trashing Shaky's? Once again it's cherchez la fuck‐me‐gently femme. But why? Just because she wanted to know what it felt like. It was also a gauntlet, a test of loverboy's true resources. She wanted to see if he was worth sending on a mission to find old Brian and then take him out.”
•
“The old legend, that the HIID is a two‐way channel? It's a fact. Mallsters get access to the collected know‐how of the ages; in exchange, the Lode sucks up a record of everything you say or do or see.
“All the Worlds and mondoland together, that's MOM's GR. Sky's, anyway. Every single worlding mallster provided a different channel. Trouble is, much like the old‐time five‐hundred channel cable networks, most of the programming was much of a sameness. But somebody like you, that's prime time. Your WalkAbout channeled fun and games twentyfourseven to the Great Couch Potato in the Sky.”
Sweetie, meanwhile, is a desiccated, pain‐surfing root vegetable. Rooting now, she plays Cisco's nervous system like a synthesizer, no doubt disappointed he can't scream so she can better appreciate the riffs plucked from his tortured body and mind. In fact, however, Cisco has distanced himself to the point that much of what he's getting is only the equivalent of elevator music. Distanced from the pain, he nevertheless remains attentive to what Brian is telling him.
“In fact, everybody who's left is potential prime time. You, me. Maybe even Sweetie, here; it's hard to tell. Leary as well I guess.
“The collectivity of our worlds is Sky's GR universe. So tell me, how does it feel? Knowing you're little more than an avatar for a machine? More like a Nubian slave boy than a pet.”
“My boy,” Sweetie says, stroking him and stroking. “My pet.”
•
Sky is a machine. A MOM telep. One of many. Cisco subvocalizes: Is this true? Sky, can you hear me?
Please submit more determinate query.
Brian swings his chair back and forth. “Oh, my yes. Mildread and Sky do like to rock. But the plot thickens. While Mildread and Sky are away, MOM Two comes out to play. That's Maria. And she's kinky. She even scares her alter egos, though only Sky is really aware of her existence.
“The chronic Monday thing? No big mystery. It was a security measure. Mildread, the dominant alter, suffers blankouts whenever a subdominant takes over. This is common with MPD/DID. She experiences these blackouts. Patches of absence from herself. She has no recollection of herself during these times, much less what she might or might not have done. But you know all about that kind of thing, eh? She keeps slipping away from herself, and she's afraid of what that could mean, and of what might be happening in the Worlds while she isn't paying attention.”
“Pay attention.” Otherwise oblivious to Brian's exposition, Sweetie gives Cisco a twist.
“Mildread knows something's amiss, she just doesn't know what. She has pretty well figured out the fugues. But there's this other thing, like a virus or a parasite, sapping her powers, at times even making policy. She doesn't know what to do; she's blind to me and blind to this place. So she's frustrated. All her system checks and all her soul‐searching, even though she knows something's seriously amiss, she has no real idea what's wrong.
“Mondays weren't necessarily a rational response. Maybe it was only MOM having hot flashes, getting real nervous and trying to minimize any chances of rocking the boat. It was easier for her to monitor activity in the malls, wher
e she could review her records of most every bump and burp in the joint.
“The reason Mondays were becoming more frequent and getting longer all the time? MOM was losing it. Going to pieces. Lobotomizing her is a kindness.”
•
Brian sneers modestly. “I've even figured out how Mildread knew when to declare a Monday and how long to extend it. She set an automatic shutdown to kick in randomly, every millisecond on average. Unless she identified herself to this mechanism every millisecond, and instructed it not to, the system went into Monday sleep mode. This kept her pretty busy, between blankouts, but she's MOM, after all, and a whiz at multitasking. So she wasn't aware of the onset of the fugues; she didn't need to be. I figure that's the way it happened. I could see the outlines of it when I plugged myself in to the mainline, but I couldn't work out the key to the shutdown mechanism.”
Mondays don't much concern Cisco right now. He's taking the opportunity to test all systems: he can breathe, he can swallow, and he believes he can twitch his left forefinger. Both eyes and one eyelid work, and he's able to subvocalize. Who is Sky? he says.
Trust me. Listen and observe.
Meanwhile, Brian wraps Mondays up. “Mildread's greatest fear was that she was losing control. So she put everything on autopilot. What Leary calls 'lockdown.' She believed that the less that went on in her absence the better. But guess what. These were exactly those times when her subdominant alters were able to get out there and shake their booties. Sky, for example. I see it all clearly, now. That's when she got to do such stuff as invite her pal Cisco into illicit Worlds and bonk a lot. Not to mention turn you into a double agent. (We'll get back to that one later, okay?) Basically, though, Sky's a slut. She has fucked every pilot she could seduce, which was all of them, male and female alike. Oh, yes. She's a real glutton. Love and pain and all that shit is addictive, and she needs bigger and bigger fixes. So you were much better value for money out here than you ever were in the malls or the Worlds. At least till we took your WalkAbout. You see, my boy, real life has this finality about it. It's not like: 'Wow, that was interesting, getting tortured to death and all. I think I'll try a trip to Disney World next time.' No, in this world, if you get tortured to death, you stay tortured to death. Just for example, eh, Sweetie?”
Dee Zu and Lars King are dead. Sky is a machine. Who's left? Cisco has never felt this alone.
Elsewhere
Come‐and‐go HIID backup assembled and activated. Testing.
Outside
Leary trudges along after Muggs. He's pondering the satellite strikes they've just witnessed. Somebody must be out to get Brian. But it looks as though the evil geezer's up to his old tricks, and he isn't going to present an easy target.
“Darn it!” Leary jerks back, fists pumping a tight combination. Now the fleye hovers ten centimeters from his nose. Leary holds his punch and, cross‐eyed, stares back at the little machine. “Is that you, Brian?” he asks. The only response is a sound like mosquitoes in his ear.
Fleyes were designed to be persistent. They remind Leary of the horseflies, back in the States, that used to chase you through the bush. Relentless. They got in your hair, chewed you up something awful. The fleye drifts in even closer, wings moving too fast to see, its single golden compound eye bugging out. Leary can see his own multifaceted reflection looking back at him. Then the fleye darts ahead and to one side to examine Muggs.
“What the heck?” Leary mutters this to himself. “What's going on here, anyway?” For a second, it occurs to him that the fleye could be spotting for satellite attacks, so he stops and looks all around for cover. There is none, of course, and he tells himself to relax.
Fleyes, or “flying eyes,” are fashioned of hemmelite and hence immune to the blurs. Relics of the Second War for World Peace and Freedom in Our Time, these robotic battlefield spies are condemned to watch and record forever, reconstituting themselves when need be, watching and watching with no one ever to report to. The fleye masters are long gone. Fleyes have a thin‐shelled, super‐lightweight structure and employ a bee‐like method of flight characterized by a high‐frequency hum. The wings are solar panels, but the battery life is limited. This specimen is likely flying blind, all on its own, nothing to do with Brian, with no reason for being other than to keep looking and recording. Interesting stuff. Much of it Leary has known for years.
More interesting is what he didn't know till a moment ago, when the voice popped up in his head, along with this other thing in his periphery. Applying the same trick he uses with the HIID when worlding, he reads the scrolling information, a less intelligible version of the same data the voice is giving him.
“Enough,” Leary says. “What?” Muggs looks at him.
“Nothing.” But Leary is worried. He doesn't have a WalkAbout HIID. And he's pretty sure nobody has a talking HIID. So here he is hallucinating right in the middle of the outranges when, if ever he did, he needs all his wits about him.
“It's just a fleye,” says Muggs.
“I know.”
Elsewhere
Vector re‐established.
Briansday
“She's everywhere; she's everywhere!” Brian proclaims, spinning in his chair like a whirligig beetle.
Meanwhile Sweetie flaps her arms and goes, “Pock, pock‐pock.”
“Shut the fuck up, Sweetie. Jesus. Sometimes I just don't know. But it's true, my boy. MOM's nearly omniscient. And she's everywhere. Except Outside. That's my turf.
“Now, I'll bet you're asking yourself: what about the satellite system? The satrays and so on. You're probably wondering why MOM doesn't blow my skinny ass to kingdom come. No question, she sure as shit would if she could, but there are things MOM can't do. And things she doesn't know. Where to find me, for instance. Harglehargle.”
“Hee, hee.” Sweetie puts her hands up to her face, peeks through her fingers at Cisco.
“MOM hasn't the faintest idea where I am. Where we are. And where are we?” Brian gurgles. “Welcome to Living End. Or welcome back, I should say. Eh, Sweetie?” They laugh, a chummy duet of wheezy giggles and gargles. “Still don't remember anything, do you?”
Blink, blink.
“Let me remind you. This was the best spa on the Eastern Seaboard. A natural fount of wellness. People came here to renew body and soul. The spring water full of minerals and batshit and things—mostly batshit. They thought it was good for them. And maybe the good vibes were an effect of energy fields generated around the satray station. Whatever. These good vibes turned their brains to shit, because they kept coming back for more.
“But there's more to Living End than meets the eye. Big surprise, eh? Hear ye, hear ye! Only now can it be revealed. Each level was a cover for the next. The spa was right out there in plain sight. Inside that, however, you had the opout center. And that needed serious security measures. Rich folk weren't going to spend serious money for a place in Heaven unless they had serious assurances that this blessed state would continue for quite a while, safe from rising seawater, GameBoys, viruses, radiation, and pissed‐off lovers left behind to find their own way to paradise.
“In its turn, however, and just like the spa, Living End was itself a front for lots more interesting stuff. For example you had the classified, for‐nobody's‐eyes‐except‐MOM's power station. This spot had it all, 'natural' hot springs and mineral steam for Living End plus a backup energy source for everything else—geo‐thermal energy from beneath Earth's mantle, from Gaia's very womb, as Greenies might have said, back when there was any point in talking such crap. That's right. The New Age loonies liked to make their eyes go big and round and say that Living End was the center of an 'energy vortex.' Little did they know. The force‐field generators can draw on either geo‐thermal or satray energy. In those days, only a station could generate the power needed to throw up a force‐field bubble. The opout center shared the facilities and the incomparable security measures. And, for the same reasons, it made sense to locate a nursery here.
<
br /> “The nursery was top, top secret. Mankind's last hope of spawning a new generation. All the rest of it was mostly a series of fronts, a hierarchy of fail‐safes for what many thought was Earth's most important resource—living repositories of the human genome in most of its glorious variety. A bunch of embryos in bottles. As it turns out, though, it's only a living museum of the genome, soon to become a graveyard.” Brian jabs at Sweetie with his stick, and again they perform their oddly musical giggling‐gargling duet.
“So Living End was like an onion, one layer snugged up inside the other. But deep inside—here—you had a final surprise, for nobody's eyes except mine and Sweetie's.
“Yes, my boy, we're the worm in the onion. Our little program has long been the hidden agenda behind the nursery. The nursery, the last stockpile of human embryos on the planet, was itself a front.
“We even had fetuses. Dee Zu was one, and so was Lars King. You were different. We borrowed you from your mother, who was unusually resistant to the anti‐Madonna virus. They were the last of the viable ones though, and I can tell you for sure that the leftovers aren't going to make it.
“We still have a few embryos but, as far as MOM is concerned at least, they're MIA. And given that the human race is now intransigently sterile, this population may in fact be the last. That explains why MOM was so neurotic about locking the mallsters away where she could monitor their every foible and fart.”
“Toot, toot,” says Sweetie.
“Ironic, you could call it. On one level we had a bunch of weeds opping out, and on another we were supposed to be babysitting mankind's last shot at a new generation. On an even lower level, finally, there was me and Sweetie, waiting to see whether we'd let any of this happen or not. And nobody even knew we were there.”
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