MOM

by Collin Piprell

  “My pretty little boy,” Sweetie titters. “My big boy.” Her hand insinuates itself between his legs and Sweetie squeezes with a strength that, in a person so apparently frail, can only be the gift of madness. The pain is shocking.

  “Little snookums‐wookums.”

  Brian wheezes with laughter. “Ow,” he says, rocking his chair back and forth. Rabbit clanks as he lurches back and forth in rough unison, trying to keep Brian under the parasol.

  Sweetie squeezes again. “Please,” she says to Brian. “Sweetie wants an opout now.”

  “For fucksake. Rabbit!”

  Rabbit is fumbling and, it sounds like, cursing at the console, trying to uplode the data. “What?” The bot sounds impatient.

  “Quick like a bunny, now. Go fetch an opout for Sweetie, here. Then get back to that memocube; I want it loded.”

  •

  “We've got a minute, so let's take inventory, shall we? There aren't many people left. Not real ones. There's me; I know I'm real. And Sweetie. Then we've got you. And Leary. Who else? A couple of opout relics. And we shouldn't forget the nursery babies, flash‐frozen embryos really, though I doubt they're viable, so maybe they don't count after all. There are others. Bio‐slowjoes, for example. And we've got tranzoominist cryos stashed away in suspended animation inside mountains or specially hardened deep‐sea habitats, waiting for somebody to figure out how to give them immortality, whether biological or qubital. We can also grant MOM personhood. But that's it. There's your global census, or near enough. In fact, my boy, you're personally acquainted with them all, at least the viable ones.

  “Maybe you think there's still hope. I'll bet MOM does. No doubt that's one of the reasons you've come here. Not only were you supposed to kill me; just in passing, I believe, you were to save the human race from extinction.

  “Speaking of which, look what Rabbit has brought us.”

  •

  “Welcome to hell, eh?”

  The opout sits slumped in a puddle of soothing nutrients, a naked slug on a wheeled half‐shell, wires dangling from sockets in its temples. Sweetie pulls the leads out, slowly, giggling at the sounds this elicits from her plaything. Its lidless eyes gape, already dry and inflamed, maybe seeking signs of its lost paradise in the scene now before it.

  “She loves that look in their eyes when they first come back. The way the surprise turns to horror.”

  She leans in solicitously to lick the opout's eyes, first one and then the other, and Cisco knows how it feels.

  “Have fun, Sweetie. But take your time; there's only one more after this, remember.”

  She takes to sucking noisily on one eyeball and then begins chewing, ever less gently. The opout tries to flap its atrophied arms and its puddle becomes discolored by piss and blood welling up from around its crotch where Sweetie has yanked something loose. Cisco can smell the urine.

  “Yes, my boy, these specimens were among the most advantaged people in the malls, or they would've had to opt for the more basic package, a World of their choice, nice drugs up the mainline and so long sucker. Given the numbers involved, in the old days long‐timers were a drain on resources.”

  Sucking and slurping, Sweetie gives the cavity a final tonguing before she stares at close range into the remaining eye. She licks at the face, leaving smears of blood. Then she starts sucking again.

  “Can you imagine? One minute you're kicking back in your customized garden of unearthly delights; the next you've got a close‐up of Sweetie. And you can't look away, because you have no eyelids. Just imagine. And, like I say, these were the paying customers, not the rabble who had to go the Bet Your Butt! route.”

  Cisco still has eyelids, and he closes the one eye he can close. Tries to turn the other away. These must be early opouts. From before the time the optic nerves could be hardwired.

  “But there are only two left, counting this one. Sweetie was getting quite twitchy till you came along.”

  Sweetie giggles.

  “Now she has a real, live person to work on. An individual of real substance with real stamina, eh? You've served nicely for now; but this is just foreplay for what you can expect later.”

  The opout still has its other eye when Sweetie turns to say, “Little sweetums is all mine.”

  •

  Sweetie is finished for now. Rabbit wheels the half‐shell over to a clear area equidistant from two spills of books. As soon as he dumps them, the remains are swarmed by roaches. In his mind, Cisco hears Eddie Eight singing: “One lit‐tle op‐out, sit‐ting on a wall…”

  Brian is oblivious. “Aren't these mushrooms great?” he says. “But we've still got a while before our co‐star arrives. If the fuckwit manages to stay alive long enough to get here.

  “So what do we do while we wait? I don't have any more questions for you, my boy, at least for now. I know all the important answers anyway. Hargle. So why don't I fill you in on a few more things?”

  Suddenly Brian brandishes his stick back and forth at something that's taken to hovering like a hummingbird right in front of his face. “God damn it, Rabbit.” he says. “How did that thing get in here?”

  “Tsk.”

  Already, the fleye has darted out of the danger zone to reappear right up there in Cisco's face where, golden light shifting deep in its lens, it goggles. Sweetie's hand looms in Cisco's periphery, slow—as slow can be. It pounces. Comes up empty. And the fleye is already back, hovering steadily four centimeters from Cisco's nose, causing him to go cross‐eyed, a sign he might be recovering his faculties.

  Brian whacks Rabbit and gets no reaction, so he also whacks Pussy. “Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit.” Brian sounds tired. “If I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times: keep the shields up. That fleye must have come in with the boy. Do you know what would be happening right now if MOM was tapped into these things? Do you? Anyway, never mind that. Where's my Ellie? Let's go.”

  “Old technology. Not easy.”

  “Yeah, well. Just fix it, eh? Uplode the goddamned data.”

  “Wait, wait.”

  “Hey, Rabbit. It's, like, no time; no time! Are you with me? We're late. So move your clankety ass.”

  •

  Sweetie is feeding Cisco more mushrooms. Not that he needs them. He's got a tankful of natter in his head as it is, and he doesn't know how much of it is mushrooms and how much is something else.

  “So how's it going, my boy? Not very demonstrative, are you? But I can tell you how you're doing. By now you should be hallucinating. Minor stuff. Not like LSD. But trippy. And you get into these raps, you know?”

  Brian doesn't know the half of it; Cisco's head is full of four or five people rapping away all at the same time.

  “But that's plain cruel, isn't it? When you're compelled to rap, only you can't say a word? So this ocean of bons mots builds up inside and builds up till… I don't know. What happens then, Sweetie?”

  Sweetie is noncommittal. “Hee, hee,” she says.

  “Too bad we don't have tequila. When you're doing 'shrooms you can drink forever without getting smashed. A case of beer, a bottle of tequila. No sweat. The more you do, the clearer your mind gets. Or so it seems.”

  Sweetie scoops more, smears it on Cisco, then gets down to lick it off him.

  “Whoo‐ee! And horny? You betcha. Senses all sharpened right up.”

  Sweetie smacks her lips and makes sucking sounds. Brian snuffles and snorts, egging her on. He swings his stick, grunts and makes farting noises. “You get right down into it,” he's saying. “Right down into the sweat and stink. Wow! Next thing, you're nothing but a big fat dick with a snout, one tiny red eye and a curly little tail. Or else a steamy swamp full of itchy little swamp creatures.” He gooses Sweetie with his stick.

  Sweetie waggles her ass. Goes “wah‐ha‐ha‐ha.” Rooting in Cisco's crotch, tugging at his scrotum with her teeth. Spitting hairs.

  But Cisco doesn't register much of these proceedings; the orgy in his lap is a distant, largely uninte
resting phenomenon. His senses are heightened in other ways, however. For one thing he's acutely aware of a dense swarm of insects, big ones, whirring round and round the single light hanging above the empty cradle, almost drowning the residual buzz of voices in the back of his mind.

  Brian also notices them. “Rabbit!” he says. “Quick, go get some of those roaches for Pussy. Jesus, look at them. They're big as bats. And you, my boy, are you hungry? Naw. Forget it. Food only slows the effect of the mushrooms. I should have never had those bats.

  “But we were going to tell you things, my boy. I've gone and lost track again, haven't I? Just can't handle my mushrooms the way I used to.”

  Cisco looks at where Rabbit dumped the opout remains. He thinks the mound of roaches is shrinking.

  •

  “These mushrooms are great.” Brian's rapping away as though he hasn't talked to anybody in a hundred cycles. “Is this shit from the same batch, Sweetie? I'm really clear‐headed. Almost straight, God help me. And I'm right into it. All rap and no babble, eh? That's right.

  “Check it out. Ask the Lode how much mushroom can you do before you're totally fucked. But wait. You can't ask; you don't have a WalkAbout anymore, do you?”

  “Wah ha‐ha,” says Sweetie.

  “Never mind, my boy. There's my answer: exactly that much.”

  Cisco's paralyzed eye has dried, and it itches. He blinks the other one, but it doesn't help. He almost wishes Sweetie would lick them again.

  Outside

  A great plume of flame and smoke shoots up amid the dunes west of the oasis they have been marching towards all afternoon. That's followed by a dervish satray dance, spectacular finale to an already fiery sundown. This is the second attack in as many hours.

  “So,” Leary says. “What do you know about this stuff?”

  “She's shooting at me,” Muggs replies.

  “MOM?”

  “That's right.”

  “She needs to realign her sights.”

  “Not at me, here. At me in my hideout. That patch of green? That's what she's after. But she hasn't got a hope.”

  Then a skinny mushroom cloud erupts a kilometer east of the satray barbecue. Thud. A couple of seconds later the jolt hammers its way right up through Leary's feet and into his bones. Then a spot west of the first explosion spurts a second mushroom cloud. Thud. His WalkAbout is telling him things he already knows. These are bunkerbusters, probably the old laser‐guided ground penetrators. They arrive from orbit, deploying giant chutes against burn‐up till they hit eight thousand meters. And then they drop. A direct hit can punch right into a hardened subterranean bomb shelter. He watches the towering spouts of dust and smoke; even at this distance he can see tidal surges of dust race out from the impacts, the enormous craters, the cones where the mushroom clouds collapse.

  Now the satray strikes are moving closer to the oasis. Leary stops and hollers ahead at Muggs where he's coasting along on his rug. “Hang on a minute. Darn it. Exactly who's got their finger on the trigger, here?”

  “Like I told you, it's MOM. The only question is, which MOM?”

  “What the heck is going on, anyway; how am I supposed to help out here if I get my butt fried before I even get to see Brian? Same goes for the Kid.”

  “Did I ever mention my old squeeze Maria?” Muggs asks.

  Leary has no idea what he's talking about. If he didn't know better, he tells himself without subvocalizing, he would have to say they had military intelligence working at cross purposes, and darn the collateral damage including any casualties from friendly fire.

  “I hope those aren't nuclear devices,” Leary says.

  Non‐nuclear weapons, the Lode tells him. Each bomb contains two tons of conventional explosive.

  A third mushroom cloud appears. And a fourth.

  •

  The oasis is there, and then it isn't. At times it's obscured by dunes or haze, other times Leary and Muggs walk up on high ground and they can see it. But it's more than that. It might appear to the west, and then disappear, even from high ground and with no haze, only to materialize later, this time maybe in the east. Most often, Leary believes, it lies north, although he doesn't have much confidence in his own judgment in this matter. The facsimile oases don't help, of course; Leary's vote is that these are weird atmospheric effects rather than something inside his own head.

  Whatever. Muggs keeps marching on a northward heading, come what may, and Leary follows.

  Muggs doesn't need rest, beyond an occasional solar energy break to top up his Oboku‐Higgs plasma battery. But he says they should stop for the night. “It's safer if we hunker down here till dawn.” When Leary asks why, he refuses to elaborate. “Take my word for it, old buddy,” he says. And that's the end of the matter.

  One good thing: the WalkAbout means Leary can dictate his book straight into the Lode. And his subvocalizing skills are improving apace.

  Here I sit covered in blur dust. All alone except for an antique Aibo. And I'm updating my chronicle. Feeding it straight into the Lode, subvocalizing it into my WalkAbout, which is handy. Who knows? I might even survive this little expedition. Maybe others will as well, and then they can read my book. If they've got nothing better to do. In which case you could ask why there was any point in surviving in the first place.

  But just you look at that sun going down. Gosh. For years after that global girdle of basement nukes went off, you got unbelievable sunsets all around the world. Same‐same a hundred and fifty years before that, from what I read, after Krakatoa blew its top. These days the blur dust gives us much the same effects. A silver lining, you could say.

  Outside reminds me of a prototype World gone bad. You have to think the designer should have stuck to his day job. Except for that sunset.

  Leary holds the locket in his hand, afraid to brush the dust away for fear of seeing this precious relic blur and disappear. He holds it tight, recalling their last wet encounter. The surprise and joy at seeing Ellie again. All his questions in abeyance as they came together. That was before the PlagueBot. After they had made love, and made love again, he conked out right there under the stars. As though he were drugged.

  When he awoke, she was gone. She left him a letter, and the lockets, in a Hylar pouch. He was afraid to open the letter. He waited for her to come back. Then he went looking for her. He remembers the horror, later, when his questions were finally answered. The message was handwritten in ink on yellowed paper, already brittle, the endpaper from a book. The note itself has long since disintegrated, but its contents remain indelibly part of him.

  Leary subvocalizes it, taking his time, entering into the words and phrases as he would a prayer:

  My darling Leary. This is the hardest thing I've ever done. Forgive me. I knew you wouldn't let me go, so I've had to sneak away like this.

  Brian sent me to kill you. Of course I can't do that. But he says he'll kill Cisco if I don't. And he'll do it. He's insane. We have to pretend you're dead. We have to fake it. And I have to go back to Brian. We can't let him hurt Cisco anymore. I know what to do. It's hard. But I know you'll come to understand. We can't let our son die. I don't know whether I'll ever see you again. If I don't, please understand that I'll always be with you in mind and spirit, wherever I am.

  Ellie had pretended to comply with Brian's instructions. She tracked Leary down, ambushed him, but, instead of killing him, she told him what Brian was doing and passed him the lockets, one for himself and one for Cisco, with her own instructions.

  One thing you must promise me: never let these lockets fall into Brian's hands both at the same time. They contain much of me, maybe most of me, till now. What's to come you wouldn't want anyway. I've fixed it so these cubes are all that remains of me; either Sweetie or I will wipe me right out of the Lode. These backups have to be kept separate and secure from Brian or anybody else until he's dead. Then it'll be up to you whether or not you want to defrag me.

  That's your choice, and I'm with you whatever you d
ecide. Please remember that. Remember me, and I'll always be with you, no matter what. In many ways you're a klutz, as I've often told you, but you're my dearest Leary, the finest klutz a woman could hope to find in this life.

  And I want you to know this. However tempting it was to edit the data, I decided to leave things as they were. Warts and all. Wysiwyg, just the way you like it. I've programmed in routines, however. Little surprises. Messages for you and Cisco, if you're around when my ebee is invoked. Messages for Sweetie and Brian, if he happens to be around at the time. Booby traps, in fact. On the off‐chance I can pay back some of the pain.

  God be with you. Goodbye is too hard.

  He had run and run, shouting her name till he could neither shout nor run any more. But she was gone.

  All that had been only a year before Lockdown. At first Leary had done what he could to pass for dead while he made cautious attempts to locate Brian, with the idea that he would do what he could to make him appear very dead indeed. Before long, however, Leary was incarcerated in ESSEA and no longer able either to hide the fact he was alive or to go out in search of Brian. Leary eventually learned that Ellie died but the Kid was okay. He had turned up in ESUSA, exactly how neither Leary nor Cisco had any idea.

  Briansday

  “Look at this,” Brian says.

  “Look!” Sweetie points at what Brian holds up for Cisco's inspection. She giggles.

  Never mind Dee Zu is dead, Cisco hears her voice saying, “Don't look.” But what choice does he have? He looks.

  An awful existential suction drags at him. He rides the event horizon of a voracious gravitational imperative towards otherness. But he remains. He's still Cisco Smith. He sees this thing Brian is holding. Brian shakes it at him and gurgles happily. Cisco recognizes it. He has seen it before. In the tank, where Eddie Eight said, “Look at this.”

  It's a piece of cloth. This version is less vivid. More worn. A flowery blue and yellow and white print, this one actually blue and yellow and gray and ragged.