MOM

by Collin Piprell

  “What's going on?” Muggs says. The tinpot know‐it‐all doesn't know. The lights begin flashing in unison.

  Leary isn't sure whether he should be scared or not. “Darn it,” he says. “What the heck have we got now?”

  Cockroach mating lek. Hyper‐evolved synchronized bioluminescent display. Probable superorganism communicative activity.

  Leary jumps and looks all around before he remembers. Gosh. Now I've got this gadget in my head, he says. And who knows what else. MOM? I'm talking to you, darn it. Sky? You can't go around just planting things in people's friggin' heads any time you feel like it.

  There's no response. Leary is not happy. He's starting to feel himself under surveillance from every which way. And right now Muggs, for one, is watching him intently.

  “Yo, Leary.”

  “What?”

  “What do you know about WalkAbouts?”

  Chronicle

  Even the cockroaches are advertising these days. So this is how the world ends. The whole place dead as a doornail, as near as darnit, except for roaches and ads.

  We made it through the twentieth century, forget the hundreds of millions of people who died in wars, not to mention all the others taken by disease and hunger and pure orneriness. Then we got the New Millennium. If some fundamentalist this or a fundamentalist that didn't get you for good and sufficient reasons of moral outrage, then a GameBoy would do it for fun. The big fear was that one day, terrorists would get The Bomb and use it. And while everybody was dreading ISIS and army surplus atom bombs from the old Soviet Union, a loose association of unhappy tough guys—the Ubikwinits, as the media liked to call them, or You Big Nitwits, as Ellie described them—were assembling nuclear devices in basements all over the civilized world. till, on September the eleventh, 2031, the bombs began to go off like a string of giant firecrackers wrapped around the planet. One city after another, with no real consideration for race, color, creed or better world to come. Boom, boom, boom. And the aftermath was terrible.

  Ellie had it worked out. The logic of terrorism, the logic of self‐entitlement combined with moral indignation, came down to this: if I can't have what I want, then no one else should be able to either. What does that tell you? Just this: none of us will be able to enjoy anything, ever. Logically, as Ellie would say, we're all denied happiness. We can't even look to somebody else's good luck and high times and say, darn it, that's what I plan to work towards. And that's basically what happened, here. “Good” became evil. You got all this self‐righteous moral anger turned on its head. “Morally retarded peabrains,” is what my Ellie called them, at least when she was in a good mood. All these people going around in clouds of self‐righteous indignation that precipitated around nearly anything that crossed their path. And of course you got the maxhappy backlash, and that went to another extreme. Us humans never could find the Middle Way.

  As if all that wasn't enough, India and China started lobbing missiles at each other, even though by then they didn't have the population pressures that everybody used to say would trigger exactly this kind of war. Next thing you had all kinds of countries wanting to join in, and that soon brought large‐scale warfare to an end. I think it was Einstein who said that World War IV would be fought with sticks and stones. That boy knew his onions.

  Moral fervor and hi‐tech weaponry did their part. But biotech served as humanity's other big savior. First some joker released the Madonna virus, a biobot that gave us spontaneous pregnancies on all sides. This mass outbreak of immaculate conceptions was soon followed by the anti‐Madonna virus, the ultimate birth‐control device. That rascally little bug mutated faster than HIV/AIDS ever did, staying ahead of every fix we threw at it. Soon after that, of course, we got the PlagueBot.

  There we were. Everybody was qubitally backed up or else stashed in liquid nitrogen, insured against most any kind of injury or death or other loss you could think of. And where did it get us? What with one thing and the other, including rising sea levels, us survivors found ourselves holed up in the malls and afraid to poke our noses out past the shields. All the goodies we could gobble. Laws forbidding unhappiness. But we were prisoners, and MOM was our keeper.

  Now we're down to not very many indeed, and the Kid and I, at least, have poked our noses out. And it's no picnic.

  In the morning we'll try to get into Brian's hideout. What are the odds? Brian wants this locket, and he does have local knowledge. And we've got Muggs channeling for him. So maybe we'll make it. Whether I ever get out again is another question altogether. Even if I do, where is there to go?

  Outside

  Leary and Muggs break camp at daybreak. No sign remains of the billboards or their roach components.

  Vision obscured by blowing dust, they trek towards a cryptic horizontal line broken by something like pickets. Around midday they come to where the dunes stop at the southern edge of a broad bedrock highway extending to the horizon. To the north, gullied hills mangy with patches of secondary forest growth descend towards the boundary. A few gum trees soar from bamboo and rattan thickets; lianas and epiphytes festoon the smaller trees. A mirage, Leary tells himself. Except that he can smell it. Like an old horse let out to pasture in the spring, he scents exhilaration mixed with sadness at all the spring meadows missed, all the rainforest walks. In fact, this other side of the barren highway looks much like the real world, a world he had thought extinct.

  A few things don't look familiar. Featureless, soft‐edged gray turrets, for example, rise seventy‐five meters tall at half‐kilometer intervals on either side of the no‐man's land. They face each other like watchtowers. And, looking towards the northern territory ravines, Leary sees ancient run‐off channels flooding with slow torrents of dust. These pool along the rocky highway at the same time the towers melt to the ground. Within minutes, a long sea of dust edges the road. It begins to sprout slowjoes.

  As far along the boundary as Leary can see, rank upon rank of half‐melted ape figures are rising to a height of two meters or more. The slowjoes begin their advance on the south, where an opposing army has arisen. Rank after rank advances to engage the foe in mutual annihilation, eerily silent explosions of fine dust that drift away to the southwest. In fact, the battle isn't all that silent; Leary senses the faintest rustle of advance and an all‐but‐subliminal chitter where the armies meet, as of a distant feeding of locust hordes.

  On the other side of the action, even from here, two hundred meters away, he can see birds. Actual birds. Swiflets dart high against the hillsides; higher still, two eagles soar in lazy patrol. This patch of green doesn't look big enough to support species like these, but there it is, this ascension of biological strata including a diversity of both plant and wildlife. He feels like crying.

  •

  The satrays strike with no real warning. The initial sizzle registers only after the burns start and it merges with a keening of vaporized dust. Rays sweep up and down along the boundary, wavering offline among dunes to strike fire in the south, incinerating greenery to the north. A metallic stench combines not unpleasantly with the sharp scent of burning forest. A screeching clamor of birds rises from the foliage, and four hornbills explode in a series of flashes along the edge of a ray.

  The slowjoe armies slow their respective advances, mill around briefly, then collapse into a dusty substratum stirred by tumultuous cross‐currents before two distinct seas recede to either side of the boundary. “Let's go,” Muggs says.

  “What?”

  “Come on. Let's hustle.” Muggs disembarks his carpet and proceeds to strut at speed across the bare rock.

  A satray is trailing fiery havoc five hundred meters west while another is doing its thing a similar distance east. To the south, at least three more are zigging and zagging, maybe with some pattern in mind. It's like being surrounded by blast furnaces, except for a northwards egress. The eastward and westward rays are burning a wavering line back towards each other, and Leary estimates they should come together exactly wher
e he now stands. So he hustles along after Muggs. The bedrock underfoot is hot enough to inflict serious burns, he figures, but his blur mantle thickens enough to protect him from the worst of it. Striding along, he's reminded of the girls in Shaky's; this must be like getting around on platform shoes. He totters and then regains his balance.

  “Hurry!” Muggs says.

  Outside

  The green patch occasionally appears through holes in the storm. Dee Zu's reckonings suggest the oasis keeps changing location; it's never where it ought to be twice in a row.

  Toot leads on, unconcerned at the fickle nature of their beacon. Then he stops, and Dee Zu stops right behind him. A window in the dust has opened on the oasis, which now lies directly ahead. They stare, and even as they look their beacon is incinerated in a snarl of satrays. The rays rake back and forth till nothing remains but a patch of white‐hot magma. They stop. As the last columns of smoke dissipate Dee Zu believes she can smell ozone and hot metal. The surge of grief soon transmutes into rage. They've killed Cisco. The seething crater, now the only feature in this whole dismal scene, aside from the dunes, soon cools and fills with dust, landscaped according to a rule of utmost tedium.

  •

  The sky clears and, after a time, Dee Zu sees why their earlier course was so erratic. There's more than one oasis. The green image disappears and reappears, transposes from place to place. In the meantime, satrays sporadically blaze away at these elusive targets, turning the whole panorama into one big shooting gallery.

  Dee Zu and Toot seem to enjoy a two‐kilometer radius of immunity from the satellite strikes. The oasis, meanwhile, the one that Dee Zu has decided must be the real one, has a secure radius of at least twice that. As the afternoon wears on and they approach ever nearer, however, the oasis's zone of immunity shrinks. The closer she and Toot get to the mirage, the closer the satrays come to finding their real target. As though Dee Zu and Toot are being used as homing devices.

  Toot is a channel for Tor, yet it can't be Tor who's doing the shooting; Dee Zu can't believe, even if he had access to the triggers, that he'd endanger Cisco this way. Dee Zu, on the other hand, is herself linked to the Lode by way of her WalkAbout, which would suggest that MOM could be behind the attacks.

  Whatever. That jungly limestone outcrop is her mission target and the place where Cisco was last seen; he must be somewhere inside. And whoever's doing the shooting, Dee Zu could well be the one who is spotting for the satellite attack system. She has to get inside. It's as simple as that. She has to play out her role in things. Besides which this biological preserve offers the only hope, however slim, of her own survival. She manages a wry grin.

  •

  Something else strikes close to what she thinks is their true destination. The skinny mushroom cloud erupts an instant before she feels the shock underfoot.

  “Not quite so invisible now. Eh?”

  “What did you say?” Dee Zu asks.

  “Nothing,” says Toot. “Let us go.”

  “Is it safe?”

  “Nowhere is safe. Let us go.”

  Another bomb explodes, and then another. Dee Zu wonders what sort of devices would throw up that kind of cloud.

  Bunkerbusters, her WalkAbout informs her, and begins scrolling. But she doesn't need the rest of it.

  “I'm coming,” she calls after Toot. The dust closes in again. A total gray‐out.

  •

  The storm clears as abruptly as it came up, revealing a heartbreakingly blue sky. Dee Zu blinks and rubs at her prosthetic lenses. The World‐leak lies a few hundred meters away, brilliant against the austere gray landscape. A kilometer or so to the west stands a steep conical crater, and three more rise a similar distance to the east. She floods with joy. This is no mirage, and Cisco may still be alive after all.

  The oasis remains intact, twice as vivid and just as anomalous as ever, sitting ten degrees off what Dee Zu calculated as the correct heading.

  Even through the bot lenses, her eyes are assaulted by a rich palette of greens. Overwhelmed by the welter of detail, she smells life, sees intriguing textures and mysterious shapes. She discerns movement that can only be life forms. Birds, and other things. Trees draped with vines, or snakes. Sensory overload.

  Between them and this vision lies a couple of hundred meters of bare rock, a broad highway stretching off straight to the horizons. Big gray towers stand along each side, facing each other at more or less regular intervals.

  A tinkly shushing causes Dee Zu to turn and see that one giant element in this loose palisade looms almost right behind them.

  •

  The tower is wobbling. In fact, a quick look around tells Dee Zu that the blur erections on both sides of the no‐man's land are subsiding. As they do so, their bases spawn slowjoes. Scores upon scores are swarming out from either side to meet the enemy. The towers continue to detumesce, spilling out across the highway. A few rogue slowjoes shamble along independently across the stone on their stubby appendages, losing bits of themselves in the process, most of these bits soon recombining with one or another passing soldier.

  Dee Zu sinks flat on her stomach, burrowing into the dusty overburden, extra camouflage beyond her own bot mantle.

  But there is no hiding. On this side of the rocky divide, the very ground comes alive. Buzzing like electricity, it begins to heave, rising between her thighs, undulating beneath her belly and across her breasts. Then she feels oddly sensuous pluckings at the backs of her legs and body, like the suckers, she imagines, of giant squid tentacles. She opens her eyes again to see slowjoes rising from the dust both sides of her, and from behind, to advance with the others already in motion ahead of her towards the growing army on the other side of the rocky divider, that stone boundary running to the horizons east and west. The source of the sucking at her back is clear. Still more foot soldiers are trying to march right through her own bot‐shrouded substance. She lies as horizontal as she can get, but she focuses on her inner vertical, relaxing, finding the center. At the same time she recognizes the responsive surge that proceedings have evoked in her loins. It feels good, sort of.

  In moments, the slumping towers have disappeared altogether into the swelling ranks of slowjoes as the armies engage each other on the rocky field of battle, the entire scene obscured by explosions of dust.

  She hasn't seen Toot since she went to ground. What does she do now? Cisco managed to get in. She saw him cross the divide. But it looked as though he had a guide. Whatever. She can't stay out here. If the blurs don't get her, the satrays will. It's time to make her move.

  •

  All hell has broken loose. The heat burns right through her bot insulation. The satrays, four or five of them, crisscross the perimeter with trails of fire, and the southern superorganism screeches, a delicate, high‐pitched squealing that can't be the PlagueBot, as such. The four‐or five‐strong chorus, one voice for each hellish swath, must come from the nanobots themselves. Cisco always said he could hear them, back in the mall.

  Something solid and animated jams up into Dee Zu's armpit. Toot is back. “Now!” he says. “Let's go.”

  As pleased as Dee Zu is to see Toot again, she's disappointed to find he has plainly lost his senses. He marches away from her right out into the chaos.

  The armies are still at it, but the rays are sweeping them away to leave great patches of fire and smoke in their place. Right there in the thick of it, Dee Zu feels like cannon fodder. But what's the alternative? She scrabbles along after Toot, an anonymous lump among the slowjoes. The army advancing from the south—their cover, essentially—is still pouring out onto the bare rock, as is the opposing army from the north. She and Toot keep moving as fast as they can. Dee Zu knee‐and‐elbows it through the dust and smoke, even though she isn't sure which direction she's going anymore, or what's providing cover, or what it is they most urgently need cover from. The rock is smooth beneath her, no ridges to point the way; she feels heat on both cheeks and everywhere else besides, so there'
s no help there either. Nothing for it but to trust to Toot's navigational skills, as long as she can keep up with him.

  The rays sweep back and forth along either side. She can't say how close, she doesn't dare look for fear of being blinded. The immunity afforded by her mantle is holding. But the heat soon leaves her unable to breathe. She feels an overpowering need to escape, though there's nowhere to escape to. So she continues her blind advance though the fiery maelstrom.

  •

  Dee Zu chances a look and sees that the armies are in full retreat to their respective borders. Soon the no‐man's land is clear again, except for a few dust devils dancing away in the breeze. She and Toot are almost there, on the other side. An unbelievably vivid bit of life flutters across in front of Dee Zu. How could a butterfly have survived all this?

  Just as unbelievably, Dee Zu and Toot remain pretty much unharmed. The satrays have provided the necessary distraction from the slowjoe soldiers. This, despite the fact that the satellites had earlier appeared set to exterminate Cisco, them, and the oasis alike. And it was almost as though Toot, or MOM, or somebody, was providing air support for their penetration. However unlikely that might be. Chances are it was nothing but dumb luck that Dee Zu and Toot weren't incinerated.

  •

  They're inside. And Toot has already been swarmed by northern blurs. Dee Zu looks back, wondering whether there's any point in running, and by the time she's decided there isn't, she too has been swarmed. This sensation is a metallized, frenzied version of the original donning of her blur coat. But in this case she's soon left naked to the world, cooling as her perspiration dries in the breeze. Clearly the northern blurs are bio‐friendly, because her mantle has been dissed but she's still alive.

  She looks for Toot, but doesn't see him anywhere. Then a satray sears its way down the line, and she runs from the heat through the dunes and up a tributary ravine to higher ground, seeking sanctuary in the jungle. Only when she has reached cover does she realize that the pain she feels has nothing to do with the blurs. Much of her body has been roasted.