Briansday
Brian rears back in his chair and gurgles. “Come ahead, you bitches. Bring it on.”
But this time his merriment is less convincing. “Of course you see what's happening.” He waves his stick at the screen. “Leary comes striding right in, standing tall, the fuckwit, provoking a defensive reaction in my plaguebot, which alarms the opposing plaguebot, and pretty soon things are escalating out of control. The satellite attacks, though, that's MOM.”
Four or five satrays meander through the wastelands, great clouds of smoke exploding out of the dunes. Rabbit dims the screen, but it's still painful to watch the intense flash at the intersection of two or more rays. Brian brings his hand down from his eyes to look into the monitor again, where satrays dance wild relief in that dismal gray expanse. “There! Now what do you think that is? Eh? I'll tell you what it is, it's Mildread. The bitch. Or it could be Maria. Shit. Who knows? They're all out to get me.”
The ambient temperature in the cavern rises by at least two degrees. There's a tang of burning metal in the air, and something else. Something at once acrid and warming, powerfully evocative, a primordial tie to the heart of every magic circle. Woodsmoke, says Cisco's WalkAbout.
Rabbit hobbles in place, parasol bobbing up and down. “Tsk!” he says. “What to do? What to do?”
Brian is no longer merry at all. “Shut up,” he tells Rabbit. “I've got to think. Is MOM getting a fix on us? Or only getting luckier?”
For a robot, it occurs to Cisco again, Rabbit has a pronounced sense of his own mortality. Sweetie is also anxious. She tugs distractedly at Cisco's member, aggravating an earlier sprain.
Brian is having a serious think. “You know what the problem is? I'm blinding them. They know somebody's messing with them, and they've already been freaking out. But do you know what's really got Mildread in a tizzy? Now I'm slamming all the windows shut. Bam, bam, bam. All the interesting channels closed right down. Together—you and I—we've been offing her. The best part of her entertainment channels are now defunct. She managed to keep her alpha test pilots going to the very end, but finally I got to them too. Even you, my boy. Especially you. You can bet she's hurting for real right now. Her and Sky. But I've destroyed her vectors, so how's she closing in on me? Who's fingering me?”
Cisco doesn't respond.
Outside
Where satrays pierce the high overcast, concentric ripples of yellow and green haze expand and pucker and then expand again. Settling in for extended burns, the rays zigzag back and forth along the perimeter, while the sky shimmers and sparks with photoelectric phenomena. Meanwhile the PlagueBot is withdrawing back up the ravines from the spare wastes below. It isn't clear what's happening on the other side of the boundary.
Dizzied by the heat and her burns and the stench, Dee Zu staggers back into undergrowth on the edge of the jungle. Thorny vines cling to her, tear at her ankles. She reaches to steady herself against some big green fronds and then recoils, bleeding. These thorns are three centimeters long. More. Rattan, the WalkAbout tells her. Old World tropical and subtropical plants represented by more than six hundred species in thirteen genera…
Toot is nowhere to be seen.
Back the way they've come, the earth's surface surges beneath a satray strike, recoiling in three hundred and sixty degrees to form a living crater. Then it freezes. As much as to say: “PlagueBot? Living surface? You're seeing things.” Closer to where Dee Zu stands, dust drifts under rocky overhangs as though stirred by many contrary breezes, runs down into crevices. In less than a minute, the whole area lies stripped to its rocky bones, freshly swept and still, a stark frame for the jungle.
The fiery beams appear to wander at random. Then three of the rays turn together and head towards Dee Zu in a straight line, one in the center of the boundary, the other two burning parallel strips either side. Abruptly, one of them veers up into the jungle. Birds and other animals, an amazing variety, erupt from the bush to flee the inferno. She sees bright flashes where a flight of birds is caught on the wing. The forest canopy explodes in flame, setting huge vines to burning like quick fuses.
Her own scorched skin burns in the heat of the satray's passing, and she's thinking she badly needs to find water, when she hears Toot. “This way,” he says. “Quick.”
Dee Zu looks back. The slowjoes are gone, sucked up by the towers. The towers themselves have slumped, collectively morphing into gray swells that withdraw back up the gullies to join a general rush to the center of the enclave. Dee Zu tears herself free of what her WalkAbout identifies as bide‐a‐wee vines and chases the way Toot has gone, after the blur torrent, springing from rock to rock. The PlagueBot is now flowing from both higher and lower in the ravine to take a tributary passage under arched rattans. Dee Zu ducks down to follow the tail end of the bot superorganism as it's slurped up by the limestone outcrop. But a new surge of dust has followed on, and Dee Zu lies flat on the ground to wait.
Dead metal smells are accompanied by faint accents of life. The dust continues to flow around her like drifting electric lint, pouring on into the cave. It eventually tapers off and, still flat on her belly, Dee Zu squirms her way after it towards the cavemouth. She isn't especially surprised to find Toot standing there, a miniature temple guardian to one side of the entrance.
“Okay,” he says. “Let's go.”
Dust mounds either side note her passing, spilling slightly to nuzzle at her for a second. But that's all. Soon she joins Toot inside.
Never short of surprising resources, Toot uses a headlight to navigate. They burrow through the dust, Dee Zu regularly craning her head high to gulp air, to glimpse the intermittent fuzzy glow of Toot's light up ahead. Eventually they come to a passage that's clear of dust, the rock covered in a thin slime of muck and nothing more.
Toot speeds on and, soon after, Dee Zu is left in the dark. “We must hurry,” is the last thing she hears him say.
Briansday
Sweetie goes “Hee, hee.” She's pleased that Brian sounds so happy.
“'Hee, hee' it is. MOM's blind to us. Plain shit out of luck.”
Whump. A soul‐jarring thud. Bits of cavern wall break off and fall to the muck below. Whump. A hysterical storm of bats erupts into the light. The whirring of flying roaches is lost in the general chaos, but Cisco can see them. The shimmering ground swarm, meanwhile, is being tossed by waves, whitecaps breaking where individual insects threaten to flee the collective. It's as though his worlding powers have been restored; he even spots the fleye hovering over by the tank, also trying to take it all in. Whump. The third concussion hits from farther away, no harder than a heavy book dropped on the floor.
“Ha‐ha!” Brian says. “I knew it. False alarm. Fluke shots.”
WHUMP!
This fourth whump puts all the other whumps in the shade. Everything goes black. There's no monitor, no Sweetie, no Brian. Only a dark blizzard of bats, roaches, and who knows what. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” Brian's mantra rises above the flutter, the twitter, and Rabbit going clank in the dark. “Where the fuck is the fucking emergency fucking power. Rabbit? Fucking Rabbit?”
The lights come back on before Brian finishes commanding it, and Rabbit returns to his station beside Brian, holding the parasol.
“What the fuck?” Brian says.
There in the middle of the deck area, not two meters from Brian's chair, stands an animal not much bigger than Pussy was. It's covered in armor plate and, way back of its vacuum‐cleaner nose, a pair of watery pink eyes take nervous measure of its surrounds.
Brian stares at it and says, “Rabbit. What the fuck is this?”
“A pangolin,” Rabbit replies.
“Yes, yes. But what I mean to say is, what the fuck is this?”
“A scaly anteater.”
Sweetie wrinkles her nose. “Yuck,” she says.
“Rabbit, Rabbit.” Brian sounds weary. “Rabbit, you dumb fuck. What's next? A high‐school marching band? The security cells have been breached.”<
br />
“It's the bombs.”
“Yes? And so?”
“Emergency system failure. Tsk. We must fix it.”
“Good call.” Brian is upset, but he's a reasonable man, he apparently wants them to know. He recomposes himself; he laughs. “Hargle.” Then he whacks Rabbit, dislodging batshit the bombs missed, and then whacks him again for good measure before addressing Cisco. “Lines and lines. No problem, eh? The satellite feed is down, and for now we'll be sucking at Gaia's tit, a little geo‐thermal fix, there. Rabbit. As soon as you get us hooked up again, bring me more mushroom.”
•
Rabbit is back. “Tsk,” he says, handing something to Brian. “The shields are up again.”
“Good work, Rabbit.” Brian has regained his expansiveness. “I have to ask once more, my boy: how can she be laying vectors on me now the 'pets are gone? It's got to be Leary. So we bring him in quick and search him. Lode the locket at the same time we neutralize whatever it is he's carrying. No problem.
“But there could well be another factor at work here.” Brian scoops mushroom from the Tupperware container and looks thoughtful.
Sweetie staggers over to brace herself against his chair. In her best babytalk voice, she says, “One more.”
“One more what?” Brian asks.
“One opout.”
“For fucksake.”
“Please.”
“No time, no time,” Rabbit says, but it isn't clear whether he's referring to the opout or to something else.
The pangolin, a shadowy form beyond the book spills, from where Cisco sits, is investigating the cockroach swarm.
“Rabbit,” says Brian. “Kill the anteater. No sense taking chances.”
Outside
Toot has scuttled ahead into the dark passage. Dee Zu follows far behind in the dark. She has stopped to gently smear more of the soothing muck over herself. Try to avoid infection, her WalkAbout is telling her. She laughs.
Part of the flushed feeling could be medibots at work, but the damage is too general to be sure. Whatever. This might be too big a job for the in‐house crew. But there's good news, compliments of the WalkAbout: she hurts so much that these must be only second‐degree burns; third‐degree burns destroy the pain receptors. She stops, manages to focus. She opens herself to a swell of anxiety, letting it dissipate before it can erupt into full‐blown panic. At the same time she relegates the pain to a bearable distance.
It's hard to judge, but she thinks they must have already penetrated at least two hundred meters into this limestone labyrinth. So far they have simply kept to their right. She must remember this, which choices they have made, in case they have to retrace their route. This particular tunnel has tapered to the point that, should they decide to return to their start, Dee Zu, at least, will have to back out.
Another choice presents itself. Which way to go, which fork to take? This time, Dee Zu's ears tell her, Toot has trotted off down the leftward tunnel. Dee Zu feels the faintest of breezes issuing from that direction, which means it might offer a way out. Anyway, the return would be right, left, left, left. Dee Zu repeats it to herself. No problem.
She humps along on elbows and knees, taking care not to bang her head, trying to spare her scorched skin, conscious of Toot somewhere in the dark ahead. The passage continues to narrow. Finally she can no longer hear her companion. She calls out, “Toot. I don't think I can go this way. Toot?” But there's no answer.
Now she encounters broken ground, a fresh fall. The rocks are slime‐free, and sharp edges tear at her. With much painful contortion she makes her way over and around it; then she finds she can go no farther. The passage is too narrow.
“Toot!” she calls. Again there's no response. Deciding it's better not to wait, she starts inching backwards towards the last junction. She has just started when there's a great thud. More than a thud. The concussion pounds at her from all directions, pummels her innards. The very earth groans; this is followed by a quick rumble. Dee Zu lies still for a good five minutes. She thinks of times past with Cisco, she thinks about Tor, and she tells herself to relax. Eventually, she resumes her backward journey out of this dead end. She proceeds only a few meters before her feet kick against broken ground. She feels all around with her toes for the passage, but there is no passage. Only the fresh rockfall. She also senses that she's missing toes, two or three digits. Was it the satrays or the blurs that took them? If it had been blurs, they wouldn't have left her the remaining toes, or anything else either.
Dee Zu weighs this option, then she weighs that one and she realizes that they are both the same: lie here in the dark and wait to die.
•
A scrabble to the end of the road, and Dee Zu is left alone with the sound of her own breathing. She feels a faint breeze against her face coming from the dark ahead, cruel suggestion of an escape route. She never did find her water. Her skin is tightening. Maybe it's the muck drying in the breeze. She's thirsty. And light‐headed. She hears an occasional grate and clack where the rocks behind her shift to a more stable configuration. Water drips, tantalizingly, but the acoustics are bad and she can't tell whether it's ahead, the way Toot went, or behind. And that's it. That's her world. No bail button.
Without much hope, but lacking anything better to do, Dee Zu tries wiggling through. She dislocates her shoulder joints. Normally this would be easy, but in this confined space it isn't. It feels like her skin is tearing. There's no chance.
One of her shoulders refuses to pop back into joint. Dee Zu shifts into shutdown mode, reducing both metabolism and cognition to minimum maintenance levels. Her last thoughts are of Cisco.
Elsewhere
Vector established. Locking.
Briansday
“Hey‐Hey!” Muggs is up there on the screen all by himself. “Somebody planning to let us in?”
Brian is excited. “Howdy, howdy, howdy,” he replies. “Welcome back! Yo, Sweetie. Guess who's come to dinner.”
“Leary?” Sweetie guesses, picking at the scabs of old eruptions on her bosom. She looks subdued, even scared.
“That's right. Rabbit! Out you go. Lickety‐split, now. My old buddy's at the door.”
“Tsk.” Rabbit trails indignant mutterings as he shambles past Cisco on his way out. “Lode the cube, fix the power, fetch the mushrooms, answer the door…”
“Good old Rabbit. My pal Leary totally deserves a couple of barbies—we used to call them 'pretties' in Thailand—but my emergency generator has a limited range.”
“Pretty.” Sweetie tugs at her straggles of hair and simpers.
Outside
With no ceremony at all, local blurs have removed Leary's protective mantle. Dissed it in seconds. But they've had the courtesy to leave Leary himself intact, however bare‐butted, hot, and unhappy he might be. Muggs is nowhere to be seen.
Safely up a ravine, at least for now, Leary stops to look back. The armies are already in full retreat. The dust of battle blows away as the slowjoe ranks slump back into a gray sea that divides and ripples back, north and south, to lie still and flat. The rocky highway again stretches bare to the horizon.
Leary turns away from this bizarre panorama to see the White Rabbit. Leary rubs at his blur lenses, but that changes nothing. He's looking at a dented, dirty, and disreputable version of an Alice in Wonderland character. It stands nearly as high as Leary and clanks as it points to an overhang beneath a house‐sized boulder nestled in scrubby jungle growth.
“We're late,” it says, as it dives into the darkness. “Hurry.”
Muggs emerges from the overhang. “So what are you waiting for?” he asks, stepping aside.
Leary looks back to see where the satrays wreak holy terror on nothing whatsoever a few kilometers to the south. Along the boundary, watchtowers begin to rise once more. Then the bunkerbusters begin to fall.
“Or would you rather stay out here?” Muggs comes as close as an Aibo can to bowing with a flourish as he invites Leary into the dark.
<
br /> “Darn it,” Leary says, and plunges in the way the White Rabbit went. He hears a muffled question from behind him: “You've still got the locket, right?”
•
“Cut the malarkey, Brian. I know you're in there.”
“Congratulations, Citizen Leary GXG222 11! This is your big chance to be yourself. You Bet your Butt! Be whoever, whatever. Forever.” The chirpy voices are drowned in a sea of cheers and applause.
“And which door will he choose?”
“The middle one!”
“No, no! The one on the left!”
“Look,” Leary bellows. “I don't care about that junk, okay?”
“So which is it going to be, folks? The one on the right?”
Leary paws at the air as though to brush away the questions. Then he unleashes a straight kick at the center of the middle door. His kick passes right through, and he falls forward, off balance, reaching out to slam against rock slimy with mud. Pushing himself away, he lunges at the doorknob on the right, tries to twist it hard, but his hands are too slick. So he goes in shoulder first, pitching forward to hit the ground beside Cisco, although Cisco can see that only on the screen. But Leary's up and fending off the Rabbit way faster than any one‐hundred‐and‐thirteen‐year‐old should be able to. The next moment he's back on the ground, paralyzed, a dart hanging off the side of his head.
Brian gurgles gaily. “A real bull in a china shop. Some things never change, eh, old buddy?”
Muggs emerges from somewhere, delivers an offhanded “Howdy” to the assembly, waddles over to the console and, heaving a great sigh, docks with some digital gadgetry.
Rabbit and Sweetie apply their respective instruments to checking Leary for homing devices. Brian is puzzled that they find nothing.
Elsewhere
Vector established. Locking.
Briansday
“Yo!” Brian hollers from his cradle. “Ahoy the peanut gallery.”
MOM Page 27
