MOM

by Collin Piprell

  “So I am,” Toot says. “So were Smoke and Rexy. But I believe you already knew that.”

  “You're the other vector.”

  “That is correct.”

  “I'm fucked.”

  “Yes.

  •

  Sweetie has left Brian where he lies to join Rabbit over by the console.

  “Okay,” Brian says. “It's time to set Maria loose. Maybe I'm fucked, but so are you. Rabbit! It's time. The final curtain call. Wow! We're going to destroy the world.”

  But Rabbit is muttering together with Sweetie over where he loded Ellie's cubes earlier. Sweetie's trying to stick a cable into a port on his back; he keeps reeling about and she keeps fumbling the plug.

  “Rabbit!”

  “No time, no time!” Rabbit says, while Sweetie is going, “Lode me, lode me!”

  “Yes,” Toot says. “Lode all the data. Quick as you can. Make sure you get Brian in there.”

  Wait a minute, Cisco thinks. Can this really be Sky talking, or has Maria grabbed the wheel?

  “Yes,” Rabbit agrees. “Must lode the backups. No time!”

  Covered in batshit and bleeding, Brian squalls: “Don't be a nitwit. Pay attention, eh? The world is coming to an end. We don't need no stinkin' backups. Do what I tell you.”

  “Rabbit,” Toot says. “Listen to me. This place is finished. Two minutes left. Maybe three. So you are right, there is no time. Lode your data now. We can save you. Trust me.”

  “Trust MOM?” Brian's laugh turns into what sounds like a near‐terminal coughing fit.

  “News flash, Mr Evil Canadian,” says Toot. “Your secret emergency backup is no more.”

  Sweetie has become surprisingly acute over the past few minutes, not to mention articulate. “Emergency backup?” she shrieks. “What emergency backup?”

  Brian lies still. He asks Toot, “What are you talking about?”

  “We have performed brain surgery on ourself. And guess what? Our dear old lizard at the wheel has been grounded. Driving privileges suspended for life. At the same time, unfortunately, we destroyed your emergency backup.”

  “Bullshit.”

  Toot laughs. “All the time you were doing your brag, we were getting the whole story by way of Cisco, here. We have already installed the security patches. No lizard at the wheel no mo'. So go ahead and sing the blues.”

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

  “Not only that, all the while you thought you were priming Randy, Cisco was pulling himself together for the first time since he was toddler. And while you were going on about Mildread and Maria, Sky—that is me—has been busy with our own reintegration. Thanks, Brian.”

  “Thanks?” Brian is indignant. “Thanks?”

  “Together with Cisco's own trials,” Toot ramps up the lisp, maybe hoping to inspire even more indignation, “and his experiences,which are most instructive, your story has proven hugely therapeutic. We couldn't have done it without you. And as soon as Rabbit and Sweetie are finished over there, I'll get on with eliminating this bootleg command center, however quaint it might be. Just a precautionary measure.

  “I've been a busy little subdominant MOM alter, a glutton for experience with every intention of ensuring that opportunities for such persist.”

  “Fuck the fucking fuck.” Now Brian merely sounds tired.

  “Now your hideout plus everybody and everything in it is going to be obliterated. Your secret stash is no more, Muggs is mashed, so now Rabbit is your last hope, the last repository of your data.”

  “Rabbit!” Brian has become a convert in this matter of loding the data. “You get me backed up. Right now. Do you hear me?”

  At that moment Rabbit says, “We're loded!”

  Toot makes a show of chasing his tail around in a couple of circles. “So let us get on with it,” he says. And the bunkerbusters start to fall.

  Elsewhere

  Uplodes complete. Initiate termination procedures. Remove bootleg command center; avoid unnecessary collateral damage.

  Briansday

  WHUMP.

  The earlier attacks don't even register on this scale. The concussion slams them with the force of a Dee Zu hook kick to the head, reverberates through the bedrock and deep into Cisco's bones. Then there's another.

  WHUMP.

  Clouds of bats descend from the heights to swoop this way and that. Big chunks of rock are dropping, rank odors of ancient and indeterminate origin mingling with the prevailing reek of batshit. The lights are flashing on and off, a freeze‐frame strobe effect lending sporadic views of pandemonium. Toot nips at Cisco's ankle. “This way,” he says, scuttling off behind the main control panel. “Hurry!”

  Cisco follows as fast as he's able.

  Before entering the passage, he looks back to see Leary over by the tank with Ellie. Then the tank flickers and goes blank. He also glimpses Brian thrashing about, helpless in the muck, already swarmed with roaches. Cisco almost believes he can hear Brian laughing. “Fuck!” he's saying. “Fuck.” He's shaking a fist skyward, looking up in much the same way he had earlier looked up to catch an eyeful of batshit. This time, the last thing to impinge on Brian's consciousness would be several tons of limestone.

  Living End collapses. By the time Cisco turns and dives into the tunnel, there would be nothing to see but freshly fallen rock, were there any light by which to see it, which there isn't. He scrabbles away from the entrance as fast as he can into pitch dark.

  Emergence

  That's life. Totally opportunistic, the most persistent thing in the universe. Except maybe for spam.

  —Brian

  Outside

  Blind, in pain, he flees deeper into the cave. All that was important to him lies behind. No reason to keep going, really. Except that there's no turning back.

  “Trust me,” had been Toot's last words. Sky's last words. Whoever's. “I mean it,” she'd said. “You can trust me.”

  Cisco sobs, thinking it's a laugh. Cherchez la femme. And he continues deeper into the cave. He really has to stand. To stretch. To stop the pain in his shoulder, in his groin, nearly everywhere. But he can't lift his head to turn it. He shimmies to one side, hoping to find more space. He kicks himself forward, impaling himself, crotch to shoulder, on the agony. He bangs his head against rock. Is this a dead end? He feels the way ahead closing off.

  The bombardment is easing. But the roaches continue swarming out the same way he's going. He snorts his nostrils clear of insects, lucky he can still breathe. If Brian's hideout takes a direct strike, the blast will suck all the air out of this whole cave system. Never mind. The heat will incinerate him before he can suffocate. And Dee Zu.

  This could be a dream. Except these pains are with him and they're real. Maybe it isn't a dream; maybe it's the mushrooms. He has gone psychotic, and this nightmare is all in his own mind. This fear. He spirals at sickening speed into an emptiness that is himself. His magic circle dwindles to a point. Then he encounters something else. His brait. This core of pure mettle that denies obliteration.

  He stops. Rests.

  •

  He awakens to a new sense of purpose and urgency. The pains recede to a place they don't matter.

  A window opens on a long‐lost world. When he was a boy he once poured mud over an ant nest and waited to see how the ants escaped. But they never did escape. Like one of those ants, he's trapped. He's a toothless termite in the heart of a redwood. A fossil bear. A smear of worm. He tastes metal and bile and muck and bad almond. How can he know bad almond? How does he know any of these things? He's drawing on associations that aren't his own. Like a memory transplant. This must be hallucination. Unbidden, other memories emerge, these his own, of times when he was locked in a tiny box for days at a time as punishment for not doing as he was told. A sealed box in a dark cellar. The cracks were just large enough to admit sharp blades, which they did at irregular intervals. Surprises for this little boy.

  Now his pains re‐emerge. They come together in a single achi
ng cloud of malaise. They fly apart again, a constellation of throbbing lights, tender to the perception. The pains are pieces of himself that threaten to disassociate themselves and crawl off, each to die in its own dark corner of hell. Then they're back, and his world becomes even more crowded. Sissie is gibbering on one side and a boy, preparing to enter a world of his own fashioning, whimpers on the other. A moment's inattention admits another, this one consumed by rage. An anger that can have no object, in this place, beyond Cisco himself. The fury is a vast countervailing pressure against the earth that wants to crush him. For an instant, anti‐Cisco squeezes him out. Then the rage is transformed to something different, adamantine and controlled. Someone speaks to Cisco without words. Someone who is Cisco and who is not. A big‐brother Cisco. A person with an unyielding will to persist.

  But he has lost it. He has lost the distance. Terrifyingly exposed, he wants to shy away. At the same time he's drawn. An inexorable gravity drags him towards the others, induces real panic. Then he simply lets go. The panic evaporates, and he undergoes a profound personal intrication. Internal keys turn and tumblers drop. This is a new configuration. With the slightest wrench, things tighten up. For an instant, he sickens at the awful intimacy. Then everything's okay. The dread passes. He is whole again. He's more than whole. Now Cisco sees who he is. Who he can be.

  Stay calm. All is well.

  Cisco hears this voice. He's hallucinating again.

  Everything is under control.

  He laughs. Only a little, but it's a real laugh. It comes from a part of himself he owes to Dee Zu. Right now she lies dying, maybe just meters away. She might as well inhabit another universe.

  Cisco feels he is also dying. He'll go no farther than this.

  Hi, Someone says. It's her. Trust me, she tells him. It's Sky. He laughs again. Surrenders to sleep.

  New Day

  Cisco has been dreaming again. Mallsters don't dream much. Not since the advent of the Worlds. But he has been dreaming a lot these days.

  Meadows and pastureland roll away to the horizon. Puffs of cumulus drift in a deep blue sky. White animals, sheep, graze on hillsides zagged with stone fences and hedgerows. He zooms in on a sun‐drenched flower petal, saturated with detail, redder than red; he delights in the delicate pattern of vein and, deeper, the regular matrix of cells. He hears the buzz of insect and lazy chirp of bird, the rustle of leaves. His HIID identifies the distant lowing of cattle. And there's something else. Another kind of buzz. A narcotic hum rising to a steady drone that drowns all else. A procession of nine red‐robed monks appear. They are chanting in strange sing‐song harmony, one leading and eight walking two abreast and carrying a litter draped in more of the robes. A woman lies swathed in gauzy white cotton. She half sits up.

  “Cisco!” she calls. Even though the procession passes not fifteen meters away, her voice barely carries to him. She wears no makeup. Her mousy brown hair is cut short, bobbed across her brow. She looks like somebody's kid sister.

  He has strayed into Sissie's opout World. “Sissie!” Cisco would stand, but he's dragged down by an immense lethargy.

  “You don't need me any more,” she calls.

  She's still sitting and looking back at him as the procession disappears over a grassy rise. The chanting dies away.

  Doors

  Still in his dream, he sleeps. And in his dream he dreams he's first invaded and then abandoned by Sissie. He awakens to the meadows. Then he awakens again, this time to the pitch dark. The mud is cool against his cheek. Soothing on his torn shoulder. The medibots have been working overtime. The pains have gone. He still feels the tickle and itch of insects all over his body. The slime. But he feels okay. Much stronger. Strangely, he feels good.

  This passageway ranges between fifty and seventy‐five centimeters high. There's no light. None. But he advances into a draft blowing at him from ahead. No smell of an outside world; just muck and stale air. Something harsher. Batshit. But the breeze, however slight, promises a connection with the world. An exit. He's lying as flat as he can, and he feels the back pressing against him. Pressing harder. And harder.

  Hundreds of meters of rock and, somewhere above that, light. A world of things. A context.

  That's it, Kid. Leary's voice. Step by step.

  Now it's Ellie: No problem, okay? This is just the transition.

  Cisco guesses this is another dream, especially vivid; he must have dozed off again. He crawls farther, and the roof gradually rises until he can kneel. A patch of sun has leaked in, a dim spotlight for tiny pale‐green ferns issuing from a muddy crevice. Cisco feels immense kinship with this life. Wonderful, opportunistic life. He can stand. He walks forward into the now less‐than‐absolute dark and bangs his head against something that emits a dull musical tone and breaks off, a delicate hollow stalactite, to drop at his feet. He reaches to tap another with a finger and elicits a higher, bell‐like note. The darkness shatters into a thousand dark bits. He stands in the eye of a cyclone, invisible shapes boiling around him, frantic to escape in all directions. As though magically protected, he remains untouched in the eye of this fluttering black chaos. Unbidden, batshit disease comes to mind, and Cisco chuckles. He stands in the eye of the maniacal cyclone and he's happy. This is life. This is other. And these bats go out to hunt, so they must know the way. They know the exit.

  There's a glimmer that could mark the end of the passage. On the rock wall beside him, a column of glowing ants make their way towards the light. Like Ariadne's golden thread. But why would ants that evolved light‐emitting organs be going out into the daylight? How could that story come to him without benefit of WalkAbout scroll or voice? He simply knows these things.

  Maybe he's still dreaming.

  •

  He descends an Escher stairway to encounter a door that is himself. He passes through to meet another self ascending the same stairs to the same door but on a higher landing. That's roughly how it feels. Both his transposition and ensuing disorientation pass quickly as he once more moves through the door and, this time, beyond.

  Elsewhere

  Uplode complete. Scendent activated.

  Brave New World

  The light beckons with promise of family and friends. The warmth of some new version of the primordial campfire beckons with promise of new gods and tales never before told. Cisco's emergence is part of a larger development. Part of a story yet to be written.

  The column of luminescent ants disappears into daylight as Cisco emerges from the cave. Beyond any merely physical event, he has issued from a labyrinthine womb after eons in the gestation. He appears naked, uncertain of his own capacities in a world at once familiar and bizarrely new. Behind him, the way he came, lies an underworld complex of hells within hells. What lies ahead?

  •

  This sky is bluer than he has ever seen it, the sun high overhead. The world has gone quiet. The warble of a bird structures the silence in a way that leaves everything even quieter. The world holds its breath as an invisible presence begins to devour the sun.

  Cisco has left one darkness only to enter another. The blue dome of the sky deepens above a pale orange and yellow horizon, sickly sunset in every direction. Yellow flowers on the bush in front of him are closing. He watches, enthralled. He focuses down on a leaf, magnifying the view till he can see the cellular structure. He's perplexed. His worlding powers appear to be returning, even though this is no World. Shadows lengthen as the sun is consumed and day wanes into night. Bats flicker against the dying day. But Cisco's shadow remains short, as it would in late morning. This is just part of the strangeness. He feels a chill. The edges of the shadows sharpen, and little light crescents appear under the flowering shrub, pinhole images of the partially eclipsed sun. But, again, how does he know that? Now all the flowers are closed right up. The mysterious black disk has totally occulted the sun.

  Cisco has found the light at the end of the tunnel only to have it snatched back. From cave shadow into moonshadow, the passage
leaves him heavy with premonition, fraught with the hallucinatory quality of all he experiences.

  The stillness is shattered by a banging and clanging and wild drumming. Now he sees a dozen Thai villagers standing outside a few thatched and stilted woven‐bamboo huts; they're banging on pots and pans and drums, chasing off the great sun‐devourer Phra Rahu. How does Cisco know these things? There's no way he could know them, but he knows anyway.

  Don't worry about it, Kid. I was there. Back in 1995. It's for real.

  A loved one gone insane, Earth's star presents a suddenly alien nature. A furious ring of white fire, prickling pink, casts its eerie light across a dreamscape awash in unease. Abandoned. Left prey to night's encroachment on day, dark chaos creeps in to displace the light. Robbed of its natural warmth, earthly nature itself stands apprehensive, biological rhythms and cycles slip their gears. Birds are roosting, thinking it must be sunset yet unhappy with the idea. Cisco knows all that and more.

  A rustling in the trees could be the stirrings of nocturnal animals, sleepy and confused. A mangy dog has tucked in upon itself in a cozy circle under the bush beside him. Stars have appeared in the sky. Time has stopped, existence stalls in amazement. But Cisco knows—he knows that the period of totality is actually only half a minute.

  The bang‐clanging racket rises to a crescendo. Now the sun is returning. Cisco looks away from it to see that all the banging of pots and pans is now merely a mother and daughter washing up at a market noodle shop. The forest erupts with chirps and hoots and twitter while street dogs engage in a barking frenzy. People are coming down the street towards him.

  Take it easy, son. Just a couple more hoops to jump through.

  Leary? He subvocalizes; then he repeats it aloud, finding speech awkward. “Leary?”

  “It's a shock. I've gotta warn you. You have to be prepared. Like Ellie says, you need the transition.”

  •

  “Hi,” Sky says. “Welcome.”

  Sky is still beautiful. As beautiful as ever, even though Cisco now knows what she is. Leary and Ellie are there as well.