WikiWorld

by Paul Di Filippo

  4. THE RED QUEEN’S TRIATHLON

  In the morning, after breakfast, A.B. approached Gershon Thales, who stood apart near the trundlebug. Already the sun thundered down its oppressive cargo of photons, so necessary for the survival of the Reboot Cities, yet, conversely, just one more burden for the overstressed Greenhouse ecosphere. Feeling irritable and impatient, anxious to be back home, A.B. dispensed with pleasantries.

  “I’ve tried vibbing your pocket lab for the results, but you’ve got it offline, behind that pirate software you’re running. Open up, now.”

  The keek stared at A.B. with mournful stolidity. “One minute, I need something from my pod.”

  Thales ducked into his tent. A.B. turned to Tigerishka. “What do you make—”

  Blinding light shattered A.B.’s vision for a millisecond in a painful nova, before his MEMS contacts could react protectively by going opaque. Tigerishka vented a stifled yelp of surprise and shock, showing she had gotten the same actinic eyekick.

  A.B. immediately thought of vib malfunction, some misdirected feed from a solar observatory, say. But then, as his lenses de-opaqued, he realized the stimulus had to have been external.

  When he could see again, he confronted Gershon Thales holding a pain gun whose wide bell muzzle covered both of the keek’s fellow Power Jocks. At the feet of the keek rested an exploded spaser grenade.

  A.B. tried to vib, but got nowhere.

  “Yes,” Thales said, “we’re in a dead zone now. I fried all the optical circuits of the vib nodes with the grenade.”

  A large enough burst of surface plasmons could do that? Who knew? “But why?”

  With his free hand, keeping the pain gun unwavering, Thales reached into a plugsuit pocket and took out his lab. “These results. They’re only the divine sign we’ve been waiting for. Reboot civilization is on the way out now. I couldn’t let anyone in the PAC find out. The longer they stay in the dark, the more irreversible the changes will be.”

  “You’re claiming this creeping crud is that dangerous?”

  “Did you ever hear of ADRECS?”

  A.B. instinctively tried to vib for the info and hit the blank frustrating walls of the newly created dead zone. Trapped in the twentieth century! Recreationist passions only went so far. Where was the panopticon when you needed it?

  “Aerially Delivered Re-forestation and Erosion Control System,” continued Thales. “A package of geoengineering schemes meant to stabilize the spread of deserts. Abandoned decades ago. But apparently, one scheme’s come alive again on its own. Mutant instruction drift is my best guess. Or Darwin’s invisible hand.”

  “What’s come alive then?”

  “Nanosand. Meant to catalyze the formation of macroscale walls that would block the flow of normal sands.”

  “And that’s the stuff afflicting the solarcells?”

  “Absolutely. Has an affinity for bonding with the surface of the cells and can’t be removed without destroying them. Self-replicating. Best estimates are that the nanosand will take out 30 percent of production in just a month, if left unchecked. Might start to affect the turbines too.”

  Tigerishka asked, in an intellectually curious tone of voice that A.B. found disconcerting, “But what good does going offline do? When PAC can’t vib us, they’ll just send another crew.”

  “I’ll wait here and put them out of commission too. I only have to hang in for a month.”

  “What about food?” said Tigerishka. “We don’t have enough provisions for a month, even for one person.”

  “I’ll raid the fish farms on the coast. Desalinate my drinking water. It’s just a short round trip by bug.”

  A.B. could hardly contain his disgust. “You’re fucking crazy, Thales. Dropping the power supply by 30 percent won’t kill the cities.”

  “Oh, but we keeks think it will. You see, Reboot civilization is a wobbly three-legged stool, hammered together in a mad rush. We’re not in the Red Queen’s Race, but the Red Queen’s Triathlon. Power, food and social networks. Take out any one leg, and it all goes down. And we’re sawing at the other two legs as well. Look at that guy who vandalized your apartment. Behaviour like that is on the rise. The urbmons are driving people crazy. Humans weren’t meant to live in hives.”

  Tigerishka stepped forward, and Thales swung the gun more towards her unprotected face. A blast of high-intensity microwaves would leave her screaming, writhing and puking on the sands.

  “I want in,” she said, and A.B.’s heart sank through his boots. “The only way other species will ever get to share this planet is when most of mankind is gone.”

  Regarding the furry speculatively and clinically, Thales said, “I could use your help. But you’ll have to prove yourself. First, tie up Bandjalang.”

  Tigerishka grinned vilely at A.B. “Sorry, apeboy.”

  Using biopoly cords from the bug, she soon had A.B. trussed with circulation-deadening bonds, and stashed in his homeopod.

  What were they doing out there? A.B. squirmed futilely. He banged around so much, he began to fear he was damaging the life-preserving tent, and he stopped. Wiped out after hours of struggle, he fell into a stupour made more enervating by the suddenly less-than-ideal heat inside the homeopod, whose compromised systems strained to deal with the desert conditions. He began to hallucinate about the subterranean Seine again, and realized he was very, very thirsty. His kamelbak was dry when he sipped at its straw.

  At some point, Tigerishka appeared and gave him some water. Or did she? Maybe it was all just another dream.

  Outside the smart tent, night came down. A.B. heard wolves howling, just like they did on archived documentaries. Wolves? No wolves existed. But someone was howling.

  Tigerishka having sex. Sex with Thales. Bastard. Bad guy not only won the battle, but got the girl as well….

  A.B. awoke to the pins and needles of returning circulation: discomfort of a magnitude unfelt by anyone before or after the Lilliputians tethered Gulliver.

  Tigerishka was bending over him, freeing him.

  “Sorry again, apeboy, that took longer than I thought. He even kept his hand on the gun right up until he climaxed.”

  Something warm was dripping on A.B.’s face. Was his rescuer crying? Her voice belied any such emotion. A.B. raised a hand that felt like a block of wood to his own face, and clumsily smeared the liquid around, until some entered his mouth.

  He imagined that this forbidden taste was equally as satisfying to Tigerishka as mouse fluids.

  Heading north, the trundlebug seemed much more spacious with just two passengers. The corpse of Gershon Thales had been left behind, for eventual recovery by experts. Desiccation and cooking would make it a fine mummy.

  Once out of the dead zone, A.B. vibbed everything back to Jeetu Kissoon, and got a shared commendation that made Tigerishka purr. Then he turned his attention to his personal queue of messages.

  The ASBO Squad had bagged Safranski. But they apologized for some delay in his sentencing hearing. Their caseload was enormous these days.

  Way down at the bottom of his queue was an agricultural newsfeed. An unprecedented kind of black rot fungus had made inroads into the kale crop on the farms supplying Reboot City Twelve.

  Calories would be tight in New Perthpatna, but only for a while.

  Or so they hoped.

  —This story is indebted to Gaia Vince and her article in New Scientist, “Surviving in a Warmer World.”

  BOMBS AWAY!

  Having departed the McConnell Air Force Base in Kansas just a few hours prior, the squadron of long-range B-5 “Shelly O” Stealth bombers arrived over Igboland in southeastern Nigeria at 3:13 A.M. local time. The air defences of the reclusive and hostile dictatorship (a failed state since the collapse of the global petroleum industry after the advent of microbe-generated electricity from trash) could not detect the invaders.

  The payloads unleashed by the bombers, however, were a different matter.

  Each package was as big as a freestand
ing urban street-toilet stall, swaddled in protective foam and with a chute atop.

  Soon, mushroom-like synthetic blooms dotted the night sky all over Igboland.

  Nigerian troops scrambled to meet their descent.

  Each package, as it touched down in countryside, town or city, automatically jettisoned its pre-programmed self-destructing foam coating and parachute, removing evidence of the landing.

  Revealed was what appeared, indeed, to be an urban street-toilet: a shed-sized streamlined plastic structure, windowless, with a curving door panel.

  In 90 percent of the landings, soldiers arrived first on the scene, surrounding the structures menacingly, weapons raised, until military trucks arrived to haul the invaders away.

  Occasionally average citizens reached the bombs first. The finders generally cooperated. They sought to shift the structures out of sight of the authorities. But sometimes fights erupted, or pirate bands intervened. For the most part, unless the citizens moved very fast, the soldiers soon showed up and took the prizes away, brutally and with bloodshed.

  But in a very small percentage of instances, the bombs passed safely and secretly into the hands of non-state individuals.

  A young, orphaned bachelor, Okoronkwo Mmadufo grew pearl millet and raised goats on the edge of an abandoned and decaying Chinese coltan-processing plant, land no one else coveted since it was seeded with toxic wastes. His farm struggled to provide even one person with a subsistence living. The soil sickened his crops and the vegetation his animals. Okoronkwo despaired of ever being rich enough to afford a wife and family.

  The night of the bombing run the farmer was awake and about, tending a sick goat. He looked up when he heard a muffled but sizeable thump, and saw the bomb settle atop a patch of scrawny millet plants. He dropped the goat and rushed to the structure.

  He began to push futilely at the big bomb, which was nearly as large as his house. But then he saw a large red unlabelled button near the door panel, and he slapped it.

  The bomb lifted itself up on a set of wheels and an air-cushion effect.

  Okoronkwo ran with the bomb toward the deserted, ruined factory. A small outbuilding looked impenetrably collapsed upon itself. But Okoronkwo knew the secret of its access.

  He moved some timbers and hauled aside a wall of galvanized tin and got the bomb hidden. After grabbing a branch, he erased any slight tracks leading back to the landing site.

  The soldiers found him cradling his sick goat.

  After interrogation and discussion, the soldiers decided not to investigate the abandoned plant, since they had heard that the effect of the toxic wastes would be to cause their penises to disappear. They had much sport speculating on Okoronkwo’s genital shrinkage, then left.

  Okoronkwo waited until the next night to investigate the bomb in the outbuilding.

  When the curving plastic portal opened, light flooded the interior of the bomb. Okoronkwo quickly stepped inside and shut the door.

  The interior of the structure appeared much smaller than expected, indicating concealed machinery or reservoirs. The only visible features were: an intake hopper, a dispensing chute, and a docked cellphone.

  Okoronkwo picked up the cell and it came alive.

  Speckled with animated glyphs, the face of a young white guy appeared.

  “Sticky here. What’s your name?”

  “Okoronkwo Mmadufo.”

  “Gonna call you OM. Here’s the tranche. You’re now the proud owner of a Biofab Field Unit. It comes supplied with feedstocks—just common stuff you’ll be able to replace—and smart microbes that will handle their own reproduction, as well as diagnostic, engineering and interface instrumentation. PCR, nucleotide decouplers and linkers, sequencers—the works. You can use the BFU to make nearly any medicine or other products of any natural or synthetic organic processes. The Unit will tailor doses of active agents as well for dispersal into the environment. You run everything via the cellphone. You’ll see the control panel now on the touchscreen, with a link to an interactive tutorial. Click on the terms of agreement, please, OM— Swell! Goodbye.”

  “Wait! I have many questions!”

  “Sorry, the feds aren’t paying me to answer questions. Strictly freelance. So, I’m gone. Unless—can you get me any rare highlife recordings?”

  “You like live shows of Dr. Sir Warrior?”

  “Hell yeah!”

  “I can get those.”

  “Bring me tracks I don’t have, and I’m yours to command.”

  Over the next week, Okoronkwo and his new friend used the BFU to tailor a remediation treatment for the soil, a cure for pearl millet top rot, and nutraceuticals for the goats.

  Okoronkwo came to feel confident in his prowess with the BFU, and eventually bade Sticky goodbye. He knew now that he could continue to help himself and his neighbours, and that his personal future would include a woman and children.

  But first he had to tailor a certain lethal smart bug, keyed only to the genomes of Nigeria’s rulers. These men were lax with condom use, and certainly obtaining their seed would be no chore at all.

  COCKROACH LOVE

  DAMIEN BRODERICK AND PAUL DI FILIPPO

  “The problem with Arab literature has been that it forgot to tell stories and lost its way in experimentation. Too many novels that start with lines like ‘I came home to find my wife having sex with a cockroach.’”

  —Pankaj Mishra, “Where Alaa Al Aswany Is Writing From,”

  New York Times Magazine, April 27, 2008

  When Kay got home, tired and unhappy from her gruelling flight halfway round the globe, she found her husband Elwood fucking a cockroach the size of a cocktail waitress.

  She had longed only to kick off her sensible yet constricting Madame Ambassador high heels, and collapse on the couch for a foot massage from a considerate spouse. Unburden herself of all her diplomatic aggravations, with a cool drink in hand. Instead, that piece of furniture was now being creakingly abused.

  Kay instinctively plucked off one pump, and heaved it at the insect.

  In her blinding fury, she missed the bug by a good yard, and her husband as well.

  The foul thing glanced at her and insouciantly kept right on peeling an orange with its mandibles as her spouse of five years thrust at its hindquarters. Kay couldn’t tell if the roach were male or female, not that it mattered especially.

  “For the love of God, El!”

  Elwood Grackle noticed her, finally. His face was flushed to a Clintonesque burgundy, and so was most of his bare chest. With a final shudder he jerked his useless fluids into the insect and fell forward, panting and dripping sweat onto the gleaming, jewel-toned carapace. The cockroach swallowed its final bright segment of fruit and chased it down with a tart bite of peel before throwing the curly remainder considerately into the faux fireplace.

  Elwood detached with a squelch and a measure of insouciance. He pulled his ankled pants up awkwardly with one hand, reclaimed his shirt from the sofa back with the other. “How was the flight from Cairo, darling? You’re early.”

  “I’m five hours late, you squamous fucker.”

  “Well, yes, strictly speaking, but I was factoring in post-arrival press conferences, debriefings, and the like. Allow me to introduce Emma. Em, this is Kay.”

  The roach’s voice resembled a bandsaw working its blade through a wet sandbag. “Your wedded bliss. Madame boss. Most honoured.”

  “My wife, yes.” He toweled himself off with his shirt. “Em is our new Kaf.”

  “Christ, so now you’re reduced to screwing a transgenic. The flight was gruesome, and so was Cairo. The noise of that place is indescribable.”

  “Really? What’s it like?” He tucked himself away, donned the damp shirt, went to the bar to wash his hands lightly but firmly, and got out two tall frosty glasses from the fridge. He fished out a lime and slashed it. “A margarita, darling?”

  “What do you mean, what’s it like? If I could describe it it wouldn’t be indescribable. Yes,
I’ll have a drink, and why don’t you tell this filthy thing to clear off, I’m sick of the sight of it.”

  “Your lovely bride is testy, Elwood. Felicitations, Madame, I was just leaving. I hope your mood is improved when next we meet.” Boldly flashing the progenitive trademark of the Abu Dhabi University biolabs branded onto its shell, the roach was out the door in a darting motion that eluded Kay’s swinging, still-shod foot with ease.

  “I take it from your sour mood,” said Elwood, “that negotiations with the Egyptians were not successful.”

  “My sour mood, as you so sympathetically phrase it, has more to do with your rutting.”

  “Oh, don’t try to make me the villain. I sensed from your last phone call that you were already about as cheerful as a… as a drowning Micronesian. Your tiresome moodiness has been the status quo in our happy home for months.”

  Kay was suddenly immensely weary. It was true. She’d been a fount of black despair lately. Not that she could help it. So much was going wrong for the nation. For the world!

  She sagged down on the couch, hit the glutinous wet spot, recoiled and shot up again—awkwardly, given her half-shod condition—and spilled her drink. Considerately, Elwood jumped to support her, and guided her to the safe haven of a dry armchair. Her façade of professional and wifely fortitude crumbled. His familiar, solicitous touch! She began to weep.

  El patted her shoulder. He went to mix her a replacement margarita, talking soothingly the while.

  “There, dear, have a good cry. It’s not easy, helping steer the ship of state through these perilous times. Never forget, I’m always there for you, darling.”

  “You’re never there,” she said, sobbing. “You’re always here.”

  “Exactly, I’m always here for you. Look, you realize now that my little impulsive moment just now has no bearing on our marriage, or my love for you?”