Science Fiction: The Best of the Year, 2008 Edition

by Rich Horton

  FooDog resealed his mask, and we headed down.

  “Aren't you worried we'll be ID'd on the way down the mountain?”

  “I hired the zipcar under a spoofed name, then despimed it. Cherry's untouchable, and you and I have our denial flags on. Once we get down the mountain, anyone who manages to get near us in meatspace will have to distinguish us from a hundred other identical cars on the road. We're as invisible as anyone gets these days.”

  “So your little invention is safe from greedy and irresponsible hands.”

  “Sure. Unless I decide to open-source it.”

  “You're kidding, right?”

  But the Dog replied not.

  So that's what the average outing with Foolty Fontal was like.

  Of course, I had certain thrills in my own line of work.

  One day my not-inconsiderable rep as a salvage expert attracted an offer from the Noakhali Nagas, a wiki from Bangladesh. That unfortunate country had suffered perhaps more than any, due to oceanic incursions. The creeping Bay of Bengal had submerged thousands of shrines. Rescuing deities would provide me with a significant chunk of lindens. And the challenge of new territory—the Cape Archipelago was starting to bore me a little after so many years—was a plus as well.

  I sat with Cherry on our favorite spot, the deck of our house on Sandybump. It was late afternoon, our “morning” time, and we were enjoying brunch and watching the sun go down. I explained about the offer I had received.

  “So—you mind if I take this job?”

  “How could I? Go for it, babe! I'll be fine here alone till you get back.”

  I emerged from the warm waters of the Bay of Bengal on a Tuesday afternoon two months later to find a high-priority news item, culled from the ubik by one of my agents, banging at the doors of my atmosphere-restored connection.

  Cherimoya Espiritu was in Mass General Hospital in Boston, suffering from various broken limbs and bruised organs, but in no mortal danger.

  I blew every isk I had earned in Bangladesh plus more on a scramjet flight back to the UWA. Four hours later I was hustling through the doors of MGH.

  Cherry smiled ruefully as I entered her room. Vast bruises, already fading from subcutaneous silicrobes, splotched her sweet face. Various casts obscured her lovely limbs. Wires from speed-healing machines tethered her down.

  “Damn, Russ,” Cherry exclaimed when she saw me, “I am so sorry about the house!”

  * * * *

  6.

  Wormholes and Loopholes

  Looking back at this narrative so far, I see that maybe right here is where my story actually begins, or should've begun. After all, it was Cherry's accident that precipitated my run for jimmywhale of the UWA, and the subsequent trade war, and that's when I entered the history books, even as a footnote. And that's what most people are interested in, right?

  Except that how could I possibly have jumped into the tale right here? None of it would've made any sense, without knowing about my backstory and FooDog's and Cherry's. I would've had to be constantly interrupting myself to backfill.

  And besides, aren't most people nowadays habituated to ruckerian metanovels, with their infinite resortability and indrajal links? Even though I chose to compose this account in a linear fashion, you're probably bopping through it in a quirky personalized path anyhow, while simultaneously offering planting advice to a golden-rice grower in Bantul, contributing a few bars to an electrosoul composer in Los Angeles, and tweaking the specs of some creature's synthetic metabolism with an a-lifer in Loshan.

  So:

  I rushed to Cherry's side and grabbed her hand.

  “Ouch! Watch my IV!”

  “Oh, babe, what happened? Are you gonna be okay?”

  “Yeah, I'll be fine. It was just a stupid accident. But it wasn't really my fault....”

  Cherry had been sunning herself on the deck yesterday, half-asleep. As the sun moved, she got up to shift her chair closer to the deck's edge. The next thing she knew, she was lying in the shallow waters surrounding Sandybump, buried under the timbers and pilings of the deck. Her head projected from the waters, allowing her to breathe painfully around her busted ribs. But lacking personal ubik access to summon help, she surely would've died in a short time from the shock of her injuries.

  Luckily, the house itself knew to call one of the 911 wikis. Within minutes, an ambulance service run by the Organ Printers had her safely stabilized and on her way to MGH.

  “The deck just collapsed, Russ! Honest. I didn't do anything to it!”

  My concern for Cherry's health and safety began to segue to anger. Which wiki had built the deck? I started to rummage through the house's construction records, at the same time pulling up real-time images of my dwelling. The tearing-off of the deck had pulled away a portion of the exterior wall, opening our beloved house to the elements.

  The Fatburgers. They were the wiki who had built my deck. Bastards! I was in the middle of composing a formal challenge suit against them, prior to filing it with a judicial wiki, when FooDog contacted me.

  “You're back stateside, nephew! Great! But there's information you need to know before you rush into anything. Drop on by my offices.”

  “Can't you just tell me over the ubik?”

  “Nah-huh. C'mon over.”

  I gingerly kissed Cherry good-bye, and left.

  I pooled my public-transit request with those of a few dozen other riders heading in my direction, and I was over the Charles River in no time.

  Foolty Fontal maintained an occasional physical presence in a building on Mass Avenue in Cambridge owned by the Gerontion wiki, whose focus was life-extension technology. Jealous of their potentially lucrative research, the Gerontions had equipped the building with massive security, both virtual and analogue, the latter including several lethal features. Thus FooDog felt moderately safe in using their premises.

  But the building knew to let me in, and I followed a glowing trail of virtual footprints blazoned with my name to a lab on the third floor.

  FooDog stood by a table on which rested a dissection tray. Coming up to his side, I looked down at the tray's contents.

  I saw a splayed-open rust-colored worm about twenty inches long.

  “Eeyeuw! What's that?”

  “That and its cousins are what brought down your deck. Shipworms. Teredo navalis. Molluscs, actually. But not native ones, and not unmodified. This particularly nasty critter was created in a Caracas biolab. They were used in the hostilities against Brazil ten years ago. They'll even eat some plastics! Supposedly wiped out in the aftermath—extinct. But obviously not.”

  I poked the rubbery worm with a finger. “How'd they get up north and into my deck pilings? Is this some kind of terrorist assault?”

  “I don't think so. Now that we know what to look for, I've done a little data-mining. I've found uncoordinated, overlooked reports of these buggers—enough to chart the current geographical dispersion of the worms and backtrack to a single point of origin. I believe that a small number of these worms came accidentally to our region in the bilge water of a fully automated container vessel, the Romulo Gallegos. Looks like purely unintentional contamination. But until I know for sure, I didn't want to broadcast anything over the ubik and alert people to cover their tracks. Or rouse false alarms of an assault.”

  “Okay. I can think of at least three entities we can nail for this, and get some damages and satisfaction. The owner of the ship, the traders who employed him, and the jerks who created the worms in the first place.”

  “Don't forget our own coastal biosphere guardians, wikis like the Junior Nemos and the Aquamen. They should have caught this outbreak before it spread.”

  “Right! Let's go get them!”

  “The conference room is down this way.”

  Ten empty chairs surrounded a large conference table formed from a single huge vat-grown burl. FooDog and I settled down in two seats, and then we called the offending parties to our meeting.

  My SCURF pa
inted onto my visual field the fully dimensional real-time avatars of our interlocutors sitting in the other chairs, so that it looked as if the room had suddenly filled with people in the flesh. Men and women scattered around the planet saw FooDog and me similarly in their native contexts.

  Most of the avatars seemed to represent the baseline looks of the participants, but a few were downright disconcerting. I couldn't help staring at a topless mermaid, one of the Aquamen, no doubt.

  FooDog smiled in welcoming fashion. “All right, ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce myself....”

  Everyone nowadays claims that instant idiomatic translation of any language into any other tongue is one of the things that has ushered in a new era of understanding, empathy, and comity. Maybe so. But not judging from my experiences that day, once FooDog had spread out his evidence and accusations to the mainly South American audience. We were met with stonewalling, denials, patriotic vituperations, counter-charges and ad hominem insults. And that was from our English-speaking compatriots in the UWA! The Latinos reacted even more harshly.

  Finally, the meeting dissolved in a welter of ill-will and refusal of anyone to take legal or even nominal responsibility for the collapse of my deck and the injuries suffered by poor Cherry.

  I turned despondently to FooDog, once we were alone again. “Looks like we're boned, right? All our evidence is circumstantial. There's no way we can redress this through the system. I mean, aside from convincing any wikis I'm personally involved in to boycott these buggers, what else can I do?”

  FooDog, good friend that he was, had taken my dilemma to heart.

  “Damn! It's just not right that they should be allowed to get away with hurting you and Cherry like this.”

  He pondered my fix for another minute or so before speaking.

  “Seems to me our problem is this: You got no throw-weight here, nephew. You're only one aggrieved individual. Your affiliate wikis are irrelevant to the cause. But if we could get the whole country behind you, that'd be a different story.”

  “And how do we do that?”

  “Well, we could mount a big sob campaign. Get all the oprahs and augenblickers talking about you. Make you and Cherry into Victims of the Week.”

  “Oh, man, I don't know if I want to go that route. There's no guarantee we wouldn't come out of it looking like jerks anyway.”

  “Right, right. Well, I guess that leaves only one option—”

  “What's that?”

  FooDog grinned with the nearly obscene delight he always expressed when tackling a task deemed impossible by lesser mortals.

  “If we want satisfaction, we'll just have to take over the UWA.”

  * * * *

  7.

  Starting at the Top

  I had always steered clear of politics. Which is not to say I had neglected any of my civic duties: Voting on thousands of day-to-day decisions about how to run my neighborhood, my city, my state, my bioregion and the UWA as a whole. Debating and parsing Wikitustional Amendments. Helping to formulate taxes, tariffs, and trade agreements. Drafting criminal penalties. Just like any good citizen, I had done my minute-to-minute share of steering the country down a righteous path.

  But I had never once felt any desire to formally join one of the wikis that actually performed the drudgery of implementing the consensus-determined policies and legislation.

  The Georgetown Girls. The Slick Willy Wonkettes. The Hamilfranksonians. The Founding Flavors. The Rowdy Rodhamites. The Roosevelvet Underground. The Cabal of Interns. The Technocratic Dreamers. The Loyal Superstition. The Satin Stalins. The Amateur Gods. The Boss Hawgs. The Red Greens. The Rapporteurs. The Harmbudsmen. The Shadow Cabinet. The Gang of Four on the Floor. The Winston Smiths. The Over-the-Churchills.

  Maybe, if you're like me, you never realized how many such groups existed, or how they actually coordinated.

  By current ubik count, well over five hundred political wikis were tasked with some portion of running the UWA on nonlocal levels, each of them occupying some slice of the political/ideological/intellectual spectrum and performing one or another “governmental” function.

  Each political wiki was invested with a certain share of proportional power based on the number of citizens who formally subscribed to its philosophy. The jimmywhales of each wiki formed the next higher level of coordination. From their ranks, after much traditional politicking and alliance building, they elected one jimmywhale to Rule Them All.

  This individual came as close to being the president of our country as anyone could nowadays.

  Until deposed, he had the power to order certain consequential actions across his sphere of influence by fiat; to countermand bad decisions; to embark on new projects without prior approval: the traditional role of any jimmywhale. But in this case, his sphere of influence included the entire country.

  Currently this office was held by Ivo Praed of the Libertinearians.

  FooDog set out to put me in Ivo Praed's seat.

  “The first thing we have to do,” Foolty Fontal said, “is to register our wiki.”

  The three of us—myself, a fully recovered Cherry and the Dog—were sitting on the restored deck of the Sandybump house, enjoying drinks and snacks under a clear sunny sky. (This time, concrete pilings upheld the porch.)

  “What should we call it?” I asked.

  Cherry jumped right in. “How about the Phantom Blots?”

  FooDog laughed. I pulled up the reference on the ubik, and I laughed too.

  “Okay, we're registered,” said FooDog.

  “Now what? How do we draw people to our cause? I don't know anything about politics.”

  “You don't have to. It would take too long to play by the rules, with no guarantees of success. So we're going to cheat. I'm going to accrue power to the Phantom Blots by stealing microvotes from every citizen. Just like the old scam of grifting a penny apiece from a million bank accounts.”

  “And no one's going to notice?”

  “Oh, yeah, in about a week, I figure. But by then we'll have gotten our revenge.”

  “And what'll happen when everyone finds out how we played them?”

  “Oh, nothing, probably. They'll just seal up the back door I took advantage of, and reboot their foolish little parliament.”

  “You really think so?”

  “I do. Now, let me get busy. I've got to write our platform first—”

  FooDog fugued out. Cherry got up, angled an umbrella across the abstracted black man to provide some shade, and then signaled me to step inside the house.

  Out of earshot of our pal, she said, “Russ, why is FooDog going to all this trouble for us?”

  “Well, let's see. Because we're buddies, and because he can't resist monkey-wrenching the system just for kicks. That about covers it.”

  “So you don't think he's looking to get something personal out of all this?”

  “No. Well, maybe. FooDog always operates on multiple levels. But so long as he helps us get revenge—”

  Cherry's expression darkened. “That's another thing I don't like. All this talk of ‘revenge.’ We shouldn't be focused on the past, holding a grudge. We came out of this accident okay. I'm healthy again, and the house is fixed. No one was even really to blame. It's like when those two species of transgenic flies unpredictably mated in the wild, and the new hybrid wiped out California's wine grapes. Just an act of God....”

  In all the years Cherry and I been together, we had seldom disagreed about anything. But this was one matter I wouldn't relent on. “No! When I think about how you nearly died ... Someone's got to pay!”

  Shaking her head ruefully, Cherry said, “Okay, I can see it's a point of honor with you, like if one of the Oyster Pirates ratted out another. I'll help all I can. If I'm in, I'm in. I just hope we're not bringing down heavy shit on our heads.”

  The door to the deck slid open, admitting a blast of hot air, and FooDog entered, grinning face glistening with sweat.

  “Okay, nephew and niece
, we're up and running. Even as we speak, thousands and thousands of microvotes are accumulating to the wiki of the Phantom Blots every hour, seemingly from citizens newly entranced by our kickass platform. You should read the plank about turning Moonbase Armstrong into the world's first offworld hydroponic ganja farm! Anyhow, I figure that over the next forty-eight hours, the Blots will rise steadily through the ranks of the politco-wikis, until our leader is ready to challenge Praed for head jimmywhale.”

  Suddenly I got butterflies in my stomach. “Uh, FooDog, maybe you'd like to be the one to run the UWA....”

  “No way, padre. The Dog's gotta keep a low profile, remember? The farther away I can get from people, the happier I am. Nope, the honor is all yours.”

  “Okay. Thanks—I guess.”

  FooDog's calculations were a little off. It only took thirty-six hours before the Phantom Blots knocked the Libertinearians out as most influential politco-wiki, pushing Ivo Praed from his role as “president” of the UWA, and elevating me to that honor.

  Sandybump, a speck of land off the New England coast, was now the White House. (Not the current museum, but last century's nexus of hyperpower.) I was ruler of the nation—insofar as it consented to be ruled. Cherry was my First Lady. And FooDog was my Cabinet.

  Time to get some satisfaction.

  * * * *

  8.

  Wikiwar

  The day after my political ascension, we reconvened the meeting we had conducted at Gerontion, this time at Sandybump. All the same participants were there, with the addition of Cherry.

  (Lots of other important national matters were continually arising to demand my attention, in my new role as head jimmywhale, but I just ignored them, stuffing them in a queue, preferring not to mess with stuff that I, for one, did not understand. This abdication of my duties would surely cause our charade to be exposed soon, but hopefully not before we had accomplished our goals.)

  FooDog and I restated our grievances to the South Americans, but now formulated as a matter of gravest international diplomacy. (Foolty showed me the avatar he was presenting to the South Americans and our coastal management wikis, and of course it looked nothing like the real Dog.) This time, with the weight of the whole UWA behind our complaints, we received less harsh verbal treatment from the foreigners. And our compatriots caved right away, acknowledging that they had been negligent in not protecting our waterways from shipworm incursion. When FooDog and I announced a broad range of penalties against them, the mermaid shimmered and reverted to a weepy young teenaged boy.