Ribofunk

by Paul Di Filippo

  “What’s the name? We’ll want all your files on him. And what did he do?”

  “His name … Um, let me recall. Bert something. Bertrand Mayr.”

  “And why did you let him go?”

  “Flagrant misuse and theft of corporate property.”

  “Precisely?”

  Kitchener smoothed his saurian crest again. “A small matter of sex. He was having sex with the product.”

  * * *

  Sometimes I try to imagine what it was like to live in reedpair times. It was only last century, after all. A lot of that cohort are still actually hanging around, admittedly without many of their original organs or neurons. But even when talking with them, you can’t really understand what their world was truly like. One of the biggest puzzles is how they managed sex. They had to cope with deadly venereal diseases, intractable neuroses, fixed morphologies, social condemnation of natural urges, and merely human sex-workers who offered mostly heartless, perfunctory service due to their oppression and mistreatment.

  Today, gratuitous venereal diseases have been extirpated. (Deliberately inflicted ones are, of course, still a problem. I remember last year the tricky time we had tracking down the perp spreading neo-koro, the penis-inversion plague.) The witch doctors of psychology have been replaced by trope closers. Malleable anatomy is no longer destiny. Laws finally reflect actual desires (at least in the NU; the situation elsewhere varies). And playpets bred and trained for their essential erotic functions come in a nearly infinite variety. (And humane treatment extends even beyond their useful stage. I understand that their retirement ranches offer a wide range of crafts and games.)

  But despite all this, you still get a few hesomagari, the “twisted navels,” those full-blooded humans contrary or perverse enough to seek a fulfillment not socially sanctioned.

  Such as Bert Mayr.

  We had his files downloaded before we left Ixsys. And this was what we learned.

  Mayr was the son of NU citizens Rowena and Boris Mayr, ex-settlers who had retreated in failure from the hard life on board Aquarius, the floating arcology and OTEC power plant off the coast of Madagascar. Their Lotto-won berths had gone to others when they fled back to Boston.

  Boris had died here shortly after Bert’s birth. Caught in the middle of a turf war between the Morgue Boys and the Thai Guys out in Charlestown, where the mother still lived. She had never rebonded on a permanent basis.

  Mayr had grown up to be your archetypical loner. No friends, no resident erotofiscal partner, no transient lovers. Apparently, he had followed this solitary lifestyle ever since becoming fully enfranchised.

  My cop’s intuition drew me a picture of a mama’s boy, the only token of his lost father, a coddled and fussed-over introvert.

  In his final year of schooling, Mayr had shown aptitude as a chromosartor. Given the standard Scios Nova cooker-splicer setup for twelve-year-olds, he had soon modified it with add-ons purchased with his pocket money to produce standalone entities up to the level of annelids. He loved to hack nucleotides and amino acids, perhaps too much so. Legal and moral boundaries appeared to mean little to him. He had almost gotten expelled for the prank of infesting the school’s showers with nonreproductive hookworms. He had programmed them with only a thirty-day lifespan—but in that time they also secreted low levels of psilocybin-analogues directly into the victim’s gut.

  When he had graduated, he found that his juvenile record of misdemeanors worked against him. No respectable peltsie would hire him as a chromosartor (at least without Mayr consenting to a course of corrective tropes, a measure he apparently rejected), for fear of his dangerously irresponsible attitude. The best job he could get was field-testing at Ixsys, a position he had held unremarkably for the past decade.

  “And then along came the Blankie,” K-mart said, back at the office when we had finished viewing the file.

  “It must have triggered something latent in him. Or touched some active kink.”

  “Because he was the first to have access to the Blankie, he came to regard it as his personal property. He takes it home—Tara! You don’t think Ixsys insisted he use it, do you?”

  I shrugged. “That’s what field-testing’s all about.”

  “Shit! Thank Ishtar I work in the adminisphere! Anyway, he gets hooked on the Blankie, uses his skills to alter it for sex. Then when Ixsys finds out and fires him, he goes suborbital, absconding with the product. Finally, he comes to resent anybody else who owns one.”

  Nodding agreement, I said, “I think we need to pay a little visit to Peej Mayr.”

  “Should I sign out the Viper again?”

  “No. A Bulldog.”

  A cocktail of canine, wolverine, hyena, and—of course—a smattering of human, the Bulldog was what we favored for a one-perp pickup with low to medium violence potential. (And Mayr’s MO, with its kind of remote-control aggro, led me to suspect he wouldn’t resist arrest.) Massing only three-quarters of a basal human, the Bulldog was capable of taking down half a dozen nonmoddies faster than you could say “Kreb’s cycle.”

  In the car on the way to Mayr’s last address, we got a bulletin.

  Almost as if our psychic attention on Mayr had drawn him out, there had been another Blankie incident. This time the vector for the assault was a family splice, a Dumbunni. Returning from an errand, it had seemed disoriented. Sent to its manger, it had wandered instead to the human nursery, where it was found gnawing at the Blankie with its blunt, newly venomous teeth. Luckily, the prodge was rescued before the Blankie began fibrillating.

  “We’ve got to put this guy away,” K-mart said, “or our personal asses—not to mention the department’s—will be so much feedstock. You’ve read the profile of the average Blankie owner. He or she is a hardnosed, string-pulling plute who’s not going to sit quietly for this.”

  “Agreed. But I’m actually more interested in the details of the perp’s kink.”

  “Great. You can write it up later for the UPCM Journal. But we’ve got to catch him first.”

  Mayr’s last-known residence turned out to be one of those old asymmetrical rhizomatic structures out in Cambridge. The bawab was a doddering kibe whose split casing seams were patched with Radio Shack Silly Cement. The unit directed us to Mayr’s flat, where our idents secured immediate entrance.

  A stale smell and a layer of dust (the lowrent place didn’t even have self-cleaning capabilities) told us no one had occupied the rooms for at least a month.

  “Shit! Cold trail,” K-mart said.

  “Patience, patience. No telling what a search will turn up.”

  So while the Bulldog stood guard at the door, we began to go through the rooms.

  I found Mayr’s porn stash in one of the more clever hideaways I had ever encountered. One portion of the bumpy, seemingly dead wall was in reality an embedded modified marine polyp with very good mimicry features. It had taps into the residential structure’s water veins, but apparently hadn’t been fed in a while. As I was running my fingers over the wall, the polyp dropped its disguise, flexed open, extruded tentacles, and weakly attempted to ingest my hand.

  I yelped, K-mart came running, flashlight in hand. He lasered the creature dead. Inside its still quivering husk were several datapins.

  We dried them and popped them into K-mart’s poqetpal. Images cohered. Right away I noticed something missing: the usual WTO official imprimatur: ALL MODELS ARE ENFRANCHISED CITIZENS OVER AGE TWELVE. Then I focused on the pictures.

  Back in that reedpair time I had been recently speculating on, there had been a flourishing porn trade—conducted mostly in the old nation-state of Japan—known as bura-sera. Images of young schoolgirls hoisting their skirts to reveal their simple, functional underwear. Sometimes this speciality extended to the sale of the underwear itself. Preferably soiled.

  With the gradual lowering of the franchise to its current level, this trade had disappeared—merged, rather, into the mainstream. But what K-mart and I now viewed reminded me of it and wa
s plainly an offshoot or descendent of the bura-sera.

  It was pix after pix of diaper-clad individuals, ages ranging from newborn to elderly. There was no actual sex going on that would have made the pins contraband. But there was a lot of peeing and crapping.

  K-mart was disgusted. “This stuff isn’t even illegal! It’s just stupid! Why would anyone murder over it?”

  I shut off the display. “You got me, Kaz. But if this accurately represents Mayr’s hardwiring, then you can see how the Blankie was like a match to tinder for him. When Ixsys took it away from him, all he could think of was revenge.”

  Just then a bulletin came in. Another Blankie taken out, this time by a swarm of sweatbees. Luckily, no loss of human life.

  “What next?” asked K-mart. “Maybe a talk with Rowena Mayr?”

  “Sounds good. I think I’d like to ask her where she got her parenting license.”

  * * *

  Rowena Mayr lived in an insensate building in a dismal neighborhood right below the Seraphim tracks. The super-fast train suspended from its overhead monorail was relatively quiet. But the Boston-Montreal Express went by once an hour, and somehow you could feel its passage in your gut as it split the air.

  The crumbling stoop outside Mayr’s building was occupied with dole-proles and their nonschema prodges. The adults were drinking cheer-beers while the kids were playing with those cheap trilobite pets so popular that summer. We garnered dirty looks as we went in, but no one tried to stop us. We left the Bulldog by the entrance to forestall anyone sending up a warning.

  As we approached the third floor door of Rowena Mayr’s flat, I spotted K-mart’s hand hovering near his flashlight.

  I didn’t know what to expect from Rowena Mayr, but it wasn’t what appeared when the door finally opened to our knock.

  Rowena Mayr was a frazettatoid, member of a highly egocentric group that had splintered off the old Society for Creative Anachronism. Boris had probably been one too. You didn’t see them around much anymore, and I was surprised there were any left unretrofitted. No wonder the Mayrs hadn’t felt comfortable in the spartan, utilitarian environment of Aquarius.…

  Rowena had had her body sculpted to resemble one of the impossible fantasy women from the canvases of her faction’s namesake reed-pair artist. Huge cantilevered boobs, a waist so slim it must have involved major organ displacement, and callipygian ass. She wore a tiny metal bra, some faux-barbaric jewelry. From a fake gold chain around her waist hung a few wisps of colored silk.

  She was such a self-contained, self-immersed, impossible creation that being in the same room with her was like sharing space with an ancient animatronic figure. I tried imagining having her as my mother. It was a major stretch.

  “Yes, Officers. How can I help you?”

  “It’s about your son, Bert. Can we come in?”

  “Certainly.”

  The flat was furnished in High Conan. We sat on embroidered cushions and explained the trouble her son had gotten himself into.

  “Well, I feel extremely bad for Bertie. He was always a good boy and showed such promise. Red Sonia knows, I did my best with him! But I don’t see how I can help you now.”

  “He hasn’t been in touch with you recently?”

  “Not for years.”

  K-mart stood. “Mind if we have a look around?”

  Rowena got hastily to her feet. “Unless you have a warrant, I’m afraid that’s out of the question.”

  Nodding toward a closed door, K-mart said, “What’s in there?”

  “That’s my shrine to Dagon. Very innocent, I assure you. But sacred. Now, if you don’t mind, Officers, I’d like to be alone—”

  K-mart started to rap a string of antisense as he ambled about the room. “Oh, I was raised Dagonite, but I fell away. Haven’t seen a shrine in ages. You don’t mind, do you?”

  Before Rowena could stop him, K-mart had pulled the door open.

  The Blankie was waiting.

  It reared up as tall as a man and twice as bulky, a quivering blue wall of cryptoflesh. Unlike what I knew about the small Blankies, this one radiated an ammoniacal, fecal reek.

  Bert had obviously been tweaking its parameters a little.

  Before K-mart could get his flashlight up, the Blankie fell forward on him, wrapping him in its straitjacket embrace.

  Rowena screamed. I had my own flashlight up, but couldn’t shoot for fear of piercing the swaddled K-mart.

  Something barreled past me so fast and hard it spun me around. When I recovered, I saw our Bulldog tangling with the Blankie, all fangs and talons. It zeroed in on a major ganglion, ripping it out in a bloody mess of dendrites.

  The Blankie collapsed like an air-mattress that had sprung a leak.

  I went to help a slimed K-mart up. Rowena rushed past me into the Blankie’s room, shouting, “Bertie, Bertie, I tried to stop them!”

  K-mart seemed shaken, but uninjured. “Tara! I smell like the time I fell into the family outhouse back in Kazakhstan!”

  Flashlight in hand, I followed Rowena into the room.

  But I needed no weapon to deal with little Bertie.

  The fearsome mastermind behind the Blankie murder lay in an oversized Bayer cradle usually used for burn victim treatment, naked except for an oversized cloth diaper. In one lax hand was an Allelix sonic injector. From the utterly wiped look on Bertie’s face, I could guess that the injector had been loaded with a probably irreversible dose of Neonate Nine or some other retrogressive synapse-disconnecting trope.

  Rowena was kneeling by the cradle, weeping. Together, she and her son resembled some kind of tawdry, modern Pieta.

  K-mart came up beside me, shaking his head. “Muy hesomagari.”

  I thought back to my own days as a mel-head. “But we’ve all got navels that can get twisted, Kaz. Leastwise, those of us born human.”

  On our way out, I came on the Bulldog chewing up the evidence. In the heat of the moment, its ancient instincts had overwhelmed its training.

  I went to kick it, but changed my mind.

  THE BAD SPLICE

  As if blindly obedient to one of the weirder plectic neothom- ist catastrophe figures, my life seemed to be warping itself around strange attractors, spiraling and darting up and down cusps and caustics, pleats and furrows that led to some unpredictable yet inevitable terminal boundary condition.

  And the worst part was—I couldn’t tell if on balance I should be scared or glad.

  Changes had swarmed through my life as thick as harvest thrips on a cloth-tree during the past few months, enough so as to necessitate a few unscheduled sessions with Doctor Varela, my BP advisor. I had thought I had seen the last of that calm and erudite Behavioral Pragmatist after he had helped me over the rough patch following my departure from the PI biz.

  Since joining Boston’s branch of the Protein Police, my life had been relatively simple and undemanding, despite the quirks and dangers of my new trade, and I had felt no recent need of beep counseling. But lately all that had changed, leading Doctor Varela to nod and murmur sagely over my condition, consult his snippets, and prescribe a course of Biomet’s Angstaway paired with Sciclone’s VivaciTee, as well as a general adrenergic booster. The tropes seemed to be working, although I still felt a little off-parm.

  But I was managing to cope well with quite a lot, I thought.

  It had all started when the Big Brains in charge of the NU’s Internal Recon and Security force (of which the Protein Police was a division) had laid down a couple of new ukases.

  First, there were to be no more human-human teams. We were just too understaffed to permit such a luxury to continue and would remain so into the foreseeable future. What with the guaranteed prole-dole, the dwindling numbers of pure-gen, fully enfranchised humans, and the seductions of virtuality, criminality, and a million sects, cults, posses, and sets representing an infinite range of hedonism, nihilism, and every ism on the scale, potential candidates for the force were few and far between. (The same was true, of co
urse, in every branch of the NU adminisphere; without kibes, demons, and cocktails, the whole system would have suffered instant apoptosis.)

  So all the old dual-human partnerships were split up. That meant I lost K-mart Saunders, the most agreeable plug I had ever worked with. In his place, I was to choose between a var or a kibe. Well, since the death of my old var Hamster, I couldn’t really work too closely with the splices and remain comfortable. That left the kibe.

  The Turing Level Four kibes had just gone into general open-access production. (The Level Fives, naturally, were already up and running, but were reserved exclusively for the use of the IMF, World Bank, WTO, and other ruling bodies of the adminisphere, which liked to stay one giant step ahead of the masses they governed. And of course the Level Sixes were not far behind, close to finishing their semi-autonomous evolution.) The Toronto HQ of the Protein Police had just received a month’s worth of shipments of Fours from the Bangalore macqui of Segasoft-TogaiMagic, and these had been further distributed across the continent.

  The kibe cores themselves looked identical to and had the same dimensions as the old Level Threes, allowing for easy retrofitting: shiny featureless platters about as thick as a stack of a dozen ancient CD’s. It was the newly evolved qubitic circuitry inside that raised their functioning to a higher level. As for the chassis that would carry the cores—well, the force’s own crada had come up with several new models specifically designed for law enforcement.

  So my new partner became a synthetic, syncretic personality in a mini-frisbee, capable of swapping bodies at will.

  On top of this unsettling switch, the Swellheads had insisted that all the humans on the force go in for a somatic upgrade. The mucky-mucks were tired of losing officers to various preventable assaults. Baseline bodies were now considered insufficent to counter the moddies of the baddies. We had to meet them head-on, match them in the arms (and legs and brains) race.

  Like most people in all walks of life, I had my share of implants and add-ons and upgrades already: simple things that had helped me in my work, like sharper peripheral vision, stronger bones, voluntary pain shunts. But unlike some bodyartists and puzzlepluses, I had never gone in for radical modifications. What was good enough for grandpooh was good enough for me. Now I was being told that I had to change or be dropped from the force.