Ribofunk

by Paul Di Filippo

  Swallowing my trepidations and instinctive dislike of being bossed around (after all, I wasn’t an independent contractor anymore), I went into the bodyshop.

  I came out sheathed in flexible imbricated skin like a pangolin’s, its plates chamois-soft to the touch yet capable of turning aside sharp edges and low-velocity projectiles. Additionally, my new integument from Calypte Biomed would react to the beam of a flashlight by instantly altering its refractive index. (I had once read that the quickest basal reaction in nature was found in the jaws of a certain ant, which could snap closed in a third of a millisecond. Science had considerably bettered that.) I had a paralymphatic system from Olympus Biotech that would aggressively react to micro- and nano-invaders. My arteries were reinforced with CuraTech’s neo-goretex, my bones threaded with Innovir’s stonefiber. My heart had an onboard Hemazyne assist, as did my lungs. I had Agouron hyperflexure in my fingers, increased haptic and proprioceptive sensitivity, and certain wetware enhancements from BioCryst not available to the general public. Finally, I could on short notice generate several highly damaging antipersonnel cytokines expressible through strategically placed exocrine glands.

  In short, I was now one mean and hyperefficient slagger for the forces of goodness and justice.

  I was also on a half-dozen new tropes that allowed me to integrate my new body image and sensory inputs.

  It was just after this makeover that the final big change in my life occurred.

  I met Xuly Beth and fell in love.

  Xuly Beth Vollbracht had been born in the Mercosur, grown up a gypsy waterbaby. Her parents, Rolf and Valentina, had managed a section of the Hidrovia, roving up and down that extensive artificial waterway, supervising commerce and maintenance, troubleshooting and policing. Educated and trained as a noah for the GEF, Xuly Beth had been stationed at various spots around the world (she had seen parts of APEC, CarriCom, and Scandibaltica), monitoring and remediating oceanic-atmospheric systems, before ending up in the Nova England bioregion.

  We met at an official function hosted by the noahs to brief the Protein Police on the latest rogue organisms we could possibly expect to emerge from runaway marine co-evolution. (Safe as silicrobe technology was supposed to be, there were inevitable glitches.)

  Luckily for me, Xuly Beth was far from repelled by my altered epidermis. It turned out that one of her first lovers had been a fishboy from the Hidrovia, and the experience had crystallized her taste for odd integuments.

  Xuly Beth was the change in my life that tipped the scales toward gladness. It was the first time since my wife walked out on me that I had a functioning pair-bonding. It felt good.

  And that feeling alone should have been enough to warn me that something bad was about to fall right on my head like one of Xuly Beth’s programmed heavyrains out of the seemingly clear sky.

  * * *

  The first notice I had of trouble was the urgent patterned pinging of my flimsy one morning as I sat at my desk. I was on scheduled fifteen-minute downtime, relaxing in a quasi-meditative state at the focus of which was a little token of her work Xuly Beth had given me. In a clear cylindrical container about as big as a pneumatic-tube message capsule, a self-sustaining miniature silicrobe twister ran its homeodynamic contortions, powered only by sunlight. Its infinite random permutations served as a Taoist exemplar of mind-wiping potency.

  But even the Tao could not ultimately contend against the earcon for a Class-One transmission. I resumed my mind and voiced the screen on. The face of my immediate superior appeared.

  Jo Priestly looked nervous. Not an easy task for a woman who wore the ruff-bordered head and snouty-toothed face of an oversized fringed lizard. (I had seen perps faint during interrogation when she simply smiled.)

  “The cat’s in town,” she said.

  “The Xuma Puma?” I asked, recalling the petty posse-leader I had more than once tangled with in the old days. “What’ s to worry’

  “I wish it was only the XP. No, I’m talking about the one and only cat that matters. Krazy Kat.”

  Now I knew why she looked worried. “I assume there’s some java following for me to dethread. But maybe you could empeg it for me.…”

  “You heard about Chicago? How the Kat nearly caused a Second Flood?”

  “Sure. But I thought he screwed up. Didn’t he leave behind some cells for the first time? All the public sniffers should be programmed by now to respond as soon as he slinks by.”

  “True, we’ve got his genome mapped, and that’s more than we’ve ever had before. But it’s not good enough. The Kat doesn’t have to go out in public to cause mischief. He’s got friends, allies, and sympathizers galore. And not just among the other splices either. There’re lots of pure-gens who support the CLF—or at least the nonviolent aspects of their platform. Groups such as the SPCC. The Kat could easily stay holed up and still cause us yotta-shit. And don’t forget private transportation. The sniffers would miss anyone in a car with positive pressure seals. No, we’re going to have to hit the streets if we hope to forestall whatever deviltry the Kat’s got in his hat. Bone up, plug. Then get out there and use your nose.”

  “Kakkoii,” I said. “Cool as the socket who climbed into the Sack and made it with the Farside storage ring.”

  The Chief was a member of the Shaker Revivalists and a doctrinaire gone-gonad. Her membranous veined ruff flushed an agitated crimson, then her face disappeared. Another earcon sounded, and down invisible lines came the petafits on the Kat.

  There was so much data it overflowed the flimsy’s buffers. I released a couple of my customized speculative agents to work in background mode, setting them loose on what was known of the Kat’s MO. Then I settled down for a long raster, grateful that some of my new wetware allowed for dual-track processing.

  Krazy Kat had been born some ten years ago in and into frustration. His sire was a mullis who went by the gnomic name of Doctor Radius. At the time, Doc Radius was a freelancer under temp-bond to Vivus-Neopath and had just been assigned to a highly secretive project. V-N had taken an anonymous encrypted contract off the net to develop a new breed of cultivar according to certain specs. The mosaic was to consist of 50 percent felidae of various germlines, 30 percent human, 10 percent viverrine, 10 percent miscellaneous useful nucleotides. Once the juvenile splices were out of the tanks, as yet unengrammed, they were to be shipped in partial stasis—without human accompaniment—to an address that turned out to belong to a dummy abe fronting for the city government of Paris.

  It turned out that the mayor of that fine city had decided to secede from the EC, after his decision to make smoking mandatory within city limits had been quashed from on high. (Tourism was down, and the mayor felt that if he could reimpose the retro ambiance of the city, the crowds would flock back.…) These new splices from V-N, all tooth and nail and cunning, were to be trained and further bred as a corps of mercenary soldiers, the backbone of a Parisian self-defense force with which the mayor could enforce his secession.

  Well, needless to say, both the EC and the WTO, among other power centers of the adminisphere, frowned on such a move and chose to express their displeasure most forcefully. (The ex-mayor was due out of stasis in another twenty years.) Upon discovering the plot, before the splices were even shipped, the authorities came down on V-N like a ton of strange matter. The firm was heavily fined, and all the special splices were ordered destroyed.

  This did not sit well with Doc Radius. Like any devoted, obsessive, manifestly brain-warped artist, he had come to regard the new splices not as mere work-for-hire, but as his personal, beloved magnum opus. When the destruct order came down, Doc Radius managed to make off with a single fetus. A secret fetus not on the original workorder, but one he had been tinkering with as a side-project, tweaking its parameters to his liking and esthetic sense.

  This was the seed that was to blossom into Krazy Kat.

  Raised in eccentric isolation with only Doc R. for a parental unit, freed of the mandated dietary leashes or propr
ietary tattoons, Krazy Kat had turned into a dangerous monomaniac. As soon as the Kat was mature enough to reason, after about a year of accelerated and highly illegal trope dosing, he had fixated on the admittedly high-handed and wanton destruction of his fellow fetuses. Only surviving member of his aborted kind, the young Kat had gone on to study the conditions under which splices of all types served and lived amidst human society. What the Kat found apparently sent him over the edge. (And although I myself was certainly no cocktail-sucker, I had to admit that some of the excesses and abuses documented here and elsewhere were nauseating.)

  At the age of five, Krazy Kat adopted the name by which the whole world would soon know him and took a vow. He would devote his life to liberating splices everywhere, waging a no-holds-barred campaign to make their “slavery” obsolete, too costly for human society to sustain.

  Thus was born the Cultivar Liberation Front.

  All this information had come to light shortly after Krazy Kat’s first unexpected and initially inexplicable terrorist excursion, the slaughter of the board of directors of Hedonics Plus at their yearly meeting in Geneva. In the ensuing worldwide hunt for clues, the Tijuana branch of the Protein Police found Doc Radius’s trashed lab, as well as the Doc himself, similarly lifelessly trashed. (At the time I had still been a loner PI, without access to this hush-hush information.) Seemingly, Radius had made the mistake of objecting to all or some of his progeny’s plans and had gotten just what all humans deserved in the Kat’s eyes. And although the Kat had thoroughly lysed all biomatter samples connected to his person, he had not been able or concerned enough to wipe all the audiovideo material the Doc had lovingly accumulated over the years.

  I studied a still shot of the mature Kat: over two meters tall, tailed, one hundred kilos of rippling muscles under a tawny, nonbasal-striped pelt. His face was a sexy, oddly alluring, highly intelligent mix of panther, civet, and human features, marred only by what I intuited was a permanent sneer calculated to reveal a glint of sharp ivory teeth.

  My speculative agents popped to the surface, shattering the Kat’s image with their signature metagrafix swirls. They had no insights into what Boston could expect from the Kat, if he were indeed in town. He seemed never to repeat himself, had no favored tactics or, ahem, catspaws, being willing to strike anywhere, anytime, through or at anyone.

  I dismissed the snippets and summoned my partner, knowing the kibe would already have assimilated the same data, in a fraction of the time. Waiting for it to arrive, I studied the swirling, captured tornado in its tube. The microweather’s patternless patterns seemed to mock the chaos around me. But paradoxically, the border of chaos and stasis was where life flourished.…

  My partner arrived.

  (The Turing Level Four kibes came with a curious legal codicil. Just as any fully enfranchised individual was legally responsible for the actions of his or her immaterial agents and demons, shards and partials, so was any owner of a TL4 ultimately accountable for its words and deeds. Mostly, corporations bore the legal brunt; but among the Protein Police, the burden had devolved to the cops themselves, as a cost- cutting measure. If my TL4 did anything contrasocial, it was my ass on the line. It was a big responsibility, almost like having a prodge. So I called my partner “Sonny.”)

  Today Sonny was wearing a Hexcel Enforcer chassis: a body with an armature of stonefiber bones, buckytube circulatory system, muscles crafted of imipolex and resilin, hide of super-sharkskin, distributed co-ganglia. Looking like a lumbering grey rubbery giant, the chassis boasted a neckless human-like head with mock sensory inputs designed to draw the deadly fire of any perp stupid enough to attempt an assault on such a monster. The real audiovisual-chemo sensors were concealed at various points around the body, as was assorted weaponry. Slotted safely behind a tough protective abdominal panel was the kibe platter itself.

  Sonny spoke in a pleasant tenor voice that seemed to emerge from its armpit.

  “I assumed from the data that there was a certain need for overwhelming force in dealing with the renegade splice. Was I in error, Peej?”

  “No, not in error. But maybe just a wee bit premature.”

  * * *

  After convincing Sonny to change into a relatively inconspicuous, less alarmingly destructive chassis (a BASF mechanical model nicknamed “the Washtub”), we hit the streets.

  I had a destination in mind: the offices of the SPCC. Chief Priestly had mentioned them. They were an obvious source of potential coconspirators for the Kat, but I was almost certain that I’d get nothing out of them. But frankly, it was the only lead I had.

  Walking through Boston’s noisy, hormone-hot streets, breathing the clean exhaust of tuktuks, I tried to do as the Chief had directed and use my putative crime-sensitive nose.

  Detouring down an alley off Arlington, I surprised a pack of scavenger kibes trying to break into the Sinochem Humpty Dumpster behind a bodyshop. The pack of ownerless runaway kibes needed certain organics for their maintenance and frequently resorted to theft, as well as begging. They must have disabled the Dumpster’s flee-and-shriek circuits, for it could only rock back and forth in place and hoot dismally as they attempted forced entry into its separation chambers.

  Before I could react, Sonny was barreling through the pack, scattering them left and right. A battered, unsteady nutraceutical dispenser marred with letterbomb graffiti toppled over, spinning its wheels uselessly. The rest fled.

  Sonny extruded a snaky tentacle and found a socket on the crippled machine. He jacked in, and the renegade dispenser died.

  “Another societal parasite terminated,” Sonny declaimed with a trace of TL4 pride.

  “Yeah, great. Come on, Judge Dredd, we’ve got bigger fish to fry.”

  “Metaphor?”

  I sighed. Just like having a kid. “Yes.”

  “Filed.”

  After a stop at an open-air tolkuchki so that I could grab a snack of biltong and camu camu fruit, we reached the Stuart Street offices of the NGO known as the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Cultivars. After fencing with a wary human receptionist, I was admitted into the offices of the director, one Peej Jane Grahame-Ballard.

  Grahame-Ballard was a small woman whose skull was capped with pink pinfeathers. Clad entirely in shiny nonorganics, she was an obvious Carbaquist Reverencer, like 99 percent of the SPCC. She regarded me with a look such as an elderly splice must display when confronted with the knacker: a mix of fear, contempt, and hatred. In her wall cycled a silicrobe animation of a charming prodge and studly plug: scion and mate. I wondered if she’d offer to introduce them to Krazy Kat.

  “Peej Grahame-Ballard,” I said with all the respectful gravity I could muster, after flashing my credentials, “we have reason to believe that the terrorist splice known as Krazy Kat has fled to our bioregion after the recent thwarting of his plans in Chicago. Specifically, to the metroplex area. The Unit for Polypeptide Classification and Monitoring is counting on the cooperation of all your members in the hunt for the criminal. Should the cultivar in question make any attempt to contact your organization—should you even so much as hear a rumor regarding that individual—we insist that you immediately notify us.”

  Grahame-Ballard had been doing a slow burn during my speech and now boiled over. “Of course! So you can rush out and kill him! Without even a pretence of justice!”

  “Justice is a word that applies only to the enfranchised, Peej. Need I remind you that for splices, we have a parallel, neatly graduated system of rules, rewards, and punishments, all formulated scientifically over many years by experts with efficiency and utilitarianism in mind. Owners are constrained from cruelty, abuse, and overwork, while splices are guaranteed food, shelter, and meaningful employment.”

  “It’s slavery, pure and simple!”

  “A word that has no application to any being other than a human, Peej. The transgenics are property, plain and simple, just like baseline milk cows or sheep.”

  “Creatures with up to forty-nine percent
human genes are property?”

  “I didn’t make the laws, Peej. I just enforce them.”

  She snorted. “And as for abuses—why, I could show you the records of things that would penetrate even that armored skin of yours and make your stupid failsafe heart go into fibrillation!”

  I thought about some of the things I had seen. “I sincerely doubt that, Peej.”

  “Every one of us should be ashamed to participate in such a system! Don’t you ever feel ashamed?”

  “Not when I’m doing my job, Peej.”

  Realizing she was getting nowhere with me, Grahame- Ballard seemed to deflate. “And your job now is to find and execute a noble creature who is plainly the moral and ethical and sentient equal of you or me.…”

  “Peej,” I said, trying to keep calm, “you have not seen the bloody results of that ‘noble creature’s’ brutal actions. I have.”

  “And who made him what he is? Mankind!”

  I got wearily to my feet. “Peej, the Kat is one bad splice. I advise you to use a long spoon when you dine with him.”

  “There are no bad splices, only bad owners.”

  “If you say so.”

  Back on the street I was silent for a while, letting Grahame-Ballard’s rifkinesque memes percolate uneasily through my cortex.

  After a few blocks, Sonny said, “We will now be staking out Peej Grahame-Ballard? Perhaps you have surreptitiously planted dustcams on her already?”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Plainly you intend to catch her dining with Krazy Kat.”

  I had to replay the conversation in my head.