Ribofunk

by Paul Di Filippo

“Metaphor,” I sighed.

  “Thank you.”

  * * *

  I met Xuly Beth that night in Hopcroft’s Cockaigne.

  In reality, of course, I was back in our apartment in Boston and she was off on assignment somewhere up in the Arctic, twiddling with icebergs or glaciers or some other such pleasantly nonsentient and tractable phenomenon. We made it a point when she was in the field to meet at least four times a week at one virtuality site or another. Our current favorite was Hopcroft’s Cockaigne, with its candy mountains and sodapop rivers, peppermint trees and cottoncandy clouds. (Although I couldn’t imagine coming here much more: not only was the construx starting to reveal its shallowness, but lately it reminded me too much of the strange reality humanity was making of baseline Earth!)

  We were wearing our actual appearances, since we saw too little of each other lately to be bored by our real shapes and faces. A privacy filter insured that we were alone, despite the possibility that thousands of others might be wandering the same construx.

  Sitting next to me on a bonbon rock soft as a sofa, Xuly Beth was finishing telling me about her day. “—so if this latest remediation works as well as the simulations project, the average sea level should start to drop by a quarter-inch per year! Why, we can probably start to repopulate Bangladesh by the next decade!”

  “Uh-huh, great …”

  Xuly Beth brushed back her pastel-green, metal-threaded hair from her brow, revealing twin barometric bumps. Together with her current skin choice of blocky maculations, the bumps conjured up the image of a gawky, lovable juvenile giraffe.

  “You haven’t heard a word I’ve said, have you?”

  “I’m sorry, Jewely-Xuly, really, I am. It’s just that this business with the Kat is itching me worse than a dose of cryptoshingles. It’s not like dealing with your average criminal, some two-fit holopero or leeson. There, you’ve got someone embedded in a societal matrix. You generally have a good idea of what such a person wants and how he’ll go about getting it. But the Kat is a loner with no goal other than to cause as much disruption as possible. He could strike anywhere, anytime!”

  “And doubting yourself like this is going to solve the case!

  “No, I guess not.…”

  Xuly Beth donned a look of concentration, fingering her meteorological head bumps in the way she had when she was really puzzling something out. After a minute or so she said, “How can the Kat cause trouble? By himself, with a gun or a bomb, he’s just another lone mucker. If he wants maximal damage, he’s got to involve others. In Chicago he had to co-opt that posse, the Roaches, to carry out his plans. Even if he wants to release some deadly vector into the general population, he’s got to find someone to batch it for him. He’s no crick or watson himself, is he?”

  “No, not as far as I know.…”

  “So if you just start shaking down all the criminal sources of such things, you’re bound to run into a signal that leads back to the Kat!”

  I let out a sigh rather more hopeful than not. “You’re right, of course. I should have thought of that angle myself. Nothing’s hopeless. I guess I was just letting the magnitude of the case get me down. Plus someone I had to interview today said some things that made me wonder why I do what I do.”

  Xuly Beth stood up. “I knew it. You’re just not thinking straight because you’re missing your little weather-girl. Well, she has just what you need.…”

  Xuly Beth disappeared, exiting the construx without even using a popup menu. In a few seconds she was back.

  “I’m in my Sack, dear.”

  I didn’t need to have my arm—or any other body part—twisted.

  Breaking my neurolink to the telecosm, I found myself back in Boston. I took my Sack out of its maintenance rack, tickled it open, and climbed in.

  You could have a strictly neuro-induced orgasm in virtuality, but for some strange reason—maybe lesser bandwidth, maybe something to do with sheldrakean fields—it just wasn’t identical with a Sack-administered full-body experience.

  Back in Cockaigne, Xuly Beth and I went into a naked-bodied clinch, fell to the ground, and began to tear up the turf. Back home and in the Arctic, two Sacks were thrashing.

  I was sure that if the Unit for Polypeptide Classification and Monitoring knew that a side-effect of the somatic upgrade they insisted I have was heightened orgasms, they would have deducted something from my pay.

  * * *

  When the break finally came, it wasn’t precisely from the criminal front. Rather, it was from an allied set of outcasts, self-exiled eccentrics despised by the majority of consensus-memed, post-reedpair citizens.

  The Incubators.

  The Incubators had figured in a previous case of mine, when I was still paired with K-mart. A new blight that affected only third-generation pumptrees from Hybritech had sprung up, and we suspected that the Incubators might have been somehow responsible for it. They had never exhibited any such terrorist inclinations before, but like most despised minorities, they were perpetual suspects whenever anything went wrong.

  Since the metro relied on pumptrees and their enormous taproots for its water supply, there was immense pressure from the adminisphere to crack the case. So K-mart and I came down rather hard on the Incubators at the time. And what was worse, the misfits had been proven innocent, the cause of the new plague eventually being traced to a mutant smut that was able to prey on hematic vegetation.

  So when, a few days after Xuly Beth and I had had our morale-boosting talk and telefuck, an anonymous demon showing only bland metagrafix delivered a tip that the Incubators had recently done a big job for a secretive client, I was aware I wouldn’t be welcomed back with open arms.

  But I was used to that.

  Sonny was wearing a Boston Scientific chassis shaped like a small tank with multiple tentacles and spray nozzles. I knew the unit was effective, but it looked ridiculous. Not that I cared, since the possibility of a real lead at last had me higher than a dose of Kiss-the-sky.

  “Hey, Dalek,” I said, “let’s go visit some pariahs.”

  Sonny lumbered after me. “Certainly, Doctor What.”

  “That’s ‘Who.’”

  “The advantages inherent in the fuzzy logic circuits of a Turing Level Four device necessarily involve the ability to compromise data in a creative manner.”

  The Incubators had taken over an abandoned antique petroleum storage tank on the waterfront. The property was currently contested and in limbo, as the legal mess from the collapse of the petroleum industry was still being sorted out, some decades after the fall. Sooner or later, the new owners would find a use for the land and the squatters would be kicked out. But right now, it was all theirs.

  At the makeshift sphincter door in the side of the tank facing the harbor, Sonny and I paused. “Stay out here and watch my back,” I told the kibe.

  “An instruction with contradictory semantics which I am fully capable of rationalizing.”

  I shook my head ruefully.

  Cleaned up with Transcell Scrubbing Bubbles, the inside of the tank bore little residual scent. What it did smell like was a combination of mold, decay, dirty bandages, and sick breath.

  And one additional, puzzling underscent that I couldn’t quite place, even with my enhanced senses.

  Dimly lit by scattered bioluminescent globes stuck here and there from floor to domed ceiling, the interior of the tank was filled with a mockcoral scaffolding.

  From the organically fractal scaffolding hung the Incubators, in their various slings and cocoons, like basal gypsy-moth larvae in their tents.

  I boosted my vision, but couldn’t spot anyone down at my level. So I shouted up, “Protein Police! Is Smallpox here?”

  There was no answer, but I saw a shifting among the calcite girders. A figure began to descend.

  A lot of the members of the Incubators were immobilized by their perpetual, modified, nonconsuming diseases. That’s why I had called for Smallpox, who had been one of the relatively active
ones last time. (They were all noncontagious, though. Their propathogen ideology, however dogmatic, didn’t extend to the point where they would have provoked a martyring backlash from the public.)

  At last the climbing figure reached the floor and began to approach, limping in rags. I could see that it was indeed the riddled and cratered Smallpox.

  “What do you want?” the pathogen-host demanded. “Can’t you just let us cultivate our smallchain, low-gnomic refugees in peace? Isn’t it bad enough that you high-gnomic imperialists have wiped the globe clean of so many innocent invisible lifeforms? Do you have to persecute our pitiful rescue mission too?”

  “Listen, Smallpox, I don’t care what you and Leprosy and Syphilis and Measles and Mumps and Polio and all the rest of your sick crew do with your own lives. But when I hear that you might be supplying contaminants to a bigtime terrorist, that’s when you’ve crossed the line.”

  Smallpox cringed. “We didn’t supply anybody with anything.”

  “Oh, no? That’s not what I heard.”

  Smallpox turned to leave. “Go away,” he muttered. “You can’t prove anything.”

  I grabbed the small man by his rags, picked him up, and stuck my face into his raddled visage.

  “Listen, my friend—how would you like to be cured?”

  Smallpox blanched. “You—you wouldn’t!”

  “Try me.”

  “You murderer!” He began to kick. “All right, put me down, I’ll talk.”

  I did, but kept alert for any funny moves.

  “We have to earn a little eft somehow, you know,” Smallpox began to whine. “And not many people will deal with us. So when we were approached with this assignment, we could hardly refuse. And besides, it was a technical challenge right up our alley.”

  “How’s that?”

  “This character—now, understand, I never actually saw him, so I couldn’t know he was a baddie—kibes conducted the whole business—anyway, this plug wanted us to create a fast- acting, orally administered prion-based vector that would take up residence in the thalamus and upset the Llinas function.”

  I couldn’t believe my ears. The Llinas function was the evolutionarily designed means whereby the thalamus, the brain’s master clock, bound all sensory input and cortical responses into a coherent second-by-second gestalt of the universe. Even the big cricks hesitated to mess with such a core function.

  “You’re telling me that you’ve created an agent that will basically destroy a person’s timebinding facility?”

  “More or less. But all lifeforms are equal, and the prions will flourish without actually killing their hosts.”

  Sonny must have been reading my vital signs and detected my nervous concern, because he burst in like a mechanical octopus.

  “Peej, what’s to be done?”

  “Wrap ’em.”

  Sonny’s nozzles came alive, and within thirty seconds the Incubators were all enmeshed in sticky tangles. I called for a pickup and relayed what I had learned to Chief Priestly.

  And that was the end of the easy part.

  * * *

  The entire complement of the UPCM, as well as hundreds of representatives from a dozen other bioregional and continental agencies, were now on the track of the Kat. The next day, after receiving Chief Priestly’s faint praise (and implied condemnation for not somehow suspecting the Incubators sooner), I, too, was back on the streets.

  The night of my discovery, I had met Xuly Beth in Cockaigne for what felt like the last time. The candyland had never seemed shallower. Postsex, as we were silently resting, she said, “Be careful, won’t you?”

  “Sure. Don’t I have Sonny to watch over me?”

  She laughed. “Turing is spinning in his grave!” Growing serious, she asked, “You still carry apoqetpal, even after your upgrades, right?”

  “Of course. It’s always smart to have a backup connection to the metamedium.”

  Xuly Beth fingered her bumps. “Good, good …”

  The Incubators had all been thoroughly interrogated without revealing any further clues about where Krazy Kat was hiding. Sonny and I explored a half-dozen random possibilities without success. And all the time, something in the back of my mind was tickling my efferents.

  Back at HQ, I took precious downtime to stare at the tornado-mandala.

  And that’s when it surfaced.

  The odd scent in the tank.

  I recognized it at last.

  It was the scent of the Mats.

  “Holy loas!” I said. “Sonny, come on!”

  I didn’t tell anyone where I was going, in case it turned out to be a wild-virus chase.

  And as Doctor Varela would later show me, maybe I unconsciously wanted a one-on-one confrontation with the creature who had caused me so much frustration.

  The UPCM kept a boathouse on the harbor. I signed out a swath—small waterplane area twin hull—and was soon zipping out to sea at a good speed.

  “We checked out the Mats when our assignment was first given,” protested Sonny, wearing a Hughes chassis today that resembled a multilegged Hallucinagenia out of the Burgess Shale.

  “I know. But that’s not to say that Krazy Kat wasn’t elsewhere then, and on the Mats now.”

  “Possibly. I wish I had been able to confirm your hunch as to the origin of that smell.”

  “There was no time. Do you want to risk having those prions loosed on the human populace?”

  “Then kibes would rule Boston.”

  I stared at the robot, but on this model there was no expression to interpret.

  “A joke. Of the type that partners make to each other.” “Oh. Ha-ha.”

  It took an hour to reach the Mats, out around the Georges Bank, but I could smell them before I could see them.

  The vast collection of cyanobacteria and diatoms carpeted several thousand square kilometers of sea, looking like a mushy ectoplasmic rug, floating meatloaf. Source of multipurpose biomass, home to a flourishing ecology of both basal and biofabbed useful and edible creatures, the Mats were cultivated for humanity by special-purpose, low-intelligence kibes.

  One or more of which the Kat must have subverted and sent to do his bidding.

  At the landward edge of the Mats, a small floating station anchored to the seafloor served the rare human visitors: an OTEC power plant, a beacon, an emergency habitat.

  We docked. I wasn’t attempting to be quiet, since there was nowhere for the Kat to go or hide.

  “Watch the boat,” I told Sonny.

  “Until otherwise needed.”

  I climbed onboard the gently rocking deck of the lonely, midocean outpost.

  In the north, I could see curious stormclouds massing in a previously clear sky. But I couldn’t spare any thought or attention for the weather. My whole being was attuned to picking up the presence of the Kat. But so far, nothing.

  That was why I was so surprised when, as I approached one side of the platform, his paw burst from the water and clamped around my ankle.

  He yanked, I went down, but not in, as I grabbed onto a stanchion. Feeling resistance, the Kat exploded out of the water and onto the deck. He kicked, I rolled, found my feet, and confronted him in a fighter’s crouch.

  “Sonny!” I yelled.

  “Coming, Pee—” said the kibe.

  Then there was a splash.

  Two harvesters had clambered aboard the swath and dumped Sonny overboard. My partner had gone to swim with the fishes. And he couldn’t swim.

  That left me and the Kat.

  I suppose I should have been honored to be one of the few humans ever to directly confront the legendary splice. But instead I was scared into almost a Blankie-wearing state. After the way he had so easily brought me down, I had to run an emergency mantra just to stay cool.

  Even dripping wet, fur plastered to his noble body, ears flattened to his skull, Krazy Kat looked every bit the Byronic antihero. There was something regal and wild about him and, I could see how his image had captivated so m
any to his doomed cause.

  “Give it up, Kat, and I promise you won’t get hurt,” I bluffed.

  His voice mixed purr and snarl, his whiskers twitched. “No, just imprisoned and reviled, made to kiss my inferior’s boots!”

  “Better to live than to die.”

  “Not on those terms!”

  “Your call,” I said, then held my palm out to him in a gesture like a traffic kibe’s.

  Antipersonnel spray—blistering, blinding, stifling—lanced out from my exocrine glands and caught the Kat in the face.

  Roaring, he launched himself at me despite the pain. We hit the plates, and I felt his teeth in my neck, piercing my imbricated skin. My grip on his shoulders meant nothing to him.

  I guessed I was about to find out how good neo-goretex veins were.

  Things started to get black, and I thought my vision was going.

  But it turned out to be the clouds above.

  And as I looked in disbelief, all hell broke loose.

  Lightning, thunder, rain in buckets, then the final punch: a microburst of wind similar to the kind that could and had leveled whole tracts of forest in pre-GEF days.

  The Kat and I were sluiced off the bucking station and into the sea. Beneath the waves, I finally managed to break his hold—or did he release me? In any case, I was free.

  I fought my way to the surface. There was no sigh of the Kat.

  Instead there was a fleet of approaching swaths, into one of which I was soon unceremoniously hauled.

  We searched for the Kat with eyes and instruments and remotes for several hours, but of that bad, bad splice there was no sign. He had gone to feed the hungry sea, or perhaps not. Though escape seemed impossible.

  Before we left, we even managed to track down Sonny and raise it from the ocean floor. The kibe had been heading back on the bottom under its own power and probably would have made it, if its brick hadn’t run down.

  The first call I took after getting patched up was from Chief Priestly, who dished out her usual mix of puffery and abuse.

  The second one was from Xuly Beth.

  “Isn’t Global Positioning wonderful?” she said, joyfully teary-eyed.