Ribofunk
Page 16
It appears that the trope the enemy hit us with was something brand new. The experts have dubbed it a “multi-vector recombinant silicrobe.” It resembles our own CENSORED, only several magnitudes more sophisticated.
Apparently, the Gorillas discharged an aerosol of harmless individual components which were small enough to slip thru our millipore gear. Once inside our bodies, however, the individual pieces intelligently assembled themselves into larger agents that headed straight for our brains.
The first indication we had that something foreign had penetrated us was a senseless announcement we all got thru our earwigs. It sounded just like my last ’vox: strings of verbs and particles with no easy meaning. When I turned to discuss it with my bunkmate, Penguin (I haven’t really told you much about her yet, Mom; she’s a real old-fashioned target, with fewer than 20 percent bodymods, and I know you’d get quite close to her, given a chance), we found that we were limited to the same bizarre lingo too!
Needless to say, this kind of neural cockup—a “cortical abortical” the NYC posse calls it —could have caused us serious trouble if the enemy wasn’t so well under control. Though even then, we’d still have the tinmen and transgenics—the splices weren’t so strongly affected—to protect us. Still, how could we give them orders? …
Anyhow, the aphasia didn’t stop our stormin’ biobrujos for long! They soon strung together a megablocker antagonist consisting of a charge of enhanced microglials and catalytic antibodies, along with CENSORED, which seems to have wiped the cerebral invader out quicker’n teraflops!
Although there id a slim chance, they tell us, that the invader has simply self-mutated according to plan.
In any case, a Digireal conference on this bug is underway now with experts scattered around the globe, including last year’s Gengineering Nobelist, Doctor Sax, the guy who practically invented neurotropins.
So don’t worry, Mom—we’re getting the best of care!
Your loving guest son,
CENSORED
SEND: IMF MOBILE NODE
SYS01-4591P
RECEIVE: MC MURDO BIOSPHERE
DATE/HOUR: 070505/1391
TRANSMISSION STATUS: OK
Daring Hotel Mothballs,
The newest truest neural contradural manifestation in the implication is undersay they way to play can’t shay. Too few too blue words are now becoming excessive depressive stretches of letches and leeches and feel like my head’s exploding decoding. Broca’s aphasia in Asia is a lack of pack of parcel of morsel of words and turds. But Wernicke’s journey to meaning of seasons is to produce unreduce of fibbing gibberish that makes senseless of relentless squawk talk. There appears to be a component histonic of dyslexia distance instance ignorance, upon trying to writer communihesitation.
This stool shall pasture.
Your louvre question,
CENSORED
SEND: IMF MODILE NODE
SYS01-4591P
RECEIVE: MC MURDO BIOSPHERE
DATE/HOUR: 070565/1450
TRANSMISSION STATUS: OK
Dear Host Mother,
The Wernicke’s is over now. It’s pretty evident that the MRS agent is staying one step ahead of the juice they shot us with. I just hope the bug isn’t baltimoring anything permanently into our genomes. Right now, all it’s doing is making auditory hallucinations. They’re kind of pleasant—I heard you talking to me just a few minutes ago—but tend to interfere with real orders thru our earwigs. I notice that Oberjefe Ozal has notched his music up to eleven. I’ll keep you posted. Hopefully, this’ll be licked soon.
Your loving guest son,
CENSORED
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SYS01-4591P
RECEIVE: MC MURDO BIOSPHERE
DATE/HOUR: 070565/1500
TRANSMISSION STATUS: OK
Dear Host Mother,
The whole pod was sitting down at the rectangular surface raised above the floor level with four posts, ready to dig into a delayed meal—reddish oblongs streaked with white marbling, cylindrical orange tapering tubes, spherical crusted objects slit crosswise and topped with a melting square of yellow organic matter—when the newest trouble hit.
It seems that the bug in our brains has now produced a generalized visual agnosia. Nothing looks familiar. The sight of common objects produces no referents in our brains, emotional or intellectual. Everything seems an assemblage of basic, almost geometrical parts, out of which nothing whole can be synthesized, resulting in a generalized lack of affect.
Or so the Digireal experts tell us. It’s kind of hard to tell exactly what’s wrong from the inside.
All I know is that when I look at what I assume is Penguin, I see a stretched toroid with an irregular topography topped with filaments of varying lengths. I assume she sees the same.
It’s hard to work up the emotion to comfort a toroid, but I try my best, and so does she.
Oberjefe Ozal has been fantastic thru all this. He never loses his composure, but always keeps the ovoid with the seven openings atop the horizontal broadening of his column as cool as liquid nitrogen. He seems to derive almost superhuman strength and comfort from the qawwali buzz in the shell-shaped excrescences on the side of his aforementioned ovoid. I don’t know what we’d do without him.
I guess this bug is not going to be as easy to smoke as everyone first assumed.
Well, now I’m contorting my buccal orifice and fleshy red tasting member into phonemes that will signal an end to our conversation, which the flat grey box that transcribes and transmits my voice will insure that you receive.
Maintain your homeostasis at a less-than-feverish amplitude, Mom! (Not too hard at McMurdo in July!)
Your loving guest son,
CENSORED
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DATE/HOUR: 070565/1829
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Dear Host Mother,
The agnosia cleared up by itself.
It’s been replaced by a real mild neuro-deficit.
Amusica.
None of our pop-tabs sounds like anything anymore.
This one’s pretty easy to take.
Except for Oberjefe Ozal, who’s killed himself.
Your loving guest son,
CENSORED
SEND: IMF MOBILE NODE
SYS01-4591P
RECEIVE: MC MURDO BIOSPHERE
DATE/HOUR: 070565/2105
TRANSMISSION STATUS: OK
Dear Host Mother,
Have I sent this message yet?
Wait a minute, Penguin!
We seem to be suffering now from TGA, or transient global amnesia. (At least we hope it’s transient!) The herriots know that this kind of thing is related to damage on the underside of the temporal lobes, so they hope to squash the bug with a directed killer while it’s busy there. Did I mention that we’ve got TGA? For a while we can’t lay down any new memories. Maybe I sent you a ’vox already on it.… Don’t worry, long-term memory is unaffected. I remember how wonderful you and the other Moms and Dads have always been to me. I hope I don’t let you down.
Wait a minute, Penguin!
Have I sent this message yet?
Your loving guest son,
CENSORED
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SYS01-4591P
RECEIVE: MC MURDO DIOSPHERE
DATE/HOUR: 070665/0105
TRANSMISSION STATUS: OK
Dear Host Mother,
The TGA seems to be subsiding. We’ve been ordered to try to get some sleep.
Everyone’s receptive to that, but whenever we start to drowse off, we experience these tremendously magnified myoclonic spasms. You know those little jerks your body sometimes gives just before passing into sleep? Well, these are the mothers of all such twitches, enough to knock you out of bed.
The mccoys are circulating now with somnifacients that should put us under.
Hopefully, wh
en the new day dawns, this goo-screwing bug will have exhausted itself.
Sleep tight!
Your loving guest son,
CENSORED
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SYS01-4591P
RECEIVE: MC MURBO BIOSPHERE
DATE/HOUR: 070665/0800
TRANSMISSION STATUS: OK
Dear Host Mother,
We lost half the pod during sleep to Nightmare Death Syndrome, that Thai/Filipino/Khampuchean tendency to flatline during sleep.
Unfortunately, the somnifacients may have contributed to the high mortality rate, preventing the sleepers from jolting awake.
I don’t know how to tell you this, so forgive me if I just blurt it out.
Penguin was one of the fatalities.
I almost wish the agnosia was back, so I wouldn’t feel so bad.
I’m asking the new CO to send you an adobe of her and me thru the metamedium.
Just in case I don’t make it home.
Your loving guest son,
CENSORED
SEND: IMF MOBILE NODE
SYS01-4591P
RECEIVE: MC MURDO BIOSPHERE
DATE/HOUR: 070765/1200
TRANSMISSION STATUS: OK
Dear Host Mother,
It’s been twenty-four hours since the last manifestation of the invader. The herriots are starting to feel safe about issuing an all-clear. And Doctor Sax is standing virtually by in the wings with a last-ditch experimental trope similar to CENSORED which they’re going to try if there’s another flareup.
Keep your fingers crossed (webbing and all)!
Your loving guest son,
CENSORED
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SYS01-4591P
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DATE/HOUR: 070865/0300
TRANSMISSION STATUS: OK
Dear Host Mother,
We’ve all received our shots of aldisscine, Doctor Sax’s new trope, despite its high LD rating.
There was really no choice after we all went body-blind.
What’s body-blindness? I can imagine you asking.
It’s total loss of proprioception, the multiplex feedback from your muscles and nerves, skin and bones, that allows you to tell—mostly subliminally—what your body’s doing.
We’re all isolated now in our heads like puppet-masters whose strings leading to their puppets have been tangled, or like a telefactor operator who’s lost his sensory feed. It’s not that we can’t move our limbs or anything. There’s no paralysis. It’s just (just!) that aside from visual feedback, there’s no inherent sense of where any part of you is! You might as well try to operate someone else’s body as your own under these conditions. It’s not pleasant, watching your proxies tripping over their own feet, missing chairs, their mouths, the D-com-poz unit—
But you can get used to anything, I guess. And the experts are confident that the aldisscine will stop any new deficits from popping up.
Anyway, I’m kind of glad Penguin didn’t live to experience this. I never got a chance to tell you, but she used to be a dancer in regular franch life.
The orders have finally come down from Brussels for our pod to be rotated out. There’s talk that if the body-blindness proves permanent, they’ll try to fit us all out with onboard stabilizer chips and nanosensors to simulate normal proprioception.
What’s one more bodymod nowadays, huh, Mom?
Your loving guest son,
CENSORED
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SYS02-999Z
RECEIVE: MC MURDO BIOSPHERE
DATE/HOUR: 071065/2400
TRANSMISSION STATUS: SOLAR NOISE
IMPEDIMENT (*) = -10%
Dear Ho*t Moth**,
As you might’ve guessed by the delay between messages, we’ve been rerouted.
We’re in transit to CEN*****, where we’ll get the best of care. They discovered that all surviving members of our pod are suffering from degenerative neurofibrillary protein tangles similar to those found in sufferers of that extinct disease known as Alz********. CENSORED is a kind of sanitarium, where an AI-human team waits to cure us.
They say the average stay at CENSORED is *** months, but could stretch to **** years. Jumping genes! You could be in another symb-bonding by then! Anyway, I can’t look that far ahead, as our prognosis is very ****.
Let me repeat that, in case these flares are interfering: we stand a **** chance, not a **** one.
Unfortunately, I won’t be able to take any incoming ’voxes from you for a while, or even send any. Not that I’d be able to really appreciate them too good anyhow. My brain seems a little dull right now. But they promise us that full metamedium contact will be restored as soon as it’s appropriate.
But don’t worry. You can always contact Brussels for updates.
Just ask for your boy, CENSORED!
STREETLIFE
Coney’s master was a Virtuality Poet. And he was one of the best. Only Planxty or Bingo Bantam could approach the depth and brilliance of his compositions, and rarely at that. So his master would always tell Coney, especially when he was under the influence of a trope such as Egoboo or Meglo, which left him prone to recite aloud his own reviews, complete with melodramatic flourishes of the crepey folds of velvet skin that hung like batwings from his underarms.
“‘Hopcroft’s latest cortex-vortex is a cell-stunner! Visit to the Mushroom Planet opens with Tenniel’s hookah-smoking Caterpillar greeting the percipient with a blast of aromatic smoke. When the cinnamon cloud clears, the perk finds herself on the Mushroom Planet of the title. Fungi lifeforms in startling variety exfoliate and enfold the mind-traveler, who can navigate the construx with more than the standard ten degrees of freedom, thanks to Hopcroft’s truly creative use of CoCenSys’s Infini-Tree Fabware. The poet’s signature use of lush textures and his smorgasbord-gorgeous false-color palette all contribute to a synapse-shattering experience—especially if you’re simultaneously running a coprocessor such as CellSmartz, as this lucky perk was! With this ’strux, Hopcroft delivers on all his past promises and establishes himself as the poet of his cohort.’”
Throwing the flimsy across the room (to be quickly retrieved by a Braun DoorMaus), Coney’s master would spread his batlike membranes wide and exclaim, “‘The poet of his cohort!’ Did you hear that, Coney?”
“Yes, Peej Hopcroft, I heard.”
“It’s all gush, of course. But true gush. I am the most accomplished poet of my clade. There’s no disputing it, is there, Coney?”
“No indeed. It is just as Peej Reviewer said.”
Most likely then—especially if the tropes were wearing off—Coney’s master would, at this point in the ritual, collapse into a convenient organiform chair (somehow he was never so distraught as to land on the floor), drape his head with his fleshfolds, and begin to weep.
“But what good does it do me, Coney? This crass society does not respect poets, nor does it honor them with rewards material or spiritual. It never has, and it never will. I am an acquired taste, and then only among a few. The mass of my fellow citizens are Philistines, plain and simple. Siouxsie Sexcrime is their idea of poetry! How can such a sensitive soul as mine endure it, Coney? Ah, but my life is hard, Coney—harder than a stupid transgenic like you could ever imagine. I can barely scrape together enough ecus to pay my Digireal fees. And my art cannot be rushed! This is why I am forced much too often to play the lusty gigaload gigolo!”
Coney knew enough not to interrupt at this point. He would wait with the patience of his kind for the tearful poet to finish his performance.
“Yes,” Coney’s master would inevitably begin his peroration, “I, the RAM-baud of my cohort, must make ends meet by crawling for pay into the Sack with lascivious starfuckers, eager to boast to their witless friends that they have enjoyed teledildonics with another ii-do tarento whose art they cannot even begin to appreciate!”
At this juncture Coney would venture a comment he hoped would bolster h
is master’s self-esteem and spare himself a collar-jolt.
“Peej Hopcroft only does what he must, to further his art.”
If he had by now downed a trope such as Zesta, Coney’s master would sigh extravagantly and agree. (Otherwise, the dreaded neuronic zap might be forthcoming, along with the admonition “not to overstep your splicey self with comments about things you couldn’t possibly comprehend.”)
Tonight—a mild June evening stochastically certified to be rainfree—much to Coney’s relief, his stock phrase served its intended purpose. The familiar scene which he had just endured for the nth time played itself out happily for him.
“Yes, little Daewoo Dumbunni, we all do what we must, don’t we? Even peddle our arse for the sake of our ars.”
Coney had no idea what this last statement meant, but was only too happy to nod his sympathy.
Rising to his feet, Coney’s master now said, “And that’s why I need you to do your part to make this latest sordid virtual assignation a success, dear Coney. I have here a new trope called O-max-O. It was given to me by one of my fans, a sensitive young plug who works at Xomagraf. It’s not available to the hoi polloi yet. He promises me that it will make this digitryst so thrilling for my client that she’ll gladly double my fee. I’m counting on you to deliver it to her within the hour. Her name is Frances Foxx, and this is her address.”
Coney’s master handed him a crawlypatch and a silicrobe calling card. The card flashed an address in the far west end of the city.
Laboriously tracing a mental map, Coney sought to comprehend his assignment. Finally he spoke.
“This place is quite far. May I take the train?”
“Don’t be silly. The train costs eft. The whole point of tonight’s dreadful exercise is to earn ecus, not spend them. And besides, the maglev isn’t safe for splices, not since those horrid razorboys, the Transgenocides, started haunting the tubes. No, you’ll have to walk. You’re a speedy little splice, or so the factory claimed. Surely you can cover the distance before Peej Foxx and I are scheduled to crawl into the Sack together.”