Ribofunk

by Paul Di Filippo

  Dos Santos considered the Vortifisher standing before him. The splice’s mouth gaped open, tongue hanging as it panted nervously. Muscles beneath its spotted coat twitched.

  “I think I have transportation. It’s slow, but it’s worth a shot. Send out a flier as backup, though. Tell it to look for me on the River.”

  Signing off, Dos Santos addressed the Hyena.

  “Canyour boat make it to Machine Lake?”

  The Hyena smiled. “This is good boat. Humans made this boat. Never stops! Eats River and spins tail, all day. Fast, fast, fast!”

  “How fast?”

  This question brought a frown to the cultivar’s canine face. After pondering a moment, it answered. “See that clo’tree? Here to there, ten breaths.”

  “Twenty knots,” interpolated the kibe.

  Dos Santos hissed. “Two hours or more to the Lake! It’ll have to do. Let’s go.”

  Dos Santos and the splice pushed the beached coracle off, then jumped in. The Hyena prodded control ganglia on a hump near the tiller, and the organic motor came to life. An intake on the bow fed silicrobes—inline or off, it mattered not—to the org-engine which broke them down and stole their ATR The thick, whiplike macroflagellum at the rear of the craft soon had them up to full speed.

  “We stop at my village and tell pack where I go.”

  Dos Santos opened his mouth to argue, then thought better of it. The splice’s teeth, not to mention its spears, gave the River Master pause, despite the comforting presence of his Intratec pistol. Although human-designed, this was no collar-wearing domestic cultivar, but a wild one, with the freewill to fend for itself. Although it was now friendly and relying on the human to repair the River, its attitude could easily change. Unless he wanted to kill this one out of hand—a repugnant choice—he would have to compromise.…

  “All right. But we can’t waste time.”

  “Go very fast. Mate and cubs must know, or fear.”

  Splices and their pretensions to humanity! Just what he needed now …

  Dos Santos dropped to a crouch in the seatless boat. Trailing a hand in the River, he and the kibe used the time to work up the formula for the denaturing compound that would destroy the toxin. All seemed clear, except—there were still strings of mysterious purpose in the contaminant.…

  After some time, the Vortifisher village appeared in a clearing on the upstream bank.

  Although the pure silicrobe medium of the upstream third of the River was lifeless, the downstream two-thirds, with its mix of water and ’crobes, supported an entire ecosystem of engineered lifeforms. Near the top of the food chain was the Hyenas’ main sustenance, the vortifishes.

  The interface between upstream and downstream channels was normally an orderly zone of increasing and decreasing speed gradients, thanks to the programmed interactions of the two types of silicrobes. However, chaotic factors, pattern seeds, occasionally caused whirlpools—vortices—of lesser or greater dimensions to butterfly into existence. These were dealt with by the various species of vortifishes, large, powerful, wide-mouthed organisms who derived their sustenance from gobbling the rogue silicrobes (and only the rogues), destroying the vortices in the process.

  It took skill and luck and courage for the Hyenas to ride their small boats to the very edge of the vortices and spear their prey, but the cynocephali managed quite superbly—as they had been engineered to do.

  Retreating through layers of shimmerstat windows, Dos Santos focused on the village of podhuts. The bank was thronged with welcoming Hyenas, hunters brandishing their spears, mothers carrying up to four nursing babies in special slings.

  Suddenly, the villagers began to scream and gesture, expressions of fear on their faces.

  The Hyena throttled down until they stood still. Dos Santos turned to look out to midRiver.

  A huge vortice was forming.

  “Peej, this is impossible. Silicrobes do not come online by themselves—”

  Dos Santos loosened his splatpistol in its holster. “It’s happening, though.”

  Something, some form, was beginning to rise up out of the vortice. ’Fishes nibbled at its base without effect.

  Matte black, the figure was plainly formed out of silicrobes. But the ’crobes were agglomerating in ways they had never been designed to. Flowing, shifting, rearing upward in a column thrice the mass of a man, they obviously sought to express some programmed form.

  At last they succeeded.

  An ebony Neptune towered out of the River. Seaweed hair, serene eidolon face, clamshell beard, massive arms and chest, fish tail below the waist.

  The River had materialized its monotone god.

  “It’s an autocatalytic set,” whispered a horrified Dos Santos.

  He had heard of such things arising, back when the Rivers had been in their prototype stage. Feedback among rogue components bootstrapped primitive, self-replicating A-life out of the isotropic soup.

  But this was different. This was planned by the Walton League, their ace in the hole, something vastly more dangerous.

  Dos Santos squirted off an alert to Isoke as he raised his pistol and rattled off a full clip.

  The intelligent bullets, loaded with instantaneous lysing agents, found their mark, but without apparent effect. Dos Santos had known that the lysing agents wouldn’t work against nonprotein A-life, but he had been hoping the bullets would disrupt the thing’s coherence. Instead, they had passed harmlessly through.

  Now the autocat began to advance purposefully across the River toward the coracle, seeming to ride on its tail, but in actuality propelled by silicrobe flow, much like a slidewalk. The thing’s actions were so intent, it must register somewhere low on the Turing scale, perhaps even as smart as the River itself had been—

  The splash of the Hyena pilot jumping overboard distracted Dos Santos. He turned to do the same—

  Too late.

  Neptune had him in its arms.

  Dos Santos’s face was pressed into the greasy bulk of the autocat’s chest. He was blind, suffocating—

  Then he began to sink into the creature.

  His own River was killing him, a hot darkness extinguishing his life.

  And on top of everything else, his suit had gone crazy.

  The contents of the system of flexipumps and thin, biolastic water reservoirs in his clothing were shifting, pooling in one place, at his left breast. The concentrated lump of water swelled, pressing into his flesh and the bone beneath it. He tried to scream, but couldn’t. Would the fist of water punch through to his heart—?

  Then he felt the overstressed reservoir burst outward, scores of needle-like microjets exiting through the suddenly dilated millipores concentrated in a patch of his suit.

  Suddenly he fell, landing in the coracle, which rocked crazily, but stayed afloat.

  Inactive silicrobe streams dribbled off him. He coughed out what seemed like lungfuls of the stuff, blew gobs out his nose. Finally, he could breathe.

  With a shaky hand, the River Master cleaned the goop from his eyes.

  Neptune had vanished, deliquescing back into the River. All that remained were a few random pseudopods and tentacles that wriggled impotently, then collapsed.

  Dos Santos looked at the hole in his suit.

  The reservoir that had filled and burst had been directly beneath the vial of Instruction Set, which was now nowhere to be seen. Presumably, the shattered vial and its contents had destabilized the autocat.

  The kibe’s tone could only be described as self- satisfied. “Rather ironic, Peej Dos Santos, that the creature was stymied by water, don’t you think?”

  “Hunh.”

  “I’ve broadcast our encounter to the Masters of the other damaged Rivers, Peej. They should be able to handle their own autocats more safely than we. Aren’t you glad I asked to accompany you now, Peej?”

  Dos Santos held his head. All the waste, all the work that yet lay ahead—Well, at least he was alive to tackle it.

  “Yes, yes
I am, kibe.”

  “And if I may remind you, Peej—?”

  Dos Santos laughed, somehow sensing what was coming. “No lawsuit, kibe, I promise.”

  DISTRIBUTED MIND

  All his life, Greenlaw had felt inexplicably cheated, an itchy sensation similar to contracting a virtuality virus, sometimes localized in his chest, sometimes in his head, occasionally even disrupting the hypertactility of his long slim multisegmented fingers. Something invaluable and irreplaceable had been stolen from him, he was convinced, although he could name neither the prize nor the thief. Or rather, he had had different suspicions of varying certainties over the course of the past century, one succeeding another as the circumstances of his life changed.

  Greenlaw was one of the few members of his cohort gestated and birthed the old-fashioned baseline way. Neither Incyte Yoot Chutes nor splice hostmothers of even the redoubtable Possum cultivar were acceptable to his parents, hardline Viridians both, their philosophy the source of his very name. Thus Greenlaw had entered the world at an extreme disadvantage, compared to his already wetwired, chomskied peers. Why, he hadn’t spoken his first words till after a whole six months of strictly neohomeopathic trope dosing!

  So of course for a time it had been easy to blame his parents, Soil and Sunflower, for any failures he encountered in his schooling and among his peers. One counselor, an Andy Panda, had even confirmed these sentiments in so many words, offering to file a retroactive punitive suit on his behalf, a step Greenlaw felt somehow disinclined to take.

  But Greenlaw’s harsh feelings toward his parents had evaporated when he attained his majority, and Soil and Sunflower, honoring the most extreme of Viridian tenets, had undergone voluntary euthanasia, offering their future resource-consumption-units back to a generally unappreciative rich world.

  Unfortunately, they left the twelve-year-old Greenlaw with few monetary resources. To escape the lite-servo class he had been born into and finance the further trope doses that he hoped would lead to a good job in the symbol-analysis class, he was forced to rent out his personal wetware, a resource whose valuable deepest structures were still unduplicatable, even by qubitic processors.

  At scheduled times each day, a certain portion of his brain’s computational cycles was placed in an online pool available to anyone with a project and sufficient eft. The precious time lost to him, spent as part of a worldwide parallel processing network, caused him to focus his resentments on all those better off than he, leading to a brief flirtation with the Plus-Fourierists.

  The inevitable disillusionment arrived with the Plus-Fourierist-sponsored assassination of the entire Executive Council of the World Trade Organization, and Greenlaw’s distaste turned toward politics in general. By this point he had gotten his first job, at Molecular Tools. The company had paid for several somatic and cellular enhancements, his first sartorizations. And there he had fallen in love.

  Her name was Anemone, and at first Greenlaw was afraid she was Viridian, although that would have been hard to reconcile with her job as leader of MT’s Santa Claus project. But he learned that her floral name simply followed a family tradition. Relieved, he had surrendered his heart for the first time.

  Greenlaw, youthfully eager, wondered why it took so long for them to have sex. But he eventually learned: Anemone was a maff, a fully functioning hermaphrodite, with a female lover whose consent to Greenlaw’s inclusion in the ménage Anemone had been courting.

  The sight of the two of them in his bed surprised him one night when he returned home. Anemone’s peculiar genital arrangements, dilated and tumescent under the basal woman’s ministrations, aroused in him Viridian prejudices he hadn’t known existed, and he fled.

  Years would pass before he could feel easy around women, who became the latest culprits in his search for what was missing from his life. He buried himself in his work, progressing rapidly, moving from one firm to another: In-novir, Hemazyne, BioCogent. Finally, a valuable commodity, he had settled in at Procept. There, he had finally met his lifemate, Stroma, beloved afferent to his efferent. She of the coarse mottled pelt and seductive prehensile lips and nipples, syrinx-trilled laughter and witty chatter. His and his alone, her minor mods acceptable to the more sophisticated man he had become.

  Happy in his work and his home, Greenlaw’s unease had subsided somewhat, although it never quite vanished. The hapless child born to Soil and Sunflower had been essentially replaced by a new self-made construct.

  Then, after satisfying decades of personal advancement, decades in which his work had helped change the world, easy decades which had lulled him into almost forgetting the mysterious theft of his birthright, had come the ultimate tragedy, which Greenlaw came to believe he had been proactively intuiting all his life. A tragedy the ultimate blame for which was frustratingly diffuse and shared.

  Wild mocklife had devoured Greenlaw’s native bioregion.

  Objectively and inclusively viewed, these were the victims and spoils of the plague:

  A sprawling infrastructure measured at 1.2 x 10 to the fifth power plectic units (on the revised Santa Fe scale).

  Ten million citizens of both Peej and Haj status.

  Uncounted vars from a thousand controlled mixes, as well as innumerable illicit sports, volunteers, and devolves.

  Thirty million multiform kibes of varying turingity.

  And finally, unreckoned teratonnes of biomass and inorganics, both basal and sartorized.

  Subjectively and selectively, Greenlaw mourned these:

  His lovingly grown zomehome. His entire chromo-cohort, however much they had teased him as a child. His proxies and splices. Those of his semisentient splinters and shards and snippets which had been unable to scatter themselves safely elsewhere across the telecosm.

  And Stroma, the one woman he had ever been able to love, so alluringly bez kompleksov, as his Snowy friends might say.

  Gone, all gone. Yet still mockingly there, parading about in their charade of daily life. Active unknowing ghosts, simulacra transfigured by the mass of rogue silicrobes known as the Urblastema or—by those who still had the energy for poetic coinages—the Panplasmodaemonium.

  And the ultimate irony: it was Greenlaw’s job to stop such things from happening. During the infiltration and ingestion of his own region he had, in fact, been halfway around the globe, supervising the defenses of another beleaguered metroplex.

  Greenlaw was good at his job. His efforts had been successful. The assault on the antipodal NewZee plex had been repelled, its citizenry saved.

  As if any of that mattered to him now.

  The cordon sanitaire around Greenlaw’s contaminated bioregion was staffed partly by members of his own commensal crada, the DizDek team from Procept. The teamer in charge was one Haj Bambang, with whom Greenlaw had often worked.

  Moving away from his organiform flier parked on the outskirts of the encampment, with ’crobe-attenuated sunlight painting the scene around him in muted hues, Greenlaw strode now toward the command nexus of the defense. One of his personal kibes, carrying a large sealed bip container, obediently trailed him.

  Amidst the organized activity of Procept kibes, vars, and commensals, Bambang stood, his seemingly unfocused stare revealing that he was obviously busy scanning his retinally displayed shimmerstats. Sensations of tension and hope were nearly tangible here, thought Greenlaw.

  As Greenlaw approached, Bambang brought his awareness back to primary reality, catching sight of Greenlaw in the process. The Indoasian’s broad cinnamon face wrinkled in a mixture of respect, happiness, and just a trace of wariness.

  “Peej Greenlaw,” said Bambang respectfully. They threw signs at each other, hyperarticulated hand-flexures of lineage and association. “Good to see you. Are you perhaps coming to take command?”

  Greenlaw sighed. Duty, professional jealousy, they seemed so unreal now.…

  “No,” he answered, “not at all. I’m sure you’re doing a fine job, although I haven’t tapped any status reports since th
e announcement of the engulfment. No, this visit is strictly personal.”

  In his habitual gesture of relief, Bambang fingered the Procept tattoon that rotated on his cheek, nanometers below his epidermis.

  The innocent gesture sent Greenlaw’s linear thought processes into a chaotic whirl. Suddenly, for the first time in his long life, he saw the ubiquitous loyal silicrobes that formed Bambang’s tattoon—and his own, for that matter—as the actual nonsomatic invaders that they were.

  Was the Urblastema merely a tattoon on the surface of Gaia?

  No. For unlike an obedient assemblage of silicrobes, it was intent on devouring its host.

  And we did it to ourselves, thought Greenlaw ruefully. I helped every step of the way. No one else is to blame.

  Onboard Xaos Tools wetware located in the bulge of his encephalocele came online, and the nonlinear vortex of emotions and thoughts damped agreeably down. Without the mod’s invaluable aid, Greenlaw suspected, he would have been a grief-racked casualty in some Humana House by now.

  “Personal?” echoed Bambang. He tickled up a fresh datum. “Oh, yes, I see.… My condolences, Peej Greenlaw. May the principles of the First Self-Organizer be of comfort to you now in your hour of distress.”

  Greenlaw waved the offered solace away, as useless in its own fashion as his parents’ Viridian principles. “I was never a true believer, Haj. And it would be most ironic now for me to worship that principle which, more or less, has stolen away from me all I once cherished.”

  “But Peej, surely you cannot repudiate the sacred principles, despite their perversion by the Urblastema.…”

  Bambang broke off, sensing that theological fencing was highly unsuitable to Greenlaw’s current mood. He changed topics.

  “Would you care to survey our defenses, Peej? We have a continuous line of shuggoths patrolling the entire perimeter to deal with macroscopic surface assaults. The entire atmospheric column above the afflicted zone is saturated with killer assemblages in the submicron range, as well as shoals of airsharks. Additionally, we’ve established positive-flow wind curtains and backup pressure fronts, with the help of GlobalMet. As for the subsurface measures—”