The Paul Di Filippo Megapack

by Pau Di Filippo

  Firpo was drinking a cocktail called “Important Intangible Cultural Property Number 86-1,” whose main component was the South Korean liquor munbaeju. The stuff was potent, and this was his second one. But he knew he wasn’t clinically drunk yet, because Beer Goggles had not kicked in one hundred percent. But the app’s stealthy oncoming seepage, an unadvertised surprise feature to Firpo, was tantalizing.

  The app was using morphing algorithms to bring every woman closer to divine elfdom by degrees, the drunker Firpo got. Right now, all the females in the place looked like sixty-forty hybrids, with a preponderance of fey. Imbibing a third “Important Intangible Cultural Property Number 86-1,” should provide the tipping point.

  Glancing to his right at Ellie Salo, Firpo jumped a hair to see how his co-worker had been transformed. Uncanny, serkku! Her familiar pleasantly wide mouth, squarish chin and broad nose seemed to have been shaved down and resculpted by an invisible plastic surgeon, and her olive skin was assuming amber tones. The upper curve of her ear was trending Spock-wise.

  Sight of the partially elven-ified Ellie left Firpo feeling confused. He didn’t want to hit on Ellie, or even consider her as an erotic object. Sex with co-workers was generally a bad idea—imagine having a lover’s spat in the stenchy subterranean dark while some unknown critter was stalking you—and he knew Ellie too well to harbor any romantic notions. But if her transformation continued, he’d be unable to keep his hands off her. And more alarmingly, she might not object to his attentions.

  Firpo said, “Scuse me a minute,” and got up to head to the john. Once there, opened the Beer Goggles app’s preferences. Much to his relief, he found a blacklist option and entered Ellie’s phone number. He returned to his stool and gave a small sigh to find Ellie looking completely like her baseline self. He downed another gulp of cocktail, and was rewarded with an intensification of estrogen elvishness everywhere else.

  “So like I was saying,” Ellie continued, “I hear that Celexion has brought a tankful of space squids online.”

  On the far side of Ellie hunkered Ismail Bazzy, a nervous scarecrow in Carhartt coveralls trimmed with nutria-fur accents. Ismail lived on the edge of constant worry and collapse, but this very hair-trigger, tripwire state had saved their bacon more than once.

  “Oh, great,” Ismail said. “Now we can expect to encounter krakens. I’m putting in for a raise.”

  From Firpo’s left, Alun Lovat spoke up. An unflappable and dapper British ex-pat out of demi-drowned Liverpool, Alun seemed the antimatter counterpart to Ismail. And yet his sangfroid had proven equally valuable in the trenches. “Oh, come now, Izzy, they’re only small chaps.”

  “Yeah, sure, now they are. But once they escape into that devil’s broth—and you know damn well they will—then you just wait and see—”

  “What’s Celexion doing with the squids anyhow?” Firpo asked, while he tried to ignore the increasing allure of the bevy of pub-crawling, beer-swigging, gyrating Galadriels circulating all around.

  Ellie answered. “They’re extracting some kind of useful lipids from their synaptic vesicles. The cosmic-ray-induced mutations did something really weird to those orbital cephalopods.”

  Firpo’s third drink had arrived, and he downed a slug.

  That was all it took. Within seconds, every woman in the Cantab went full-bore elf. The effect was like when black-and-white Kansas turned to Technicolor Oz.

  Firpo slid jerkily off his stool like an untrained robot fresh from the factory. Ellie looked quizzical. “You okay?”

  “Uh, yeah, fine, swell. It’s just—I think I see somebody I know over there and I wanna say hello.”

  Firpo wasn’t lying. The woman he saw across the room was a creature he had long been familiar with from his dreams. He began to make a beeline in her direction.

  Alun chuckled. “Do nothing not in my playbook, my lad.” Ismail said, “Be careful!” Ellie, sounding slightly disappointed, said, “We’ll see you before we leave.”

  Firpo just nodded absentmindedly. Jasmine Mofongo launched into their big hit, “Mi Dulce de Hyderabad,” a song Firpo always loved, but he never heard a note.

  * * * *

  The space between Firpo and the elf woman he had singled out disappeared without his conscious volition. Standing with her female pals, nursing a drink, she had watched Firpo approach with a wry and knowing amusement. Now within her intoxicating personal space, he found himself momentarily unable to utter a sound.

  Although her squad of buddies all exhibited elvish allure in differing proportions, the Beer Goggles had created something special in this one woman, perhaps having had a superior baseline body to map onto. But there also existed something authentically vibrant in her stance and attitude, the way she comported herself. Facially, she looked exactly like Leetah of the Sun Folk: masses of wavy red hair through which poked enormous lynx-like ears; pool-like canted eyes, their green-painted lids echoing their emerald depths; arrowhead chin and complexion of buttery copper.

  “Um,” Firpo stumbled. “Can I buy you a drink?”

  “Got one.”

  “Okay. Wanna dance?”

  “Sure.”

  Leetah handed off her glass to a pal, who sniffed discourteously (or was she whiffing Firpo’s eau de cloaca?), and they squished themselves into the sardine-thick dance floor pack.

  Jasmine Mofongo segued into “You Say Somosa, I Say Pastelito,” perfect tune for a slow dance. Firpo took Leetah into his arms. He longed to stroke her impossibly tall and curvaceous ears, to see how well the haptic feedback matched the visuals, but he refrained.

  After a few moments of sweaty shuffling more or less in place, Leetah said, “I’m just curious—what are you seeing when you look at me?”

  Busted! Could he deny—?

  “Don’t try to fool me. I saw from across the room how you went all googly when some kind of app kicked in. What is it?”

  Why’d he have to pick a sharp, smart elf? Firpo resigned himself to starting over again, with some lesser goddess. But before he ditched her, he owed Leetah an answer, so he explained.

  “Hmmm, well that’s not as icky as what I imagined.”

  Firpo untensed. Maybe this could still go somewhere. “What about you? What are you seeing when you look at me?”

  “The real you.”

  “Not likely.”

  “Fosho. I don’t do Ay-Are. No memtax.”

  This perverse luddite revelation shocked Firpo more than getting caught out using Beer Goggles. Did he really want to get involved with such a modern primitive?

  Undecided, and the song ending just then, he let Leetah lead him to a relatively quiet pocket in the room, near the entrance.

  “No Ay-Are? How do you function?”

  “Oh, I manage. But sometimes it is inconvenient. Like right now, for instance, you could save me a few steps if you order me another drink.”

  Firpo teleked the Cantab’s bartender, and soon they had fresh cold glasses in hand via the Boston Dynamics servebot. Just in time, for Leetah was reverting gradually to human. Firpo boosted his blood alcohol, and she popped back to Rivendell.

  “Hey, by the way, I’m Firpo Manzello.”

  “Vicky Licorice.”

  “Fosho?”

  “It’s my pen name, but I’ve gotten to like it.”

  “Would I have seen any of your stuff?”

  “Only if you have a pre-schooler at home. Little Lost Dino Escapes the Vat? Little Lost Dino in Manhattan? Little Lost Dino Saves the Great Barrier Reef?”

  “Sorry.”

  “That’s okay. I can hardly stand to read them myself once they’re published.”

  An hour or so of amiable, intermittently teasing conversation ensued—although hearing a beautiful elf discourse about Cambridge city politics was slightly disconcerting—and around midnight Firpo felt ready to try for a kiss.

  Unfortunately, that was the exact moment when all hell broke loose.

  Days later, crowdsourced and media reports had compreh
ensively pinned down the nature of the event, which came to be labeled “Apparition Eve.”

  A coalition of monkeywrenchers—everyone from The Universal Grammar of Hate to Tragedians of the Commons—had hacked into augiespace with specter-bombing malware. Insidiously, their strikes arrived not all at once, but in a timed cascade where each new incident fed on prior confusion and chaos.

  And one of the first, smaller assaults was against Firpo’s new app, Beer Googles.

  Leaning forward boozily to kiss a receptive Vicky Licorice, Firpo experienced instant yotta-terror as a gunshot boomed in his ears and he watched Vicky’s head disintegrate in a bloody mist. He even had haptic feedback of a spasming body.

  Firpo screamed like a pitchforked pig. For an infinite span of nauseous seconds, he was utterly convinced someone had randomly assassinated the woman in his arms.

  But the non-reaction of the immediate bystanders—as well as Vicky’s own confused exclamations, issuing from the ruins of her face—alerted him otherwise. However realisitic, it had all happened only in AR.

  Elsewhere around the bar, other apparent Beer Goggles users—not all of them males—were showing similar distress.

  An augie intruder popped up in Firpo’s vision. The badass female warrior-type said, “Happy date-rape, bastard! Beer Goggles promotes violence to women! This has been a message from The Sisters of Lysistrata”

  The specter dissolved in a spray of unicorn sparkles, but Vicky’s ruined countenance remained. Firpo couldn’t stand the horrible sight. Even as he awkwardly thumbed out his memtax, cursing, he found space to wonder how blowing up the heads of women could serve as the best possible anti-violence message.

  The actual Vicky of course looked nothing like Leetah. A concerned expression filled a charming Latina face.

  “What the fuck was that all about?”

  His pulse slowing, Firpo told her. The other victims were calming down as well, and reconnecting with those they had seen killed.

  Then the next attack struck.

  A subset of the crowd shrieked and reared back from something invisible and threatening in the center of the Cantab. One woman screamed, “It’s hell! Hell’s opening up!” Another person yelled, “The teeth, the teeth!”

  The shrieking of the damned filled Firpo’s earbuds, and he plucked those out too. Now he felt truly insensate. Without his own connection to augiespace, Firpo had no notion of what the horrified patrons were seeing or why they had been selected out of the crowd. He felt bewildered and helpless.

  People were beginning to surge toward the narrow exit. A stampede seemed imminent.

  Vicky took charge. She grabbed Firpo’s hand and pulled him outside.

  The hot night air hit Firpo like a wool-padded sledgehammer. “My friends! They’re still in there!”

  Firpo attempted to re-enter the Cantab, but the sound of exploding stacks of amplifiers stopped him. Specters must have tricked Jasmine Mofongo into some kind of “turn it to 11” mistake with their equipment. Suddenly a copious outflow of other fleeing patrons carried Firpo and Vicky out onto Massachusetts Avenue.

  Dodging wild-eyed pedestrians, they regained the curb just in time. The orderly, scant flow of late-night vehicular traffic was disintegrating. Whatever specters the passing drivers were experiencing—children in the road, sudden sinkholes, giant kaiju, their dashboard telemetry red-lining—were causing them to swerve wildly and crash into lamposts, buildings and unfortunate pedestrians. The din was terrific: bending metal, fleshy impacts, sirens and screams.

  Vicky pulled Firpo into the doorway of a shuttered store. “Your friends will have to manage on their own. The first responders will be here soon. We can’t do anything. We’ve got to get someplace safe. Where do you live?”

  “Charlestown.”

  “You’re closer. I’m way out in Waltham. Let’s go.”

  Regaining a little more composure, Firpo took a step out from their sheltering niche, then stopped.

  “What’s the matter?” Vicky said.

  “I have no idea how to get home. I always followed the augie trail here.”

  Vicky took some kind of antique handheld device out of her purse.

  “What’s that?”

  “GPS unit.”

  “That must be fifty years old! It still works?”

  “No memtax, you get creative. C’mon!”

  They did not dare use the subway. The sound of titanic crashes emanating from underfoot was persuasion to stay aboveground. Even as cautious pedestrians, they ran into plenty of dangers. One of the worst was plummeting bodies, as baffled, specter-tormented victims were led to step from high windows and off rooftops that must have appeared to them as safe paths. Smokey fires contributed to the Dante’s Inferno atmosphere of a city in upheaval. Were other places under attack as well? Firpo had no way of knowing.

  But eventually, after a few hours, Vicky and Firpo reached the relative safety of his houseboat and collapsed wearily into bed. After a few mumbled endearments, they both fell asleep.

  And in the morning light, amidst the humbled wreckage of the city, augmented and physical, even without Beer Goggles, using just his naked eyes, a grateful Firpo discovered that Vicky looked plenty beautiful enough to drive all thoughts of Leetah and her kin forever from his mind.

  LIFE IN THE ANTHROPOCENE

  1.

  Solar Girdle Emergency

  Aurobindo Bandjalang got the emergency twing through his vib on the morning of August 8, 2121, while still at home in his expansive bachelor’s digs. At 1LDK, his living space was three times larger than most unmarried individuals enjoyed, but his high-status job as a Power Jockey for New Perthpatna earned him extra perks.

  While a short-lived infinitesimal flock of beard clippers grazed his face, A.B. had been showering and vibbing the weather feed for Reboot City Twelve: the more formal name for New Perthpatna.

  Sharing his shower stall but untouched by the water, beautiful weather idol Midori Mimosa delivered the feed.

  “Sunrise occurred this morning at three-oh-two AM. Max temp projected to be a comfortable, shirtsleeves thirty degrees by noon. Sunset at ten-twenty-nine PM this evening. Cee-oh-two at four-hundred-and-fifty parts per million, a significant drop from levels at this time last year. Good work, Rebooters!”

  The new tweet/twinge/ping interrupted both the weather and A.B.’s ablutions. His vision greyed out for a few milliseconds as if a sheet of smoked glass had been slid in front of his MEMS contacts, and both his left palm and the sole of his left foot itched: Attention Demand 5.

  A.B.’s boss, Jeetu Kissoon, replaced Midori Mimosa under the sparsely downfalling water: a dismaying and disinvigorating substitution. But A.B.’s virt-in-body operating system allowed for no squelching of twings tagged AD4 and up. Departmental policy.

  Kissoon grinned and said, “Scrub faster, A.B. We need you here yesterday. I’ve got news of face-to-face magnitude.”

  “What’s the basic quench?”

  “Power transmission from the French farms is down by one percent. Sat photos show some kind of strange dust accumulation on a portion of the collectors. The on-site kybes can’t respond to the stuff with any positive remediation. Where’s it from, why now, and how do we stop it? We’ve got to send a human team down there, and you’re heading it.”

  Busy listening intently to the bad news, A.B. had neglected to rinse properly. Now the water from the low-flow showerhead ceased, its legally mandated interval over. He’d get no more from that particular spigot till the evening. Kissoon disappeared from A.B.’s augmented reality, chuckling.

  A.B. cursed with mild vehemence and stepped out of the stall. He had to use a sponge at the sink to finish rinsing, and then he had no sink water left for brushing his teeth. Such a hygienic practice was extremely old-fashioned, given self-replenishing colonies of germ-policing mouth microbes, but A.B. relished the fresh taste of toothpaste and the sense of righteous manual self-improvement. Something of a twentieth-century recreationist, Aurobindo. But not
this morning.

  Outside A.B.’s 1LDK: his home corridor, part of a well-planned, spacious, senses-delighting labyrinth featuring several public spaces, constituting the one-hundred-and-fiftieth floor of his urbmon.

  His urbmon, affectionately dubbed “The Big Stink”: one of over a hundred colossal, densely situated high-rise habitats that amalgamated into New Perthpatna.

  New Perthpatna: one of over a hundred such Reboot Cities sited across the habitable zone of Earth, about twenty-five percent of the planet’s landmass, collectively home to nine billion souls.

  A.B. immediately ran into one of those half-million souls of The Big Stink: Zulqamain Safranski.

  Zulqamain Safranski was the last person A.B. wanted to see.

  Six months ago, A.B. had logged an ASBO against the man.

  Safranski was a parkour. Harmless hobby—if conducted in the approved sports areas of the urbmon. But Safranski blithely parkour’d his ass all over the common spaces, often bumping into or startling people as he ricocheted from ledge to bench. After a bruising encounter with the aggressive urban bounder, A.B. had filed his protest, attaching AD tags to already filed but overlooked video footage of the offenses. Not altogether improbably, A.B.’s complaint had been the one to tip the scales against Safranski, sending him via police trundlebug to the nearest Sin Bin, for a punitively educational stay.

  But now, all too undeniably, Safranski was back in New Perthpatna, and instantly in A.B.’s chance-met (?) face.

  The buff, choleric, but laughably diminuitive fellow glared at A.B., then said, spraying spittle upward, “You just better watch your ass night and day, Bang-a-gong, or you might find yourself doing a lâché from the roof without really meaning to.”

  A.B. tapped his ear and, implicity, his implanted vib audio pickup. “Threats go from your lips to the ears of the wrathful Ekh Dagina—and to the ASBO Squad as well.”