Pete faced Ruy. “Is this how you repay—”
The renegade academic’s words were cut short by the hailstorm rattle of a shower of soil and stones. Everyone turned to face the disturbance.
A large swath of ground on the far side of the river was heaving and churning in a localized quake, like dirt porridge in a hot cauldron.
The top of a large polished skull poked up into the air. Then, explosively, the rest of the Gorgosaurus launched into view, as if springing from an underground diving board.
The towering, titanic dinosaur was a nightmare in white and black. The dirty white of its fossilized bones, threaded with black carbon-nanotube sinews and muscles. Distributed ebony ganglia clung like clusters of grapes to its frame. This lacework but substantial apparition resembled an old-fashioned plastinated corpse: flensed, with all its subdermal mechanisms on display.
“Gertie!” yelled Pete ecstatically. “Gertie lives!”
Ruy turned to Rachel. “Gertie?”
“It’s what he’s always called her. After some old cartoon. She’s animated by some apps downloaded from the Jurassic Park MUD. Should be pretty safe….”
Besotted, Pete darted forward, right into the shallow river up to his knees. “Come to Papa, Gertie! Pick me up now! Time for walkies!”
The dinosaur’s little arms did not respond properly. Furrowing his brow, Pete plainly found his telemetry to the stitched-together revenant being ignored, due to unforeseen cascading glitches within Gertie’s independent onboard processing units.
“Gertie—” Pete began.
And then, in a blink, the Gorgosaurus had Pete in its jaws.
Everyone screamed.
A crunching and grinding noise marked Pete’s gory demise.
Patton had instinctively released Ruy. The Slykes began to back away from the dinosaur. Yet in the open level land, there was no escape.
But Ruy had a hope.
“Give me a thinking cap! Now!”
No one reacted fast enough, so he peeled back Patton’s hood and grabbed the cyber-reticule off his head. He slapped it hurriedly on his own scalp, then picked up Proty. The drone nestled automatically against Ruy’s chest, like a friendly koala.
“I’m sorry, pal. I hope you understand.”
Ruy popped up Proty’s onboard menu, raced through some choices, then sent the command that turned Proty into a dedicated factory for pumping out a certain self-replicating attack synthicrobe keyed to carbon nanotubes.
Inexplicably, a second window opened up in Ruy’s vision. It depicted not any local feed, but rather a recorded snippet. The little loop showed the UCalgary kennel, with Dr. Grigori bending over to stroke the recording entity: Proty in his nest.
The Gorgosaurus was crossing the river now, its mountainous tread shaking the ground. Closer, closer, swaying head lowering to gobble—
Ruy could wait no longer. With all his strength he hurled Proty into the monster’s open mouth. A stone tooth pierced the drone as if it were a ripe grape, and Proty splattered his contents.
The rapidly autocatalytic bugs proliferated up and down the network of carbon nanotubes. In seconds the substance they secreted began to eat away at the black fibers. First the lower jaw of the Gorgosaurus fell off, and then in a swift cascade all its other parts clattered and splashed separately to the ground and river.
The Slykes had paused in their desperate scramble. Ruy asserted himself boldly into their leaderless pecking order. “Get Big Dog alive, and put Pete’s body on it. We’re heading back to civilization.”
As they marched off, Ruy snugged his thinking cap on more firmly and ran some diagnostics on his Nuvaderm.
It was good to feel comfortable again in his own skin.
FarmEarth
I couldn’t wait until I turned thirteen, so I could play FarmEarth. I kept pestering all three of my parents every day to let me download the FarmEarth app into my memtax. What a little makulit I must have been! I see it now, from the grownup vantage of sixteen, and after all the trouble I eventually caused. Every minute with whines like “What difference does six months make?” And “But didn’t I get high marks in all my omics classes?” And what I thought was the irrefutable clincher, “But Benno got to play when he was only eleven!”
“Look now, please, Crispian,” my egg-Mom Darla would calmly answer, “six months makes a big difference when you’re just twelve-point-five. That’s four percent of your life up to this date. You can mature a lot in six months.”
Darla worked as an osteo-engineer, hyper-tweaking fab files for living prosthetics, as if you couldn’t tell.
“But Crispian,” my mito-Mom Kianna would imperturbably answer, “you also came close to failing integral social plectics, and you know that’s nearly as important for playing FarmEarth as your omics.”
Kianna worked as a hostess for the local NASDAQ Casino. She had hustled more drinks than the next two hostesses combined, and been number one in tips for the past three years.
“But Crispian,” my lone dad Marcelo Tanjuatco would irrefutably reply (I had taken “Tanjuatco,” his last name, as mine, which is why I mention it here), “Benno has a different mito-Mom than you. And you know how special and respected Zoysia is, and how long and hard even she had to petition to get Benno early acceptance.”
Dad didn’t work, at least not for anyone but the polybond. He stayed home, cooking meals, optimizing the house dynamics, and of course playing FarmEarth, just like every other person over thirteen who wasn’t a maximal grebnard.
The way Dad—and everyone else—pronounced Zoysia’s name—all smug, reverential and dreamy—just denatured my proteome, and I had to protest.
“But Benno and I still share your genes and Darla’s! That’s ninety percent right there! Zoysia’s only ten percent.”
“And you share ninety-five percent of your genes with any random chimp,” said Darla. “And they can’t play FarmEarth either. At least not maybe until that new generation of kymes come online.”
I knew when I was beaten, so I mumbled and grumbled and retreated to the room I shared with Benno.
Of course, at an hour before suppertime he just had to be there, and playing FarmEarth.
My big brother Benno was a default-amp kid. His resting brain state had been permanently overclocked in the womb, so even when he wasn’t consciously “thinking” he was processing information faster than you or me. And when he really focused on something, you could smell the neurons burning.
But no good fairy ever gave a gift without a catch. Benno’s outward affect was, well, “interiorized.” He always seemed to be listening to some silent voice, even when he was having a conversation with someone. And I’m not talking about the way all of us sometimes pay more attention to our auricular implants and the scenes displayed on our memtax than we do to the person facing us.
Needless to say, puffy-faced Benno didn’t have much of social life, even at age sixteen. Not that he seemed to care.
Lying on his back on the lower bunk of our sleeping pod, Benno stared at some unknown landscape in his memtax, working his haptic finger bling faster than the Mandarin’s grandson trying to take down Tony Stark’s clone in Iron Man 10.
I tried to tap into his FarmEarth feed with my own memtax, even though I knew the dataflow was encrypted. But all that happened was that I got bounced to Benno’s public CitizenSpace.
I sat down on the edge of the mattress beside him, and poked him in the ribs. He didn’t even flinch.
“Hey, B-man, whatcha doing?”
Benno’s voice was a monotone even when he was excited about something, and dealing with his noodgy little brother was low on his list of thrills.
“I’m grooming the desert-treeline ecotone in Mali. Now go away.”
“Wow! That is so stellar! Are you planting new trees?”
“No, I’m upgrading rhizome production on the existing ones.”
“What kind of effectuators are you using?”
“ST5000 Micromites. Now. Go. Aw
ay!”
I shoved Benno hard. “Jerk! Why don’t you ever share with me! I just wanna play too!”
I jumped up and stalked off before he could retaliate, but he didn’t even bother to respond.
So there you have typical day in the latter half of my thirteenth year. Desperate pleas on my part to graduate to adulthood, followed by admonitions from my parents to be patient, then by jealousy and inattention from my big brother.
As you can well imagine, the six similar months till I turned thirteen passed by like a Plutonian year (just checked via memtax: 248 Earth years). But finally—finally!—I turned thirteen and got my very own log-on to FarmEarth.
And that’s when the real frustration started!
* * * *
Kicking a living hackysack is a lot more fun in meatspace than it is via memtax. You can feel muscles other than those in your fingers getting a workout. Your bare toes dig into the grass. You smell sweat and soil. You get sprayed with salt water on a hot day. You get to congratulatorily hug warm girls afterwards if any are in the circle with you. So even though all the kids gripe about having to leave their houses every day for two whole shared hours of meatspace schooling at the nearest Greenpatch, I guess that, underneath all our complaints, we really like being face to face with our peers once in a while.
That fateful day when we first decided to hack FarmEarth, there were six of us kicking around the sack. Me, Mallory, Cheo, Vernice, Anuta, and Williedell—my best friends.
The sack was an old one, and didn’t have much life left in it. A splice of ctenophore, siphonophore, and a few other marine creatures, including bladder kelp, the soft warty green globe could barely jet enough salt water to change its mid-air course erratically as intended. Kicking it got too predictable pretty fast.
Sensing what we were all feeling and acting first, Cheo, tall and quick, grabbed the sack on one of its feeble arcs and tossed it like a basketball into the nearby aquarium—splash!—where it sank listlessly to the bottom of the tank. Poor old sponge.
“Two points!” said Vernice. Vernice loved basketball more than anything, and was convinced she was going to play for the Havana Ocelotes some day. She hugged Cheo, and that triggered a round of mutal embraces. I squeezed Anuta’s slim brown body—she wore just short-shorts and a belly shirt—a little extra, trying to convey some of the special feelings I had for her, but I couldn’t tell if any of my emotions got communicated. Girls are hard to figure sometime.
Williedell ambled slow and easy in his usual way over to the solar-butane fridge and snagged six Cokes. We dropped to the grass under the shade of the big tulip-banyan at the edge of the Greenpatch and sucked down the cold soda greedily. Life was good.
And then our FarmEarth teacher had to show up.
Now, I know you’re saying, “Huh? I thought Crispian Tanjuatco was that guy who could hardly wait to turn thirteen so he could play FarmEarth. Isn’t that parity?”
Well, that was how I felt before I actually got FarmEarth beginner privileges, and came up against all the rules and restrictions and duties that went with our lowly ranking. True to form, the adults had managed to suck all the excitement and fun and thrills out of what should have been sweet as planoforming—at least at the entry level for thirteen-year-olds, who were always getting the dirty end of the control rod.
“Hi, kids! Who’s ready to shoulder-surf some pseudomonads?”
The minutely flexing, faintly flickering OLED circuitry of my memtax, powered off my bioelectricity, painted my retinas with the grinning translucent face of Purvis Mumphrey. Past his ghostlike augie-real appearance, I could still see all my friends and their reactions.
Round as a moonpie, framed by wispy blonde hair, Mumphrey’s face revealed, we all agreed, a deep sadness beneath his bayou bonhomie. His sadness related, in fact, to the assignment before us.
Everyone groaned, and that made our teacher look even sadder.
“Aw, Mr. Mumphrey, do we hafta?” “We’re too tired now from our game.” “Can’t we do it later?”
“Students, please. How will you ever get good enough at FarmEarth to move up to master level, unless you practice now?”
Master level. That was the lure, the tease, the hook, the far-off pinnacle of freedom and responsibility that we all aspired to. Being in charge of a big mammal, or a whole forest, say. Who wouldn’t want that? Acting to help Gaia in her crippled condition, to make up for the shitty way our species had treated the planet, stewarding important things actually large enough to see.
But for now, six months into our novice status, all we had in front of us was riding herd on a zillion hungry bacteria. That was all the adults trusted us to handle. The prospect was about as exciting as watching your navel lint accumulate.
At this moment, Mr. Mumphrey looked about ready to cry. This assignment meant a lot to him.
Our teacher had been born in Louisiana, prior to the Deepwater Horizon blowout. He had been just our age, son of a shrimper, when that drilling rig went down and the big spew filled the Gulf with oil for too many months. Now, twenty years later, we were still cleaning up that mess.
So rather than see our teacher break down and weep, which would have been yotta-yucky, we groaned some more just to show we weren’t utterly buying his sales pitch, got into comfortable positions around the shade tree (I wished I could have put my head into Anuta’s lap, but I didn’t dare), and booted up our FarmEarth apps.
Mr. Mumphrey had access to our feeds, so he could monitor what we did. That just added an extra layer of insult to the way we were treated like babies.
Instantly, we were out of augie overlays and into full virt.
I was point-of-view embedded deep in the dark waters of the Gulf, in the middle of a swarm of oil-eating bacteria, thanks to the audiovideo feed from a host of macro-effectuators that hovered on their impellors, awaiting our orders. The cloud of otherwise invisible bugs around us glowed with fabricated luminescence. Fish swam into and out of the radiance, which was supplemented by spotlights onboard the effectuators.
Many of the fish showed yotta-yucky birth defects.
The scene in my memtax also displayed a bunch of useful supplementary data: our GPS location, thumbnails of other people running FarmEarth in our neighborhood, a window showing a view of the surface above our location, weather reports—common stuff like that. If I wanted to, I could bring up the individual unique ID numbers on the fish, and even for each single bacteria.
I got ahold of the effectuator assigned to me, feeling its controls through my haptic finger bling, and made it swerve at the machine being run by Anuta.
“Hey, Crispy Critter, watch it!” she said with that sexy Bollywood accent of hers.
Mumphs was not pleased. “Mr. Tanjuatco, you will please concentrate on the task at hand. Now, students, last week’s Hurricane Norbert churned up a swath of relatively shallow sediment north of our present site, revealing a lode of undigested hydrocarbons. It’s up to us to clean them up. Let’s drive these hungry bugs to the site.”
Williedell and Cheo and I made cowboy whoops, while the girls just clucked their tongues and got busy. Pretty soon, using water jets and shaped sonics aboard the effectuators, we had created a big invisible water bubble full of bugs that we could move at will. We headed north, over anemones and octopi, coral and brittle stars. Things looked pretty good, I had to say, considering all the crap the Gulf had been through. That’s what made FarmEarth so rewarding and addictive, seeing how you could improve on these old tragedies.
But herding bugs underwater was hardly high-profile or awesome, no matter how real the resulting upgrades were. It was basically like spinning the composter at your home: a useful duty that stunk.
We soon got the bugs to the site and mooshed them into the tarry glop where they could start remediating.
“Nom, nom, nom,” said Mallory. Mallory had the best sense of humor for a girl I had ever seen.
“Nom, nom, nom,” I answered back. Then all six of us were nom-nom-noming awa
y, while Mumphs pretended not to find it funny.
But even that joke wore out after a while, and our task of keeping the bugs centered on their meal, rotating fresh stock in to replace sated ones, got so boring I was practically falling asleep.
Eventually, Mumphs said, “Okay, we have a quorum of replacement Farmers lined up, so you can all log out.”
I came out of FarmEarth a little disoriented, like people always do, especially when you’ve been stewarding in a really unusual environment. I didn’t know how my brother Benno kept any sense of reality after he spent so much time in so many exotic FarmEarth settings. The familiar Greenpatch itself looked odd to me, like my friends should have been fishes or something, instead of people. I could tell the others were feeling the same way, and so we broke up for the day with some quiet goodbyes.
By the time I got home, to find my fave supper of goat empanadas and cassava-leaf stew laid on by Dad, with both Moms able to be there too, I had already forgotten how bored and disappointed playing FarmEarth had left me.
But apparently, Cheo had not.
* * * *
The vertical playsurface at Gecko Guy’s Climbzone was made out of MEMs, just like a pair of memtax. To the naked eye, the climbing surface looked like a grey plastic wall studded with permanent handholds and footholds, little grippable irregular nubbins. But the composition of near-nanoscopic addressable scales meant that the wall was instantly and infinitely configurable.
Which is why, halfway up the six-meter climb, I suddenly felt the hold under my right hand, which was supporting all my weight, evaporate, sending me scrabbling wildly for another.
But every square centimeter within my reach was flat.
The floor, even though padded, was a long way off, and of course I had no safety line.
So even though I was reluctant to grebnard out, I activated the artificial setae in my gloves and booties, and slammed them against the wall.
One glove and one bootie stuck, slowing me enough to position my second hand and foot. I clung flat to the wall, catching my breath, then began to scuttle like a crab to the nearest projecting holds, the setae making ripping sounds as they pulled away each time.
The Paul Di Filippo Megapack Page 29
