Fantasy & Science Fiction, Extended Edition

by Spilogale Inc.

  "A human concussive force shouldn't've broken it," said Zhaoping. "Where'd you buy that pile?"

  "Never mind," said Dusty, stiffly. "I was getting a new board anyway."

  "Damn right you are." Zhaoping nodded at a side door in the wall to his back. "I got something I'm working on. Hey—are you recording right now?"

  "Huh?"

  "Your cyberneurons. You recording this?"

  Dusty blushed. He would've thought of that from the start, if Roderick's board hadn't smacked the sense out of him. How often do you get to meet Zhaoping Ho? Everybody in Malihini, the whole world even, would kill to meet Zhaoping Ho, and only a sand-eared fool wouldn't record it with his cyberneurons so he could have a perfect, lossless memory of it forever. Dusty started recording and said, "Of course I'm recording this. You're the greatest man alive that ever was."

  "Turn it off."

  "W—what?"

  "I said, turn it off." Zhaoping jerked his head to indicate the alley. "This is a no-digital zone. These walls look capable of interfacing to you? Go ahead. Send out a ping. All my turf is silent like that. Policy. I got trade secrets in my shop. You know what I'm saying?"

  Dusty nodded, both abashed and thrilled. "Sure. Sure I do." He halted the cybermemory input. "You too, Roderick. Turn it off."

  "Huh? Turn what off?"

  "Okay," said Dusty, "Roderick's fine."

  Zhaoping took another drag. He held the smoke in his lungs a moment, eyes narrowing into dark slits, before letting out a whistling exhale. Dusty felt him ping his mind— and hold it there —to make sure Dusty didn't record. Zhaoping Ho is watching my mind! Oh, holy orbitals! "Good. Like I was saying. I'm working on something, a device for a project. It needs a test, but this is top secret, and I can't test it myself without attracting attention.

  "It's housed in a new kind of board."

  A shot of adrenaline hit Dusty's heart. "You—you want to give me a board?"

  "Toldja," said Roderick.

  "Not give," said Zhaoping. "Loan. Look—do you know how the beach works?"

  Dusty cocked his head. "How it works?"

  "The Smart sand, fool."

  Dusty drew himself up. "I don't have to know, exactly. Me and the sand, and the waves, we have an understanding. A spiritual understanding. A guy like you knows exactly what I'm talking about, I'm sure."

  Zhaoping stared. "Uh-huh." He glanced at the tip of his cigarette, frowning at the rolling paper. "Listen, Dougal—"

  "Dusty."

  "Yeah. The Smart sand's a matrix for information, carried by the nanites between the actual sand grains. The beach is held more or less in place by the forces of the converging ocean currents in this part of the Pacific, though the matrix is limited such that even if pieces of it did wind up somewhere else, it wouldn't function as a gestalt until a critical mass of it were reached. This is why when some mud-wit forgets to hop in a suck-shower before leaving the beach, he can't will the Smart sand stuck in his asscrack to transmit a radio station. You got me so far?"

  "I guess." Dusty shrugged. "I don't know what this has to do with a board. Besides, I'm not a nerd, or anything."

  "Clearly." Zhaoping tapped his cigarette to knock off some ash. "I'm working on a way of hacking the critical mass problem of the matrix—that is, of finding a way to make that sand in the asscrack transmit. I need to work up to it, though. First, I need to run some tests in a part of the matrix that has dramatically reduced density. Which, at Nana'ite Beach, means the surf."

  "Huh?" said Dusty.

  "The sand in the surf, genius. The Smart sand matrix is diluted in the water, as particles floating in the waves."

  Dusty frowned at Roderick. Roderick shrugged.

  Zhaoping sighed. "Let me spell it out real clear. I'm a surfer. And I make surfboards. I'm also a hacker. I am dying to hack this pounding beach. If I can eventually hack this pounding beach so that I (or anyone) can command something with their cyberneurons that's smaller than the Nana'ite matrix by a factor of at least a billion, and from very far away, then the field of infomatrices will be blown wide open. We'll be able to find practical applications for it, and not just create a hedonic diversion on a manufactured island."

  "So?" said Dusty.

  "So I made a surfboard that should interface with the beach, you screwhead," said Zhaoping. "If it works, the surfer will be able to interface with the Smart sand on the ocean bottom and in the waves."

  "But why would anyone care about interfacing with the beach from a surfboard?"

  "Hey," said Roderick. "If, like, your mind can control the sand in the water? And the sand in the water can connect with the sand on the bottom? Which controls the beach? And since the information can, like, go both ways, your mind would be, like, interfaced with the waves? And you'd be, like, One with the ocean? And be the best surfer ever?"

  Zhaoping grinned wolfishly. He closed one eye and pointed his smoldering cigarette at Roderick. "Bingo, kid. I've got the Surfboard of Zen. And your friend is going to test it for me."

  Dusty gaped.

  "And," said Zhaoping, "because I need to run the tests in a period of heavy matrix use, he's gonna do it in the Malihini Junior Surf-Off competition this weekend. Aren't you, Duncan?"

  "Dusty." He gulped.

  "Yeah."

  Overwhelmed, Dusty looked at Roderick. Roderick looked back, but only offered his big goofy grin. "It's not... illegal, is it?" Dusty asked Zhaoping.

  Zhaoping shrugged.

  Dusty gulped again. His mom would holler at him for sure if she knew he was doing anything that could get him in real trouble. But…this was Zhaoping Ho. Asking him for help. Him.

  And what about all the girls who would be watching?

  Dusty finally drew himself upright. "I'm your man, Mr. Ho. I just have one question."

  "Shoot."

  "So, this is top secret, and we can't tell anyone, right?"

  "Correct."

  Dusty glanced around, checking for spies in the five-foot gap between Zhaoping's shop and the Dolphin Hut. "So…why are you trusting me ?"

  "If you do tell anyone, I know they won't believe you."

  "Why is that?"

  Zhaoping blew a cloud of fragrant smoke into Dusty's face. "I understand you were recently elected the new mayor of Loser-ville."

  THE DAY OF THE SURF-OFF dawned clear and hot, with high winds and righteous waves. By nine A.M., Nana'ite Beach was packed. You could hardly see the ads popping up below, for all the tanned feet and flip-flops, and the acres of skin shimmering with sunblock and oil. When dudes strutted by, the Smart sand flashed with lightning and flames; when the girls strolled, it was sizzles and showers of color. The surf roared a backdrop to the squeals and chatter, the buzz of scrambled audio feeds from beneath, and the silent but dizzying transmissions of millions of cyberneurons swapping and forwarding jokes, stories, pictures, and opinions.

  "Oh man," said Roderick. "My Incoming memory is full again." He tilted his head and smacked an ear, as if he could physically dislodge the unwanted data from his brain. "I've remembered this same clip, like, three times already."

  "Just block it all for now." Dusty stood nearby, but in a world apart. They'd painted a big number on his wetsuit in polymer ("A zero," a bleary-eyed assistant had said, while painting it on shortly after dawn, "since you're the first one here"), and Zhaoping Ho had made good on his promise.

  The Board stood erect next to Dusty, a sleek thing with a faint silvery sheen. Like some kind of rocket, Dusty thought, gripping the edge of it with a sweaty palm. But unlike a rocket, it weighed practically nothing, and the kids on the beach had gone nuts when Zhaoping had strolled onto the sand with it. And even more nuts when Zhaoping located Dusty's shimmering "0" in the crowd and strolled toward him. "Hey, kid," he'd growled. "Here's the board you ordered. Don't pound it up. And I'll see it if you do. I'm on the panel."

  Dusty had straightened and accepted the board, while the hot girls tittered and swooned. Dusty turned to address them, but they chos
e to play it safe and gawk after Zhaoping. Well, that was okay. You couldn't blame girls for being shy.

  "I don't wanna block my Incoming memory, man," said Roderick, horrified. "What if I miss something?"

  "Dudes and Dudettes!" boomed a voice from the wireless amps in the sand. "Are you ready to surf? "

  Across the beach, nubile bodies turned to the judge's table. Cheers went up.

  "I said, are you ready to surf? "

  The cheers ratcheted into screams. Ladies jumped up and down, and the jamming signals propagating through the cyberneurons of thousands of spectators got crossed and confused. Hundreds of virtual bikinis were unable to keep up, and you could see flashes of everything.

  "I said, are you ready to SURF? "

  The screams erupted into an orgy of high-fives. Girls poured oil over each others' heads. Dudes charged each other and leapt into the air, bumping chests with hardcore roars, waterproofed armpit hairs glimmering.

  "Then welcome to the eleventh annual Malihini Junior Surf-Off Competition! Where over 150 untested studs and babes are ready to tame the waves! And boy, is that surf up. I'm Jace Hancock, your MC, and your awesome judges today will be Dae Woon, from Malihini Weekly; Paulina Namimoto, Lieutenant Governor of Hawai'i—that's a totally tubular bikini, Governor, how about a round of applause for her?—and Zhaoping Ho—"

  The rest of the MC's intro was drowned out in a fever pitch of noise. Babes in fabric bikinis flashed the judges' table. A thousand manly hands clenched into fists, thumbs and pinkies extended, and shook at Zhaoping in a fierce exhortation to hang loose.

  Zhaoping ignored them. Instead, he stared down the beach, right at Dusty. His dark eyes flicked between the shimmering board and Dusty's big fat zero. Dusty felt a thrill all the way down to his toes. He subconsciously commanded the sand below him to flutter a nervous orange.

  And when he did, the zags of orange rippled all the way down the beach, like ripples on a pond.

  Dusty started and looked down. Was that Zhaoping's board, transmitting it that far?

  Next to him, Roderick shifted the weight of Shelia onto his hip and kept smacking his head. "Because it'd be terrible to miss something."

  Dusty kept staring at his feet. Cautiously, he flipped his cyberneurons' reception settings from passive to active, and for the first time in, like, ages, really listened to what the beach was saying. Mostly, listening to Smart sand got old after the first week or two. Listening to different classes of data was just like listening to all the files that were swapped around by everyone in homeroom—you got pieces of what other people wanted to tell everyone they were feeling or thinking about or accessing in the digital part of their memory—except with the Smart sand, you also had the sensory data from the beach itself. Like you felt the internal temperature of the sand and the sensation of people walking all over you, or the feeling of being accessed and manipulated in a hundred places.

  But before, Dusty had never been able to feel past the dry. And never in a radius so freaking huge.

  He stared at Zhaoping's board, a sudden prickle of cool running between his spine and wetsuit. What was in this thing?

  "Yo, Dust!" Roderick shoved him between the shoulder blades. "Come on, go!"

  Dusty started again. Everyone else in the first bracket was whooping and charging into the surf. He flipped the board horizontally to carry it and said to Roderick, "Relax, Roddy. You've got to play it cool. You never see Zhaoping run anywhere, do you?"

  Roderick scratched his head.

  Dusty strolled to the surf last, like he meant to all along. Roderick trotted with him, trusty Shelia in tow. "Why don't you see Zhaoping Ho run anywhere?"

  "Hey," said the MC. "Who's that with Number Zero? Somebody get that unregistered kid out of the water."

  "It's because he's cool, Roddy. Like me. Like this. " Dusty steered his board into the waves. Even though he was wearing a leash this time, the swells were almost hard enough to rip the thing from him anyway. Despite what he'd said to Roddy, this was gonna be tough, no joke.

  Or was it? His cyberneurons were still listening, and he could still feel the matrix. He'd never felt it with the waves on top—or as something that could move with the water, as a part of it. Dusty was tumbling end over end, and yet standing perfectly still; bobbing in place and yet rushing to the shore, even as his human feet were fluttering over the ocean bottom and pushing him out into the Pacific. And if he looked at the data a different way, he could feel slow waves of cool and hot. And funny feelings of…pressure?

  There. Where a wave was cresting.

  Dusty paddled out beyond the swells and sat on his board, staring back at Nana'ite Beach's frothing surf. The MC, Woon, and Namimoto were shouting into their microphones as surfers chose their swells and rode in. You got three swells, and if you scored high enough, you went on to the finals. Right? Dusty wasn't sure. He couldn't remember or even think straight. Every swell was a tsunami of new data and gnarly feelings.

  "Look who it is! It's the Mayor!"

  Whoops and the slaps of high-fives floated over the swells. The ocean below Dusty dropped into a trough, and Dirk, Big Kohaku, and Greasy Mike, sitting astride their boards and laughing, appeared at the top of a swell. "Mr. Mayor, can we have your autograph?"

  "Hey, nice board," said Greasy Mike. "Did you rip up a rocket?"

  Dusty pushed out his chest as far as it would go. "No," he said loudly. "I got it from Zhaoping. When he gave it to me. In person."

  They laughed. The waves rearranged themselves, dropping The Coastal Gang out of sight. Good riddance! thought Dusty.

  And, I'll show them.

  When that funny feeling of pressure began to build, Dusty threw himself onto his magic board and paddled with all his might. He could feel the ocean bunching up under him. Getting ready. And—

  —now!

  Dusty stood up. He almost fell from the board, he was listening so hard, but that's the only thing that saved him, too. The cyberneuron processes that reached into his vestibular system zinged with frantic activity as his wetware and hardware tried to integrate everything that was happening in his body and not-body, the signals somehow magnified and refined by the board beneath him. Unless the board was, like, some kind of external, supplemental brain ?

  But no. It had to be even more than that. Because what else could explain what was rolling in along with him?

  Dusty gasped. Fanning from the sides of his board was a chaotic froth of lighting and fire, like the big flutter of orange he'd made by accident on the dry. Except extreme. No—except epic.

  "And here comes Number Zero," said Namimoto. "With an awful lot of…um…seaweed."

  The bad-ass wave frothed down into nothing around Dusty's feet, any visual effects of the thinned-out, suspended matrix breaking up in all the movement and noise. Dusty eased toward shore, body poised and heart ramming into his ribs.

  "Funny," said Woon. "Isn't really the season for that."

  "Right," agreed Zhaoping, forcefully. He gave Dusty a withering stare. "But there it was. Seaweed."

  Dusty stared back, bewildered. Was he not rocking the board hard enough?

  "Whoa!" said Roderick, running into the surf. "Did you see that? What you did just now? That was wicked, man, totally wicked!"

  "How'd that unregistered kid get back in there?" the MC demanded. "Somebody get that joker out of here!"

  "Thanks," said Dusty. "But Zhaoping's seriously harshing on my mellow. Look at him. Is he mad at me?"

  "Hey, Mr. Mayor," called Dirk. He cruised through the surf at Dusty's right, hips swinging easy and comfortable. "Are these waves a joke or what? Even a baby like you can handle them, huh?"

  Dusty's confusion soured further. "Yeah—with fire under me!"

  Dirk's smug grin turned blank.

  "You didn't notice? " said Dusty.

  "Meanwhile, that's a very nice showing by Number Seventeen," said Woon, her tone chirping with interest. "Did you see that bottom turn?"

  Dusty fumed. Greasy Mi
ke and Big Kohaku sailed in, grinning, while two other guys flailed and wiped out in the monster waves behind them. So Dusty and his epic flames weren't worth noticing, huh? He'd show them something to notice!

  "Gotta go, hoaloha, " Dusty said to Roderick. "Things just got real."

  "They did?"

  Dusty charged back into the Pacific, determined. All over Dusty's not-body, that funny building pressure rippled and pushed, and all Dusty had to do was paddle his board to a spot that was getting ready. And if taming those waves with lightning and fire wasn't enough, then by golly—

  "Wait up, Loser-ville," called Dirk. He and his stupid friends were right on Dusty's tail. "We wanna record a video of you wiping out."

  Dusty glared, his anger rising as high as the killer swells. "Oh yeah? Go ahead. Ride my wave. I wanna record a video of me surfing over your face. "

  The swell came. Dusty paddled like a madman, hating the Coastal Gang behind him a little more with each stroke. When his not-body hummed with the right pitch of pressure, he practically leapt up on the board and listened so hard, he could barely remember to breathe. The world tipped into a vertical wall of roaring, opalescent blue, and his not-body fluttered and curled into a tube, even as he cruised effortlessly down its heart.

  Record this, you voltheads!

  It was better than lightning, better than flames. Dusty commanded the matrix suspended in the water around him to display, 'EAT MY FOAM, DIRK DUKOWSKI!' in towering black letters ten feet high and two feet thick. But the water was moving, and so was Dusty, and the matrix in the waves was thin.

  "And here comes Number Zero," said Woon, "this time with some…with some, uh…what are those things, Pauly?"

  The monster wave gradually petered out. Dusty sailed to the beach amidst the leftover foam, images of himself flickering across the dry. "Look!" squealed a girl, pointing at a video. "Look, look, you can see them!"

  The beach erupted in thrilled screams: "Sharks! Sharks! Sharks!" Girls squealed and clung to each others' toned bodies. Dudes whooped and ran to the waterline to get a closer look. Someone call the Shark Squad! flashed through countless Incoming memories, along with I knew a guy who was bit in half one time! and close-up clips of the ominous, indistinct blobs.