Genesis 2.0

by Collin Piprell

  Praise for MOM

  "[MOM] is a page‐turner that contains all the right components for a smash movie… The Bard of Bangkok has really outdone himself this time. My strong hunch is that MOM is destined to attain classic status."

  –Bradley K. Martin, author of Nuclear Blues, Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader, and more

  * * *

  "MOM…has to be one of the most jaw‐dropping feats of the imagination ever accomplished in any genre."

  –Paul Dorsey, The Nation (Bangkok)

  * * *

  "MOM is a big bang of a novel with many big ideas… Old Asia hands, sci‐fi fans, and readers of quality fiction who enjoy complex and entertaining yarns should enjoy MOM."

  –Kevin Cummings, Thailand Footprint

  * * *

  "If you are looking for a book that will make you question everything—life, humanity, and Earth as we know it today—definitely pick up MOM by Collin Piprell."

  –Ellen, Scribbles, Quibbles and Scrawlings

  * * *

  "This book will take you on the craziest trip you’ve ever been on. And it will make you question everything."

  –Siobhan, Novelties

  Published by Common Deer Press

  Copyright © 2017 Collin Piprell

  All rights reserved under International and Canadian Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the copyright holder, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Published October 5, 2017

  Common Deer Press

  London, Ontario, Canada

  ellie@commondeerpress.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Piprell, Collin

  Genesis 2.0 Magic Circles Book 2

  First Edition

  (E-book) 978-1-988761-04-6

  (Paperback) 978-1-988761-03-9

  (Hardcover) 978-1-988761-05-3

  Cover and Interior Design: Ellie Sipila Move to the Write

  For more information, please visit Common Deer Press

  Contents

  Beginnings & Ends

  New Allies, Old Foes

  Taking Care of Business

  Going to Ground

  Into Eden

  Paradise Lost & Lost Again

  Other Worlds

  Emergences

  Heavenly Hosts

  Threesomes and Foursomes

  Reset

  Mindfucks R Us

  Head Out on the Highway

  Between Worlds

  Boogoo Boogie-Woogie

  Where is Cisco?

  Complications

  Dead in Two Worlds

  Collateral Damage

  Survivors

  Happy Chillin

  Brave New World

  Population Boom

  New Beginnings

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  beginnings & ends

  Do unto others before they do you.

  – Poppy

  subterranean sport

  Auntie's bare foot gropes his crotch. Son pretends he has a lump of monkey stuck in his throat and pushes back from the table to clear it.

  At home in the Bunker this evening, they're having monkey and mock‐bean stew, spicy enough he can almost forget it's monkey, though it's a young one, and tender. Son likes pig best, and rats are pretty good. He doesn't care for monkey.

  "What?" Son says to Poppy, who's watching him eat. "What are you looking at? This is good," he tells Gran‐Gran, who cooked it. Then he scoops Auntie's bacteria paste with his knife and lathers so much of it over a chunk of meat he can forget it's food, much less monkey.

  Son looks everywhere except at Auntie. Meanwhile, Auntie is looking mostly at Poppy, who's sampling her latest condiment with due deliberation.

  She cultures microbial mats and then slow‐dries them with hot sauce and other stuff. She says it's good for them. Gran‐Gran says it's mashed germs and germs cause disease, so she won't have anything to do with it. Poppy looks stoical and takes a tablespoonful straight up, one with every meal.

  Poppy sometimes objects, either on grounds of how wasteful her failed experiments can be or how stomach‐turning her successes, mostly relishes and steak sauces. Auntie responds with expressions such as self‐sufficiency and autonomy. Poppy doesn't genuflect at these times, as Auntie tells Son with a grin, but he comes as close as he's able and holds his peace.

  "Genuflect" is a good word. Gran‐Gran doesn't genuflect; she's Libertarian, O Lord, she says, not Catholic, though she comes close when in full ecstatic union with the whatever.

  Son felt like genuflecting the first time he saw Auntie naked, up close and presented for his private inspection. Right now she has her good leg extended beneath the table, and her bare foot has gone back to groping his crotch. Auntie likes to tease. But this kind of thing, if she isn't careful, is going to get them both killed, down here in their hole in the ground.

  nature's way

  The GameBoy screams in much the same way a person would.

  Son looks away from the spill of intestines and whatnot, examines the GameBoy's ritual scarring, furrows and craters like a plowed battlefield across its chest and around its neck in a half collar. The GameBoy clearly doesn't understand Poppy's English, but that doesn't matter. Poppy just keeps tugging away and asking his question.

  Once, when Son was a boy, Poppy explained how Eskimo hunters would impale a baby seal on a hook and dangle it over a breathing hole in the sea ice because they knew its crying would bring the mother, which they'd then harpoon. "Nature's way," Poppy called it.

  "They called themselves Inuit," Auntie told him. "Not Eskimos." Poppy knows everything there is to know about hunting and combat; Auntie knows everything about everything else.

  "Whatever," Poppy said.

  The creature they captured this fine morning is no baby seal, though according to Poppy it isn't a real man either. First, they broke its arms and legs so it couldn't resist too much.

  "Where are the others?" Poppy asks, as he pulls its guts out through the slit in its abdomen.

  Son is freaking out a bit, checking in three‐sixty degrees for more GameBoys. What with the noise, they've surely zeroed in on them already. The screams finally die away to some gasping, and Poppy breaks the GameBoy's neck. Son and his father step well back as an impatient ratswarm moves in on the carcass.

  "That was messy," Poppy says, his face impossible to read, mantled as it is in blur dust. "But we needed the screams. That's our bait."

  "Jesus Christ," Son says, something he can't say back in the Bunker in that tone without Gran‐Gran threatening hellfire. The dust itself quickly disses the remains of the ratswarm's meal, leaving the scar breastplate for last.

  "Let's get ready for our visitors," Poppy tells him.

  They disappear back into the Boogoo and move away through it to higher ground. Once more they go still and silent.

  •

  Son watches. Son is a hunter, and a real man.

  This day is hot and still. The air remains nearly dust free, the visibility exceptional. At once hunters and hunted, he and Poppy crept through the blurs for much of the morning, making their way out of the dry stream bed and up a ravine to Long Lookout Ridge.

  They were just clumsy enough to allow those three GameBoys to find them on the ledge below where they watch now. This place where they killed two of their pursuers outright and then asked the other one some questions. Much in this wasted terrain isn't what it appears and, give
n the chance, most things in it will kill you before you can kill them. "Do unto others," Poppy says, "before they do you."

  And there's been plenty of doing to others, this past while. Never have they seen so many bio‐blurs in the area. For some reason, all of God's critters are gravitating toward Eden.

  And they're getting more GameBoys, which shouldn't be happening. As Poppy says, any GameBoy you chose would tie for first place with every other one for a Darwin Award. So there should be fewer of them, not more. In fact they should be long extinct, these degenerate relics of the original GameBoys, a loose association of culture jammers, occupiers, teapartiers, HackenCrackers, Rightsrightists, Islamisrightists and the Radical Moderates who, toward the end, became the most terrifyingly violent of those unwilling to swap their freedoms for security. One of Poppy's favorite histories to tell of an evening at home in the Bunker, how these subhumans lost the pizzazz of their forerunners, their imagination and sense of fun, retaining only brute instincts to kill and destroy.

  Auntie goes quiet on these occasions, sadder and more tired than usual.

  •

  Son likes the idea that GameBoys are hunting them. It's also scary, though he won't admit that to anyone except himself. It's the GameBoys who should be scared. Hunting hunters is dangerous work. Especially when these hunters happen to be Son and Poppy.

  doing unto others

  Son watches. There's still no sign of their GameBoys.

  He performs a quick inventory, feels for his spearsticks where they lie hidden in the dust, as he himself lies concealed. His catchbag is flexible‐phase hemmelite, a tough little military‐surplus drogue chute with hemmelite drawstring and cords; both scent‐ and blur‐proof, it could have been designed in the beginning as a catchbag. His canteen, which has always been a canteen, is hemmelite as well. So is his knife, and the corded belt he keeps it in.

  •

  Gran‐Gran says this whole world is dead, and they killed it. She means humans.

  But the land isn't nearly as dead as that.

  Subtle shifts and stirrings at the sun's gradual rise have much to tell a skilled watcher. A pigswarm, for example, has hunkered down near the top of the eastward‐descending gorges. It may be doing some watching of its own, in no hurry to join the bio‐blur tussle underway just downslope of it where a monkeyswarm overwhelms a dragon. Even at this distance, gazing in a way only he can, Son watches the solitary animal's jaws emerge from its mantle as it thrashes monkeyguts back and forth, flinging shit to the four winds. By the time the stink arrives at Son's hide on the slightest of breezes, the survivors are feasting. An adjacent patch of jittery dust suggests a ratswarm awaiting scraps.

  All God's critters. That's what Poppy calls them back in the Bunker, mostly to get Gran‐Gran's goat. Whatever. They're seeing all of those, and more that aren't God's creatures. More and more of them every day, just about.

  The dunes and ridges and plains sprawl to the southern horizon, all the panorama swaddled in blur dust. Similarly mantled with blurs, Son is one with the land here atop Long Lookout Ridge, safe, as long as he remains still, from the many eyes that hide in the Boogoo.

  •

  Only two kilometers to the northwest, Eden lies vivid against the otherwise gray terrain. One of life's great mysteries is how this green oasis has survived the Boogoo, the blanket of tiny self‐replicating bot disassemblers that otherwise shrouds their world. The blurs.

  This land is alive. The entire landscape lives in its many parts and, Son believes, as a whole.

  •

  Son watches, not much distracted by the fact he has gone hard. That happens a lot these days. It comes from thinking about Auntie.

  Auntie looked worried this morning, before Son left the Bunker. "Be careful," she told him, prompting a snort from Poppy. "A body is always careful," he said. "Either that or dead." Son—sixteen years old, already four years a man—is good at staying alive, and it's good that Poppy is out here riding shotgun today.

  At the same time, he wishes he were back in the Bunker with Auntie. With Poppy's woman. Auntie has told Son what he mustn't tell Poppy; she can't go on this way any longer. Sometimes she gets so sad it's scary. Confined to the Bunker, unable to hunt since a ratswarm took one of her legs, she's cooped up in an underground world extending no more than three hundred square meters on two levels. And she can't live with Poppy any more, she says. She just can't.

  This is only a way of speaking, Son believes, yet he's shocked. And excited. Not to mention scared.

  lay of the land

  Out here on the land there's not much that really scares Son. He himself is what Poppy calls an apex predator.

  He hooks a toe against underlying rock and flexes, inching himself around so he can watch more comfortably. Plus he needs to work some stiffness out of the sore hip. He hasn't mentioned the hip to Poppy, this souvenir of a scuffle with his father back in the Bunker three days ago. Neither has Poppy talked about the bum arm Son knows he's favoring. A trained Special Forces killing machine, he has taught Son what he can of the manly arts, how to do others before they do you. He may sometimes regret this, now that Son, at sixteen years of age, is as big as he is, almost as strong, and faster.

  Whatever. Even short of full contact, they're crazy to fight. The last thing you need out here on the hunt are self‐inflicted wounds. And the first thing you want is a buddy to watch your back.

  Barely moving, he checks around but sees no sign of Poppy. Of course Poppy's a hunter and a warrior—the best there is—so he's normally invisible out here.

  •

  Poppy was part of a New China and United Securistats of America Special Southeast Asia Operations Recon unit. Their main role was to monitor allied operations and report intelligence. Call them what you like, Poppy says. In fact, he and his comrades were no more than token battlefield humans, the last non‐warbot battlefield presences on Earth. And given the speed, complexity, and general inscrutability of warbot strategy and tactics, the bots' wet brothers‐in‐arms rarely had any idea what was really going on. "Doesn't matter," Poppy says. What he means is that the USA no longer exists. Neither does New China, nor do any wars other than their own survivalist battle with what passes for nature these days.

  "After the Boogoo struck, we got marooned," he tells Son. "And who cares? You can be sure Homeland looks much the same as what we've got here."

  Son has never seen Homeland. He has never seen anything except the Bunker and the land right around it and around Eden.

  •

  Auntie has told him the story. When he was just a kid, he'd ask her for this one again and again, till finally he thought he could make some sense of it.

  All it would have taken is a single self‐replicator to escape, or for someone to release it into the wild. Whatever. Within a day or two, the surface of the earth had been mostly converted into about a zillion zillion nanobots. And—thanks to the miracles of '30s nanotech combined with state‐of‐the‐art qubital information processing—though each blur was no bigger than a large molecule, it was in itself a pretty handy computer. These were the self‐replicating disassembler‐assemblers. The "blurs" were designed to strip anything more complex than themselves down to its atoms and use those components to build more of themselves. And that's it. The whole name of the game. Except that before they finished the job of turning the entire planet into dust—this part of it took a good deal of Auntie's telling—the blurs themselves, collectively and unconsciously, gave rise to the Boogoo. To some higher level of organization. To more than one Boogoo, in fact, given the smaller one inside Eden, and they're territorial.

  •

  Ahuk. The earth clears its throat. As though it's choking on blur dust.

  Clears it again. Ahuk.

  The coughs arrive on a breeze tainted with pigswarm from the vicinity of Ahuk Hole, a geothermal borehole lying east between Two Tops and Shrug‐up Central, the main runoff wadi lying northeast of Two Tops. These are dry coughs, no gurgle. It hasn't rain
ed in a month. Son has spotted the pigswarm, knows where it rests, though at this distance he probably only imagines its snuffle and grunt.

  A mystery. At first the pigs never ranged far from the waterholes, especially during dry spells. But something has changed, because the last couple of years you find pigswarms nearly everywhere; never mind that Auntie says they have no sweat glands and need muddy wallows to stay cool.

  •

  Son reads the various configurations of the dust and its general disposition.

  This side of the border with Eden, much of the blur dust lies deep in the gullies and ravines, promising almost zero chance of rain and leaving less cover for dragons on the hilltop and ridge, though enough remains they've mostly moved to high ground. They're invisible unless they move, but Son knows they're there. Dragon or man, high ground affords a better view of what's going on around you. Mind you it can also expose you to other predators. Deploying yourself in low ground, on the other hand, leaves you open to surprise attacks and flash floods. You do get some minutes' warning of a flood, usually, when the dust starts to retreat up the slopes. Though it doesn't always work that way.

  And the Boogoo has other tricks up its sleeve. Right now, for example, forty‐meter blur "watchtowers" stand along either side of the bare bedrock border with Eden. Who can say how they've arisen or why. Though it's clear the dust inside Eden is independent of the main Boogoo, and the towers on either side of the no‐man's‐land are enemies. That's strange enough. Stranger still is this: How can Eden maintain a tame mini‐Boogoo just inside its bounds while the rest of the enclave appears to be a full blur‐free biosystem?

  As Son watches, some of the opposing towers begin to sag. Each starts to knobble at its base, ten meters in diameter, extruding restless forests of stubby arms and legs. These half‐emergent boogoomen wave their stubs every which way before they're reabsorbed.

  This display promises meatier entertainment to come. Overall, though, the entire Boogoo is becoming less predictable, behaving in ways that defy the ken. It's interesting, even exciting, at the same time it's worrying. The world is changing. Who knows why, or exactly how or where it's all going. The biggest mystery is that the Boogoo sometimes behaves like one single creature.