Genesis 2.0

by Collin Piprell

  Seeing no hope in Poppy's manner, it turns its pleading toward Son. It's still looking at him when Poppy brains it with a stone as big as his fist. Intent on Son, it hardly ducks, so the first blow is probably enough, though Poppy hits it twice more to make sure. Then he crouches, like Son, but facing the opposite way. One of the GameBoys—the one that Son killed—farts, a gentle posthumous release of gas. Son is amazed at its foulness, and wonders what these creatures have been eating.

  Still and silent, Poppy and Son watch as a ratswarm, a roachswarm and, finally, the blurs assimilate the female's remains and those of the others.

  Then Son says to his father, just loudly enough he can hear: "You asshole. Why did you do that?"

  fatal distractions

  "What's the matter with you?" Poppy isn't whispering. That's the third time today they've broken the rule of silence on the hunt. He wants Son to know he's seriously pissed off at something.

  "What do you mean?"

  "You had the drop on that first one. And what did you do? You stood there like a goof."

  "You had it covered."

  "Yeah? And what if the other one had been armed—then what?"

  "Somebody had to watch the enfilade. Who knows what was behind those big rocks."

  "Bullshit. You were staring at the skank. Paying no attention to business."

  "Anyway, it wasn't armed."

  "How would you know? One look at that pussy left you stiff and stupid as a post."

  Son feels himself flush, more with anger than embarrassment. What had really distracted him was the boy's concern for the girl, and its bravery. GameBoys aren't supposed to act like that. "Those two were different," he says.

  "GameBoys are animals," Poppy says. "Worse."

  "You didn't have to kill the girl."

  "Haven't I taught you anything? My God. I suppose you wanted to bring it home and house‐train it. Which planet are we on, here?"

  •

  Once when Son was much younger, and before Auntie lost her leg, Poppy and Auntie came home from a hunt with a live baby monkey. They had its mother, a good fat one, chopped up in their catchbags. Poppy handed the baby to Son. If he wanted to look after it, he could keep the thing. Son called it Tiny; never mind Gran‐Gran said this wasn't a girl's name, because Poppy claimed that was the smallest monkey he'd ever seen. Son and Tiny became inseparable. Son even hid bits from his own meals to build Tiny up.

  One day, Gran‐Gran called Son for dinner, a spicy stew of meat and beans. He was sopping up the juices with a piece of soy biscuit when Poppy told him, "You did good, chum."

  "How do you mean?" Son asked.

  "You got Tiny bulked up right nicely. Plenty for dinner and some left over for breakfast."

  Son thought Poppy was joking. Auntie had tears in her eyes when she told Son he wasn't. He went at Poppy screaming, a flurry of little fists and boots. Poppy simply boxed his ears. Whack‐bang. Left him half‐deafened and sprawled on the floor.

  "Goddamn it," Auntie said, another shock for Son—she almost never swore, at least in front of him. "He's just a boy."

  "Maybe so," Poppy replied. "But he'll soon be a man. You. Boy. Stop that sniveling. You hear me?"

  Son got up to go to the toilet, where he puked his guts out. When he came back to the table, he said, "I don't like you," his voice steady, deadly serious.

  "You don't have to like me, boy. All you have to do is listen to me and do as you're told."

  "And I don't like living here."

  "So run away and join the circus." Poppy laughed, though he didn't sound happy.

  "What are you doing to our boy?" Auntie asked.

  Poppy answered her right away, and now he wasn't smiling: "He's my son, not yours, you hear? I'll thank you to let me look after his upbringing." He turned to Son and said, "I'm raising you to be the toughest sonofabitch there is. And the smartest."

  "Meanest sonofabitch in the Valley of the Shadow of Death." Gran‐Gran cackled, maybe at her command of the Scriptures. "That's our Sonny."

  "That's right," Poppy said. "I'm raising a survivor. You listen to me, boy. We're living in Gran‐Gran's valley of death. And every goddamned one of us is going to die, but I want you to be the last man standing. Independent of help from any Good Lord, do you hear? Standing there on your own two feet, dick swingin' in the breeze. Or more likely, in your case, dick still in hand."

  "I'm not eating," he declared in level tones.

  Poppy only laughed and piled extra on his own plate. "Meat is meat," he'd said. "The only feelings you want are for your bunkermates. Everything else is food. Fair game."

  Son hollered "Fuck you," and punched the edge of the dining table for emphasis.

  "You watch your mouth, Sonny!" Though Gran‐Gran looked more scared than angry, and so did Auntie, afraid of Poppy's reaction.

  "Fuck me?" Poppy roared. Then he laughed a laugh from way down in his belly. "Fuck you, chum. And fuck your buddy, tasty morsel that she is."

  Turns out Son punched the table so hard he broke a knuckle, but he didn't say anything. Auntie found out later, when his hand swelled up and turned black. Poppy didn't say anything either, though he called him chum for days afterward, calling him boy only a couple of times.

  •

  That was then. Now is now. The time Son had hoped would never arrive.

  Poppy breaks the silence again. "You know something, boy? You've gotten way too big for your britches." He frees a spearstick, slaps at the blade in his belt, and snaps the hook on his catchbag. His movements flow into one another, a single action. "And the Bunker just got too small for the two of us."

  problem solved

  Son doesn't want this to be happening. Not now.

  First, the whole landscape starts going crazy, sliding right off its rocker. Now some lunatic spirit has possessed his father, whose face is twisted with a confusion of rage and sorrow.

  Son's still thinking some other time would be much better when Poppy's spear thrust nearly gets him. He's saved by the dizzy spell that takes him as he ducks, causing him to slip in dust still slick with blood. He goes down on one knee right on the lip of the trap, and the spearstick misses him. It barely scratches his shoulder even as he drives his own spear into Poppy's groin. Poppy grabs the stick where it enters his body and, with the other hand, he swings his mace at Son's head, the big turbine bearing in its cord sling appearing as if by magic from his catchbag. But spears in the groin are distracting, and Son easily ducks the blow at the same time he stands and pushes as he steps around the pit, feeling resistance where the spearstick jams against Poppy's pelvic bone.

  Poppy grunts as he steps around the other side of this arc of their engagement, hunching away from the stick in a slow dance and a precarious one. So perhaps he can be forgiven his lapse of attention, the kind of thing he always says is going to spell Son's own end. He steps into the hole, letting go the stick to clutch at thin air. Son yanks his weapon clear as his father plunges. A last word dies away down the hole with the rest of him. It's unintelligible. A faint chittering follows hard upon the distant thud at the bottom of the trap. Then there's the ratfall.

  Son retreats a few meters from the trap and crouches, one with the land once more. He watches as the roachswarm lens closes shut again, splotches of Poppy's blood shrinking away to nothing, fading through pink to dusty gray. The Boogoo shrugs up the tiniest bit on Son where he crouches, triggering a jolt of alarm before it recedes.

  He has never in his life felt this bad.

  He performs a three‐sixty inspection from his POV here by the hole as well as from auxiliary points elsewhere. Somewhere—it isn't clear to him exactly where, from the composite image and given his condition—a file of four or five GameBoys are leaving this area, moving fast at a higher elevation. These are the ones he spotted earlier; the ones he decided to let escape.

  •

  The world's number‐one problem has been resolved. Just like that. The flood of relief, a big surprise, is cut short by a stab
of anguish. The anguish quickly transmogrifies, another Auntie word, into a mix of grief and despair, and settles in to stay.

  Son thinks about returning to the Bunker. What's he going to say to Gran‐Gran? Poppy's mother. Telling Auntie will be easier, though he isn't in a hurry to do that either.

  What he has to do now, though he has to move fast, is to make his way back up onto Long Lookout for a quick recce before heading home. His wound needs attention. But first, he needs to get his head straight.

  He has his wish. The Bunker is no longer complicated by Poppy's presence; he has been scratched right out of the equation. But this isn't the way Son would have had it happen.

  A beggar granted his wish, Son now fears the horse won't run. What's he going to tell Gran‐Gran? Poppy's mother. Even Auntie, who said she couldn't live with that man anymore. What can he tell her? Whatever she expected after their talk, it wasn't Son saying, "Oh. Okay," and then going out to kill Poppy.

  Except for the grace of he knows not what, it would've been himself down that hole. It should have been him. The ken tells him that the blurs ought to have assimilated the patch of blood well before it provided that lucky slip and fall. One more way the mysterious changes are making life better. At least for him.

  taking care of business

  I've given you new power, chum. The power to end things at a time of your choosing.

  – Poppy

  non‐routine povs

  Son feels dizzy. This isn't good. He should head for home and let Auntie tend to him.

  Auntie. What's he going to tell her? And Gran‐Gran. Poppy's mother.

  Never mind. Despite everything—forget about his wound, forget the fact he has just killed his father—he's hungry. He needs a hot meal. And he needs to be safe at home with his family. What's left of it. Supposing they let him stay once they discover what he has done.

  The godbolt attacks meander off into the far distance and then cease. The landscape settles again, and Son tries to relax with it. But once more the land is the land, and Son is Son, the uncanny connection lost.

  Once more atop the southern end of Long Lookout, he performs a routine check of his surrounds. Mentally, he occupies key POVs in his environment from which to check back on his own physical location in the world. But what he sees now is not routine.

  •

  Looking back at himself from the multiple perspective, the space above his current station addles. It becomes a hectic muddle. It connects with a snarl of unease within himself, the threads of which include poisons from the dragon bite plus a sense of something different about the recent godbolt attacks. The cloud of foreboding is shot through with flashes of eagerness quickly swamped by horror. More than Poppy's death, this has something to do with Auntie. The ball of unease twists tighter.

  Son watches the cloud from several POVs simultaneously. Then he reverts to a single‐pointed view from where he crouches, once more distanced from everywhere else. He's sweating and dizzy, sick to his stomach.

  He totters on his heels and his leg hurts; that dragon managed to nick him good. Though he should last till he gets back to the Bunker, where Auntie can give him medicine. His ribs hurt, especially when he breathes deep; they're bruised, maybe separated. One more thing: he really, really has to pee. But he doesn't want to rob the Bunker; he'll wait till he gets back and then piss into the recycler.

  munchies for malls

  He has to pee so bad it's making him see things.

  Something's happening way down beyond hill and plain to the south, down toward where ESSEA Mall would stand. Something looms on the horizon, a behemoth, larger at that distance than anything should ever loom. As though all the land is dreaming. A muddled patch of atmosphere down there on the horizon reminds him of the dark things hovering over the Bunker and here where he's parked on Long Lookout. Except this new one is way distant and a lot bigger.

  It wavers and firms, wavers again. The thing rises and rises till it resembles an impossibly large block building. A blind fortress, windowless. Or a giant silvery‐gray mesa. Son saw this once before, hunting with Poppy, also around high tide on a hot day. Poppy said you got these things over cold seas or ice where there was a stable layer of colder, denser air at ground level. Instead of light rays getting refracted downwards, they bent upwards.

  To tell the truth, this still doesn't make a lot of sense to Son. But Poppy learned plenty about lots of different things, partly because of his Special Forces training. His desert warfare background gave him more than your average citizen ever needed to know about mirages, for example. And Poppy's theory was that, on days like this, you got fine blur dust rising in response to the sun or moon, providing a refractive layer similar to cold air over ice. Maybe even a better one.

  Now the big mirage on the horizon has sprung a row of legs. When Poppy told Auntie about the earlier sighting, when the same thing happened, she got all excited. "That's the way they built the malls," she said. "Those legs were columns to keep them safe from rising seas." She believed they'd seen actual images of ESSEA Mall, way down around where Bangkok and the Eastern Seaboard, Southeast Asia, used to lie. "Get serious," Poppy told her. "That's eight hundred kilometers away. Anyway, there's nothing down there. The Boogoo dissed everything, same as here."

  He stares at the mirage, trying for a higher‐rez view. More than that, he wants it to be real. He needs ESSEA Mall to exist, and he wants it to be full of people. Whenever Son or Auntie proposed a live mall, Poppy scoffed. "People?" he'd say. "Forget about it. The malls are gone, blurs on the wind. But what the hell. You had nothing but mallsters living in them anyway."

  Poppy and Son are not mallsters, according to Poppy, and they never have been. They aren't GameBoys, for sure, and they aren't mallsters. They're real men. Nevertheless, Son is surprised at the surge of hope that ESSEA Mall is okay. Up and running and inhabited. Otherwise, all that's left is either life in the Bunker or being dead.

  The Bunker is the Bunker, his life‐long home and where his family is. He can live there, or he can die outside. Where else is there? He can dream about trekking to ESSEA. But even if it was possible to make his way down there, which it isn't, Poppy is probably right—the mall has been dissed along with all its mallsters. So, it's back to what Poppy calls reality and back to his favorite advice: "You take what you're dealt, and you deal with it."

  What about Eden? In its own way it's more mysterious, more amazing, than the satray barrages. More than once, Poppy and Son discussed expeditions into Eden, but the risks always overrode any conceivable gain.

  He turns south again in time to catch a grand finale. The mirage expands and it contracts again; its legs disappear and reappear. The whole thing goes hi‐rez, holds still for a few seconds. Then big bites of it begin to slump away as though torn off by an invisible monster. In a minute or two, nothing remains.

  Son stares, not wanting to trust his eyes in this matter. It's like someone punched him in the stomach, and he wonders at the sense of loss.

  Relax, he tells himself. It was just a mirage, maybe not even a mirage of ESSEA Mall.

  •

  He continues watching, though he finds himself focusing on things with uncertain survival value, his continuing effort to scope out traces of the old world.

  The Great Pyramid, for instance—it's too geometrically regular to be natural, even under its coat of dust; and the Northern Line, equally unnatural, suggests a continuous feature blocked from view in places by dunes or where it's covered in dust. Maybe it was a highway. Or a pipeline. Whatever it was, the Northern Line is the only feature in this landscape with an original pre‐Boogoo name. Auntie found it on a map, a paper artifact that shows it running to the "IBP Station (ESSEA)," lying twenty‐five klicks beyond the ken to the south. Poppy claimed IBP stood for intercontinental ballistic pod.

  People used to fly. They could cover eight hundred kilometers in less time than it'll take him to crawl back to the Bunker.

  He decides he'd better have that pee now.<
br />
  •

  He massages the tip of his little finger. Strange. Usually, this sharp ache heralds a rainstorm, yet there are no shrug‐ups in the wadis, no other sign of rain.

  Son had never seen Auntie so angry, Gran‐Gran mopping blood, and Poppy saying, "He'll be faster next time, won't he?" Back there in the middle of becoming a real man, the ceremonial bottle of tequila nearly finished, he was treated to an impromptu bod‐mod. It was like a rite of passage, Poppy said the next day, referring to the cleaver and cutting board game just before dinner. It was meant to quicken Son's reflexes, never mind they were both drunk as lords, as Poppy announced at the time with much hilarity.

  Son lost the first joint of his little finger, including the knuckle and a bit of the second joint. Clean as a whistle. A month or two later, when the finger had pretty well healed though it still hurt some, Poppy claimed that, before he sewed up the fingertip, he inserted a pin into the marrow of the second joint. Another part of Poppy's credo: "Always look for bright sides to bad luck and adversity. If something doesn't actually kill you, see it as an opportunity." So in turning the amputation to Son's advantage, he also found a use for part of that otherwise useless armory back in the Bunker. He extracted the pin from a stealth‐kill dart, coated it in plastic, and jammed it into the marrow of Son's second finger joint. "What you've got now, chum, is something better than any fingertip. You've got new power. The power to end things at a time of your choosing. Bite down hard and bam. You're gone."

  Poppy told him about how speckops agents like himself routinely had teeth installed that delivered the same escape. All you did was bite down hard on something till the tooth cracked. Finger bones were easier, he said. "But do you want to know the difference between a real man and everybody else? Your standard pussy uses the tooth just to escape hard times and pain. A real man only does it to protect his squad or maybe Homeland. Or his family. You get me?"

  "Yes."

  "Howsumever, this is real man stuff. Only between you and me, chum. So Auntie or Gran‐Gran don't need to hear any of it, okay?"