Genesis 2.0

by Collin Piprell

  He draws his finger back ever so slowly. Now the earth, and then the rest of the planets and the system as a whole recede, faster and faster, till he's staring into a complete void. His fingertip is about six centimeters from the surface of the cup, still connected to what is obviously an elastic "sticky field." He has read about this. He shakes the finger and gets another tingle as the field disengages. The initial view of the solar system snaps back.

  "Wow," he whispers.

  But now everything is catching up with him. He twists the two hemispheres back together and returns both balls to his catchbag. He sprawls on the pallet, shifting to relieve the pain of his ribs. His leg wound has retreated to where it's only a vaguely calamitous background ache.

  He gets up once more. The notion that he might watch TV strikes him again, this time with the force of forbidden lust. The controls look simple, though once again he can't get past the on/off patch, which clicks when he touches it, does nothing beyond that. The machine appears to be a wireless device, but nowhere else can he find any way to power it up. He unwinds a string of flowers and tries on some goggles. Nothing.

  He lifts the brim of the hat to find the blonde's eyes are closed. A shiver runs up his back.

  Son takes the self‐detonating popcorn back to the bed and rips the heating cord. They ran out of popcorn in the Bunker ten years ago or more. The buttery‐burnt aroma, rich with obscure associations, rizzles at the back of his throat, rises to the back of his eyes, nearly breaks his heart. He eats it all, feels the salt doing him good. He eats till he's sated, and falls asleep licking his fingers.

  •

  He awakens again, anonymous to himself, drenched in sweat, chilled through and shaking. The bedcloths are soaked, and they stink of strangers. He falls asleep again even as he struggles to think of who he is. Later in the night, a dream godbolt strike, more blinding, more destructive than any he has ever seen, jolts him awake, yanking him out of a black well of forgetfulness. He opens his eyes briefly before falling asleep again, believing the dark scene in the Bunker is merely part of a nightmare and he's still safely at home with the others. The next time he wakes up he sees where he really is. A flash of dream returns to him, some place cold where he was trembling, miserable. It passes again, and he decides it's time to face the new day.

  •

  It's a new day. And it's a new world; nothing can ever be the same again.

  He can hunt. Aside from killing meat for himself, though, there's no longer much point. And the way his lore is failing him, can he still call himself a real man?

  Poppy was a real man, yet he died as poorly as those GameBoys did, his last words even less interesting. Son thinks that thought and nearly cries.

  In the end, how were he and Poppy basically different from the GameBoys they'd slaughtered? He has no answers to such questions, and he has no one he can ask. Is he still a real man if he's the only one there is? Stupid with fatigue and fever, he staggers to his feet and collects his gear.

  •

  Rules are rules, and they say no water from a canteen except in emergencies. But what remains of his life beyond an ongoing emergency situation? So, he takes a long swig. He opens a can of pears with his knife and scarfs them down. Come what may, today he's going to cross the border. He chugs the syrup from the can, relishing the sugar rush.

  He nearly decides to dump the hemmelite bearings. Instead, he wraps them in a threadbare towel and puts them back in the catchbag. What the hell. They're not that heavy, just heavy enough to serve as weapons if needed.

  He catches himself rubbing at the finger again. It doesn't hurt. Earlier, he had eyed a pair of pliers in the pile of stuff on the shelf with the blonde head and considered his options. But it's too soon to say what these options really are. There's more in this world to explore before the game is over. Whatever. It's better to die out on the land than alone down here in this GameBoy pig wallow.

  In fact, just the prospect of entering Eden fills him with excitement and, as Poppy would tell him, not enough fear. What's he going to do once he's in there? Good question.

  THUMP.

  The TV monitor shudders, and Son coughs on the dust, surely only primitive, pre‐blur dust, that rises off every surface in his lair.

  THUMP.

  Holy Jesus. What's going on?

  into eden

  This could be Armageddon, God's that pissed off.

  – the Gran‐Gran inside Son's head

  mysterious ways

  The sun burns high overhead.

  Twelve hours of sleep has left him numb, dangerously unconcerned. Traveling faster than what he'd call safe under normal circumstances, he soon arrives atop Little Long Lookout, as close to Eden as he has ever been, and settles in to watch.

  In full combat mode once more, the Boogoo armies surge to and fro. And no matter how merely ritual the border war, this crossing isn't going to be easy.

  THUMP.

  A tall, skinny mushroom erupts three klicks to the northwest. He has never seen a bomb before, never imagined it would be so powerful.

  Even before bedrock delivers the concussion, Son's mantle shivers in sympathy with the juddering of the Boogoo. No godbolt, this must be what he felt earlier, before he left the bunker. The mushroom spurts higher than the Ahuk geyser, and a crater wall races out from ground zero, rippling over the dunes in three hundred and sixty degrees. The column of dust and broken ground stands poised for a long moment before collapsing into a tall mound. The crater wall, after a longer moment, shrinks back in to surround the cone at a radius of about one hundred meters.

  This can't be a nuclear weapon. It's gigantic, but not that gigantic. Besides which, from what Poppy has told him, he'd be vaporized where he sits, exposed as he is to the northward prospect.

  THUMP. THUMP.

  Two more mushrooms spring up, one about a kilometer to the west and another to the northwest, and closer.

  THUMP.

  Another bomb strikes to the north beyond Eden, more distant this time, breaking the pattern that, from the first eruption, had staggered toward the oasis.

  With each strike, in rapid succession, Son senses a tremor in the dust, the concussion through bedrock, and then the WHUMP. But—and this is interesting—he feels the dust recoil even before the land spurts a towering column of broken ground. It's like a massive shrug‐up in reverse.

  And now the godbolts are back. All hell is breaking loose. Spears of intense light penetrate the high atmospheric haze, huge green‐yellow circles rippling out from the punctures and back in again. The associated electromagnetic pizzazzle might exist only in his own head. Again and again the sky puckles as the heavens unleash their bolts, the strikes moving ever closer to the oasis.

  Things get even hairier. Four godbolts take to crisscrossing the perimeter, trailing fire and a chorus of screeches, who knows from what. Even at this distance, the heat penetrates Son's blur insulation. The metallic taint of vaporized nanobots in their trillions burns in his nostrils, and the dust shudders. A thin keening rises from the land itself. Or so it seems. This could be Gran‐Gran's Armageddon, the Powers That Be are that pissed off.

  Things have changed, that much is clear. But exactly what's different, and what are the new rules? Eden, a real biosystem, has enjoyed something like divine protection ever since the Boogoo emerged. Someone or something has kept it shielded. What's different now? It's as though a balance of power in some invisible sphere is shifting fast. It looks like Eden's days are numbered, and Son has no idea why, or who sits on the other side of the crosshairs.

  The bolts strike with renewed fury, and one more natural law is invalidated as they whip back and forth along the border area, vaporizing much of the combatant armies. The five‐kilometer prohibition no longer applies. Real sacrilege, they even stray into Eden itself, where trees erupt into flame. A flight of birds catch the edge of a godbolt and explode in a series of tiny bright flashes above the forest. Another strike passes close enough Son feels the burn right thr
ough the heat of the day and his blur mantle. He feels it despite his fever, which is getting worse, just as his leg is hurting more, but only if he thinks about it.

  Another anomaly among the spate of anomalies. Even as godbolts sizzle back and forth across the border, a humanoid creature races through the boogoomen battlefield. Miraculously, given the near misses, this individual avoids the fate of those birds. It goes down once, hits the ground rolling and rises to its feet again amid the flash of flames to hobble the rest of the way into Eden.

  Son could swear the woman—he reckons this desperado is a woman—is accompanied by a single bio‐blur the size of an adolescent monkey, though this thing doesn't move like a monkey. In fact, it moves like no animal Son has ever seen.

  But the real question is this: Where can human beings be coming from?

  •

  Son is calculating his chances of duplicating that last humanoid's mad dash when the landscape loses its jitters. It goes still, as though holding its breath.

  Okay. It's time to make his move. He steels himself.

  WHUMP.

  He changes his mind. This time the bombs are so close and so big he can watch their descent.

  THUMP …THUMP …THUMP …

  The impacts are followed by a series of deep, oddly delayed explosions. His ribs ache with the impacts, his leg throbs.

  THUMP.

  Another blasts a notch off one edge of the Great Pyramid. The whole Boogoo recoils. Massively agitated, it shrinks southwards like an exaggerated tidal effect. The blur overburden thins enough to reveal dragons descending at speed from high ground to their lairs. Careless of predator or prey status, bio‐blur swarms scurry up, others scurry down. Clouds of bats boil from limestone formations inside Eden. The entire landscape is panicking. Son himself resists the drag of some kindred force, subdues an impulse to flee the series of gigantic eruptions that stalk toward him. Toward Eden, really.

  All along the border the watchtowers melt down until, more than towers, they resemble the steep cones of broken earth from bomb strikes. Except the cones are bigger and surrounded at a respectful distance by crater walls of dust. This is nothing like the prelude to a big rain, where low‐lying dust ascends to higher elevations. Neither is this the shock of bombs registering through dust and then bedrock. The landscape, at least this side of Eden, is shifting. This is the Boogoo cringing.

  And now it wants to hide. As though stirred by opposing breezes, the dust mantle starts to drift under rocky overhangs, to run down into crevices. Soon the whole surface is being sucked into cracks and holes. Within a minute the earth has slurped up the dust and licked the plate clean. The whole perimeter area around Eden lies stripped to its rocky bones, freshly swept and still.

  Son and his neighboring bio‐blurs retain their mantles, but now this merely makes them stand out against the stark background. He's still considering what to do about this sudden outing, when there comes another pause. The lull before another storm.

  A snarl of godbolts rake back and forth to leave blazing pools of white‐hot magma and to incinerate bits of Eden. Finally, they stop.

  •

  The lull is short‐lived. The satrays exit stage right; the bombs, as though on cue, enter stage left.

  WHUMP.

  The concussion jars him to his bones. The sound of the explosion arrives just after, and Son turns to where a skinny mushroom cloud has erupted to the east. The landscape races out in all directions from the epicenter of the bomb‐strike, from the plume of dust and smoke, to form an enormous living crater.

  THUD.

  The landscape spurts a second cloud, this one closer.

  WHUMP.

  And here's another, closer still. The bombs march toward Eden, leaving a trail of pockmarks through the Boogoo, finally exploding in among the trees and limestone crags, the nearest mushrooms raining down stone and organic debris. The bombardment stops again, leaving small fires and much smoke rising from inside Eden. Outside, on this side of the border, nothing moves.

  He crouches, spellbound, unable to read developments. He wishes Poppy were here to see, remembers that can never happen.

  The bombs eventually stop. Son waits and watches.

  •

  All's quiet on the northern and western fronts. No bombs, no satrays. The dust creeps back out to shroud the land.

  Once more in place, the Boogoo no longer pulls southwards, but Son still feels the jitter. It's not just him—it's not his own nerves, though it could almost be. It's more like he has been assimilated to the Boogoo's nervous system. Poppy, if he could hear these thoughts, would want to lock him in the storeroom for sure. Poppy always said the Boogoo, whatever it is, isn't intelligent and doesn't have a nervous system. Yet it can react remotely to rains. And to bombs. Whether or not it has a nervous system as such, on some level it's aware of its environment, and it responds to pressures from outside itself.

  The Boogoo towers deployed either side of the no‐man's land stand depleted, barely stirring, no more than saggy hillocks. The Boogoo appears apprehensive.

  In the slant of afternoon light, the Great Pyramid displays two flat triangular sides facing southwest and southeast and rising to a peak. Some notion of symmetry suggests two more sides, unseen, facing northwest and northeast. But here's the thing: One of the bombs has not only taken a bite out of the western edge, it has also knocked much of the dust off what is now more clearly a pyramid, sharpening the point and edges of what used to be merely a mound. The strike has revealed what could be another rare vestige, an ancient mall, perhaps, or an office tower. Why did the blurs never take it?

  An apparition of buildings, clean geometries of shining glass and steel, streams of flashing sunglint that are elevated trains, a vivid amalgam of things Son has encountered in books and things Auntie has told him about. Then his window on the past closes, and he looks back toward a still‐smoking Eden.

  He turns his attention back south and feels his heart slam his ribcage. A fleye. The thing is right up there in his face, goggling at him. Before he can think about it, he punches—once, twice—and then slashes out with his knife. He freezes again, surveying his surrounds to see what interest his antics have attracted. The fleye, hovering just out of range, whines and ogles with its compound eye. What is it spotting for? There's more to this than mere personal threats or heavenly bolts of anger.

  Son smiles, tells himself to wise up. His leg is giving him serious pain now, though it still works okay. It's time to make a move. However dangerous the crossing or Eden itself, he can't stay out here. If those people—not GameBoys, maybe even real men, one a real woman—can cross over, then so can he. Though he decides to wait a bit longer, just to see what's what.

  He gazes back out over the land, trying to interpret things in light of the ken, looking for the world they've domesticated in its naming, for a familiar narrative within which he can feel at home. But things have gone cross‐eyed crazy on him. Something evil lurks out there. Less and less cryptic, it threatens to erupt from the landscape with a giant shit‐eating grin, the very foundation of things gone berserk.

  This is as good a time as any to move. Wrapping his sticks so they won't clatter, and fastening his catchbags together behind him so they won't get in the way, he heads down the eastward ravine, planning to take that dry streambed, too shallow, but still affording cover, till he hits the border. Skywards, all remains clear and calm. A ratswarm disappears into Eden, while only a hundred and fifty meters to the west a monkeyswarm stands poised on this side of the border. It can dither some more if it likes, but Son is on his way.

  •

  He moves fast. Even as he moves, he thinks about those creatures he saw invading Eden right in the middle of a shitstorm. Where did they come from? Could this be Gran‐Gran's Lost Tribe, target practice for her angry god? If so, it's a whole lot of to‐do about not very much. At least he isn't as all alone as he thought. That's if those people survived the bombardment.

  Whatever. They're just on
e more threat, one more thing to deal with. He needs to learn whether there are more of them and, if he can, where they've come from. Then he'll probably have to kill them.

  paradise lost & lost again

  It's better if your burns really hurt.

  – the Lode

  dead end

  WHUMP.

  Dee Zu tries to relax, let her body absorb the concussions.

  WHUMP …WHUMP.

  Her WalkAbout says these bombs are most likely bunkerbusters, and she isn't safe even down here in this cave system. She's sorry she asked.

  "Toot?" she calls out. "I can't go this way."

  Toot has scuttled ahead into the cave passage, taking his integral headlamp with him. Now he's so far ahead Dee Zu can no longer hear him.

  She begins to move again, following far behind in pitch‐dark. She pauses to smear more soothing muck over herself. Her WalkAbout advises her to avoid infection. As though it matters.

  She laughs. She's flushed, mind you, and feverish. But that's probably her medibots at work; it's too soon for infection. She wonders whether she suffered more damage than the bots can handle. Maybe not, for now the WalkAbout delivers good news, straight from the Lode. These are mere second‐degree burns. Third‐degree burns destroy pain receptors, and she wouldn't hurt this much if things were more serious. She laughs again. Supposing she wants to survive, this degree of pain is good.

  She stops again and focuses. "Toot?" she calls again. "Toot."

  There's no answer, and nary a glimmer of light. She opens herself to the swell of anxiety, lets it dissipate before it can erupt into panic. At the same time, she relegates the pain to a bearable distance.

  Dee Zu is a Worlds UnLtd test pilot, one of ESUSA Mall's best, trained to deal with novel circumstances and dire threat. Though the Worlds, no matter how challenging, include a virtual console, a means of changing your environmental specs. And there's a bail button for when you need to get out fast. This is different. This world is all she's got, and she'll have to deal with it or die. As in wind up really dead, no reset.