Genesis 2.0

by Collin Piprell

  Over in one corner of the yard stands an ornate little wooden building atop a post. Leary watches a gray squirrel where it crouches on the front deck of the spirit house, poaching on offerings of green mango, peanuts and sticky rice. A gang of mynah birds strut about on the lawn nearby, awaiting their chance to finesse some food, maybe dip into that glass of red soda pop set out for thirsty spirits. A charming scene, no doubt. But Leary has seen it all before. He has seen it, and seen it again. Sometimes the mynahs outwit the squirrel, sometimes they don't. Once a snake moved in on the squirrel instead. When Leary told Ellie about it, she said, "No more snakes, okay? It's no big problem but, if you don't mind, we'll do without."

  In fact, Leary likes snakes. They were part of mondoland, what he still thinks of as the "real world." Pre‐malls mondoland. Even though he knows that what they have now is the real world, the realest one on offer, anyhow.

  "Our Aeolian Bangkok is plenty good enough," Ellie tells him, maybe a tad too often. "I like it here."

  •

  The hot, humid air is fragrant with jasmine, never mind it's too early in the day. Back in mondoland, before the PlagueBot ate everything, that tree, the one half‐concealing the balcony outside the upstairs master bedroom, was a night‐blooming species. So what, says Ellie. Back in mondoland, back before the PlagueBot and the malls, she always believed their Bangkok home would be perfect if only she could smell these flowers all day long. That, and if the cool season got extended throughout the year and if they had their own child to share this house and garden. She has decreed the first two conditions, here in this Aeolian version of Bangkok, and so it has been. The business of the child has proven more complicated.

  Aeolia. This is Leary's world. He's almost okay with it, though some things bother him. For example, he isn't entirely happy with twentyfourseven night‐blooming jasmine. Part of the pleasure, back in the old days, was the chronic surprise when nightfall extruded this heady fragrance. But he doesn't argue the issue. What the heck. You get a similar scent from the strings of jasmine buds draped over the deck on the spirit‐house. Now that he's paying attention, Leary also smells incense, looks to see it rise in delicate twists from a thicket of joss sticks amid the flower garlands. Neither he nor Ellie ever believed in jao thii, the "spirits of the place," or any other spirits either. Or so they always said. Still, they liked to honor the local traditions, and in a way he can't explain, those spirits, in their honoring of them, actually did come to live inside them and their home, and they were welcome.

  You have to wonder, though, what spirits inhabit Aeolia, this manifold of generated realities, GR worlds without end, potential realities fashioned according to whoever's memories and whatever whims. If spirits do inhabit these strange qubital spaces, were they here in the beginning; did GR spirits exist before the generation of these worlds and the ascendance of their creators, human and machine?

  Mind you, this kind of thinking gets you nowhere. Besides which, Leary is distracted by a hubbub in the lane outside their compound. You have to wonder what spirits might animate the ever‐denser horde of posits that presses up against their gate.

  In some ways, this heaven isn't all you'd want your heaven to be. This matter of the posits, for example.

  Besides which they want news of their boy. Ellie's sick with worry. So's Leary, if the truth be told. But Sky says relax. She says just about nothing has happened yet back in mondoland. She says it's like they're living in two different time zones, the fast track up here and the nothing's really happening track down there. Which doesn't make much sense, and welcome to Aeolia.

  So life's unfolding like a mostly pretty good dream here in Aeolia, while the action's hardly gotten started where Cisco and Dee Zu are. Then the question is this: Does that give them time to do something to help? Sky says it's too soon to tell.

  But it's hard, not knowing how he's doing down there. Mondoland is better than being dead or being a Brian experiment. But maybe not a whole lot better. Hard to see what's there for him. Or for Dee Zu. Sure, they've got each other. Realistically, though, how long will they survive mondoland on their own?

  •

  Oblivious to all such issues, the squirrel is squirreling away as much of the food offerings as it can. Meanwhile a mynah bird, the one they call Bandit, marches up to the pedestal post and squawks threateningly. The others mosey around as though one of them has lost a contact lens in the grass, maybe figuring they can together divert this simple rodent from its lunch and then move in to scarf the leftovers. But the squirrel is designed to appear smarter than that; it barely pauses its nibbling. Leary watches, almost forgetting that this is all simply part of the program, and that these creatures are only configurations of qubital data in the Lode. Mere ebees. Electronic beings.

  He doesn't like to remember this. Even less does he want to remember that neither he himself nor Ellie is much more than that. Although they are more. Or so they're led to believe. "Scendents" are special, after all. "Autonomous ebees." That's what Sky calls them. Maybe so, Leary reckons, but they're ebees for all of that. Like Sky herself. Or like the ever‐increasing numbers of "posits," composite ebee scendent‐equivalents.

  "Sky has to do something about that," Ellie says. Though it isn't clear that Sky can fix this even if she wants to.

  Modular beings built from partial loded data, elements of what were once real people and then fleshed out with off‐the‐shelf qubital components. They're proliferating like rabbits. Ebee spam. Though Sky says they're real people, if not the same as wet scendents, still close enough.

  Never mind. Posit, scendent and ebee squirrel wallpaper alike, all are dependent on the Lode for their existence. And on MOM. Even more than in the malls, survival remains impossible without the mall operations manager. A machine that has evolved into something more.

  The easiest way to describe Aeolia, it's like one big Worlds UnLtd world, though this one is the World of Worlds. The scendents have the space to choose and customize their own world within it, but now the "real" one—the reality underlying it all—that's Aeolia. And the Lode. Forget the flesh and blood, the material physics and chemistry and so on. Now they're qubital beings, whatever the heck that means. Creatures of the Lode, as Ellie says. She also says that would've made a good title for a horror movie.

  •

  Never mind. Life here could be worse. Ellie is pretty much the Ellie she always was. And she says Leary is who he's supposed to be, or near enough.

  Aside from Cisco, whose scendent rests in suspension for now, Brian is the only other wet scendent. Leary's "old buddy," and they do go way back. But he's another matter. The Aeolian Brian is a mess. A dog's breakfast. Only partly the man he used to be, who was already a mess, he now includes a mix of other stuff nobody would want in his head.

  Having said that, does Leary feel sorry for him? No. God knows Brian deserves all that and more.

  despatch from hell ~ chickenman's brag

  First, I should introduce myself.

  The name is Brian Finister, sometimes known in the old days as Brian the Evil Canadian. And that was quite some time ago because I'm one‐hundred‐and‐thirteen years old. Can you believe it? I look no more than forty. Same as back in Worlds UnLtd which, after all, was Aeolia's predecessor, I can present myself as any age I want.

  Or any ages, come to that. Back in the Worlds, I was a dab hand at running two teleps at once. Telepresent Ebee Projections Were Us, eh? Same‐same in the mallster holotanks. Aside from Sky herself, nobody could do it the way I did. I was here, I was there, I was nearly everyfuckingwhere, with no one ever the wiser.

  "Chicken Man!"

  That was Sweetie. I've recorded her interjection because I'm going to have to explain all this later. For the record, I've replied thusly:

  "Shut the fuck up, Sweetie."

  "Hee, hee." Her again.

  Boilerplate response: "Shut the fuck up, Sweetie."

  I was talking about running multiple teleps at the same time. What I'm doing
here is all that and more.

  Get this. Right now I'm lurking here in my hideyhole, snug as a bug in a rug. Safely nowhere that is anywhere, while another me sits downstairs in Boon Doc's Bar, my headquarters these past eighty years or more, one hand on a beer glass and the other on one of Keeow's tits.

  Anybody goes looking for me, it's the scendent Brian downstairs they're going to find. Meanwhile, the better part of scendent me is parked upstairs here in this counterfeit La‐Z‐Boy with what looks like a PC on my lap. In fact, this is a contraband GeezEeezee writer/editor keyboard that ascended to Aeolia along with me and the rest of Soi Awol circa Bangkok 1984. Never mind this GeezEeezee All‐in‐one Instant Author is an anomaly—it didn't come on the market till forty‐odd years after 1984—it's an obsolete piece of shit nobody's used for thirty years. Still, I like the feel of the thing. Sometimes the old ways are just better.

  So why bother writing this stuff? These despatches are a history, an account of things Aeolian for readers I can't even imagine sometime down the road. What creatures, in what future world, are ever going to read it? Maybe machines. Or cockroaches. Probably nobody.

  Wallpaper can't read. And the posits don't want to. Don't need to, they think.

  That's here in Aeolia. Call it Genesis Take Two, eh? Godhood gone to Sky's head. Never mind there are bugs in the heavenly ointment, only some of which she recognizes.

  new rules

  A weather‐beaten, gray‐haired Thai man stands over by the wall pruning the bougainvillea. This patch of wallpaper remains as oblivious to outlaw squirrels and mynah bird bandits as he is careless of self‐doubts or any other scendent drama.

  The air quickens, freshens with the scent of rain; the smoke signals from the joss sticks dance and stream out every which way to dissipate in the gusts. The gardener takes a last couple of snips, brushes himself off, and strolls toward the back shed to seek shelter. Leary knows that, if he looks in ten minutes, he'll find the old man inside smoking a cigarette and sharpening his tools. He knows this for a fact.

  Back in the original Bangkok, Somchai was like family. And Ellie always reckoned he knew as much about people as he did about plants. Whatever. He'd been a rock for Leary, after Cisco got taken and Ellie died. Leary did what he could to return the favor when, after Somchai's little girl Waow drowned in a rain jar, Somchai refused to take a month's leave with pay, coming in after four days to say he wanted to work.

  Be that as it may, this low‐rez facsimile, this joyless, equally sorrowless Somchai is the best they can do here in Aeolia. The fact of the matter, there wasn't nearly enough Somchai data in the Lode to flesh out a scendent, and there never will be. The same problem sent Cisco back to mondoland. They didn't have enough Dee Zu data to resurrect her, and she'd spent her whole life in ESUSA Mall, every bit of it duly monitored and loded.

  The only true scendents, aside from Sky herself, are Ellie, Cisco, Leary, and Brian. Because however much the posits may also be autonomous ebees, that doesn't make them full people. Sure enough, the Aeolians are all of them electronic beings. But what they've got is an ebee hierarchy, with wet human scendents coming first, the posits next and finally, way back there on the hind teat, the wallpaper faxes. You did the best you could, given the program and the limited data. Still, these bits of Bangkok would never see real versions of the many people who might make Aeolia the place you'd want to spend eternity. So you specified whatever approximations you could to people such as Somchai and Lek, and you tried to forget how much they fell short of the real McCoys.

  Then you have Brian. He has never in this life or his past one treated women much different from what he specified for his Bangkok. His ebeegirls are no more than a bunch of Blow Me Up Boopsies. And then he complains Aeolia is Hell. Never mind his Aeolia is built to his specs, that he made his own world and now he can go ahead and live in it.

  •

  On the other hand, it's Sky who started building the posits, the composite personalities. It's like Dr. Frankenstein sets up an assembly line to plug together all manner of prefab bits and pieces and then calls the results people. Worse than that, lately it's starting to look like Dr. Frankenstein has outsourced posit production to the Sorcerer's Apprentice.

  "Gosh darn it," Leary says. The clamor from the posits at the gate is getting louder. It's more like a rant, now. A surge of demanding voices, largely unintelligible. Bangkok was always noisy, but this is something different. It's hard to say what it portends.

  Sometimes the posits remind Ellie of the PlagueBot, she says. Once the first blurs got loose they soon took off like rabbits to the point they were about to eat the whole planet, and it's hard to say what stopped them. Of course the posits aren't really the same, except they could bring Aeolia to a standstill in just the way the PlagueBot very nearly brought life on Earth to an end. The way things are going, according to Ellie, they could well multiply till Aeolia implodes, collapsing under something like a gravitational force of posits beyond number, an informational supernova.

  Another thing Leary likes about Ellie is her imagination. Whatever. Forget about any supernovas, things are already getting pretty gummed up, here in Heaven.

  •

  Ever since Leary and Ellie took up residence in their Aeolian Bangkok home, they've enjoyed mainly cool, sunny days and cool, often unrealistically starry nights. Ellie specified the base weather pattern, though the two of them have voted unanimously for a dose of rainy season. Perfect skies need the counterbalance of foul weather. And now, from the lane on the other side of the wall, there comes the clash and bang of wheeled metal traffic barriers sailing at cross purposes. The big banana plants either side of the front gate panic; their frond‐flapping tizzy spreads with a wild rustle and thrash to the mango trees.

  The posits have gone to ground, at least for now. It seems autonomous ebees know enough to stay in out of the rain.

  Leary looks up to where Ellie has emerged on the bedroom balcony. She waves at him, and he heads inside, leaving his shoes on the verandah and dodging Lek, the maid, and her big basket of laundry at the foot of the stairs. "A'cuse me," she mumbles. Excuse me.

  The sky darkens even more as Leary joins Ellie on the balcony. Sheets of newspaper gust down the laneway on the other side of the wall. Two big Kloster Beer parasols, tattered by long use and earlier adventure, lift away from street vendors' stalls to go tumbling among a swarm of waiting motorcycles and tuk‐tuks, little three‐wheeled taxis, and their attendant drivers. The spicy papaya salad and grilled chicken ladies shriek merrily as they scramble to catch up and grab hold.

  "Mary Poppins, peasant variety." No sooner does Leary think this, than one of the vendors lifts off and flies away dangling from her parasol. (The parasol reads "Happiness You Can …" Leary finishes the ancient slogan in his mind: "…Drink: Kloster Beer.") The other vendor, no explorer, lets go of her parasol early to land on her butt in the road, dumbfounded, and watch her friend sail away.

  "Good gosh," says Leary.

  "My God!" Ellie says. "What was that?"

  This is strictly against the rules of this place as Leary understands them. Their Aeolian home base is meant to be stable. Rule‐governed and predictable. A proper home. They haven't been here long—a few months, it feels like, though what with the time disjunction it's hard to say anymore—but this is the first time Leary has seen an anomaly of this magnitude. He grins sheepishly. "Maybe I did it."

  Ellie's eyes remain big with disbelief, and lovely, and she can't help grinning now. "Well, stop it," she says.

  So he does. No more knowing how he stops it than he knows how he managed to launch the vendors in the first place. From down the lane and just out of sight there comes the crash‐bang of a hard landing among garbage cans, followed by another shriek.

  "Ouch," Leary says. But what the heck, the street vendors are nothing but ebees.

  Leary snorts dismissively as he says, "Wallpaper." He grins and adds: "But it's just like old times, isn't it?"

  Though it reall
y isn't.

  booms & busts

  This is just like old times, and yet it isn't.

  Boom's bare butt looms right there in Brian's face. He tries to derive satisfaction from this circumstance, telling himself that Boom has the nicest butt in Boon Doc's bar. No question, she could get a job down the street at Shaky's in a minute, though she used to say she wasn't that kind of girl.

  He gazes past Boom's butt at the ceiling mirror to see that she is conjoined at the lips with Keeow, which is to say they are kissing, deeply and, in his opinion, too noisily. Keeow is riding his erect member, slowly and voluptuously, while Boom is sitting on his face, though not so conscientiously as to entirely block his view of proceedings. The upstairs room at the mondoland Boon Doc's never had a mirror on the ceiling. The rooms at Shaky Jake's, on the other hand, had mirrors there and everywhere else as well, but Brian finds he's less and less inclined to go down the street to Shaky's, so he simply fixed things here in his own room.

  All the kissing and licking and gentle rocking eventually proves therapeutic. Reflecting on threesomes past, he drifts off.

  •

  In his dream, he is naked. He's rolling across a wonderfully pneumatic landscape of medium‐ to large‐sized breasts all asprout with erect nipples. He rolls up hill and down dale, warmed by the sun and cooled by a breeze. Then a cloud darkens the sun, and he is assailed by anxiety. The breasts transmute into a field of hairy damp hummocks at the same time he himself has come to resemble a rolling pin with a human head and an array of erect penises like spokes. With uncanny precision, each dick penetrates a succession of hummocks, each of which pulls lubriciously at a member before letting go. They suck harder and harder, more and more reluctant to let him move on. Another cloud crosses the sun, and it gets darker. Now he is enfolded by the landscape, reminded of both a fish market and an old dream of being buried alive as hummocks attach themselves to all his members, as they envelop his hands and feet, and his nose, as they block his mouth. He's being suffocated by the pussy collective. He awakens with a start of horror, and pushes Boom's butt away to seek himself in the ceiling mirror.