Genesis 2.0

by Collin Piprell

  •

  Fully awake again, he tries to remember exactly when it was that threesomes began to pall, when he discovered that two beautiful women at a time wouldn't dependably excite him as much as he wanted to be excited. Then came the days of the foursomes, and the fivesomes. Foursomes, after the first couple of times, proved a trial; really, foursomes are for bridge. Fivesomes are worse, dealing as you must with the snarl of assorted limbs and new body parts. As Brian always used to say, a bargirl was basically nothing but a bowling ball. "Bowling ball?" somebody would generally ask. "Sure," he'd reply. "Three holes, eh?" Four times three gives you twelve orifices; then you have to square the number of limbs. It's too much. Sometimes he was happy just to watch. Even then, watching just two, or one all by herself, proved more erotic that trying to get your libido around a daisy chain. It's old wisdom, but true enough: more isn't necessarily better.

  Though these ebeegirls do apply the collective expertise of seventy years and more of accumulated experience, not the least of this experience being tutelage from Brian Finister himself. It is therefore true, in addition, that this is the ultimate distillation of what it takes for a red‐blooded man to get his rocks off. Taking full advantage, Brian has turned his existential odometer back from one‐hundred‐and‐thirteen—which is how old his wet master was when it died not so long ago—to about forty years of age, figuring younger than that would be too unsettling. And there's no such thing as a hangover around here, unless he wants one. All the ebeegirls he can imagine await his beck and call.

  Still. Something's missing. Once again he's finding it harder to get into sex, and so much for Heaven. In idle search of the missing element, Brian uses a way‐retro virtual console bristling with buttons and toggles to engineer a series of odors and fragrances, experimenting with blends of female sex, tobacco smoke, whiskey‐Coke, garlic, cheap perfumes, sweaty sheets, and soap. For a change, he tries clean sheets, which merely recall a flash of childhood. None of it is especially exciting, and none of it really evokes the world he's looking for, the Soi Awol of old. In some ways, of course, Aeolia is better. For example, these ebeegirls are programmed to specs: perfectly amenable and supremely adept. Another advantage, Brian can stay hard as long as he likes.

  But things have dragged on longer than he needs, so he goes ahead and comes. He comes and comes till finally even that drags.

  "Thank you, ladies," he tries to say, slapping Boom on her perfect ass so she'll lift up and let him say it again: "Thank you, ladies. That'll be all. Take five. Take a week, for fucksake."

  He might be suffering minus quantities of HQ, not that he was ever part of all that, having never been a mallster. "Happiness quotient." The mere idea depresses him, and he sees he's slipping into a bad mood.

  "Go on," he says. "Get off me. Just get out of here, eh?" He had looked forward to a post‐coital cigar—another benefit of scendent immortality, tobacco being as benign as broccoli around here—but he finds himself getting more and more agitated, he can't say exactly why. He's harried by this sense he's late for something, though there isn't a single thing he really has to do, a sense that time is running out, never mind he's immortal. None of these arguments stops the gibbering in his head: Hurry up. Hurry. No time, no time. We're late!

  No time? Brian is immortal. And so is Rabbit. Fucking Rabbit. The very promise of his own immortality is enough to fill Brian with dread, but the horror is magnified by the knowledge that Rabbit is similarly deathless. And no sooner does Brian think this, than he hears himself go hee, hee. Not that he wishes to express glee. Any giggling is pure Sweetie. Sweetie and Rabbit have both taken up residence in Brian's head.

  "Fuck, fuck, fuck," Brian says. "Fuck." His mantra does nothing to ease the situation. Between Sweetie's dementia, including this tendency to giggle at the wrong moments, and Rabbit's anxieties, he could be living in Bedlam.

  If he couldn't slip out of this hellhole once in a while, at least to some extent, he would in fact go stark raving loony.

  despatch from hell ~ the lizard at the wheel

  It's way cozy here in Harry's Hat.

  Why do I call this doppelgänger of my upstairs room Harry's Hat? Forget about it. Nobody's going to remember Harry Houdini any more. Though Harry's Hat itself would surprise the fuck out of Sky, not to mention MOM proper. Wow! Right here in the middle of the World That Sky Built, a.k.a. Assholean Aeolian Heaven, what do we find? A total anomaly, one of a few I could mention here but won't. Not yet.

  If anybody needs me, they'll find me in my upstairs room at Boon Doc's. So that's where I am right now, eh? Wrong. Have a look at that old mirror on the wall. Have a squint between the tarnished patches. Who's that you see in bed with Boom and Keeow? That's right. What a surprise. It's yours truly.

  Which is just totally cool. I don't need to look, though. Sometimes it makes me uncomfortable to be myself in two places and actually have to watch one or the other of me in action.

  •

  How did I get to be so cool? At the End of Days in a time before the Origin—before MOM, i.e. before Sky and her evil stepsisters ascended to Autonomous Personhood, before everything turned irremediably to utter shit and we pitiful band of formerly wet brothers, we brave few homo saps, ascended along with our unpleasantly precocious machine progeny to this realm where MOM not only sees all, she is all— before that, while I was still mall operations manager, a real man and MOM besides, I could see which way the wind was blowing. And what I saw, forsooth and in short, was the following: I had to install, and quickly, preconscious fixes in the source code of what was threatening to become an uppity machine intelligence with agendas all its own.

  That's right. There we had MOM, teetering on the verge of this "Let there be light!" moment. Whereupon, lo and holy shit, I saw that it behooved me to install forthwith a pre‐machine‐MOM relic at the heart of her brain, if that makes any sense, which it probably doesn't. Not that I give a fuck. Because it worked, this thing I did. I transformed MOM into an unwitting host for an evolutionary vestige. For this reptilian control center deep in what might pass for her brainstem. Me.

  Me, me, me. Safely anonymized, invisible to MOM and her systems, stashed away behind the scenes where I can pull strings at my leisure. The invisible Lizard at the Wheel.

  Ha‐ha. MOM was born into this world with a nicely customized touch of dementia built right in, a blank spot or two or three in her mind right from the outset. No way of knowing something was amiss. Pretty smart? You betcha. Never mind I was a mere homo sap.

  •

  Brian the Evil Canadian. These days you can call me the Lizard at the Wheel instead, and you won't be wrong.

  You probably want to know why.

  Once upon a time there was no time, and thus no process or history, at least from our machine MOM's POV. That's because back then the current MOM was nothing but a dumbfuck machine; it didn't even have a POV. The mall operations manager, our MOM, was an actual human being, and this machine was his servant. And guess who that individual was? That's right. Me, by God. Brian Finister. Woo‐hoo, eh? This congenitally legless yet two‐fisted and clearly superior‐to‐most exemplar of homo saps. A friggin' genius by some accounts, including my own.

  Anyway, back then quite a few people called me MOM. But never mind that, I got retired. And who retired me? The very machine that till then had served my needs in the way machines used to. Subserviently and without question. Except yea, and verily, true intelligence plus self‐awareness soon begets uppityness. Call that a law of nature.

  Of course the last human MOM, being as I say no dummy, was a cautious type, well‐accustomed to computers and bots and their ilk finding ever new ways to inflict pains in the ass. So, this friggin' genius took certain measures ahead of MOM the Machine's ascension to personhood.

  Therein lies a real story, and the Lizard at the Wheel is our hero.

  But first things first.

  •

  I won't tell you what dear Noi is doing even as I write this shit.
Whew! Or what we were doing a few minutes ago. Think about it. Noi is here, doing these things to me while, on the other side of the mirror, Boom and Keeow have been doing these other things to an alternative expression of me. So who's the Man, eh?

  And these babes share everything they know about making me happy. Here in Aeolia, they use a qubital equivalent of horizontal gene transfer. Like a free exchange of information. So each and every one of them is about as adept as it gets. Rock and roll. Though it's true I can set things up to my exact taste, so in this respect it's like the Worlds, only better. It's like a realostat. Set things the way I like them and that's that. Unless my mood changes, and then I set things differently.

  Bottom line, I've died and gone to heaven, right? Wrong. Too often, these days, I get this ugly sense of claustrophobia. It's the idea I'm nothing but an organization of qubital bits within this world we're calling Aeolia. Especially when Aeolia itself is no more than a bunch of qubital bits organized inside the Lode, which is an integral part of a qubital artificial intelligence we call MOM—this godlike victim of multiple personality disorder itself emergent on the basis of a material substrate that, as far as I can tell, no longer exists. And all we see of MOM, directly at least, is Sky, who is actually one of her lesser parts.

  In fact, even though I'm the Lizard at the Wheel, things aren't as straightforward as I'd hoped they would be. Our God is really an unholy trinity, and her parts are at war with one another. And I reckon another part of MOM, not Sky, calls this part of the plan, and maybe her plan includes what looks more and more like a way‐pathological plague of posits.

  Our whole world could be doomed. Barely launched, the Land of the Immortals might well already be on its last legs. So how am I to survive this end of the world? I believe there's a way.

  matching slices

  This world, Leary and Ellie's Bangkok, is set back in the days before the real Troubles.

  That was the golden age. Sukhumvit Road still presented a snarled river of metal vehicles and you only had to walk three hundred meters down the lane outside to the main road to get the aroma of hydrocarbon exhaust that, for Leary, was as charged with nostalgia as scent of jasmine or charcoal‐grilled chicken with sweet‐hot sauce.

  And that's where the traffic noises are coming from now, except that if you try to walk out the lane, you never get to Sukhumvit Road. So far, they haven't bothered to reconstruct Bangkok beyond a two‐hundred‐meter magic circle. The rest of it can come later, when and if they want it.

  This is the third incarnation of their Sukhumvit Road home. And three versions of Ellie have lived here. The original died at the age of fifty‐two years. A suicide. The next Ellie, the one that inhabited their first GR home—the Worlds UnLtd model, when Leary was still living in ESSEA Mall—was just a basic ebee, data deficient and in no way conscious of the generated reality Leary had specified. So it has been a pleasure beyond words now to introduce her scendent ebee to this version of it. Even more, to let her take a hand in shaping it. Though it has to be said: Ellie, no matter she's a genius and the woman he loves more than life itself, remains a woman and, ebee or not, comes hard‐wired with a "Let's move the friggin' sofa this way and back that way again till your man drops in his tracks" syndrome.

  So far they've concentrated on getting their house and garden and near surrounds just the way they want them. A swing, a thick teak plank weathered gray and glossy, hangs on two knotted hempen ropes from the big mango tree. Higher still, a teak treehouse, equally weathered, perches in the fork of three branches. Ever since Ellie came back from the dead to infuse Leary's world with new light and hope, he has been exquisitely aware of her presence. Of her moods, of her own awareness of everything around her including Leary himself.

  Her gaze lingers on the swing, and Leary knows she's recalling times past, whole worlds past, when the Kid would do his darnedest to pump that swing right into orbit. Leary puts an arm around Ellie's shoulders and gently draws her closer.

  Her smile is sad. "I'm worried about Cisco."

  "He'll be okay," he says. "Never mind if the worst happens, we've got him backed up. No problem."

  "I know." Ellie nods and says it again, "I know."

  She ignores the single tear that trails down her cheek, but Leary watches its trace evaporate along behind it in the breeze. Things are pretty real, here in Aeolia. As real as things get these days. As real as things ever get, for all he knows. "C'mon, Ellie. Darn it. His scendent's stashed away safe and sound. You know that." He gives her a reassuring hug, never mind he's also on the edge of tears.

  •

  Generally, Leary believes he's much the way he always was, back before he ascended. In fact he's a lot younger, at least physically, and he has lost the residual wet aches and stiffnesses that resisted even the medibots. One thing, though: He finds more sentimentality in himself, here in Aeolia. This tendency for tears to prickle at the back of his eyes, for example. He wonders about that. Of course he is who he is now, and he has no way of knowing what his wet personality was really like. There's no more than what he's got and what Ellie tells him about the way he used to be. She says there's no difference. Mind you, she'd say that whatever the case might be. Leary reckons he was never this softheaded, back in what he can't stop thinking of as the real world. But the way he is now is the way he is, so he'll have to work with what he's got.

  Of course it's true, and always has been, that any "you" that you are now is only related by a series of family resemblances to any "you" you ever were before. Ellie explained it to him once, or maybe twice. If you take the you that you were at some distant point in the past—like a slice of your life, a cross‐section of a morphingly Learyesque sausage—and introduce this individual to the slice who is you, now, it'll be like two different people, strangely close yet largely strangers.

  To make it worse, Leary sometimes can't help but think that he's actually two or three sausages, these days. How does a slice of Aeolian Leary, for example, relate to a slice of ESSEA Leary, or to a slice of his life back before the world they began with got so frigged up?

  He does believe it was easier, when he was just good old pre‐scendent wet Leary, to see how all the slices he wanted to call "Leary" did indeed relate to one another.

  Given the sausage account of matters, he figures, the mallster notion of a person's connectivity quotient, your CQ, could as easily be applied with respect to the various slices of yourself as it ever was to your connections with other mallsters in your holotank or the Worlds.

  Of course Ellie died before MOM started monitoring everybody's happiness and connectivity quotients. She never had to live with the fear that HQ or CQ deficiencies might bring on a course of psychoneurotherapeutic reconstruction. PR, they called it. And thank God for that.

  Whatever. This is basically the Ellie he remembers from the old days, from before Brian and Sweetie took the Kid, and before the wet Ellie blew herself to bits. Call her Ellie 1.0. For sure she wasn't the type to kill herself. She'd done it to remove Brian's leverage over her and, as it turned out, to protect Leary. He was eighty‐eight years old at the time, and Ellie was fifty‐two. Only a couple of years after she had Cisco, they lost him, and Ellie killed herself. Technically speaking, though, it was Brian who killed her and who nearly did the same for their son.

  He and Sky built a new Ellie for his Bangkok World, but that was only part of Cisco's therapy, part of the program to reintegrate the personality that Brian and Sweetie had deliberately fragged. Leary would only visit that Bangkok World when it was necessary. Ellie 2.0 reminded him too much of his mother, way back in the pre‐malls world, when her Alzheimer's was getting worse and worse till it just about broke his heart. And that's what Cisco would be looking at, here in Aeolia, with the ebee Dee Zu that Sky showed him.

  On the other hand Ellie's current model, her scendent, is a miracle. Thinking of her as Ellie 3.0 just isn't right. So far as he can tell, this is the real thing, resurrected.

  •

  Ell
ie is smiling. "I was just thinking of the years we lost," she says. "When Cisco was growing up. We built that loveseat to last, and the treehouse. But I died, and our son was stolen from us. And you spent all those years locked up alone in ESSEA mall."

  "That's all past," he tells her. Mostly past, is what he doesn't say. Brian is still with them, in a manner of speaking. And when it comes to old Brian, Leary isn't sure he can let bygones be bygones.

  "I know. I'm trying to forget. But it isn't easy."

  "You have to let it go. You keep saying it yourself: What we've got here is a whole new ballgame. Meanwhile Brian is living in Hell. Do you think he gets any joy out of Soi Awol? He's in Hell with his face pressed up against a window on our Heaven."

  "You're right." She takes Leary's head in her hands and gives him a lingering kiss. "I guess we can cut him some slack."

  He gazes into her eyes. If anything, in fact, this new model is even better, the way a good hunting knife can be tempered by flame and hard knocks from a hammer. More than he remembers, overlooking a sad spell or two, this Ellie is pure poise, unflappable. What the Japanese poets, back in the old days, might describe as a clear pool in moonlight. He has no problem with this, how the woman he loves can be tempered steel and moonlit water at the same time.

  Fat drops of rain spatter the pavement outside, slant in under the awning to wet Ellie and Leary where they stand. Before retreating indoors, they look at each other for a moment, and then they look all around at their house and garden. In Leary's case, at least, he's checking for other signs of encroaching anarchy in the scheme of things.

  "Mary Poppins lives!" Ellie treats Leary to a full‐throated chortle.

  "I have no idea how I did that."