Genesis 2.0

by Collin Piprell

  The gray surfaces of the world behind him are roiling. Some of that must be the fever. Besides which the Boogoo, in ever more uncertain ways, is evolving faster and faster. And godbolts and bombs have taken to falling like a hard rain. Not in the old way, where they stalked the landscape at random. They've zeroed in on Eden. And right in the middle of all this, strangers appear from God knows where. Not GameBoys. Real people, it looks like. However connected with other dimensions they might be. One more weirdness among the weirdnesses that keep bubbling through the ever less familiar surfaces of his world. Now he himself is parked here in Eden without a mantle confronted with things no part of his ken.

  He could merely be out of his head with fever, mind you. In fact, everybody might be going gaga. The non‐GameBoy male, for example, and his come‐and‐get‐me antics. Something like what Son himself tried down in Boulder City. But this guy's performance had been right up close and personal; it was only by God's grace he didn't get skewered.

  And then, just in case anybody still thought he was right in the head, he started talking to himself. "Thirty meters?" he said, loud enough for Son to hear. Even before that, he gave every sign of communicating with an invisible presence above him. One minute he was addressing thin air and waving his arms around, the next he turned and spoke to the woman and they took off, GameBoys in hot pursuit.

  Never mind the woman's sore foot, they ran faster than the GameBoys. Thirty meters ahead of their pursuers, they stopped and looked back. As though they knew what was coming next. But there's no question. That guy was liaising with whoever had a finger on the godbolt trigger. Probably implanted with a comms chip, something Poppy used to talk about, just one of the reasons, he said, he chose to live in the Bunker instead of a mall.

  Far from being members of Gran‐Gran's Lost Tribe of Israel tossed out of Eden for target practice, these people enjoyed protection from on high. The question is, from where, exactly? "This world is the only world we've got," Poppy always claimed. "Forget your 'virtual realities' and your books and your daydreams. We live in this world. How do we know? Because if we kick this one, it kicks back. So just get on with making the best of it; there isn't anything else."

  In this, as in many other things, Poppy was wrong.

  •

  Sometimes, at home in the Bunker, he used to find Auntie weeping. "We didn't appreciate what we had," she'd say. "And now we have nothing."

  "We have each other," Poppy would reply. Then his voice would harden again. "And we have food. We're alive."

  Son is still alive; he still has food. Though no one remains to share it with.

  Before he advances, he takes inventory: spearsticks, knife, two catchbags and two cords, a canteen, one can of pears, one of corned beef, a security key and two hemmelite bearings, one of them, lighter than the other, containing a concealed gadget, probably qubital in nature, the first qubital gizmo he has ever actually seen. And that's it. All he has in this world, aside from the ken and his survival skills. And with the way the Land is changing, his ken is proving ever more unreliable. He can't even count on his skills, given the shape he's in.

  These others, whoever they are, have some serious chops when it comes to fighting. Never mind. In for a dime, in for a dollar, as Poppy would say. It's time to kick the world and, one way or another, deal with how it kicks back.

  Before he gets up he pushes the fun ball, as opposed to the dumb ball, under the rock that conceals him. He scoops soil over it, real soil, not blur dust, containing at least one insect and what he believes is a worm. This gadget is the coolest device he has ever seen. Of course Poppy would ask right away what use it was and tell him to dump it. But Poppy is dead. This thing is something special, and it makes its new owner special too. He's not about to lose it to these strangers. He locates its hiding place on a line of sight between a jungle‐fringed stone outcrop deep inside Eden and a feature over to the southwest that looks much the same, except it's bald.

  Anyway, it's time to introduce himself. Why not? What can they do besides kill him? Most likely they'll all be soon dead anyway. There aren't that many games in town, and he might as well try to throw in with whoever's connected to the Great Triggerman in the Sky.

  Spearsticks held high overhead in both hands, and shrugging off most of his godbolt worries, he exposes himself to the view of these others.

  friends

  "Well, well," Cisco says. "What have we here?"

  The odd man out has revealed himself. Like Dee Zu herself, and Cisco, this person is naked. Except for a belt with a knife, a couple of packs slung behind him, and two sticks held together two‐handed over his head.

  Dee Zu spreads her own arms, palms up. See? No weapons. I'm a friend. Cisco does the same.

  They walk slowly toward the feral. Dee Zu steps over the corpse of the boy with the broken neck, and the rats back off momentarily, one of them emerging from a hole in the boy's abdomen. Roughly halfway between them and the wild man, there's a patch of flat ground in front of the exit from Living End, and they look set to meet there. Slowly and deliberately, establishing more distance between each other as they proceed, they walk toward him.

  Turning in three‐sixty degrees as she goes, Dee Zu steps carefully, cocked for action. Cisco joins the dance, also turning as he proceeds on a parallel line, always scanning the prospect opposite hers. The monkeys on Dee Zu's tail retreat when she faces them and edge closer when she turns away. Her entourage includes a two‐meter lizard that's focused on one small straggler monkey. On her next turn, she catches the lizard scuttling forth to snatch the wee thing. Coveys of rats and monkeys watch Cisco from the jungle verge on his other side, but nothing has actually taken to following him. One patch of something shimmers dark and light and retreats each time he turns its way.

  •

  "Hi," Dee Zu says.

  The feral remains silent.

  He's only a boy. Like the GameBoy she killed a few minutes ago, he's too young. He must have also been born after the anti‐Madonna virus supposedly left the human population of the world infertile.

  "How're you doing?" Cisco says, and moves farther away to one side. If he puts another half‐meter between himself and Dee Zu, it'll trigger something violent in this guy.

  "We're friends." Evidence of good faith, Dee Zu extends her arms to either side again and rotates her empty hands. "I'm Dee Zu," she says, all the while coordinating her movements with those of the man. "What's your name?"

  "Who wants to know?" the boy says. He speaks English.

  cunt‐struck again

  He should kill her. How can you not think about killing a stranger?

  But it feels wrong in this case. This is no GameBoy. She stands more erect. Her movements are surer, her manner more positive. She's smarter. And never mind she was unarmed, she made short work of those others. Bam, bam, bam.

  Plus, this woman is beautiful. Not the way Auntie was beautiful, yet she's really something special. "Yeah, yeah." Son can hear Poppy saying it. "Cunt‐struck again. Stiff and stupid as a stick."

  The guy takes advantage of the distraction to shift even farther to Son's right. "My name is Cisco," he says. "Cisco Smith." His gaze is startlingly blue and direct. Son might also regret killing this person. Whatever. The moment has passed when dropping either of them would have been easy.

  "Hi," the woman says, and she smiles at him. She looks relaxed in the way predators, just before they make their move, want you to believe they're only taking the breeze.

  You don't hesitate in such circumstances. Yet he hesitates. Though his sticks could be ready in an instant, he doesn't throw. Stupid bordering on suicidal is what Poppy would call it. But his leg is rotting; it feels like he's cooking in his own blood. And all the medicine in this world is gone. He'll probably die soon anyway, so why not ride the flow, see what happens. He backs away to a safe distance, to where he can check them both out at the same time.

  These two want to appear friendly. Yeah, right. They've diverged, stretching
Son's attention and attack range to one side and the other. Any move toward one flank will prompt a counterattack from the other.

  The sweat's pouring off him. His legs tremble under a great weight that descends on him as he collapses into a swirl of darkness.

  chocolate woman

  "You're awake," she says.

  It's time to admit it. He opens his eyes and grunts.

  This is the first person of color he has ever seen. All his family were white. Even Auntie. She came from northern Chinese stock, so she was whiter than Poppy or Son, though Son heard Poppy call her a yellow bitch, one night when he wasn't as asleep as he was supposed to be. He has seen black GameBoys, of course. In fact he'd killed one, a gray‐grizzled patriarch black as print, and he'd watched Poppy kill another "black," really a brown female with a terrible skin disorder that made it hard to say what color it was supposed to be. Not that this woman before him is black. Neither is she merely brown. She's light milk chocolate, like the Hershey's that ran out on Son's thirteenth birthday but with coppery undertones. Auntie showed him photos in a book, before Gran‐Gran destroyed it, of human racial types, including some with reddish and yellowish skin. This woman is unlike any of these, at the same time she might include traces of them all.

  "Who are you?" she asks.

  "Son."

  This woman isn't much older than he is. Her skin is flawless, and her whole face and body glows. "You aren't a GameBoy," she tells him.

  "No." He starts to sit up.

  The gentle hand on his chest suggests much power in reserve. "Relax," she says. "You need to rest."

  Son moves her hand away, not hurting her but showing he's also stronger than he looks. He sits up. "Who are you?" he asks.

  "You first."

  "I told you," he says. "My name is Son." He feels himself a fool. He should pretend to be weaker than he is. "Never underestimate the advantage of surprise, chum," is what Poppy would say.

  "Son." Dee Zu smiles. "That's it?"

  "It's not enough?" Name, rank, and serial number. Though really all he has is his name.

  "It's fine. Like I said before, my name is Dee Zu. This is Cisco."

  "Cisco Smith," the guy says it again. Two names. As though that makes him somebody.

  "We aren't mallsters," the guy tells him again. "We're test pilots."

  "For Worlds UnLtd," Dee Zu says.

  "Vid games?"

  "Christ, where are you from, boy?" the guy says.

  "Generated realities," says Dee Zu, giving Cisco a look.

  "From over there." Son nods vaguely in a direction opposite to the way he came. He doesn't tell this slow‐mover to go fuck himself. Who does he think he's calling boy?

  "Where are the others?"

  It would be stupid to tell them there aren't any others. That he has no backup.

  A stink of rot, maybe from his leg, nearly masks the smell of this woman. A stab of pain from his little finger turns his gaze northwards. "We'll be getting rain," he says. That much is true.

  He sinks back into the dark.

  •

  Son drifts in and out of a dream. People are talking.

  "That looks awful," says a woman.

  Somebody pokes at him. Son opens his eyes a crack and sees it's the woman.

  Then it's the guy talking. "What happened to your leg?"

  Son gives up any pretence of sleep. "Dragon," he says.

  "Dragon?" the man asks.

  Now the woman, and then the guy, look off into some other space, what Poppy called a thousand‐yard stare. What he used more and more often, toward the end, to describe Auntie's withdrawals.

  The woman refocuses first and says, "Could be a dragon lizard. Reptile. Indigenous to Komodo, Indonesia. That's thousands of kilometers south of here. There shouldn't be any dragons around here."

  •

  The sweat is pouring off him.

  "Are you awake?"

  It's the guy. Why don't they let him sleep?

  "Your dragon."

  "What?"

  "Do you mean a Komodo lizard?"

  "What?"

  "Can you access the Lode?" the woman asks Son.

  He's too tired for this. "Load of horseshit," he says.

  "Where do you get your information?"

  What information? A fresh wave of grief takes him. Auntie's gone. Poppy and Gran‐Gran are gone. Gran‐Gran's God never existed. The Bunker and all the books are gone. What's left? Poppy's School of Hard Knocks. Kick the world and, if it doesn't kill you when it kicks back, try to remember why. Kick it again in light of this better information. Repeat above procedure till one day the world kicks back hard enough to kill you.

  "The ken," Son says.

  "What?"

  Everyone's speaking English, but nobody understands anything. Over this guy's shoulder, Son watches a sinuous green strand pour from one tree limb to where a bird perches on another below it. The green thing is a snake. Son has never seen a snake before. Slick as can be, it takes the bird.

  "The ken tells me what I have to know."

  "Who's 'Ken'?"

  "What?"

  "Ken. Who's Ken?"

  Like talking to idiots. Son descends back into oblivion.

  •

  The guy in the dream is discussing some place with a woman.

  "You followed me to Living End. How?"

  "A pod," she says. "An intercontinental ballistic pod. Toot and me."

  What's she talking about? There are no pods anymore. Not since back before Son was born. And who's Toot? There are more of them.

  "How did you do that?" the guy says.

  "Stealth mode. We slipstreamed your pod."

  "Why?"

  "I waited and waited. But the bus never came." She has a nice chuckle.

  "Let me guess," the guy says. "A telep appears in your holotank, or in some World. She calls herself 'Sky.' She says follow Cisco around the world, and you go, 'Okay.' Not knowing who Sky is, or where you're going or why?"

  "Sky? Tor told me to do it. Sky is your girlfriend. Or did you forget already?"

  First Toot, and now this "Sky." And "Tor." Where are these people?

  "This guy Tor, you used to see him in the Worlds?"

  "Did I fuck him?"

  Son peeks out between his eyelids, watches the dude pretend this idea doesn't bother him.

  "Now and then." The woman looks him in the eye. "Not often."

  "And you were screwing around on Mondays, right? Never mind the Worlds were officially closed."

  "Yes."

  "Guess what. We were both fucking Sky."

  She inspects his face, says nothing.

  "Tor and Sky, one and the same. One master running both teleps."

  "No way."

  "It was MOM."

  "No way."

  "MOM avatars. Both of them. Mondays, right? You only met Tor on Mondays, and you couldn't figure out how you could have black access to the Worlds without getting yourself off‐lined."

  "And you know all this how, exactly?"

  "I had the same deal with Sky."

  "No."

  "Yeah. I didn't know she was MOM. Not till I met her in Aeolia."

  "Too outré."

  "The way things are."

  "Whatever. The Mall was going down anyway; we barely got out ahead of the PlagueBot. Plus, I had nothing better to do, under the circumstances."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "Why I followed you halfway around the world."

  Gran‐Gran hated the f‐word, outlawed its use in the Bunker. Auntie, for her part, only ever used it for good effect, when it was really needed.

  family matters

  So Dee Zu fucked Sky. Or some version of the same. Who hasn't, Cisco is beginning to wonder.

  Not this kid, at least. He looks to be in his middle or late teens. Medium height and, except for his massive thighs, wiry. Scars, especially those across his chest and forearms, suggest incidents that go beyond the cradle sprains and sore muscles
of mallster worlding adventures.

  Dee Zu massages her toes as Cisco goes through the boy's kit. At the same time, they both keep watch in all directions. A variety of animals watch right back at them, though not all that intently. Maybe there's enough other prey at hand, much of it smaller and easier.

  Cisco holds up a hemmelite knife in a hemmelite sheath and a hemmelite canteen on a hemmelite belt. He points to the hemmelite sticks lying a safe distance from their owner. "Blur‐proof, all of it." He drags the catchbags to one side. One of them is heavy with what turns out to be a metal ball, wiped clean and cradled in a sling. The second bag contains metal containers. "I'll bet this is food." Cisco holds a can up to show Dee Zu.

  Magifacturing, the Dolls, made canned food obsolete decades ago. Leary would love this find. Not that his Aeolian scendent could eat any of it. But Cisco can hear him saying, "Gosh, doesn't that take me back."

  Cisco puts the gear back beside the boy the way he found it. The kid stirs, trying to say something.

  "What?" Cisco says. "I can't hear you."

  "Fuck," he replies. Then he passes out again.

  •

  "So," she says. "Everybody's dead. Except for you."

  "Even me. I was sort of dead."

  "Oh, yeah?"

  "This me." Cisco stabs at himself with a thumb. "The wet one. I nearly shut down. My medibots were about to sign off on me down here at the same time a qubital me awakened to consciousness."

  "A qubital you. Not a telep."

  "No. Another me. A real one. Autonomous. So I was alive here and I was alive in a GR place. But I was unconscious down here. Close to dead."

  "And now?"

  "I'm still alive up there, though now that me is suspended. Not conscious."

  "In the Lode."

  "They're calling it Aeolia."

  "The Lode?"

  "Where they're living. A generated reality."

  "Who? Who are 'they'?"

  "Leary and Ellie. Their wet masters are dead, in Ellie's case for about fifty years. But they're still alive. Now they're part of MOM. Along with Sky. This place, Aeolia, it's part of the Lode. Or MOM. It's complicated."

  "Mind transfer."

  "I guess. MOM survived the breaching of the malls, wound up tethered to another substrate."

  "And Aeolia is tethered to MOM."