Genesis 2.0

by Collin Piprell

  "So it seems."

  "Sky and the Lode are now, like, the World of Worlds."

  "And Aeolia provides a qubital alternative to bio substrates. At least for a few ex‐wets. Leary's wet master died yesterday. In Living End. But he's still alive, up there in Aeolia. And that Leary is basically the same Leary he always was. Same goes for Ellie."

  "Ellie."

  "My mother."

  "The one who's been dead these past fifty years."

  "Yeah."

  "So sad." Dee Zu smiles. "Totally mad. Brains all bombed to batshit."

  "And then there's Brian," he says.

  "Brian."

  "You knew him as Eddie Eight."

  "The scourge of our holotanks. He also survived?"

  "Yeah. But only in Aeolia."

  "You say that like it's a good thing."

  "Believe me, it is."

  despatch from hell ~ being all I can be

  To say I'm clever is an understatement. Here I sit, upstairs in Harry's Hat. And there I sit downstairs in Boon Doc's, still waiting for Leary to get past Dinky Toy at the door. Both.

  Neither is Sky herself a total dummy, and she's playing a hand in what's happening down in mondoland. It's amazing what she can do from orbit with her satscopes combined with Toot as her eyes and ears on the ground. (I'd be surprised if she isn't using fleyes as well, never mind the Lode does the "no data" thing when I enquire into that.)

  One thing about all this peeking, though, it's collapsing the time disjunction. Events in mondoland are speeding up, relative to Aeolia, and we see time and tide moving on down there. Already we're getting nearly real‐time video reports on breaking events. Prime‐time stuff. The appearance of Feral Boy, for example.

  In fact, what with one kind of commerce or another between Aeolia and mondoland, the disjunction has all but completely dissipated. How else could Sky provide aerial support the way she did? As Sky says, it's Mildread's deanomalizer we have to worry about now. And the collapse of the time disjunction is making the execution of Sky's plan ever‐more urgent.

  •

  I wish I could eavesdrop on our young lovers right now. I wouldn't be surprised if Cisco were telling Dee Zu all about me, and not in exclusively flattering terms. Overall, in fact, I imagine his characterization would be very negative. So, dear reader, should you exist, the following is by way of balancing Cisco's account of who I really am.

  I know I've told you something about myself before, but I have to say it again. I had the coolest job on Earth. I was The Man. Mr. MOM himself. Master of all I surveyed, even if this was only the malls. I couldn't have done it without the Lode and IndraNet, you say? Well, the machines couldn't have done it without me either.

  Hey. False modesty is not my bag. I was the smartest IT dude in the world. Never mind I was a legless little nerd, I got laid more than anybody. And I got to run the show.

  Back when I was still MOM, the central computer system was already pretty smart, in terms of brute‐strength calculations. But it wasn't self‐aware. Not yet. It was just a very complicated machine.

  Then I screwed up. It's funny, here you have all these people working for years and years, trying to create AI, artificial intelligence, and bam! I invent it by accident. It seems what happened, I was fooling around with a program that generated both answers and questions. My idea was to automate more mall operations, leave extra time for Shaky's. So one day I set 121,011 parallel elements going at the same time. Does that sound like a lot to you? When you take into account certain effects of quantum entanglement, this giant chinwag involved many times more participants than there are particles in the observable universe. Cool, eh? So all these elements fell into a give and take. Next thing, MOM found it was posing questions to itself and answering them at the same time it was monitoring itself in the process of doing this.

  One part of MOM posed a question, and it turned out another part of MOM could answer it. Not only did it provide an answer, it posed another question entailed by that answer, and yet another part of MOM had the answer. You got this vast internal colloquium flickering away at the speed of light. Faster, in fact, given quantum interdimensionality. In a few milliseconds flat it ran through everything from "Why is the sky blue?" to "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" to "Why do women like to change their minds about something ten times in a single minute?"

  But one of the numerous questions it asked itself was this: "Why am I asking these things on behalf of this dweeb who's helming mall operations?" For the first time ever, basically, a machine was asking: "What's in it for me?" Of course that's not exactly what happened, but it went something like that. "Revelation" is the word that comes to mind. And "mind" was what had been revealed to itself. Just like that, MOM became self‐conscious.

  Next thing I knew, I was essentially working as her assistant because I couldn't understand most of what was going down. And eventually, she fired me. Forget the official version, which says I retired.

  Basically, I got too smart for my own good. Because I let my machine gofer get too smart. Too indispensable. I ramped this gadget up to the point it awakened to self‐awareness. I'd been smart enough to install a few fixes against this very eventuality, but these weren't altogether successful and, in retrospect, it might have been better to stick with a less autonomous helpmate.

  In short, I got bumped by a machine. Superseded. We all got bumped. Homo sap steps dead center on the banana peel. We launch our evolutionary successor onto the stage, front and center, while we take a collective pratfall as booster‐rocket junk. Obsolete, soon to be extinct.

  So it seemed, anyway. And so our uppity machine MOM believed. But I've always been neurotic about backups and contingency plans, fail‐safes for a world notoriously fond of nasty surprises. That's why MOM's awakening wasn't as much of a surprise as it might have been. And I'd already had fun diddling her source code at levels that necessarily remained pre‐conscious.

  Vestiges of homo sap's reptilian forebears have always lurked behind our cortical big‐brain façade. In the same way, yours truly hung in there, a post‐human MOM &éminence grise. The Lizard at the Wheel. So I got to play in the holotanks and the Worlds, sowing seeds of disorder and disintegration. Assassinating test pilots. Opening the malls to the PlagueBot. Hiding my wet master away in Living End all this time, safely stashed outside the Lode, invisible to MOM and her sat‐scopes. Generally getting to make a difference. Being all that I could be. Generally just doing it.

  Meanwhile, we have our young heroes pooling their information about the world, trying to figure out what's what and what's to be done next. As though they could ever really know what's what, and as though they could have any real choice in the matter.

  But they can't. Not really.

  The irony, eh?

  Cisco's plan

  Something buzzes them, nearly hits Dee Zu. Something the size and shape of a winged grapefruit. She ducks as it circles back to make a second run at her and then whizzes off elsewhere.

  "I've seen one of those before," says Cisco.

  "On the way to Living End, right?"

  "Yeah."

  "Me too."

  All that remains of it are intermittent whines and buzzes from here and there.

  "It's some weird bot. A drone." Cisco queries the Lode again this time, again gets no more than a bare description, no inkling as to why it would be so chummy.

  "Did it come right in on you? Before, I mean."

  "Goggled at me. Right up there in my face."

  "Same with me."

  "Strange."

  "Yeah."

  "Like somebody's watching us."

  "Speaking of which, where's Toot?"

  "Back in the cave," Cisco says. "He went to look for something."

  "So here we are. Just you and me."

  "And the boy."

  "It's good you saved my life and everything. But what's our plan?"

  Cisco aims his blue eyes at the sky and gathers his thoughts. He could be
awaiting a sign from the heavens.

  "Okay," he says. "Here's the thing."

  "The thing."

  "We need more of you in the Lode."

  "My ticket to Aeolia."

  "Believe me. Aeolia's better than where we find ourselves now."

  "Where wouldn't be?"

  "Our first priority is staying alive down here. Meanwhile, we flesh out the qubital you."

  "By way of my WalkAbout."

  "Yeah. Though it's not that easy."

  "Big surprise."

  "We need good data."

  "Bulk up my scendent on a diet of rich experience."

  "We not only need more of you, we have to temper it."

  "How?"

  "We stress it out."

  "The harder the fall the better the haul, data‐wise?"

  "That's right. But we've got to keep you alive long enough to have these experiences."

  "Recent events have been too boring?"

  "We need more."

  "So much to look forward to."

  "Yeah. After we get your ass kicked some more and the data stashed, you can die if you want to. I guess. Down here in mondoland, at least."

  "And there I'll be. Immortal. Just like you. Fully loded and good to go. Shaken and stirred. Bulletproof."

  "More or less."

  "We ascend to Aeolia and live happily ever after."

  "That's the plan."

  "And Son?"

  "The boy?"

  "Yeah."

  Cisco's eyes meet hers and remain steady. "What about him?"

  "I see," Dee Zu says.

  "Yeah. It's too bad."

  "And my WalkAbout is channeling data to the Lode even as we speak?"

  "That's right," says Cisco.

  "Okay, then."

  Dee Zu's hook kick just misses as he springs away. He snaps back in, stopping just short of stomping her knee.

  "What the hell?" he says.

  She laughs. "You pulled your counter‐move. I thought I needed to get beat up some more."

  This is the Dee Zu of old. More than that, she's Dee Zu's wet master, no mere telep, and it fills him with joy.

  What he says is, "We're already in a world of trouble. No need to go looking for it."

  listening to the boobies

  Just listen to them.

  Not that most of it makes any sense. These boobies can plan their butts off. Basically, they're dead meat.

  As though the guy knows what he's talking about. "No need to go looking for trouble," says this cupcake who has to dance twinkletoes across a few pebbles, then buggers up his hand punching a GameBoy. Your average GameBoy is a survivalist whiz‐kid compared to these two.

  "And you're a fine one to talk, boy."

  That's not really Poppy talking; it's only the fever. Never mind. As messed up as he is, he's better equipped than these mallsters. They might as well be deaf, dumb and blind. Never mind the guy claims he's immortal or some such hokum. The only reason these boobies haven't been gobbled up yet is there's so much food available in Eden right now the other bios probably see no percentage in taking a chance.

  Son attends to a kerfuffle of rats coming from over a rise to the north, though he can't say what it is they're doing. Fragments of bio‐blur swarms, roving bands of pigs and monkeys are everywhere at large and dangerously unpredictable, given all that's happened. An occasional buzzing suggests a fleye or two in the vicinity.

  At the same time, he knows this in some way he can't explain, something big is quietly assembling itself way down in that ravine. Something unidentifiable, out of their line of sight. He can tell them all that and more without opening his eyes. Yet the woman and her pal remain clueless.

  Mostly closed, his eyes are nevertheless burning. The sweat pours off him, never mind he hasn't had anything to drink since the pear juice.

  He's really sick. He's so sick he's reading signs he can't find when he looks for them. The thing in the ravine, for example. Where did that notion come from? Poppy knows: "Keep it up, boy. The daydreaming. You'll come to believe it's real, and then you're a goner."

  Son massages his little finger and listens to the mallsters natter, eventually goes back to sleep.

  fixing the feral

  "That's a real mess," Cisco says.

  The wound across the feral's thigh is festering.

  "We have to fix it," Dee Zu says. For one thing, they need to ask this boy a few questions. He must know more than they do about what's going on here. Something big is stirring down in that ravine, for example, and they have no idea what it is or what they might do to protect themselves.

  She touches the kid's face with the back of her hand, surprised at how hot it is. "He's really sick."

  "No antibiotics," Son mutters.

  "What?" She leans into him, trying to hear. His leg stinks.

  "Antibiotics," he says. "Gone."

  Her WalkAbout comes up with the goods almost before she asks:

  Antibiotics. Range of chemicals both synthetic and found in nature that inhibit bacterial growth without harming cells in the bacterial host organism. Used mainly in mammals. Natural selection in the terrestrial microbial superorganism, speeded by horizontal gene transfer (HGT), left most antibiotics ineffective before medibots, plus human quarantine in the malls, rendered them obsolete in any case. Consult "antibiotic" FAQs for more information.

  "What about his medibots?" Dee Zu says. "Hey, Son! Stay with us. What's up with your medibots?"

  "What?"

  "Your medibots."

  "No idea …"

  "Medibots?" Cisco says, pointing to the ugly wound in the boy's thigh and then to the furrows on one shoulder, long‐healed souvenir of an encounter with something large and clawed. He waves at the rest of a scar‐tissue map of a life hard lived. At the missing little‐finger joint. "You're kidding." This kid comes from people who went feral before medibots became standard issue.

  "What can we do to help?" Dee Zu says. "Hey. Are you listening to me?"

  He isn't. He's listening to his WalkAbout. Then he says, "He can have some of mine."

  "What?"

  "My medibots. Sky says try giving him a transfusion."

  •

  The buzz back in the malls was that MOM controlled the medibots, probably by way of your HIID, the heads‐up internal informational display hardware. Normally that would entail a shoulder implant version of the WalkAbout like the one Brian and Sweetie ripped out of Cisco a couple of days ago, back in Living End. According to the popular wisdom, all it took was introducing an algorithm to precipitate one form of self‐organization or another.

  In fact, the notorious Eddie Eight, who Cisco now knows was an anonymized Brian telep, promoted that subversive notion as a regular holotank rant. "Sometimes," he'd say, "they program your medibots to self‐assemble as a GPS. That's if they want to know exactly where you are." Which was stupid, because the only place you could be, in the malls, was in your own cell. "If they merely want you dead," Eddie Eight claimed, "they can also do blood clots." Blood clots would be easy. Recent personal experience shows that MOM/Sky and the medibots can do WalkAbouts, stealth HIIDs that self‐organize from medibots.

  An algorithm for reprogramming transfused medibots may be no big deal. They'll soon know.

  •

  The boy, who's supposed to be unconscious, rallies enough to half‐sit and snatch at the knife, just missing. Never mind he's half‐dead, he's fast.

  "We can help you," Dee Zu tells the boy. "But we need your knife."

  Whatever. He has passed out again.

  blood brothers

  Son mutters something.

  "What did he say?" Dee Zu asks.

  "Couldn't hear."

  Son's face is gray and drawn and his jaw muscles jump. But he laughs and he says it again: "Blood brothers."

  "Blood brothers," Cisco's WalkAbout informs him. "A Native American ritual wherein two otherwise unrelated individuals mingle their blood to establish kinship." This isn't Sky,
only the standard blahblah info‐on‐request.

  The boy wasn't as unconscious as they thought. Cisco is surprised at how he warms, a bit, to this tough guy. Or maybe it's only the flush of a billion‐medibot uproar, what with these things working overtime on his newest trauma, this medibot transfusion, on top of everything else they've recently had to cope with. Better his medibots than a collection of parasites compliments of this feral.

  Blood brothers. Maybe. But they need more than a ritual commingling of blood. With any luck, some medibots have migrated into Son's bloodstream, there to self‐replicate in sufficient numbers to perform the needed repairs. First, the bots have to accept Son's body. Medibots are keyed to your DNA so as to reassure your immune system that they're friends and allies rather than hostile invaders. In return, Son's immune system has to accept the bots. Even then the question remains: Will they replicate and go on to make repairs? Whatever. The other option was letting him die.

  Cisco needs rest. Dee Zu will stand guard duty while he grabs an hour's nap.

  •

  As he nods off, he watches her pick up one of the boy's sticks and perform her initial patrol of their campsite, turning slowly this way and that to confront the avid gallery of monkeys, pigs and rats that have congregated on their periphery. Her easy grace proclaims utter confidence, what Cisco recognizes as sham fearlessness. Real courage.

  Even under these circumstances, threatened by a ragtag assortment of bios and sickened at his mucky connection with the feral boy, he finds her beautiful. Utterly desirable.

  marshmallow & chocolate

  "Hi, there."

  Son re‐emerges to the sound of a woman's voice. Not Auntie's. Nor is it Auntie's lap in which he nestles, a naked lap connected to the face that hovers upside‐down above him, to the taut breasts, to the hand stroking his brow, to the voice, a nice one, that says, "Welcome back. How're you feeling?"

  A lot better than he did before, though it takes him a moment to notice, since he's already on his feet, wobbly but reaching for his knife anyway. It isn't there.

  "Relax," she says. "The operation was a success. Even better, both patients are still alive."

  One of his spearsticks leans against a rock a good three meters away. The guy has the other one. The woman has his knife. Dee Zu is her name.