Son puts the charred object down on patch of stony ground. He reaches for a smallish rounded boulder, lifts it shoulder high and smashes it down to crack the thing open. He works his fingers in and tears something loose. There issues an aroma from heaven, suggesting something better than any soya steak ever presented by the Dolls. With a flourish of his knife, he tosses steaming guts to where a ratswarm awaits. He pulls a piece of flesh free of its crusty shell. "I think it was a monkey," he says. He strips a piece with his teeth and chews a bit before swallowing and saying: "Yep. Monkey. Not my favorite."
Even in the mall, Dee Zu didn't eat meat. She had no ethical problem with magifactured meat, and the program kept it all nutritious and healthy. She just doesn't like meat. But she's starving, so she chews a bit off the chunk of flesh Son hands her. This is real meat. Not something synthesized by a Doll. It's rich and greasy. At once delicious and nauseating, especially when she really thinks about what it is she's chewing. It needs salt, though.
Cisco is also chewing away. "Good, isn't it?" he says, mouth full.
"Um," Dee Zu replies.
"Poppy and I traveled five kilometers or more to scout areas around godbolt strikes," Son says. "Sometimes we found what looked like cooked game, but the burns fused the mantles. Left a shell harder than stone." This monkey, on the other hand, was naked when it got hit. Succulent inside its shell of carbonized outer tissue, the monkeyball presents oven and meat in one handy package.
No way is Cisco going to appear less manly than Son in this or any other matter. "Mmm," he says, extending his arms so the juices don't drip on him.
Watching him gag, Dee Zu grins and manages to keep her own share down. She even tears off another mouthful, dripping with juices at once savory and sickening, redolent of stale blood and death.
Wet sex feels more substantial than GR sex, richer yet somehow unwholesome. Compared to its magifactured substitutes, real meat is like that. Both meat and wet sex excite her. What the sex lacks, compared to the supersaturated rez of the Worlds, it makes up for with a complex of subtle associations that speak directly to her center. Same goes for this meat. Never mind she still thinks she might vomit.
"But the real secret?" says Son. "After the godbolt strike, I reckon, the monkeyball rolled down into the gully where I found it, the brush all burnt out, embers still glowing, so the meat got to slow‐bake inside its own shell."
"Mmm," she says. "Good."
"Excellent." Cisco gurgles.
In fact, what Dee Zu wants is a big bowl of cherry tomatoes straight from her Doll with sweet basil leaves and mozzarella cheese drenched in olive oil and sprinkled with cracked black peppercorns. But there are no Dolls, and no prospect ever again of a decent meal.
She picks dark‐green leaves from a weedy plant beside the rock she's sitting on, and sniffs them. "Is this good to eat?" she asks Son.
"Don't know."
"Let me try," says Cisco.
Son laughs at the face he makes as he spits it out.
"What's wrong?" Dee Zu says.
"It's awful."
"Like how?"
"I don't know. It's …"
"Bitter," Son suggests.
"Maybe. I don't know."
"If you don't know, who does?"
"I know the word 'bitter.' But I've never tasted it."
Neither has Dee Zu. Chances are the malls long ago declared bitter a species of pain, hence evil. So she tries one of the leaves. "Yuck," she says. It's interesting, but no way could she say it's good. Though neither would she say it's inherently bad. "Warning," says her WalkAbout. "Such flavors often signal poisonous matter. Be advised that it is best to avoid ingesting substances that taste bitter."
"Never tasted anything bitter?" Son says. "Our man has been around."
"Fuck off."
"Been there, done that."
"This, from Mr. I've Got Voices in My Head, It Must Be God."
"Fuck you."
Dee Zu moves to stand between them and says, "Come on now, boys." An old joke: Proof‐positive that women are brainless, they have no dicks to keep them in.
"What now?" Cisco says.
"We can stay in Eden, where there's plenty of food and water. Or we can head out into the gray wastes."
"That's it?" says Dee Zu. "Those are our choices?"
"We stay, then. Combine forces."
"Kings of the Heap."
"Apex predators," says Son.
"What?"
"I say we stay in Eden. There's plenty of food."
Just in case there really isn't, maybe, Son has stuffed his catchbag with food, with what he claims are baby pigballs plus the charred hindquarters of a large monkey. That's beyond the amazing quantity of flesh he has already managed to stuff inside himself.
"Never carry more than you can run with," says Cisco. "Isn't that the way it goes?"
"Whoa," Son replies. "For a mallster cupcake, you sure do learn your way around fast."
"The last men in the world," Dee Zu says. "Both of them dickheads." And what does that bode for the known human population of the planet?
"So we stay in Eden?" Son says. "There's plenty of food."
Either they park here in Son's eternal barbeque, or they head out into the wastelands to die. Dee Zu wouldn't mind another option. Something more accessible than Cisco's "Aeolia."
reset
What's worse than learning your God is a machine? How about discovering that this God is also nuts. And what's even worse than that? Try three different machine Gods, all of them nuts and each at war with the others.
– Brian Finister
just like the old days, not
"Hey!" Leary pounds on Boon Doc's door some more.
The judas hole slides open to reveal a pair of suspicious eyes framed in silver glitter on blue mascara. Eyelashes maybe supplied by a Fuller Brush salesman.
"Dinky Toy?" he says. "It's me. Leary. Let me in."
A man yells something in the background as the door opens a crack. Leary edges through, dripping sweat, shoving at the posits who try to slipstream him. Inside, Boon Doc's air‐conditioning wheezes away, barely stirring the stale air. Nice. Just like the old days.
"Wow," Leary tells Dinky Toy. "You're looking good." She's being presented as about thirty years old, pretty and in her prime, never mind her wet master died when she was in her eighties or nineties.
"Han'sum man too mutt," Dinky Toy tells him. "Cum insigh' please."
Leary and Dinky Toy were friends for seventy years or more, in both mondoland and Bangkok World, and now her qubital vestige doesn't recognize him. This hurts, never mind it's not really Dinky Toy—her wet original died before she could lode enough data for ascension.
"That's Leary, for fucksake." The other man's voice is Brian's. "Say hello to Leary."
•
This Dinky Toy is pure downer, a dull approximation at best.
Back in the original Boon Doc's, she was a stubbornly sweet woman badly used by a succession of no‐good Western men who could never thereafter return to Boon Doc's, not as long as Big Toy manned the cash. Then one night when Boon Doc's was having a birthday party, Dinky Toy leaned into a bunch of balloons just as her current swain popped one of them with his cigar. Unfortunately these balloons were filled with hydrogen, which should not have been the case. The fiery chain reaction scarred her face and made a talon of her right hand. So it was good for her when the GR Boon Doc's came along some years later, part of Worlds UnLtd, because then her wet master could hide back in the ESSEA Mall while her perpetually young, always beautiful telep contributed an essential vitality to the qubitally generated Boon Doc's. And so it went till her wet master died at the age of ninety or thereabouts. Sad to say, all that survived was a facsimile of her telep. Then, not that long ago, really, the malls and Worlds UnLtd went down together, breached by the PlagueBot.
Never mind. She has been resurrected, after a fashion, here in Aeolia. Brian has specified her as part of the décor. Wallpaper. The Lode lacke
d the data needed to produce a scendent Dinky Toy, a full person independent of her wet master, not that Brian necessarily would have wanted that anyway.
•
"Hello, Leary," Dinky Toy says. "You buy me co‐la."
"Yeah, yeah." He waves at the cashier and says, "Howdy, Big Toy. Co‐la for the lady and a Jack on ice for yours truly. Heck, go ahead and have a tequila shooter yourself."
Something else that isn't just like the old days, Dinky Toy is dressed in a tatty green satin G‐string, maybe to match her tatty green high‐heeled pumps and pink halter top. This is gear for the go‐go cage. Even in her prime, Dinky Toy never used to dance. It wasn't her thing.
"Leary," Brian says. "Welcome!"
Leary doesn't punch him in the head. "Brian," he says.
This is Boon Doc's Bar, and yet it isn't. The place is jammed. There weren't this many customers on the night of old Boon Doc's epic wake. Every seat at the bar, every table is taken. There's hardly standing room. At the same time it's eerily quiet. Nothing but unintelligibly quiet conversations.
Keeow is shuffling around in the go‐go cage looking nervous, maybe claustrophobic even up there, at the invasion of posits. Of course Keeow is only wallpaper, and this species of ebee suffers no fear or any other emotion either. Leary's apprehension may be only a projection of his own unease with the way things are going.
No one is hassling him directly, not since he came in off the street. Though some of the posits sneak glances at him, their excited mutters riffling the otherwise sedate hum of chit‐chat. Then it becomes more overt.
"Leary."
"It's Leary!"
"Look!"
"Leary."
"What the heck's going on?" he asks Brian.
"That's what we're here to find out."
Brian sits alone at a table for four, an island of space in a barroom full to bursting with posit tourists. He's wearing nothing but a glitter‐spangled purple jockstrap and a smirk. Dinky Toy and Boom, attendant ebeegirls attired in G‐strings but no smirks, stand on either side of him. Brian rams the sodden stub of a cigar back in his mouth. The gaily packaged bulge in his crotch is complemented by massively overdeveloped legs. His arms and torso, less extravagantly muscular, are nevertheless impressive.
"You good man," Dinky Toy tells Brian. "Young man. Han'sum too mutt."
"I know, I know," Brian replies. He lights his cigar stub with a flourish, takes a big hit off it, and blows smoke at her.
"You buy me lay‐dee dink, na?"
"Fuck off."
Dinky Toy goes "Not polite!" and punches him in the shoulder in a way that says she could care less. Anyway, she's already got the drink Leary fronted her. The hassle, never more than habit, now only provides local color. Part of the specs. Wallpaper ebeegirls don't need co‐las, for one thing; for another, you can order enough GR drinks to drown an ebeegirl and never spend a dime.
•
It's awful, the number of posits in here.
Too bad old Boon Doc himself never lived to see this volume of trade. Leary looks around and takes a deep whiff, savors the bouquet of stale beer and tobacco smoke, of cheap perfume and roach powder. Though this isn't really Boon Doc's. Not infested with posits the way it is. And the girls are only pale ebee facsimiles of their defunct wet masters. Still, it feels a bit like old times. Brian, beer glass in one hand, has slipped his other hand into Boom's G‐string. One more touch of verisimilitude, a word Ellie likes to use.
Brian grins at Leary as he gropes Boom's butt.
Leary refuses to react. His bourbon arrives and he wipes it across his forehead for the cooling effect, takes a sip, winces, and slams it down on the table. "So here I am," he says. "Why?"
"Is that any way to greet an old buddy?" Brian does his best to look hurt, and digs deeper between Boom's buttocks. She responds with rote squirming. More verisimilitude.
"Cut the 'old buddy' crap. What are we doing here?"
"Look around. Nothing's amiss? You say you noticed a few posits on the streets on your way over here."
"A few," Leary replies. "So?"
"Besides which you didn't wonder where these new parts of Bangkok are coming from?"
Waiting for Brian to get to the point, Leary gazes at the go‐go cage, where Keeow watches herself shuffle in the smudged mirror.
"It's all part and parcel. The posits are breeding faster than rabbits in a Viagra dump. As fast as the city's growing, without my leave or yours, it's filling right up with these clueless fuckwits."
Some unease prompts Leary to take a break from his contemplation of the go‐go cage to gaze instead at the tourists. There are more of them than there were when he arrived. Which doesn't make sense. The door hasn't been opened even once. It's like finding himself in a jam of Thai shoppers, a flash of the old Friday‐end‐of‐month‐payday megamall claustrophobia.
"Darn it," he says. He rubs his glass of Jack up against his forehead. "Yo, Big Toy. I need more ice over here."
Something about Aeolia leads him to fear that claustrophobia in this place could be far worse than any mondoland version. The little window in the toilet is barred, and there's no other way in or out, a circumstance that cost Boon Doc some money, back in the old days, when he occasionally had to pay the informal taxes for running a firetrap. It's as though they're breeding right here, inside Boon Doc's. But how could that be? None of them are doing much of anything. Except that, just as they were in the streets, they're tending to clump up together in a way that's hard to specify.
"We're looking at more than a posit population boom," Brian says. "Mindless motherfuckers though they may be, the Positivity is reiwikifying the whole city. Maybe reconstructing the whole twentieth‐century world, and it looks like everything's going exponential on us. You have to ask why. I don't like it."
"You don't like it."
"No, I don't." He takes his hand out of Boom's G‐string. "Like I say, it's time we had a serious talk with Sky."
ballbusters
"So our evil genius doesn't like the way things are going in Aeolia," Leary says. "You probably want me to sign a petition."
"It's past time we talked to Sky about things."
"And why am I talking to you?"
"We have to settle some things before we meet her. We need to spell out the issues. And our demands."
"Demands. You're kidding, right?"
"Why not? She needs us. More than ever, she's starting to realize that."
"Brian the Evil Canadian mans the barricades. A gosh‐darned wet‐scendent revolt. Just can't handle retirement, can you?"
Brian remembers now how much Leary's laugh can irritate him. "There are things you have to know about Sky, and about MOM."
"What are you talking about? Sky is MOM."
At that point the door to Soi Awol rattles in its frame. Somebody yanks the doorknob a couple of times, then there's some hoo‐hah from outside followed by a draft of hot air.
"You!"
Everyone in the bar, aside from the wallpaper, turns toward the entrance. The posit spam do this in near unison.
"Gosh," Leary says, grinning doorwards. "Is that a friend of yours?"
•
Brian must have missed something. One minute Big Guy is at the bar, and the next this wallpaper punching bag is standing in the doorway like Jesse James. And who let him in? This is Brian's bar, and it's closed.
"Yeah. I'm talking to you."
"What the fuck do you want?" Brian asks.
With a sneer for all to see, Big Guy says, "I want your ass." He rolls his shoulders and flexes his arms, looks down to watch his tattoos come to life. Maybe Aeolia has taken to handing out Oscars.
"You fuckwit. Close the door before you let the posits in." This is Brian's home base, and now he has to deal with ebee insurrections? Upstart posits are bad enough; unruly wallpaper is way too much.
Big Guy slams the door shut with a back kick.
"Do you get this kind of thing a lot?" Leary asks Brian, hands resting
either side of his old‐fashioned glass. He looks more interested than concerned, though he clenches his fists hard enough the tendons crackle. Probably just running a systems check.
Doesn't matter. Big Guy ignores Leary. "On your feet, motherfucker," he tells Brian.
Rogue wallpaper. A mere glitch in the program, though you don't like to think about glitches in this program, Aeolia being the only world they have at the moment. Mutinous posits are one thing, but when did wallpaper start improvising?
The posits, aside from a few renegade outliers, remain attentive to the unwonted action, a covey of stunned ebee half‐wits.
Big Guy stalks toward him, John Wayne on amphetamines.
"Help yourself to a world of pain, fuckwit." Even as Brian delivers the line, he recalls hearing it in some long‐ago movie.
"You break, you pay, na?" True to her wet version back in the old days, the ebee Big Toy goes on autopilot. She subsides behind the bar till nothing remains of her except the top of her head and the hand that reaches up for her shot glass of tequila.
"Hee, hee."
"Shut up, Sweetie," Brian says, and then sees Leary looking at him. "It's a long story," he tells him.
"Whoo‐ee."
If that dumb shit Leary grins any wider, he'll swallow his own head. Brian evokes his control console and performs a mental operation equivalent to "erase Big Guy." Mildly diverted but mostly bored, he waits for this anomalous pain in the ass to disappear.
Big Guy keeps coming.
"What the fuck?" Brian says.
"Duck!" Leary suggests this about the same time Brian catches a straight‐armed fist square in the face.
Qubital avatar though he may be, Brian feels his brain rattle in his skull amid flashing lights and much confusion. Then he lies there inert and hurting, regretting his decision to specify the full pain option.
Big Guy stands over him massaging his fist and looking pleased.
"Nice move." Leary's belly laugh does nothing for Brian's headache. "I believe you nearly broke his fist."
All in all, he realizes, he's depressed. And he has a headache.
•
He decides to lie there on the floor for a spell while he gets his bearings. He notices how clean things are, never mind the specs call for cigarette butts and roaches and suchlike.
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