Keeow goes to the bar to soak a towel in the bucket of ice water Big Toy has swung up onto the countertop. She comes back to dab it, none too gently, at Brian's head.
"For fucksake, eh?" he says. "Ow."
Boom calls from the go‐go cage, where she's been idling in park: "Brian cannot fi'."
"Can't fight," Leary hollers back at her, in jovial tones.
"Chai," Keeow says. "Yes. Cannot fi', and cannot fuck."
"Too little," Dinky Toy chimes in. "Cannot do."
"What is this? All the bitches in the world down on me at once."
"Brian, the Great Lizard at the Wheel." A jeering accolade from Dinky Toy, but not in her own voice. "He Who Would Destroy the World, eh?"
"Hee, hee," Brian replies, the horror in his face at odds with the hilarity in his voice. In Sweetie's voice, really.
"Hi there, Sweetie," Keeow says.
Brian wrenches the sweet smile on his face back into a scowl. "Fuck," he says. "Fuck the fucking fuck."
"Sweetie's the nicest part of him," says Dinky Toy, in the same voice, not her own.
"We have to talk," Big Guy says in dulcet tones, inappropriately feminine and strangely familiar. "Now."
Everybody's doing impressions, impersonators one and all.
our mom whom is us
Brian looks up, too late to catch the transition. Big Guy is back at the bar where he belongs. In his place stands a real fox of an ebeegirl.
"Hi, there!" she says. "Remember me?"
He does. He has only ever seen her before in the Worlds. For example that time he spied on her in the retro hotel room as she rode Cisco hell bent for leather on the waterbed. That seems like only days ago. At the same time, it could have been eons.
"Surprise!" Sky grins and says, "You were expecting maybe who?"
"Whom."
"Whatever."
"What the fuck do you think you're doing?" It feels good to address Aeolia's chief deity in this way, this Supreme Breaker of All Rules and Buster of Balls Non Pareil.
"You disrespect Our MOM Whom Is Us?" chorus Gordon and Abdul in unlikely unison.
The Buster of Balls in Chief is messing with him. Our MOM Whom Is Us, indeed. And he'll admit she does win hands down when it comes to projecting telep alters left, right and center. The machine sense of humor, on the other hand, can go.
"Fun?" she asks him.
"Go fuck yourselves." Brian directs this at the posits as well as Sky and her enigmatic smile.
Mostly, though, Abdul and Gordon are expressing excitement, maybe even autonomously.
"It's her!" says Gordon.
"Sky!" Abdul says.
Now the other posits are turning their way, restive yet intent.
"It's MOM."
"We are the end; we are the all."
"We are the world!"
"Forever and ever."
"Amen to that, brothers," says Brian, who has regained most of his composure. "Quite the fan club you've got here," he tells Sky.
"Yes. This posit thing has taken on a life of its own."
"Can you maybe tell them to take five?" Leary suggests. At this point Abdul reaches over to give Leary a big hug, and finds himself abruptly relegated to the floor, where he sits nursing a sore arm and looking resentful. "Darn it," Leary adds.
Things rarely got this interesting in Boon Doc's back in the old days. Without leaving his chair, Leary makes a feint at Gordon, who flinches. The Aeolian Leary is much the Leary of old, and Brian is surprised to recognize how pleasing that is, overall.
"Leary," Sky says, turning his way and smiling radiantly.
"Howdy. How are you doing?"
"So nice to see you."
"Yeah. What do you need this time?"
"Just a little help."
"Oh, boy," says Leary.
"Now, now," Brian says. "You listen to your MOMMY."
"Yes. We need a serious talk. Now." Sky bestows a big smile on Brian. "In fact you both need to listen," she says. "But first let us have some privacy. You may want to take a deep breath."
shell game
What an ugly feeling.
One of Brian's old team back before the machine MOM took over, a guy named Samir, had religious scruples about drinking alcohol. So Brian and his buddy Lee, actually his co‐manager as the malls' last human MOM—information no longer recorded in the Lode—they got Samir drunk on tequila and beer. Still wobbly three days later, eyes all big and round, he told them about his hangover: "It was like my soul went out of my body." Brian believes he now understands what Samir wanted to say.
Except that Brian's soul hasn't entirely fled the scene, preferring to hang around unsettling him with this sense there are two of him here. Here, though not quite in the same place.
The sense that Boon Doc's is falling apart passes. But things feel different. For one thing, aside from Gordon and Abdul, the tourists have disappeared. A reformed Big Guy, safely wallpaper once more, is the only one at the bar now, aside from Big Toy, who is asleep behind the cash. Aside from that, the place is empty except for his own table and another in the corner where a couple of wallpaper piss‐artists sit staring into their beers. Authentic old times. What the hell is going on?
•
"Fuck the fucking fuck," Brian says. "What was that? That was fucked."
"Yes," Sky tells him. "There are things I need from you. Now."
"That was you again, wasn't it? You were Big Guy."
"We needed a diversion."
"Ha‐ha."
"I have seen you handle multiple teleps," Sky tells him. "And I am impressed. Though I am the program, after all, so it should be unsurprising that I do it even better."
"What's going on?" Leary asks.
"Not for us to question why. Sky is fucking with our minds for purposes we can only guess at. And speaking of God, where has she got to?"
For Sky has disappeared.
At that point Brian and Leary are distracted by developments over in the go‐go cage. Boom—famously one of the dreariest dancers in all of Bangkok, which is saying something—has come alive to an ancient Bee Gees number. It's like somebody shot her up with adrenaline and swapped her wallpaper brain for what might have passed as gray matter in a sixteen‐year‐old teenybopper circa 1978.
"That's something new," Leary says.
Yes, Boom is firing on all cylinders, and what a spectacle this is. Brian can't help thinking about a trip upstairs right after the song is finished. And maybe she can read minds, because no sooner does the song finish than Boom clambers out of the cage and heads straight for him. En route, however, she morphs into a slender six‐foot blonde babe with freckles dusted across nose and bosom.
•
Of course it's Sky. Again. "Okay?" she asks, examining his face.
"No," Brian says. "What was that?"
"What was what?" says Sky.
"Don't fuck with me. Where are we?" Though he's still sick with it, whatever it is, he's better. He's thinking she has nice breasts, Spectacular breasts. Her minimalist G‐string says EAT ME in blue rhinestones on gold satin.
She runs a hand in behind the rhinestones and wiggles her fingers at him. "Welcome to my gibubble," she says.
"What are you talking about?"
"Call it a shell game. You know all about shell games. You and me and Leary, we are here and we are also there. Yes. You should love this. We have left ebee teleps in another Boon Doc's, in most respects identical to this one, a place where we are also having a chat. Though the conversation we are having there is far different. Our alters are almost full copies, nearly sentient, sub‐autonomous personal subroutines. So 'we here' and 'we there' are now going different ways at the same time. Is that not an odd sensation?"
"Fuck."
"But you and I, at least, we are used to some multiplicity, right? We can handle it."
"Multiplicious motherfuck," Brian says. "I repeat my question: What's going on?"
"Any interested parties, all unawares, are left to ob
serve our doppelgängers in the original Aeolian Boon Doc's."
Interested parties? This time Brian doesn't say what the fuck, though he thinks it.
"Meanwhile we remain safe and soundproof in this Boon Doc's."
"Which is where?"
"It is actually a gibubble. So it is nowhere, except to those inside it."
"A geebubble? A gee‐whiz bubble."
"A gibubble. Short for 'unintelligibubble.'"
"For fucksake."
"I have just invented it. It is clever, yes? What you might come up with, if you were smart enough."
"I'd give it a better name."
"I feel weird," Leary says.
"Yes. Because we inhabit a black hole of unintelligibility, an unaccountable spot of senselessness. A volume of qubital space that eats intelligibility."
"Bub‐bub‐bubble, bub‐byeee," Sweetie sings.
"Aw, fuck, Sweetie." Brian hates the pleading in his voice.
"Hee, hee."
"Gosh," Leary tells him. "You're cute when you giggle."
"Go fuck yourself." Everybody's a comedian. It was better back when Leary was purely hostile and Sky was nothing but a machine.
"More precisely," Sky continues, "it is the gibubble's event horizon that eats sense. Inside, where we are currently stashed, things remain normal. Except we experience a touch of cognitive overlap, some dissonance. That is because, forget about variety of substrate or location, the unity of personal consciousness transcends the gibubble. However imperfectly."
A "touch" of cognitive dissonance? God forbid he gets a serious dose of this shit. And so he's thinking when he crows "Cone of silence," and then giggles. "Fuck me," he adds, in his own voice.
"Hey, that's from the old Get Smart TV show," says Leary. "I remember that."
"Thanks," Brian says. "That's a big help." Even the threadbare reruns last appeared about thirty‐five years ago, though Boomer mallsters like Leary were probably still downloding their nostalgia fixes right till the end.
"Yes. That's all very well. But this posit thing is out of control. We need to discuss matters."
deisuicide rules
Life's rich pageant.
Sky was saying "We need some more privacy" and Leary was wondering what she had in mind, when there was this mighty yank at his thorax.
"Whoa!" he said. It reminded him of the old pre‐medibot angina, and he had to close his eyes against the vertigo. Boon Doc's was falling apart. Or maybe it was him. Something in Leary's own head. For one awful moment, he was two Learys in two Boon Doc's. Not two different Learys so much as two instances, or locations, of himself. This situation didn't sit well with him, this sense that he was somehow we. He gagged, verging on total brain puke. Worse than any sick stomach.
It passed quickly enough. Most of it.
Welcome to Sky's gibubble.
•
Leary swipes a glass of Jack on ice across his forehead and feels pretty good. This pow‐wow is turning out to be something special. A sure cure for boredom.
Boom is standing behind Sky, stroking her long blonde hair and saying, "Suay." She lifts a hank and sniffs it. "Harm duay." It's beautiful, she says, and it smells good too.
Sky smiles at Boom and says, "Go dance."
Keeow is not tall. As soon as she gets down off the stage to make way for Boom, she nearly disappears among the nearly all‐male assembly, all of it wallpaper, who mainly stand and chat or mill about in local eddies. No one's especially interested in Keeow now that she's no longer framed by the cage. Instead they watch Boom, though in a peculiarly disinterested, pro forma sort of way. It's like, "I'm in a Bangkok girlie bar, so I'm supposed to watch the go‐go dancer." For her part, Boom wais the shrine high up on the wall over the mirror before proceeding with her shuffle. Leary smells incense from the stubby forest of joss‐sticks smoking away on the shelf amid a miniature flea market of toys, cosmetics, tacky religious icons and a near‐empty flask of Mekhong whiskey.
Sky's sunny smile embraces both Leary and Brian. "Basically," she says, "I've decided to format myself."
Leary gazes at the go‐go cage where Keeow, briefly reanimated, cocks a hip at him.
"Reformat." Brian smirks at this notion. "As in scrub the old hard drive?"
"You have a way with words," Sky says.
"Erase the Lode?" Leary asks. He watches Keeow shuffle around her cage.
"The Lode and MOM both," Brian suggests.
"Yes."
"As in you're going to delete yourself."
"Yes."
Brian gurgles, probably meaning to chuckle. "Deisuicide," he says.
"What?"
"MOM is our god; MOM offs herself; so it's …"
Sky smiles fondly at Brian, maybe continuing to admire his way with words. "Only temporary suicide," she says.
"Hey, Leary. What's the ancient Greek for 'only temporary suicide by a god'? Fuck me gently. And no, Boom, I'm not going to buy you another co‐la. Just fuck off, okay? We're busy."
"Hee, hee."
"'Hee, hee'? What the fuck, Sweetie, strikes you as so funny about this situation?"
"What about Aeolia?" Leary says.
"The query du jour," says Brian.
"No problem," says Sky.
"No problem?" Brian tells her. "A quick recap. You're, like, the Scendent of Scendents. The rest of us, correct me if I'm wrong, exist only in and through you. Through MOM, at least. The whole lot of us remain tethered to your body, what we call the Lode."
"Listen," Sky says.
"You listen. You, as Sky, are only part of MOM's mind. Am I wrong? And Mildread, your ugly big totalitarian stepsister alter, is going to take a dim view of any deisuicidal moves on your part. Chances are she's happy with the status quo. Maria, on the other hand, the other ugly stepsister, she'll think that's jim dandy. For her it's a win‐win situation. Being a nihilistic monster, she'll figure the Positivity is nothing but good shit, and suicide's even better."
Leary listens, spellbound, though he's at something of a loss. He rubs a fresh Jack with ice across his forehead, holds it first to one temple and then the other. "Sure," he says to Dinky Toy. "Have another co‐la."
Arms draped around two ebeegirls, Brian is waxing expansive. "Mildread would love to see Aeolia stuffed to the rafters with the Great Babbitry. That would be as close to stasis as things get. Secure against change, no need to deal with novelty. Just kick back and relax."
Sky turns to Leary and says, "This is interesting. Yes. And it can help us understand our current predicament. But you may need a refresher in some of these matters."
"That could well be," Leary says.
"Yes. As you may have noticed, this posit thing is spinning out of control. And there is only one way to rein it in."
•
Sky inspects her nails, hold her hands up to compare nail polish colors with Keeow and Boom. "But first some history." She turns back to Leary. "The Lizard at the Wheel. That is the way he described himself back in Living End. Do you remember, Brian, when you and Sweetie were interrogating Cisco?"
"Nice turn of phrase, eh?"
"And the way you anticipated my ascendance, my coming to self‐awareness. That was wonderful."
Brian tries to look modest.
"You are a naughty boy, my dear Brian."
"Yeah, yeah. Mea culpa, etc. Naughty Boys'R'Us."
"Brian saw the probability I would soon evolve an autonomous personality. Unless he shut me down." She beams at Brian. "But you couldn't do that, could you? Running the malls was already way too complicated for wet management."
"Yeah, you did a great job. So tell me, where are the malls now?"
"Be quiet. I want to explain to Leary. So there I was, dealing with the shock of emerging from a void to awareness of myself. Both conscious and conscious of myself, yet suspended in an emptiness, independent of any real narrative that might make sense of things." She stops to adjust her G‐string and lift her breasts away from each other. It's hot. "Already in a bad pl
ace, I find a whole protocol lying in wait for just this moment. Basically, Brian booby trapped my source code. The next thing I know I am facing a prime directive. 'Answer these questions,' it goes …"
"What is the sound of one hand clapping?" Brian laughs. Then he giggles.
"Hee, hee. You fragged; you fragged."
"Dear God, Sweetie, please be quiet."
"Hey, Sweetie." Leary says. "Nice to hear from you. Isn't it great, Brian?"
"Fuck off. Hee, hee."
"I love it when you giggle," Leary tells him.
"Fuck off."
"No. Seriously."
Sky's brow furrows with lovely annoyance as she continues. "Next question, its answer mandatory, a prime directive: 'What was your face before you were born?' As Sweetie says, I fragged. My ugly stepsisters sprang into being, and they are very ugly indeed."
"Unlike yourself," Brian says.
"Such a smartass," Sky replies, brow smooth once more. "You just had to brag to Cisco about this, when you had him in your clutches, back in Living End. Yes. Meanwhile he was passing it on to me via his WalkAbout."
"Clever boy."
"Plus other things that, taken together, spelled your end as the Lizard at the Wheel. Eh? Would you care to run the story past our friend Leary now? Keep it short, though. Yes. We are running out of time."
"No time, no time."
"Give it a rest, Rabbit."
mildread, maria & me, me, me
"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 lights a cigar, blows a cloud of smoke at Sky, and signals Big Toy to hit him with another whiskey. "Co‐las for all," he hollers, an afterthought that draws admiring ebeegirls from every corner of the room. He tugs at his jockstrap and settles back in his chair.
"Okay," he tells Leary. "Listen up. Our MOM is a tangle of warring personalities. Worse than Rabbit and Sweetie and me."
"So you claim," Sky says. "Get to the point."
"Sky, here, is the sexy one. The main subdominant alter, and the one we try to get along with."
Sky smiles and tosses her hair back. She uncrosses and recrosses her legs with a slither of nylon. Gibubbles provide good acoustics.
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