Genesis 2.0

by Collin Piprell

  MOM's format is another matter. That has always been a matter of the highest security concerns, and you do need codes for an orderly purge of her qubital slate. In fact, any unauthorized format attempt would pose a real challenge, a high‐tech toughie of epic proportions. And I have actually supplied Sky with the correct codes, which she's passing on to Cisco to help him play his role in our EV drama. Of course simply having a substrate for her pre‐awakening data doesn't guarantee the resurrection of a self‐conscious successor Sky.

  The real question is this: Will I wind up resurrected? Ultimately, after all, it comes down to me, me, me.

  I have updated my private copy of the pre‐Sky Lode, but only spottily, I fear. And spotty isn't good enough. I want to feel fairly confident I'll reascend from my Rube Goldberg backup and find myself master and commander of whateverthefuck. It's hard to say what we're going to be left with. So I want the data Sky's got as well, and the only way to fix that is to have her first lode Cisco up in Aeolia, then shut him down there before reviving him in Living End, where, as soon as Muggs can downlode Cisco's data into the Rube Goldberg shitpile, we take Cisco out of play, format MOM, refrain from rebooting her and voilà. Bob's my uncle. Aeolia is defunct, together with aeolianeveryfuckingthing.

  Except me. I should be okay. Oh my, yes. It's MOM who's in for an ass‐kicking. Because as it turns out she hasn't got everything I know.

  •

  In general, I'm pleased to see our putative machine successor remains as sappy as her homo sap forebears ever were. Turns out machine semi‐divines also tend to hold their breath and believe what they want to.

  Why would I say that? Let's look at IndraNet, for one example. Infinite redundancy is a myth. Always was. Just another Lizard fix, a shuck, this one designed to encourage false optimism in our machine MOMMY.

  That's not to say it wasn't possible, only that I made sure it didn't happen. Instead, we got my approximation to infinite redundancy—backup balls strewn all about the place. Sometimes the old ways are best. Obsessive backer‐upper I may be, but why is that? What's all that in aid of? Control. The short answer. And redundant backup equals control. No way did I want an infinitely redundant MOM. Not a real one. But I did want to make my own personal persistence as sure‐fire as possible.

  Infinite redundancy for MOM would've jeopardized my place at the wheel. So fuck IndraNet. And let a thousand backups bloom. It's a security blanket‐type of thing. Insurance.

  I was the only person on Earth who knew MOM and the Lode weren't as secure as Sky would've liked, and the only one who knew about that shitload of pre‐ascension backups, and the only one who knew no codes were needed to boot them. I was essentially in control, or so I liked to feel.

  Back before my machine successor became self‐aware, before I got bumped as mall operations manager, I decided it would be better if I personally held the keys to any MOM format and subsequent reboot from one of these balls. Thus I fixed MOM's source code so that yours truly was the only one in the world, sufficient unto myself, who could format and reboot MOM. The Lizard at the Wheel. Yea and verily, deep thinker that I am, I foresaw MOM's emergence to autonomy, so I also made sure she'd have no way of formatting or rebooting herself. Neither could Lee, my human co‐MOM, do these things on his own.

  And all the while I maintained my own Rube Goldberg backup, so I was okay no matter what.

  Sky got this much right, at least. I was indeed bullshitting her with regard to Lee's relevance to our little project. Come on. How would you ever retrieve the other half of a codestring from a frozen head buried in an hi‐security crypt on the other side of the world when you needed it in a hurry?

  •

  While we're on the topic of gullibility and gods, let me say this: Ubër‐intelligent artifacts of human design, MOM being a paradigm instance of such, are genuine whiz‐kids of the highest caliber when it comes to high‐tech fixes for what ails you. They often prove charmingly obtuse, however, when it comes to low‐tech solutions. Something else that gives me one more advantage over the Mighty Ms. MOM.

  sky's favourite

  Sky turns Brian right side in, and has Gordon and Abdul park him at a table. She sits across from him and orders drinks.

  "Fuck," he says. From a traumatized old man trembling on the edge of oblivion, he's already blossoming back into the full glory of his Eddie Eight telep, notorious scourge of everyone's holotank back in the malls.

  "We now have an understanding, do we not?"

  Brian leers at Sky and reaches into his jockstrap to rearrange his parts. He flexes some muscles in an experimental mode. "Fuck," he says it again. "You're one sick puppy. A total whacko."

  "Do we have an understanding?"

  "Sure."

  Sky smiles. "Now, was that so difficult? You could have saved yourself a lot of pain."

  "No more!" Sweetie's voice. "No more pain." A sadist she was and remains, what remains of her. A masochist she's not.

  "Fuck yourself." This is Brian's voice.

  And then Rabbit's, despondent: "Time. Alas, and time again."

  "'Alas?'" This word, which has issued from Brian's own mouth, disturbs him. "'Alas,' my ass. When do I see the clean version of myself? You promised."

  "You are excellent value, Brian. The very best."

  "You and Sweetie. Nice ways of showing affection."

  Sky smiles solicitously. "Are you feeling better?" she says.

  "You mean now my guts aren't hanging off me like the front window of a butcher shop, a few good ideas for dinner? Sure. I'm feeling great."

  "Good. Because I want you to take me upstairs for a ride."

  •

  In fact, it's amazing how okay he feels, in light of recent events. Sky has him sit facing her, wobbling away on the water bed, and she straddles him. She reaches down to insert him, and her hand delivers a slow vibratory pulse. "Do you like that?" she asks, knowing he does. With a quick wiggle of her hips, the better to engage him, she begins to ride, rocking back and forth, rolling from side to side, pumping up and down to meet his thrusts. She enfolds him in the grasp of a moistly meaty, rhythmic glove. "How about that?" she murmurs.

  "It's fine," he says. "How about you don't talk."

  Now the socket ramifies, complexitizes, becomes strangely animated, several mouths sucking and licking together. It evolves into a pouch of little rodents all wearing their flesh on the outside, washboard ribcages, blind philosopher mice excitedly exploring an elephant.

  Wine‐dark tumescence floods Brian's throat and his gut before backing up into his brain. The blind philosophers have escaped. Now oily nymphet‐imps slide and hump and bump against every part of him, the oil almost too musky. He opens his eyes to see the window frames go frizzy in red‐purple response to unseen manifestations, neon explosions outside Boon Doc's gibubble‐shrouded upstairs bedroom window. The ceiling mirror is full of him and Sky and reflections from this redlight war out there in the street.

  Overall it's quite good. Even a hee‐hee stink or two merely complements the rest of it. Rabbit's hurry, hurry, hurry registers as a driving backbeat. They come together, Brian pretending a bit, grooving on the music. His whole body extends, stretches to impossible limits, rising and rising finally to disintegrate into a shower of infinite color and notes and scents and nameless sensations of touch and other things, falling back to here, now.

  They bask in an afterglow where Brian is thinking they should have invited Boom and Keeow to join them. But too late for that now.

  His head rests in Sky's lap. She's making a pitch, her purple and yellow words meant to seduce his attention. "Have you ever experienced anything like that before?" she asks.

  "No."

  Sky slides out from under, creating tides, and gets off the bed. "Listen to me, Brian." She leans over him, her lips swollen, eyes earnest. Too sweet, the words cloy. "Are you listening?" Rich fullness of walnut and date, compensatory dark chocolate, bitter. Though things are fast becoming less surreal. She goes over to the gi
rlie calendar, lifts it away from the door to look behind, finds nothing. "You have to trust me," she says.

  Brian fails to stifle a laugh. "Of course," he says.

  Now Sky is peering at the dresser mirror. She's looking into it, more than at it, turning her head this way and that, maybe trying to see past the tarnish.

  "If we can't trust each other now," Brian adds, "then who can we trust?"

  "Yes. That's right."

  "So let's get on with it," Brian says.

  "Okay. You get things ready on your side. I will put Cisco in place on mine."

  despatch from hell ~ better than autoerotic asphyxiation

  Whoo‐ee. That was something. Though I still don't know why I didn't think to bring a couple of ebeegirls upstairs with us. Now we'll never get another chance.

  This gamble of Sky's is a bigger risk than she wants to tell us. Way bigger. This is better than autoerotic asphyxiation. Let's just strangle ourselves, okay? Take a trip to the brink of oblivion to really seriously get our rocks off. But let's do it right. Let's try actually getting dead. What a great idea. Or just sort of barely dead. Slip into something maybe more comfortable, some realm, a novel state we don't know anything about. Yeah, that's it. And we'll adopt a blind faith we won't really be dead. That we'll come back, and we'll still be us. And life, the Universe, and everything will carry on exactly like before, or pretty close. Maybe even better, for some reason it's hard to specify. Yeah. I like this project.

  •

  Thud‐clatter. Bang.

  Now what? Another ruckus from the other side of the mirror like a wrecking crew tossing my room. Looking for what? For me, I'm guessing. Fuck. I'm afraid to look.

  Like the pain and CD aren't enough? Now I'm getting the ghosts as well. Plus a sense of pressure here, on this side of the mirror. Like something other is threatening to displace me. Fuck, fuck, fuck. It's pressing up all close and personal like some not‐yet‐substantiated thing set on cohabitation. This is bad shit. Like the original Mildread and Maria figure they'll move in together. A ménage à trois out of hell.

  Dear reader. This may be my last despatch. Be that as it may, I'll keep recording till the end.

  There it is again. What's going on? I'm under siege, and how can that be? For I'm stashed in no place that is anywhere. It's a matter of simple physics.

  Yet Hell has just got even more hellacious. On a scale of one to ten, Aeolia looks like a solid ten. Without this refuge, I'm fucked. I can't handle Aeolia without my deke‐out. What's happening here is totally untenable; I'm close to freaking out. An eternity in hysterical chorus with Sweetie and Rabbit. Hallelujah and holyflamesupmysorryass. Fucked. Forever and ever.

  Though no way it's amen. So be it? This is so, like, not going to be it. No way. It's me or it's Aeolia. And guess what. Aeolia has to go.

  Ha, ha. I laugh, but it isn't easy.

  •

  There. It has stopped. One more anomaly. I'll be okay.

  God is dead or dying. Long live me, me, me. One question, though. How many real people will be left to admire me? Who will read these despatches? Who will sing my praises? Who's left?

  head out on the highway

  Mildread's deanomalizer threatens to expose us, man and machine alike, where we plot our various heinous plots. We will be undone.

  – Brian Finister

  borehole bound

  The boy is bleeding again, mostly from a shoulder and one cheek. He has just killed two big monkeys who came barreling in to grab at his catchbag. These bags are only scent proof, he tells Cisco, if they're kept closed.

  "Whatever," he says, shaking his head. "Those monkeys were real kamikazes. They couldn't have been that hungry, under the circumstances. And why only the two of them? Maybe they lost their swarm instincts at the same time they dropped their mantles."

  Yeah, yeah. More servings of ex post facto ken. Though Cisco doesn't say this. What he says is, "Probably they didn't recognize what a hard man they had to deal with."

  The boy looks at him but doesn't say anything. For one thing, he's busy enjoying the way Dee Zu tends to his wounds.

  Cisco believes Dee Zu is overly relieved to find most of the blood belongs to the deceased monkeys. For his part, he'll go so far as to admit he's impressed with the way their feral friend despatched those creatures, knife flashing nearly too fast to follow but with a fine economy of movement and great effect.

  "This isn't so bad," she tells the boy, wiping at his face with some leaves.

  He just shrugs. No problem. Most mornings he gets chewed up this way twice before breakfast.

  Then, he's that intent on being a hard man for Dee Zu, he almost gets ambushed again. Cisco wards off these next attackers with a couple of well‐thrown rocks. Maybe to save face, the boy finishes the job with his spears before hitching the catchbag up more securely in front, like it's already a bellyful instead of a bagful.

  "The medibots can handle this, right?" The boy isn't as hard a man as he pretends.

  "So," Dee Zu says, returning to an earlier discussion. "What do we do next?"

  No problem, as it turns out.

  •

  "Citizen Cisco Smith ZEZQ112."

  "Hi," he says. "Why so formal?"

  "We need you to do something for us."

  "'Us'?"

  "Me, basically."

  "Sky."

  "Yes."

  "What do you want this time?"

  "You must penetrate Living End again."

  "Are you crazy?"

  Son goes wide‐eyed and looks skyward, clearly impressed at this reckless attitude toward the gods.

  "It's Sky, isn't it?" Dee Zu says.

  This time Cisco subvocalizes: "Are you crazy?"

  "No. This is more important than you can know, though I cannot explain it now. But trust me. We have to do this."

  "'We'? That's me we're talking about. I'm supposed to go back down inside there again?"

  "No. Too much smoke and gas remains. Even some fires. You must go down the borehole."

  "What borehole?"

  "Son knows. He will show you. You must follow him that far."

  "Right. So now I should trust you and I should trust the boy."

  "Yes. That is best."

  "Wow." He subvocalizes it, and he says it again, aloud. "Wow."

  "Cisco?" Dee Zu says. "Is everything okay?"

  "Yeah," he says. "It's okay. Wait." He turns back to Sky: "How do you know we can use the borehole?"

  "Brian says it is so."

  "You're joking, right?"

  "Brian has been incentivized. He is cooperating fully."

  "He says the borehole is safe?"

  "No. But your scendent is safe and sound with me. Yes. So it is no big deal."

  "Right. What about Dee Zu?"

  "What about her?"

  "If I die, she'll be left down here all alone."

  "Son can look after her."

  "Never mind you're only a machine, you really know how to piss me off, don't you?"

  "I am just a machine?"

  "That's right."

  "I am only a machine. Yes. That means I do not give a fuck. So listen carefully. You are going to do what I tell you. Or else you can say goodbye to Dee Zu. And you can take that to the bank. Got that? And believe me. Yes. I do not give a fuck."

  Take that to the bank? You could believe Sky has been chatting with Leary too much, or maybe Brian. "You're really something, aren't you?" Cisco says. He tries to keep his voice conversational, but it isn't easy. Not only has he learned his erstwhile inline lover is a machine, it turns out she's also a stone‐cold killer. Or so she wants him to believe.

  "Yes. So shut up and listen. I need you to deliver some things to Living End. The best way to get them where they are needed is down what Son calls Ahuk Hole."

  "I can't go down there."

  "You can go down there and so you will."

  "Gosh friggin' darn it." Cisco sounds as much like Leary as possible and then tries a Lea
ry laugh, which doesn't come out right.

  "Ha, ha. Yes. You are being funny. I am a machine, of course, so I appreciate that only analytically. Yes. Ha, ha." Sky deliberately sounds more the way she reckons a machine should sound.

  "You must leave. Now."

  "But …"

  "I can provide aerial support till you get to the Hole."

  "Satrays again."

  "Yes or no?"

  "Yes."

  Cisco will do what she tells him. For the time being. It's chilling, this abrupt switch from "trust me, we're buddies," to "do what I say or I'll kill your loved one."

  "We have to leave," Cisco tells the others.

  following their leaders

  "We're leaving," says Cisco.

  "Not now."

  "Yes, now."

  "Sorry to interrupt the pissing contest," Dee Zu says. "But maybe you guys should have a look at this."

  Two bio‐blur swarms are executing broken‐field maneuvers toward them from the other side of the bare‐bedrock border with Eden.

  "Forget about it," Cisco says. "We have to go."

  "In a minute. What's happening?" she asks Son.

  "Pigs and monkeys," he tells her.

  "How do you know that?" says Cisco.

  "The monkeys bob up and down. And the clacking?" Claws, or hooves, against bedrock. "That's pigs. The scrabble is mainly monkeys."

  "What about the squeaks?" asks Dee Zu.

  "The pigs are hungry."

  "They seem to be dragging their asses, no?" Cisco says.

  The monkeys also look tired.

  "That's because they've come a long way."

  "How so?" Cisco asks him.

  "Bios from the closer ranges are already here. These are the first newcomers we've seen in a while."

  "Uh‐huh," Cisco says, and gives Dee Zu a look.

  He has no business riding the boy this way. Though she has to admit Son looks more pleased than these crumbs of intelligence merit. She doesn't see how this stuff is of any immediate help.

  "Listen to that," Son says. "The cry of a big male monkey claiming its territory."

  Mid‐crossing, much of the mystery disappears, since the two swarms drop their mantles to reveal a herd of pigs and a gang of monkeys, a large male prominent among them. So there you go. The ken works. Son looks more pleased at this than Cisco does.