Genesis 2.0

by Collin Piprell

  More than pleased, he looks excited. "First time I've ever seen these," he says. He points at the pigs, stubby‐legged creatures with twisted little tails. They're largely hairless, excessively naked and pinkish. A few of them are huge. "You wouldn't think it," he says, "but they must be good hunters. Look at the guts on them."

  They weave this way and that, always within the bounds of a four‐meter‐square pack, bellies nearly dragging on the ground.

  "Good hunters?" Cisco says. "More like picnic lunches on the hoof. They can hardly walk."

  "And you learned all your wilderness lore where, exactly?" Dee Zu asks Cisco, at the same time giving Son a smile. "I forget."

  Son looks so grateful she wishes she had shut up.

  Meanwhile inside Eden other things, among them what the Lode says is a scaly anteater, emerge from forest and fissure. All in all, she'd enjoy this more if it were a generated World. There's far too much scope for surprise, here in mondoland, and too little in the way of bail buttons.

  Within just the past couple of days, Dee Zu and Cisco were expelled from their mall cocoon. Then Cisco abandoned Aeolia, leaving his scendent in suspension and returning to mondoland to rescue Dee Zu. Son lost his home and his family. Now the three of them are being cast out of Eden. And Sky hasn't really explained why.

  "Enough," Cisco says. "No more fun in the play zoo. We have to leave. Now."

  head out on the highway

  This woman's slow‐moving, wannabe swinging‐dick friend would do better to shut up. He needs to listen more and mouth off less.

  Neither he nor the woman notice the bird that swoops low across no‐man's‐land. Bam. A tendril lashes out from a farside dune to snatch it in mid‐flight. Which is reassuring. At least this is the Boogoo Son has always known and feared.

  Overall, though, things are changing too fast to keep track of. It's just one surprise after the other. These pigs, for example, are new to him.

  "Feral swine," says the Lode. The real‐time voiceover is also new. And it's something that doesn't necessarily wait till you ask before it provides. "Domestic pigs," it continues. "Probably Sus scrofa domesticus gone wild."

  Fancy that, as Poppy might say. And what's that nugget of information worth? Can the Lode tell him if they're more dangerous than standard pigs; do they taste better?

  Stripped of its collective mantle, this swarm presents nothing more than an obscene rabble. To wild pigs, these ferals are probably roughly what GameBoys are to real men. Same‐same for feral mallsters. The monkeys, on the other hand, oddly enough given their nature, maintain a tight phalanx even without a nanobot cloak. Maybe they're smart enough to be afraid.

  "Whoa," Cisco says. "Look at that."

  A herd of standard wild pigs, including a few serious tuskers, chases several of the newcomer monkeys back across the border and out into the dunes, where they all tear around raising clouds of dust till the two groups engage. By now it's difficult to say which species is chasing which. Hardly matters. The Boogoo decides it's no more Mr. Nice Guy and, right in the middle of their bloody free‐for‐all, disses the lot of them.

  "Yikes," says Dee Zu.

  "Yeah." Son watches her friend brush at his sides and legs, thinking no one notices, probably wishing he still had a mantle even though they're in Eden. "What Poppy called hard times."

  "Your Poppy sounds like quite the dude," the guy says.

  "He was that," says Son. Then he waves at the far side of the border and asks, "What about yourself? Still in a hurry to head out on the highway?"

  "Steppenwolf," says the guy.

  "Wolf? What are you talking about?"

  He laughs, looks at Dee Zu. "No. Head out on the highway. The band that did the song. Steppenwolf."

  What passes for survival lore among mallster muppets. One more thing he knows and Son doesn't.

  Whatever. When Poppy was in a really good mood, which wasn't that often, he'd sometimes break into song. "Head out on the highway" were the only lyrics he knew, that and "looking for adventure." Sometimes maybe another line or two. More often he'd just whistle it.

  leaving

  Now the Kid whistles it. Not to mention he's shining big eyes at Dee Zu, like he's making a point.

  Cisco once saw a vid where a school of little fish with big teeth scarfed up a whole cow where it waded in a tropical river. What he just witnessed is much the same, except on a larger scale and in fast forward. So no, he can't say he's in a hurry to head out on the highway. Not if that means tramping off into the gray wastelands.

  Once again he's hailed by the voice inside his head. "Go now," Sky tells him.

  "We can't go out there without mantles," Cisco says. "Get serious."

  A satray strikes the outer edge of the border just thirty meters west of where they stand. The white‐hot beam wavers back and forth, a child god trying to follow the line with a laser crayon. A thin scream of burning blurs and the stench of superheated minerals come to them on the breeze. Dee Zu is coughing her guts out when another satray strikes, this one starting about thirty meters east of Cisco and sterilizing the border the other way.

  "What the hell is this?" asks the boy.

  "Maybe we should leave now," Dee Zu says.

  "Yeah," Cisco rasps through the tearing at his throat. "It's time to leave."

  "What the hell. That was a message?"

  "Yeah. And Sky says you lead the way."

  "You're okay with that?"

  "Be my guest."

  Once again the kid whistles a bar or two.

  "So we head out on the highway," Cisco says.

  "Looking for adventure."

  "My God," says Dee Zu. "Cisco and Son's fabulous fun road trip."

  obsolescence isn't what it used to be

  Eden remains one big jamboree, a stirring muddle of odors, squabbles, shrieks and hoots. Plumes of smoke issue from forest and fissure. Right in front of them, the stony border area even now continues to radiate heat from the godbolt strikes, dust dunes along both sides, sparser on the Eden side, knobbling here and there like embryo watchtowers.

  Son gazes at the wastelands south of them, and thinks how much cleaner and simpler things look across the border, never mind the heat shimmer. The dunes beyond have settled down for now, though he imagines the scene of the recent massacre remains pinkish. And he knows it's still plenty dangerous out there. All the more so because everything is changing, unpredictable in new and mysterious ways. No part of his world will ever be the same again.

  "Stay here," says Son, preparing to invite a mantle. "Wait to see what happens."

  The guy tries to put a hand on Son's shoulder. "No," he says. "Let me go first.

  "What?"

  "You lead once we're mantled."

  "What are you, bait?"

  "Come again?"

  "Our brave volunteer goes first. A decoy. Draws the Boogoo off while we make a break for it."

  "I'm going first." The fool says it again.

  Son gives Dee Zu a shrug and steps back. It's like all those pigs and monkeys were only chumming the dunes, appetizers for some immortal asshole come looking for adventure.

  Mr. Me First ignores the look Dee Zu gives him and walks along the far side of the border till he finds a less restive stretch. Merely stepping off into the dust inspires a new outbreak of fledgling boogooman soldiers right where he stands. He steps farther in, past the dusty commotion, and stops again. He gets down on his knees. Proceeding stage by stage, maybe reminding himself of how immortal he is, he lies flat on the ground.

  "Cisco?" Dee Zu says.

  "Yeah?"

  "It isn't working. You aren't getting anything. No mantle."

  "That explains the breeze on my ass." He opens his eyes and gets back on his knees, rises to his feet. He brushes dust off his hands as gently as he's able. He looks at them, first one and then the other, probably pleased to see he still has them, not to mention everything else.

  "Okay, Mr. Real Man and Great Hunter," he says. What's the sto
ry now?"

  "Yo, Mr. Marshmallow. The Boogoo's probably saving you for something. Maybe dessert."

  "Ha, ha."

  "Seriously," Dee Zu says. "We need to know what's going on here."

  "It's hard to say."

  "Mr. Ken holds back again."

  "What can I tell you? The Boogoo is changing."

  "The PlagueBot?"

  "The Boogoo. Even yesterday I wouldn't have taken ten‐to‐one odds on your surviving this far."

  "So reassuring," Dee Zu says.

  "Whatever. It looks like we can't count on bio‐blur mantles."

  "They're obsolescent?" Now Dee Zu's friend wants to teach him English.

  "Not only that, sometimes the Boogoo is hungrier than other times. You could call it fickle."

  At that moment a small disturbance arises in the dust not twenty meters away. It quickly resolves itself as a monkey. The animal bares its fangs at them, not very convincingly.

  "He looks sick," Dee Zu says.

  "His swarm abandoned him," says Son. "He's been lying low."

  At that moment it lurches. There's a brief screech as the Boogoo disses it, less than five seconds of horror.

  "Maybe even obsolete," the guy says.

  In fact, the mantles have never offered any guarantees. You're always dicing with death in what Auntie termed the accepting ritual, the daily donning and shucking of blur mantles. Poppy's brother Benny Bob got dissed mid‐ritual. Never mind he'd already adopted the position hundreds, probably thousands of times without incident. Just a kid on a well‐supervised day excursion outside the Bunker, Son had watched. Still, when he recalls Benny Bob's face, the horror only dawning, his mind insists on completing the scream that only ever half emerged.

  Out where the monkey got dissed, a couple of dust tendrils lash out at something. Then things settle down.

  invasion of the earworm

  Son feels sorely exposed. Up till a couple of days ago, the ken would have had them long since dead. And, bits at a time, their mantles keep sloughing off. He doesn't tell them about what happened to Uncle Benny Bob. What good would it do?

  Not that he wants to get as careless as his companions, but it might help, just for now, to make light of things. "I feel downright mangy," he says. What Gran‐Gran used to say sometimes as she tugged at wisps of hair, trying to cover the bald spots.

  "Mangy?" Dee Zu asks him.

  "Like when you lose your hair," Son tells her.

  Mangy. Worn in spots, shabby; figurative use of mange (noun), an infectious disorder caused by parasitic mites leading to loss of hair, mainly among dogs and other domestic animals; from Old French mangeue (to itch), or, literally, eating, from mangier to eat…

  Jesus Christ. So the Lode knows all about it and wants to share. This is going to take some getting used to. It's like Mr. Marshmallow and the Lode have decided they should gang up, pack his head tight with shit he doesn't need.

  "Is this standard?" Dee Zu asks.

  "The manginess? No. Something new."

  "Something else new," her friend says.

  Asshole. Son doesn't say this, but he thinks it pretty loud.

  "Yeah. And your Lode just told me all about mange, never mind I didn't ask. Is that standard?"

  "No."

  "Generally," Dee Zu says, "it doesn't provide information unless you for ask it."

  "So everything's changing."

  Worse than the Lode, another voice has taken up residence in his head, and it's pissing Son off.

  "Move, move, move."

  They're hiking along at what, till recently, would have been a suicidal rate. And she wants them to go faster.

  "Time is of the essence."

  "Yeah?" Son is getting the hang of subvocalization. "And how fast will we travel after we're dead?"

  "I am watching over you. Trust me."

  Covering his back. Right. However much he suspects that's bushwa, Son maintains the pace. His two companions pay no mind to how reckless they're being. It's like they're on a picnic and hope to attract as many other picnickers as possible. Son should never have joked about friendly Boogoos and suchlike.

  On the other hand, this Sky thing is less self‐confident than you normally want your gods to be.

  Still, they've got a couple of things going for them. For one, the bio‐blurs, the few remaining on this side of the border, are single‐mindedly intent on getting to Eden and not much interested in rogue critters heading out against the mainstream. Plus they do remain mantled, however mangily.

  Nevertheless it's scary, the thought of being way out here on the land with no proper mantle, no bolthole at hand. And so he admits, if only to himself. Patches of tame blurs come and go, a tattered and ever‐more threadbare cloak that shifts without apparent rhyme or reason. He distances the fear of being summarily dissed. Dusted down right in the middle of this insane trek to Ahuk Hole, and he'll never even find out what it was they were supposed to do. One worry among others, one more thing these mallsters are missing, some of the bio‐blur swarms out here are still fully mantled, all but invisible and doubly dangerous because of that. At the same time, Son and the others are being hustled along so fast they can't do a proper job of watching.

  Never mind. As Poppy would say, you play the hand you're dealt.

  "Move, move, move."

  This Sky thing is a regular earworm. The way "head out on the highway" used to invade his mind and refuse to leave.

  He refuses to refer to Sky as "she." She's really only an "it." Same‐same thinking of the Boogoo as something with senses and plans and stuff. Poppy would love this. A living Land, invisible machine gods armed with satrays, all manner of voices in his head. He almost has to laugh. His world has turned crazier than anything Gran‐Gran's scriptures ever served up.

  Plus they've got Mr. Bulletproof bullshitting about another world, Aeolia, where he also lives. The same place this Sky thing hangs out.

  "Okay," he tells the others. "We'll go this way. You watch northwards and aft as we proceed," he tells the guy. To Dee Zu, he says, "You take the south and forward sectors, okay?"

  For his part Son will watch everywhere because he'd just as soon not die right now.

  ahuk's bronchitis

  Their approach to Ahuk Hole has them swinging up and around through the low pass between the northern and southern ends of Big Tabletop. As they come up on the hump at the southern end, they get a view of the lower, middle plateau.

  "What the hell?" says her friend. He might as well shout it, and never mind Dee Zu was assigned the forward watch.

  "What's your problem?" Son hisses in reply. Even minus effective blur camouflage and with chaos reigning everywhere, idle chatter out here in the open makes him uncomfortable.

  "What's that?"

  The surface of the plateau shimmers in the sun. Meanwhile, more shimmer is slowly streaming up most of the gullies on the southwest flank of Big Tabletop's more northern hump.

  "Roachswarms," Son says.

  One more pain in the ass. Now they'll have to head down sooner than he would have liked and cross treacherous terrain, not the least of it Boulder City with all its handy cover for ambushes, before arriving at Ahuk Hole.

  "Roaches?" Dee Zu responds. "No way. There can't be that many roaches in the world."

  "And what's that?" The guy sticks his oar in again.

  Off in the distance, all along the shimmery streams, little squalls of dusty turmoil explode like trailside IEDs.

  "Ambushes," Son says. "Pigswarms and monkeyswarms, mostly. These roachswarms make easy pickings."

  When the season brings hot, dry air, roachswarms are driven to congregate on flat ground, for example on Big Tabletop's northern plateau. Together, a living sea, they can extend over hundreds, maybe thousands of square meters. The ken has incorporated that lore for the past three years.

  "We need to stop here for a spell," Son tells the others. Forget about how much of a hurry their mallster god is in. It's time to take stock, do some watc
hing.

  Pigswarms and monkeyswarms have learned to station themselves along the access routes to what Auntie described as the high‐ground mating lek, exacting their toll from the roachswarms with free‐for‐all feeding frenzies. Up on the plateau itself, the diners are generally satiated by the time the roachswarms settle in to begin the amalgamation.

  "Poppy and I once found ourselves on Big Tabletop during a similar event. By the time the roachswarm survivors reached the plateau, the other critters were happy to let them be."

  "So what happened then?"

  "Not much. Night was coming on, and we had to get back to the Bunker. We did notice woogly skies appearing directly over the superswarm, with patches descending lower than we'd ever seen before."

  His companions finally go quiet for a minute, maybe processing all this interesting information.

  But Sky's back. "Move," she says. "I told you to keep moving."

  "Back off," Son says.

  "Okay," he tells the others, "let's get on with it."

  •

  AHUK …AHUK‐AHUK.

  They stop about three hundred meters from the borehole. Dee Zu comes up behind him to take his arm and ask, "What's that?"

  "Ahuk Hole. No problem."

  "No problem? Cisco's going down inside that thing."

  "No problem," says the hotshot in question, but then he'd have to say that, wouldn't he?

  "Look over there. There, where I'm pointing, where things are all wavery."

  "Hot air?"

  "Hot air and steam. The borehole's all that's left of an old geo‐thermal power station."

  "And what are those things?" Mr. Mallster asks.

  A good question. This is something new. They resemble sheets of diaphanous paper, a meter or two across. About a dozen of them, a loose flock soaring and flapping and dipping in the air column over the borehole.

  "What are they?" Dee Zu asks.

  "I'm not sure," he says. Maybe this is what mantas look like up close. It's too soon to say, though. He doesn't want to look any more foolish than he already has. Then he decides to hell with it. "They could be mantas."