Genesis 2.0

by Collin Piprell

  These apparitions have always been rare, in Son's experience. Yet now the whole landscape is abubble with weird shit. It's just one thing after another, a regular jamboree, no time to think about why you should be scared. And this part of it's like an only‐fooling war, the War of the Digital Wizards, with every damned thing out there trying to outfox every other damned thing. In fact it's exhilarating.

  "Yo, Mr. Ken," Dee Zu says. "What's happened to the commentary?"

  "Ha, ha."

  •

  Two more war machines rise from the dust basin. Eerily silent, they begin to move toward Son and Dee Zu.

  "My WalkAbout says it's a species of OOFOPS," Dee Zu says. "An organic omniphage forward observation patrol sentinel."

  "I reckon it's just another variety of Mac4," says Son.

  "What now?"

  "Stay put."

  "But …"

  "And stay quiet."

  Dee Zu takes his advice. The too‐long‐patient pigswarm, on the other hand, finally freaks. It surges out of the path of one warbot and into that of the other; it surges back the way it came. It's milling about raising dust when one of the machines passes right over the swarm, or through it. The swarm suffers no harm at all. But it freezes, its members maybe befuddled with shock at the news they're still alive and well. Meanwhile, a third machine has arisen. It advances on a line that includes the pigs and then Son and Dee Zu. Whether burned out on adrenaline or stupefied at their earlier good luck, the pigswarm stays where it is. Maybe it's playing dead.

  Son remains as still as the pigswarm, while staying alert to other options. "This one's different," he tells Dee Zu. For one thing, it's blurrier, whether because of residual dust from the piggy panic or a sudden instance of heat shimmer, he doesn't know. But you can also hear a squeaky rasping that grows louder as it approaches. There's something more substantial about it. Then it catches the edge of the pigswarm, and there's an explosion of squealing and blood and much grunting and snorting as the swarm breaks up into three, two of them rippling off to the sides and coalescing again behind the machine.

  Dee Zu and Son also run to the sides. The third element of the pigswarm, failing to outrun its nemesis, is minced.

  "Another rule," Dee Zu says, as though she's still having fun. "When it's a bad idea either to sit tight and see what happens or to step into something's path and see what happens, it's best you run."

  "Get the fuck out of Dodge City."

  "What does that mean?"

  "Run," he says. "What Poppy would've said. But check this out."

  Instead of treadmarks, the warbot holo that wasn't a holo has left a strange track in its wake. Two banks parallel a single middle ridge of dust extending behind.

  "You see what's happened?" Son says.

  "No."

  "That ridge? The blur‐dust shrugged up on a holo warbot template. So we've got a machine simulacrum, maybe in the same way boogoomen mimic humans. Though it isn't moving the way a real warbot would."

  Dee Zu ponders that. "So the fogbot substrate," she says, "the bit that forms the treads, is substituted from moment to moment as the warbot proceeds? A serial emergence."

  Son gives her a blank stare. "As it goes along its front end assimilates the immediate overburden plus some shrug‐up. Plus it eats anything else that gets in its way."

  "Pigs, for example."

  "Yeah. Mantles and all." The very much non‐holo mass of the warbot effigy did an excellent job of mangling the slower or more confused pigs. "It moves ahead by feeding on material to build itself, while its rear end leaves this trailing ridge of warbot shit."

  "The PlagueBot built a Mac4."

  He nods. "Seems as if," he says, checking their surrounds for other anomalies.

  "My God."

  The thing continues on over the dunes and out of sight.

  "So first we get a holo." Dee Zu supplies the recap. "Then comes a fax of the holo—a substantial fogbot version of a holographic copy of the original machine."

  "You could put it that way."

  "Have you ever seen anything like that?"

  "No." Son would clearly prefer to appear more on top of things.

  Interesting stuff, though. That warbot pig mincer must have been composed of nothing but blurs. Though who can really tell? More and more, this world needs a new operating manual.

  "So what's next?" Dee Zu asks.

  Son says nothing, only gives the land a quick three‐sixty survey.

  polyangulation plus

  The fleye dive‐bombs them, then slows to skim the surface in wobbly circles.

  "Whoa!" Dee Zu says, clutching at her head.

  But she hasn't been hit. The shrilling also arises deep inside Son's own skull, turning his brain to jelly. His vision, or his attention or something, threatens to frag. He feels it in his head at the same time he's sick with it in his gut, with the threatened disintegration of his mental model of their surrounds.

  A big dune right beside them explodes with more fleyes, dozens of them. At the same time something monstrous tries to thrash free of the Boogoo.The great pulsating cloud of big buzzing bot insects hurtle every which way, now drawn in nearer the monster, now flung farther away. Then it gets worse.

  "Holy Jesus." Son totters, hands clasped to his face.

  "What's wrong?" Dee Zu is shaking his shoulder. "What is it?"

  When he was a boy, Auntie showed him a kaleidoscope. "Look!" she said. She told him to watch the brilliant colors and shifting patterns and try to imagine this was a telescope, that those were real things out there in the world. Poppy called it a mindfuck machine. Keep playing with it, he claimed, and your actual world would come to look that way forever. Maybe. Before that could happen, Son took his toy to pieces, only to discover the mirrors and bits of colored glass and the sad news that this infinite possibility of magical realms was mostly in his own head.

  "Son?"

  His POV bursts into a storm of perceptual shards, leaving neither rhyme nor reason in what he's seeing. Not even mirror‐imposed symmetries.

  "What is it?" Dee Zu asks. She puts an arm around him and says, "Sit."

  "Just a minute."

  He sees bits of everything everywhere. Parts of things, different perspectives on chaos. This is what Poppy described as polyangulation, "something that standard battlefield technology gave warbots and forward observers like myself, before everything went to hell on us." But this is polyangulation plus. Or maybe it's full‐bore madness. He isn't doing it barehanded, of course; the fleyes must be part of these proceedings.

  Meaning to check that theory out, even though it goes against everything he has learned as a hunter and a warrior, he pulls free of Dee Zu to stand and raise his arms overhead. He waves them about, trying to jump up and down at the same time, though he soon threatens to keel over again. Dee Zu catches him and helps to ease him down. But not before he has seen himself in action. His display has attracted the attention of any number of fleyes at once, so he's getting a bunch of perspectives on Dee Zu and himself, not to mention a storm of impressions from the surrounding landscape.

  This is like inhabiting the land. An indwelling. A mental touching that extends beyond the scope of the usual senses. He projects a mind that knows different borders, new limits awaiting exploration. This stuff that's happening, it's both exciting and scary. Maybe it's a combination of his talent for still‐sitting, his native gizmo, the amalgamated gizmo‐WalkAbout, and the fleyes. That's Hypothesis A. Hypothesis B? He has gone gaga.

  He's reeling. There's no way he can process this information.

  "Son?"

  "Wait," he says. "Give me a minute."

  Then, just like that, he can handle it. Everything falls into place, as though someone has turned a special barrel on the kaleidoscope. He sees himself and Dee Zu, surreal in their vivid presence and three‐sixty detail. He sees them from every perspective at the same time. He also sees every element of their surrounds as he attends to them. He's aware of the whole, yet able
to focus here or there as he will. On the warbot holos and faxes, the few swarms at large locally, the dusty wastes and Eden behind them, the way forward.

  "Christ," he's saying. "Christ."

  "What? What is it?"

  He's at the center of a collective POV, and yet he isn't. In one way, there's no center; in another way, there is. Yet it's not him. Rather, it is him, but it is also, and maybe foremost, the great cratered head that has emerged from the Boogoo. How to explain it? This is something that's happening in his head, in his gut and, this is the really mysterious part, in the emergent bot all at the same time.

  "My God," Dee Zu says. "Look at that."

  He sees it. He is it, almost. He sees the bulbous head with its blind sockets in such detail it's excruciating. A cloud of fleyes swoop down to regroup around it, surrounding that misshapen tri‐turret head before locking back into their sockets.

  And, just like that, Son's normal perspective on the world is restored. As normal as it ever gets, at least. A few outlier fleyes remain at large, maybe scouts and sentinels.

  "What the hell was that?" Dee Zu says. "Son?"

  "Just a minute."

  Poppy has told him some of what the Lode gives him now.

  gG. The last and most remarkable of the US Army dicksacks, from the original acronym AFOASTDCCLSAC ("afwasdicclesack"), for autonomous forward observation and strategic/tactical deployment coordination center with land, sea and air capabilities. Dicksack for short. Alternatively characterized as a SFOOWVUHC ("swoovuck"), or self‐fueling organic omnivore with virtually unlimited hibernatory capacity.

  According to Poppy, by the time they started building the gG the main human battle input was finding catchy names for warbots.

  •

  "Son?"

  "Just a minute." First he has to deal with yet another invasion of his head.

  "Enough."

  "Sky?" he says.

  "We do not have time for this. Stand together behind the ridge to your left. The rocky outcrop. Move."

  "What …?"

  "Do it."

  "But …"

  "This is bullshit. Move!"

  He grabs Dee Zu and says, "Come on."

  "What now?"

  "Your Sky is getting antsy."

  They take shelter just as the shit hits the fan.

  Son looks skywards to register the puckling of a high haze as the same time a spate of godbolts lashes back and forth across the land, weaving elaborate scribbles among geological features, bios and holos alike. The cumulative impact of thin blur screaming from all quarters is nearly enough to smother the shrieks of incompletely incinerated monkeys somewhere close by. Smells of ozone and burnt metal compete with other, earthier stinks.

  Then, as the godbolts subside and the screams dwindle, the shrilling rises once again, Son's WalkAbout providing real‐time voice‐over.

  The gG rubs tentacle‐like appendages together to produce stridulations modeled after the water boatman bug, which, by rubbing its penis against its abdomen, once produced the loudest sound, relative to body size, of any creature in nature.

  And he feels something else he noticed with the earlier shrilling, a buzzy ache deep in his gut.

  more gobbledegook

  They're looking at the mother of all shrug‐ups. At least Dee Zu guesses that's what's happening. The PlagueBot, or the Boogoo or whatever, flaps itself like a massive blanket. With a series of great shurrings and whoomphs, it clears the deck of warbots, holo or otherwise. The air remains full of unidentifiable bits that flutter about before settling back to ground.

  Within seconds it has yanked its mantle away from the near landscape, piling up in a giant embankment to the east as it strips the terrain naked. A few holo fragments sputter and flicker in the air above like static. Otherwise all that's left is bedrock and sinkholes and vestigial flotsam and jetsam as far as the eye can see. Cryptic traces of old infrastructure, holes and trenches, scars in the bedrock. Like the vid Dee Zu once saw of the exposed seabed just before a tsunami arrived.

  And now the centerpiece of this seabed appears, the warbot lord of the fleyes finally exposed in its entirety. The triglobular head rears back on its segmented body as though scenting the breeze. The cloud of fleyes bursts forth once again and disperses.

  "I ask again. What. The. Hell. Is. That?"

  "The gG!" Son tells her.

  "A geegee?"

  "The gobbledeGook!"

  "Ah."

  Son is excited. "The gobbledeGook was one of Poppy's stories. But this is the real deal." He tells Dee Zu how Poppy served as a speckops ground observer and training target for early testing of the gG outside the securistats. He granted warbots in general special exemption from the hatred he expressed for most twenty‐first‐century high‐tech and what he believed it did to speed humankind's corruption. But the way he spoke of the gG, it could've been a beloved pet. "Kilo for kilo, he used to say, the gobbledeGook was the most expensive combat machine ever built."

  Dee Zu doesn't feel much the wiser. "What's a gobbledegook?" she asks the Lode.

  Please wait. Processing…

  There follows a summary based on recently declassified information.

  The gobbledeGook (commonly, gG). A forward command and control center adjunct to satellite surveillance and targeting systems. Officially designated an experimental large‐scale hemmelite structure, it incorporated associated swarm‐like thin‐shell hemmelite structures.

  As a data collection and processing field unit deployed in the mid‐2030s, it was charged with remaining eternally vigilant. Where it identified threats, it was to produce hi‐rez, real‐time poly‐POVic (polypoeiohvoeic) representations of small‐ to medium‐scale battlefield situations. In conjunction with a central command authority, it could use such 4D holographic models to project locally adjacent futures with remarkable accuracy and to coordinate related ground‐and‐orbital targeting strategies.

  She tries another question while she's at it. "How could they build something that big out of hemmelite?"

  Only one gobbledeGook (gG) was ever constructed. Hemmelite was relatively abundant at that time, though the only even remotely economical source was an asteroid in the Van Allen Belt. Hem 344,010 was more than ninety percent hemmelite, little changed from when it was expelled by a freak supernova event 2.6 billion years earlier.

  During the First War for World Peace and Freedom in Our Time, a beleaguered New China blockaded Hem 344,010 with a cocoon of shielded disruptor fields, which remained generally invisible at the same time they jumped at random in and out of the locally prevailing space‐time continuum. After that, mining was limited to a few much smaller bodies where hemmelite was rare and difficult to refine.

  The subsequent scarcity of hemmelite ended plans to build a team of gGs. In fact, few hemmelite items of any kind were produced from that time forward.

  A giant insect head planted on a huge tentacled worm, the gG inches and wiggles and writhes. It flips this way and that, raising clouds of dust before finally disintegrating into fragments that individually go to ground. Disintegrating and reintegrating, fractally self‐similar and diminishingly small yet always independently mobile components break off and go to ground, trying to find cover. The segmented elements drag the stubby neck‐segment and great three‐lobed head, now all but fleyeless, over to a hole and plant it there so it hardly clears the surface. Then the bits themselves disassociate and go to ground, finding cover where they might. They hug up under overhands, squeeze into trenches, burrow between outcrops, various camouflage and concealment features kicking in.

  Now the only things that move in all this broad landscape are a couple of residual holos. Glimpses of an Ultra or two.

  "So it's a gG," she says. "So tell me this: What on earth is happening?"

  "Sky is trying to slap the Boogoo down," says Son. He says this in the tones he reserves for pronouncements from the ken. But Dee Zu can see that he's excited, a little boy blown away by events.

  S
ky's telling the land to settle down, shut up, make way for Son and Dee Zu, who are on a mission and have no time to dick around.

  ambush

  The Boogoo floods back in to remantle the land. The more familiar prospect makes Son happier. Even if he can't trust things to behave the way they have in the past.

  But now his earworm is suggesting, in ever‐more hysterical tones, that they have to make up for lost time. So they move, move, move ever southwards at a breakneck pace that should have Poppy riding him the whole way, though he's silent for now.

  •

  "Son!"

  A familiar stink announces what's happened even before he turns to look.

  Dee Zu is down, pitched forward with both legs buried to the knees, arms spread wide, hands buried to the wrists. Her spearstick also lies buried. Thank Christ it's long enough to span the hole.

  Under control, maybe a little stressed out, she maintains a two‐handed death grip on the spear. "My God!" she says. "What's this?"

  "Roachtrap." He grabs her under the arms and drags her back.

  "What?" Gagging, probably at the stench, she brushes dust from her legs, checks for damage. "Who wants to trap roaches?"

  "Nobody. The roaches are part of the trap. They weave a lens over a hole. Together with the blurs. It makes a good way to trap other bios, easy pickings for roaches and blurs alike."

  Not to mention for attendant ratswarms. Dee Zu hasn't noticed the sizeable swarm that edged in on her as she dangled her legs down the hole. Now Son stutter‐steps toward the swarm which, never mind nobody fell for the trap, is sizing them up as a meal. It retreats and retreats again as he stabs at it with his spear.

  The roachtrap ecosystem, according to Auntie, who never saw one herself, added up to a colonial organism, a higher‐level collaboration than simple bio‐blur swarms.

  "That was close," Son says.

  "No kidding."

  "I told you," he says.

  "Told me what?"

  "You aren't equipped for this."

  "Is anybody?"

  "Some more than others. Guess what?"

  "What?"

  "That's the way Poppy died."

  "Your father?"

  "That's right."

  "That's terrible."