Genesis 2.0

by Collin Piprell

  Then dark thoughts sap the sneaking sense of well‐being. Could MOM actually still be monitoring their condition? Could this lift in her spirits be merely the result of psychoneurotherapeutic reconstruction, some tinkering on the part of her medibots? She's had no such report from the Lode, but that doesn't prove anything.

  •

  Son's asleep again. He really is still a boy.

  worst‐case scenario

  This is like the Worlds. One minute you're in this reality, the next you're in that one. One day you're having the first wet sex in our life with the man who completes you, and the next you're having wet sex with someone else. Each of these individuals has stunk in his distinctive way, each has been awkward. Cisco, because this was his first wet sex, and Son because he's still mourning the only other woman he has ever fucked. The only woman Son ever loved is dead; and the only man Dee Zu ever loved could be dead as well. She needs to prepare herself for that outcome.

  "Request information." She subvocalizes. "Status, including whereabouts, Citizen Cisco Smith ZEZQ112, ESUSA Mall."

  Nothing.

  "Goddamn it," she says. "Urgent request. I repeat…"

  "Data unavailable."

  She has no idea where they're going or why, and no reason to expect she'll live to get there. So. It's make‐do time. She doesn't really expect to learn much of use from the boy right now. What she needs are grounds on which to establish a working relationship with this supercharged adolescent. The kid means well. But he's basically a young savage. A relic Rightsrightist who lives for little more than food and sex. Though he can be funny. He's got to have other redeeming qualities. Aside from his essential toughness. He's so tough it's scary. To kill his own father that way.

  So this sudden rush of affection for Son makes her uneasy. Cisco could be dead, for God's sake. The wet Cisco, at least. This thought causes her to burn with a different kind of heat. Can Cisco's scendent see what she's doing?

  Anyway, what's the worst‐case scenario? His wet master is dead, and his qubital backup lives on in this Aeolia place. And so he has told her, again and again. He can't really die. They'll just revive his scendent, and he'll be as good as new. Right?

  Though what good is a scendent Cisco to Dee Zu, down here in mondoland? Her own wet master is all she has. If it dies, she has no Aeolian backup plan. So no more Dee Zu and Cisco, what a lovely couple. Only her and this kid. This rube with a permanent hard‐on. Once again she thinks of Cisco and is assailed by guilt.

  Here's something to think about. If the wet Cisco is actually dead down here and what he told her about Aeolia is true, then wouldn't his scendent be reactivated? Then he should be able to contact her via the WalkAbout. But he hasn't contacted her, so he must still be alive. QED. Absurdly, her heart lifts at this.

  "Sky?" She subvocalizes it. "I need to speak to Cisco. Cisco? Can you hear me? I know we don't talk this way, but I love you. You have to know that. And what I'm doing now means nothing. Can you hear me?"

  "Cannot process query as framed. Please rephrase following appropriate protocols."

  •

  Son's awake. He touches her face, feels her tears. "What's wrong?" he asks her. "Is your foot hurting?"

  "No, no. It's nothing. Go back to sleep."

  Dee Zu tries again. "Request information."

  "Please specify."

  Now Son's fingers are gentle against her throat. "You're talking to the Lode," he says.

  Dee Zu brushes his hand away. "Go back to sleep," she says it again.

  "But …"

  "Shut up!" she tells Son before addressing the Lode again: "Request information."

  "Please specify."

  "Citizen Cisco Smith, formerly of ESUSA Mall. Request status report: Is he dead or is he alive?" Like stepping off a precipice, body and soul clenched against the impact of hearing the worst.

  "No data."

  "Cisco Smith has WalkAbout privileges. Is his channel open?"

  "No data."

  "Damnit!" she says.

  "What?"

  "Nothing."

  "Nothing?"

  "When I say nothing I mean nothing."

  "Okay."

  "Goddamn it."

  Cisco will forgive her. This interlude, this little swarm of two, it doesn't mean anything. Really.

  •

  "So," she says. "Auntie was an excellent tutor."

  Whatever makes him feel better.

  connections

  Son mentally compares his performance to her friend's, when Dee Zu and Mr. Me First made love sitting up in Eden. They did it only once.

  "So," he says.

  "So what?" Dee Zu replies.

  Never mind there isn't enough light to see it, he hears the grin in her voice. That, together with the smell of their sex, inspires a good idea. "Want to go again?"

  "You're kidding," she says. "Who's going to keep watch?"

  •

  Dee Zu shudders. Afraid he has hurt her, Son stops.

  "Don't stop," she says.

  So he doesn't. And next thing he's shuddering, and she's shuddering, and it's good.

  And then it isn't so good. Their mantle begins shuddering just out of sync. It's more than that. It's a weirder, weightier kind of thing. Even here under the overhang, Son can sense the whole Boogoo shudder.

  "Did you feel that?" he asks her.

  "God, yes. Wasn't it obvious?"

  So she hadn't felt it.

  •

  Here he lies, way out here with his ass on the line, paying little attention to anything except this woman. And he's not nearly as worried about that as he should be. It's not as though he's safe at home in the Bunker. He's parked here under a rock like meat for some other predator's table.

  Plus he finds himself colonized by a bunch of blurs. What the mallsters call medibots. Call them what you like, he's been breached by close cousins of the enemy. If this isn't a real situation, then whatever would be? The Poppy in his head is silent, maybe overwhelmed at the spectacle of His Son the Booby in full booby flight.

  Yet to say Son feels okay is an understatement. His fever is gone. Though it has been replaced by a different flush, one that maybe relates to his medibot renovation. Amazing. Poppy believed mallster tech was an unadulterated curse, and in this he's proven wrong again. Hey, the bots have repaired Son's wounded leg. That can't be bad. The bum hand is under reconstruction, God grant the new one works. And the hip that should be giving him the devil, with him jammed in here and no room to stand since nightfall? It's no problem.

  Not only that, he has become privy to the Lode, a whole new ken, a universe of knowledge, most of it beyond anything he shared with Poppy and the others in the Bunker.

  •

  The moon casts its spectral light over the terrain as high tide lifts the tenuous Boogoo aura, boosting a kindred rise in Son's spirits.

  Then his mood crashes again. Trillions of blurs inside him rise together with the Boogoo. A thought lurks at the edge of consciousness, a cognitive shadow threatens to become flesh. A floosher of dread erodes his newfound sense of well‐being. Are those tiny buggers inside him going to be satisfied with mere repairs? Where's all this going to stop? This army of blurs inside his own body, these "medibots" tinkering away inside him, setting agendas without so much as a may‐we. They've built him a WalkAbout, not to mention adapted some no doubt blur‐based gizmo already there inside him, maybe a resident blurball or something. A transfusion? An infection, more like it. An invasion. Even worse, an assimilation.

  "Before you know it, Sonny," Gran‐Gran used to say, "they'll take you over. You'll look the same as you do now, but you'll be one of them." Satan's minions.

  Mind you, Gran‐Gran used to say lots of stuff that Son never took too seriously. Still, this must be part of it, the way Poppy claimed individuals got sucked up into the Machine and homogenized. Neutered and blenderized. Incapable of looking after themselves outside the Machine. Meanwhile, inside the Machine, all your needs were taken care
of. Or so you were told. As long as you agreed that getting looked after was all you needed.

  •

  The sound of her breathing suggests that Dee Zu remains awake. It's her watch, so he should sleep. Staying rested is a vital survival factor. But the more he thinks about it, the more he can't sleep. Poppy's old complaint.

  He feels for knife and spearstick. He feels for the ball. He reviews recent events and imagines how things could have turned out differently. Maybe if he'd gone home from the hunt earlier. Instead of lollygagging, letting his imagination off the leash. He thinks about Dee Zu's missing foot, and how he might have prevented that. And he just thinks about Dee Zu, straight up.

  He dozes.

  Suddenly he feels unbearably crowded. Poppy has joined their swarm. Son actually believes this for a second or two. Awake again, the sickness from his dream ebbing, he thinks about how he needs to sleep if he's to deal with the day to come, this thought leaving him unable to sleep for a long while.

  Eventually he does drift off, and in a dream he awakens to some mysterious thing invading their mantle. An insidious something worming its way into their private space, even right into his head. In this dream, Dee Zu remains oddly passive, barely present as Son struggles to comprehend what's happening, to understand who or what this interloper might be. The thing swells beyond the confines of their shelter, beyond the range of the ken and off in all directions toward the horizon. Son awakens, his heart racing.

  He sleeps again till daybreak. This time he emerges from a dream where he's on the hunt, and the snore of a nearby pig has followed him out of the dream, the sound of Dee Zu's steady breathing, not quite a snore. She has rolled toward him in the night, and her hand rests on his hip.

  He turns his head to look. Her fingers lie there long and graceful and light. And naked. Dee Zu has shed her mantle. As he has, he now realizes. Outside, toward the northeast and roughly above Ahuk Hole, a scaly patch of sky iridesces in the first light of morning.

  Dee Zu comes awake. She starts back, not recognizing him at first. Right up close this way, nose to nose, dawn's light on her face, her eyes glisten with a delicate woogly overlay. He raises his hand to brush at her face and stops.

  "What's wrong?" she says.

  "Nothing. No problem."

  She realizes at the same time he does. "Your hand!" she says.

  Son's right hand is bare of mantle. And it sports four fingers and a thumb, though two of the digits are gray and unnaturally smooth, only stubs, no fingernails. "That's crazy," he says. "Let's see your foot."

  Way ahead of him, she has drawn her knee up to her chest. She's cradling a right foot. A lovely foot, though it's more gray than coppery chocolate. She turns it this way and that. "Impossible," she says. "There hasn't been time. Not for a whole foot. They hadn't even finished rebuilding my toes, and that was after two or three days. And now look."

  "What's going on?"

  They sleep again.

  swarm of four

  In her dream, the medibots have fully reconstructed Son's foreskin.

  "What are you doing?" Dee Zu says.

  "Playing," he replies. He yanks the hood back and forth and goes "Bang, bang!"

  "The mighty hunter."

  Son grins at her. "Want to play?"

  He sounds so much like Cisco that Dee Zu wants to cry.

  Then sorrow turns to joy. For Cisco in fact joins them. She relaxes into a lush erotic dream in which he and Son make love to her together, accepting of one another, blood brothers, and everything is fine.

  In her dream she awakens to Tor's voice: "Get up! Get moving. Go, go, go."

  •

  Unbelievable. Son is hard again. Dee Zu, other things on her mind, pretends she's asleep. Then something else intrudes.

  "Dee Zu?" A man's voice. Not Son, not Cisco. Yet familiar.

  "Tor?"

  Then a familiar woman's voice.

  "Sky," Dee Zu says.

  "Yes. I am more comfortable with that."

  Son sees she's awake. He murmurs and gathers her closer.

  "Not now," Dee Zu says.

  "What? What's wrong?"

  "Nothing. Just not now, okay?"

  "I liked being with you. Yes. It was good."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "Your swarm of two. You and Son. A swarm of four, really. I enjoyed you as Tor and I enjoyed you as Sky. I joined both of you each way. You and the boy Son. This way and that way. Yes. It was very good."

  "I don't believe this."

  "Your young friend gets full marks for enthusiasm."

  "You must be kidding."

  "Cisco is more experienced, however. Better overall. Do you agree?"

  "Tell me where he is."

  "Do what I tell you. Then we will talk about Cisco."

  •

  Dee Zu feels dirty. She knows it's silly, but there you go. Not only has she cheated on Cisco with Son, however retro that notion may be, she has just participated, however unwittingly, in a way‐kinky clusterfuck. She swears, to whom or what she can't specify, that, if only Cisco is still alive, she'll make it up to him when they meet again.

  He must be alive, otherwise his Aeolian scendent would surely have been in touch by WalkAbout or something.

  "Cisco. Can you hear me? You understand this thing with Son isn't serious? Are you listening?"

  "Cisco is non‐contactable."

  "If that's you, Sky, I don't want to talk to you. Just bug out."

  "Cisco?" She tries once more.

  where is cisco?

  Call it a quantum loophole.

  – Sky

  a piece of cake

  "Listen carefully." The sex kitten is all business.

  "I need you to convey some data to mondoland," Sky says. "And this information must be kept absolutely secret. Even from 'me.'" She hooks the quotes with her index fingers, which Cisco finds creepy. "Even MOM cannot know about this. You understand?"

  "What are you talking about? You are MOM."

  "There is more to MOM than you know."

  "Whatever. How can we keep secrets? IndraNet makes that kind of thing impossible."

  "IndraNet can be bypassed."

  "How? Aeolia is nothing but data, and infinite redundancy means that every element of the whole contains that whole within it." And so he lectures one chief architect of this scheme. "The ultimate backup system."

  "No problem," she says. "Our little love nest?"

  That would be her GR fuckpad. "Yeah?" he says.

  "It is enclosed in a gibubble."

  "A gibubble."

  "Brian calls it a cone of silence."

  "Brian has been here?"

  "No, silly. That was another gibubble. I needed to ask him a few questions. Things that had to remain confidential."

  "So what's a gibubble?"

  "It is an unintelligibubble. It encrypts proceedings in a way that would have taken all the quantum computers in our old world at least a day to crack even working simultaneously, as quantum computers do, in a bunch of parallel universes."

  "Uh‐huh."

  "They establish quantum loopholes."

  "Right." The kind of loopiness he'd expect to hear from Brian.

  "Yes. You farm information out to a vast number of parallel universes, a nearly infinite number of adjacent worlds, but on the whole you bypass this one. Okay?"

  "Heh."

  She strokes his member, which this talk of quantum phenomena has rendered flaccid, and says, "Think of it as something akin to entanglement. In the linked gibubble—in this case linked by your simultaneous presence here in my love nest, as a scendent, and back there in mondoland as a wet—the information can be recovered from some of those other worlds, but only within the second gibubble. That's not exactly what happens, of course, though that is the closest we can get without resorting to higher maths."

  "You're telling me I'm the quantum loophole."

  She gives him her best you're‐such‐a‐smart‐little‐human smile.
"You are the only extant specimen of a personality that exists as both wet human and scendent. Yes. A unique resource. And this is very interesting, but there is insufficient time for experimentation. What I am proposing will work or it will not. If it does not, then nothing else is going to matter."

  "Um." He puts his hand over hers, wanting to suspend the stroking while he thinks this through. She leans in toward him to flick a nipple with the tip of her tongue and then blow on the wet spot. It does nothing for him.

  "Let me put it another way," she says. "What is left of IndraNet's material substrate, my primary locus as MOM and the Lode, lies in a location that must remain confidential. Aeolia, if you want to talk about a physical location, is emergent upon data stored there. But qubital spaces such as this gibubble, strictly speaking, are not located there. In fact, they are located in a number of parallel universes all at the same time."

  She gives him a nip.

  "Ow," he says.

  "For now," she continues, "think of what we have here as one particular realized embodiment, 'here' or 'there'"—she does the thing with her index fingers again—"of qubitally encoded data determining a given n‐dimensional probability matrix expressed as a reasonably coherent, reasonably self‐consistent world with a specifiable locality. Yes?"

  "Sure."

  "Trust me."

  What a good idea, he thinks. I'll just trust you. Right.

  "This is serious," she says. Never mind she's still naked and sprawled back amid the cushions.

  "Okay. So tell me again."

  "You are the key. You are uniquely qualified to act as my courier. You are here with me in Aeolia, in my gibubble, at the same time you are unconscious in Brian's Empty Volume, down there in mondoland. Thus you provide a conduit between two secure spheres. I need you to transfer information without the rest of MOM being aware of it. And we have to do it soon."

  Sky glances around their boudoir as though to reassure herself regarding the gibubble. "Already there are signs that another part of MOM might be trying to steer events in mondoland. Our young friends down there are experiencing things, whether these are deliberate interventions or mere anomalies I do not yet know, that should not be happening."

  "What? What 'things'? Is Dee Zu okay?"