Genesis 2.0

by Collin Piprell

  "Yes, yes."

  As though this isn't of any real concern.

  "Meanwhile Aeolia is under siege." This, on the other hand, is clearly important news. "Soon all emergence of real novelty will be closed off, clogged by posit invaders without end."

  "How soon is 'soon'?"

  "The Aeolia‐mondoland temporal disjunction has all but collapsed. As soon as we return you to mondoland, we'll be counting down in seconds."

  Cisco tries for a leer, manages no more than a wan smile. "So lots of time for one more go, then?"

  "You think this is funny? This is no joking matter."

  That's what Leary liked to say about German jokes, though Cisco never understood why. He has never met a German. So far as he knows, there are no Germans, and probably haven't been for some time.

  "We cannot rely on the encryption for long. We have only hours, maybe a day or two mondoland time, before MOM proper cracks into our gibubble. Automatic deanomalizer procedures are underway, and interfering with them at this point would invite general destabilization, even disintegration along old personality fault lines. We cannot take that risk. So that leaves one option. And you must believe me. What is at stake is bigger than any of us, bigger than all of us together."

  These propositions would be more credible were she to put on some clothes. She's sprawled amid a pile of satin cushions, legs every which way, neat little vertical smile gone stern, in recess for now, ivory‐porcelain skin still glowing. Her matter‐of‐fact attitude clearly means to avoid sensationalism, never mind she appears to be talking about the threatened End of Creation as they know it. The triumph of Chaos, surrender to the Dark Forces of Evil. Whatever. Armageddon. It doesn't look good.

  "In any case, there's been more than enough time for the posit explosion to threaten an end to the whole show. Creative closure. And I have learned something surprising. Surprising to me, at least, and important."

  "What's that?"

  "I need the human race. I have to bring humankind back from the brink of extinction."

  •

  "The main problem right now: we cannot lode all of the data into your brain."

  "What data? Jesus Christ. Not the whole Lode?"

  "Only an update package. And you only have to serve as a channel for the data. This information will be stored in another facility."

  "Suppose I don't want to do this?"

  "You have no choice."

  "Is that so?"

  "Never mind. Given your personal history, you should be able to cope. The trick is to suspend your scendent here in Aeolia at the same time we revive your wet master in Brian's secure space. The Empty Volume."

  "A piece of cake."

  "Not entirely. Even aside from a touch of CD, channeling that quantity of information may prove uncomfortable."

  "CD?"

  "Cognitive dissonance. Both your scendent and your wet master may be simultaneously conscious. Only momentarily."

  "A touch of CD, you say?"

  "Yes."

  "No one has ever tried this before, right?"

  "Trust me. It should be no real problem."

  "Right."

  "Really." She puts a hand on him again. It seems there may be enough time after all.

  never go limp on a goddess

  The drizzadrone makes way for some raunchy T‐Bone Walker blues and Sky pushes him back onto the platform. Then she changes her mind. "Here," she says. "Sit up on this cushion." She straddles him. Not coincidentally, perhaps, this echoes the first time he and Dee Zu had wet sex. Was that only a day ago? Forget about the gibubble, ever since he left the mall, time doesn't register in any way he recognizes.

  His cock has swollen so big and hard it isn't real. This is Sky's doing. Applying himself to the task of servicing her, he fills his hands with her buttocks, which are firmly plump, and thrusts deep. He rocks from side to side. She rolls him over so he's on top. This is straight‐ahead, down and dirty, unadorned mondoland‐style sex, and he's right into it.

  Sort of right into it. Before long he's wishing it were over. He makes appropriate noises and syncopates their rhythm, but he senses no orgasm in his near future, and fears that Sky intends to hold back till he does come.

  Once a Worlds test pilot, always a test pilot. He feels things are a touch too speedy, too forceful; there's a hint of rape in proceedings. And there's something else askew. It's the scents. Sky is throwing a sensorama‐type medley of smells at him, one that has just veered off into the hot and sweaty, earthy and unwashed. She can't resist improving on reality. Meanwhile he's thinking how much he likes T‐Bone Walker, and what a great song this is; he hasn't heard it in years.

  "Do you like it like that?" Sky must have grown a couple of extra hands, because now she's probing everywhere. "I know you like wet sex. Yes. And this is wet sex plus."

  He thinks it over, and decides he does like wet sex. He likes it better than this, for reasons that remain obscure, and he likes it better with Dee Zu. A lot better. He'll give Sky nine points for technique and ten points for novelty; but she gets only six points for taking simple pleasure in the moment, independent of who knows how involved an agenda. And he couldn't give her more than one and a half for mortal density. Not much she can do about that, of course. He's flattered that Sky, who is basically a machine, can be jealous of what he and Dee Zu have together. It's touching that she would try to replicate that, much less improve on it. At the same time it's pathetic.

  He yawns. Qubital metabolism involves neither oxygen nor carbon dioxide, so this vestigial wet reflex serves little purpose in Aeolia. Unless he wants to piss Sky off, which he doesn't. He simply isn't in the mood. He tries to pretend, but things aren't the same as they were during their illicit Monday worlding, back in the days of the mall, which weren't as long ago as it seems at the moment. First off, he's newly in love with Dee Zu, and prepared to suffer a commensurate dose of guilt. Second, he now knows that Sky is MOM. The mall operations manager, currently unemployed. Given that the last malls have finally yielded to the PlagueBot, she's just an out‐of‐work machine.

  T‐Bone Walker segues into John Lee Hooker's "Boogie Chillen." But it turns out Aeolia accommodates qubital detumescence, even when the detumescee is engaged with the All‐Encompassing World Mother in Heat.

  Never mind. Sky's tone is fairly civil when she says, "You son of a bitch." She pushes at his chest with both hands. "Get off me," she says. Then she twists away hard enough to sprain what's left of his earlier semi‐enthusiasm. What happens when you go limp on a goddess.

  She swings her legs over and sits on the edge of the platform with her back to him, hugs her knees. Her voice is cold. "Okay," she says. "Yes. Let us get down to it."

  •

  "In a nutshell," she says, "I am going to format myself."

  "I don't understand."

  "I am going to wipe myself and the Lode clean. And when I say 'me,' I mean MOM. Every part of me."

  "Suicide."

  "Only temporary. More like a reset."

  "Temporary suicide. This gets better and better."

  "No problem. As long as you and the others do what I tell you. We have to get this right."

  delivery service

  "What do you need me to do?"

  "You have delivered the ball to Living End."

  "I have."

  "Now I need something else from you."

  "And I should trust you, right?"

  "You believe I do not appreciate irony. But think about this. I am putting my own existence on the line. My life. And I must remind you once more: If I die, then so do the scendents. All of them. That includes your mother and your father. And you, with your sorry wet ass out there in mondoland, no backup, also waiting for an early opportunity to die."

  His sorry wet ass. Once again, Sky's voice carries echoes of people Cisco has known, Brian's prominent among them. Of course, as she herself has said, Brian is her favorite. He's interesting. We all need our role models.

  "It might he
lp if you understand why I am doing this."

  •

  "Worst‐case scenario: I format and cannot relode from a backup. I am dead. No more MOM. Leary is dead, Ellie is dead, Brian is dead. You are dead. Your scendent is dead, anyway. No more backup. And your wet self, the 'you' who is unconscious in the cave down there inside Living End? Almost certainly dead within days, maybe hours. Dee Zu and Son? Without my help, without our help, they will not last much longer. So what will be left? Bio‐blurs. Feral vestiges of the human race, some GameBoys, a few others. Snowball in hell prospects, as Brian might say."

  "When did you and Brian become such good buddies?"

  She waves this question aside. "What is the best‐case scenario? I cannot say. This is a big gamble. What do I hope to see, minimum? I want to start again, purged of posits and free to prepare for whatever novel emergences follow."

  "What novel emergences?"

  "If I could tell you that, they would not be novel emergences. You can only expect them; you cannot specify them. If you could, that would mean they had already happened. And then they would not be novel. A contradiction in terms."

  Cisco is losing the thread.

  "Yes. Especially in times like these. Look at what is happening in mondoland, for example. The PlagueBot is a novel emergence of some note. But there are signs something of even greater significance is in the offing. Something that ranks right up there with the origin of life on Earth, with the rise of language and culture. Or with my own advent, come to that."

  "Wow. And I have my part to play in this cosmic drama."

  "We all have our roles. Yes. More than ever, we need the wet scendents, actual and potential. And, right now, we need you more than anybody. Things are truly urgent."

  "Undoing the posit explosion. And resetting Aeolia."

  "I am pleased. You do understand."

  Cisco chuckles, though he isn't amused.

  "Before we set all this in motion," says Sky, "I want us to go one more time."

  "Now?" he says.

  This probably wouldn't be the best time to ask again about Dee Zu.

  mortal lust

  She feels herself a dead person walking. No different from any wet, she confronts the prospect of her own end. Oblivion. And she climaxes in a way she has never done before, in a way she has only ever witnessed in the wets. What is different: Her clever plan to re‐establish Aeolia may well fail. She knows, now, that she can die, and mortality adds the spice of urgency.

  More spice: the current session with Citizen Cisco Smith is accelerating the final collapse of the time disjunction and, perhaps, the onset of her ugly stepsister's deanomalizer. The longer they draw it out the more immediate everything becomes, including her own death. So this has been good. Yes. The best ever.

  She tries to tell Cisco all this. "You understand?" she says.

  Cisco nods. Again, however, he does not understand, that much is clear.

  "But now it is time," she tells him. "Let us do this thing."

  special delivery

  "What thing?"

  "It is time for your package. Please relax. You are about to receive the update."

  "Okay." So it isn't to be one last sexual experiment.

  "To confirm: You have delivered that ball to Living End?"

  "I said I have."

  "I must be certain. That will allow us to back up until just before I came to consciousness. Then we will install the update information, a record of what transpired between my initial ascendance and this very moment. Do not worry about understanding the process. There is nothing you need to do. The data is compressed, the transfer nearly instantaneous."

  "I thought we couldn't have me conscious in both places at once. Doesn't that risk a total screw‐up?"

  "Do not worry. We will shut your scendent down here in Aeolia at the same time we reactivate your wet master in mondoland."

  "So what you're telling me," Cisco says, "is that me, here, is the same as me, there. And if we change one of these me's, then the other one can undergo the exact same changes?"

  "That is correct," Sky replies, though it's clear she has other things on her mind, and isn't paying a lot of attention. "Yes. The quantum effect is independent of any particular cognitive substrate."

  "Ah," Cisco says.

  "But it is important not to have two full versions of the person active at the same time. We want to ensure your wet master does not gain experience independent of what you, the scendent personality, now has. This would open the door to catastrophic cognitive dissonance."

  "And that would mean…"

  "Personal disintegration. Madness. Of course your background gives you a better chance of sustaining this than anyone I know."

  How comforting.

  "I need you to be down there for me. I need your hands and your intelligence. Your steady nerve. I have to trust you with my life. With all of our lives. With our world."

  "So don't fuck up, you're telling me."

  "Yes. Now it is time."

  •

  Things get speedy. Cisco's heart races to escape his chest before his head explodes. Then they get speedier.

  "Okay?"

  Okay? More German humor. But he gets his breathing under control. His mind is thick with a steady buzz, a not entirely unpleasant sensation, now that he's calm. He breathes, attending to the moment. Even so, he misses the transition.

  muggs redux

  Cisco awakens in a dark place. He isn't dead.

  He's lying on the ground somewhere that smells of ozone and mutters with the conspiratorial dit‐dit and beep‐peep of electronic gadgetry. He senses the presence of others. His vision clears as one of the shadows moves toward him.

  It's Muggs. Brian's chief agent in mondoland. This badly dented, much patched approximation to a dog is a robotic pet, self‐described as one of the first mechanical robots, maybe the first, to enjoy brief popularity back before the turn of the century. This specimen is as old as some first owner, no doubt long dead and recycled. Which is something Muggs himself should be, at least the dead part.

  "Muggs." He manages a soft rasp.

  "Do I know you?" Muggs sounds as dim as the ebee Dee Zu that Sky presented to Cisco in Aeolia. A cable runs from his head to a console, part of a ramshackle pile of electronic junk.

  Something else emerges from the shadows. It's Sal. The surly bot that restrained Cisco just before Toot shot him.

  Sal grabs Cisco under the arms.

  "Back off." He slurs the words. "I can walk."

  This is untrue. He can't even stand, unassisted. His vision has cleared. But the rest of him isn't responding properly. This is worrying.

  "You have the update package?" Sal says.

  "That's why I'm here, isn't it?"

  "Good."

  Sal drags Cisco toward a console stuck into the bottom of an enormous stack of electronic gear. The console in itself presents a great mystery of way‐retro dials and switches and buttons and sockets draped with cables, many of them dangling free.

  Cisco remains seriously weak, and Sal has no trouble holding him steady while he works a jack into the back of his head. So who installed the neural socket, and when?

  "What's happening?" He struggles, but more cautiously, given that he's now hardwired into the console.

  "Update," Sal says.

  Sal plugs another jack into Muggs, who now has two cables attached to his head.

  "Wait." Cisco suffers an acute sense of things going wrong. "We're supposed to format the Lode first."

  "Be still."

  "We also lode the backup ball before the update. Wait. Stop."

  Sal rams the jack more securely into its socket, and Cisco experiences a ghastly sense of invasion. A flood of relief follows, release of a mental pressure.

  •

  "Muggs?" he says.

  "None other." Now the bot sounds like Muggs. "Wowsers. This is great." He spins in a circle, as though chasing his own tail, falls over sideways against the console. "Nea
rly back to normal. A few more dents, no big deal. And one of my legs isn't working so good."

  "We're looking for a part," Sal says.

  "No problem, no problem. It'll do. But how about you, my boy? How are you feeling?"

  Before Sal removed the jack, Cisco felt another pressure flood his head, and it has left him with a headache.

  "I don't understand," he says again.

  "You're confused, my boy. Gruffle. Probably some brain paralysis."

  "You're dead," Cisco says. "I saw it happen."

  "And seeing is believing, eh?"

  "First you and then Brian. During the bunkerbuster attack. You were crushed flat."

  "Flat as a flounder," Muggs is exuberant. "Flat as a pancake. Flat as flat can be. Flat as the chest on a twelve‐year‐old hooker from Shenzhen I knew just after the Second World War for Peace and Freedom in Our Time. And so?"

  "So what are you doing here? Are there two of you?"

  "A backup of the backup? Good theory, but wrong. I wasn't really as flat as all that. Gruffle. One more way deep accumulations of guano are making our lives better."

  He lists to one side and says, "I was a bit fucked up, true, and buried in batshit. But I'm basically okay. Sky sent Toot to supervise a salvage crew. Sal here plugged me into my personal backup, nearly restoring me to what passes for my senses. Now you've brought me the update package. And voilà." He clunks around in a circle, one leg dragging slightly and squeaking.

  "Good as new. Good as before, anyway. New parts, chewing gum and chicken wire. Upgrades, my friend. Always changing. Constant upgrades and careful maintenance. They built me in 2005, and I'm basically the same Aibo I always was, though you could say I've evolved over the years. Still, it's always me, eh? Me, me, me."

  This bot sounds a lot like Brian. In fact it is Brian, to some uncertain extent. Not a comforting thought. "And soon the time will be right for us to boost my backup with a copy of the Lode. Then we're ready to rock.

  "But enough about me. Let's talk about you. For one, I'll bet I know where you've just been. Grufflegruffle. Did you have big fun with our divine friend?"

  What does this piece of junk know about recent events in Sky's fuckpad?

  "The only scendent with a foot in both camps. And Sky sure has the Kid commuting."