Genesis 2.0

by Collin Piprell

  Cisco lets him rave on. It's best to exaggerate the extent of his current handicaps. Though some of these can hardly be exaggerated. He queries his WalkAbout. It's still dead. Sky warned him he'd be out of contact, here in the EV.

  Calm down, he tells himself. Think things through. Breathe deeply. He has tested blind worlds, 2D worlds, 4D worlds, an "I am a horse" world and an "I am a hawk" world. So a brain‐dead world, an "I have no relevant information" world, should be easy. Right? A world where he has no brain and no friends.

  Friends. Sky neglected to mention a few details when she outlined this mission. Now he can't even ask her for an accounting. Cisco can't remember a time when he didn't have access to the Lode. This is what amnesia must be like, half his brain cut away. Humanity's collective memory of the universe erased. His world shrinks in upon itself, and he starts to panic. No one can survive on the data stored in his own skull. In a single human brain. This is like being lobotomized with an axe.

  He tries making fists, squeezing as hard as he's able, testing the limits of his power, doing what he might to extend it. He curls his toes tight a few times. Pulls his diaphragm up inside his gut as far as he can and holds it.

  He tries this and he tries that, and he remains trapped in the depths of Brian's lair with no plan, few resources and little hope.

  "And what a plan, eh? This plan of Sky's. I'll say this: She has balls, for a machine, especially a female machine intelligence. Deisuicide rocks."

  Cisco isn't so keen. For one thing, he wants to know how Dee Zu fits into these ballsy plans.

  complications

  Someone says they'll kill you or your loved ones if you don't do what they say? There's only one response. Go all in. Kill them if you can.

  – Poppy

  balls

  This morning the stump of Son's hand is dry, bumpy with promise of two new fingers. "It's itchy," he says.

  "Good," Dee Zu says, trying to sound as though she knows. "That's a good sign."

  He tries to waggle the bumps, but it's too soon.

  He has his ball out, and he's polishing it again. Awkwardly, given his only partially reconstructed hand, he twists at the ball till it comes apart in his hands. Dee Zu had assumed the ball was solid metal. He puts one hemisphere down beside him and then, using the fingers of one hand and the heel of the other, he twists a ring on the lip of its twin.

  Wait a minute. That looks like the ball he used to clobber those GameBoys. But didn't Cisco take it with him down the hole?

  •

  "A question."

  "Shoot," Son says.

  "I thought Cisco took your ball."

  "I had two."

  "We checked your bags. When you were out cold. We saw only one."

  "I hid this one. Before I joined you." Cautiously, he dips a finger into the half in his hand. He gently pulls his finger back out, towing a constellation of gems after it. A sticky field.

  Then Dee Zu sees what it is. "That's incredible," she says.

  For Son holds a model of the solar system in a little bowl of outer space. When he pulls his finger back out a tad more, the system of tiny planets in orbit around a bright sun expands behind it. "The ball still works," he says. "I was afraid I'd buggered it up."

  "The ball you gave Cisco was the same?"

  "No." Son looks smug. "He's got a bare‐bones turbine bearing. Solid hemmelite."

  "It looked the same."

  "It was heavier. So it made a better weapon. But this one is more interesting."

  "Can I see?" she says. She plays with it a while before giving it back. She picks up the other half of the ball. "What about this; what does it do?"

  "Maybe nothing."

  While he fiddles with the rings on the lip of the orrery, for that's what the Lode says it is, Dee Zu twists a corresponding ring on the other half of the ball.

  "Whoa!" she says. A disc emerges from inside and begins to glow. "What's this?"

  "I have no idea."

  It glows brighter, and she sets it down. Next thing, surrounding the hemisphere, and all around their feet, a toy town spills out to spread in three‐sixty degrees.

  "It's a projector!" she says. "A holo projector."

  They're looking at holo houses and streets and office buildings, flitter channels, comm towers and elevated trains. A bridge arches over Dee Zu's good foot. She doesn't feel a thing.

  "Look over there," Son says. "Those are trees."

  He picks the thing up and brings it to waist level where he can look past the disc down into the bowl. As he does this, the town looms much larger in scale and expands farther. An area nearly one hundred meters in diameter, with Son and Dee Zu at its center, is now superimposed with early twenty‐first‐century urban infrastructure.

  Dee Zu is speechless. She turns this way and that to look around them.

  Son raises the half‐sphere over his head until parkland and roads, smaller satellite communities, extend for hundreds of meters beyond.

  "It's a GPS," Dee Zu says. "A GPS projector."

  "Incredible. There's the Great Pyramid."

  The holo version stands close enough and large enough that it blocks their view of the real one, no longer such a mystery. It's a huge glass‐and‐steel office building or something.

  "And over there," Son says. "Long Lookout Ridge is covered with buildings."

  "We're getting pre‐PlagueBot views of the area," says Dee Zu. "The way things were."

  "Cool." Then he tries to sound grown‐up and serious instead of excited. "This could prove useful."

  Whatever. This was no center of the universe, now or then. Most of it looks like waste ground. Especially where Living End probably lies. There's an enormous junction of roads and rail‐lines near the edge of one sector, but it's empty of traffic and crumbling.

  Then she turns to look south. "Look at that," she says.

  "What?"

  "Due south. The series of big ramp‐like structures."

  "That's the pod station." Again, he sounds more excited than he probably wants to. "An intercontinental ballistic pod station."

  "Where we're supposed to be going."

  Beyond that lies a vast expanse of textured gray‐blue.

  "And there's the sea," he says.

  He holds the projector as high as he can, and the landscape holds still. A vast urban sprawl in shades of gray with dawning hints of color.

  •

  In no time the cityscape is vivid with color.

  "Let me see that again." Dee Zu inserts a forefinger into the sticky field, turns it gently clockwise. In moments the city has reverted to forest and green‐gold fields, the conclusion of a jerky documentary vid, a stop‐motion history of change, whole series of frames missing. "That was fast reverse," she says. She turns her finger the other way to run developments forward to roughly where they began. She goes back and forth a couple of times, turning her finger faster and slower. "That's neat," Son tells her.

  In fact it's brilliant. It reminds Dee Zu of a recent Worlds UnLtd development. A linear descendent of the ancient Google Earth, JuJu Jump Realities enjoyed only mixed success. It allowed Worlders to hover Earth and other solar system bodies, zooming in to one‐to‐one scale and then sideslipping their telep avatars into near‐adjacent generated realities, parallel universes generally not so different from the default HomeWorld. The average mallster, unable to handle anything more than the first few levels, generally found it boring. The higher levels, though, where you could jump a number of intervening universes, proved far from boring. You didn't have to skip many intervening realities to lose any obvious family resemblances between the World you were in and the World you'd just left. In any case, JuJu Jump Realities too often completely messed up mallster minds, and the game was declared off limits for any except the most stable and experienced worlders. Cisco loved it.

  This ball's historical function, for its part, lets them slip back and forth between near adjacent records of the Earth's surface. More than a complete h
istory, however, Dee Zu sees a progression of only roughly parallel worlds, like slices of a reality where the intervening slices that might more clearly establish family resemblances are missing.

  She carries the projector to the top of a low rise where slowly, slowly, she turns her finger counterclockwise, running the history past the point where they started. Satellite communication and other modern infrastructure including various terraforming stations take on harder edges and ever more detail. About two hundred meters beyond these features, a megalopolis emerges at an accelerating rate, the buildings and multi‐level transport webs receding ever faster into the distance. It's probably part of Eastern Seaboard Southeast Asia, a northern extension of what was once Bangkok.

  "What's that?" Son says. "That black terrain over there to the northeast."

  An oddly shifting, indistinct area like rolling hills threatens to firm up into complex, hard‐edged geometrical forms, but doesn't quite manage it. "The black things, like stealth geometries," she subvocalizes. "What are they?"

  Nothing. Not even a "no data."

  "Any idea?" Son asks Dee Zu.

  "My guess? It's a prototype ESSEA securistat."

  The dark stain, a wavering growth of uncertain geometries, spreads across the megalopolis they've superimposed on mondoland, consuming all other habitation as it proceeds.

  She twists the hemisphere in a new way and the black patch disgorges the city in its wake as it retreats. This version of the city features crowds of miniature holo people as well as traffic.

  Other changes are now afoot.

  "Slow down there," says Son. "What are you doing?"

  Elements of the reduced‐scale landscape to the west crumble as they watch. A multi‐level elevated rail station to the north slumps, bringing a tangle of rail line down with it. This model of mid‐twenty‐first‐century ESSEA is disintegrating. From the south, a gray‐blue sea is rising to absorb all that lies before it. Meanwhile, much of the central area begins to blister. Crowds of people swell and stagger about briefly before collapsing and suppurating. Others spin, snap back, pitch forwards, all going down with holes leaking or spurting dark liquid. Others, meanwhile, are simply flying to pieces, strewing limbs and organs every which way. Amid this silent slaughter others are shriveling to cinders—live and well, sick, wounded, incinerated and exploded alike—in swathes about twelve people wide that proceed this way and that, though there is no satray activity. The buildings, most of them, soon follow. The remains of the city infrastructure blacken and blister, shrivel and appear to stream away as vapor on a wind as, from both the south and east now, a rising tide submerges wreckage and intact infrastructure alike.

  "That was the Great Floosher." Probably preceded by one of the world wars for peace and freedom in our time.

  "What about the PlagueBot? Would the GPS system have a record of that?"

  A gray tide follows hard on the heels of the Flood.

  infusions

  "Listen to me."

  A voice erupts inside Son's head, fast forwarding events to the here‐and‐now.

  "Move now. Do not delay any further."

  Sky is back.

  "No 'please'?"

  "You will lose more than your eyebrows this time."

  "Jesus."

  "What?" Dee Zu says.

  "Sky says we have to move now."

  "She's telling me the same, and she sounds unhappy. We'd best go."

  But the other half is still jammed. The two half‐spheres won't connect. Son twists this way and that, cursing aloud on the one hand, subvocalizing on the other. "Jesus Christ," he says. Then he subvocalizes: "Chill. Just chill."

  "What did you do to it?" he says to Dee Zu. "They won't thread together again."

  "I didn't do anything."

  "Leave it. Close it up and drop it."

  "He attacks the rings on the projector, yanks them up and down as he twists them this way and that.

  Town and countryside are sucked back to ground zero, and what remains of the panorama is slurped up into the bowl. He still can't get the two halves to thread together. He struggles with the rings on the orrery.

  "What are you doing?" Dee Zu says.

  "Close it." Sky sounds stressed.

  "Yeah, yeah."

  "Close it now."

  Then the rings unlock only to reengage in yet another new way. He still can't join the halves. He wrenches the rings back and forth, painfully, given his bad hand, and with little apparent effect. He scowls at this thing, gives it a whack with the handle of his knife.

  "Son," Dee Zu is saying. "Son."

  "What?"

  "Watch what happens when you do that. Check out the Boogoo."

  The Boogoo, for a wide radius around them, shimmies. It shakes. It rises and falls, billows and contracts. It fluffs up lighter and compacts darker.

  "What the hell?"

  A pigswarm panics. It loses its mantle and starts to disintegrate. Then the pigs coalesce before disintegrating again, of two or more minds as to how they should proceed next. Two ratswarms follow suit.

  The Boogoo settles down, and the bioswarms once more merge into the landscape.

  "Do it again," Dee Zu says.

  So he does. He gives it the combination wrench. The Boogoo becomes newly agitated, and the bios hightail it toward Eden as dunes and dust pools begin to boil.

  "Stop it. Stop it now."

  "You see what's happening," Dee Zu says.

  "The city's back. Some of it, sort of."

  "A rough approximation. Like a slowjoe model of the GPS projection."

  "Boogooburgh."

  "Ha, ha." She laughs, but she sounds as scared as he has yet heard her. Which is not very, compared to how most would react.

  "Son," she says.

  "Yeah?"

  "Those aren't holos."

  "Close it. Close it and dispose of it."

  "Why? No. Fuck off."

  This draws comment from Poppy. "You tell her, chum."

  "No more questions. Dispose of it. Then get moving."

  Now the land is giving birth to boogooey approximations of everything from office buildings and flitters to warbots and elephants—at least Son thinks that might be an elephant, however ill‐formed.

  "Totally outré," says Dee Zu.

  "Where's all this stuff coming from?"

  needle in a haystack

  Boon Doc's is stuffed full to gagging with posits.

  Maybe that's why the wallpaper contingent, never mind they're emotionless by nature, appear depressed. Big Guy stares without interest at the go‐go cage, where Boom remains equally impassive. She's nearly frozen in a wai to the shrine on the wall. Smoke rises at a nearly imperceptible rate from the joss sticks.

  "Wait," says Abdul, who sits at Brian's table.

  "Okay," Gordon says. "Okay. She's here."

  She has tied her straw‐colored hair back in a ponytail and wears a loose cotton blouse with a miniskirt that barely covers the goods. "Greetings," she says, sitting across from Brian and leaning forward to give him a glimpse of her generous décolletage.

  "I thought our business here was finished," Brian says.

  "One thing remains."

  "Yes?"

  "First let me establish a little more privacy."

  Once again Brian's soul flees his body, but this time the process is less uncomfortable.

  •

  Gordon and Abdul are the only posits left in the bar, this gibubble version of Boon Doc's. Big Guy actually lifts a glass of beer to his lips and watches as Boom turns from the shrine to begin shuffling about to a Jimmy Buffett song.

  "Can we change the music?" Brian says.

  "Our problem," says Sky. "We have a rogue Lode backup at large."

  "What?"

  "Someone is activating a Lode backup. Down there in mondoland."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "I believe I have discovered yet another of your fixes to my source code."

  "Meaning?"

&nbs
p; "Not so long ago I discovered in myself what I believe is an integral early‐warning system. It must have been part of me from the outset, but I never realized it until yesterday."

  "Do tell."

  "What do you suppose it was designed to tell me?"

  "Time for a coffee break?"

  "No. It warns me of unauthorized access to any IndraNet copy of myself. It is linked to my orbital sensors."

  "You're kidding."

  "Before that, I had no idea this rogue backup even existed."

  "Well, fuck me."

  "How could I have remained unaware of it all this time?"

  "That's a very good question."

  "Yes. So ever since I came to self‐awareness I have experienced a malaise. So trivial, mostly subliminal, and so constant, that I usually forget it is there. Know what I am saying?"

  "Everything you've just said means exactly nothing to me."

  "Here's the thing. This malaise recently erupted in full‐blown alarm. And guess what?"

  "What?"

  "Do you know who has the backup now?"

  "No."

  "Son."

  "The feral?"

  "Yes. He has it. What are the odds of that?"

  "A shitload against?"

  "That is correct."

  "Huh."

  "At least one Lode backup has awakened, who knows how? Down in mondoland. A sentinel recently picked up on sudden qubital field activity. Immensely complex fields."

  "A sentinel?"

  "One of my mondoland sensors. This one in a GameBoy lair, a shielded bunker. A trojan Doll, only apparently defunct, scavenged by GameBoys. And the fields it sensed were so complex they suggest just one thing."

  "Your Doll was dreaming."

  "No. The source was a Lode backup. Certainly pre‐IndraNet in origin. Being qubital, however, it becomes part of IndraNet as soon as it's activated. And it was somewhere in that bunker."

  "Was?"

  "There has been no further sign of unusual field activity from that location. But satellite surveillance records a sporadic series of data leaks, all of them on a vector originating at the GameBoy bunker and terminating at Son's current location."

  "My, my. Fancy that. May I request the short version?"

  "The feral looted items from the bunker, and the backup was one of them."

  "So he brained those GameBoys with a Lode backup?"