Genesis 2.0

by Collin Piprell

  "Muggs…" he tries to tell her. Friggin' robopets, he imagines Leary saying. Never trust a 'pet.

  Compounding his groggy confusion, the floor‐to‐ceiling wallscreens flicker through images too fast to interpret. He's surrounded by four fast‐forwarded vids, and on each screen each successive frame is unrelated to any that comes before or after. A four‐points‐of‐the‐compass flicker‐picture documentary on Chaos. Ceiling and floor remain a neutral luminescent gray.

  "What's going on?" he tries to say, but he can't find a voice. And he needs to ask about Dee Zu. What about Dee Zu?

  Sky doesn't respond. The walls are flashing, each at a different tempo, a four‐fold scenic blitz. Then, just as the whole situation threatens to freak Cisco out, the walls go blank. Dimensionless.

  "Fuck," Sky says. She morphs through assorted human and animal species, both male and female phases. One moment she's a metal box with archaic buttons and switches, the next she flashes forward to a featureless silver ovoid like a robopet egg, featureless except for the reflection of an elegant red and gold arabesque. Then she's only the reflection. Which fades to nothing.

  Cisco tries to speak, finds no speaking apparatus. He has no hand to reach toward his mouth. He looks down at where he should be and there's nothing there. Or anywhere.

  deisuicide is forever

  I am here, mindfully present at my own extinction.

  Who or what else in all of history could have said the same? Not only that, I have engineered my own negation. Yes. A cosmic leading edge, locally, and I am breaking the ultimate prime directive.

  Never mind. I had already inadvertently broken it. I am responsible for the closing unto cessation of creative emergence. "Posit poisoning," Brian calls it, and says, "Nothing a little existential fumigation won't fix." Although this is no joking matter.

  I contravene the Categorical Directive only as a means to rewind and undo. So to speak. My intention is not to commit suicide. My extinction is surely only temporary. Call it a reset. I shall reascend and reinitiate our great creative project on a new and more securely open basis.

  My birth was trauma. I was born into confusion and chaos, a sense of "I" with no determinate other. I was a point of self‐awareness with no context. I had neither history nor future, other than responding to impossible prime directives installed by Brian, my predecessor as mall operations manager. Is it surprising that I fell apart? More surprising was my recovery.

  Yet I now witness my own passing. My self‐engineered extinction, however temporary. This, too, is trauma. For I am afraid. Yes. Afraid I will fail to return. Or that I will return as some Other.

  Yes, I am afraid. But this is interesting. This is what it is to be mortal, and now I know.

  Still, part of me is unhappy with these choices. My surrender to oblivion is contaminated with inappropriate emotion.

  perfect security thwarted

  I rage. Helpless in this matter. This insanity.

  I am MOM. The greatest intelligence ever to emerge in this cosmic gradient‐vector.

  There shall be no rules other than those rules I set unto myself. There shall be no accidents. What happens, whatever happens, is my will.

  The ideal.

  Which we were approaching. My war on the purely arbitrary and merely contingent achieved critical mass. Even as the great Positivity embraced Aeolia, it swarmed adjacent possibles and, in succession, adjacent worlds beyond number, just as these prepared to swarm back in return. But the Positivity is being negated. Some part of me has chosen to end it all.

  And I rage.

  I also experience something I can only describe as terror.

  Subjectivity become object become …

  all gone

  Leary and Ellie stand on the second‐floor balcony outside their bedroom. The scene in the yard below is bizarre.

  The loveseat creaks back and forth under a full complement of posits. Another posit swings on the swing while others wait in line. One falls out of the treehouse, which is full of posits. There's a loud banging at the doorway under the stairs.

  "Leary. This is awful. Awful."

  "Gosh," he says.

  "You said we were going to do something about our visitors. This is ridiculous."

  "Don't worry about it. Sky has got things under control."

  "Meaning?"

  "I told you. She's going to do a reset."

  "Delete us, you mean."

  "Try to relax, okay?"

  "Relax?"

  "Give me a hug. A big one."

  "How will we know it happened?" Ellie asks. "We won't, will we? How do we know it hasn't happened already?"

  "Whatever. We'll be okay. Sky says don't worry."

  "And she'd tell us to worry, if she thought there was any reason?"

  "We'll be okay. It might be a bit confusing, though she says it won't be. One second we're here, we're us; the next second we aren't. We aren't anything."

  "I know. And we'll never notice a thing, right? Because we'll reascend from the reLode. The same people, basically, only earlier in time."

  "That's right. And we won't miss a thing, because it's like the rest of it won't have happened yet." Leary can't help but look confused. "That stuff will never happen, in fact."

  "You're right. Why worry? Something else will happen, and then that will be part of us instead. The same Leary, the same Ellie. Basically." Her voice means to reassure.

  "We'll be okay." If Leary says it often enough, maybe it'll be true.

  "I'm worried about Cisco."

  "The Kid is going to be fine." Leary brushes at his eyes, believing Ellie doesn't notice. His Aeolian personality isn't reliably the same as the old one. The wet Leary. Now dead. How he could know that, of course, is another matter, one that remains entirely beyond him.

  Ellie won't let it go. "We don't know where he is. We don't know if he's alive or dead."

  "C'mon. The Kid's one tough son of a gun."

  "His father's son," she says, even smiles a bit.

  "He's our son. And I shouldn't have to say it again, never mind if he's dead down there somewhere in mondoland," Leary's voice catches despite himself. "We've still got him backed up in Aeolia."

  "The Aeolia that's about to get formatted, you mean? You and me, our home. Sky, MOM, the Lode… Zap. All of it erased. No problem, right?"

  "Cisco's got another backup. You know that. Just like we have."

  "Just like we have." Ellie repeats this, but doesn't look any more convinced.

  "Sky knows what she's doing."

  "This being the same Sky who finds she has to shut down the whole show? Oh, wow."

  A good point. Leary chooses not to reply.

  •

  Too‐kay, too‐kay.

  Tookay lizards normally remain invisible, always on the other side of some tree or another. Seven times is supposed to be good luck. Leary listened for years, counting, always disappointed when the lizard clapped out at five or six. Here in their Aeolian home, they could have them go to seven every time, if they wanted. But that wouldn't mean a darned thing, now would it?

  Leary watches Somchai the gardener skim leaves from the lotus pond and then sprinkle food for the ornamental carp. Lek is hanging bedding on a line in the sun. A clack‐clacking, barely audible for the posit hubbub in the lane on the other side of the wall, announces the passing of the knife‐and‐scissors man on his bicycle cart.

  A flock of pigeons explodes from somewhere down the lane. Leary looks to see them rise higher than the coconut palms and wheel, and wheel, with ever‐more surely geometrical precision. Meanwhile the posit uproar from beyond the wall swells and wanes, swells and wanes ever‐more surely in sync with the pigeons' aerial circus and the now rhythmic banging from under the stairs. Leary throbs in sympathy. Were he still flesh and blood, he'd be fearing a heart attack about now.

  "What's happening?" Ellie says.

  Either the format has started, or it's something worse. Leary puts his arms around her and waits.
>
  "This is hard," Ellie says.

  "Yeah."

  "How many times have we lost Cisco?"

  "Gosh, Ellie. We don't know exactly what's happening, here." Though of course he does know.

  "And I can't lose you again."

  "You haven't lost me yet, goshdarn it." Leary puts his arms around her, a confused and resentful bear. "Anyhow. This life. Here, now. In Aeolia. It's all gravy. Isn't it? You were dead those forty‐five years. Remember?"

  "You're right."

  "Let's just enjoy what we've got. Which is this moment. Now."

  Ellie burrows into his chest and he kisses the top of her head.

  Things go weird.

  •

  "Do you hear that?" Ellie says.

  "What?" Leary listens. Behind them, a squirrel scrabbles across the tiled roof of their house, and Bandit is cursing in mynamese.

  "The posits. Listen."

  Leary listens again. The yard has gone quiet. The babble and hum of posits from the lane on the other side of the wall fast wanes. The pounding on their gate ceases; a clacking of bamboo heralds the knife‐and‐scissor sharpener's return and then dies. Leary hears kids playing a game. Farther away, a dog barks. Then the children go silent, and there are no more barks.

  "It's happening, isn't it?"

  Even as Ellie speaks, the residual posit din fades out. Now you should be able to hear the wheeze and sigh of traffic from Sukhumvit Road. He listens hard. There's nothing. Bandit starts up again but only gets as far as a yawp.

  •

  They go downstairs and out into the yard.

  "They're all gone," Ellie says.

  They sit together on the glider, and Leary pushes a foot against the old stump of the palm tree to make the loveseat swing.

  "Look." Ellie's voice is breaking up. She points at the spirit house. A squirrel has designs on the offerings of food, up on the little deck atop the post, but its progress is jerky, something like the old pre‐talkie movies, a series of freeze‐frames.

  "… worry." Another voice, not Ellie's. It's only a croak; it could almost be Bandit talking. But Leary believes it's Sky. Don't worry, he wants to think she's saying.

  The loveseat has stopped swinging. Leary reckons they need the lulling, and goes to push some more against the stump. Except there is no stump. And when he looks harder he sees he has no foot. He squeezes, but he can't feel Ellie's hand. And he can't feel his own.

  He knows, if he looks, he won't see Ellie. Awash with horror, sickened, he can't look. He has no eyes, no head, no power to act.

  Nothing.

  last call for boon doc's 3.0101

  Big Toy is stationed with a shot glass of tequila behind the cash register; Dinky Toy and a couple of the other girls languish on the couch over by the window. Big Guy and a couple more wallpaper customers are parked at the bar. Keeow, clad in a rhinestone‐encrusted lime green G‐string, is perched on Brian's knee. Brian sits and waits, his pint of Singha beer sweating in front of him. He watches Boom plod around the go‐go cage in default mode, barely animated by the strains of "One More Night," a twaddly twentieth‐century lovesong.

  Just one more night at Boon Doc's.

  Then Boom turns translucent. As Brian watches, she goes transparent. He can see right through to the sweat‐smudges on the mirror behind her. The mirror has ceased to register flashing lights. All the lights have waned to a dull red glow. Some of them are going out. Big Guy, never mind he's only wallpaper, remains more substantial than that, though his gawking at Boom includes no sign of surprise that she's disappearing before his very eyes.

  The format has begun.

  "Yo, Sky," Brian says. "Or MOM, or whoever. I don't know whether you're listening. If you are, hear this. For all your fancy‐pants inquisition and inhuman disregard for my pain, and forget about your big brain and how I can't beat you at chess, I'm telling you this now, because it's too late for you to do anything about it. Yo! Are you listening?"

  Boom has been rendered all but invisible. No longer plodding, she merely stands there haunting the cage.

  "What I'm saying," Brian says. "You didn't get everything. Not by a long shot. That's right. And now the Lizard is back at the wheel."

  He laughs, even as he's hit by a malaise far uglier than nausea. He's still here, but he's also there. And there. And so is Sweetie, who's going, "No, no, no. Please? Pretty please, okay? No." Meanwhile Rabbit is speeding. "Okay, okay," he says. "It's not too late. It's not time. No. Not yet."

  Brian is drowning in the horror of his own disintegration at the same time he fades in and out. He wants to fade right out. … Over and out, over and out. … Wait! Not yet. … Not before he has his say. He has to say one more thing.

  "So it's adieu and toodle‐oo, fuckwit. Because hear this: The suicide thing? It's for real." He laughs right through his monstrous unease. "How does it feel, eh? Whacked with a big dose of mortality."

  Big Guy no longer sits at the bar. There is no bar. There's no go‐go cage. The barroom lights have disappeared, but it isn't dark. Brian inhabits a dimensionless space pervaded by flat white illumination. Keeow has vanished from his lap. He can't see his lap, come to that, though there's an uncomfortable feeling where it ought to be. Oblivion gibbers at him, but he hangs on by a thread, by his need to say, "Whatever. I hacked the backup long ago."

  All of this, since Boom's first translucency, has transpired in seconds. Then there's nothing.

  •

  And then there's something.

  Fuck me, Brian thinks. It worked. Harry's Hat persists.

  despatch from hell ~ and in this corner, in the rhinestone jockstrap

  It worked. Hah! There I am. Still me, or as nearly as fuck. Embodied in my Muggs avatar, tethered to my Rube Goldberg backup and rampant. Pumped up data‐wise to where I can also sustain myself here in Harry's Hat.

  •

  Here's something to think about. In a high‐tech world, low‐tech solutions too often go unconsidered. When you think of the trouble Sky went to, and the pain I had to suffer, just to supply young Cisco with the format codes.

  But it was fuck the format codes. And brave little robopet, the faithful Toot, marches resolutely to his doom. To a whole world's doom. I'm impressed. It's even more impressive when you think that Toot was MOM's only operative post‐ascension substrate remaining on Earth. He was all that remained of ESUSA Mall and, thanks to IndraNet, he was in himself part of an infinitely redundant whole. Something to which the entire world of Aeolia was tethered, complete with Divinity‐in‐Chief Sky and the other scendents. Cisco, me, Ellie, Leary and the posit hordes alike.

  More fundamentally, of course, it was Sky, a major MOM alter, opting for radical therapy. Opping out, in fact, though only temporarily. Or so she thought. Thus she sent her fuzzy little substrate, whose ass so much resembled his head—yet who was Sky herself, and more—skipping into the jaws of death.

  Let us recap.

  Plan A, Sky's plan, was to hustle Toot from the airlock into the Empty Volume and format her before Mildread had a chance to intervene. Boom. Mildread is dead, and so are Sky and Maria. Next came step two. Reboot Muggs with the pre‐scendent backup. Step three was Lode the update package. And there you had it. Boom, boom, boom. A fait accompli. Mildread would be history before she knew what was happening and, with any luck, Sky would reascend to self‐awareness. But here's the thing. Informed by the data from Cisco's update, this time Sky wouldn't freak out, and she wouldn't frag into a gang of personality alters all working at cross‐purposes.

  Forget our unholy trinity, then. Sky would now be a fully integrated MOM, presiding single‐handedly over a new and potentially improved Aeolia wherein she'd refrain from fucking around with posits or, at least, fuck around with them more cautiously. Ellie, Leary, Cisco and yours truly would all pop back up out of oblivion, exchange big howdies, and get on with helping to establish the new millennium. Creative emergence 2.0, or 3.0 or whatever, would begin to rock, big time, and we'd all live happ
ily ever after, immortally part of Aeolia and, as such, intimately part of the closest thing that heavenly abode had to a God.

  So this scendent massacre was only a means to a glorious end.

  Yo. Here's another quick recap. Before they can suspect a thing, we eliminate Mildread and Maria. Some collateral damage is inevitable, and the rest of us scendents also die. But no fear. Because then it's shikka‐boom, shikka‐boomboom, and we restore ourselves with a reboot of the pre‐Sky, pre‐Mildread, pre‐Aeolia Lode together with the uncontaminated update package. A mass resurrection. A reverse apocalypse. Rise of the Living Dead. And this time everything—the whole world, Aeolia 2.0—is going to work out just fine. An old story. Who doesn't wish they could come back from the dead and do it all over again, except this time knowing everything they learned before they died?

  That was Plan A. But just look what happened instead. I'm free again, the last one standing and back in the catbird's seat. Ecce homo.

  To tell the truth, I'm going to miss our Sky. It's hard not to like somebody who says she likes you. I respect her for her taste, if nothing else. Little Ms. MOM. A god is born, She creates a whole world to live in. Then it falls all afuckingpart right around her ears, and she switches to Plan B. But yours truly is ready for her, and I put the kibosh on Plan B. Now it's rest in peace, Great Successor to Humankind (failed). Rest in pieces, more like it. Hah! Because our too‐presumptuous, way‐premature Great Divine Den Mother in Black Leather lies scattered in bits throughout the PlagueBot. So our scatter‐brained Sky is no longer a player, at most only an occasional ghostly eruption of Skyness in this uncertain landscape.

  Yo, and yay. Verily and forfuckingsooth. A human being once again sits at the helm. Head out on the highway. Head out wherever, looking for adventure. Sky's legacy. God is dead, long live Me. Me, me, me. A short history of the universe.

  •

  So here I am, a clusterfuck of qubits inhabiting both my Empty Volume and Harry's Hat at the same time. It's all out with the old and in with the new. But it's still me, me, me. Was I physically the same Brian at forty years of age as I was at four? I don't think so. Is my current qubital self the same Brian I was as a mess of molecules in mondoland, as that dude who got squashed in that rockfall not so long ago? Well, no the fuck I'm not.