Genesis 2.0

by Collin Piprell

  Not yet.

  •

  Dear readers of whom there are doubtless none. Excuse me if this all sounds kind of complicated. It isn't. In that corner, wearing the blue shorts, we had Sky, who was representing MOM. In this corner, wearing the purple rhinestone jockstrap and representing mankind, which is pretty well extinct, we have me, the Lizard at the Wheel. Sky believed she had me on the ropes, and the machines were winning. In fact she was laboring under a serious misapprehension.

  acute mortality

  "There you go, my boy. We've just formatted your fuck‐buddy."

  He awakens from one bad dream, in which he died, right into another bad dream where he's chatting with an ancient Aibo in a cave.

  "My fuck‐buddy," Cisco says.

  "And mine, eh? Grufflegruffle. Gone. Forever and ever. Her and the rest of MOM. Not to mention all of Aeolia, together with your mommy and your daddy."

  Cisco sickens at the dreadful knowledge that wells in him.

  "That's right. Alone again. Worse than that. You've lost your backup. Read all about it:

  FORMERLY IMMORTAL

  CISCO THE KID SKATES ON THIN ICE!

  "Existentially speaking, that is."

  "And where are you without Aeolia?"

  "Don't you worry about me. I'm blessed with a shitload of foresight plus a devious mind."

  Cisco chokes a bit on residual gases from Toot's termination.

  "But you, my boy, you have come down with an acute case of mortality. In all your wetness, wrapped in naught but your mortal coils, you're a sitting duck for any bad shit that comes along."

  •

  Administering the necessary passcodes, Muggs leads the way through the portal back into the main Empty Volume.

  "That was the format, my boy. Somewhat rough and ready, perhaps. But we extended our old Toot the mercy of a quick death."

  Muggs being Brian, basically, and Brian being Brian, Cisco has to mistrust these good intentions. Sky did insist her post‐ascension self had to be formatted, however, and supposing Toot was really her last remaining mondoland substrate, then Muggs has proceeded according to instruction. But something isn't right.

  Sal plugs Muggs back into the console, and once again approaches Cisco with a neural jack.

  "Our Sky turned into a real desperado. She was all like, let's bet the pot, eh?"

  Cisco says nothing. For what's to say? Ends of worlds are all the rage these days.

  "Think about it. First, she drops a bunch of bunkerbusters on Living End, you could almost believe we had her evil stepsister Maria at the bombsights. But no. Sky merely figured it was all or nothing at this point. Kill or cure. Would Sky have dropped bunkerbusters on Living End knowing that our dear Toot was in there?"

  Cisco interrupts. "Why is Sal plugging the jack into me again?"

  "In what could be an excess of virtue, my boy, I'm making a backup of the update package. I prefer to copy the original."

  Muggs resumes his rap. "Toot, after all, was the only remaining substrate for MOM, the Lode, Aeolia and the scendents, including Sky herself. But maybe she needed to see if she was going to blink when the chips were down. Could it be this was a prototype deisuicide? Though she couldn't have known then how Aeolia would turn out."

  Again, Cisco makes a fist and finds he is stronger.

  "You'd think Sky would have contrived another backup, an ace in the hole. But it seems that only Toot remained. My guess? In the midst of pursuing his various errands, Toot was also calling in strikes minute by minute, pausing the attacks only when he couldn't be reasonably certain of finding cover. That's the only scenario that makes sense."

  "That makes sense?" Cisco says.

  "How else could Sky have felt comfortable about bombing me, what with the ground of her being right there with me inside my hideout? Whatever. By comparison, Sky's most recent plan made all that look excessively prudent. She decided to kill herself, along with her evil stepsisters and everybody else in sight. Talk about collateral damage. Though I did find this resolve of hers convenient."

  Cisco finds this last proposition chilling, never mind he isn't sure what Muggs means by it.

  Sal unplugs both Cisco and Muggs.

  "Now, my boy." Muggs adopts a positively puppyish élan. "What's next?"

  Cisco doesn't reply. He concentrates on staying impassive, not wanting to broadcast the news that his motor control is fast returning. He doesn't dare test it right now, but he might even be able to stand on his own.

  "The backup ball," says Sal, holding Cisco's bag up for Muggs inspection.

  "Yo. The next step. Let's take a look at this thing our boy has brought us."

  "It's what Sky said to bring," says Cisco, sounding as innocuous as he can. "A backup trigger or something."

  Sal dumps the ball on the floor.

  Muggs slaps the thing with one paw and then another, rolling it around on the floor, and then says, "This isn't a backup."

  "Sky said it was."

  "Well, she was wrong. This is a hemmelite turbine bearing. The landscape around here is thick with them; they're as common as dunes."

  "That's the ball Son was carrying."

  "So?"

  What the hell is going on?

  "Now we have to ask: How many balls was Son carrying?"

  "I took the wrong ball?"

  "Go to the head of the class."

  "So how are you going to reboot MOM?"

  "No problem. Look there." Muggs points over to what looks like a stack of little cannonballs. "Guess what those are."

  "You're kidding."

  "I kid you not. Turbine bearings."

  "I don't understand."

  "Never mind, my boy. Sometimes ignorance is bliss. Be happy with knowing this much: It doesn't matter you messed up, bringing us the wrong ball that way. Totally no problem. This show is about to go on the road nonetheless." He limps over to a smaller pyramid of half a dozen balls. "What do you think these are?"

  "You're not going to tell me they're backup balls."

  "There's where you're wrong. Too bad you can't go back out there and look around for a while. The landscape is littered with backup balls. Hemmespheres Were Us, eh?

  Cisco pretends to listen to this motormouth as he retrieves the ball, hamming it up, pretending to be weaker than he is, and slips it back in his catchbag, which Sal has kindly returned to him. Now his inventory includes a ball, the catchbag and an extra cord. He slings the bag around behind his back. Out of sight out of mind, maybe.

  Muggs limps over to the console and punches a button. A way‐retro shelf with a deep hemispherical depression swings out and away from the panel. "That's where you put the ball, my boy. If you're planning to reboot the Lode."

  •

  "And I will relode this data, never you fear. But I'll do it in my own good time, and I'll do it in a way that means MOM won't have a chance of coming to consciousness again. In a way that means I'll have the data I need to resurrect myself plus look after all my information needs in future. But that's me. Just the way I am."

  "Are you still with us, my boy?"

  "Asshole." Cisco pretends his response takes more effort than it does. He runs a few surreptitious checks on his other faculties. No question, he's getting stronger.

  "I understand your chagrin. Just reunited with your family after all those years, and now look. Down here in mondoland with a projected lifespan of approximately fuck all, while Aeolia, along with mommy and daddy and MOMMY senior, your favorite fuck‐buddy Sky and mine is no more.

  "Aeoli‐fucking‐ahh. Heaven, or so they'd have had you believe. But it was your choice to return to mondoland. True love rules, OK! Conquers all. Trouble is, now Aeolia is terminally defunct, no reprieve. No more 'let's just kickstart the old scendent data and Bob's yer uncle.' No more instant Cisco, just add water and presto, here you are again, only this time in Aeolia. Meanwhile Dee Zu remains in mondoland, no chance of ascension. And no chance of reuniting with her one true love. Young love thwar
ted. Though it was a nice try. Heroic, even. But no brass ring."

  "Rave on. A loony in love with the sound of your own voice."

  "True, though we digress. And I have something I want to show you."

  twice mortal

  "Let me introduce you to the data coop, my boy. What currently passes for my main personal backup.

  "And now we're going to reboot with one of those balls before plugging you in again, this time to load Sky's update package yet again. A crude backup, another version of the Sky‐proof Lode to which the Great Lizard at the Wheel shall tether himself for all time to come. Or, at least, for however long proves convenient."

  Sal delivers one of the balls.

  "This is the only non‐qubital facility around here or anywhere else capable of taking the whole Lode on board. Are you filled with awe?"

  "Yeah," Cisco says.

  A stacked riddle of electronic gear leans double‐ and triple‐parked against two sides of the cavern. Many components of this puzzle resemble what people used to call PCs. Their glass monitors gaze blankly every which way. Together with a variety of other antique digital items, maybe the guts of PCs, the whole of it rises higgly‐piggly against the cavern wall high into the dark above. A scree of derelict electronics surrounds the base of the pile, stuff that slid off to crash against the floor. The stack is webbed with cables and adapter boxes. Raveled cables lead away to a series of domed enclosures sitting on the floor like surplus flying saucers from an ancient Hollywood movie.

  "Main systems architecture by Mr. Rube Goldberg, eh?"

  "Very impressive."

  "Never mind. It works. And though strictly speaking it's non‐qubital, as I'll explain, it shares key capacities with qubital systems.

  "And now we're going to marshal the pre‐Sky Lode and any other parts of MOM that might prove useful to me. That's the pre‐self‐aware MOM, of course. You've provided the update datapack, for which I thank you. Once I format myself and then reboot a clean copy, I can reascend in full knowledge of what happened between MOM's ascension to self‐consciousness and the rise of the Great Positivity Snafu, followed just now by Sky's splendidly quixotic deisuicide. Those who don't understand history are doomed to repeat it. An outcome I intend to avoid."

  "And this differs from Sky's suicide in what way?"

  "I'm conducting the whole operation all by myself. I'm not trusting anybody else in this matter."

  Sal stands to one side. Cisco looks for vulnerabilities, sees none. His own resources, meanwhile, amount to little more than a catchbag cord and the knowledge of how to weave it, within seconds, into a basket for a turbine bearing. Or for a backup ball, come to that.

  Taking advantage of the prevailing gloom, Muggs' motormouthing and Sal's current inattentativeness, he goes ahead and weaves the basket.

  •

  "I never get the chance to show this shit off. So, my lucky boy, I'm going to give you the tour."

  Some of what looks like rockface slides away to reveal a passageway.

  "After you," Muggs says. "After you."

  Sal drags Cisco through, Cisco never letting on that he can probably walk on his own now.

  The smell of ozone is complicated by earth odors and a faint stench of rot reminiscent of the feral boy's leg wound. This chamber is enormous, its back disappearing in the murk overhead.

  "In the beginning," Muggs says, "Sweetie and I were able to turn folly and pain to good ends." He waves at an elaborate array of large dome‐like containers linked with cables and conveyors to each other and to smaller auxiliary containers. "This was an opout center," he says. "It included several social network circles, permanent holidays from reality that preserved nothing but opout heads. Maintaining the associated bodies proved just too much of a logistical hassle."

  Muggs paws at something and, with a faint whine, the nearest dome opens like a clam. Sal holds Cisco up so he can see inside, where a circle of human heads in jars are wired in parallel.

  "This cluster has descended from opped‐out chuckleheads, themselves late descendents of the twittering homo sap masses, neurally wired together to share their collective post‐mondoland heavens. At least till Sweetie and I commandeered their empty tête‐à‐têtes and turned them to better use."

  "These were people," Cisco says.

  "Opouts," Muggs replies. "The weediest of the weedy. Homo sap at its sappiest.

  "People."

  "Whatever. The other domes are much the same. Though that one over there at the end is long defunct. I doubt we want to see what's inside.

  "Anyway, these heads don't really belong to opouts. Maybe a couple of them, but no more. There could be cryos among them as well, though I don't think so. Most of them, probably all, are GameBoys."

  Not real men, according to the feral.

  "Yes, indeed. A final stroke of luck was having Sweetie's farm there to provide replacement heads when they were needed. The original opouts and the frozen optimists, are long gone, their heads replaced one or two at a time from GameBoy stock over the years. So are these the same klatches we started with? Doesn't matter."

  •

  "Let us proceed to the next component of my secret backup installation."

  Muggs steps aside so Sal can drag Cisco past the dome at the end and over to a doorway that opens at his command. As the three of them proceed inside, lights dimly illuminate some of a large, low‐backed cavern with a concrete floor and an assortment of shadowy installations.

  "I give you Sweetie's backup farm!"

  Cisco gags at the pungent mix of medical and bio odors. This place stinks. What could be holding pens recede away from them into the dark. Sal hoists him upright, maybe so he can see farther. Their visit has inspired a largely unintelligible gabble.

  "So, as I said before, the basic idea for our klatches descended from economy‐class opout social networks, though for years now the actual heads have been harvested from Sweetie's ranch. And that operation evolved from a pre‐existing layer of the Living End onion. Did I mention Living End once included a GameBoy detention center? Of course 'GameBoy' had by that time come to serve as a catchall term for subversive assholes of all stripes.

  "Rattle their cages," Muggs tells Sal.

  The securibot lets Cisco slump to the ground as he attends to his master's bidding. A ragged moaning arises from the stock, swelling away from them as the clatter moves down the line from enclosure to enclosure.

  "This, my boy, is what remains of our GameBoy herds. Holding pens for Sweetie's experimental subjects and replenishment for my backup system. Fast dwindling, I might add."

  •

  Muggs induces a blank bit of rockface at the back of the GameBoy ranch to reveal itself as the door to an elevator that takes them down to another level for the next part of Cisco's tour.

  Smells of ozone and chemicals invade the elevator even before the door reopens. "Embryos, my boy. No harm in saying so now. Not much future for them, I'm afraid."

  Not knowing what to say, Cisco says nothing.

  For a time nobody says anything. Fans tick and hum to the bloops and bleeps of what he imagines are devices making decisions, swapping reassurances and queries, issuing alerts. Unlike in those parts of Living End with which he became more familiar, back when Brian and Sweetie were interrogating him, there are no bats, nary a whiff of batshit, though he spots what might be a roachswarm shimmering in the gloom.

  "This space lies at the heart of the onion. And what's left when you peel the rest away? Nothing. At least to all appearances. Cool, eh? So here we are. Right here where we, or anything else either, aren't. If you follow me.

  "And my job has been to maintain the mechanical and digital substrate that permits an autonomous Brian to persist. A Brian that is proving more immortal than MOM."

  •

  "So did you enjoy the tour, my boy?"

  "Sky said her reboot was urgent."

  "No longer as urgent as she thought. But you're probably getting bored. It's time to go," Muggs s
ays, and Sal drags Cisco back to the elevator.

  adios to that shit

  Sal drops Cisco to the floor in front of the console, where Muggs scuttles back and forth in a state of excitement.

  "So let's do it," Cisco says.

  Muggs makes a noise, it could be a laugh.

  "Let's have the ball, okay? I've got the codes."

  "Not just now, my boy. Sal! We need an all‐points security check."

  Sal moves off to do this thing.

  "You really were going to relode MOM, weren't you?" Muggs says.

  "What are you talking about?" Cisco leans against a jam of derelict PCs, part of the scree at the base of Muggs' backup, and gets to his feet.

  "You pussy. You sniveling excuse for a human being. Nothing but a mallster, after all."

  "You have no intention of rebooting Sky."

  Muggs goes, "Duh."

  Cisco's kick flips Muggs over and sends him skidding through the slime to bang up against a wall. Spinning to confront Sal, he lunges back off his front foot, away from the angry refrigerator, firing a straight lead punch in his wake. Son himself would have been hard put to load the ball this fast. At maybe fifty percent of his normal capacity, he whirls it. It clashes against the securibot. Impassive, Sal advances. Cisco steps back to whirl the ball again, but to no avail. He stops. He's staring at the business end of the same weapon with which Sal annihilated Toot not half an hour before.

  Flash‐flash‐flash. The rays come so fast they merge into one blinding beam of white‐hot light.

  The ball, being of hemmelite, is impervious, though the cord glows so hot Cisco drops it in an instant. Sal now points the weapon at his head.

  "Okay, okay," says Muggs. "Hold your fire, for fucksake. How about giving me a hand?" He lies there, legs treading air, snapping his head groundwards, trying to generate enough torque to right himself.

  His aim never wavering, Sal moves to where he can use a foot to flip Muggs right side up.

  "One more dent for my collection," Muggs says. "Maybe two. Gruffle." He waddles in a circle, testing his various parts. "But dent away, my boy! You're too late. MOM's fucked. The whole fucking world is fucked. Say goodbye to Sky. Bye‐bye to Mummy and Daddy, too. The Brian‐Sweetie‐Rabbit Thing is also no more, thank Christ. Adios to that shit, eh?"