Genesis 2.0

by Collin Piprell

  never hug a fleye

  "What are you doing?" he says.

  "What do you think I'm doing?"

  Such a boy. He could be Cisco's stunt double, carrying on as though he's invincible, the swingingest dick in the land. Unlike Cisco, however, he's all over her like a second mantle. Don't worry, fair maiden, I'll take care of you. And he doesn't have the sense to see how much she hates this.

  "I'm having a pee," she tells him. "My God. What does it look like?"

  "Then pee into this." He tosses her the canteen.

  "You're kidding."

  "No."

  "Have you peed into it?"

  "Not yet."

  So why is she offended? In the mall, they recycled nearly every molecule of everything from piss to dead mallsters. But they were more discreet about it. Not to mention hygienic.

  •

  No sooner do they start off again than he hisses at her. "Stop!" he says.

  Dee Zu has seen it. The thing emerges from a dune and heads straight for them. An ill‐formed creature about three meters long. Not a dragon. It's four‐legged, with the hind legs jacked up and jointed the wrong way. No, it's six‐legged. And now the hind pair straighten, lifting its rear end a meter or so higher.

  "It's trying to jump," Son says, pointing his spearstick at the thing.

  "Have you ever seen a grasshopper?" she asks Son.

  "A grasshopper?"

  She could have sworn it had six legs, but now it has only four, and the rest of it has turned into a spoon‐shaped concavity hanging on a four‐legged frame, the hind legs still jacked up as though ready for action. It performs a couple of desultory leaps, never actually leaving the ground, and parks beside them. It's gray all over, with a suggestion of darker gray stripes.

  Son stabs at it in an exploratory manner, but it doesn't move.

  "It's like a chair," Dee Zu says.

  "What?"

  She circles behind it, always out of range of those hind legs. "Looks comfortable," she says.

  "Don't even think about it." Son stabs it in the middle of its concavity, just a tickle.

  The thing snaps shut on his stick.

  Whoa! Son moves to retrieve his weapon and steps back.

  Dee Zu's first thought: the roachtraps have evolved.

  But Son sees what's wrong with that hypothesis faster than she does. "This thing is pure nanobot!" he says.

  Now the fleye is back, peering this way and that. Son nearly gets it with his spearstick.

  Intrigued by the hungry chair, the bot focuses on it, swooping in nearly close enough to touch it. On its third pass, the chair snaps at it. The next thing, it's hunching up and gagging, much like Son choking up a blurball.

  It expels the fleye, which darts to a station a couple of meters away to hover, ogling the thing that would eat it.

  "Well, yeah," Son says. "The fleye is hemmelite. Undissable."

  Maybe so. Now a second fleye flits in to mess with the chair. It flies right into its pouch, triggering the trap reaction.

  BOOM. The chair explodes. All that remains of chair and fleye is a cloud of dust that wafts away, soon assimilated without a trace by the Boogoo.

  "Huh," Son says. "A kamikaze fleye."

  "A fleye is not always just a fleye?"

  "Capture proof. Some Oboku‐Higgs batteries include a self‐destruct protocol."

  "More Poppy lore?"

  "Yeah. Once when we were out on the hunt Poppy told me, 'I saw you try to grab one of those suckers. Take my word, chum. That's an unskillful practice.'"

  "So. More basic ken: Fleyes are basically non‐huggable."

  "Ha, ha."

  "I have to pee again."

  "Here." He tosses her the canteen. "I'll stand guard."

  sporating mantas

  A dust tendril snakes up to caress his wounded hand. He feels an electric snap and braces himself for more, but it doesn't come.

  Ahead of them stands a series of towering dunes. Otherwise gray and featureless, they drop off like cliffs on the near side. They suggest to Son the row of giant ramps the GPS projector showed, the ones they imagined were associated with the pod station.

  Dee Zu has a new foot, and Son has a new hand. Neither is exactly back to normal, but they're doing pretty good. He gazes at her foot, wishing it weren't as gray as it is, and he can't help but notice she's gazing at his dick. This both arouses and embarrasses him. Even as she stares, this brand‐new hoodie he's sporting comes to look more like a turtleneck.

  He decides he'll look at her face as much as possible before he sees how much that irritates her. But when he tries not looking at her face and not staring at her body, it becomes hard to know where the hell it is he's supposed to look. Now she's all contorted, trying to examine her stump.

  "Can you take a look?" she says.

  Something about her contortions makes him very horny indeed.

  Early on, Poppy taught him the trick of unfocusing in a fight and that helps. You don't look at your opponent's eyes. If you can read his next move in his face, he can probably read yours. Instead you take a holistic POV, attending to the whole context, including his entire presence and manner.

  Dee Zu, on the other hand, isn't shy about looking him straight in his private parts.

  She also points out that he's been carrying a vestige patch of his mantle on his lower back. She tries brushing it away with her spearstick, but it won't budge. Then she's brushing something else. Which is good. Unfortunately, she's interrupted.

  •

  "Wait," Son says. "Wait."

  To the east of where they're headed, a big flat area begins to roil up. The dust boils out in a panicky three‐sixty flood to pile up in a great crater wall. Then it rushes back toward the epicenter where it slowly, eerily, erupts in a skinny column that soars and soars.

  "What now?" Son says.

  "Reminds me of bunkerbuster strikes I saw when I was homing in on Living End,"

  "The Boogoo's mimicking bombs?"

  A mushroom cap forms and the whole of it holds for a long moment before it collapses. The dust races out as the column subsides, forming another crater that holds a moment before it races back in to launch yet another long, slow mushroom cloud. All around the tall, skinny mushrooms the Boogoo takes to erupting in enormous bubbles that break, collapsing in craters and then bubbling up again.

  They could be modeled partly on bomb strikes and partly on sporating roachswarms, except they get a field of them. They rise and rise, like big balloons bobbing on long tethers more than mushrooms. Then they burst in a succession of silent explosions.

  "Those don't look like roaches," Dee Zu says.

  "That's because they aren't. They're mantas."

  "Wow."

  They watch as dense clouds of mantas scatter and rise to turn the late afternoon sky pearlescent.

  It's a short hike to where those big dunes rise out of the landscape.

  squidpod

  The thing sits there on the flat, still and silent, gray as the dust around it. Dee Zu and Son ease in till they're only a dozen meters away.

  "Is that a pod?" Son asks her.

  It whirls and points its bow straight at them. How could it do that, lying on the ground, to all appearances powered off? Pods don't do that, Dee Zu is thinking, even as she looks for gunports. The way Son drops to the ground, you'd think this was a I‐can‐lie‐flatter‐than‐you contest.

  A tinkly chitter is followed by a fwoosh. And another pod materializes to one side of the first. Where there was one pod, now there are two, one light gray and one dark.

  "So bizarre," Dee Zu whispers.

  Mr. Ken gives her a quizzical look and says, "Do you think it can hear us?"

  Chitter‐fwoosh. Fwoosh.

  Now there's only one pod. The dark one. It wavers and collapses, dissipates on the breeze. Now there's none. Son stands again to advance toward where the pods aren't, looking all around and holding his stick in a way that proclaims readiness to spear any pod that mi
ght reappear.

  He points to one side, and she spots the original again, effectively camouflaged against a dune. No sooner do they get a fix on it than it once more expels a fogbot mist that coalesces as a duplicate of itself. The chitter‐fwoosh accompanies the appearance of the decoy. The second fwoosh marks the original pod spurting off in the opposite direction. This is interesting. Apparently it can't move far, so it repeats the procedure again, and again. And each time it ejects a pseudo‐pod. Never mind these quickly lose their power to bamboozle.

  "Tor," says Dee Zu. "Are you there? What are we looking at here?"

  Nothing. No change. Tor has signed off. Or Sky has. Whoever.

  "Now what?" Son whispers.

  "You're the expert; you tell me."

  "Yeah, but."

  "Yeah, but what?"

  "I've never seen anything like this before."

  "A mix. Something like that roachtrap?"

  "I don't think so."

  "Not a colonial, then."

  "It's more like a machine‐bio hybrid. Without a real bio. Or a real machine."

  "This happens a lot?"

  "Yeah. Like never."

  "What do you know about squids?"

  "Auntie showed me pictures when I was a boy."

  "I'm thinking our friend, here, looks like a pod but behaves like a squid."

  It's surprising enough that squids, over however many millions of years, would have evolved this behavior. It's a lot more surprising that the PlagueBot came up with a parallel overnight.

  "So the Boogoo is copying two different things." Son's voice tells Dee Zu this is purely good stuff.

  "And mixing them together."

  "Where would it get the basic design for a pod?"

  "Not to mention for a squid."

  "Or this hybrid."

  "So weird."

  "Cool. A super‐sophisticated boogooman."

  "It's like the squidpod is part of the station defenses," Dee Zu says.

  "But how can that be? There was no Boogoo back when they built this place."

  "Then I don't understand."

  "We're going to need a whole new ken."

  "Sky?" Dee Zu tries again. "What's happening, here? Sky?"

  There's no answer. Not even a "no data."

  not so smart

  Throwing a spearstick at the squidpod would be unskillful. Akin to sticking your hand in an unexamined hole. Because what does he know about this critter?

  Though he has learned something. "I'm thinking it isn't so smart after all," Son says.

  "Oh, yeah?"

  "Every time it throws up a decoy, it moves farther from its original position."

  "And?"

  "And it's doing this in a straight line away from where it started."

  "So we proceed back along the opposite bearing to find what it doesn't want us to discover."

  "Bingo."

  •

  The squidpod follows after them for a while, spawning duplicates as it comes, but soon gives this up.

  They walk along the foot of the dune‐cliffs to the far end. There they encounter a ledge‐like structure, twice as high as a person.

  Son kneels in the lee of a bump in the terrain and says, "Open, sesame!"

  "Louder," Dee Zu tells him.

  "Open, sesame!" he hollers into the stillness.

  "Open, sesame!" she chimes in.

  With that, a marquee extrudes from the top of the squarish feature in front of them and starts flickering with lights.

  "Get down." Son says, unsure why he whispers this, after all the shouting just past.

  "What…?"

  "Don't move," he hisses.

  "Um. Okay."

  The holo throbs and flashes at them, rotating its messages in a vivid motley of blue, yellow and orange characters.

  When virtual presence isn't enough

  Planetwide Pod Deliveries

  Intercontinental material transpositions

  "Bingo, again."

  "Yo, Ali Baba!" Dee Zu yells the next password at it.

  A door materializes in the rockface beneath the marquee. It slides open.

  mail delivery

  Son is amazed at such a relic of times past. Though he's disappointed to find its inside largely gray and featureless.

  This place smells dead, at once sterile and stale. The most interesting part of it is a view, behind a big Plexiglas oval, of what must be the launch cannons. On the walls to either side of the glass, checkerboard monitors ascend into the murky heights, all of them displaying a blankly gray much of a muchness. Between them and directly over the glass, a bright sign blinks through a spectrum of colors:

  Incident‐free deliveries for more than two decades

  And counting

  Son and Dee Zu advance to confront a two‐meter metallic column. It presents a round monitor like a porthole at head level. The monitor is blank. Beneath it protrudes a red button with the instructions "Push button to contact boarding agent."

  Son punches the button and steps back, on guard, as the monitor lights up. "You remember the next password?" he asks.

  "Of course."

  "Do you want to deliver it?"

  "Sure. BRIAN SENT US."

  The monitor blinks.

  "Brian sent us." Dee Zu repeats it.

  A bright yellow smiley face appears. "Greetings!" The genderless voice comes from everywhere.

  "Howdy," Son says.

  Dee Zu snickers.

  Son adopts his most adult voice. "I believe you're expecting us." He's trying for nonchalance. But this past couple of days has been more exciting that the rest of his life put together, and things just keep getting goofier. Even when they're threatening to kill them.

  The metal post's expression never changes. "Do you wish to take advantage of our delivery services?"

  "That is correct." Way serious, Son's voice registers an octave lower than usual.

  Dee Zu fires an impatient look at him. "We need to go to the USA," she says. "To Utah."

  "Ah."

  Dee Zu turns to Son and says, "This thing just said 'ah.'"

  "Ah?" Son says to the smiling pillar.

  "Yes. We regret to inform you that no passenger pods are available."

  "What?" Dee Zu says.

  Keeping his own voice neutral, Son asks, "Who else is using them?" Getting all pissed off with this smiley face isn't likely to get him anywhere.

  "No one," says the post. "There are no passengers, and there are no passenger pods. All cargo pods are similarly out of service."

  "Those cannons are empty?" Dee Zu says.

  "No passenger or cargo vehicles are available for launch. None remain in the departure or arrival bays. Neither do any pods outside this station remain in contact. The entire inventory has been designated MIA, presumed permanently inoperative."

  "I see," Dee Zu says.

  "Jesus Christ," says Son.

  "What do we do now?"

  "Look," Son tells the kiosque. "We have to get to the USA. It's important." Not that he really cares all that much. It might've been nice to see Homeland once in this life, even if the landscape probably looks much the same as here. But he's good with what in his view was Plan A from the start: Life with Dee Zu in the GameBoy bunker. Supposing the over‐and‐under gooseneck securiscope doesn't burn a hole in his forehead first.

  "Please confirm. Two passengers wish to embark. One Citizen Dee Zu ZEZQ121, of the former ESUSA Mall, no longer in service, and the person Son, of no known address. That is correct?"

  "What else have we been talking about, here?"

  "Take it easy," Dee Zu tells him.

  "It might be faster to walk."

  The post keeps smiling. "You wish to embark?" it says.

  "That is correct."

  "We can deliver you postal class. But you must sign a waiver."

  "A waiver?"

  "And we must install tooth implants, one per passenger."

  "What? No!"

  "Please wait
while we process more data."

  "Tooth implants? What the hell?"

  "One moment… Please accept our apologies. No mail is available for delivery, and we have no record of your carrying secure cognitive implants. We may therefore waive the pre‐boarding IED tooth implant requirement."

  "What the hell?" Son has to say it again.

  "However, we must insist upon another pre‐boarding medical procedure. Our sensors find anomalous metal deposits throughout your bodies. Widely distributed microscopic bits plus larger conglomerations. Please wait while we assess level of security threat and most appropriate removal procedures."

  •

  For reasons that remain unclear but appear unrelated to their strong protests, the second medical procedure is also waived.

  "We may proceed." The smiley face seems friendlier.

  "May we?" Son says.

  Dee Zu treats him to a lopsided grin. "I'm betting our boarding agent isn't big on sarcasm."

  "Our database contains pre‐booking information appropriate to your request for material delivery."

  "Good, good." Son wants to assume this is good.

  "Intercontinental OMDV ballistic pod on standby for Happy Chillin, Utah, USA. Please confirm destination."

  Dee Zu looks askance at Son.

  "Destination confirmed," he says, never mind this is the first he has heard of Happy Chillin.

  "Happy Chillin it is," says Dee Zu.

  "This is a high‐security destination requiring special stealth delivery. Please present the password."

  Son looks at Dee Zu and says, "You remember it?"

  "It's okay. You go ahead."

  He feels himself blush. "Sleep tight, motherfucker," he tells the smiley face.

  "Correct. Who is 'motherfucker'?"

  "William Farley Frick."

  It turns out Dee Zu has to go through the exact same procedure anyway. Son almost blushes again. What kind of god is this Sky, who'd saddle them with such crap?

  "Thank you. Please proceed with boarding."

  A doorway beneath the oval window on the launch area opens, and a green light begins to blink.

  beam rider

  They lie belly2belly, crammed into a cozy space designed for one person and a mailbag.

  "What the hell is this?" Son says, not as annoyed as he tries to sound. It reminds Son of that time he and Auntie hid together in the old UV tanning capsule.

  "Weren't you listening? It's an OMDV. An official mail delivery vehicle."