Genesis 2.0

by Collin Piprell

  united securistats of America

  They dive in under a high overcast toward a four‐sided pyramid of blackened stone standing on a dusty gray plain.

  A series of ramp‐like dunes stand a kilometer or two short of the hill. To one side lie other features, similar to those only seen before in the GPS, back the way they've come. A great cruciform landing strip‐cum‐landing target stands out lighter against the darker gray of the prevailing blur overburden. They're approaching so fast there's no need to zoom the view.

  "It's another podport," he says.

  A ring‐a‐levio control tower stands in the northwest crotch of a crucifix. Two featureless buildings occupy the outskirts of the southeastern quadrant, and a seashell‐like structure stands to the west of the landing area.

  Son has time to say "I'll bet the big building is a terminal" before their pod abruptly decelerates and, rockets screaming, swings stern downwards, leaving Son's guts hanging here and there in space and back there in the pod again. The bang of parachute deployment is followed by a throaty, teeth‐rattling roar of retrorockets.

  disposable terminals

  They emerge naked from the shelter of the pod. They wait, tented under the super‐reflective Bylar parachute. Dee Zu smells new odors, whether hers or Son's or something else altogether it's hard to tell.

  "Are we okay?" Son says, maybe deferring to Dee Zu's greater experience of pod landings.

  "Okay."

  "What now?"

  "We look. No. You're the Great Reader of the Land—you look."

  He lifts the edge of their tent and peeks out. "Holy shit," he says.

  Dee Zu also looks. She says, "My God."

  •

  They're slow to leave the residual warmth of re‐entry for the bitter cold. The pyramid lies a good half‐kilometer away. In the distant west, on its other side, a chain of mountains could pass for another cloud layer. To one side, not so far away, a forest of sporating mantas release more kites toward a woogly sky. To the other side, the pod station is disintegrating.

  Eerily, the collapse of control tower and other structures raises no dust. "Collapse" isn't quite right. It's more like a phase transition, a blur redeployment on a mammoth scale. The target zone structures disappear in a slow‐motion subsidence, the dust alive with currents and tidal forces. The shell‐like terminal is the last to go, as though the PlagueBot were reluctant to see the end of this architectural pièce de résistence.

  welcome?

  "That's strange," Son says.

  "What is?"

  "We've still got half a kilometer to walk."

  "So?"

  "So why didn't your MOM set us down closer?" He gazes across the empty plain. "I don't like the look of this."

  "It's quiet, isn't it?"

  "Too quiet."

  With that, an expanse of dust between them and the pyramid starts to shimmy.

  Dee Zu steps back. "Just had to say that, didn't you?"

  Son feels dizzy for a moment, as though his fever is returning. But it isn't him. It's the land. "Whoa!" he says.

  Dee Zu staggers, recovering her balance before he can reach her.

  A broad highway materializes even as the ground beneath them cobbles. It runs from beneath their feet toward the pyramid. The land has come alive, extruding blocks of porous yet hard stone. Orange stone.

  "Now it's doing colors," Son says. He blows on his hands and stomps at their instant expressway.

  The road reverts to gray and disintegrates, leaving both of them up to their ankles in dust. At the same time a wall of gray blocks rises to thirty meters in front of them, high enough to block their view of the pyramid. The construction turns light orange.

  "I don't like this," says Dee Zu.

  "If we stand here, we'll freeze to death."

  "So do we go over, or around?"

  The wall now extends in a straight line off as far as the eye can see to the east and to the west.

  "Over?" Son says.

  At which point things get more complicated. "What's that?" Dee Zu asks.

  Whatever it is, it quickly colonizes the top of the wall.

  someone's fucking with us

  "That's razor wire," she tells Son. "All those sunglints? Little razors."

  "You think I don't know that?" he says.

  Way off in the distance, the sporators make their sporadic deliveries, with fewer mantas per charge. Meanwhile the sun finds a hole in the cloud cover, delivering warmth and better visibility.

  The PlagueBot apparitions are displaying ever‐higher rez and ever‐greater detail. What's more interesting is the fact that the entanglement first appeared at a spot on the wall directly ahead of them, and only then ramified both ways along the wall to the horizons. And the road, however briefly, connected them directly with their landmark destination. This can hardly be coincidence.

  "What's happening?" Son asks.

  "No clue."

  And it's more than merely who, or what, is at the controls. How, or why, is the PlagueBot responding to Dee Zu and Son's presence? This entanglement, for example, obeys multiple impulses. It's blocking their way to the pyramid at the same time it toys with ideas. Where are these ideas coming from?

  "First the road tells us: 'This way, and welcome.' Next thing it's gone and we're blocked by a wall covered with entangled stuff."

  "So unlikely." Dee Zu thinks of gameWorlds where visitors—test pilots being the only mallsters cleared for entry to most of these—encountered rules which applied only till the program recognized that the visitor had interpreted them. At this point they would change absolutely, and then change again. "As though somebody's fucking with us," she says.

  mixed metaphors

  "That's eerie," she says.

  "What now?" he says. It doesn't much bother him to offer her the lead. What's the ken got to offer, the way things are?

  "I'm thinking, okay?"

  For his part, Son thinks there's no going back the way they came. Nor is there any obvious way of going forward. Neither is there any staying where they are, because then they'll soon die of exposure. Unless the Boogoo decides to kill them first.

  "Well?'

  "Okay," she says. "I've thought."

  "And?"

  "We're screwed."

  Her chuckle arouses him. Which is surprising, under the circumstances. At the same time he thinks, once again, that it's past time she got serious. They have to decide what to do next.

  And so he's saying to Dee Zu when the wall collapses. More accurately, long sections, including the one right in front of them, disintegrate. Dust to dust.

  "Jesus Christ," Son says.

  He insists on going first.

  "Every man I know thinks he's bulletproof," she says.

  "Follow five paces behind me. You look to the left and behind; I'll look right and ahead."

  He takes a two‐handed grip on his spear and checks on the mace in his catchbag. "Let's go," he says.

  No threat presents itself, and they make good time to their destination.

  •

  Up close, the pyramid isn't so pyramidal. The side facing them ascends in irregular steps of mostly bare‐bones stone, with windblown blur dust lying in drifts on shelves and piled against cliffs. The mound appears lifeless, empty of warmth.

  "So here we are," says Dee Zu.

  "This sucks," he says, an expression that always drew Gran‐Gran's wrath, who knows why.

  "So it does." Dee Zu looks back the way they came, to where the pod is no more.

  "Here's the thing." He adopts his Poppy voice. "You just keep on keeping on. Nobody ever said it was going to be easy. But our business is survival. End of story." And so he has lived his sixteen years. And never before has he had occasion to question the basic wisdom. Not even after discovering what remained of his family after the GameBoys had their way. But he keeps these thoughts to himself. "No sign of bios," he tells Dee Zu.

  "I'm hungry," she says.

  "Me too. And cold."


  They come together in a hug, share the meager warmth, a two‐unit bio swarm bereft of blur cocoon, utterly vulnerable in an alien world as it slides ever farther into insanity.

  •

  "Try the ball."

  "Do what?"

  "Try the GPS projector. Maybe it'll show us where to find this place.

  Son nearly drops the ball, his remaining fingers stiff with cold. "You try it," he tells Dee Zu.

  She breathes on her hands to warm them, unscrews the ball and passes one hemisphere to Son. She twists down to projection level.

  They get the pod station right away, as well as a hillside community with what might be a walled research area with buildings and an observatory or radar station or something. There's nothing on the near face of the pyramid.

  "I'm betting it's a stealth installation. Maps and GPS would've been blind to it."

  In preparing to screw the two halves of the ball tight together again, twisting the rings on the GPS hemisphere this way and that, Dee Zu must have stumbled upon the level that had Sky up in arms before the storm. The Boogoo starts to shimmy and shift and heave in much the same way it did back on the other side of the planet. The three remaining sporators explode mantas and collapse on themselves, their remnants reabsorbed by the Boogoo in moments.

  Son realizes he's tensed up against the onset of more WalkAbout marching orders. But Sky remains silent. Instead it's himself who says, "Enough, okay? Give it here."

  Dee Zu hands it back, and he twists the halves together again, turning them tight and secure.

  Though patches of dust continue to shudder here and there, the Boogoo mainly settles down.

  "That was interesting," Son says.

  "Now what?"

  "Let's try some passwords."

  "Ha." You can see this proposal impresses her. "Like, yell them one after the other in all directions?"

  "Let's hear your better idea."

  While they wait for this, Son stomps his feet, and Dee Zu stomps her feet, in her case mostly one foot, leaning on him so she can favor the gray one. They alternately hug themselves and slap their arms, doing what they can to generate warmth.

  "Stand tall," he tells Dee Zu.

  "What?"

  He has been monitoring a huge ratswarm, big enough to get uppity with two armed humans, that lies about twenty meters away. It has become interested in them.

  "Look as big and strong as you know how." He intones the precepts. "Move with confidence."

  Dee Zu is looking all around, but mostly back at him, puzzled. Not as quick a study as she believes.

  Then, just before the ratswarm can make its move, a patch of dust beside it begins to heave. The Boogoo extrudes a rough circle of little bumps that quickly resolve themselves as a dozen dwarfish boogoomen. They grow gray costumes, extrude gray peaked caps with gray plumes. Next thing, caps and clothes turn red and green and black and white. And all of the little people start to stomp, maybe inspired by Dee Zu and Son's getting‐warm exercise. Except these figures are moving in sync. Now they pair off to link arms and stomp around in circles before joining hands in one big circle, still stomping, sort of, mixing it up by kicking together this way and that.

  "Gnomes," says Dee Zu.

  "They're dancing," Son says. Sometimes Auntie and Poppy would dance in the Bunker, listening to music after dinner. Gran‐Gran used to dance with Son, when he was little; Auntie danced with him just once. That was a few days ago; it could have been years.

  The ratswarm has instead taken to sidling toward the dance party when a dark quadruped, twice as big as Son, prowls out of the ground right in front of them. Its head and limbs are smooth and featureless, its movements feline.

  "My God."

  "A boogoocat?" Son says. He has never seen a cat of any description, outside pictures in books.

  It steps this way and then that, ducking gracefully. Then it bellies down, tail twitching, ready to pounce on the dancers. But it waits too long. The gnomes are reabsorbed by the blur dust.

  Without a glance at Son and Dee Zu, the boogoocat redescends into the ground, maybe in search of subterranean gnomes.

  "What's going on?" says Dee Zu.

  At that moment another boogoocat emerges from between two dunes to advance on them.

  "Reruns," she says. "So boring."

  Not boring. They stand downwind of this apparition, and Son already knows two things. First, this isn't a boogoocat. He smells carnivore—an unfamiliar musk, but carnivore nevertheless, a living, breathing big cat. Second, it's the apex predator hereabouts, or it wouldn't come at them from upwind, so careless of their response. The rats, for their part, have backed off to reconsider their plans.

  "Hang on," Dee Zu is saying. "That thing is real."

  Standing even taller, Son steps toward the thing, quick and ostensibly confident. He goes to his knees as it pounces, the butt of his spearstick jammed against stone. The spear passes through the animal with little resistance, leaving Son pinned beneath what he estimates could be a hundred and fifty kilos of still living cat. This is far from ideal, and he's pleased when Dee Zu steps up to thrust her own spearstick, the weight of her body behind it, into the dying beast once, twice and three times, never mind Son is saying, "Enough. It's dead. Can you help get it off me? And mind the rats."

  The rats are soon preoccupied with the dead lion.

  •

  "I saw that on a vid, once."

  "What?" he asks her.

  "Young hunters had to kill a lion with a spear. A rite of passage on their way to becoming men."

  "Yeah?"

  "They used exactly the same technique."

  "What, an assistant with another spear?"

  She laughs. "Where did you learn that?"

  "What else could I do? It was only common sense."

  "So sensible."

  "You did good," he tells her. "Thanks." And where did this woman learn to laugh under just such circumstances?

  A film of dust that stayed with him following the tussle has removed the blood and stink and then sloughed off—an only temporary, lite‐mantle‐to‐go. He's left standing clean in a cool breeze.

  "Are you okay?"

  "Wrenched a shoulder. Hope the medibots are up to it." And some of the blood was his, it turns out. He has four great scratches roughly where the dragon left its mark a few days ago. They hurt like a bastard, though they're sealing up already.

  "That was interesting," he says.

  "Oh, yeah. Way interesting."

  "No, I mean that we got the boogoocat right before the real one. What was that all about?

  "Plus even the boogoocat was amazingly realistic. Not just some slowjoe cat."

  The rats remain preoccupied with the dead bio version.

  •

  They stand there, as tall and confident as they can manage, alert for dancers, swarms, lions, whatever. What other surprises might the Boogoo have in store? He doesn't have to wonder long.

  A big dune about thirty meters to the south begins to exfoliate, and the singing of its blur‐sands gives them about two seconds' warning.

  Four individuals mounted on ponies ride right out of the dust. They come all but naked, armed with bows and arrows and their faces eloquent of battle cries that can't be heard. Warriors and horses alike take on more substance as, accompanied still by the unearthly singing of the sands, they charge straight at Son and Dee Zu. Now the feathers on their heads are visible, and the painted designs on their faces and bodies, patches of color on their horses.

  "What the hell?" Son says.

  Dee Zu is backing off and saying, "Let's go; let's go," though there's nowhere to go.

  Never mind. The horsemen ride themselves back into the ground. Buried to their riders' knees, they almost stall out before briefly recovering to wallow on till they're up to their necks and then right over their heads. All that remains of the raiders, finally, are a few big feathers sticking out of the dust, real enough to tremble in the breeze before they drain of
color and disintegrate.

  "Hm," says Dee Zu.

  But the show isn't over.

  A squad of large men emerge from the base of that same dune. They're lifelike, though mostly gray of complexion, wearing floppy over‐sized shirts with logos on the front and numbers on the sleeves. Hooked sticks in hand, they come charging in a peculiar side‐to‐side, forward‐thrusting gait.

  "What the hell?"

  "No idea."

  Doesn't matter, because then it all goes wonky as they brake and swerve, slash into one another with their sticks and disintegrate into fine shimmers of dust that quickly settle to the ground.

  "Those were no holos," says Dee Zu.

  "They weren't roachmen either."

  "Thank God."

  "Yeah. We're still okay." Even as he speaks, Son sees he spoke too soon, because now the whole dune takes to heaving and four ungainly black machines erupt from its crest in a great cloud of dust.

  "Copters!" Dee Zu says.

  "Attack helicopters," Son adds. Probably late twentieth‐ or early twenty‐first‐century models. Squat and hump‐backed, their landing gear spraddled, they have missiles attached to their undercarriages and they bristle with cannons. They're about a third the size of the real McCoys.

  They flounder around bumping into each other with crispy crunches instead of bangs, hopping about as though trying to get airborne. Their skids morph into articulated appendages that look like birds' legs, then go back to being skids. The helicopters remain attached to the substrate by one part of their construction or another, some part of them always in touch with the Boogoo. Rotors rotating with eerie, near‐silent shushing, they fail to achieve take‐off, only slide downslope to crumple in a heap at the base of the dune, misshapen rotor blades like bunny ears flopping about in the dust, then like birds.

  "Black Hawks!" Son says.

  "What are you talking about?"

  "Those were Black Hawk attack helicopters."

  "Another Poppy poster?"

  "He showed me pictures."

  "Same‐same the logo on the shirts of the men with sticks."

  "Say again?"

  "Didn't that logo remind you of those horsemen?"

  "Wow. You're right."

  "The Boogoo is spewing up a motley assortment of stuff related only by an idea." Dee Zu is delighted, a response Son has to think is unskillful. She claps her hands and says, "Metaphors made real!"