Genesis 2.0

by Collin Piprell

  "Yeah. I've seen stuff like this in books. Sort of like this."

  Something flits among the trees along the river. Out of habit Son squints, trying to telescope prosthetic blur lenses that are no longer there.

  "Birds!" Dee Zu says.

  Higher in the sky above, half a dozen larger, strangely indistinct winged creatures ride the thermals.

  "This is beautiful."

  Momentarily, even without the lenses, Son zooms in to where he can see they're similar to mantas. Then his amazement is complicated by a sudden ache deep in his gut. Not arousal.

  •

  A familiar whining precedes the fleye's appearance. It comes right in to goggle at Son from arm's length.

  "So," Dee Zu says. "Loyal mystery bot waits all these years for your return."

  Then another one appears about the same time Son notices the twingeing in his groin again.

  "Ow!" he says. He slaps at his shoulder, leaving a splat of blood and tiny bits of bio wreckage.

  "What was that?"

  "I don't know." What he does know is that the blood is almost certainly his own. Whatever it was, this is merely the first attacker in a world that, given its unpredictability, may be even more dangerous than the one they left behind. "It bit me."

  "An insect?"

  "Probably."

  Blood‐sucking insects suggest blooded prey animals. What they need to know now is, what animals, exactly, and what their dietary preferences might be. Son does another three‐sixty, rattles his spearsticks, fails to reassure himself.

  "What are you doing?"

  "Watching. Reading the land."

  "And it's the fine print you've been reading off my butt, then?"

  The morning shines brighter in the light of Dee Zu's lopsided grin, this world's first. Promise of real recovery. And he savors his sense of a vast land to explore, full of surprises and potential. His spirit expands to fill a rich new space. "This is huge," he tells her.

  "A wet version of Worlds UnLtd," she replies.

  "Yeah," he says, though he doesn't really know what she's talking about.

  The puncture in his shoulder itches, but the swelling has gone down. "The medibots are still on the job," he says.

  "If they weren't, we'd be rotting away on the other side of the planet."

  The fleyes have disappeared, as have any hint of biting insects.

  "Here," Son says. "You'd better take a spearstick."

  •

  "This world," Dee Zu says. "It's like things have been restored to a time before the PlagueBot. Before the Troubles."

  "Before we were born."

  "Yeah."

  "That's weird."

  "Yeah."

  "What the hell is going on?"

  "The Boogoo has settled down."

  "Found its groove."

  "Ha, ha."

  Brave talk. As if they didn't have a real situation on their hands.

  They last saw mondoland in the grip of what they call the Boogoo Boogie, the Boogie for short. Total lunacy. Now they've got a world that at first sight appears stable and harmonious.

  Homeostasis was an Auntie word. She used it to describe what they knew of the bio‐blur ecosystem. "Homeostasis?" Poppy told her. "That's horseshit. This situation we've got on our hands here? It's basically a Mexican standoff."

  To Son he said, "Though there's no real stasis about it, chum, only the quick and the dead. And you want to make sure you're quick." Auntie knew better than to argue, though Son understood she was really talking about something different. And it's an even better way of accounting for what Son is looking at now, given how much more complex the landscape has become.

  The terrain is cloaked with vegetation rather than blur dust, a different kind of mantle, richer and more engaging. Way more mysterious. Son watches, and the Land watches back. Like the Boogoo before it, the Land is riddled with eyes. Creatures visible and invisible. Probably far more of them now, in fact, though maybe not so predictably hostile.

  There's motion wherever they look. Leaves flutter, grassy fields ripple in the breeze. Unseen creatures, about six of them, wend their roughly parallel wakes through tall grass on the near side of Long Lookout. But they move according to rules beyond Son's ken. Messages appear everywhere; making them intelligible is another matter. It's like trying to read an unfamiliar language, something that's almost English but isn't. Never has Son felt so ignorant of how to proceed.

  •

  "Homeostasis." Dee Zu tries that notion on.

  "Yeah."

  "Maybe it's stable. But is it safe?"

  "My guess is no." They've come back into a world transformed. They have neither mantles nor any real ken, no reasonable expectation of survival. Their combined inventory of assets includes two spearsticks, a knife, a qubital gadget that doubles as a weapon, the key to a bunker, and a bag of stuff compliments of the staff at Happy Chillin.

  "So okay, then, big boy. Time to kick our brave new world, no?"

  "What?"

  "See if it kicks back."

  "Oh. Right."

  Dee Zu smiles, but there's something wrong. She isn't looking too good, all of a sudden. Son prays to Gran‐Gran's god that this world hasn't taken the first kick.

  "What's the matter?" he says.

  twenty‐two or twenty‐two million

  "Are you okay?" Son asks her.

  "Give me a minute."

  Dee Zu stares dully at the ground. Despite the nausea, she's unable to expel this thing in her gut. A parallel ache in her chest she attributes to grief. Meanwhile this boy threatens to smother her with his unrelenting solicitousness.

  Twenty‐two years a cryo. Dee Zu is the larval phase of a new creature released into a new, maybe incompatible world. Maybe released prematurely. Her pallid skin is blotched with a rash that clears even as she watches. That, at least, is a good sign. Her new foot remains unchanged.

  Son takes her hand in his good one. He grimaces at her, probably thinking it's a smile. "Feels like I went to sleep just last night and woke up with a hangover," he says.

  "You've had hangovers?"

  "One. The first time I went on a serious hunt with Poppy. I was twelve years old. Back home we celebrated with the last bottle of tequila in the Bunker, drank the whole thing."

  "Wow. A man of the world."

  "He only told me about the hangover part afterwards."

  "I've never had a hangover, but I do feel like shit."

  "Close enough."

  Unlike the rest of her, the new foot doesn't ache. It only buzzes. And she really, really wants to puke.

  "I'm starving," he says.

  "So," Dee Zu says. "The hangover's clearing up."

  He hefts a spearstick. "I'm hungry enough for raw meat."

  "Don't you at least want to get your bearings before you start killing things? I see flowering trees down there. I'll bet we can find fruit. Edible plants."

  "Fruit," he says. Son comes from a line of meat‐eaters, he tells her. "We're top of the food chain," Poppy always said. "We're either that, or we're food."

  "Poppy is twenty‐two years dead," she tells Son. "And this doesn't look much like any world he could have known."

  Son wants to keep Dee Zu sweet, for he lowers his weapon without further argument.

  At that moment, Dee Zu's guts seize up. She doubles over, gagging.

  Son is all over her in an instant. "What's wrong?" he says.

  "Nothing," she replies.

  "What can I do?"

  "It's nothing, for God's sake."

  He's only trying to be nice, but still.

  A minute or two later she's better, back to merely feeling like shit. Not good enough to share Son's meal of green bars with fungal fusilli.

  •

  "Do you think he was telling the truth?" says Dee Zu.

  "Bentley?"

  "Yeah. And his ditherbots. When they said we'd been frozen for twenty‐two years."

  "It felt more like twenty‐two minutes."r />
  More like twenty‐two million years, given the changes. Even the sky is different. It's like the woogliness has spread far and wide, unless this is an after‐effect of her suspension. "You think you can lead us back to the wadi?"

  "No problem."

  "Oh, yeah?" she says. "Orient me."

  "Those cliffs over there, with the scrubby jungle on top? That's Long Lookout Ridge. The landmark features, the bones of the land, are still there. That stream of water is running through what used to be Greater Little Wadi."

  "Where's Living End?"

  "Eden?" Son says. "There. West of Long Lookout and east of that clump of tall trees."

  "The border's gone."

  "No." Roughly this side of where the bedrock no‐man's land used to lie, a long line of trees shimmer gray‐green. "Check out that row of trees."

  "What kind are they?"

  "How would I know?"

  "Identify trees." Dee Zu subvocalizes it.

  No response.

  A silvery shimmer moves from copse to copse, independent of any breeze. "It's almost like a signal," Son says.

  "Not almost," Dee Zu replies. "It's like a signal." No big surprise in a World. But how to explain it here in mondoland?

  "I need to get back to that hole in the wadi bottom," she says.

  "Jesus Christ," Son says.

  "I'm going to pay my respects to Cisco."

  "We'd do well to keep our distance from that hole. Anyway, you're too sick to travel."

  In fact the gut problem is back again. Where are her medibots? She really needs to throw up.

  "Are you going to help me or not?" she says.

  two's a crowd

  The wadi has come alive. A creek chuckles away below where they stand, and the hole should be roughly there, according to Son, beneath the whirl of water midstream.

  Whatever. This place will do. She stands as straight as she's able to while taking some weight off the gray foot.

  "Dearest friend." She pauses. "Partner. Lover. My hero. You abandoned Heaven, returning to a ruined world to save my life."

  She's still sick. But she's here to talk to Cisco, and talk to him she will. She stops to breathe deep, steadying herself before she continues: "Though staying alive isn't such a big deal for me now. I'd made peace with myself, back in that cave‐in. I knew I was going to die alone, trapped there in a dark space not much bigger than a coffin. Never mind I knew I'd never see you again, my last thoughts were of you. That made things easier, I don't know why. Now I have to believe you're alive, somehow and somewhere, and we're going to see each other again."

  Son is sneaking up behind her. She waves him off, resists an impulse to deliver a spinning kick to the head.

  Maybe she only imagines that the creek has become more animated since she started her memorial. The thrashing of leaves from the other side of the ravine also makes it less likely Son can hear what she's saying, which is intended for Cisco's ears alone. She clasps a clenched fist to her chest and tries to grin. "And I won't say you were better than me at OmniStrike, but you were good."

  Has it really been twenty‐two years? The grief at his absence remains only a few days old, the uncertainty just as painful. "If you're still alive, I pray we meet again. If we don't, I pray that, wherever you are, you're well."

  Son comes up beside her. Two people in this vast landscape, and he has to make it a crowd.

  Supposing Cisco didn't die, could he have survived on his own? The boy would say no. When she imagines he is alive, the thought of Cisco alone all this time brings more pain. And would he be the same person? He'd be twenty‐two years older than he was when he went down the hole, for one thing, while Dee Zu hasn't aged more than a few days.

  Son adopts his manly voice. "You know a real man by the way he chooses to die," he says.

  "Shut up. You didn't even know him."

  "I'll take your word."

  "And you don't know he's dead."

  "Either way, he's a hero."

  "Just bug out," she tells him. "I don't need you horning in on this."

  another hero

  "We all need our heroes, chum." The Poppy who lives in his head loves this notion that Son sees Dee Zu's friend as a hero. "Though it's best you don't choose a dead booby as your role model."

  Whatever. It hurts, what Dee Zu is saying. What she's saying to Cisco and what she's saying to Son. He's hurt, and he's angry. So her friend was a hero. What about Son, didn't he save her life as well?

  Plus he's filled with unaccountable misgivings. Dee Zu acts as though something is being resolved, a weight lifted. Son, on the other hand, dreads what she might be awakening, how he imagines Gran‐Gran must have felt at the prospect of Hell's gates edging open on their world.

  •

  Finally she's done.

  "I feel terrible," she says. She must feel bad if she has to admit it to him. "Maybe my medibots have stopped working."

  "Don't worry," Son says, trying to quell his worry. "We got along fine before the medibots." Which is not strictly true, since he himself would surely be dead except for Cisco's transfusion.

  "Do you feel okay?" she asks Son.

  "What do you mean?"

  "No headaches? Stomach okay?"

  "I'm pretty good," he says. Then he subvocalizes: "I need information about Dee Zu." Nothing ventured, nothing gained. After all, the Lode had been quick to give him his own medical report. "Please report."

  Nothing.

  "Is she going to be okay? Come in. Can the medibots fix her? Come in, for Christ's sake."

  No Lode. Nothing. It's surprising, how diminished he feels at the loss of this power he enjoyed for such a short time. Lacking both ken and Walkabout access leaves him as stupid as he can imagine ever being. Seriously ineffectual. Auntie's lament after she lost her leg.

  Dee Zu vomits.

  This isn't good. She lived nearly all her life in a sterile environment. Without either her medibots or his natural immunities she'd be dead.

  Taking a leaf out of Dee Zu's book, he draws the blade of his knife across his forearm. Tit for tat. The Gran‐Gran expression fits. He holds the arm up for Dee Zu's scrutiny. The wound is closing; the bleeding slows to a trickle and stops. "They're working," he says. He tries for a heroic tone, only feels silly.

  "Yours are working; I'm still sick." She starts gagging again. Then she pukes something up, probably stuff she ate twenty‐two years ago. Then she starts hacking so hard she convulses. Son grabs her from behind, his arms crossed beneath her breasts, and yanks her upright, clearing her passages.

  After she gets finished with the gasping and so on, she looks mostly embarrassed by the small mess at their feet.

  Son is so relieved he laughs. "Souvenirs of the Boogoo," he says.

  "My very own blurball?"

  "Lucky you."

  "Stuff from another time."

  "Another world."

  There are two blurballs. One she puked, the other she coughed up. Prophylactic amalgams of blur dust ingested or inhaled all those years ago. Even as they stare at them, they're absorbed by the soil. One minute the blurballs are sitting there, one large the other small, both of them disgusting, the next they've disappeared. Dust to dust. Sort of.

  "It must've been the storm," Son says.

  "What?"

  "It generally takes longer to grow blurballs that big."

  The line marking the cut on his arm has vanished altogether.

  "I feel better," Dee Zu says. "Maybe I'm going to be okay."

  more changes

  Dee Zu says she's nearly back to normal. For his part, Son feels better than he has since the Bunker.

  Their new home is coming along. The Bylar reentry chute, fortified and extended with rocks and bits of brush, serves to keep the rain off. Son has scraped a shallow pit where they can dispose of waste. This bivouac is habitable enough for now. Except that their perimeter remains exposed to incursions from whatever. He has no idea what to expect, so there's no way he can relax.r />
  Most of the Land is green. Eden presents an especially lush growth, its pale border little more than bedrock overgrown by creeping vines and suchlike. Ethereal flocks of Aeolian mantas ride the thermals above Ahuk Volcano. Meanwhile low‐relief, swarm‐like patches creep across the streaks and splotches of red and orange and brown microbial "lava" on Ahuk's slopes. On a clear night, Son can see the same patches, or maybe others, glow pale green with what he assumes is bioluminescence.

  He has yet to take a closer look at these things. Given his lack of information or effective weapons, that would be dumb. Much like sticking an arm into an unexamined hole. Unskillful.

  As he keeps trying to explain to Dee Zu, they can only explore their new world in careful increments. They need to secure it zone by zone as they extend their ken beyond the Homestead.

  •

  The Boogoo has become the Land; their campsite has become the Homestead. It's hard to say what Son has become. He feels normal. Better than that. But he's not the same person he was. For one thing, the medibots give him some of the confidence the blur mantle used to provide. For another, he feels connected to the Land in ways different to those that tied him to the Boogoo.

  A patch of blur dust persists on his lower back. It never does anything, beyond fluff up and, Dee Zu says, turn lighter in color after a wetting in the creek or the rain. It doesn't hurt; he's hardly conscious of it.

  His gray fingers, on the other hand, tingle at odd moments for reasons that remain mysterious. Especially when he brushes them against the Land. Dee Zu reports the same experience with her gray foot. "It doesn't bother me," she says. "It's just like it gives me this buzzy connection with the Land." She likes to stroke Son's gray patch. When she does this with her gray foot, she says, she gets something like a mild electric shock.

  And things sometimes mumble away inside his head, especially around their camp by the creek.

  Son didn't want to set up so close to the hole, but Dee Zu insisted. That's another change he sees in himself. More and more, he gives in to this mallster booby and her ideas of how things should be done, even when he knows they're unskillful. Of course half the time he's no longer so sure he knows better than she does what needs doing. They need to rebuild a proper ken.

  Sometimes, at least, the voices in his head are props. He tries to relegate the noise to the same place he keeps the rustling leaves when they try to talk to him. To the place he used to keep Gran‐Gran's sermons. It's incredible that the prop generator, what Dee Zu calls a propagator, could still be active. Some things are forever. Prominent among these, as Poppy liked to say, are roaches. Add propagators and dreckmills to the list.