Genesis 2.0

by Collin Piprell

  This is a bad attitude. Totally unskillful. Life has been too easy so far, and maybe they've been too lucky. Because they remain blind to darker sides of their storybook world.

  Now's the time to consolidate their resources, shore up their defenses. The Homestead itself has been leading the way in this.

  •

  Not that Son is blameless in these matters. Sometimes it's as though he's asleep and sharing a storybook dream conceived by Eva and abetted by Dee Zu, who should know better. It's easy, at times, to forget that, under all the Land's charm and compliance, darker things lurk.

  Once in a while, for example, Son is disturbed by a notion that something else has come to dwell with them even in the Homestead. That their cozy swarm is threatened with invasion. He can't point to any real sign; it's just that, at times, the place feels populated by another. Maybe what Eva would call an otherthing.

  Of course the entire Land simmers with things old and new, real and only potentially real. But this is something different. Visions of smirches afflict him like waking dreams. Bad dreams. Meanwhile events in the tangible world, the world that kicks back, suggest he isn't dreaming this stuff. For one thing, the Homestead, maybe all on its own, has started pulling the wagons up in a circle.

  The berm stands a good meter higher than it did before Dee Zu had her go at resurrecting a dead lover. Go figure. Plus a thorny entanglement is extending itself atop the compound wall, and the back gate has disappeared, leaving the front gate as the only way in or out. These changes are as radical as the appearance, way back, of the second floor on the house and the emergence of the furniture, most of which popped into existence overnight.

  In the meantime, the worry grows in him like a cancer. The way he imagines a cancer would grow, how it would feel. They've got a situation on their hands, and it's pregnant with something monstrous.

  son's entourage

  This day is cool and sunny. Eva and her retinue are playing beside the pond, while Dee Zu is at the Doll negotiating new clothes. Son has had a big breakfast and a workout behind the house. He should be feeling great. Instead he is filled with unease.

  He heads down to the creek. He has to do something. Too much of his life involves little more than sitting around watching, waiting for things to happen. For things to happen to him, and to happen to his family. Enough is enough.

  •

  Homeostasis aside, the Land remains full of surprises. The Land itself loves to play, always launching this experiment and scratching that one. Finding a balance and then disrupting it. There's still no reading things, not really. Even after the years.

  Son has the ball with him, driven by a strange compulsion to retest its deepest level, that mysterious gizmo lurking somewhere beneath the model solar system. He means to stir up shit, see what events might tell him this time. Sometimes, if you need hard information, you've got to apply hard kicks.

  Auntie used to tell him, when he was a boy, not to pick at scabs. Of course it's just as impossible now as it was then not to pick at them, and pick at them till they bleed anew. And he doesn't need Poppy to tell him how stupid this plan is. At the same time, he's humming Poppy's favorite lines. "Get your mo‐tor run‐nin'." Bum‐bum bum‐bum buuum, bum. "Head out on the high‐way. Lookin' for adven‐ture…" Yeah.

  •

  He contemplates the solar system. You can call this part of the ball an orrery, something he learned before his WalkAbout fizzled out. Orrery. There's a word for you.

  He pulls the planets out to where he can consider an Earth the size of a monkey's eyeball. Vivid blue and green and white, an Earth much closer to the one he now inhabits than the one where he found the ball. Then he twists the rings on the orrery's lip. He twists them this way and that, feeling for the combination that leads to the level Dee Zu believes is a Lode backup.

  Strange that you can back up the cumulative human wisdom and knowledge of the ages in something half the size of a turbine bearing or smaller. That's as long as you're using qubital technology. Something Poppy regarded with the same affection Gran‐Gran lavished on Satan & Co. If you want to back up that much information in any other way, Dee Zu tells him, you'd probably need something about as big as the surface of the planet. Neat.

  He twists the rings till finally he senses the familiar snaplock‐release of the real guts of the ball.

  •

  WHUMPH. A landslip takes a bite out of the bank across the creek from him. Signs of agitation erupt everywhere. The meadow grasses on the southern slopes of Long Lookout come alive with leapings and scurryings in all directions and, when he twists the rings again, landslips scar the surrounding hills, pulling vegetation down with them. Earthy whirlpools suck at meadows. His bare feet register electric vibrations of a novel intensity. Beyond the unbearable tickling, he fears where all this might lead, and he twists the gizmo back and forth, seeking the way back out.

  Dire premonition swells together with an ache in his groin. Then there's the shrilling as a swarm of fleyes erupt from the creekbank north of the nook. They buzz and glint in the late afternoon sun like giant metal spores. As a few of them zoom in to ogle Son, a great three‐lobed, deeply pock‐marked head bursts forth from the ruptured soilbank, weaving about as though sniffing the air. The head is followed by an enormous body segmented like a worm. It thrashes about, eye sockets vacant. It's the gG.

  Poppy's voice erupts inside his head: "Now you're in for it."

  triggerman

  Son's finger aches, and the Land beneath his feet prickles. The lump of pain in his groin is the worst it has ever been. A fleye buzzes somewhere in the vicinity, while an unfamiliar voice inside his head stutters in and out.

  "…come in …fields op …come in …"

  He's flooded with images not clearly connected to the familiar world of the Homestead and its environs. Among these is a shoreline littered with green sunbathers, vegetable people. Eva tells him she has talked to creatures like this, mostly about the weather; Son had thought they were figments of her imagination. Herds of things, bigger than tigers, graze grasslands at an indeterminate distance from his station on Long Lookout. His impression is that some of them have more than four legs. He extends his attention farther southward to view an endless sea that displays its own woogliness, not a reflection of the sky. This is something else that demands exploration, though not yet.

  •

  Whoa! Here's something new. One minute he's trying to decide if the sea views are really real, the next he locks into a POV so high the panoramic view snatches his breath away. Momentary dizziness gives way to acute clarity as he draws his focus in on his adjacent surrounds.

  His POV hovers amid a swarm of baggy winged creatures so ethereal they're almost not there. This is amazing. You couldn't get closer to the mantas without being swallowed by one. Fact is, though, they don't look like much. They're translucent, nearly transparent, inscrutable internal structures faintly outlined in blue. Just by thinking it, he turns his POV toward the mass of gaping maws as they cruise along, supping at a buffet of things he can't see. Most are neutral in color. A few are faintly orangeish, others reddish. He watches a Siamese‐twin manta gently divide, leaving two creatures where there'd been only one. This is why they don't see the great sporations anymore. The mantas have mutated.

  A single fleye flits past. Adopting its POV, Son then looks back at another fleye, at the POV he has just abandoned. He's getting the hang of things. Learning his way around these powers he never asked for. Not to mention the voices in his head.

  Here's this new one again: "…null agenda …target …assign target …"

  Next thing, this compound POV soars, zooming out to where the Earth looks like a planet, with great blue and green areas, even white patches. To the south, where the GPS has told them ESSEA used to stand, and to the west, where ESNEWCHINA must have earlier succumbed to seas or PlagueBot, a great gray smirch is swallowing the green landscape. An awful tumor on the Land, the shifty planes and edges of stealth habitation
encroach, gigantic versions of the same grim, uninterpretable geometry Son and Dee Zu encountered on their trek to the pod station. The same awful metastasis.

  "Adopting protocol D…assign target…"

  He ranges back in at terrifying speed to focus on this diabolical smudge, not far north of what used to be Eden, that creeps toward them.

  Son fixes on it. More than focusing, he gets this tension deep in his groin, not quite nausea but like that, as he triangulates on the cancer from a compound POV that must somehow include both satellites and the gG.

  The unease swells, intensifies till it becomes something else altogether. Having pinned this enormous smirch, he brings to bear a cold, ultra‐intent focus. Hunter, spear and target become one. Polyangulating, he beams his deadly intent at the target below, just as he looks skyward from where he watches on the ground to see the high haze puckle everywhere it is penetrated by bright godbolts. Looking down from where he also watches, he sees the darkness writhe and thrash in response to the strikes, sees it go still more indeterminate.

  "Field ops …come in …field ops …"

  He directs more strikes, orgasmic throbs launched from the gut. This time there's no puckling. Instead the godbolts pierce a woogly patch, setting off a chain reaction of explosions, spectacular even at this distance in daylight. The sky's on fire, the firestorm flickering amid a milky blue‐orange maelstrom like sun shattered on atmospheric ripple.

  Far below the terrain writhes and the smudge swirls away, sucked into a legoitic whirlpool. Son watches as part of the Land devours itself.

  "Move …Protocol E …ack …acknowledge …"

  He has taken the black invader by surprise. He knows this and he knows lots more. But it's too soon to tell the others. What could he tell them, without appearing nuts? Though he knows he hasn't gone gaga. He needs to experiment with these new powers. He needs to have a good think about these events before he can discuss them with Dee Zu and Eva.

  So he has found one way around the weapons ban. Big time. The Great Triggerman in the Sky. Wow.

  •

  Son retreats to his customary POV as the fleyes flock back to plug into the gG, folding their wings like eyelids as they settle in, the globular head all aflutter. Body segments twisting and writhing, the warbot burrows its various ways back into the Land.

  "Did you see that?"

  Son spins around to see Eva, Spiff and Poof standing either side of her, unlikely bodyguards. He smiles, shakes off the exhilaration of his recent godhood.

  "Did you see that firestorm?" Eva says. Nothing about vast diabolical cancers on the Land, nothing about giant warbot heads all aflutter with wings like compound eyelids.

  "Cool stuff, no?"

  "Way cool! Was that for my birthday?"

  "What are you talking about? Is today your birthday?"

  "Ha, ha. Funny. Do I get a cake?"

  "Happy birthday! Happy birthday!" Spiff and Poof, a pair of bot simulacra who can't even eat cake, are up on their hind legs dancing. They're in a celebratory mood.

  •

  In truth, Son is shaken by his new power. Plus he awaits some snarky comment from Poppy. It doesn't come.

  happy birthday

  Son has made dinner.

  His most recent essay at realish meat combines secret herbs, mushrooms, roots and a peppery bark prepared in the traditional way of mashing everything together and baking the result. He serves this thing sliced, and invites the diners to add dollops of Auntie's Special Memorial Sauce. He presents the latter entity with some trepidation and keeps its name to himself.

  "This is pretty good," Dee Zu says.

  "Good," says Eva. "Not so pretty." She laughs, impressed at her own wit.

  Manfully, Son spoons more sauce onto his loaf and has another taste of it. "It's really okay?" he asks them.

  "Is it my birthday present?"

  Son laughs. "No," he tells her. "Maybe partly. Close your eyes."

  "I smell smoke," she says, at once excited and apprehensive.

  Dee Zu emerges from the kitchen with her own creation, a pink and red and orange cake. Son wonders how she managed the pink. Five tree‐sap candles blaze away on top, filling the room with their heavy fragrance.

  "I knew it! I have a birthday cake. I knew it!"

  They sing "Happy Birthday" nearly loud enough to drown out Eva's shrieks of merriment. Once she subsides, they hear Spiff and Poof still singing outside the window.

  "Can they come in? It's my birthday party."

  •

  "Blow out the candles and make a wish," Dee Zu says. "But you can't tell anyone what it is, okay?"

  "Okay." Eva closes her eyes tight, extinguishes the flames in one go.

  She looks totally happy, and so does Dee Zu.

  •

  Son is bursting with love for these joyful beings, his family. Eva entirely fills him. He's almost sick with the love of her. Yet he's equally full of this glorious woman who is Eva's mother and his mate. Not his, exactly. It's more like he is hers, and Eva's. He's immersed in them, and in their Homestead. He surrenders himself to a whole that harbors the seeds of so much more.

  At the same time he confronts mysterious threats of disaster. He feels it again. The sense of invasion. Something else inhabiting their space. Maybe wanting to share their mantle of happiness. He sickens with it, wondering whether it's really out there in the world or only inside his own head. Though he fears it lives both inside the Homestead and out there on the Land, beyond their secure perimeter, where he senses the emergence of murky, poorly understood things.

  •

  "What's wrong, Daddy?" Five years old going on fifteen or twenty‐five.

  "Nothing, chum." And there is nothing wrong. At least not wrong in the sense of an immediate real situation.

  He knows now that Cisco in some way remains alive, dwelling out there in the Land. And that he's probably Eva's biological father. Son even accepts Dee Zu's right to love him still. All that's okay with him. The darkness passes, and his love grows stronger as it becomes more all‐embracing. "There's nothing wrong." He says it again, and laughs with the great pleasure he takes from saying that and meaning it.

  He almost hears Poppy saying, "Go ahead, boy. Let your guard down and enjoy your short life. Go ahead and be merry. And say goodbye to another family." But he has to work at conjuring the voice, and it remains unconvincing. A welcome thought: Poppy may finally be dead dead. And it's Eva who has helped to kill him. Though that's not quite what he means to say.

  "My turn," says Dee Zu. "I have birthday news. A present for us all."

  Eva's retinue take to cavorting in a way that could get them banned from the house once again. "Settle down!" Son tells them. "And listen up."

  Dee Zu makes her announcement: "There's going to be an addition to our family."

  Son shudders at a sudden dark image of the ciscothing emerging from the riverbank.

  Dee Zu comes around the table to embrace him, beckons Eva to join them. Spiff and Poof sit uncharacteristically sober and attentive.

  "I'm going to have another baby."

  This idea doesn't sink in right away.

  Eva reacts before Son does. "A baby sister?" Her eyes go big enough to pop. "Holy shit!"

  "Eva!" says Son.

  "Or a brother? Her eyes glisten with happiness. "Fuck me," she adds, in case they've failed to understand how amazed she is.

  They're having another child. Nearly six years after Dee Zu last had sex with Cisco, she's pregnant.

  "Fuck me," Son says, but only to himself. To Dee Zu he says, "I love you. Damn. I love everybody."

  He even includes Spiff and Poof in this ocean of good will. And he catches them looking at each other in an odd way before they get back to cavorting and going, "Happy birthday, happy birthday!"

  epilogue ~ still evolving

  Shaggy stories are the structure of life. Rube Goldberg as God.

  – Brian Finister

  despatch from limbo ~ renaissance
>
  Hot off the press and coming straight to you from Boon Doc's 4.02.

  READ ALL ABOUT IT

  That's right. Guess who's back. Blow me down, eh? Or just blow me, ha‐ha. Up to you. Never mind. Picking up where we left off, let me pose this sobering question: What's the current sum total of humanity?

  It's not much different from when last I reported in, except we must now include little Eva in our calculations. Adding her sixteen kilos gives us a total proven global wet human mass of about a hundred and fifty kilos. This amounts to forty‐five kilos of dry weight, of which four and a half kilos is microbial.

  This is discounting what might still lurk in shielded cryo centers and suchlike—untold numbers of crèche embryos, opouts, maybe even GameBoys all stashed away in their respective holes in the ground. But what good is that? Under the circumstances and everything. Whatever. My guess is the sum total doesn't amount to a hill of beans, and probably isn't viable anyway. Besides which, it may well be that, just like everything bio, we've always been only part of the microbial superorganism. So what the hey.

  Be that as it may, here's the kicker for you. Homo sap may yet redeem itself, for what that's worth. And we could well see a human renaissance, one to match the larger planetary regeneration aborning.

  The PlagueBot, a.k.a. the Boogoo, has fast evolved into what tree huggers, long extinct, might have called Gaia 2. Though what we're looking at now, in this brave new world of ours, goes way beyond the PlagueBot, which was basically nothing but a stalled‐out gray goo scenario. I prefer to call this thing the Proteant Enigmass. Why? Because I like the sound of it, eh? This pair of cunningly punning neologisms. Call it the Nigma for short. A good name for our new‐model symbionosphere.

  Symbiogenesis rules, OK!

  The PlagueBot emerged as a superorganism drawing its basic energy and sensing its environment by way of the microbial superorganism, which, in all its manifold guises—including many symbiogenetic versions, including homo saps—had already constituted the Earth's biosphere for billions of years. Then it turned out this new bipartite entity could serve as a planet‐wide substratum for qubital information, including the Lode—i.e. for the sum total of human experience since the dawn of history. So now we're left with the Nigma, a tripartite superorganism of incredible complexity and brand‐new capacities. And it's still evolving.