Aeota

by Paul Di Filippo

  Holger Holtzclaw—naked as myself, but battered and bruised— was immured in a living cage. I came up to his bars.

  “Oh, thank God! I don’t know who you are, or where I am, but you have to get me out of here!”

  “I’m a detective. Your wife hired me to find you.”

  “Whatever she’s paying you, I’ll double it if you can free me!”

  I studied the cage. I assumed Holger had tried to bend or bust the bars or dig through the mat without success. So I wasn’t sure what I could do.

  An image of the Green Lady suddenly filled my mind, vivid as if she were standing here before me. Could our mating have established some kind of bond between us?

  I reached forth my hand, and as it approached the bars, the rancid stalks began to shiver and retreat from my presence.

  Quickly employing my other hand, I created a gap big enough for the emaciated captive to slip through.

  “Let’s go! Quick!”

  Trying to keep a straight course, we plunged through the forest, the slimy boles whapping us like the fabric flaps of a car wash.

  Eventually, we emerged onto the undulant plain.

  Motion attracted my eye upward.

  Mister After All was arrowing toward us. He began to screech like a banshee.

  At the same time, a big healthy-green sphere was rolling across the mat right at us.

  “Run! Toward the beach ball!”

  Mister After All almost got us. But just as his claw-like hands painfully yanked out strands of my hair, we plunged into the jade grass-smelling sphere like two raisins into a pudding, while Mister After All bounced off its surface that selectively repelled him.

  The summery smell filled my lungs, and then my brain.

  19. CANDY FROM A STRANGER

  I had never awoken side-by-side with a fellow sleeper before in the Vaalbara room at the AEOTA factory. I wondered if the management charged as much for a double as for a single.

  I picked myself up in the familiar vacant cavernous room with the sunny rifts in the roof, then helped a stunned Holger Holtzclaw to his feet.

  I was dressed in that morning’s Oxford shirt and khakis. Holger wore what he had presumably worn on his visit to Thaumas & Company: a dapper summer-weight linen suit and Weejuns.

  He looked around, blankly at first, then with growing awareness.

  “I-I know this place. It’s where I, where I—”

  “Don’t sweat it, man. We’re safe now. Let’s go.”

  We climbed the ladder and entered the anteroom.

  There were two sets of my footprints in the dust: from my return after Green Lady sex and my return after Yulia sex. I added a third track as we made for the exit.

  Unlike the previous loop, I was apparently not following right on the tail of myself. At least, my earlier avatar was nowhere to be seen. He was probably already in the truck belonging to the Aeota Farms folks, winging his way back home.

  The sun was fairly low in the east, and I had to hope that this was the morning of the pancake breakfast at the trailer. If it were earlier, the waiting would be frustrating. But if it were later—well, who could say what chances I would have missed?

  I turned around to survey the ruins of the factory.

  The signage atop the building said:

  FIRST CHURCH OF THE GLORIFIED AEOTA

  “EX NIHILO NIHIL FIT”

  I turned back to Holger.

  “You have a phone on you?”

  He patted a coat pocket and came up with a smartphone.

  “Can you get us an Uber?”

  Holger was regaining some of his old Ponzi scheme savoir-faire as the harsh memories of his fantastical incarceration receded into a dream-like haze. “If I have a signal…”

  The car took nearly an hour to arrive, out here in the middle of nowhere. During that time, I fed Holger a spontaneous bullshit story about drugs and kidnapping and industrial espionage. I was hardly about to tell him the truth—even assuming I really believed any of this madness. He seemed to buy my farrago.

  “Juniper is going crazy without you,” I concluded. “But you know that going back to her means facing the law.”

  Holger seemed genuinely repentant. Maybe his stint in the DUCA future, even rationalized as a nightmare, had actually served to rehabilitate him to some degree. I tried to imagine his lawyer making a case for “time served” at his sentencing hearing. “Although my client will not be incarcerated for another four billion years, he has actually already suffered through that imprisonment, and is thus exempt from additional punishment.”

  “I’ll face the music,” Holger said. “I’ll make restitution and maybe the judge will be lenient. No one was really hurt.”

  “Good for you, pal. You’ve got a helluva woman in that Juniper.”

  My praise might have sounded a tad too intimately enthusiastic, because Holger eyed me askance.

  “I mean, the money she laid out to find you and all. Plus the tears. Lots of tears.”

  Just then the Uber pulled up, and any suspicions were derailed. We climbed into the late-model car—which proved to be an Aeota Motors Protero.

  The driver, a middle-aged white guy with a lean face and shaved head, wearing a T-shirt with Suzanne Vega’s picture on it, introduced himself. “Hello. My name’s Carnarvon Jarrell. Sit back and relax. We should be arrive at your destination in just a couple of hours, if the traffic is decent.”

  Holger and I both took the guy’s advice. Suddenly I felt totally drained, and Holger seemed to experience the same enervation.

  I drowsed dreamlessly until I heard Jarrell’s polite coughing.

  “We’re almost there.”

  I looked around and saw we were on the final street leading to the Holtzclaw McMansion, but had yet to turn down the driveway.

  “Stop here, please,” I said.

  We got out and Jarrell motored off.

  “Is there a back entrance to the grounds?”

  “Yes, for deliveries.”

  Give Holger credit for gratitude and trust; he didn’t question me, his rescuer, but just followed meekly along.

  I left Holger at the rear of the house.

  “Don’t leave this spot till I come and get you, understand? I have to prep Juniper for your startling reappearance.”

  And put my dick away, I didn’t say.

  I went around to the front of the house. Aelita sat patiently in the car.

  Blammo!

  I was back inside the house, merged with my earlier sweaty self, draped half-insensible atop a bent-over Juniper, her playsuit pooled around her ankles as she leaned against the back of the couch.

  “You send me, girl, you really do. But now we gotta get dressed. I’m expecting a call that could break this whole investigation wide open.”

  Once dressed, I grabbed my old Nokia as if it were vibrating silently. “This could be it.” I pretended to take the nonexistent call, conducting an imaginary dialogue.

  “No! You say he should be arriving now? Fantastic!”

  I hit the off button and addressed Juniper. “Go fix yourself up. Your hubby’s coming up the drive.”

  She dashed off, and I went outside. I secured a meek and obedient Holger first, then got Aelita out of the car.

  “Well done, Vern. I knew you could do it.”

  “If I have to wake up in that fucking place one more time, I’m going to stash my pajamas there ahead of any jumps.”

  The reunion between Holger and Juniper was suitably touching, even given knowledge of the cheating sex that had just occurred.

  Aelita was tugging on my shirt again. “Get the thing he has for us. It’s in his left coat pocket.”

  I asked Holger to hand over what he had in that location. Puzzled, he said, “But there’s nothing—” Yet as he put his hand into his suit coat, he encountered something unexpected. He took it out and handed it to me.

  It was a small transparent cellophane packet with a single largish lacquered crimson marble inside. The lettering s
aid:

  AEOTA CANDY COMPANY

  FAMOUS HADES FIREBALL

  I glared at Aelita.

  Her beguiling child’s face remained unperturbed. “Trust me,” she said.

  20. INVASION OF THE CHRONOSPORES

  I noted the changes in my city as we drove away from the happily reunited Holtzclaw lovebirds. (I had made sure to tell them that they’d be getting my final bill in the mail, and that the total would be a significant five figures, even though I had no real faith in any of us surviving to pay or be paid. But old habits die hard. I figured that just before DUCA converted us all to slime, I’d probably still be instinctively checking the Nokia’s voice mail for new clients.)

  The downtown district, formerly several square blocks of empty storefronts and needle-strewn sidewalks populated by druggy wastrels was now host to flourishing emporiums and middle-class patrons. That was a plus. My continuum-skipping seemed to be following a gradient of improvement. We passed a beauty shop offering “Aeota Threading” and the Aeota Cinemas. The marquee on the latter advertised a double bill of the gone-away world and portrait of jennie.

  As I continued to drive toward Marty Quartz’s apartment—or at least the place where I hoped he still lived—I saw other changes. There was a public park where there had never been one—the grassy acres were filled with people playing some kind of polo while driving electric-powered monowheels—and a tower that seemed to be sheathed in golden fish scales. Trouble was, I couldn’t determine if these changes stemmed from my first, second, or third time-travel excursion. I wondered if I’d still have a home and a wife to return to after all this.

  As if reading my thoughts, Aelita said in her alien way, “Don’t worry, Yulia is okay.”

  “Thanks for that.” A thought that had been bubbling under in my mind suddenly demanded voicing.

  “I don’t really understand about the nature of this change that DUCA is trying to install, this new monoculture regime. Shouldn’t it be instantaneous, or have already happened? I mean, here we are, four billion years in DUCA’s past. So he starts extending his realm backwards, conquering one antecedent year after another in succession as he moves toward uniting with LUCA, four billion years prior to our present. Shouldn’t that wave of change have hit us by now? Or is it propagating at some finite speed, and has yet to engulf us? And is there some objective universal measure of time outside our normal reference frame that we can use to measure the advance of the threat? It’s all highly confusing.”

  “None of your suppositions or conceptions are adequate or accurate. It’s very hard to explain. A crude analogy involves tipping points and emergent phase shifts. Think of it like this. DUCA is sending spores backwards, to infest each previous era. And when those spores take root in a given period, they multiply until a critical mass is reached, at which point everything instantly transitions. It’s like the ‘false vacuum’ theory in physics. The multiverse exists in an unstable mode that can be toppled over into an inescapable eternal lower-energy configuration by certain actions.”

  “These spores—what do they look like? How do they manifest?”

  “You’ve already encountered one such manifestation, in the person of Brevis Baxter.”

  I had to pause to dredge up the associations with that name.

  “You mean the crummy bum who braced me at A. O.’s Tea Room and gave me a box of goop?”

  “Yes. He was a host to a DUCA spore, but not yet fully morphed. He was trying to contaminate you as well with that package. But I caused the spore to deliquesce before you could be affected.”

  “But I didn’t even know you then! I didn’t know any of this insanity existed.”

  “But I knew you already, Vern. And the ‘insanity,’ as you call it, or the reality, was always with you.”

  Stubbornly, I tried to remain optimistic. “I think the fact that we are still here talking, that DUCA hasn’t yet colonized us, means that he will never colonize us, that he’s already failed forever.”

  Aelita sighed. “I wish that were true, Vern. But it’s not. We have to continue to struggle and fight, with all our brains and heart.”

  “Well, let’s see what this lead that Marty uncovered is all about. Maybe it’s a game-changer.”

  It was almost noon, my appointment time, when we pulled up in front of Marty Quartz’s apartment building. Reassuringly, the place looked as I recalled, from however many timelines ago: a former tofu factory turned into luxury condos. Marty’s job as a freelance IT security consultant paid good money, and allowed him to work just as much or little as he desired. We had met during another case, when I was tasked with finding the source of some industrial espionage.

  In the lobby, a concierge rang Marty’s room, then allowed us to proceed.

  The door to Marty’s third-floor quarters was already open when we arrived, and the man we had come to see awaited us, framed in that portal. Still dressed in yesterday’s LARPing outfit of Irish tweeds and brogans, he resembled a plumper Yeats, right down to the little spectacles—which must have featured lenses of window glass, since Marty had never needed visual assistance till now, so far as I knew. His tired face and bleary eyes showed that his usquebaugh consumption had been authentically copious.

  Seeing Marty, Aelita ran toward him and hurled herself at him as she had done for me when I arrived home.

  “Uncle Marty!”

  “Hey, microbe! What’s fermenting?”

  I did a double take. “Microbe?”

  “You know, man. It’s what Donald Duck calls his nephews.”

  “Oh, right…”

  Inside the apartment, I sniffed a weird odor. It was organic, but not exactly that of the Archean period, I thought.

  “What’s that smell?”

  “Oh, we had a peat fire going here last night for verisimilitude. Burning the bog, man. Getting in touch with the roots. Look, just let me change, and then we’ll go.”

  “Go where?”

  “A place I found when I Googled ‘aeota.’ One you never mentioned. Luckily, it’s right here in town.”

  Marty disappeared in back, while Aelita and I waited silently. Upon his return, he sported his more customary outfit of cargo shorts, a baja “drug rug” hoodie in eye-straining rainbow colors, and Teva sandals.

  Down in the car, Marty sat in the back rather than fuss with Aelita’s booster seat. Obviously feeling more alive after some covert bedroom toot, possibly of a trendy restorative nutraceutical, he leaned forward in his typical energetic fashion to tell what he knew.

  “This guy’s been on my radar for a while. Roopnarine Ströma. Heads Ströma Heuristic Systems. Took over the business from his father, Aadidev, the founder. Sells software-learning systems to the government and big corporations. DARPA’s a client. But I never realized he’s got a side project that’s been going on for decades. It’s called AEOTA. Stands for ‘Artilect Enjoined to Operate on Thomist Axioms.’”

  “In English, please.”

  “An artificial intelligence designed to reason about God and the universe.”

  “Okay. Not too ambitious.”

  “I figure, given the coincidence of names, that this gizmo might have some answers to any questions you can ask it.”

  “And Ströma will see us?”

  “Yeah, he knew my work and agreed. I didn’t explain that you were nuts, though.”

  “Thanks. When I’m running the universe, I’ll do something nice for you in return.”

  “Hey, that reminds me. Let me see that phone of yours a minute.” I passed the Nokia over my shoulder.

  “Can’t see any sign of modding. And you say it printed out a slip of paper?”

  “Twice. I’ve got them right in my pocket.”

  Marty handed back my phone. “We’ll look into this later.”

  The building housing Ströma Heuristic Systems was a sleek early-eighties postmodern edifice on the edge of town. It reminded me generically of the AEOTA HQ upstate, and I had to repress a shiver.

  Roopn
arine Ströma was a striking, handsome young figure. Of blended ethnicities—I was going to guess, based on his name, half-Hindu, half-Swedish—he presented a dapper businessman’s façade with an overlay of intellectual heft. Very Richard Branson by way of Elon Musk.

  After shaking hands all around, even with a somber and wide-eyed Aelita, Ströma conducted us deep into the bowels of the place, past layers of security.

  “When my father first began to construct and program AEOTA, he didn’t want to use any of the company’s then-limited resources on his private mission. Stockholders and venture capitalists get antsy about that. So the project was tucked away in a basement room, functioning on whatever he could scounge, and it’s stayed there ever since. We don’t dare move it, because we would have to power it down, and no one knows if it would ever reboot. It’s the most massive kludge I’ve ever seen.”

  As he told us this, Ströma unlocked a final door and swung it wide, and I could instantly see he wasn’t kidding.

  21. INTERVIEW WITH AEOTA, INTERVIEW WITH AN ARTIST

  The room was not large, probably about as big as the kitchen in the Holtzclaw McMansion. It was air-conditioned and featured a false floor for easy access to cables. In the middle was an old beat-up workbench. The long metal table supported a mass of what looked to be randomly gathered computer hardware piled high, threaded together with a variety of wires, the whole mess surrounded by tipsy functioning stacks of other equipment, some in racks, some in freestanding towers, leaving just about enough room for three adults and a kid to crowd inside. Ströma closed the door and locked it.

  The many LED telltale lights—red, green, amber, and blue— reminded me of a nighttime jungle scene with the eyes of animals shining in the gloom. At the center bottom of the silicon ziggurat on the table was a monochrome display and a clunky keyboard. The ancient equipment triggered a memory I had not considered in ages: my first computer as a kid, a Commodore 64.

  “Is that…”

  Ströma seemed embarrassed. “Yes, it’s a Cee Sixty-four. You have to remember that Dad started building this monstrosity circa 1985. By the time he died, he had added about six million layers of equipment around the Commodore. But the Sixty-four is still the kernel and the interface.”