Trafik

by Rikki Ducornet

  Quiver rallies and, crossing the room, confronts Mic with her height, majestic on legs that, to Mic’s dismay, go

  on forever.

  “You forking self-righteous GIZMO!” she shrieks. “The normal functioning of my body is not an indignity! It is not a misdemeanor! You are accusing me of being human—you maddening THINGAMABOB! And even if it is true that I am incapable of photosynthesis and cannot go solar, still… I mean … you, too, Mic, will succumb to space-time sooner or later! You, too, are subject to change! Subject to endings! TO ENDINGS, MIC!”

  CONTACTS TO MOLECULAR

  Mic is so distraught by Quiver’s outburst he suffers a brief glottological rust rash. For the first time in their history together, he is deprived of speech. His back pressed up against the ice machine, he stares into the void Quiver has just now revealed to him. Never before has he “felt” so existentially compromised. He ponders Quiver’s significant otherness. Never before has she described him so disparagingly! Never before has he been made to consider his own finitude!

  Quiver, also visibly shaken, gazes at Mic with concern. She reminds herself that Mic was conceived to serve in human domestic realms as much as with machines and the vexing realms—above all unknown—that they must navigate together. He once called their relationship “an entanglement”—which at the time enraged her. But now she thinks he is right. It is an entanglement—an entanglement within myriad entanglements behind, ahead, and all around them.

  Mic, she considers, is after all a deeply thoughtful gizmo. He had been wired to think, to brood, to philosophize, to solve complex problems, to—lest she forget—keep her from cracking. What’s more, the galley heat transporter and condensed matter coolers had both disfunctioned at the very same moment she had lost it and shouted at him, reminding her that Mic is connected to every single one of the gizmos on board.

  “Micosan,” she murmurs, walking to him, tenderly reaching out to him, gently caressing his insulator topper. “It’s O.K., baby. I am well aware,” she continues. “I am grateful that each and every nanoparticle in this Wobble depends on you. There is no statistical evaluation, not a single bias sweep, not one inquiry into spectors, scales, or peaks that happens without you. And yet, despite these never-ending tasks, you keep on trucking, every quik you are here— thoughtfully, Mic, attentively in the present. Thanks to you, we soar, baby! And always at a perfectly maintained room temperature, no matter the challenges. No matter how very, very cold, how very, very hot!” Then, knowing how much he loves to hear a human sing a song just about more than anything, she sings one of Phys Chem’s greatest hits: Contacts to Molecular, which begins (as surely you recall):

  I wanna monitor

  your interferometer

  contact molecular

  exaltor homuncular

  wanna accelerate

  your scintillator

  your scintillator

  wanna check out

  your interstellar laser

  titillate your laser!

  ON BEING

  The following First Cycle, Mic confronts Quiver as soon as she unfolds from her hamok and even before she hits the floor.

  “I am a self!” Mic, beyond excited, levitates from within a diaphanous halo of steam.

  “Yes! Yes! I know, Mic! I—”

  “Not so fast!” Mic cries, his voice rising as he orbits the breakfast table, a trail of mist behind him. “You see, I have been mulling this over in the dark, an interminable darkness so dark even the Space Eye was empty of light.”

  “O.K.! O.K.! I get it, and—”

  “Here it is!” Mic cries. “Are you listening, Quiv?”

  “I am! I am!”

  “I am a self because I think!”

  “Yes! Yes! I get it-”

  “Quiet, Quiv! There is more! So much more! If I am because I think, this means I am thought!”

  “Wow, baby. I guess so—”

  “Quiver! This means that I AM NOT A GIZMO!” Satisfied, he rolls off, eager to consider the current cycle’s itinerary. Thoughtful, Quiver nibbles her Crick. I have been soulblind, she thinks, overwhelmed by self-loathing.

  QUASI

  Inexorably, First Cycle returns. A small company of owls as soft as moths rise from the forest canopy and scatter. Her hair beating the air like a wing, the redhead dashes past, within a breath dissolving. Such encounters remind Quiver that she has rarely known such moments of release. Of expectation.

  The few steps she takes from the Lights to Home Free are taken in absolute solitude. But now she sees Mic, the Space Eye, and Quasi rise above them, one rock among many and not much larger than the rest. A red star—named Melodious (the Atlas informs them)—blinks in a corner.

  Toggling closer they see spars of multiple Fibonacci flowerets the color of ham, each as tall as the Burj Khalifa before it was swamped by the sea. “Quasi’s silicate skeleton and barbed electromagnetic spuds are constructed much like my thought box,” Mic says. “Already I feel an affinity. This is propitious. Destiny, perhaps.”

  “You were,” Quiver advises him acidly, “conceived and constructed for the very purpose of mineral extraction. It is no accident we have been sent to Quasi.”

  “I was constructed, yes! As you say! No need to remind me of that. Unlike you, you who are the outcome of a cascade of random and chronic accidents! Whereas I—let us not forget it—I am the outcome of a precise cause.”

  “As was I, you, you … botling! I hung suspended in the nursery for a purpose! And by the way! You look like a bottle of hot sauce in that outfit,” she scolds, unable to contain herself.

  “That nursery reeked like the dead oceans of First World!” is his reply. “Or so I suppose, as one forced to ambulate in your proximity, cycle after cycle, in a space not much larger than a shoe closet—a small shoe closet,” Mic adds as an afterthought. (His was one of the rare intelligences for whom such things mattered. He had been impressed by the opulence of Paris Hilton’s own shoe closet as seen on the Swift Wheel’s Celebrating Celebrities’ Closets App.)

  “How?” she wonders. “How can you go on (as is your wont) about my supposed off-gassing when you, Mic—I hate to tell you this—have no nose, but only an orifice not much bigger than a keyhole in a door, a bunghole of a—”

  “Now you sound like me!” Mic yelps, bouncing up and down like a toddler in a tantrum.

  “Not at all!” Quiver thunders above him. “It is you, you, you counterfeit, you accumulation of soup cans, you interloper—who has been wired to sound like me!”

  “Not so!” Mic, still bouncing, rages, his lenticulars rattling like dice in what passes for his head. “Not so! You thing of cosmical irreverence! I am the voice of the imminent present! IT IS SILICA THAT WINS THE BATTLE! IT IS GRAPHITE THAT SOLVES THE MYSTERY! IT IS THE MAGNET AT MY CORE THAT HAS THE LAST WORD! Wait and see!” In his excitement his pillbox hat begins to levitate. It circles the room, stalls, charges, and under full steam lunges for her. She grabs her ever-handy sonic dustionizing deibulator and strikes as Mic attempts to duck. The hat explodes with a pop as, concurrently, Mic’s frustulator sheds a silver trickle of electromagnetic gravy.

  “Ah! Mic!” Quiver approaches him, concerned. He grabs her by a strap; they fall to the floor and grapple like primates. Sobbing marbles he says: “Don’t you ever mess with my frustulator!”

  “I aimed at the forking hat!” Quiver says as the hat’s scattered particles attempt to regroup and instead collide with marbles. The absurdity of everything catches up with her and she finds herself helplessly laughing.

  “You need me, Mic!” she sputters between gales of laughter. “Without me who will lubricate your poke hole? Who will… will stimulate your … alt, alterior … thermonics?”

  “Your species is damned,” he says softly, seemingly exhausted. And then, as an afterthought: “Everything is doomed. But for the light! THE LIGHT!” Exulted, he spins on his axle in a kind of joyful trance. He is recalling his prototype, dear little Radio 1 (Rad for short), who would spin
for the pleasure of it, his one little amethyst lenticular focused on the sun. (A memory that goes way back, when from the Moon it was still possible to see the sun and, beneath its beneficial influence, be flooded with joy.) “I am thinking now of little Rad,” he explains, as if nothing had happened and they were starting the First Cycle all over again.

  Quiver is touched that a bot and a boy of Silica and Fluorescent Graphite with sparse electron density had once gazed at the sun with pleasure—something she herself recalls with longing. And Mic, pleased that Quiver is looking at him with tenderness, says: “I am your friend, Quiv. Even though you ignite my fuses. Even if you will always be… strange!”

  These words are punctuated by a thud and a blistering landing on Quasi. (In their rage they had completely forgotten that they were about to arrive at destination!) Brutally rocked back and forth, they cling to Food Face as the Plonk Sidereal Atlas upbraids them repeatedly until things settle down and they can prod its pin: Screwup! Screwup! Screwup! Topographical Error!

  They are perilously perched on a spiraling outcropping of spars a great distance from Rucker’s Parameter—the one place on Quasi that is flat and in proximity to APM: the area of potential mines.

  “I started that quarrel,” Mic says gloomily, once they are steady. “And this despite everything the Kyoto App has taught me about civility. I am ashamed. I bow before you, Quiv.” Then he does.

  EMU PARK

  Stuck on a spar, they have no choice but to call upon the benzine escalator, a tricky vehicle salvaged from a disenfranchised Pico Cycle (as an afterthought), and stashed in cargo. That the Pico Cycle had been dumped on them was just another example of how they have been treated all along. And why? Wasn’t Quasi’s mineral wealth enough to ensure the project’s importance? Hadn’t Quiver proved her own worth having been one of the first to orbit Saturn, spending 730 cycles riding the ether among the fricative flotsam in a solar wind that whistled and trilled so incessantly that she suffers tinnitus even now, yet has never once complained? Hadn’t Mic withstood the terrible rages of Jupiter’s storm clouds, accumulating data on over twelve thousand unknown particulates, including the supermarvelous non-ionizing Cuticular Sidebar? The very sidebar that is now the required first integument for absolutely all Deep Space vehicular traffic?

  The neglect is stupefying. And now, here they are, down in cargo, tugging at the forking benzine escalator, pushing and prodding it into position in the nook at the back of dexter hatch, cussing. Once entombed, dressed in their sidebar haulovers and boots, they are violently thrust, up and away, leaving their pod unsteadily poised—they can see just how unsteadily—on the rim of that ridiculous maze of spars that, in Mic’s words, are of an unprecedented hue, an obscene pinkitude—as if the guts of a gigantic mole rat had been torn out, spliced, and left standing to freeze dry on top of a sponge the size of Manhattan (that is to say, before Washout, Noise, and that city’s consequent collapse). She agrees that the terrain is horrible and unlike anything they have encountered. But just then, as they shriek, the Wobble, having been unbalanced by the escalator’s explosive ejection, topples over and, on a roll, careens down the spar’s slick edge only to vanish.

  “I cannot,” says Quiver, the cinnamon of her face now pallid, “I cannot, cannot—”

  Mic, recalling that he is wired to be indefatigably serviceable, and in the mellow tones of his favorite homeboy psychobot, says: “We will do what we were sent to do. We will redeploy the benzine escalator, prepare for excavating, find the Wobble, load cargo, and return to Elsewhere with Harvey Troano and what looks like vast accumulations of nonionizing Cuticular in proton-bunch populations, glowing—see that to the dexter?—like cobs of gold teeth!”

  “Forking unbelievable!” Quiver exclaims, and then she screams. The ground at their feet is glistering with the bioluminescent spores of the fantastically omnivorous bacillus-grumpus-eptaxis. It spreads in all directions like wildire. In the heat of the moment, they had neglected to sterilize their boots, infecting the Quasian terrain and precipitating a catastrophic mutation that will in no time cause the spongeous asteroid to shrink, to splinter into one vast Cuticular Sidebar cracker.

  Without delay and with the help of their profiterole lasers and rooter blades, they tear into the highly prized material, slice it into irregular squares friable as salteens, stuff it into the escalator, speed across a worsening pattern of fissures in the direction they had last seen the Wobble, and discover that it has landed on its side but with the escalator’s elevator face up! It takes a number of jacks, ladders, pulleys, and complaints to get the escalator and its precious cargo back into the elevator, but in time it is done and they are able to, exhausted, clamber inside the Wobble and Home Free, where at once Quiver tumbles into her hamok, and Mic, decompressing his vesticular corridor, indulges in a refreshing barometric foaming. Then, as Quiver slumbers, wading into a deep dream in which the redhead approaches her, time after time, to gently caress her cheek with tender curiosity, Mic informs their base commander, Alpha Astron, that they are returning with a full cargo. Alpha Astron appears at once, looming on the ceiling, barking: “Sidebar? Sidebar?”

  “Sidebar!” Mic crows, despite a surge of misgiving deep within his central coil. Satisfied, Alpha Astron vanishes in a puddle of ink.

  To ease his anxiety, Mic dives into his latest fascination—an antique terrestrial game: Emu Park. It takes place in the Anza-Borrego Desert decades before the cascading events that erased First Planet and, soon after, the Moon.

  Mic is crazy for the emus. They are chibi—meaning irresistibly cute—a cross between a bird and a camel. In the game, the emus and the roadrunner are the central characters. Mic sides with the emus every time, acquires a number of Chaldean trailers and dozens of truckloads of unexamined junk that he parks beside the Salton Sea.

  There are treasures to be found in the trailers and the trucks such as a Carthaginian compass that will direct his number-one emu to a secret river in space that leads to the Light and Sidereal Survival. (The loser is tossed into a galaxy of dubious origins and is banished to a sublunar purgatory in an undiscoverable dimension.) There are celestial mountains of marvelous metals to be found. There are schools of comets whose entrails illuminate the pathways to seers and mediums. There are sinkholes to universes made of coral, of beeswax, of feathers and scales. There is always the risk of collision, of dissolution, of implosion, explosion, of never-ending solitude, of irritating the gods, of being snapped up by hungry ghosts—the ghosts of those whose destinies have been torn from them. There is always the promise of reaching an ocean of light foaming with delights, generous with answers. Ah! How Mic loves Emu Park!

  Later, when Quiver awakens from her nap, Mic, radiating in a gold lamé kimono, serves her centrifuged rice and squid simulate. Eager to check out cargo and itemize what they had managed to salvage, Quiver bolts her food. A good supply of sidebar and Harvey Troano will make up for other losses, perhaps stave off any investigations. But when they descend into cargo’s vacuum chamber, they find only a fine dust that, suspended further, dissolves as they look. Scrambling back to Home Free, they frantically search for Quasi on the Plonk Sidereal Atlas. Although the Atlas bleeps with bodies bright and dark, large and small—Quasi is undetectable.

  “Where?” Mic dares ask the Atlas. “Where is Quasi?”

  Encroached, the Atlas intones lugubriously. Encroached, Infected, and Eliminated. And Eliminated. And Eliminated.

  “Forking unbelievable!” Quiver cries. “We’re cooked.”

  GOING ROGUE

  The moment is momentous. They will have to report back to Elsewhere, admit their phenomenal negligence, suffer raised eyebrows, stagnate in Limbo as Alpha Astron decides their next—and it will be dangerous and humiliating—assignment.

  “That is,” Quiver whispers, “unless we go rogue.” They are standing inside the kombucha cooler with the door closed. The cooler is calming. “I’ve never acquired a taste for kombucha,” says Quiver, “yet here we are.” They
feel the Wobble slowly rolling in place, listen to the familiar sound of kombucha sloshing in its vat. “I’ve often wondered what was making that noise,” says Quiver. “I feared it was happening in my mind.”

  “If we go rogue,” says Mic, “let’s go to Trafik.”

  “Trafik!” Quiver approves.

  They abandon the cooler and, standing beneath the Space Eye, gaze up at the swarming stars.

  “The attention of the cosmos is focused upon us,” she says. “Their blinking is the way they signal to one another and to us.”

  Disencumbered by all expectations and restraints, the sequencer flashes azure, a black hole claims its center, and Bugs Bunny appears wearing a top hat.

  “Eeh!” he says. “What’s up, Doc?”

  “Trafik,” says Mic.

  “Trafik!” says Bugs. “Coming right up!”

  “What was that?” Quiver asks dumbfounded.

  “Hollywood,” says Mic. “An avatar of yore.”

  Later, as Quiver eats her freeze-dried sashimi, Mic recalls how they had, not so very long ago, mined the terrestrial ring together, those radical density lumps of wrought iron, Jurassic sandstone (much of it having originated in Brooklyn), architectural glass, paving stones, gravel, highway tar, powder room ceramics, and so on—all this having been thrust into orbit the instant Noise blasted, taking with it solar cells, satellites, and the stuff of falling stars. This trash had so mightily incrassated, it was near impossible to break apart. A toxic hard candy, it stuck to, abraded, and fractured the stoutest extirpators, clotburs, and hanks. Sometimes the mass came unbound unexpectedly and sent them careening into the abrasive faces of oscillating unclumped variables—all of them ejecting unprecedented gasses.

  From the start, Mic had declaimed: “We won’t last a day.” After what seemed like forever he said: “We’re not doing it.” And Quiver agreed. Even then they were on the verge of going rogue.