MOM

by Collin Piprell

  The Lode. Our collective memory. Here's something else you might try. You ever hear of Africa? Never mind. It was one of the biggest continents on the planet. Well, you go look for Africa on the Lode. Nothing. Not a thing. Anywhere you look. And that's something I can put my finger on, though there won't be many like me around for long. Where are all the other things that have gone missing or been changed around in some way? You don't get writers any more, but never mind, there aren't any readers anyway. No Africa. No writers. What else have we got none of? Like where are the population figures for the past ten years? Last ones date back to 2037, and they reported a total of two hundred thousand worldwide. You've got to imagine it's fewer now. But how many fewer? And the crèches? Nothing. Not a mention. When was the last time you saw or even heard of children? The Kid says the youngest he knows of is Sissie, and I guess that's so. A least I don't know of anybody younger. Of course you can't count Sissie, though the Kid doesn't know that yet.

  Scratch that last sentence. Is it gone? Okay.

  And it's strange. They still had three test pilots in ESUSA. The way things are, they must have represented a fair part of the whole population. Now there's only two of 'em, and it's still odd. (Here in ESSEA, there's nary a one left. Seems they killed each other off, except for two I had to deal with myself.)

  Anyway, according to Brian at least, before the IndraNet and holoms, the holoquantum memospec doojiggers, the Net was still open to system crashes, including big memory losses. He says that's where Africa went. But ever since we got the infinite redundancy, data loss should be impossible. How come, then? We already had IndraNet before we lost Africa and the global population figures, so what happened to the information? It appears that some of these “holoms” are really black holoms, if you get my drift. Sometimes you start to think they're cosmeticizing the whole world. Who are “they,” you ask? Good question.

  Some people say MOM is self‐conscious. Okay. Let's say she is running the show, whatever that show might be. How can we know that? And what are we going to do about it? Try to destroy her before she destroys us? Is there any reason to destroy her? Can we destroy MOM? I don't think anybody has tried since the GameBoys.

  Given the chance, the GameBoys used to smash anything they could get their hands on, machine or human. But they're gone now. If MOM is alive, and I'm not saying she is, would killing her be murder? And we're talking about destroying our own offspring, here. Because if she's alive, then we, by gosh, gave birth to her, and just maybe we're responsible. It. Gave birth to it. It, it, it. I don't even know if I can talk this way. Next thing I know I'll get myself offed. People say MOM knows everything that happens, every qubital detail of every mallster's life. It's like she watches every sparrow fall.

  Except there are no friggin' sparrows anymore.

  Anyway, some of the stuff that was lost before holoms, maybe it's just as well.

  These days, most of each of us is somewhere in the Lode. Given our lifestyle—prisoners in our own apartments, no matter how you cut it, every word, every bowel movement recorded, and only our qubital teleps wandering the Worlds—why, bit for bit they've got us completely plotted. Infinitely redundantly gosh‐darned collected and preserved forever and ever. If you can believe someone like Brian, which in this case I do. But Ellie is dead and mostly gone. And that's good, when it comes right down to it. The question is, can we keep it that way? What do you say, Brian—are you reading this? Should we keep it that way? Should we let Ellie go the way of Africa?

  One problem is, I believe she had a message for us. For the Kid and me. And we won't know what that was unless we put her back together again so she can tell us. And I don't care if you see that or not, Brian. It's time to put all our cards on the table and play them out anyway. It's showtime.

  Worldsday

  Boon Doc's bar is not rocking: there's Leary, Brian the Evil Canadian, and the girls.

  “You broke the law back there.” Leary sips at his GR bourbon and winces.

  Brian unhands Om and reaches for his GR beer. “Which law, back when?” He has broken plenty of laws lots of times, he wants you to understand, and worrying about that would never have gotten him where he is today.

  “The Hal thing.”

  Brian gurgles. “Shitfire, old buddy. What are they gonna do, off me? How would they manage that? MOM doesn't know I'm alive. Even if she did, she wouldn't know how to find me.”

  “You buy me co‐la,” Dinky Toy tells Leary.

  He thinks she must be joking. They're old friends, and this is not her style. “Hah,” he says. “You buy me a whiskey. You think I'm made of money?”

  “Han'sum man. Just one ladydrink, na?”

  Leary looks at her strangely.

  “Hey, old buddy,” Brian says. “Notice anything different about our friend Kinky Toy?”

  “What?”

  “Guess what.”

  “What?”

  “Kinky's no longer with us.” “Come again?”

  “You heard.”

  Dinky Toy smiles at Leary in her winningest fashion. Leary looks at her, and looks again with dawning horror. “No way,” he says.

  “She's gone, old buddy. Last cycle. Over and out.”

  Leary puts his hand on her shoulder as if to reassure himself of her real telepresence. “Dinky Toy,” he asks, looking into her eyes. “I'm going to ask you if you remember something…”

  “Han'sum man,” the ebee tells Leary. “No break my heart, okay? You buy me co‐la.”

  Leary turns back to Brian: “You know what?”

  “What?”

  “This is your doing. You and your Hal.”

  “Oh, come on. She was a prime candidate whatever I might have done. Seventy years of broken promises and broken hearts. What do you expect?”

  “You buy me co‐la.” Dinky Toy's ebee is still there, but Leary has ceased to acknowledge her existence.

  “What the fuck, old buddy. Ebee babes are just as good as the real thing. Better.

  You can turn 'em off when you're not using them. One more way technology is improving our lives. And, with a little more experience, our ebee Dinky Toy, here, will start to put on personality. Think about it, old buddy. In the old days, all we could look forward to as the years went by was watching her put on more flesh.”

  “And back when you took up with a psychiatrist,” Leary says. “That should've been a match made in heaven. Except she was twice as crazy as you ever were.”

  “Still is, my friend.” Brian laughs. “She still is.”

  “So why do we never see her anymore?”

  “She's become something of a recluse, you could say.”

  Leary gazes into his glass, works at ignoring Dinky Toy's ebee pleading for a co‐la.

  “I've got more news for you, Leary.”

  “I don't want to know.”

  “Keeow, here.” Brian slides a hand under her bikini bottom and then works some fingers in between her buttocks. She's an ebee too.”

  “No.”

  Brian dons a look of huge piety. “It must have been last cycle, same as Dinky Toy. Nothing left but her pale facsimile.” No matter how pale and gone she might be, Brian is taking great delight in groping her, and she's reacting much the same way you'd expect any such employee whose job requires her to submit to such attentions to react. “It's like an epidemic,” Brian says. “Watch this. Keeow, honey, what say we go upstairs and you give me a trip around the world?”

  “No like. I good girl. No smoke. No do round word, duay.”

  “What did I tell you?” Brian says to Leary. “Keeow's telep smoked like a stream locomotive. Could suck a golf ball through a garden hose, learned that over all the years. But her ebee's programmed according to some long outdated notion of what's standard among the local ladies. So you see?”

  “Doesn't prove a thing,” Leary says. “No friggin' way.” He swipes his glass of digital bourbon and ice across his forehead then bangs it down on the table. He reaches up with his qubital hankie
to mop qubital sweat from his qubital brow, dabbing at his eyes in passing. Then he hammers back his drink and waves his empty glass towards the bar, not looking when Dinky Toy takes it. “Let's get down to business,” he says.

  “You no buy me drink?” chorus Keeow and Dinky Toy, but neither Leary nor Brian pay them any mind.

  Leary holds the new qubital glass of whiskey on the rocks up against the side of his head. “I've got something you want,” he tells Brian.

  “And what might that be?”

  “Something you want more than anything else, erased forever from the Lode. Remember all that time you spent, back when, searching for the missing data?”

  “What are you talking about, old buddy?”

  “Ellie.”

  “Bullshit. I was all over your account, back when, looking for her. You've got diddley squat.”

  “Memocubes.”

  “What?”

  “Two quantum memocubes. Pre‐IndraNet. Want 'em?”

  Brian thinks it over for a minute, and then laughs. “You never were much good at poker. You're shitting me.”

  “No bluff.”

  “Okay. Let's say you have got her. What do you want?”

  “I just want to be there when we defrag Ellie.”

  “Why don't you do it yourself?”

  “I've only got half of her.”

  “The boy?”

  “That's right. He has the rest.”

  “Maybe we can deal.”

  “So you're game?”

  “First thing, you have no idea where I am. Or how hard it's going to be to deliver the cubes. So you bring yourself and the boy around to Shaky Jake's next Worldsday.” Brian gurgles his broken drainpipe of a laugh and gives Om a slap on the butt. “Let's see if you two have what it takes.”

  Chronicle

  I want a time‐lock on this installment. Nobody gets access to it for twenty cycles. Nobody. By then the Kid will either know all this anyway, or he'll be dead. Fact is, by then we'll probably all be goners.

  •

  Brian wants to toy with the Kid first. A few preliminaries before the main bout. It may be hard to believe, after everything Brian did to the Kid when he was a little boy, but Brian admires him. “Toughest little bastard I ever saw,” he tells me. “Better than any of the others. Except maybe Dee Zu. And Lars King. Different, somehow. Kind of hated to do it to him. And the others. But they were prime material.”

  The Kid has to know enough of what's going on, but not too much. Sky's helping out on this, and I trust her, I guess. But it's a tricky business. Who's to say how much damage Brian and his friends did to that boy? He's a tough cookie, but he has been to hell and back. And now we're going to ask him to bust right back into the inner circle and do us all favor while he's there. I swear, if he can pull this off, then I've got new respect for all of us as human beings.

  All the people with any spunk left, meanwhile, it looks like they're killing each other off. Like this epidemic of Worlds pilot murders. Looks like we're down to nothing but killers and mallsters. You can see Brian's point. Maybe we should just let the machines have what's left. Except for Ellie. Brian wants to defrag Ellie. A full reconstruction, or at least as full as he can make it. I know him well enough to see the idea's got him by the short and curlies. So if anything's keeping humanity alive for the time being, what's left of it, it's only that Brian's got the hots for my dead wife.

  My wife. A fine woman who, by the way, Brian as good as killed in the first place.

  Now he wants to bring her back. He thinks he'll get to live out his days with the woman he loved so much he killed her. Better still, with a customized ebee version of her. Like he says: maximum service, minimum backtalk. But he might be in for a surprise. My Ellie was smarter than most, and the fact she's dead doesn't mean her game is played out yet.

  The Inuit, what we used to call Eskimos, they had a trick. Call it a trojan. They bent a piece of sharpened whalebone over, wrapped it in blubber, tied it up tight with something, and froze it. Then they took the string off the bait and left this nice surprise lying around for a polar bear to find. The bear would see it, hardly believing its good luck, and gobble it right down. Then the blubber would thaw out deep inside the bear's gut and the whalebone would spring open. After a while the bear bled to death, or at least slowed down enough the Inuit hunters could catch up and finish it off.

  Do you know, sometimes I reckon the digital revolution was much the same trick, except we had the whole human race gobbling the goodies. Never mind, it's a pretty sure thing there aren't any Inuit left. Or polar bears. Or blubber, come to that. No T‐bones, that's for sure. Not real ones.

  So here we go. Let the games begin. The gauntlet. Whatever. Listen up, screen. You be sure to keep the time‐lock on this bit.

  Worldsday

  They come to a hard‐edged island in the murk, a tiny street market shrouded in perpetual night. Leary wants noodles before they meet Brian. And a chat, he says.

  Seven metal stools, irregularly arranged on the pavement, surround two flimsy steel tables as though awaiting the Seven Dwarfs. Each table holds a bright red plastic tissue‐roll dispenser; a clear plastic container of toothpicks; a steel box of forks, spoons and chopsticks; and a steel condiments tray with four glass jars, all illuminated by naked electric light bulbs strung overhead. Ghostly diners are parked at similar dining suites, ill‐resolved archipelagos sited three or four meters distant in this snug universe. Cisco knows the other tables will take on finer resolution if he approaches them, even as these smear away. The magic circle has a radius of only four meters or so. Outmoded economies of process and memory. This is an early World, something of an unfinished prototype. It's obvious Bangkok was generated with a '30s‐vintage, Genesis‐type reality engine and half‐heartedly upgraded later with an advanced world processor. For one thing, it supplies tastes, a feature that wasn't developed till pretty late in the game.

  A girl appears from nowhere to take their order.

  “Noodle soup with red pork for me,” Leary mutters, not even looking at her.

  She's an ebee, Cisco guesses. Quite a cute ebee. “Aray na?” she asks. “What?”

  “Baa mii nam, darn it.”

  “No unnerstan'. You speak angrit? English? Speak Thai?”

  “I am speaking Thai. Bring me baa mii nam muu daeng. A bowl of noodles, darn it.

  And red pork, okay?” Leary's telep flushes with linguistic exertion. “You'd think they could at least program these ebees to speak Thai,” he tells Cisco. “And this one's new. Haven't seen anything new around here for years.”

  The waitress is scribbling something on a pad of paper, just as though she understands what Leary's on about.

  “Bring a bowl of tum yam kung for my friend, here. And bia sing. Song,” he adds, with more authority. Two Singha beers. “You're going to like this stuff, Kid.” Leary pulls a handful of tissue off the roll on the table and swabs his forehead.

  “I guess we could turn down the heat,” says Leary. “But that's the way things were. If you can't stand the heat, then get out of the kitchen; and if you can't handle Bangkok, then frig off to Finland.”

  Aside from the nightmarket the street is ill‐defined, mostly dark. Shadowy figures pass silhouetted against multi‐hued smudges of neon and the prowl of disembodied headlights. This is no more than an impressionistic sketch of Soi Awol. And Bangkok Old Handland is this street, together with Boon Doc's at one end and Shaky Jake's at the other, the city's current and probably forever frontiers.

  Their drinks come unrealistically fast, according to Leary, along with a tin ice bucket and tongs. “Nearly eighty years, and they're still trying to put ice in my friggin' beer.” He grabs an ice cube, rubs it across the back of his neck and then shoves it up against the side of his head. The arrival of the food inspires new indignation. “Gosh. What's this?”

  The waitress looks surprised he doesn't recognize the dish, seeing as how he'd ordered it.

  “This isn't baa mii na
m muu daeng. This is fishball soup.” “Aroi mahk,” she says. “Very delicious.”

  Leary sighs. “Full marks for realism, Kid. That's exactly the way it used to be.

  Probably the only reason she got the beers right is Singha is all they stock.”

  The waitress tosses her head in Leary's general direction, gives Cisco a red‐hot look that bears him no ill‐will whatsoever, and, in a leisurely sort of way, which is all you can manage in a sarong and flip‐flops, she flounces off.

  Leary tells Cisco to eat the rice with his hot‐and‐sour prawn soup. “No need to add anything,” he says. “Just take care you don't set fire to yourself.” Meanwhile, Leary himself is spooning what he says is vinegar and chopped green chilies, fermented fish sauce, and crushed peanuts into his own soup. He adds measured dollops of each with the careful attention of an alchemist who knows exactly how to turn noodles into gold.

  In the beginning, the idea was to resurrect Bangkok. They had planned, over time, to extend its frontiers beyond Boon Doc's and Shaky Jake's to where old hands and tourists alike could relive the city's heyday. “Fifteen years later,” says Leary, “there's Boon Doc's bar, Shaky Jake's, a spooky fax of the road connecting them, and nothing more.”

  Earlier, Cisco has seen a coterie of vendors and a midget tout outside the door to Boon Doc's. That bar, Leary has told him, is closed to tourists, though given the fact that the Old Hands are almost extinct, that bylaw was up for review. Shaky's does take greenhorns—watching tourists was always more fun than watching shows—but they need special dispensation from a quorum of the founding fathers, which in this case is Leary and Brian.

  “What we mostly got here,” Leary tells Cisco, “is a combination of way‐old technology and failing memories. Even more, it's lack of energy, pure and simple. The old boys sit around Boon Doc's chewing over recollections of the city. Same with the old girls. That's all most of 'em need, living out their days in a hazy cocoon.