MOM

by Collin Piprell

  “Chances are nobody notices much difference between this setup and the original one. Nothing much has changed. The ebeegirls, some of 'em, dance better than the real ones ever did. But the conversation's much the same. 'Weah you cum fum?' 'I luv you too mutt.' Of course that's how they're programmed, because that's what these fellas want. Nothing too complicated. They only need to be told they're handsome young men now and again, and they have to keep up the supply of co‐las because then they know they're needed. But some people will tell you that's just life, and so what? Go ahead and enjoy it if you can.”

  The beer is ice cold, with a bitter yet refreshing buzz. The hot‐and‐sour soup is even more interesting, though, in this lighting. Cisco's having trouble seeing what he's eating. He spits out a shell with spiny legs hanging off it. The carapace of a prawn, he learns from both Leary and his own HIID, a crustacean related to crabs and lobsters. He has no sooner disposed of this in the metal cuspidor under the table, then he bites into something that goes beyond interesting. “Holy shit!” he remarks. Cisco, as usual, has taken the full pain option, but he has to wonder if this is a joke.

  “Guess you found one of those little chilies. Hot, aren't they? But they're only there to add zing. You're not actually supposed to eat 'em.”

  Cisco chugs most of a large bottle of Singha and then waves the girl over to order more. “Why don't you use real lights?” he asks Leary. “Maybe then I could see what I'm putting in my mouth.”

  “Fluorescent lighting would be more authentic, I'll grant you that. The whole friggin' world used to be lit up with fluorescent tubes. And Bangkok Old Handland is supposed to be the real McCoy, but members have options. I can't stand fluorescent lighting; it turns everybody into corpses. Candlelight, of course, is as human as lighting gets. Gaslight's pretty good too, and nightmarket vendors were still using it when I first hit Bangkok. Electric light is okay, not as good as gas, but lots better than fluorescent. Trouble is, the Thais felt it was too hot and too expensive. Well, I can stand a bit more heat; this place is already so friggin' hot it hardly signifies.”

  Even given Leary's electric lighting, they have overdone the blues in this World, maybe going for atmosphere. Cisco wants to suggest that a touch of red would warm the place up, but he feels it isn't his place to interfere. He asks, “What's wrong with LED?”

  “Didn't happen in these parts till the early '20s.”

  Subtle dissonances pervade the scene. A cluster of glissy, late twentieth century‐style skyscrapers looks as though it's been pasted against the night, the windows, maybe twenty‐five percent of them, as though they're cutouts to a bright fluorescent world behind. Up around the thirtieth floor of one tower, the sun glares red off the glass‐panelled façade, even though in other respects the scene is well past sundown. Maybe the building is supposed to be high enough to catch the last rays from over the horizon. Maybe. The cognate red glare in the condensation on the ice bucket could be either the skyscraper or the neon. Basically this World, never very sophisticated, is old and decaying.

  “This is good, Leary,” Cisco says, wanting to be nice. “But you know you could do a whole lot better.”

  “I suppose we could fix things up, with all the new technology and so on. But why bother? I kind of like things the way they are, much the same as they looked back when a man went around all bleared out with whiskey and beer.” Leary takes a hit of beer, winces into his glass. “Gosh,” he says. “Darn it.” Then he bangs the tumbler down, splashing Cisco with runoff from the ice bucket. “Of course the drinks don't taste the same. And they don't work on you the way the real stuff used to, but all the old times, the dedicated boozing and natural rot have produced the same degree of stupefication.” Leary plies the chopsticks with his right hand, slurping up the fishballs and noodles, and the spoon with the left, sucking up the broth with relish. “GR noodles aren't half bad, if you're in just the right mood, which I am. Beats the heck out of GR bourbon, I can tell you that.”

  Tastes had been hard; smells were relatively easy. Gazing askance, Cisco consults his HIID, which identifies the sweet‐sour reek of rotting garbage and wet cement.

  Boom times in Bangkok, Leary tells him, back when buildings were rising like concrete‐and‐glass mushrooms. All of them long gone, not even reconstructed here. Only their spoor. Cisco stares down at the bits of rubbish, cigarette butts and so on. People still smoked in those days. Then one of the bits moves. It's an insect. A big one, with long feelers frantically feeling as it makes its way through the litter. This tiny enclave of surreality, at least, is finely finished. Cisco can see the bug's shadow scuttle along with its master.

  “Saw that, did you?” Leary asks him. “Hard to say where that kind of detail comes from. Can't imagine who specified cockroaches, unless it was Brian. He's strange enough.”

  “More be‐ah?” The waitress has materialized at Leary's side.

  “How come I've never met this guy before?” Cisco asks.

  “Brian doesn't use the holotanks. And you're not likely to run into him in any of the Worlds. Except for this one. Says it's part of his stealth mode. You could call old Brian something of an enigma.”

  Cisco knows of just one other person who never appears inline. Sky.

  “Brian and I go way back. Drinking buddies at Boon Doc's in the old days. I was an ex‐oil platform manager and diveshop owner; he was an IT whiz, a digital security genius. Whatever. Beer and bargirls were the great levelers. Brian the Evil Canadian, he called himself. You'd never find a better man with computers. He ran his own consulting business. Best hacker anybody ever heard of—had to be, to be that good at protecting you from other hackers.”

  Their waitress has returned.

  “No. I don't want another darned beer. I'll tell you when I want another drink, okay?

  “Where was I? Brian. You'd never know it to look at him, but once he was as important as a person could be in this world. Never mind he had no legs. He did have prostheses at one time. Before the GameBoys took them. Of course he could've got new ones, but he said no need. Now we've got the Worlds, and a telep can have as many legs as it likes.”

  “Sexy man,” says their waitress. “Sek‐see mahk mahk.” She says this to Leary, but she's looking at Cisco. Quite a trick, though Leary pays her no attention whatsoever and sees no part of it.

  “Rumor had it Brian was also a spook,” Leary says.

  “A ghost?”

  “A spy. CIA. No one knows where Brian lives now. Not the real Brian, the wet master behind the teleps. He doesn't live in ESUSA and he doesn't live in ESSEA. He doesn't even register on the Net. What's really odd, MOM shows no sign she's aware of him. Nobody but Brian could pull something like this off. He just isn't there, as far as the system's concerned. The invisible man.”

  The waitress giggles. “More be‐ah?” she asks.

  “If I want beer, I'll ask for beer,” Leary tells her and turns back to Cisco. “Maybe it's not so strange that MOM's blind to my old buddy. Way back when, before he semi‐retired to his security business and Bangkok nightlife, Brian himself was ESSEA MOM. So if anybody knows his way around, it's him.”

  “You're telling me he was mall operations manager?”

  “That's right. The last human MOM.”

  “No way.”

  “And he must have been a genius to be taking care of business even back thirty‐five years ago.”

  The waitress simpers, fires another hot look at Cisco, cocks a hip in the same general direction.

  Brian, the last wet MOM? A world historical figure, especially one that Cisco would have imagined had died long ago, about to meet them here in Bangkok World?

  Cisco spoons elixir from his second bowl of hot‐and‐sour prawn soup, careful, as per Leary's instructions, not to breathe too deeply as he ingests it.

  “You see that?” Leary asks him. “It's got you sweating, hasn't it? It's hot, the way it's supposed to be. But they never get it exactly right. There's something phony about the taste. Metallic,
kind of. Still, it's close. Don't know how they do it. All these GR tastes and smells.”

  “Algorithms, old buddy,” says the waitress.

  Leary is nonplused. “What?” he says.

  “It's all algorithms.” She mops water from their table. “Khaojai, mai?” she asks, which doesn't mean a thing to Cisco till his HIID translates.

  But Leary replies. “Khaojai, gosh‐darn it. Understand.” Even though it's clear he doesn't, not really.

  “Sexy man.” The girl simpers again, but her voice has become a husky rasp. “Speak Thai too mutt, eh?”

  “Brian?”

  “It's all algorithms and, man, I got algo‐rhythm. So when are you dickheads going to come and rock?”

  “Brian!” Leary flushes even darker under his heat flush. “I should have known.

  This here is the Kid. Cisco the Kid.”

  The comely young waitress morphs into a scruffy, white‐haired man in a wheelchair, the transformation too quick to register. Cisco looks at Brian and experiences a peculiar unsettledness, dark tremors from someplace and sometime just beyond his reach. He thinks he recognizes this old man. At the same time he has a sense of standing outside himself, of being at once both familiar and unfamiliar to himself.

  “I've been looking forward to this, my boy.”

  You have to imagine this telep is WYSIWYG; who would want to create this persona? Brian's languid eyes swim and blink, then turn alert, even electric as his spongy features stir with some psyzmic disturbance. As quickly as it appears, the riffle of emotion sinks back into the placid pool of his moon face.

  “Ready for the games?” he says.

  Worldsday

  “What?” Cisco yells. The noise is unbelievable. “What did you say?”

  “The way they built this joint,” Leary shouts back at him. “Any girl you meet could be a telep, an ebee, or a friggin' chimpanzee in a bargirl suit. Can't see anything too good; can't hear a thing. Just like the old days. Except you'd be watching out for ladyboys instead of ebees.”

  “What?”

  “This is exactly the way it was, Kid. And whole generations went stone deaf enjoying themselves Thai‐style.” Brian grins from ear to ear.

  Bangkok go‐go bars were designed for one thing. Every seat faced a center stage, and there was nowhere else to look. The dancers, mostly farm girls from the Northeast, appeared in states of undress that varied according to whether and how recently the police had been paid off. They performed what Leary calls the Isarn Buffalo Shuffle—a grudging approximation to enthusiasm for music they generally didn't like. The music, which someone must have liked, mocked conversation. No point in distracting the johns from the business at hand, i.e. ogling and drinking and fondling and buying co‐las for one and all, eroding your judgment till you bar‐fined a girl out of the joint. Short‐time, if you still had a few wits about you, or long‐time if, as Brian used to say, you were some kind of fucking moron. Why get involved?

  But Shaky Jake's isn't your average go‐go bar. Cisco, Leary, and Brian sit right up at the wraparound bar, and the stage floor is a big mirror, a well of bright carnage, a swarming chaos of body parts and light fragments. If customers crane their heads back, they can see that the ceiling over the stage is transparent glass, and a second tier of dancers are dancing above the first level, displaying, in smudgy soft focus, soles of bobby sox‐clad feet and interesting things up under their miniskirts. One of the performers drops down to do the splits and then writhes around as though having a fit. More smudges. The ceiling of the second stage is mirrored, like the stage floor in front of Cisco. Two strata of girls, visually chopped and blenderized, multiplied towards infinity.

  “Isn't this grand?” Brian hollers.

  Rockabilly segues into disco, heralding a change of shift. At least on the main level. A new herd of girls enters the arena as the previous one commutes offstage.

  A long‐stemmed beauty dressed in nothing but G‐string and high‐heeled platforms comes clacketting towards them. She's Cisco's favorite. Right through the musical holocaust, you can hear her big black shoes hitting the floor. But, no matter what the Bangkok Worlders might want to think, things just aren't right. A pause in the music and Cisco can tell the footsteps fall too flat; there's no indoor‐echo effect. Shoddy design. A small matter, given everything else that's going on, and scarcely noticeable, especially under the circumstances. Except for someone like Cisco. This sort of thing is pure carelessness; it promises other, perhaps more important screwups. And if they're going to let bogus bits like this slip through, why can't they turn down the volume while they're at it?

  The dancer totters on her platforms, right up there in Cisco's face. “Hello, han'sum man,” she says.

  “Hi,” he replies.

  “Darn it, Kid.” Leary guffaws loud enough to render the music benign by comparison. “I believe she was aiming at me and just missed. Can't expect anybody to navigate properly in those clodhoppers.”

  She has skin like honey. Dark honey. “What yo' name?” she asks, in tones that are quite pleasant, given that she's yelling at him.

  Cisco ignores the ensuing HIID account of what honey used to be and why it was sometimes dark, not to mention the evolutionary and historical bases of different skin types in peoples around the world. “Cisco,” he says.

  “What?” She puts her ear up to his mouth. “Cisco.”

  “Me Bia.”

  “What?” Cisco shouts, putting his ear to her mouth. “My name Bia.”

  “Hi, Bia.”

  “You buy me co‐la.”

  “Okay. Why not?”

  While she goes to collect her drink, Cisco watches two big glittering balls spin above either end of the stage, lights and colors and images shattering against the hundreds of little mirrors turning and turning, pitching glitzy fragments to the four corners of the room. But the flash and smash of the strobes against the disco balls are oddly out of sync, probably a touch of temporal friction.

  Bia is back. Cisco perceives a darkening, some loss of resolution, in all her surrounds, while Bia herself acquires even deeper saturation. Almost as though she's been superimposed on the scene. He meets her eyes and sees her pupils dilate with interest. Or maybe it's because he has leaned over between her and the bright dazzle. Either way, it's no proof she isn't an ebee, given the current state of simtech.

  “Han'sum man.” She sips her co‐la. “Wheah you cum fum?”

  “ESUSA,” Cisco replies, shouting into her face.

  Brian wheels closer, running over a tourist's foot in the process, and he lays a paw on Bia's bottom. He ignores the glare from his burly victim, a fellow in a Singha beer tank top and many tattoos who might well be a telep with the live pain option. He also ignores the hard words; he probably can't hear them anyway. Tugging at Bia's G‐string, he leers up between her buttocks.

  Bia pushes his hand away. “No good, na? Khun Cis‐co, he buy me co‐la.” She takes Cisco's hand and places it on the newly vacant space, which is warm and resilient. Cisco feels the smooth play of muscle when Bia shifts on her shoes, trying not to fall off. Some things the designers got right.

  The tattooed asshole decides to get belligerent. He grabs Brian by the wheelchair and starts yanking him back and forth, saying something nobody can hear. Smiling his best smile, Cisco steps up to the fellow and yells, “Be nice, now. Let go of the chair.”

  Leary also steps up and calmly decks the guy. Two left jabs, bam‐bam—and bam, a right cross to the point of the jaw. “Never mind,” he says to Cisco. “It's only an ebee, and a friggin' obnoxious one at that.”

  Brian remains unfazed by the altercation. He suggests that the ebee was merely behaving the way he's supposed to, according to the program. “Come to think of it, that's no doubt true for you two as well.” He laughs. “Hey, but, old buddy. Aren't you getting on in years for this kind of thing?”

  Bia leans into Cisco so close her lips touch his ear. “We go upstairs, na? Okay? I be nice for you.”

 
; “That sounds like fun,” Cisco begins to say, “but…”

  “Go ahead.” Leary's voice booms in his other ear. “Enjoy yourself, Kid.”

  “What are you talking about, Leary?” Leary has told him that real men don't mess with bargirls, even real ones. And no doubt this one's an ebee.

  “Trust me, Kid. Go for it.” Unaccountably, then, for someone with his contempt for ebees, he speaks directly to the girl. “Bia, honey, you take good care of the Kid. You hear me?”

  “Come wit me, na? Yes. Bia love you too mutt.”

  Cisco is looking down, considering this proposition and wondering whether the guy lying there on the floor is only an ebee, when he sees a big cockroach with one leg missing trying to scuttle through the debris. Brian has also seen the creature, and he edges one wheel of his chair over it, barely moving, watching the bug rupture, innards gushing, antennae flailing till the end. And they couldn't get the sound of footsteps right. Brian sneers up at Cisco.

  Cisco turns back to Bia and says, “Nah. I'd better not.”

  “Sky's the limit,” Bia tells him, in impeccable English, but not so loud the others can hear. “Come on. I've got things to show you.” She takes his hand, which he has removed from her bottom, and places it on one of her breasts. She smiles up at him, brilliantly. “Yes,” she says. “Trust me.”

  •

  Brian is sitting at the bar, and he isn't looking at the dancers. He isn't even looking at the all‐but‐naked ebee who's groping in his crotch. He's looking towards the stairs, the way Cisco and Bia have just gone, and he looks thoughtful.

  “What do you know about this?” he asks Leary. In fact he yells it, twice, and Leary still pretends not to understand.

  •

  Bia's footsteps fall even flatter on the wooden floorboards in this squalid little room. She sits on the bed, and a bouncy squeak and squeal of stressed metal takes Cisco by surprise. What a ridiculous design for a bed.

  Bia removes her shoes and lets them drop. Cisco has never pretended to understand how the programs work, but it's odd that Bia's footsteps would fall flat while the very same GR shoes would clatter to the very same GR floor with a proper resonance, muffled by the magazine cutouts of ancient media stars that paper the plank walls. Bia's skin glows in the light of a single bedside lamp.