Leary, Rexy, and Muggs stand on a vast RokBot platform, what was a combination dock and flight deck extending five hundred meters out over the waves. Half the silvery matte surface is covered with dunes; the rest has been windswept clean, especially where pillars must have collapsed underneath, dividing the deck in a neat diagonal where the northeastern half collapsed towards the water in a long, mostly gentle slope.
“Don't move,” Muggs says.
Leary is asking who put him in charge when, just ahead of them, a thick blanket of dust begins to knobble—promise of slowjoes to come. But what the heck? A hundred and thirteen years is a pretty good run; if now's the time, Leary tries to tell himself, he's ready to cash in his chips. But Muggs marches straight at the enemy. Before the emergent slowjoes can grow legs, he extends a utility arm from a chest cavity, something new for Aibos in Leary's experience, and strews a handful of powder ahead of him. Dust to dust, but with a difference. The knobbles quickly recede as the blanket undergoes another sort of regimentation, a ripple effect that spreads fast before it settles and squares off.
“Gosh,” says Leary. “Our Aibo is a magician.”
Rexy goes over to sniff at the giant carpet. The thing shuffles forward and from side to side, expanding as it assimilates more dust. Then it settles again and lies still, a gray ten‐by‐ten‐meter pad about sixty centimeters thick. Muggs has to hop up a couple of times before he makes the ascent. “All aboard!” he says. “Come on. Step on it.”
Leary looks around to see other bits of dune shuddering and shifting, and some of these bits start to creep towards them. He looks at Rexy, who is looking back at him. He shrugs and asks, “Who goes first?” But Rexy has already decided. He's atop the magic carpet in a single bound, looking back to check on Leary, who's right behind him.
“And we're off!” cries Muggs, a tinny excursion leader.
•
Their conveyance makes a beeline for the diagonal divide. It ripples along like a marine flatworm on the clear patches, and all the three adventurers need to do is stand still. When it encounters dunes, however, the carpet proceeds by assimilating the dust ahead while an equivalent volume of dust disintegrates aft. “Move! Keep going,” Muggs tells them. But Leary and Rexy have already worked this out on their own, and, treadmill‐style, walk at a pace designed to leave the dissing safely astern.
Front‐edge mouth devouring, rear‐edge anus eliminating, the blur carpet moves them through this world to the brink of the slope. Then Muggs goes “Whoo‐ee!” as they toboggan down to the water's edge, where their carpet spars with a light surf, inflates a little, and then undulates onto an outgoing surge. Just like that, they're rafting away from the mall.
Chronicle
I'm going to dictate some of this into my recorder. Might as well continue the chronicle.
I had a heck of a time getting my Doll to come up with this gadget. No need for portable recorders, these past twenty or thirty years. Or for PCs, or anything else like that. Even before we got the qubital stuff, digital technology went “ambient.” No matter where you were, you could record into a wall, or the floor, or a refrigerator or whatever. Before long we had everybody going around talking to themselves all the time. That's what it looked like, anyway. If you needed information, or wanted to use a computer for something else, all you had to do was ask and kazam!—there you had it. A screen. And a console if you needed one, but you could always just talk to the screen. None of that now, of course. Not outside the malls. Nor inside them, I guess. Not anymore. Anyway, I'm Outside, and I've got my recorder, a neat little gizmo smaller than my watch, so I might as well keep the chronicle updated. Who knows? I may even survive this little expedition. And maybe a few others will as well, and then they can read my book. If they've got nothing better to do. Which might make you wonder, if that's the case, why there was any point in any of us surviving in the first place.
It's strange. You could almost believe the PlagueBot has pulled out of the area. This is a wasted landscape. Still, it's a good deal different from what I was getting through my window. The mall stretches off towards the horizon, too big to be real. It's perched way up on a forest of metal stilts. Puts me in mind of Thailand's old wooden libraries; they set them on posts in ponds to keep the ants from getting at the manuscripts. They didn't have any force fields, though. And chances are we don't have any ants.
There's no sign of recent breaches or the exploding beach balls, though there are plenty of old repairs. The mall was almost featureless, originally, not even any windows. My own apartment was stashed deep inside, leaving no way I could have a direct view out any window. The best you could say is that I was getting scans from external sensors. And all this time I was looking at an edited reality, something no realer than those darned holos. An anti‐Cosmetic Imperative showing the outranges as hell on earth. It could well be that MOM decided to quarantine humankind, and the main purpose wasn't to keep the PlagueBot out, it was to keep what was left of the mallsters in.
Maybe Eddie Eight wasn't talking through his hat after all, at least in this case. Seems the world outside the windows has been nothing more than another holo behind the holos—Yunnan, Waikiki, Rio, and Outside. We got Outside presented as one more just‐so diversion from life in the malls, the scary other pole to the Worlds. A hell that keeps you happier locked away in the malls, suffering through Mondays, knowing you'll get to heaven on Worldsdays. And this is a bit of hell, though it's not as bad as I expected. Mind you I was already wondering, way back, whether it was ever actually showing me Outside in the first place. Maybe it was even making the whole friggin' thing up. So I'm not all that surprised, really. That my window's been lying to me the whole time. Taking big liberties with the truth, at least. The question, I guess, is why? And that raises another question. Exactly who is it that's been taking these liberties?
Whatever. It looks like we're the last of the ESSEA mallsters, and there's no going back now. Not that there's anything to go back to anyway. But that's just the way things are. There's this whack on the butt and a whole lot of kicking and hollering and then it's, “Welcome, my boy.” Nobody ever thinks to mention this terminal illness you're looking at from day one. This business we call life.
Outside
They're cruising south and east to where Leary reckons they might be somewhere over Chatujak Park, the old Weekend Market, and what used to be the northern terminal when the subway was first built, nearly fifty years ago.
Lots of people used to call Bangkok a cancer and, sure enough, it spread. It metastasized, much like the cancer that finally took Leary's first wife, Nancy. It merged with a bunch of other conurbations, and before long you got one big stinking hot mess of concrete, metal and glass swarming the entire Eastern Seaboard of the Gulf of Thailand. But never mind. Global warming, the PlagueBot and a few other little contingencies soon straightened out what all the politicians and city planners couldn't.
“Not much traffic now, is there, Rexy?” Leary asks.
But it's Muggs who replies: “The bright side.”
The slick swell mirrors a listless sky, so Leary can't tell whether he's looking at reflections or whether the sea is swarming with shadowy creatures barely held at bay by surface tension. About the time he decides they're reflections, something more substantial bumps their raft. Leary is wondering what the agent of this bump might be, and what he should do if it's dangerous, when he notes that Muggs and Rexy have taken up guard duty either side of him. It's good that they're concerned for his welfare. Though you could ask why a couple of pets, one of which Leary has only just met, would give two hoots. Leary looks at Muggs and Muggs looks back, expressionless, the way Aibos must.
Their blur raft undulates along in flatworm mode. It must be assimilating seawater as they go, getting bigger and bigger so that, by the time they begin to submerge, it's thirty meters square.
•
“Chatujak Station!” Muggs calls. “Bullet pod for all points north.”
The raft star
ts to go wobbly. At first Leary thinks it's breaking up, and he steels himself for a swim with the shadowy things beneath the surface. “Darn it! Are you listening, Brian?” Leary looks all around but directs this mainly at Muggs. “Just you remember, I've got Ellie's cube.” Their magic carpet‐raft takes them a little farther, sags in the middle to form a big fuzzy purse before sealing off at the top and sinking. Neat.
“Watch it!” Muggs growls. “You're standing on my face.”
Rexy is silent. But he provides a link to Sky, and Leary needs reassurance right now. “Darn it, Rexy,” he says. “Haven't you got anything to say about all this?” He doesn't have.
As they sink, the water pressure increases and their purse presses in on them like a big fur coat. You could describe this sensation as comforting, if it weren't for the things moving around out there in the water, bumping at the blur membrane.
“Delicate business, this.” Muggs's complacent voice issues from the dark. “We need enough air to breathe during our descent, but not so much that we're positively buoyant. Wow. You have no idea where nanotech was headed before we decided to totally fuck things up instead.”
And Leary is astonished at how the magic carpet‐cum‐raft‐cum‐diving bell can also dock to an underwater airlock. Next thing he knows, they're expelled into a transport pod and fired off northwards aboard a dust‐free and brightly lit bullet pod. Leary's stash and the water bottles were left in the blur purse, leaving him with his locket, his watch, and his recorder. But it's too late to do anything about that now.
The pod accelerates smoothly away, leaving Leary to sit staring at the animated flicker‐picture ads that appear on the subway wall in the light from the windows. He turns to their tour guide: “You—'Muggs,' or whoever you are—what do you know about the Kid? I was supposed to meet him by now.”
“No idea what you're talking about,” Muggs replies. “And now I have to conserve energy.” He switches off, goes into standby mode.
Rexy sits equally motionless in the aisle beside Leary, but his eyes remain alive with more than reflected flicker ads.
•
Rexy already stands outside in the tunnel; he's gazing after Muggs, who has swaggered off towards the light. Their pod stopped fifty meters short of the station platform, where a sign identifies this place as the Chiang Rai subway terminal. They must have been doing five hundred klicks an hour or better.
Leary climbs out, stiff, never mind it was a pretty short ride, and looks back the way they came at the darkening tunnel.
“Okay,” Muggs calls back. “Let's get this show on the road.”
Leary is impressed. “It's what you call ironic, Rexy. After all those years they didn't build a subway because they said it would fill with groundwater, and now it's the one part of Bangkok that isn't flooded. And Chatujak used to be the northern terminal. Now it's Chiang Rai, eight hundred kilometers north of Bangkok as I recall, and a fair bit higher. Some subway system.”
Rexy appears preoccupied and doesn't respond.
Except for overhead and up along the platform, the lights have dimmed to blackness. Heaped by the maglev rails lies a midden of mostly tiny bones and other bits of garbage. Leary kicks at a pile, sending giant roaches scuttling and triggering a minor slide that reveals a larger bone. It looks like a human pelvis. Now he also sees the joint of a leg bone and a rack of ribs. Fresher remains lie scattered along the rails amid pools of something dark and the wreckage of rough shelters. People had camped on the track. The head of a woman, hair matted with filth and face disfigured with sores but otherwise intact, rests at Leary's feet. This first pod arrival in some time must have come as a surprise.
Leary walks farther along to investigate a twisting plume of aromatic smoke rising from the near end of the station platform. It seems to mark a shrine.
Everything's covered with dust—not blur dust, only dust dust. Tatters like cobwebs hang from pipes, and every surface is gritty with something that turns to slick mud with the least drop of sweat, and Leary is making lots of mud. But this patch of platform is different. The floor tiles, even the cement border and tiled lip of the platform, have been polished to a shine. Aside from copious remains of what look like incense sticks, there's a heap of what might be offerings, unidentifiable bits of colored plastic and cloth, a toy (a Matchbox flitter), shiny electronic components, what could be the skull of a human baby. Someone performs regular rituals here.
The stink of human sewage almost smothers the cloyingly sweet smoke, the underlying odors of rot and must. And now, back the way they came, rustlings and squeaks begin to issue from the shadows. Rats are emerging en masse to challenge roaches for the fresh food. But the darkness also teems with other things. The shadows resolve themselves as another wave of scavengers, a dozen adult humans, male and female. They eye the meat where it heaves with rats and roaches, the decapitated woman, and they look at Leary, who appears even fresher, he guesses, and less contested. They come for him. Emaciated stick figures, they totter forward, naked bodies covered with ulcers and filth. Some of them carry clubs; a couple have sharp instruments.
Rexy starts barking, which surprises Leary almost as much as the earlier talking episode; he has never heard him bark before. But the way Rexy rips loose you might mistake him for a killer, if you didn't look too close. It's working, in any case. At least for now, the wets have stopped their advance. And Muggs has joined Rexy in a duet, his own tinny yapping maybe doing much to destroy the credibility of the canine threat as a whole.
“How're you doing?” Leary addresses the little assembly. “I come in peace, darn it. Do you speak English?” Even at a hundred and thirteen years of age, Leary is a good deal spryer than any of this lot. He hoists himself up onto the platform, slipping on sweaty muck to bang a knee on the tiles. “Darn it!” He says it again. “Phoot phassa thai, dai mai?” he adds, asking whether they speak Thai and running the risk of instead ordering a bottle of beer by mistake.
His overture inspires a real commotion, but nothing intelligible. More than anger or indignation at any sacrilege, their manner telegraphs acute hunger. Leary is still considering his options when Rexy takes the lead, mounting a credibly dog‐like attack on the people in the rear, snarling and nipping at their ankles. Meanwhile Muggs, a dented and disreputable mechanical arthritic, stalks the periphery.
Just then a voice erupts inside Leary's head.
PSALMS!
Looking after you and yours since 2027.
Evidently the others can hear the voice as well. They've stopped and gone silent, except for one who is saying, “Fuck off, fuck off!” and trying to kick himself free of Rexy. Leary is relieved to hear English, thinking that there's at least a starting point for negotiations. But now Rexy backs off as the erstwhile mob choose that moment to go down on their knees as though in supplication. “Gosh,” Leary begins. Then he sees they're instead addressing themselves to something behind him.
Turning, he sees a two‐hundred‐centimeter 3D display flickering away on the platform wall, the images sporadic and obscure.
Leary remembers PSALMS from the old days. If you stopped to listen you triggered the full spiel. A lilting voice, half old‐time salvation preacher and half hypnotist, is laying on warm, comforting rhythms, an unctuous argument for never losing anyone or anything important to you, including your own butt.
PSALMS!
For full backups, both bio and digital. And don't forget our cryo layaway plans.
Fear no evil!
Trust Personal Salvation Longlife Multi‐backup Systems for all your anti‐mortality needs.
An eerie sound arises, not part of the dreckad. The basketcases are humming along with the spielster's pitch. A couple of them bang their foreheads against the ground in rough time.
Total assurance, no matter what happens. No more tragic accidents; no more vital mistakes. Rewind, undo, and restore.
PSALMS!
“Who the heck are these people?” Leary asks.
“The dregs,” sa
ys Muggs. “Zoomer cargo cultists. Homo sap's weediest of the weedy.”
•
“Follow me,” Muggs says.
“Right. Suppose you first tell me where it is you think we're going?”
“If you aren't down off that platform and over this way in twenty seconds, pissing on that middle rail will be a pure picnic compared to what's about to go down. So move it.” Muggs has already trotted up a ramp to the platform opposite. “Better hurry, old buddy,” he calls. “Where there's juice for dreckads, there could well be juice for kleerkutters as well.”
“What? Here?”
The cargo cultists have risen to their feet and are milling around behind Leary, apparently of several minds regarding what they should do next. Then majority opinion swings back to “Let's eat Leary.”
“You coming?” Muggs calls.
Weighing the arguments pro and con, Leary decides it's time to follow Muggs's advice, no matter how galling that might be. He's over beside Muggs, sheltering behind a tiled half‐wall in less time than it would take to tell about it, never mind his sore knee. Muggs has found a maintenance niche and is fiddling with something in a metal box. “Here,” he says to Leary. “You've got fingers, for fucksake. You do it. Pull this dojigger hard, twist it and then slam it back in. I've already given it the code. Whatever you do, don't look back the way we came.”
The flash ranks right up there with a cluster of magnesium flares.
•
For Leary, at least, the stench brings to mind a fire in a slaughterhouse, burning hair and flesh mixed with electrical smells and metal. A dense crossfire of lasers has cleared the rest of the platform of anything that burns at less than 2,300 degrees centigrade.
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