MOM

by Collin Piprell

  •

  Clearly other parties are interested in the green things. A series of satellite attacks have already been targeting one version of the oasis or another for a while. Then, as Dee Zu gazes at the best candidate for the real oasis, which also happens to be the closest, she sees movement. A dense cloud of dust rises in a straight line along part of the boundary and, although it's hard be sure at this distance, two figures appear to be crossing bare ground between the dunes and the green.

  Outside

  They're inside. North of the boundary. Alive. Though the slowjoe looks different now; it's twice as thick with blurs as it was before they made their mad dash. Then it throws a clanking, squeaking fit, and the dust sloughs away to reveal an archaic mechanical robot modeled on a large bipedal animal that stands as tall as Cisco's chest. It's a rabbit, judging by the ears, wearing a painted‐on, red‐and‐white checked jacket and a paisley vest, encrusted here and there with a splotchy substance. “Hurry!” it tells Cisco. “We're late.”

  Cisco's skin crackles with electricity as his own blur mantle disintegrates and slides off. Within seconds he's left naked, up to his ankles in dust but unharmed.

  The mechanical rabbit points to a big ravine. “Follow me,” it says.

  Just then, a dust torrent erupts from high up the ravine to race towards them. But the river divides; it rushes on around Cisco and dwindles to nothing. It leaves him standing there on soil nearly bare of dust and overgrown with little plants. Cisco can smell them, where his feet bruise their leaves. Mondoland is full of surprises. The olfactory bouquet threatens to wrench him away to half‐remembered worlds and other times. Cisco's feet, meanwhile, stripped of blur mantle, are exquisitely sensitive, tender to the touch of the earth.

  “We're late!”

  Cisco whirls. His guide has materialized again. Right behind him. It pushes aside a big boulder with peculiar ease. Cisco sees that it's not a boulder, only a foglet construction. But its removal releases a burst of dank air, full of earthy life and decay.

  “Come,” the rabbit says, indicating, where the boulder used to lie, a hole less than a meter in diameter, big enough to admit a human body.

  Cisco looks back south to see clouds of blur dust explode from the middle of the highway below. In the distance, satray strikes are seeking this way and that. Strange. He believes he can see other green oases out there. As he thinks this, one of them becomes the target of several satrays at once.

  “We're late, we're late, we're late!” The rabbit plunges into the hole with a muted clatter and clank. After a moment's deliberation, Cisco follows. He hears the boulder roll back over the hole behind him.

  •

  The rabbit hurries on ahead administering passcodes. An abrupt suction of air from behind them indicates that they have entered the second cell of a compound force‐field airlock. Once through, the rabbit speeds ahead into the utter dark. Lagging behind, following the occasional clank and squeak ahead, Cisco comes to where the roof of the cave soars away into the blackness.

  He climbs up on a gallery, a long shelf cloistered by conjoined stalactite‐stalagmite pillars. There's no sign of the rabbit, and all he hears is the incessant drip and muffled echoes of his own progress. From somewhere ahead, then, comes the sound of people laughing. And voices. Now he sees light. Down that way, to the right. The voices ahead grow louder as the internal chatter, never more than inchoate, dies away, and there's more laughter.

  He comes to a dead end, to where the light and the sounds issue from a man‐sized hole in the gallery floor. He lowers himself to the slick clay, braces himself with a hand on either side of the hole and lets his body hang there half in the hole. Then he lets go. He slides down a muddy chute and through one more double force‐field airlock to fly sprawling into a subterranean room, cool and well lit.

  Outside

  Be Yourself. Whoever, Whatever. Forever

  Big, bright wall posters proclaim this to be Living End, your official Expressway to Heaven terminal. The rabbit has disappeared. Two young women in clinging VitaSkin tunics approach from behind a gigantic wooden desk. “Welcome!” the barbies chorus, unruffled at what is, aside from smears of mud, his total nakedness.

  Cisco doesn't bother to respond. He's on a hair trigger, alert to dangers he can't yet imagine, trying to see where all this is going. So far, more than the malls ever did, the real world leaves him feeling at the mercy of unseen forces. They even know who he is.

  “Welcome, Citizen ZEZQ112. Welcome to You Bet Your Butt!” That was the way it went in the old days. If you weren't rich enough to buy the in‐perpetuity package, then you entered the Bet Your Butt! crapshoot.

  This part of the “real” world, in fact, is only holo. Early holo. But it makes him feel more like a Worlds pilot again. The resolution of anything depends on how directly you focus on it. On Cisco's periphery everything blurs away; no visual problem, this is a question of economy on the part of the holographic generator. And though the reception area of this place—an opout center, to speak plainly—is the utilitarian/chic design of waiting rooms everywhere, its essential sterility is corrupted by rank odors of soil. The floor appears polished, shiny‐clean, yet he can feel irregular ground underfoot, probably rock and clay.

  “Congratulations!” The two greeters are holo barbies, too smooth to be bots and enough alike to be clones. “You've won a chance at your express ticket to Paradise.” They're pitching the wrong man, but these nubile projections aren't sophisticated enough to realize that. “Come this way,” they chirrup.

  He reviews his options, comes up short, and follows radically feminine butts through sliding doors into an elevator. One of the barbies pretends to punch a button and they begin to descend. His proprioceptors confirm they're going down, but none of the surfaces he sees are real. He touches what looks like a slick, wooden‐veneered wall panel, but his fingers come away blackened and wet. The mess is redolent of birth and decay, a rich history. As he knew it would, his hand passes right through the butt on the barbie nearest him.

  •

  The stage is framed with marquee lights. Behind him, barbies and elevator area have both disappeared, and beyond the lights lies nothing but anonymous dark. He turns back to face three blank doors of the wooden twentieth‐century variety; if you turn the palm‐sized metal knob on any given door, it lifts a latch and the door swings open on hinges. He considers ignoring the holo illusions, wonders what might happen if he were to deviate from the script. But walking off the given path right now, a leap into darkness just to see what might lurk there, would be too dangerous.

  “The one on the left!”

  He starts at the sudden shriek.

  “No, no. The right.”

  An invisible studio audience is cheering and screaming advice.

  “The one in the middle!”

  “Choose a door!”

  “The one on the right!”

  “The middle one.”

  “No, the one on the left!”

  Cisco shrugs. As though it makes no difference to him. But he has seen that only one of the doors is real. The other two are merely holos. He tries zooming in to check before recalling his disempowerment in this world. But it isn't necessary. Two doors are identical—those are the projections, and who knows what lies behind them. The third is different, less perfectly finished, for one thing. He steps up to the middle door, turns the handle and pushes. He enters a bare room smaller than the elevator he has just ridden from surface. The walls are featureless but for an ancient electrical power socket with plug and a cord leading to a little black box in the center of the floor.

  “Welcome, my boy.” It's Brian the Evil Canadian. No mistaking that voice. “Welcome to my lair. Hargle. To the doors to my lair, anyway.”

  You could say the plot has thickened. Here he is at the end of the world, the guest of a legendary Bangkok boomer friend of Leary's, last seen in Shaky Jake's Go‐Go Bar just before the place fell apart. And he hasn't heard from Sky since he left ESUSA
. So what's going on? He subvocalizes the question: What's going on?

  Good question.

  That didn't sound like the Lode. Sky? Is that you?

  Be strong.

  •

  The studio audience laughs. They scream and whistle. “Yes, indeed, folks. Welcome to You Bet Your Butt! Once again, we bring you the ultimate in reality entertainment.” It's Brian's voice, but the Evil Canadian himself is nowhere to be seen. “This shit, it's unreal how real it is.” The cheering rises to an unbearable crescendo. The audience has also taken to clapping and stamping its feet.

  You Bet Your Butt! topped the ratings for years. Cisco remembers seeing reruns. Unless you were rich, opping out had been no option, except for the lucky lottery winners who got to join this show. Contestants were never given a clue—beyond the conflicting hunches of the viewing audience—which door concealed a clue to the next level; which concealed heaven, and, to the accompaniment of a great flourish of trumpets, glorious release; and which would open, accompanied by a loud raspberry, to reveal a team of white‐smocked attendants with hypodermic guns and a gurney. Euthanasia was the consolation prize for losers. Although losers would be admitted to a GR world that resembled Heaven, they would soon pass away in the midst of their idyll. A “good death.” Maxie principles of both individual and collective happiness well served.

  Heaven, Hell, or the Sphinx. The first two led either to immediate opout or euthanasia, which, according to Leary, were effectively same‐same. The third led to a question‐and‐answer trial that presented one of three outcomes, the first two again being immediate preparation for opout or euthanasia. The third, in this case, was another choice of three doors.

  “Okay. Here's the situation. Are you ready, Citizen ZEZQ112?”

  Cisco doesn't respond. He feels for a real wall and positions his back against it.

  Brian isn't bothered. “Listen carefully,” he says. “You see that box? That's MOM. And you've discovered MOM is alive and self‐aware. You know she has her own agenda, but you don't know what it is. What you do know is that, if you pull the plug, MOM dies. Right. Are you ready?”

  Much cheering and clapping.

  “Here's your question.”

  A flourish of trumpets and a drum roll. “Do you pull the plug?”

  Another roar from the audience.

  “Do it, do it!”

  “No, no. She's our friend.”

  “Pull the plug!”

  “No! Let her be!”

  Beep, beep, beep.

  “You have three seconds to answer before you forfeit your life. One… two…”

  Cisco yanks the plug.

  •

  “Well, folks, what do you say?”

  Joyous marching‐band music and mad cheering.

  “What a man!”

  The black box, MOM's stand‐in, vanishes. A concealed door in the wall ahead of him opens to reveal three more doors. Again, Cisco can see that only one of them is real.

  “Okay. Behind one of these doors lies a bunch of hungry tigers.”

  Whistles and jeers.

  “Hey. Not really, folks. There isn't a tiger left in this whole wide world. But what the fuck. There are lots of other horrible ways to die. And at least one of them awaits behind one of these three doors. A nasty big surprise. Are you ready?”

  Cisco says nothing.

  “Answer the question, boy. Or die.”

  “Go fuck yourself,” Cisco replies. But he points to the middle door.

  “The Middle Way. Yes! Once more, our boy goes for the weasely path, the easy way out.”

  Cheers.

  Cisco opens the door and steps through.

  This time there are just two doors.

  “What a champion. But now for the final choice. And do we have a choice for you.”

  The audience howls itself hoarse, scenting a soul ripe for translation.

  “One door, the one on the left, leads to a World of endless bliss. The other leads to the real world. Your choice. Eternal peace or the chance to find out who you really are. To tell it like it is.”

  Now the audience is chanting: “Op out! Op out! Op out!”

  “Your choice, my boy.”

  Which is the real door? Even without zooming, Cisco sees the grain on the left‐hand door is identical to the earlier projections. Sloppy stuff. He steps to the door on his right, clasps the metal knob and turns it. The audience is screaming “No, no!” He pushes.

  Gods

  What you get when your God frags: a truly gigantic fuckup.

  —Brian Finister

  Briansday

  “Welcome, my boy!”

  Cisco stands there, tries to take it all in. A jury‐rigged jumble of antique, mostly only digital equipment, dominates the dimly lit periphery of the cavern. There's limited resolution, but he can discern some detail. A holotank stands empty under an overhang along one wall. A couple of smaller screens hang next to it. Booster boxes bolted onto the walls either side suggest the holodeck has been extended to cover most of the visible cavern floor. Against the opposite wall, a four‐meter frame box resembling a homemade suspension cradle lies jammed under another overhang.

  There's more, much of it unidentifiable. It's all jerry‐rigged. Cables spill every which way. Cables. They're attached to cartoonish consoles replete with retro dials and switches. Cisco recognizes a bank of several PCs only from old inline images. These things are “personal computers,” their monitors blank, bits of other equipment trailing off them from more cables. All in all, it looks like a crude attempt at self‐organization on the part of a '20s scrap heap. The place stinks of decay, part of it a sickly‐sweet odor, perhaps from the avalanches of moldering books that spill out of dark recesses in the main cavern wall opposite the tank and cradle. The ceiling of the larger space lies hidden high in the blackness above.

  “Welcome to Living End!”

  The voice emerges from a wheelchair commanding center stage about seven meters from where Cisco has slid out of the hole. An old man nests on the chair amid a pile of ragged bedding. He holds a wooden cane in one fist, although he appears to have no legs. Propped against the wheelchair stands a mummy—macabre window dressing for a house of horror. It might once have been a real woman. The rabbit is also there, as muddy as Cisco and even more beaten up. He holds a tattered parasol over the man in the chair. Outside the holodeck area, the floor shimmers and shifts. Cisco's first thought is that it's a carpet of blur dust.

  The old man hands his cane to the rabbit, raises a pistol, two‐handed, and shoots Cisco right in the face. “That was easy,” he says. “So much for all your training, eh, my boy? Welcome to the real world.”

  Elsewhere

  Vector established. Locking.

  Briansday

  “There you go, my boy. How do you feel now?”

  Cisco doesn't feel good. For one thing, he's unable to move. An ugly sense of entrapment threatens oblivion; he's on the verge of slipping away from himself.

  “Here we are, then. A truly wet maximondo meeting.” Brian sputters with dirty hilarity. “Come give old Brian a big kiss.”

  With that, Cisco does lose himself. After a while, a moment, or an eternity, he's back, flooded with adrenaline and rage.

  “A little pissed off, are we?” Brian is beaming. “Yessirree. I bet there's unfinished business with me you'd like to take care of.

  “But who exactly do we have here? Eh?” Brian has the rabbit wheel him closer so he can peer into Cisco's eyes, only one of which, Cisco discovers, he is able to shut. “Yoohoo.” He taps Cisco on the forehead with the knob of his walking stick. “Anybody home?”

  Cisco gets his breathing under control, and the flames of anger recede. He's finding the distance. Calming himself. Now he's back. Still groggy, disoriented, but he pretends to have less of this than he feels. And right from the outset he's been mapping his surrounds, cataloging potential resources. It's a short list.

  Brian looks delighted. “This is what we're a
fter. Check out those eyes. If looks could kill, eh? Oh, yes. You'll do nicely…once we're ready.”

  Cisco tries to listen, though what he hears makes little sense. He reviews the situation, but he can see no way whatsoever to take control. Except this: to observe and to interpret whatever he sees, no matter how circumscribed and dim this world in which he finds himself, as carefully as he can, and report it back to the Lode. Go for the chance that someone, somewhere, will somehow access the Lode with the right questions. And that they will first, recognize Cisco's predicament; second, give a damn; and third, be able to help him. A snowball's chance in hell, as Leary would say. But what else can he do? He has no real idea why he's here. He doesn't even know for sure whether this is where he's supposed to be.

  “Right now, though, you can't so much as budge, can you?” Brian's gurgling chuckle hints at respiratory problems. Unbidden, Cisco's HIID supplies

  pulmonary histoplasmosis, commonly known as batshit disease.

  Brian coughs something up and spits it to one side. A tongue‐shaped portion of the shimmer from beyond the holodeck area flows in to engulf it and then retreats again. This isn't blur dust. It appears to be a swarm of cockroaches. Cisco's HIID is unable to elaborate. Insufficient data, it tells him.

  “We'll have you ready when you're needed. Don't you worry.” Then he looks into Cisco's eyes again and says, “But exactly who have we got now, Randy or Cisco? Hey, is that a hint of Sissie?”

  Cisco tries to respond. Sissie's dead. And who is Randy? The words boil up hot, but his vocal apparatus won't cooperate.

  “The way things are, my boy, you'd make a great poker player. It's hard to say exactly who it is we've got here. But Randy will be up and ready when we need him. That's what I call him: 'Randy.' Always ready to rock. In the meantime, you go ahead and look around.” Brian is jeering. “Let me know when you've got things figured out, okay?”