“We could oil that thing,” Rabbit suggests, strain evident in his voice.
Brian looks at the robot in astonishment. “Shut up!” he says. He cracks his stick back and forth as though he were clearing weeds, eliciting a screech from Pussy and knocking more batshit off Rabbit. “Here. Take this and figure it out. It's a quantum memocube, twenty years old and disguised. I want the data. I want them all uploded. Securely uploded. Maximum stealth protocols.”
“No time; we're late, we're late!”
“Jesus Christ, Rabbit. What the fuck are you talking about? Could be I made a big mistake, designating you prime backup. But then who else around here would be smart enough to handle a job like this one? Not you, eh? Not on your own. You dumb fuck of a clankety big floppy‐eared klutz.” Brian smiles, maybe pleased at the fluent invective. Then he stops smiling and says, “Just get those data loded.”
Rabbit sometimes seems strangely autonomous. Cisco delivers another sub‐vocal note. Especially for such an ancient device.
“I am looking forward to having a poke at mumsie. Yes, yes. Old Brian still gets to use the tank. No problem. And the Worlds. The trick is to jack into the Lode without anybody knowing you're in there. You think that's easy? It isn't. There's one person on this planet who can do it. And guess who that is. Who is it, my boy?” Brian pokes at him with his Pussy stick. “Who, who, who?”
“The owl,” Sweetie guesses, twisting into Cisco again.
“No,” Brian trumpets. “Me.”
“Tsk.” Rabbit communicates his indignation from all the way over by the console. “This memocube is old. Totally archaic.”
“Just fix it, Rabbit. Do you hear me? And you, boy. You had better hope the cube works. And that it has Ellie's data on it. Otherwise there's no point keeping you around any longer, is there? No, there isn't. And Sweetie gets to claim her prize. In full.”
“Goody!” Sweetie looks happier than she has since they found the locket.
“Goody gumdrops, eh, my sweet? Hey, why don't we check to see how the rest of our Ellie is doing?” Brian points to one of the monitors flanking the holotank. “Have a look here. This is where God gets to watch all the little sparrows fall. And who do we have on the program today? Sweetie? Our boy can't see it very well.”
She manages to get to her feet this time; she turns Cisco's head slightly and pinches his cheek.
“Check it out,” Brian says. “Exactly the man we're waiting for. And as soon as this last guest arrives, we can start the party.”
Outside
“Rexy!” Leary yells.
Nascent slowjoes are emerging all around them. A giant double geyser of blur‐dust arches across the sky not two hundred meters away. The whole prospect threatens doom, and Leary thinks about heading back down into the subway. “Rexy!” he calls again.
Rexy is sniffing at a dust pool. Why that pool and not another, Leary has no idea. But sniffing at any of them, much less going in for a dip, strikes him as ill‐advised. And he's right, because a greedy clutch of dust tendrils whip up out of nowhere, just missing Rexy as he retreats with alacrity to stand in front of Leary. Leary turns to find Muggs spread‐eagled in the dust.
“Strip!” Muggs barks at him.
“What?”
“Get your clothes off.” By now Muggs himself is almost entirely shrouded in blur dust. “Lie flat!”
“Darn it!” says Leary. But the terrain is becoming ever more animated, what with geysers spewing and tendrils whipping and mounds shifting. All in all, it's pretty scary.
“Get down in the dust,” says Muggs, a mumbly gray mound. “Do it or die.”
It's like the first time, back in jump school, Leary ever stepped out of a plane. Except worse. “Okay.” He prostrates himself in the dust. Awaits the horror. But this feeling, as he lies there in a shallow pool of dust, reminds Leary of something, not at all horrible, that a Thai masseuse named Voraporn used to do with duck feathers. It never went farther than that, mind you, so he wasn't cheating on his Nance, no matter what she claimed when she brained him with the unabridged Roget's thesaurus at the top of the stairs that day.
“It works,” says Muggs, who is back up on all fours. “Don't ask me why, but it works.” Even stubbier of limb with his blur coating, he struts back and forth, triumphant, a little four‐legged slowjoe. He pauses his back‐and‐forth march to say, “Usually it works. There's probably something else involved, because chances are only fifty‐fifty that a given patch of dust accepts you.”
Fifty‐fifty? But Leary says nothing else other than “darn it” as the dust creeps up over him. Then he closes his mouth and stops breathing. After a minute, he stands up again. He brushes at himself, generating a peculiar buzz between hand and face. Cautiously, he opens his eyes. It's like seeing the world through welding goggles on a hot day, but it quickly gets better. He looks down at himself to see he's covered from top to toe with blur dust.
“You make a great slowjoe,” Muggs tells him, in tones muted both by the pet's own blur coating and by the semi‐rigid blur membranes that now cover Leary's ears.
Leary reaches up to touch them. He's amazed. The blurs have assembled prosthetic sense organs.
“A bow‐legged slowjoe.” Muggs gurgles, reminding Leary of Brian trying to laugh. “Let's get moving,” he says. “Okay?”
Again, Leary sees this piece of ambulatory scrap metal, this cantankerous piece of junk, knows far more than a patchwork 'pet dog has any business knowing. Leary looks around for Rexy. “Where's Rexy?” he asks.
“He dived into that pool of dust over there.” “What?”
“And that's the last they ever saw of old Rexy. Grufflegruffle. 'Is your pet watching you?' Not anymore, eh?”
Elsewhere
Vector lost.
Briansday
“You have to wonder why the subway never succumbed to the PlagueBot. Same goes for the MahaNakhon building. There are plenty of strange things out there. Anomalies. Could be they're part of a greater plan.” Clearly buoyed by proceedings, Brian, maybe alluding to metaphysical treatises, gestures towards a spill of books in the murk behind him. “Though whose plan could be greater than mine, eh? Harglehargle.”
Sweetie goes “Hee, hee” and squints knowingly.
“It's amazing. You even get human bios surviving out there. Leary, for one. So far, anyway. That part's simple. The evolution of a bio‐blur mutualism. All you do is submit yourself. Assume the position till you've got a nice coating of blurs. If it goes wrong, of course, you're fucked.
“It's the clownfish defense,” Brian says. “You know clownfish, don't you? Hey‐hey, I got to see the whole thing. Hargle. Our boy is a GR‐certified scuba diver, muff diver, the works. Touch the Sky, eh?”
Cisco's HIID is scrolling even as Brian rocks his chair in front of the monitor. It's amazing, what the Lode can tell you, as long as it doesn't involve treatment for paralysis or who your parents were or what happened to Africa. It says that clownfish, of which there were numerous species, habitually lived among the stinging tentacles of sea anemones, apparently immune and protected from predators that were not. But this wasn't real immunity. What it was, the young clownfish would brush against its chosen host, its mucous coating absorbing the inhibitory chemical the anemone employed in its own mucus to avoid stinging itself to death. Afterwards, it enjoyed effective immunity because the anemone took it for a part of its own body. But sometimes the fish got it wrong and was stung to death. Rexy being a case in point, according to Brian's moniter.
Leary is still alive, even if he does resemble part of the landscape. As Brian remarks before going on to say, “It's good we can give Leary the red carpet treatment, sea cruises, rides on bullet trains. A nice day in the country. Only the best for our Leary. Never mind the unpleasantness in the station; we dealt with that, didn't we?
“Ah, yes. The mighty Leary. Looming there on the screen. That's because we're peering up at him through wee Muggsie's eyes. Muggs is my Aibo. Cute, eh? I've had him for f
ifty years or more. But what can I be thinking? You're too young to have even heard of an Aibo. Never mind. Muggs might be the last genuine Aibo on Earth. Mechanical, like Rabbit here. Not foglet, not GR. The real shit. Of course he has had upgrades. And new parts. In fact, how much of him is original is a good question. Maybe nothing. Then again, how much of any of us includes the original parts? Organs, limbs, cells. Even the molecules. We're constantly recycling what are already only recycled bits of dead stars. Ever think about that? Puts everything in perspective.”
They watch as, up on the screen, the pet's utility arm, a fifth appendage, extends from a cavity in the Aibo's chest to strew something across a dust pool. Before you know it, Muggs is riding a blur assembly the size of two thick doormats end to end. As he proceeds, the magic carpet constitutes itself from the dust ahead at the same time it disintegrates behind him; when it encounters a patch of bare rock, it switches modes to instead creep along like a flattened inchworm. Muggs, meanwhile, walks in place atop it in a desultory sort of way maybe designed to keep his parts clear and working.
Leary slogs along behind, footsteps squeak‐squeaking in the dust. “Don't I get to ride?” he says.
“Relax,” Muggs growls. “We don't have far to go.”
Brian sounds gratified, as though he were talking about a prodigal son: “That's my 'pet, my eyes and ears Outside, and my backup. That's right. That beat‐up little tin dog—dog is dyslexic for 'god,' by the way—that bot is a cache for all the Brian data there ever were. He's my man in the field. My ever‐lasting, sonofabitchin' soul, my hope and trust in immortality. Should I decide to live. Should I decide to let anything survive. But all that's a secret, okay? ” He spins his chair, colliding with Rabbit, who tsks and steps back to give Brian an assist, a push that sends him whirling back the other way till one wheel gets caught in a rut.
Sweetie looks confused, although her eyes glitter anyway as she simpers and brushes at her straggles of hair, wanting to be part of it, whatever it is that has Brian so full of beans.
Cisco files a report: Muggs is a Brian backup; Rabbit is another.
Meanwhile, Brian has become more subdued. “Where I come from,” he says, “you can never be too neurotic when it comes to backing up, at least if you're not part of the modern Lode. Still, personal backups are like cryos. I hate to say it, but I may be just another poor deluded asshole. Your loved ones can still have a piece of you, of course. But when you're gone, you're gone. Trouble is, there's always that forlorn hope that one day it'll be different, and somebody will be simply able to wave a magic wand and, presto! Your data will wake up and say, 'Hey, what's for breakfast?' Fat chance, eh?
“But you get your optimists, people like Sweetie, here, who need to believe in qubital resurrection. It's nothing but old‐time religion. Basically, life on earth would be a real bummer without some heaven to look forward to.”
•
“Whatever. Let us return to the moment. Where it's yippee‐yai‐yay! Cisco the Kid rides again. Right into the bad guy's hideout. Hah! And Pancho's on the way to join him. You've done us all proud. Yessirree. You're your dear old daddy's son, my boy. No question. And your Mommy's too. But let's not get into that yet.”
The awful darkness begins welling again. Who's this “Pancho,” and what does Brian know about Cisco's parents? Is he saying that Leary's his father? He absolutely needs to hear more; at the same time, the prospect inspires dread.
“Right now I want you to take a gander at the great Leary, who is totally dependent on a fifty‐year‐old mechanical dog who knows far more about what's happening than Leary does. Watch how this bit of twentieth‐century wreckage instructs my old buddy, another bit of twentieth‐century wreckage, in the art of survival 2050s‐style.” Up on the screen, although the sound is muffled, Leary is arguing with the machine that's giving them the live feed.
“Whoa. Rabbit! Send Muggs in for a closer look. My, my. What have we here? That thing around Leary's neck. See the way our friend keeps pawing at it, muttering away to himself like he's got Alzheimer's. Blow me down, my boy. No, no. Just blow me. Hargle. Leary's got a locket exactly like this, hasn't he? It's all covered with blurs, but there it is. He's got the other half of Ellie hanging there around his neck.
“So we don't actually need Leary; we can simply take that locket off him. But what the hell, let's bring him in. We still have the end game, and it won't be as much fun if old Leary isn't here to enjoy it with us, now will it?”
Brian smacks the cat, then he smacks Rabbit. “The reception's terrible,” he says. “Of course we're getting things through Muggs's eyes. The blur eyes don't work so well. Neither do the ears. Prosthetics. And you don't get much of a sense of touch,” Brian adds. “Though having no feeling is an advantage sometimes, isn't that right, Sweetie?”
Cisco is treated to an obscene duet of giggles and gurgles. Sweetie tapers off to a modest titter. “Analgesia,” she says.
“See!” Brian exclaims. “She's still got it, by George. 'Analgesia' it is. No feeling; no sense of pain. But this curare‐type stuff? It paralyzes you at the same time it leaves you fully pain enabled. Think about that.
•
“It's so nice to have someone to talk to, someone who can't turn off the tank or go stare out his window instead of listen… Woman! Not now, eh? Just wait. I want our boy's undivided attention. I have got your attention, haven't I?”
He whacks the cat, which waggles its legs, never learning, still desperate to get away but unable to do more than rock in place and yowl. Sweetie leaves Cisco and journeys all the way to where the cat lies to step on its head. She twists her foot back and forth, hard, grinding its face into the dirt, and then reaches down to yank its tail.
“Whoa there, Sweetie! We don't want to kill old Pussy, do we?” Brian whacks the cat again, and it wails like tortured babies.
“I was born with no legs. How's that for the luck of the draw? I did have prosthetic grafts once way back when. They never did work very well, but GameBoys took them off me anyway. That hurt. But I was pretty much living in the Worlds by then, so I didn't need legs. And now I like things just the way they are.” He runs the chair back and forth in its ruts as if to demonstrate. “But these days, at least in mondoland, mainly all I do is watch. Never mind. I get my rocks off in other ways. Big ways. For example, soon I'm going to oversee the end of mankind. Master of ceremonies. Ringmaster at the demise of an evolutionary Edsel. You don't understand any of that, do you? Fuck me, Sweetie. Let him be for a minute.
“As I say, I've got good reasons to end it all. Mainly though, I'm bored. I need real action, fun action with real rewards and penalties. I'm tired of all the candy‐ass mallster games. Treadmills are for hamsters. Us people, those few remaining, we need to play for real stakes. And we're playing Darwin's rules here, my boy. This is no game for pussies.” Pussy shudders, maybe at what he fears is the sound of his name when he would prefer to keep a low profile. “We're playing my game now,” Brian says, “and we're playing for my stakes. That's right. Darwin rules, OK! Are you following me? It's impressive stuff, wouldn't you say, my boy? Yes, indeedy. Check it out. This obsolescent piece of shit formerly known as MOM. Me. I'm the one who can and will bring down the whole screwy shebang. Brian the Evil Canadian is going to destroy the world. Isn't that a gas?”
Sweetie breaks into song: “It's a ga‐ga‐gaasss.” Then she farts.
“Yes, it is. But never mind. The status quo is unsustainable anyway. It's unstable. A fine asymmetry in the scheme of things is leading to a time, soon, when there'll be nothing but plaguebots endlessly feeding on themselves and each other, forever recycling molecules. Just for the hell of it, I guess. The final absurdity. A cosmic digging and filling of foxholes forever and always. If there's any god other than yours truly, she must be a US Army noncom.”
•
“Maybe you're thinking, if we wanted to destroy the world, why didn't we merely let the nanobots take care of business? The short answer is 'self‐organiza
tion.'
“There was a time, not long before you were born, when everybody was hustling to create self‐replicating nanobots; they were all afraid their worst enemies were going to do it first. At best, though, all they could aim for was a version of mutually assured destruction, what the Cold War wazoos used to call nuclear MAD. As though the genie was never going to get out of the bottle. But most of the tame experts said it would never happen—the 'gray goo scenario,' the nanotech nightmare where self‐replicating nanobots proliferate in a geometrical progression, rapidly converting the entire planet into nothing but nanobots feeding on nanobots to produce still more nanobots.
“The genie did escape, of course, and at first it looked like, if anything, the prophets of doom had underestimated the threat. What wasn't clear was whether we were looking at standard US or Chinese or Indian government bots that mutated, or whether these were the handiwork of nihilistic hacker‐terrorist sonsofguns. I'd like to think it was the latter. Whoever. They unleashed the most voracious self‐replicator anyone could have imagined, and we almost did get our end of the world.
“But salvation was at hand. Before you knew it, you had self‐organizing nanobot systems emerging out of nowhere, and these quickly evolved into self‐limiting systems. Soon you had massive blur superorganisms staking out territories in competition with other blur superorganisms, their boundaries expanding and contracting with breaches and assimilations until a working equilibrium set in. Now the 'PlagueBot' is in fact many plaguebots, and they've carved up the world among them, devoting their entire energies to maintaining their borders.”
Brian stops. He rears up from his bedding and bawls, “Rabbit! What are you doing?”
Rabbit is clanking around the perimeter of the holodeck area with a spray can, boosting the roach carpet's behavioral conditioning, re‐establishing proper bounds. But Brian is impatient. “Forget that shit. Get the data loded, and do it now.” He turns back to Cisco. “I swear. Even the bots have no real attention span left.
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