MOM

by Collin Piprell

  Leary and Cisco sit side‐by‐side, motionless and attentive. Sweetie, giddy at the possibilities, kneels between them.

  “Are you ready?” Brian the Qubital Cook provides the voice‐over as Rabbit makes a final adjustment to taste: “Voila! Now we add some zest, previously unloded and hence undeleted—the data from Ellie's last day on Earth.”

  A mechanical voice issues from the electronic sprawl: “Testing‐testing. Testing‐testing.”

  The tank churns with ghosts. Ebee sketches mill around bumping into one another while Rabbit communes with the holotank control console.

  “Testing‐testing.”

  Two ebees remain. The images tremble, slightly out of sync with each other.

  “Testing.”

  “Ta‐dah,” proclaims Brian, jumping the gun. “I give you the new, improved Ellie!”

  Ellie resolves herself.

  “Ah, hah!” Brian trumpets. “Welcome. Yes! Welcome, welcome.”

  Ellie blinks and looks around as Eddie Eight materializes in the tank beside her.

  “And now… ” Brian bucks in his suspension cradle. “Heeerre's Eddie.”

  Eddie Eight is quick to grab the limelight. “Behold! My Ellie. I give you life.”

  “Yes, indeedy,” says Brian. “The gang's all here, and it's showtime.” He bobbles and rocks a frenetic mime of his wheelchair dance.

  Meanwhile Eddie Eight flexes and preens and grabs at an enormous bulge in his silver‐spangled, fluorescent purple jockstrap. He reaches for Ellie, who remains strangely passive, dim.

  “Wait,” Rabbit says. “Too soon. We don't have Leary's data yet.”

  Eddie Eight stops in mid‐prance. “Fuck me gently,” he says. “What are you waiting for, then? Lode it.”

  “Lode it!” echoes Brian from the cradle. “Jesus Christ.”

  “Testing.”

  Yet another image appears in the tank. Eddie Eight stands back to watch as this latest wraith moves to surround Ellie with an electric aura. It sets. Merges. Ellie attains an amazing saturation and resolution.

  “Hello, boys,” she says.

  Leary manages a sob right through his paralysis.

  •

  “Leary?” she calls. Then she laughs. Chuckles, at first, like a starter motor on a cold morning. Then it catches, and she's laughing a great belly laugh. “Oh my God. Leary, is that you?”

  “She's the same,” Sweetie whispers. “Still young.”

  Sweetie's crying, but Cisco may be the only one who notices.

  She's there. The same Ellie as last time, but much more so. “It's me.” She looks down at herself with astonishment. “I'm here! How that can be?”

  This is indeed surprising. Ebees are not aware of themselves.

  “Welcome!” Eddie Eight bulges and glitters beside her, sneers with joy.

  Ellie shakes her head as though to clear it. “I'm really me,” she says. “I'm back. Actually present at my own defragging.” She turns to Eddie Eight with a big smile. “Hey, Sky has told me about you. Just now. You're Eddie Eight. Hi!”

  But it's Brian who answers, calling from his cradle. “Ellie? Holy shit, it is. It's Ellie.” He gurgles with delight, unsurprised, it appears, or perhaps still unaware that the ebee Ellie is conscious.

  “Hi there, Brian.” Ellie's voice is bright, almost affectionate. Then she waves to Leary and Cisco. “Hey, guys. Sky said you were here. This is so good. We're together. My God.”

  “Ellie. It's me. Brian. I've done this. I've brought you back.”

  Ellie laughs. “Get serious. I brought me back. Leary and I did it. And Cisco.”

  Brian ceases his aerial circus. “What are you talking about? You were dead and I brought you back.”

  “Look,” she says. “We don't have much time. So listen up.”

  Self‐awareness is one thing; ebee insubordination is something else. Brian is outraged. “Jesus Christ! You shut up. You listen to me. Take your clothes off.”

  “What?”

  “You ebee bitch.” Eddie Eight rips off his jockstrap and a giant erection springs free. “You heard me. Drop them.”

  “Are you nuts?”

  Brian responds to that one: “Why do you think I've brought you back? Eh? So you can yak away with these losers? It's showtime. So show us your goodies, or that's it.”

  “That's it?”

  “Hey. You're nothing but an ebee. I'll switch you right off.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” For a moment she tunes out, as if listening in on another frequency. Then she laughs again. It bubbles up from her belly and explodes, Dee Zu‐style. As if to say, “Whatever this is that's going down, what the hell, it has to be fun, right?” Though what she does say is, “Leary? Don't worry, okay? Trust me. You too, Cisco. Listen up. Don't worry. Whatever happens, we're safe. Don't sweat it. We're going to have all we need.” More than ever, her laugh reminds Cisco of Dee Zu.

  “This is un‐fucking‐believable, man,” says Eddie Eight. “I guess it's time to reduce the rez on old Ellie.” He moves in towards her.

  As a fighter, Ellie is no Dee Zu, but she still makes it look easy. She steps right into Eddie Eight's advance, pulls one of his arms down, rams her other elbow up under his chin and then pulls his head down hard to meet her knee. In three seconds Eddie Eight is lying on the floor enjoying the full pain option. The ebee Ellie comes fully loaded and ready for action. Brian, hanging there in his cradle, is also curled up in the fetal position.

  “That's it,” Eddie Eight gasps. “You're history.”

  “No, wait.” Brian changes his mind. “Not yet. She should see what comes next.”

  •

  “You think you can fuck with me? Well, let me introduce you to the new, improved‐model Manchurian Candidate. 'Father's fucking son,' eh? Watch this. Are you ready, my boy?”

  Blink.

  “I wonder. Better we try a booster first. Sweetie? Give him the double whammy.”

  Cisco holds onto himself. He's afraid. At the same time he feels new confidence.

  And he's blown away by the emergence of his mother. How, he has no idea, but he knows. This is his mother. And Leary is his father, another rock to stand on.

  “The bag's transparent, eh? That's so we can see his face. Hargle. But it's also so he can see this. Sweetie? Fucksake. This, Sweetie. This, this, this. The dress.”

  Sweetie gropes around with her free hand till she finds it, and then she hoists the blue and white and yellow rag and shoves it in close. Now no one can see Cisco's face. But when Leary sees the dress he gasps, again, right through the paralysis.

  Eddie Eight, all the while maintaining a respectful distance from Ellie, has recovered to the point he claps wildly. “And now, folks,” he says, “let's have a really big welcome for our Randy!” Brian is flapping around in the cradle, and Sweetie applauds a bit, uncertainly, while Rabbit merely shifts and clanks and manages to look uncomfortable.

  Up there in the tank, Ellie is clapping even harder than Eddie Eight. “Bravo,” she says. “You schmuck. Bravissimo.”

  This pisses Brian off. “Laugh, you bitch. Go ahead and laugh, if you can. And watch your boy do in Daddy with his bare hands.”

  “Bare naked.” Sweetie shrieks with laughter and pulls the bag tight.

  “Sweetie,” Brian says.

  She pulls Cisco's shrink‐wrapped face in against herself.

  “Sweetie! Take the bag off his head. What the fuck are we supposed to do with a dead assassin, eh?”

  Sweetie looks around, dazed with excitement and confusion.

  “Now you give him the antidote.” Brian is stabbing a finger towards his chair. “Over there, you silly cow. The hypodermic.”

  Cisco can breathe again. He sucks air past the paralysis right down to his toes, a celebration of his determination to live. Almost as pleasing to him is the sense that he is still securely Cisco. By all means, he thinks. Give me the antidote.

  •

  “Sweetie!” Ellie's voice rings sweet and clear.

&n
bsp; Sweetie gnashes her teeth with such force that one audibly disintegrates. She spits fragments, the smell of rot.

  “Listen to me,” Ellie says.

  “Fuck,” Sweetie replies. “Cunt.” She sprays Cisco with more saliva as she struggles to her feet. She starts to stumble towards the chair.

  “Sweetie? When did you last check your backup?” Sweetie stops.

  “Sweetie,” Brian calls from his cradle, the voice of sweet reason. “Forget Ellie. Please. Just get the needle, okay?”

  But she's looking at Ellie now and listening.

  “You and Brian. What kind of deal have you got these days? 'Have you looked after all your anti‐mortality needs?' Has he?”

  “Turn her off!” Brian yells. “Off her!” He starts coughing.

  “Turn me off all you like,” Ellie says. “I'm permanently loded. I'm okay. But what about you, Sweetie? And you, Rabbit?”

  “Rabbit! Delete the bitch.”

  “Too late, too late.” Rabbit, as is his wont, looks more anxious than any machine should. But right now he's riveted on Ellie. All ears.

  Brian is not in a good mood. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he's saying. Then Eddie Eight starts prancing around making whoop‐whooping noises, maybe hoping Sweetie won't be able to hear Ellie.

  But Ellie talks right over him. “Even if you were loded, Sweetie, what do you think Brian's going to do after I tell him who deleted me? What then?”

  Eddie Eight stops his cavorting, stands still and silent. Brian cups an ear and strains towards Sweetie from his cradle.

  “No!” Sweetie says. She looks terrified. “No.”

  “Call my opout a double suicide. I took care of my wet termination, but I needed help with the qubital part of it. Before I blew myself up, I downloded my data and partitioned it onto two cubes. That was easy. But I needed someone else to delete me from the Lode afterwards, somebody who could deliver the code in real time.”

  Sweetie giggles as pee trickles down her leg.

  “No problem. All I had to do was beg and beg Sweetie to promise she'd secure my backup. And that was enough to get me wiped me right out of the Lode without further ado. Many thanks, Sweetie.”

  “You moron,” Brian says to Sweetie. “We could've been happy together. The three of us.”

  Ellie laughs. “Is that right, Sweetie? As I said, when did you last check your backup? When was the last time you got to go worlding?”

  “Shut up!” Brian starts to rant. “Rabbit, shut our Ellie off. Off her. Now. And Muggs. For chrissake unhook yourself and look after business here. I want you to get the hypodermic and shoot the boy up. Rabbit, you stand by.”

  Muggs disengages himself, struts over to the chair to collect the needle, and then heads towards Cisco. “Leary, old buddy,” he says, “I almost hate to do this. Grufflegruffle.”

  Then he is rudely interrupted.

  WHUMP.

  The near miss inspires much fluttering and twittering of bats and a “Jesus, Jesus Christ!” from Brian. A moment after the tumult dies down, a gigantic thuddish splat focuses attention on the center of the floor. Exactly where Brian's wheelchair would normally be parked, a big chunk of limestone sits in its shallow crater of batshit.

  Muggs almost made it clear. Front legs and utility limb protrude from beneath the rock; the hypodermic lies just beyond reach.

  Everyone waits, and waits, for the next bomb.

  “Yes!” Brian finally breaks the silence. “Intelligent bombs!” Then he laughs himself into a choking fit. “But no, no. It's only a coincidence, eh?”

  There's a briefer silence while everyone considers this proposition. One lit‐tle back‐up, sit‐ting on a wall. The inane ditty goes round and round in Cisco's head.

  “No problem,” Brian says. “Rabbit! You shoot him up.”

  •

  “Lode me, lode me.” Sweetie is more wired than Cisco has yet seen her.

  Rabbit is trying to give Cisco the shot while Sweetie keeps tugging at his other arm. He teeters back and forth stabbing at Cisco's good shoulder. Then he makes contact, and Cisco feels the prick of the needle. He relishes the quick suffusion of power, ignores the hullaballoo with Rabbit and Sweetie as they waltz away leaving the needle stuck in Cisco's right shoulder.

  Meanwhile Brian is rapping away in his cradle: “Now we get to watch your darling boy kill his own daddy. Big kinky fun, eh? He's going to take care of business you left unfinished twenty years ago.” Ellie merely laughs, which annoys Brian. “I wanted Leary to watch us fucking first, of course,” he adds. “But nobody ever said this was a perfect world.”

  Whatever the antidote is, it's effective. Within seconds Cisco extends an arm and swings around to where he can brace himself against the wall. He senses the hypodermic fall to the ground as he rises to his feet. Dizzy and only half reanimated, he can nevertheless move. He stands over Leary, who rolls his eyes to look up at him. Cisco sees his father is able to move two fingers, and is trying to signal something.

  “That's it,” says Brian, gurgling and hacking and rocking away in mid‐air. “Strangle him, my boy. Rabbit, you help. Hey, Ellie. Watch this, eh?”

  The surge of potency has petered out, and he knows what it is to feel a hundred years old. He can empathize with the crusty old bot as Cisco stretches back down to reach the hypodermic where it lies amid the batshit, blood, piss and God knows what. But he picks up the needle and raises it to find that it's still half full. He sees Leary's eyes on him. Leary is moving them back and forth like a maniac. “No!” he's trying to say.

  “Cisco!” Ellie calls from the tank. “Don't worry about that.”

  But Cisco leans towards his father and injects the rest of the antidote.

  “Kill him!” Brian is screaming. “Randy, you moron. Kill him. Jesus Christ. Okay, Rabbit, you kill him. Kill them both.”

  But Rabbit is a robot. It's one thing to give a human an antidote, even if this also means activating an assassin; it's another thing entirely to strangle somebody. “I cannot contravene a prime directive,” he says.

  “Rabbit, you fuckwit.”

  Leary has made it to his feet, stands propped against the wall. “No!” he mumbles. He only means no, don't give me the rest of the antidote. But it's too late.

  •

  Pushing past Rabbit and Sweetie, Cisco staggers over to the console, trying to remember what he has seen Rabbit doing at the controls.

  “Hey, man!” Eddie Eight is frantic. “Yo, Cisco. Look up here! Look.”

  Cisco pulls switches and punches keys until he sees Brian slump in his harness. Then he glances towards the tank; it's now empty except for his mother.

  Brian isn't looking too good, but you could almost think someone has given Sweetie a shot of something. She manages to make it all the way over to the cradle, where she grabs hold of Brian and says: “What did you do with me? You bastard.” She tugs and slaps at him, all to no real effect. “Where am I?” It's a nearly miraculous return to mental life. “You deleted me. When? Where are they? Where are my data?”

  It finally occurs to her to release his harness, and Brian tumbles out to lie there helpless, a pallid larva streaked with guano. She finds the strength to drag Brian from the frame and onto the ground. “I'm not there. Where am I?” Sweetie kicks at his face, stomps his crotch, reels around trying to keep her balance. In the meantime Brian is mewling, waving his arms, covering the wrong area of himself at any given time, no doubt looking for a plan. Then Sweetie produces the metal rod she used earlier on Pussy.

  “Fuck off.” Brian is spluttering, clawing back. “Rabbit! Sweetie's gone crazy. Disable her. Immediately! That means now, you stupid machine. Shit! Ow.”

  Sweetie descends to ground level in stages, like a defective marionette. She scrunches her eyes up tight against Brian's scratching, stabs blindly with her weapon, seeking entry.

  “Ow, ow! Rabbit! Help. This is a prime directive.”

  Meanwhile Ellie is calling again: “Don't worry about any of this, Cisco. Forget Bria
n. We've got it under control. Don't worry about Leary. Just get out of here. Hurry. You have to get out now.”

  Cisco is having trouble standing upright, never mind doing anything useful.

  “Please, Cisco. Leary and I are okay, but we may not have enough of you yet. Go!”

  It's pure bedlam. Leary is lurching along like the undead, oblivious to Brian and Sweetie, headed straight for the empty cradle. “Son,” he says in passing, his voice a mere rasp. “Darn it. You listen to your mother.”

  In some ways, Cisco feels more together than he has in his whole life. At the same time he suspects all this is part of a mushroom trip.

  Then it gets weirder.

  •

  “Greetings.”

  It has to be the mushrooms. This apparition is more startling than the anteater. Brian, for one, is clearly amazed. This could even rank up there with high‐school marching bands. “Toot?” he says, rolling onto his nearer side for a better look.

  “Hi,” Toot says.

  “Toot, toot,” Sweetie says, distracted from her torment of Brian.

  “How did you get in here?” Brian asks. “Where the fuck did you come from?”

  “I came with Dee Zu.”

  Dee Zu is dead. Out of habit Cisco subvocalizes it.

  But it isn't the WalkAbout that responds. “Dee Zu is not dead,” says Toot. “We only wanted everyone to think she was. She was a failsafe vector. Our wild card. I came with Dee Zu,” he says. “We followed you all the way from ESUSA.”

  First it was talking WalkAbouts and now it's mind‐reading 'pets. Then Cisco sees what's actually happening: Toot is directly connected to the Lode. Where is she now? This time he deliberately subvocalizes.

  “Back in the cave,” says Toot. “She is stuck. Nothing we can do.”

  Brian is looking back and forth between Cisco and Toot, aware that they're communicating, trying to work out how.

  Cisco checks to see exactly who it is he's dealing with here: Where did we make love? That time before the octopus?

  Toot doesn't hesitate: “On a waterbed in the Landmark Hotel.”

  Brian interrupts, panic in his voice. “You're Sky.”

  Confirmation, if it were needed, that somebody else was in the hotel room that time.