MOM

by Collin Piprell

  autonomous ebee (n.) an e*lectronic be*ing who has ascended to self‐consciousness; see “scendent.”

  avatar (n.) face or character adopted for relating socially inline; synonym for “persona,” different from a true self, more like a fashion, something you can try on to see how it looks; nearly all mallsters maintained a core stable of personal avatars, and most experimented with plenty of others; the Lode maintained an enormous avatar library mallsters could draw on, using them straight up or customizing them.

  barbie (n.) from “Barbie Doll”; 1. a conventionally beautiful woman used to promote consumer goods; 2. a plastic, rather witless, woman; 3. originally, a doll produced by Mattel, an American toy manufacturer in 1959; Barbie Dolls™ were popular among later 20th‐century and early 21st‐century pre‐adolescent girls; these dolls came to be produced in a variety of skin colors and racial types, with extensive wardrobes for a range of recreational and social activities; at the outset, however, they epitomized one white Anglo‐Saxon (WASP) middle‐class ideal, characterized by scaled‐down 36‐ by 24‐ by 36‐inch breast‐waist‐hip measurements, long legs, and—as generations of boys confirmed by checking under Barbie's skirt—seamless crotches; anatomically correct Barbie Dolls did not appear until after changing social mores eliminated prurient elements in such features; what with the anti‐Madonna virus (see “anti‐Madonna virus”), and wet quarantine in the malls, children became vanishingly rare and the family unit died out as a social institution; demand for Barbie Dolls died apace.

  big bandwidth (n. & adj.) to have influence, access to privilege; to be “real,” in the sense of having both personal depth and coherence.

  blur (n.) from “disassem*bler”; a nanobot or nanobot swarm programmed to disassemble anything that moves; connotations of “blur,” referring to the appearance of an item being disassembled, which blurs around the edges and then quickly dissolves in a total blur before either disappearing or reassembling in another guise.

  brait (n.) rough diamond, possibly mistaken version of “bort”; idiosyncratic use, origin unknown, by “Cisco Smith,” an early scendent, to describe a core of pure mettle encountered—just as self‐extinction appeared inevitable—at the center of his own being.

  dim (adj.) from “dim*ensionless” or “dim*ensionally challenged”; thin and uninteresting, uninspiring.

  DisposAll ™ (n.) cleaning unit combining both vacuum and disassembler technology.

  diss (v. trans) from “dis*assemble”; indirectly related to the late 20th‐century ebonic expression “to diss,” derived from “dis*respect”; this connotation may persist.

  Doll (n.) from “Provi*dAll”™; a molecular assembler, a vastly more sophisticated equivalent of the early twenty‐first‐century 3D printers, providing the full range of material consumer goods, although mallsters needed licenses to order certain privileged goods. Alcoholic beverages, for example, or potentially lethal implements, were only available according to a mallster's qualifications or personal qualities; other items were awarded as status symbols in light of achievement, contributions to the good of the mall.

  dreckad (n.) from “direc*t ad*vertisement”; a marketing technique that used the cranium as a soundbox to deliver individually targeted and personalized commercial messages.

  drizadrone (n.) from “drizzle” and “drone”; a form of mid‐21st century pop music.

  ebee (n.) from “e‐being,” or “e*lectronic being”; qubital human simulacrum; a nonself‐conscious approximation to a real personality.

  face2face (adj. & adv.) syn. “wet”; relating to an offline persona; given that people only rarely met in the flesh, this came to refer to an “authentic,” inline self, as measured only by physical appearance and DNA analysis; referring to carnal encounters, and carrying prurient overtones.

  fleye (n.) from “fl*ying eye,” an early 21st‐century self‐repairing and self‐directed battlefield intelligence drone characterized by a lightweight thin‐shell structure and a high‐frequency hum due to its bee‐like mode of flight.

  foglet (n.) near‐microscopic robot (sometimes “fogbot”) that incorporated advanced programmable—and in some cases self‐evolving—computational capacities; from “fog,” a reference to the cloud‐like substratum of foglets awaiting execution of directives, and “‐let,” or tiny; using gripping appendages, foglets/fogbots can combine in configurations of any size from molecular to mall size and beyond, maintaining structural integrity according to a template derived from RNA; experts say they provide a means, in principle, of concretizing mondoland cognates of qubital realities.

  frag (v. trans. & intrans.) to disintegrate, to cause something to disintegrate, whether a personality or a World; orig. from “frag*mentation grenade” and, later, from “to frag,” as in the 20th‐century USA‐Vietnam War sense of fragging, where officers showing excessive enthusiasm for putting their men in the way of harm—especially only in the pursuit of personal advancement during what was often considered an unjust, even unaccountable war—were killed through the simple expedient of tossing a grenade into their tent. (See “MPD/DID.”)

  GameBoys (n.) anarchistic, smash‐it‐for‐the‐sheer‐buzz‐of‐smashing‐it iconoclasts evolving from anti‐consumerist “terrorist” organizations; similar tactics to the Radical Moderates, although, unlike the latter individuals, GameBoys were nihilistic, espousing no identifiable ideology or socio‐political program; perhaps sardonically related to “Game Boy™,” a registered trademark from the late 20th and early 21st centuries referring to a portable digital game console produced by the Nintendo company.

  glissy (adj.) from “glossy” and “glassy”; connotations of “glib” and “slick.”

  holo (n. or adj.) from “holo*gram,” “holo*graphic”; not real, insubstantial—like a hologram; connotations of “hollow.”

  HIID (n.) heads‐up internal information display; scrolling, peripheral vision Lode information service; most mallsters could only access the Lode this way while in the Worlds; privileged citizens had WalkAbouts installed, which gave them the same functions in mondoland. (See “WalkAbout”.)

  kleerkutter (n.) from “clear‐cut”; hi‐energy laser crowd‐control device designed for extreme measures, a more economical alternative to automatic 12‐gauge shotguns; first used, historically, against radical greenies violently protesting the clear‐cutting of the last remaining lowland rainforest in Washington state, part of what was then the United States of America.

  Lode (n.) the “database of all databases,” the successor to the Cloud, the World Wide Web, and older methods of information storage such as libraries; from the mid‐21st century, the Lode represented modern humankind's collective memory, a cultural archive that, with the advent of MOM, was to include real‐time updating of the inline experiences of all citizens of the malls; originally: a rich source, a commercially important deposit of mineral ore; “Lode” used as a proper name, especially in association with MOM, also connotes the “Mother Lode,” or main ore body; the Lode now is being mined for constituents of an ever‐expanding population of scendents (see “scendents”). See “seedysea.”

  lode (v. trans.) to add information to the Lode; related to the older and more general “load,” in the sense of loading data to a computer program; variant “uplode.”

  low‐rez (adj.) from “low rez*olution”; merely real as opposed to superreal; syn. “mondomondo”; dull, lackluster, as in a weak personality; incomplete, as in a “low‐res” account of something, an only partial or otherwise unsatisfactory explanation.

  Madonna virus (n.) a biological designer virus sponsored, some believe, by Radical Moderates who feared the extinction of European races and cultures—birthrates among “developed” countries were falling to unsustainable levels at the same time those among “developing” peoples, notably the international Islamic upsurgence, soared. (An alternative theory claims that the virus was nothing but a GameBoy prank.) But the explosion of spontaneous pregnancies in the Western nations wa
s countered by the release, by Global Islamicists, of the anti‐Madonna virus, which, unfortunately, had the effect of sterilizing the entire species. Together with the Wars for World Peace and Freedom in Our Time, regional wars over water, rising sea levels, agricultural problems due to climate change, and rapidly mutating microorganisms both bio and blur, the entire human race rapidly diminished to unsustainable levels. (See “Omega Generation.”)

  magic circle (n.) 1. the area, commonly measured as a radius, within which it is both technically feasible and economical to maintain a generated reality (GR) from any given standpoint; 2. that sphere of narrative coherence, the familiar universe coextensive historically and cognitively with the circle of light and companionable narrative thrown by the primordial campfire.

  mallster (n.) mall inhabitant; the satirist Jimmy Shine (AD 2012‐2037) insisted that “mallster” connoted “hamster,” an idiosyncratic interpretation; rf. the song “Got to Tread This Mall 'til I've Done It All.”

  magifacturing (n.) from magi (multibot assembly goods inventory) and “facture” (“a making”); suggestive of “manufacturing”; connotations of “magic.”

  majig (n.) abbrev. “crypto*majig,” composite of “cryptic,” “thingamajig,” and “magic.”

  Mallsday (n.) see “Monday.”

  maxhappiness (n.) the idea that absolute happiness is the natural end of human existence, together with the associated notion that pain is sinful; Harlan Bertz, in Loaves and Fishes and Selves (NY: Abracademe Books, 2032), presented an ironic critique of this ideological response to religious fundamentalists and their reactions to zoomerism; but no one was reading books anymore, and hedonistic zoomerism maintained its ascendancy to the extent that the Maxhappies (variant “Maxies”), a political movement based in ESUSA, managed to have principled maxhappiness enshrined in the Constitution of the United Malls, such that citizens' happiness quotients (HQ) should be monitored, and those who allowed their HQ to slip below acceptable norms would legally be subject to psychoneurotherapeutic reconstruction (PR); even among non‐fundamentalist maxhappies, the medibots, magifacturing, and the Worlds together promised a virtually painless existence; that this belief was absurdly optimistic—not to say that the utilitarian/zoomerist path to happiness was basically wrong‐headed—became clear in the period just preceding the final destruction of the malls. (See also “Omega Generation.”)

  MIA (adj. & n.) from “m*issing i*n a*ction”; the expression became popular among an emotionally confused population who went to extreme lengths to recover physical evidence of unconfirmed casualties among US combatants following an unpopular mid‐20th century American war in what was then Southeast Asia.

  Monday (n.) officially, “Monday” was “Mallsday,” denoting irregular periods of time when the Worlds were off‐limits to mallsters; the mallsters preferred “Monday,” with its connotations of “mondo” and the traditional depressing “Monday” of yore—the first “day” of a “week,” which pre‐mallsters often divided into five working days and two rest days; see also “Worldsday” and “Mallsday”.

  mondoland (n.) the “real,” non‐GR world (slang).

  mondomondo (adj.) 1. part of the non‐GR world; 2. boring, dismal.

  MPD∕DID (n.) from “m*ultiple p*ersonality d*isorder” and “d*issociative i*dentity d*isorder,” the supposed coexistence of more than one personality in the same body; in the 20th and early 21st centuries, this condition was usually considered a psychiatric illness; the expression MPD was superseded in clinical usage by DID, although MPD persisted in popular usage until, from about AD 2035, it was superceded by “all fragged up” (see “frag”); a majority of professional mental health practitioners once believed the disorder was in most cases iatrogenic, i.e. induced by the counselors themselves; strongly religious practitioners, on the other hand, often found that the idea of DID complemented beliefs in demonic possession; the pendulum was to swing again, however, when fragging became pandemic, especially following the general retreat into the malls and the Worlds; since the mid‐21st century, mainstream thinking tends to see “multiple personalities,” in some sense, as a necessary feature of any conscious individual's constitution.

  nanobot (n.) device capable of manipulating matter on atomic scales (see “foglet”).

  nineelevenoh‐one (n.) refers to the eleventh day of the ninth month, in the old calendar, in the year 2001, when New York City's World Trade Towers—a powerful symbol of the USA's primacy among the nations of the world—were utterly destroyed in a terrorist attack; many observers believe that date marks the end to a naïve self‐righteousness and belief in a predestined enjoyment of ever‐greater material comfort on the part of the USA and the other “Western powers”; it was also from this point onwards that responses to perceived threats of global terrorism led to a progressive hermeticization of populations, a growing authoritarianism everywhere, and a polarization along newly inflamed religious and pseudo‐ideological lines.

  nineëleventhree‐one (n.) on the eleventh day of the ninth month, 2031, an undetermined number of nuclear devices—stashed, doubtless over a period of several years in basements and tunnels in cities around what was then known as the developed world—began to go off like a string of big firecrackers wrapped around the planet. All within hours of each other, dozens of cities and hundreds of millions of people were destroyed, with little consideration for race, color, creed, or a better world to come. Hundreds of millions more perished in the aftermath. The Ubikwinits—a shadowy organization, never really identified, are commonly held responsible.

  Oboku‐Higgs plasma battery (n.) a compact modular battery that generates both its own force‐field container and the energy it leaks upon demand.

  OD (n., v. & adj.) an euthanasia center, a prototype “opout center” (see “opout”); from “orderly departures,” originally official procedures for moving refugees from holding areas to new countries of residence; connotations of 20th‐century slang for “overdose on drugs.”

  off (v. trans.) from “off*line,” to put someone offline; connotations of “off,” 20th‐century underworld slang for murdering a person, often under contract.

  Omega Generation (n.) lit. “The Last Generation”; the ultimate expression of zoomerism, hailed by maxhappy utilitarians as the logical and most desirable culmination of human history, where remaining specimens of Homo sapiens should consume the fruits of that endeavor with no thought of generations to come, free of guilt or moral issues, for no future generations were coming; less zoomerist‐oriented opinion often described this generation ironically as The Big Payoff or, more directly, as The Final Pigout. (See “maxhappiness.”)

  OmniStrike (n.) eclectic martial art evolved from jeet kune do, invented by Bruce Lee in the 20th century, which comprised a mix of fencing, Western‐style boxing, and kung fu and which went on to incorporate any other technique that proved useful.

  op out (v. phrase, intrans.) from “op*t out”; to choose the option of leaving mondoland on a permanent basis.

  opout (n.) a person who has chosen either euthanasia, the passing eased by death in an ideal GR world of the opout's own specification, or, for those who could afford it, long‐term stays in GR realities with medibot maintenance and nutrient baths.

  PlagueBot (n.) a “plague” of feral self‐replicating nanobots; this mid‐21st‐century phenomenon nearly presented the world with the Gray Goo Scenario. Industry and governments assured the public that the demon was never going to get out of the bottle. But of course the demon did escape, and at first it looked as though the prophets of doom had underestimated the threat. But little‐understood natural laws meant salvation was at hand. Self‐organizing nanobot systems quickly emerged out of nowhere, soon evolving further into self‐limiting systems. Massive blur superorganisms staked out territories in competition with similar organizations, boundaries expanding and contracting with breaches and assimilations until a working equilibrium set in. Now the “PlagueBot” really comprised many plaguebots that carved
up the world among them, devoting their entire energies to maintaining their borders. So the much‐feared Gray Goo scenario in fact never did materialize. Instead, the plague of self‐replicating disassembler nanobots conformed to a pattern of self‐organization. This emergent superorganism (or superorganisms) —not intelligent in any conventional sense and no more sophisticated, to all appearances, than an ant colony—soon extended around the world, much in the way the archaea had mantled the globe billions of years earlier.

  prism (n.) a qubital device that breaks the telep personality up into versions of itself, either whole or partial; used in therapy, under controlled conditions and with mixed success, to encourage patients to disintegrate, then assign constituent selves to the various prismatic clones and come to terms with them before reintegrating the personality.

  qubital (adj.) from “qubit,” basic unit of information in quantum computing, counterpart to the binary “bit” in digital technology.

  realish; realishtic (adj.) almost real, sort of; about as real as things get, in the malls.

  reality engine (n.) qubital generator of virtual realities. (See “world processor.”)

  satray (n.) from “sat*ellite ray”; satellite‐mounted laser/phasar weaponry with the capacity to destroy targets within range either in space or on the Earth's surface; briefly proscribed by New Geneva Convention rules after the First War for World Peace and Freedom in Our Time, then readmitted, according to the Constitution of the United Malls, under post‐PlagueBot emergency measures.

  scendent (n.) syn. “autonomous ebee”; connotations of both “a*scendant” and “tran*scendent”; an ebee that has attained the existential density and complexity to condition the emergence of self‐awareness and a degree of autonomy, able to act in novel ways to identify and serve its own interests, behaving and evolving in ways that humans never could. E.g., since scendents are integrated within the Lode, every single element of a scendent's experience is qubitally recorded and rendered infinitely redundant on the IndraNet. Feeding this data back and forth in a dialectical process with the scendent in the light of new experience—including that feedback process itself—the scendent becomes progressively more autonomous, ever richer an individual.