WikiWorld

by Paul Di Filippo

  As spimed materials churned under supervision like a nest of snakes or a pit of chunky lava or a scrum of rugby robots in directed self-assembly—boring into the soil and stretching up toward the sky—I watched with growing alarm, wondering if this had been the smartest idea. What kind of miscegenous mansion was I going to end up with?

  That’s when Foolty Fontal showed up to save the day.

  He arrived in a one-person sea-kayak, of all things, paddling like a lunatic, face covered with sweat. So typical of the man, I would discover, choosing not to claim primary allegiance with any wiki, so he could belong to all.

  I tried to tag him, but got a privacy denial.

  Having beached his craft and ditched his paddle, Foolty levered himself out with agility. I saw a beanpole well over six feet tall, with glossy skin the colour of black-bean dip. Stubby dreadlocks like breakfast sausages capped his head. Ivory SCURF curlicued up his dark bare arms like automobile detailing.

  Foolty, I later learned, claimed mixed Ethiopian, Jamaican and Gulla heritage, as well as snippets of mestizo. It made for a hybrid genome as unique as his brain.

  Spotting me by the food tables, Foolty lanked over.

  “Russ Reynolds, tagged. Loved your contributions to Naomi Instanton.”

  Foolty was referring to a crowdsourced sitcom I had helped to co-script. “Well, thanks, man.”

  “Name’s Foolty Fontal—‘FooDog.’”

  “No shit!”

  FooDog was legendary across the ubik. He could have been the jimmywhale of a hundred wikis, but had declined all such positions. His talents were many and magnificent, his ego reputedly restrained, and his presence at any non-virtual event a legend in the making.

  Now FooDog nodded his head toward the construction site. A small autonomous backhoe was wrestling with a walking tripodal hod full of bricks while members of competing wikis cheered on the opponents.

  “Interesting project. Caught my eye this morning. Lots of challenges. But it looks like you’re heading for disaster, unless you get some coordination. Mind if I butt in?”

  “Are you kidding? I’d be honoured. Go for it!”

  FooDog ambled over to the workers, both human and cybernetic, streaming ubik instructions with high-priority tags attached faster than I could follow. A galvanic charge seemed to run through people, as they realized who walked among them. FooDog accepted the homage with humble grace. And suddenly the whole site was transformed from a chaotic competition to a patterned dance of flesh and materials.

  That’s the greatest thing about wikis: they combine the best features of democracy and autocracy. Everybody has an equal say. But some got bigger says than others.

  Over the next dozen hours, I watched in amazement as my house grew almost organically. By the time dusk was settling in, the place was nearly done. Raised high above sea-level against any potential flooding on deep-sunk cement piles, spired, curve-walled, airy yet massive, it still showed hallmarks of rival philosophies of design. But somehow the efforts of the various factions ultimately harmonized instead of bickered, thanks to FooDog’s overseeing of the assorted worldviews.

  One of the best features of my new house, a place where I could see myself spending many happy idle hours, was a large wooden deck that projected out well over the water, where it was supported by pressure-treated and tarred wooden pillars, big as antique telephone poles, plunging into the sea.

  Three or four heaps of wooden construction waste and combustible sea-wrack had been arranged as pyres against the dusk, and they were now ignited. Live music flared up with the flames, and more food and drink was laid on. While a few machines and people continued to add some last-minute details to my house, illuminated by electrical lights running off the newly installed power system (combined wave motion and ocean temperature differential), the majority of the folks began to celebrate a job well done.

  I was heading to join them when I noticed a new arrival sailing in out of the dusk: a rather disreputable looking workhorse of a fishing sloop. I pinged the craft, but got no response. Not a privacy denial, but a dead silence.

  This ship and its owner were running off the ubik, un-SCURFED.

  Intrigued, I advanced toward the boat. I kicked up my night vision. Its bow bore the name Soft Grind. From out the pilothouse emerged the presumptive captain. In the ancient firelight, I saw one of the most beautiful women I had ever beheld: skin the colour of teak, long wavy black hair, a killer figure. She wore a faded hemp shirt tied under her breasts to expose her midriff; baggy men’s surfer trunks; and a distressed pair of gumboots.

  She leaped over the gunwales and off the boat with pantherish flair moderated only slightly by her clunky footwear.

  “Hey,” she said. “Looks like a party. Mind if I crash it?”

  “No, sure, of course not.”

  She grinned, exposing perfect teeth.

  “I’m Cherry. One of the Oyster Pirates.”

  And that was how I met Cherimoya Espiritu.

  3. IN LOVE WITH AN OYSTER PIRATE

  Gaia giveth even as she taketh away.

  The warming of the global climate over the past century had melted permafrost and glaciers, shifted rainfall patterns, altered animal migratory routes, disrupted agriculture, drowned cities, and similarly necessitated a thousand thousand adjustments, recalibrations and hasty retreats. But humanity’s unintentional experiment with the biosphere had also brought some benefits.

  Now we could grow oysters in New England.

  Six hundred years ago, oysters flourished as far north as the Hudson. Native Americans had accumulated vast middens of shells on the shores of what would become Manhattan. Then, prior to the industrial age, there was a small climate shift, and oysters vanished from those waters.

  Now, however, the tasty bivalves were back, their range extending almost to Maine.

  The commercial beds of the Cape Cod Archipelago produced shellfish as good as any from the heyday of Chesapeake Bay. Several large wikis maintained, regulated and harvested these beds, constituting a large share of the local economy.

  But as anyone might have predicted, wherever a natural resource existed, sprawling and hard of defence, poachers would be found.

  Cherimoya Espiritu hailed from a long line of fisherfolks operating for generations out of nearby New Bedford. Cape Verdean by remotest ancestry, her family had suffered in the collapse of conventional fisheries off the Georges Bank. They had failed to appreciate the new industry until it was too late for them to join one of the legal oyster wikis. (Membership had been closed at a number determined by complicated sustainability formulae.) Consequently, they turned pirate to survive in the only arena they knew.

  Cherimoya and her extensive kin had divested themselves of their SCURF: no subcutaneous ubik arfids for them, to register their presence minute-to-minute to nosy authorities and jealous oyster owners. The pirates relied instead on the doddering network of GPS satellites for navigation, and primitive cellphones for communication. Operating at night, they boasted gear to interfere with entomopter cams and infrared scans. They were not above discouraging pursuers with pulsed-energy projectile guns (purchased from the PEP Boys). After escaping with their illicit catches, they sold the fruit of the sea to individual restaurants and unscrupulous wholesalers. They took payment either in goods, or in isk, simoleans and lindens that friends would bank for them in the ubik.

  Most of the oyster pirates lived on their ships, to avoid contact with perhaps overly inquisitive mainland security wikis, such as the Boston Badgers and the Stingers. Just like me prior to my island-buying—except that my motivation for a life afloat didn’t involve anything illicit.

  Bits and pieces of information about this subculture I knew just from growing up in the Archipelago. And the rest I learned from Cherry over the first few months of our relationship.

  But that night of my house-raising, all I knew was that a gorgeous woman, rough-edged and authentic as one of the oyster shells she daily handled, wanted to hang out on my ti
ny island and have some fun.

  That her accidental presence here would lead to our becoming long-term lovers, I never dared hope.

  But sure enough, that’s what happened.

  Following Cherry’s introduction, I shook her hand and gave my own name. Daring to take her by the elbow—and receiving no rebuke—I steered her across the flame-lit, shadowy sands towards the nearest gaggle of revellers around their pyre.

  “So,” I asked, “how come you’re not working tonight?”

  “Oh, I don’t work every night. Just often enough to keep myself in provisions and fuel. Why should I knock myself out just to earn money and pile up things? I’m more interested in enjoying life. Staying free, not being tied down.”

  “Well, you know, I think that’s, um—just great! That’s how I feel too!” I silently cursed my new status as a land-owner and house-dweller.

  We came out of the darkness and into the sight of my friends. Guitars, drums and gravicords chanced to fall silent just then, and I got pinged with the planned playlist, and a chance to submit any requests.

  “Hey, Russ, congratulations!” “Great day!” “House looks totally flexy!” “You’re gonna really enjoy it!”

  Cherry turned to regard me with a wide grin. “So—gotta stay footloose, huh?”

  To cover my chagrin, I fetched drinks for Cherry and me while I tried to think of something to say in defence of my new householder lifestyle. That damn sexy grin of hers didn’t help my concentration.

  Cherry took a beer from me. I said, “Listen, it’s not like I’m buying into some paranoid gatecom. This place—totally transient. It’s nothing more than a beach shack, somewhere to hang my clothes. I’m on the water most of every day—”

  Waving a hand to dismiss my excuses, Cherry said, “Just funning with you, Russ. Actually, I think this place is pretty hyphy. Much as I love the Soft Grind, I get tired of being so cramped all the time. Being able to stretch in your bunk without whacking your knuckles would be a treat. So—do I get a tour?”

  “Yeah, absolutely!”

  We headed toward the staircase leading up to my deck. Her sight unamped, Cherry stumbled over a tussock of grass, and I took her hand to guide her. And even when we got within the house’s sphere of radiance, she didn’t let go.

  Up on the deck, Foolty was supervising a few machines working atop the roof. Spotting me, he called out, “Hey, nephew! Just tying in the rainwater-collection system to the desalinization plant.”

  “Swell. FooDog, I’d like you to meet—”

  “No, don’t tell me the name of this sweet niece. Let me find out on my own.”

  Cherry snorted. “Good luck! Far as the ubik knows, I’m not even part of this brane. And that’s how I like it.”

  FooDog’s eyes went unfocused and he began to make strangled yips like a mutt barking in its sleep. After about ninety seconds of this, during which time Cherry and I admired a rising quarter moon, FooDog emerged from his trawl of the ubik.

  “Cherimoya Espiritu,” he said. “Born 2015. Father’s name João, mother’s name Graca. Younger brother nicknamed the Dolphin. Member of the Oyster Pirates—”

  Cherry’s face registered mixed irritation, admiration and fright. “How—how’d you find all that out?”

  FooDog winked broadly. “Magic.”

  “No, c’mon, tell me!”

  “All right, all right. The first part was easy. I cheated. I teasled into Russ’s friends list. He added you as soon as you met, and that’s how I got your name and occupation. My SCURF isn’t off the shelf. It picked up molecules of your breath, did an instant signature on four hundred organic compounds, and found probable family matches with your parents, whose genomes are on file. And your brother’s got a record with the Boston Badgers for a ruckus at a bar in Fall River.”

  Now I felt offended. “You teasled into my friends list? You got big ones, FooDog.”

  “Well, thanks! That’s how I got where I am today. And besides, I discovered my name there too, so I figured it was okay.”

  I couldn’t find it in myself to be angry with this genial ubik-trickster. Cherry seemed willing to extend him the same leniency.

  “No need to worry about anyone else learning this stuff. While I was in there, I beefed up all your security, nephew.”

  “Well—thanks, I guess.”

  “No thanks necessary.” FooDog turned back to the bots on the roof. “Hey, Blue Droid! You call that a watertight seam!”

  Cherry and I went through the sliding glass door that led off the deck and inside.

  I made an inspection of my new home for the first time with Cherry in tow. The place was perfect: roomy yet cozy, easy to maintain, lots of comforts.

  The wikis had even provided some rudimentary furniture, including a couple of inflatable adaptive chairs. We positioned them in front of a window that commanded a view of the ocean and Moon. I went to a small humming fridge and found it full of beer. I took two bottles back to the seats.

  Cherry and I talked until the Moon escaped our view. I opaqued all the glass in the house. We merged the MEMS skins of the chairs, fashioning them into a single bed. Then we had sex and fell asleep.

  In the morning, Cherry said, “Yeah, I think I could get used to living here real fast.”

  4. MUCHO MONGO

  My Dad was a garbageman.

  Okay, so not really. He didn’t wear overalls or hang from the back of a truck or heft dripping sacks of coffee grounds and banana peels. Dad’s job was strictly white-collar. His fingers were more often found on a keyboard than a trash compactor. He was in charge of the Barnstable Transfer Station, a seventy-acre “disposium” where recyclables were lifted from the waste-stream, and whatever couldn’t be commercially repurposed was neatly and sterilely buried. But I like to tell people he was a garbageman just to get their instant, unschooled reactions. If they turn up their noses, chances are they won’t make it onto my friends list.

  I remember Dad taking me to work once in a while on Saturdays. He proudly showed off the dump’s little store, stocked with the prize items his workers had rescued.

  “Look at this, Russ. A first edition Jack London. Tales of the Fish Patrol. Can you believe it?”

  I was five years old, and had just gotten my first pair of spex, providing rudimentary access to what passed for the ubik back then. I wasn’t impressed.

  “I can read that right now, Dad, if I wanted to.”

  Dad looked crestfallen. “That digital text is just information, son. This is a book! And best of all, it’s mongo.”

  I tried to look up mongo in the ubik, like I had been taught, but couldn’t find it in my dictionary. “What’s mongo, Dad?”

  “A moment of grace. A small victory over entropy.”

  “Huh?”

  “It’s any treasure you reclaim from the edge of destruction, Russ. There’s no thrill like making a mongo strike.”

  I looked at the book with new eyes. And that’s when I got hooked.

  From then on, mongo became my life.

  That initial epiphany occurred over twenty years ago. Barnstable is long drowned, fish swimming through the barnacled timbers of the disposium store, and my folks live in Helena now. But I haven’t forgotten the lessons my Dad taught me.

  The Gogo Goggins has strong winches for hauling really big finds up into the air. But mostly I deal in small yet valuable stuff. With strap-on gills, a smartskin suit, MEMS flippers and a MHD underwater sled packing ten thousand candlepower of searchlights, I pick through the drowned world of the Cape Cod Archipelago and vicinity.

  The coastal regions of the world now host the largest caches of treasure the world has ever seen. Entire cities whose contents could not be entirely rescued in advance of the encroaching waters. All there as salvage for the taking, pursuant to many, many post-flood legal rulings.

  Once I’m under the water, my contact with the ubik cut off, relying just on the processing power in my SCURF, I’m alone with my thoughts and the sensations of the dive
. The romance of treasure-hunting takes over. Who knows what I might find? Jewellery, monogrammed plates from a famous restaurant, statues, coins— Whatever I bring up, I generally sell with no problems, either over the ubik or at the old-fashioned marketplace on the mainland.

  It’s a weird way of earning your living, I know. Some people might find it morbid, spending so much time amid these ghostly drowned ruins. (And to answer the first question anyone asks: yes, I’ve encountered skeletons, but none of them have shown the slightest inclination to attack.)

  But I don’t find my job morbid at all.

  I’m under the spell of mongo.

  One of the first outings Cherry and I went on, after she moved in with me, was down to undersea Provincetown. It’s an easy dive. Practically nothing to find there, since amateurs have picked it clean. But by the same token, all the hazards are well-charted.

  Cherry seemed to enjoy the expedition, spending hours slipping through the aquatic streets with wide eyes behind her mask. Once back aboard the Gogo Goggins, drying her thick hair with a towel, she said, “That was stringy, Russ! Lots of fun.”

  “You think you might like tossing in with me? You know, becoming business partners? We’d make good isk. Not that we need to earn much, like you said. And you could give up the illegal stuff—”

  “Give up the Oyster Pirates? Never! That’s my heritage! And to be honest with you, babe, there’s just not enough thrills in your line of work.”

  Just as I was addicted to mongo, Cherry was hooked on plundering the shellfish farms, outwitting the guards and owners and escaping with her booty. Myself, I knew I’d be a nervous wreck doing that for a living. (She took me out one night on a raid; when the PEP discharges started sizzling through the air close to my head, I dropped to the deck of the Soft Grind (which possessed a lot of speed belied by its appearance) and didn’t stand up again till we reached home. Meanwhile, Cherry was alternately shouting curses at our pursuers and emitting bloodthirsty laughs.)

  Luckily, we were able to reconcile our different lifestyles quite nicely. I simply switched to night work. Once I was deep enough below the surface, I had to rely on artificial lights even during the daytime anyhow.