WikiWorld

by Paul Di Filippo

  Several nights each week, you’d find us motoring off side by side in our respective boats. Eventually our paths would diverge, signalled by a dangerous kiss across the narrow gap between our bobbing boats. As I headed toward whatever nexus of sunken loot I had charted, I’d catch up on ubik matters, writing dialogue for One Step Closer to Nowhere, the sitcom that had replaced Naomi Instanton, or monitoring border crossings for an hourly rate for the Minute Men.

  Cherry and I would meet back home on my little island, which Cherry had christened “Sandybump.” We’d sleep till noon or later, then have fun during the day.

  A lot of that fun seemed to involve Foolty “FooDog” Fontal.

  5. A PORTRAIT OF THE CON ARTIST AS A YOUNG FOODOG

  During all the years we hung out together, we never learned where FooDog actually lived. He seemed reluctant to divulge the location of his digs, protective of his security and privacy even with his friends. (And recalling how easily he had stolen Cherry’s identity from my friends list, who could blame him at worrying about unintentional data-sharing?) FooDog’s various business, recreational and hobbyist pursuits had involved him with lots of shady characters and inequitable dealings, and he existed, I soon realized, just one step ahead—or perhaps laterally abaft—of various grudge-holders.

  I should hasten to say that FooDog’s dealings were never—or seldom—truly unethical or self-serving. It’s just that his wide-ranging enthusiasms respected no borders, sacred cows or intellectual property rights.

  But despite his lack of a public meatspace address, FooDog could always be contacted through the ubik, and me and Cherry would often meet him somewhere for what invariably turned out to be an adventure of the most hyphy dimensions.

  I remember one day in November….

  We grabbed a zipcar, FooDog slung several duffels in the interior storage space, and we headed north to New Hampshire. FooDog refused to tell us where we were heading till it was too late to turn back.

  “We’re going to climb Mount Washington? Are you nuts?” I picked up the feed from the Weather Observatory atop the peak. “There’s a blizzard going on right now!”

  “Precisely the conditions I need for my experiment.”

  The normal daily high temperature atop the peak at this time of the year was thirteen degrees Farenheit. The record low was minus-twenty. In 1934, the Observatory had recorded the biggest wind ever experienced on the planet: 231 MPH. There were taller places and colder places and windier places and places with worse weather. But Mount Washington managed to combine generous slices of all these pies into a unique killer confection.

  Cherry said, “C’mon, Russ, trust the Dog.”

  I grumbled, but went along.

  We made it by car up the access road to 4300 vertical feet, leaving only 2000 feet to ascend on foot. With many contortions, we managed to dress in the car in the smartsuits FooDog had provided. When we stepped outside, we were smitten with what felt like a battering ram made of ice. We sealed up our micropore facemasks and snugged our adaptive goggles more firmly into place. Cherry had a headset that provided a two-way audiofeed to the ubik. We donned our snowshoes, grabbed our alpenstocks, and began the ascent, following the buried road which was painted by our ubik vision to resemble the Golden Brick path to Oz. FooDog carried a box strapped to his back, the object of our whole folly.

  I won’t belabour you with the journey, which resembled in its particulars any number of other crazed climbs atop forbidding peaks. Let’s just say the trek was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

  We never even made it to the top. Around 5500 feet, FooDog declared that he could conduct his experiment at that altitude, with the storm raging slightly less virulently around us. He doffed his box, unfolded its tripod legs, spiked it into the snow, and began sending an encrypted command stream to the gadget over the ubik.

  “Can we know now what we risked our lives for?” I said.

  “Sure thing, nephew. This gadget messes with the quantum bonds between the hydrogen atoms in water molecules, via a directional electrostatic field. I’ve got it pointed upward now. Good thing, or we’d all be puddles of slop.”

  I took a nervous step or three away from the machine, unsure if FooDog was kidding or not. But I should have trusted him not to endanger us—at least via technology.

  I looked toward Cherry, to make sure she was okay. She gave an exclamation of awe. I looked back toward the machine.

  There was an expanding hemisphere of atmospheric inactivity above the gadget. It grew and grew, providing an umbrella of calm. Some snow still pelted us from the side, but none reached us from above.

  FooDog’s box was quelling the blizzard.

  FooDog undid his mask. His black face, wreathed in a wide grin, stood out amidst all the white like the dot of a giant exclamation point.

  “Hyphy!” he exclaimed.

  The ubik was already going insane. Weather-watcher wikis frantically sought to dispatch entomopter cams to our location, to supplement the reports of the fixed sensors located at some distance, but were frustrated by the surrounding storm, still in full force. But I suspected that if FooDog’s bubble continued to expand, sooner or later a cam would get through and ID us.

  Evidently, FooDog had the same realization. He said, “Brace yourself,” then shut off his machine.

  The blizzard socked us with renewed vigour—although I seemed to sense in the storm a kind of almost-human shock, as if it had been alarmed by its interruption.

  FooDog resealed his mask, and we headed down.

  “Aren’t you worried we’ll be ID’d on the way down the mountain?”

  “I hired the zipcar under a spoofed name, then de-spimed it. Cherry’s untouchable, and you and I have our denial flags on. Once we get down the mountain, anyone who manages to get near us in meatspace will have to distinguish us from a hundred other identical cars on the road. We’re as invisible as anyone gets these days.”

  “So your little invention is safe from greedy and irresponsible hands.”

  “Sure. Unless I decide to opensource it.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  But the Dog replied not.

  So that’s what the average outing with Foolty Fontal was like.

  Of course, I had certain thrills in my own line of work.

  One day my not inconsiderable rep as a salvage expert attracted an offer from the Noakhali Nagas, a wiki from Bangladesh. That unfortunate country had suffered perhaps more than any, due to oceanic incursions. The creeping Bay of Bengal had submerged thousands of shrines. Rescuing deities would provide me with a significant chunk of lindens. And the challenge of new territory—the Cape Archipelago was starting to bore me a little after so many years—was a plus as well.

  I sat with Cherry on our favourite spot, the deck of our house on Sandybump. It was late afternoon, our “morning” time, and we were enjoying brunch and watching the sun go down. I explained about the offer I had received.

  “So—you mind if I take this job?”

  “How could I? Go for it, babe! I’ll be fine here alone till you get back.”

  I emerged from the warm waters of the Bay of Bengal on a Tuesday afternoon two months later to find a high-priority news item, culled from the ubik by one of my agents, banging at the doors of my atmosphere-restored connection.

  Cherimoya Espiritu was in Mass General Hospital in Boston, suffering from various broken limbs and bruised organs, but in no mortal danger.

  I blew every isk I had earned in Bangladesh plus more on a scramjet flight back to the UWA. Four hours later I was hustling through the doors of MGH.

  Cherry smiled ruefully as I entered her room. Vast bruises, already fading from subcutaneous silicrobes, splotched her sweet face. Various casts obscured her lovely limbs. Wires from speed-healing machines tethered her down.

  “Damn, Russ,” Cherry exclaimed when she saw me, “I am so sorry about the house!”

  6. WORMHOLES AND LOOPHOLES

  Looking back at this nar
rative so far, I see that maybe right here is where my story actually begins, or should’ve begun. After all, it was Cherry’s accident that precipitated my run for jimmywhale of the UWA, and the subsequent trade war, and that’s when I entered the history books, even as a footnote. And that’s what most people are interested in, right?

  Except that how could I possibly have jumped into the tale right here? None of it would’ve made any sense, without knowing about my backstory and FooDog’s and Cherry’s. I would’ve had to be constantly interrupting myself to backfill.

  And besides, aren’t most people nowadays habituated to ruckerian metanovels, with their infinite resortability and indrajal links? Even though I chose to compose this account in a linear fashion, you’re probably bopping through it in a quirky personalized path anyhow, while simultaneously offering planting advice to a golden-rice grower in Bantul, contributing a few bars to an electrosoul composer in Los Angeles, and tweaking the specs of some creature’s synthetic metabolism with an a-lifer in Loshan.

  So:

  I rushed to Cherry’s side and grabbed her hand.

  “Ouch! Watch my IV!”

  “Oh, babe, what happened? Are you gonna be okay?”

  “Yeah, I’ll be fine. It was just a stupid accident. But it wasn’t really my fault….”

  Cherry had been sunning herself on the deck yesterday, half asleep. As the sun moved, she got up to shift her chair closer to the deck’s edge. The next thing she knew, she was lying in the shallow waters surrounding Sandybump, buried under the timbers and pilings of the deck. Her head projected from the waters, allowing her to breathe painfully around her busted ribs. But lacking personal ubik access to summon help, she surely would’ve died in a short time from the shock of her injuries.

  Luckily, the house itself knew to call one of the 911 wikis. Within minutes, an ambulance service run by the Organ Printers had her safely stabilized and on her way to MGH.

  “The deck just collapsed, Russ! Honest. I didn’t do anything to it!”

  My concern for Cherry’s health and safety began to segue to anger. Which wiki had built the deck? I started to rummage through the house’s construction records, at the same time pulling up realtime images of my dwelling. The tearing-off of the deck had pulled away a portion of the exterior wall, opening our beloved house to the elements.

  The Fatburgers. They were the wiki who had built my deck. Bastards! I was in the middle of composing a formal challenge suit against them, prior to filing it with a judicial wiki, when FooDog contacted me.

  “You’re back stateside, nephew! Great! But there’s information you need to know before you rush into anything. Drop on by my offices.”

  “Can’t you just tell me over the ubik?”

  “Nah-huh. C’mon over.”

  I gingerly kissed Cherry goodbye, and left.

  I pooled my public transit request with those of a few dozen other riders heading in my direction, and I was over the Charles River in no time.

  Foolty Fontal maintained an occasional physical presence in a building on Mass Ave in Cambridge owned by the Gerontion wiki, whose focus was life-extension technology. Jealous of their potentially lucrative research, the Gerontions had equipped the building with massive security, both virtual and analogue, the latter including several lethal features. Thus FooDog felt moderately safe in using their premises.

  But the building knew to let me in, and I followed a glowing trail of virtual footprints blazoned with my name to a lab on the third floor.

  FooDog stood by a table on which rested a dissection tray. Coming up to his side, I looked down at the tray’s contents.

  I saw a splayed-open rust-coloured worm about twenty inches long.

  “Eeyeuw! What’s that?”

  “That and its cousins are what brought down your deck. Shipworms. Teredo navalis. Molluscs, actually. But not native ones, and not unmodified. This particularly nasty critter was created in a Caracas biolab. They were used in the hostilities against Brazil ten years ago. They’ll even eat some plastics! Supposedly wiped out in the aftermath—extinct. But obviously not.”

  I poked the rubbery worm with a finger. “How’d they get up north and into my deck pilings? Is this some kind of terrorist assault?”

  “I don’t think so. Now that we know what to look for, I’ve done a little data-mining. I’ve found uncoordinated, overlooked reports of these buggers—enough to chart the current geographical dispersion of the worms and backtrack to a single point of origin. I believe that a small number of these worms came accidentally to our region in the bilge water of a fully automated container vessel, the Romulo Gallegos. Looks like purely unintentional contamination. But until I know for sure, I didn’t want to broadcast anything over the ubik and alert people to cover their tracks. Or rouse false alarms of an assault.”

  “Okay. I can think of at least three entities we can nail for this, and get some damages and satisfaction. The owner of the ship, the traders who employed him, and the jerks who created the worms in the first place.”

  “Don’t forget our own coastal biosphere guardians, wikis like the Junior Nemos and the Aquamen. They should have caught this outbreak before it spread.”

  “Right! Let’s go get them!”

  “The conference room is down this way….”

  Ten empty chairs surrounded a large conference table formed from a single huge vat-grown burl. FooDog and I settled down in two seats, and then we called the offending parties to our meeting.

  My SCURF painted onto my visual field the fully dimensional realtime avatars of our interlocutors sitting in the other chairs, so that it looked as if the room had suddenly filled with people in the flesh. Men and women scattered around the planet saw FooDog and me similarly in their native contexts.

  Most of the avatars seemed to represent the baseline looks of the participants, but a few were downright disconcerting. I couldn’t help staring at a topless mermaid, one of the Aquamen, no doubt.

  FooDog smiled in welcoming fashion. “All right, ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce myself….”

  Everyone nowadays claims that instant idiomatic translation of any language into any other tongue is one of the things that has ushered in a new era of understanding, empathy and comity. Maybe so. But not judging from my experiences that day, once FooDog had spread out his evidence and accusations to the mainly South American audience. We were met with stonewalling, denials, patriotic vituperations, counter-charges and ad hominem insults. And that was from our English-speaking compatriots in the UWA! The Latinos reacted even more harshly.

  Finally, the meeting dissolved in a welter of ill-will and refusal of anyone to take legal or even nominal responsibility for the collapse of my deck and the injuries suffered by poor Cherry.

  I turned despondently to FooDog, once we were alone again. “Looks like we’re boned, right? All our evidence is circumstantial. There’s no way we can redress this through the system. I mean, aside from convincing any wikis I’m personally involved in to boycott these buggers, what else can I do?”

  FooDog, good friend that he was, had taken my dilemma to heart.

  “Damn! It’s just not right that they should be allowed to get away with hurting you and Cherry like this.”

  He pondered my fix for another minute or so before speaking.

  “Seems to me our problem is this. You got no throw-weight here, nephew. You’re only one aggrieved individual. Your affiliate wikis are irrelevant to the cause. But if we could get the whole country behind you, that’d be a different story.”

  “And how do we do that?”

  “Well, we could mount a big sob campaign. Get all the oprahs and augenblickers talking about you. Make you and Cherry into Victims of the Week.”

  “Oh, man, I don’t know if I want to go that route. There’s no guarantee we wouldn’t come out of it looking like jerks anyway.”

  “Right, right. Well, I guess that leaves only one option—”

  “What’s that?”

&
nbsp; FooDog grinned with the nearly obscene delight he always expressed when tackling a task deemed impossible by lesser mortals.

  “If we want satisfaction, we’ll just have to take over the UWA.”

  7. STARTING AT THE TOP

  I had always steered clear of politics. Which is not to say I had neglected any of my civic duties. Voting on thousands of day-to-day decisions about how to run my neighbourhood, my city, my state, my bioregion and the UWA as a whole. Debating and parsing Wikitustional Amendments. Helping to formulate taxes, tariffs and trade agreements. Drafting criminal penalties. Just like any good citizen, I had done my minute-to-minute share of steering the country down a righteous path.

  But I never once felt any desire to formally join one of the wikis that actually performed the drudgery of implementing the consensus-determined policies and legislation.

  The Georgetown Girls. The Slick Willy Wonkettes. The Hamilfranksonians. The Founding Flavours. The Rowdy Rodhamites. The Roosevelvet Underground. The Cabal of Interns. The Technocratic Dreamers. The Loyal Superstition. The Satin Stalins. The Amateur Gods. The Boss Hawgs. The Red Greens. The Rapporteurs. The Harmbudsmen. The Shadow Cabinet. The Gang of Four on the Floor. The Winston Smiths. The Over-the-Churchills.

  Maybe, if you’re like me, you never realized how many such groups existed, or how they actually coordinated.

  By current ubik count, well over five hundred political wikis were tasked with some portion of running the UWA on non-local levels, each of them occupying some slice of the political/ideological/intellectual spectrum and performing one or another “governmental” function.

  Each political wiki was invested with a certain share of proportional power based on the number of citizens who formally subscribed to its philosophy. The jimmywhales of each wiki formed the next higher level of coordination. From their ranks, after much traditional politicking and alliance building, they elected one jimmywhale to Rule Them All.