Ribofunk

by Paul Di Filippo

  But a small, alert wren-form bird, like the one alighting now upon the window sill, was anticipated by neither system.

  The bird surveyed the nursery interior.

  The walls held embedded silicrobe animated pictures: fairytale characters that capered across the constantly shifting backgrounds. The Big Bad Wolf pursued a cloaked Little Red Riding Hood; the young ballerina in her cursed red slippers danced till exhausted.

  In the middle of the room stood a white biopolymer crib shaped like an egg halved along its long dimension and resting in a bip support base. The Bayer logo blinked orange from portside. In the crib lay a naked baby boy of several months, tummy up. Above him floated a mobile representing the Earth and some of its myriad orbiting artificial satellites. The large globe revolved and its tiny attendants spun in their intricate, never-intersecting orbital dance supported only by shaped magnetic fields emitted from the crib.

  Beneath the baby was a Blankie, its Ixsys brandmark plain in one corner.

  The Blankie was approximately as big as a large bath towel. Its glycoprotein-glycolipid paradermal surface was colored a delicate pastel blue and resembled in texture antique eggcrate bedding foam. Except that the individual nubbins of the Blankie were much more closely spaced, and in the shallow dimples of the Blankie gleamed a subtle organic sheen like a piece of raw liver.

  The bird flew from its perch on the sill and landed on the crib’s edge, its claws clutching the material of the Bayer halfshell.

  At that point two things happened.

  All of the flat silicrobe characters on the wall stiffened and stopped. The Woodsman, who had just emerged to rescue the swallowed Little Red Riding Hood, was the one exception. He dropped his one-dimensional axe and began to yell.

  “Intruder! Intruder! All security kibes to the nursery!”

  Simultaneous with the alert, the baby began to pee. A fountain of yellow shot up a few centimeters from it.

  When the first drops of pee hit the Blankie, it responded in its trophic instinctive way. The portion of the Blankie between the boy’s legs elongated like a pseudopod or flap and reached up to cap and drink the urine for its own metabolic purposes, simultaneously cleaning and drying the infant’s wet skin.

  The bird dropped down into the crib while the Blankie was preoccupied. It jabbed its beak into the Blankie. Then, in one spastic implosive moment it pumped the contents of its nonbasal nasal sacs into the Blankie.

  In a flash, its load of venom delivered, the bird darted to the rim of the crib and launched itself toward the window.

  Now alert, the window caught it instantly in a flash-extruded web of Ivax Stickum.

  The bird self-destructively exploded, charring the windowframe.

  In the crib the Blankie was writhing and churning like a wounded octopus. Fractal blooms whipped up from it, then fell across the baby, who began to cry.

  Within a second or two, the blooms coalesced into a blue webwork. When a strand fell across the baby’s mouth, its cries ceased.

  The door to the nursery flew open and assorted kibernetics appeared.

  But it was too late.

  The Blankie tightened its embrace like a basal anaconda.

  The sounds of snapping bones were registered by the confused and helpless kibes.

  * * *

  I popped the silver datapins from the player, abruptly terminating the sounds of little Harry Day-Lewis’s death, collected less than a day ago. Although I had watched the tragedy unfold a dozen times since then, I hadn’t quite yet gotten used to that fatal, snapping-sticks sound. I doubted I ever would.

  I was sitting in my office in the building that housed the Boston branch of the North Aanerican Union’s Internal Recon and Security division. Although I had occupied this fiftieth-floor corner room for sixteen months, since my last promotion, it still felt alien to me. All those years operating my own private investigating firm out of increasingly cheaper quarters had left me unused to luxuries such as Organogenesis self-cleaning carpets and Zeneca squirmonomic chairs. Not to mention the steady posting to my eft-account.

  But I had had to get out of the PI biz after the job I had done for Geneva Hippenstiel-Imhausen. That had been my last case before my crackup.

  While booting her husband, I had lost my sidekick, a useless low-end splice named Hamster. If you had asked me prior to the murder of the cut-rate transgenic what the little shag meant to me, I would have said zepto-nothing. But there was a lot I hadn’t known about myself back then, and my fatherly affection for the splice had been one such secret.

  I had purchased Hamster right after my wife left me and apparently had transferred a lot of unresolved feelings to it. Anyway, that’s what Doctor Varela, the expert in Behavioral Pragmatics, had told me during my analysis. But the beep analysis hadn’t happened until I hit planck-bottom, winding up in a clinic for mel-heads. In illegal doses, the melatonin-analogue-based trope I became addicted to let me sleep all day except for an hour or two, lost in pleasant dreams inspired by a second trope, TraumWerks (produced, ironically enough, by the H-I gembaitch owned by my ex-client).

  I had wasted away to a muscleless ninety pounds before a routine sweep of streetlife picked me up and deposited me in Varela’s rehab joint.

  When I got out, officially a functioning member of society again, I had opted to continue in law-enforcement, rather than be regrooved for a different job. Accepted by the IRS, I had started as a simple walkabout operating out of my Kenmore Square koban, eventually reaching my current status, a detective in the Unit for Polypeptide Classification and Monitoring, better known as the Protein Police. (Our motto: “We collect strings.”)

  Now, rolling the datapins reflectively between my fingers, as if hoping to feel the intangible nanoscratches that encoded Harry Day-Lewis’s death, I wondered if maybe I was getting too old for this job. I had thought I was used to nasty. But this was a new magnitude of evil.

  My office door said, “Kasimzhomart Saunders wishes to enter.”

  “Let him in.”

  K-mart was my current human partner. His parents had emigrated to the NU from Kazakhstan during the tumult of the Last Jihad. As NUish as me, he looked more exotic, affecting a dark complexion, Mongolian topknot and long drooping mustachios. Today he wore a sleeveless shirt (at our rank, uniforms were not mandatory) that bore the demand of the Selfless Viridians: “Give me euthanasia or give me death!” My partner was big into irony.

  Waggling his poqetpal significantly in the air, K-mart said, “Finally got the burst on the Day-Lewis family. Their respective peltsies took their time cleaning up the data. Ran it through a dozen intelligent filters before they’d release it. No proprietary secrets left. But there’s still everything we need. Want a squirt?”

  “Sure. Pipe it over.”

  The file showed up on my desk screen a second later. I picked up the flimsy and flung it at the wall like a floppy pizza. The flexistik screen clung upside down, sensed its new orientation, and flipped its display Now both K-mart and I could read it.

  After letting me have a quick scan, K-mart summarized. “Standard plutes. Politics just what you’d expect from members of the tekhnari. Semideviationist nouveau peronistas. Marshall, the plug, works for Xytronyx, field-testing mosaics. The socket, Melisma, heads a crada sired by Cima Labs out of Phenix Biocomposites. No major kinks—except for occasional separate visits to Hedonics Plus. She favors the Paris Percheron lines, while he goes in for the Moon Moth.”

  I made an admonishing mudra as deftly as I could, lacking hyperflexion. “Unless this is strictly necessary—”

  K-mart smiled at the notion of having official access to the peccadillos of others. He was still young. “Just thought you should know all the angles. Anyway, they decided to put the prodge together last year, when their combined eft topped two hundred kay. Set themselves up as prime candidates for a kidnapping and ransom demand from any posse of wackos. Sons of Dixie, League of Country Gentlemen, Radical Optimists, Plus Fourierists, you name ’em—they�
�d all like a crack at such a scion.”

  “But there was nothing overt, right? No warning posts, no anonymous messenger splices, no letter bombs?”

  “Right. The attack on the Blankie was the first sign of any trouble.”

  “No chance they’re behind it themselves? Some insurance scam? Post-vitrio depression?”

  “Nope. If you want to drop the pins on the interrogation, you’ll see how authentically quenched they were.”

  “I didn’t really think so. But you have to trace all the pathways.”

  K-mart twirled his mustachios like some reductionist-paradigm villain. “You know what I figure?”

  “What?”

  “The Blankie itself was supposed to do the kidnapping. Crawl away with the prodge out the window, after it got its subversion-shot from the bird. But the ganglia-mappings were screwy—bad engineering—and the heist went sour.”

  I thought about K-mart’s theory for a moment. It just didn’t ring true to me. How would the combined mass of the Blankie and its human burden have gotten past the sensate alarm? Surely any kidnappers sophisticated enough to gimmick a bird like that would have considered such a crucial detail. Maybe the Blankie could have bypassed the house’s circuits somehow after its alteration. But then where would the pickup have occurred? I couldn’t picture the Blankie inch-worming its way through town unnoticed. And there had been no suspicious intruders located in the immediate neighborhood. No, the whole kidnapping angle, although it was the obvious answer, seemed wrong somehow.

  “These Blankies—I’ve never heard of them before this. Are they new? “

  K-mart chased down a few hyperlinks and found the information. “Ixsys submitted all the documentation and beta-test results on them six months ago. The NUdies approved the Blankies for the domestic market a month after that. Global licensing from the WTO still pending.”

  “What’s their market-share?”

  “Only ten percent. The Blankies don’t have a lot of the higher functions of other childminders. Most parents still favor Carebears and Mother Gooses when the prodge gets a little older. But the Blankies are cheap and easy for round-the-clock sanitary functions and monitoring. They never sleep, for one thing. Helps explain how they went from a zero to ten share in just under half a year.…”

  I got up from my imipolex seat, which flattened out into its default shape, awaiting the next occupant. “Sign a lie-detector out of the stables.” I didn’t work with the IRS splices directly anymore, leaving that part of the job to K-mart. “We’re going to pay the swellheads and trumps at Ixsys a little visit.”

  “You smell corprotage?”

  “Does the Goddess’s Daughter on Earth wear Affymax tits?”

  * * *

  Like many peltsies and beeves, Ixsys had no centralized headquarters per se , being a distributed organization. The local node was just a few minutes away from central Boston, in the edge city of Newton.

  I met K-mart down on the street. He had signed out both a cruiser and a lie-detector. The vehicle was a standard Daewoo Euglenia, the hydrogen source for its ceramic engine plain water continuously and smoothly broken down by a bioreactor full of cytofabbed algae with photon input piped from roof solar traps. The lie-detector was an Athena Neurosci Viper model. With a combination of infrared, vomeronasal and lateral-line sensory input, the transgenic creature could read epidermal and subdermal blood-flow, as well as ambient pheromone and respiratory data, right off a suspect to make its judgment on veracity. With basal humans, its accuracy rate approached unity; highly modified subjects introduced varying degrees of uncertainty. But most innocent citizens didn’t sport the kind of moddies necessary to defeat a Viper, and the presence of such blocks was in itself evidence of a sort. In my book, if not a court of law.

  “I’ll drive,” said K-mart, and we all got in, the Viper sinuously slithering into the backseat without saying anything.

  The bawab at the Ixsys node was one of their massive Ottoman Eunuch models, 15 percent human pedigree, the rest a mix of simian and water buffalo. I saw the same kind as doorman at my apartment complex every night. He towered over us, his shaggy head level with the door’s lintel. The scimitar by his side was, I knew, really a quick-lysing device: liquid protease compressed in the handle could be released as a spray from micropores in the blade, melting flesh in picoseconds.

  The Eunuch growled wordlessly when he saw our lack of Ixsys tags. But a flash of our UPCM idents triggered a hardwired servility response, and he let us in.

  We hadn’t called ahead, not wishing to precipitate any kind of cover-your-ass reaction. (Although news of the Day-Lewis murder had already been culled from the net and disseminated by millions of newsie demons throughout the metamedium, and any half-smart executive with damage suits glimmering in his brain would have already gotten ready for our visit.) So we had to wait while the receptionist arranged for one of the Ixsys trumps to meet us. I spent my time admiring the colorful, throbbing, hot-blooded plants in their terrariums and tiying to decipher the circuit diagrams of signaling pathways that hung decoratively on the walls.

  The company rep finally emerged: a broadly smiling young plug with a modest crest of small bronze-colored dragon-like spines running from his brow over his head and down his back, his suit slit to accomodate them. Pride in a recent degree in biobiz administration was written all over his face. Sacrificial lamb, an expendable toe dipped into possibly shark-infested waters. Achieve maximal deniability at all costs. It made me sick.

  He stuck out his hand. “Pleased to meet you, Officers. I’m Tuck Kitchener, in charge of community relations and risk bubble analysis. How can I help you?”

  “You’re aware of yesterday’s Blankie murder, I take it?”

  Kitchener tsk-tsked. “Most unfortunate and deplorable. A clear case of warranty violation. The Blankie should never have been exposed to exo-avian secretagogues under any circumstances. The owners of the Blankie were clearly at fault. I hope you agree. There’s no question of corporate responsibility, is there?”

  “I don’t know yet. That’s why we’re here. I’d like a look at your design facilities. Talk to the team members responsible for the Blankie.”

  “Why, certainly! Nothing could be easier. If you’ll just accompany me to the sterilization lock—”

  Before long, K-mart, the Viper and I were sluiced, dusted, and wrapped. The exit procedure would be even stricter, involving internal search-and-destroy, to insure we didn’t try to smuggle any proprietary secrets out.

  Once through the lock, we made our way past breeding vats and reactors, paragenesis chambers and creches, wunderkammers and think-tanks, all staffed by efficiently bustling Ixsys staff.

  “As you can see,” Kitchener said boastfully, “we run a tight ship here. All by the regs. No spills, no chills, that’s our byword—”

  K-mart interrupted. “We’re not inspectors from NUSHA, Peej Kitchener. We’re the Protein Police. And we’re trying to solve a murder. A murder involving one of your products.”

  It still amazes me that anyone falls for good-cop-bad-cop, but they do. Uncertain of who was senior, Kitchener looked imploringly at me. But I just raised my eyebrows. The young trump began nervously to stroke his cranial comb, which bent like stiff rubber. “Ah, yes, of course. Why don’t we proceed directly with your interview of the Blankie team?”

  “Why don’t we?”

  So Kitchener took us to the swellheads.

  Although I had dealt with doublebrains in the line of duty before, the sight of their naked bulging encephaloceles always made me somewhat queasy. Cradled in their special neckbrace support chairs, surrounded by their digitools and virtuality hookups, their basal metabolisms necessarily supplemented with various nutritional and trope exofeeds, they seemed to regard us visitors with a cold Martian scrutiny.

  K-mart appeared unaffected by the massed clammy gaze of the eight Cerebrally Enhanced—or at least capable of putting up a better front than I —and plunged right into querying the swells.
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  “Okay—how many backdoors did you jokers install in the Blankie ganglia?”

  The team members exchanged significant glances among themselves, then one spoke. “I am Simon, the leader of the octad. I shall answer your questions. There are no hidden entrypoints. All is as the published specs declare.”

  “For the moment, I’ll assume that’s true.” K-mart glanced meaningfully at our Viper, who had not objected yet. But I wondered how good its skills would be against the swells. “Who did you steal from to build it? Come on, I know you seebens are always plundering each other’s finds. Who’s got a mindworm against Ixsys and wants you to look bad?”

  Simon actually betrayed a tiny measure of affronted dignity. “We derive all our insights and findings direct from the numinous sempiternal sheldrakean ideosphere. Our labors are unremitting and harsh, as we prospect among uncharted territories of ideospace. To accuse us of theft is to demean our very existence!”

  The rest of the interrogation went just as awkwardly, yielding nothing. Finally even the tenacity of K-mart wilted.

  As we were leaving, my partner turned to the recumbent CE’s and said, “See y’all at Madame Muskrat’s, boys!”

  We headed slowly toward the exit, while I tried to think of another lead. Kitchener’s smug look didn’t help my concentration.

  Then something from the Day-Lewis bio came back to me. The father’s job.

  I turned to Kitchener. “Who field-tested the Blankie?”

  “Ah, that employee is currently on extended leave—”

  “He is lying,” said the Viper.

  Pay dirt! K-mart jumped in.

  “Allow me to read you your rights under the NU Treaty. You have the right to a kibernetic counsel rated at Turing Level Five —”

  Kitchener laughed like a man caught with his hand in his pants at a Amish church picnic. “Certainly you don’t intend to arrest me for a mere slip of the tongue, Officers? What I meant to say is that the employee in question had to be fired under prejudicial circumstances.”