Ribofunk

by Paul Di Filippo

“This is an assent?”

  “Does the Goddess use tampons?”

  The poptate churned its heuristics for ten seconds, then began to brew us our sidechains.

  “Want to sit by the pond?” asked Jinx, after the drinks were mixed.

  “Sure.”

  I carried the juices, and we found an empty bench on the grassy marge of the small ornamental pond. Two or three baseline ducks were paddling in the reeds, and I was reminded of my dumb id2 and Honeysuckle’s sexy one.

  I plopped down on the syalon seat, and Jinx used his strong arms to lever himself up beside me. Sitting together like this, his head nearly on a level with mine, it was easy to forget his lack of legs.

  We clinked our glasses, and I quoted the ADM jingle.

  “‘Peace of mind—’”

  “‘—for a nudollar ninety-nine!’” finished Jinx.

  We downed our brews and waited for the effects.

  The tropes had been expertly reverse-engineered from a sampling of meditating monks: in the case of Jinx’s drink, from the mind of the Dalai Lama himself. In a minute or so, the world took on a shimmering translucence, and I felt connected to the whole universe. Nothing mattered, but everything counted. All my problems were nonexistent.

  Staring out over the perfect pond, I saw the surface ripple in the middle, then break to reveal the finned back of an airfish making the phase-change into the second half of its life.

  We had just studied the specs on these splices, and they rushed into my brain in perfect arrays.

  Having filled its flotation bladders with hydrogen broken out of the water and revamped its physiology, the airfish was now ready to live in the atmosphere. It would subsist for a few months on airborne microzooa, spore, and pollen, all the while sucking low-level ozone from the air and concentrating it in a different bladder. Rising higher and higher, it would eventually burst at around 15,000 meters, the lower edge of the ozone layer, releasing its cargo of reactive molecules where they would do good, not harm.

  Highly unslouch. Truly nonfactorable goldstar-plus cytofabrication. I definitely wasn’t down with the kids who’d try to shoot the O3-suckers with flashlights just to watch the hydrogen mini-explosion.

  Jinx spoke up with deep significance. “The airfish is born, becomes adult, does its work, then dies.”

  Without satori tropes, Jinx’s words probably don’t mean much, or else sound ultra-simplex. But I can’t tell you what they meant to me then. They seemed to encapsulate our whole situation in a nutshell.

  “We’re ’fish too,” I answered. “But we’re also more than ’fish.”

  “You’re bright as a three-alarm solar flare, girl!”

  I knew then that I loved Jinx and would always be with him.

  At that very moment, as if in confirmation of our love, another couple wandered in to sit on the bench next to us.

  The woman wore Systemix meat, a Great Mother soma-type. Dressed only in a grass skirt, she had a double line of small breasts running down her torso, and her hips were broad as the lake behind the Yellow River dam.

  Her companion’s silicrobe trademark told me he was racked out by Cellpro. And what a superstring raster he was! Hawkheaded Horus, noble falcon plumage mantling his shoulders.

  Jinx and I looked on in mute admiration for several minutes. In the midst of our trope-induced satori, the couple seemed like heavenly visitors. Even after the glamour had worn off our vision, they still looked megatrump, if merely human.

  Ignoring us, the adults quaffed their drinks. (Horus’s pointy birdtongue was ultra-uptake!) The brews must have been some kind of aphrodelix, since the couple soon started into some heavy petting. Horus’s loincloth quickly became a tent, and I got awfully jealous and sad at the same time.

  “Jinx,” I pleaded irrationally, “let’s use Honeysuckle’s card to get the moddies we’ve always talked about, then run away together!”

  Jinx held my hand. “Arnie, think twice. Putting legs on me is no simplex patch job. I’d be laid up for days. We couldn’t travel very far even in a hired scar-car without leaving a trail even a senile augie-doggie could follow. Honeysuckle would be pissing prostaglandins at the theft of her card. And then our poohs—or yours anyway—would snatch us back, and the next thing you know, we’d be wearing obedience collars like some splice! No, the only thing to do is to hold out for a year. It’s not such a long time.…”

  Jinx spoke with the voice of reason, and I knew what he advocated was the only sensible course. Still, my whole soul rebelled at the notion of going on with our boring lives without doing something, especially when we’d have to face all our cohort tomorrow.

  I stood up. “I guess the only thing left to do then is to get spiked. At least it’ll show our poohs we’ve got wills of our own. And it should shut Honeysuckle right up. Are you in a dedicated mode?”

  Jinx boosted himself off the bench, thumping onto the grass. “Does a carebear sit in the pedwards?”

  I laughed. “G-Gnome, here we come!”

  Slidewalk Seven was only a one-block stroll north of us, so we chose that transport over the Arteries.

  If you pulled out a length of your intestines and slit it longwise, you’d expose the velvety microvilli lining, the zillions of little fingers that propel food through your gut. You’d also have a pretty good model of a slidewalk.

  The sturdy silicrobe microvilli of the slidewalk propelled anything placed atop them along at a steady 5kph. (You could ride the network cross-continent in just a month, if you wanted to spend your vacation that boring way, like many slouch oldsters did.) Each invisible finger was rooted in place, yet flexible enough to pass on its burden to its neighbor. (In constant motion, the slidewalks conveyed a visual impression similar to the waveriness of heated syalon pavement. And if you rode them barefoot, they tickled almost subliminally.) Different lanes had different built-in directional orientations, for two-way travel.

  The Amgen motto—”Taxis, not taxis”—was spelled out right in the substance of the slidewalks. I remembered having to have my dads explain it to me when I was little, since I never knew that “tax-us” could also be pronounced “tax-ease,” or even what they were.

  Jinx swung himself deftly onboard with the other passengers, vars, kibes, and citizens, and I had to stutter-skip to stay with him. I wasn’t usually so awkward, but guess I was kind of nervous about our plans, even though I thought I had convinced myself it was the only way.

  As if sensing my unease, Jinx tried to make me laugh. “Did you ever download any reductionist paradigm fiction where the author tried to imagine a system like this and came up with miles of rubber belts on rollers?”

  Jinx’s trick worked, and I laughed like a hyena splice. “That’s not true. You’re yanking my rods.”

  Jinx held up one hand. “Parity-plus, Arnie. I’ll give you the urals, and you can see for yourself.”

  I chuckled some more. Those ancients—where were their heads at?!

  Before too long, we were dismounting at Bughouse Square.

  The thronging Square always reminded me of an old- time carnival midway you might see on some historical channel of the metamedium: lines of garish booths and arcades, peopled by touts and vendors under gaudy silicrobe signage. The centerpiece of the Square, the original Chiron Bughouse, looked positively postmodern, next to the more recent exotic additions to the meatmart.

  Here you could find a chromosartor or genebender or simple trope doser who would perform any possible alteration on your somatype or genotype—for a price. If you had the eft, you could be snipped, ripped or zipped; pumped, stumped or trumped; strobed, lobed or probed; primped, skimped or pimped; vented, scented or demented.

  I stood for a minute or so bathing in the scary, alluring, surreal circus, until Jinx tugged at the hem of my doublet.

  “Let’s find number ten-forty, before we change our minds.”

  Tracking round the Square, past the TATA Box and the Primordium, past the Organelle Store and Radio Shack Biocircuits outlet,
we soon came to the G-Gnome’s Cave.

  Its facade was all fractal-modeled grocrete stalactites and stalagmites framing an irregular entrance curtained by enviromental ribbons.

  I looked at Jinx, and he looked at me. Taking his hand, I tried to be as brave as my truncated spaceling.

  “Let’s get spiked,” I said.

  And we went through the ribbons.

  My dads told me that a decade or two ago there was a rage for somatypes modeled on the characters in some old reedpair fantasy novel, sparked by a new virtuality rendering of the work. So for a while all you saw on the streets were bobbits and snorks and smogs, or creatures with some such names.

  I figured the G-Gnome must have modeled himself on a troll or dwarf or some other runt from that book. His big blue eyes, capped by furry brows, were nearly on a level with Jinx’s, and the G-Gnome was standing on his bandy legs! Two tufts of snowy fluffaduff sprang from behind his ears and decorated his otherwise bare skull. He wore a leather bib apron over a Windskin suit, and his hands were more massive than Jinx’s.

  To have maintained the same outdated look all these years made me think he was a conservative, slowmole kind of guy, and I instantly felt better to be putting myself in his brawny hands, so reassuringly similar to my proxy’s.

  “Children,” the G-Gnome rumbled, “how can I help you?”

  “We’re here—” I began, then stopped.

  A thrid-vid display had come on at our arrival, and now, cycling through a display of the G-Gnome’s wetwares, it had reached the boobs.

  They were so beautiful. Conical or melony, brown or creamy, drip-nippled or virgin-tipped, they were like taunting mirages in my personal desert.

  It was all I could do to turn back to the G-Gnome and beg, “Please, shut that off.” With my luck, the next thing shown would be a variety of the cocks Jinx lacked.

  The proprietor complied, and I could breathe.

  “Thank you. We’re here to get spikes.”

  The G-Gnome’s professional smile never wavered, but I could sense something tightening inside him.

  “You have your parents’—”

  “We’ve got this,” I said, and offered Honeysuckle’s card.

  Taking it, the G-Gnome flexed it back and forth with a noncommittal expression, but I could see nudollar signs in his eyes.

  “Peej Rancifer lent you her card without, ah, duress? …”

  I tried a haughty sniff like Honeysuckle used. “Of course. We’re the best of friends.”

  “There should be no problem then.”

  “I hope not,” I said, as the G-Gnome’s words made my knees go watery.

  “Please, be seated.”

  When Jinx and I were side by side, the G-Gnome activated the display again. But this time it ran through the various models of spike.

  By the second rep, we had made up our minds.

  “I’ll take the Staghorns,” said Jinx.

  “And I’ll take the Coral Cage.”

  “Very fine choices, both. The placement of each differs slightly. The Staghorns are implanted in the frontal region, whereas the Cage tends more toward the temporals.”

  The G-Gnome had donned gloves while he was talking and now squeezed from a tube a line of paste. He approached Jinx and rubbed the goop into his skull, up front.

  Then he did the same to me, more toward the middle of my head.

  Carefully peeling off the gloves and dropping them into a D-Grade-All unit, the G-Gnome said, “A mix of topical anesthetic and bonemelt. It takes a few moments to work. I shall debit Peej Rancifer’s card while we wait, if you have no objections.”

  When he was done with that, the G-Gnome went to a cabinet, from which he removed the spikes.

  I had never seen the things except on the metamedium, where they were always filtershot real sexy, so I was unprepared for how innocuous they looked in real life: just a pair of square-ish, pointy, drab—well, spikes, like the kind you might find holding down reedpair railroad ties.

  Next from the cabinet came a shiny chrome-handled, rubber-headed mallet.

  And with this, the G-Gnome drove the spikes into our heads.

  I couldn’t feel anything, even when the spike penetrated my dura mater. That G-Gnome was slouch-negative! He had that single tap down perfect. Naturally, I should have known that Honeysuckle and her family would patronize only the best.

  Next, the G-Gnome slapped crawlypatches on our arms and began to lecture us.

  “These are nutraceutical supplements. You’re going to need them. The spikes will be utilizing some of your body’s energy to grow. Even with the patches, you’ll want to stoke up with something like Genzyme Carbprot afterwards, to make up for the loss.”

  Now I could half-feel ghostly invasions of my cranium. Right on cue, the G-Gnome explained, “The spikes are growing osteo-anchors, as well as paraneurons that will interface with yours. That’s how they’re able to control the color and pattern changes that reflect your moods. Once the endogrowth is done, the exogrowth will begin. Let me get a mirror.”

  The G-Gnome wheeled a digital mirror into place and turned it on, just in time.

  The exogrowth, the visible part of the process, was starting.

  From the single spike centered in Jinx’s head, a pair of antlers began to develop, magnificent self-similar branchings.

  From mine a rough coral stalk shot straight up. When it reached a height of about eight centimeters, it began to overspread into a gorgeous latticework umbrella.

  Jinx and I watched ourselves and each other admiringly in the mirror, while the G-Gnome smiled benevolently on.

  By the time the growth was finished, we were already adjusting to the novel weight of our new accessories. Jinx’s antlers almost doubled his height, while my cage had stopped at nose level like a living lace veil.

  “How do I look?” asked Jinx, his antlers flaring a crimson I knew from metamedium shows meant excitement.

  “Very muskophallic! How about me?”

  “Brain coral goddess!”

  The G-Gnome clapped his hands together, and we knew he was eager for us to leave.

  “I’m glad you’re pleased. Remember, removal is a rather more time-consuming and costly process.”

  “Oh, we’d never want to get rid of them!” I said.

  On the way out, Jinx had a little trouble with the door-ribbons catching on his rack, but aside from that, everything went superstring.

  Until we got home, of course.

  Jinx came in with me, and my poohs just lost it.

  I will never ever forget the sight of them that day. They kind of scared even me, their own daughter, who should be used to them.

  My dads are biological brothers who were in the same IMF assault unit during the last Short War. They were lying in a trench together, under enemy fire, when a shell was lobbed in on them.

  The weapon contained some weird parazyme that no one’s ever quite figured out yet. What it did was to fuse my dads together everywhere they were touching, as well as introduce a lot of collateral damage and changes, right down to the mitochondrial level.

  The bonescrapers patched them up as best they could. Ironically, they had to use a couple of bulgy remora-cords to join them even more symbiotically, since Alvin and Calvin had to share a lot of cytokines to stay alive.

  When they were demobbed, their experiences led them to join the Moderationists, for whom they became instant and effective spokesmen.

  I came along as a teratoma.

  My dads kept developing these squelchy growths all over their bodies, which the bonies kept removing. One of the growths had more than usual baseline human structure to it, and my dads got the idea that it would be nice to turn it into a daughter. It cost a lot, both in eft and in compromise of their noninterventionist principles. But they were really kind of lonely, and I guess the Moderationists finally relented on the dogma part.

  Naturally, I’m glad they did.

  So anyhow, there my Siamese dads stood, linked by flesh
and remora-cords straining fit to burst, shouting their heads off at me and Jinx, whose spike growths were turning green with contrition and purple with sorrowful anger at how innocent kids like us always got quenched in the end.

  To make a long story short, we had to get rid of the spikes (but not before everyone in our cohort saw us with them), and Honeysuckle’s parents had to pay for it all, and she had her estrogen shut off for a month, and Jinx, my darling Jinx, got sent back to Asgard.

  But I really am not worried. Like Jinx said, a year is not such a long time to wait till we’re franchised.

  And after seeing me with a spike, there wasn’t much resistance from the poohs a month later, when I pleaded one last time for tits.

  And they’re from a much classier vendor’s line than hers!

  UP THE LAZY RIVER

  1. Muscle Fatigue

  Flying northwest, parallel to the interface of the River Seven bankside forest and the manicured savannah, across which herds of null-sophont cultivars roamed peacefully, Norodom Dos Santos grieved for his hyperfluid charge.

  Normally, River Seven appeared from the air as a thick two-toned viscous snake, subtly pulsing in controlled opposing flows. Constrained by its mostly baseline geophysical channel, two-thirds dirty quicksilver grey and one-third matte black, it resembled a stripe of gel like the squeezings from a tube of antique toothpaste.

  Today, River Seven lacked its usual luster, seemed lifeless and dispirited, victim of the unexplained changes Dos Santos was speeding to investigate.

  I’m personifying the River again, Dos Santos mildly chided himself. What would Master Trexler think of such imprecision in one of his students?

  After all, even dead, Trexler still exhibited all those old personality traits which a Turing Level Eight platform was capable of emulating, and one did not care to disappoint him.

  Transferring his Synergen-grown craft to kibe autopilot (a simple TL4), Dos Santos resolved to abandon sentimentalism for work. Prompting his higher centers into microsleep, he freed up paraneurons to run deep plectic simulations of the River’s failure.

  Midway through the third evocation, disaster struck.