The Artificial Kid

by Bruce Sterling

  “And take your bug-trees with you!” I yelled after it, heaping branches onto the fire.

  We took turns keeping watch, Anne first. Insects were attracted by the light from our fire, but did not fly into it; they were precision navigators. As night’s darkness grew denser, we heard rustling in the branches, and small furry animals with the tired, wrinkled eyes of debauchees ambled up out of the darkness to look us over. Occasionally these animals, which Crossbow called “squirrels,” would catch a moth and eat it, but with an abstracted, bored air that suggested that they were doing us a favor.

  During my watch, the last one, the fire burned low again. To save effort I dragged in a large log and heaped it on the fire, and a horde of ants large as crickets poured out of the log. The warrior ants had long nozzles in their heads and they assaulted us with spurts of glue and formic acid, so that we were forced to retreat to the top of the limestone crag that sheltered us.

  We dumped our provisions out of the tent and pegged it to the top of the crag. We slept uncomfortably, painfully gouged by hard limestone lumps under the tent floor. We awoke well before dawn and sat up in the darkness, stiff with boredom. When it finally dawned we found that most of our shiny objects, including our knives and hatchets, had been stolen during the night. We also found that our seaweed cakes were riddled with tiny weevils.

  “Oh well, they add protein,” said Crossbow nonchalantly, and he ate them. Anne and I forced ourselves to follow his example. They had a nutlike, slightly bitter flavor.

  We marched on. As the terrain continued to descend, springs grew more frequent, but the going was much rougher. The chunks of limestone appeared more often; the trees declined in height, and we began to see increasing signs of the presence of the Mass. Green tree-leaves were splotched with faintly furred patches of white. Damp furred masses like thin white throw-rugs clung to the trunks of trees. The ground grew noticeably damper underfoot, and some of the trees showed heavy knees and buttresses for support in the wet soil.

  We began to spot pools and sinkholes. With a sigh of relief, Crossbow flung itself into a wide pool, sank beneath the surface, and did not return for half an hour. Then it came back, its ribs convulsing as it choked out a lungful of water, exulting over the network of water-caves it had found beneath the surface. While I climbed a tree in search of dead branches for a fire, Crossbow paddled around the pond, catching aquatic game with its long, agile fingers. We built a fire in a natural depression in a limestone slab and had roast turtle and fish steamed in bladdered pondweed. It tasted marvelous in our famished mouths, and we napped for three hours in the afternoon while Crossbow snoozed comfortably at the pond’s weedy margin. Mosquitoes bit us, and I swatted one whose hair-thin legs were suspiciously furred.

  We had to force ourselves awake again, but we could not afford to waste the daylight hours. Violating our natural circadian rhythms, we staggered to our feet and plodded on as if dosed with depressants. I took a little smuff for the soreness in my legs. The wounds in my arms and torso were already almost healed, and the busy follicle mites were devouring the edible stitches still sunk in the pink new flesh.

  The forest was giving way to swamp. The trees were shorter and broader in the base, with thicker bark, and we found larger and larger areas where the earth squelched messily under our tired feet. We had to skirt more sinkholes and broad marshes where the shimmering water was half-hidden under the thick leaves of fleshy aquatic plants. Many of the plants were white, and there were areas where different species of plants were gummed together by a surface froth of sticky Mass material. The forest canopy overhead grew thinner and thinner and finally disappeared altogether in places, leaving the afternoon sun shining almost blindingly off glittering expanses of shallow marshwater.

  Crossbow dealt easily with the water in our path; it simply plunged in and swam, leaving us to wade along as best we could, our feet wrinkling up in our shoes like stewed fruit. Sometimes we sank neck deep and paddled after the neuter, clinging to the airtight tent for support.

  Finally we discovered that the wet ground beneath us had degenerated into the “trembling earth” of a true marsh. There was no honest dirt in it. Instead, we walked bent-kneed on wadded mats of decaying vegetation, some of them rooted in squashy mud but others floating free, buoyed up by pockets of trapped gas from decomposition. Luckily there were still many firm islands that had collected around the roots of groves of mighty aquatic trees. We dried off at the islands when we could, eating sparingly of berries from thorny marsh vines, weaving mats to sit on from the green waxy stalks of pliant rushes. Blobs of wet white moss dangled from the tree branches. We found several trees that were almost devoured with fur, but they seemed healthy; the cranes and egrets of the marsh nested in them without fear, and even thatched their nests with bits of fuzz.

  When night fell we camped on the largest island we could find. While I looked for firewood I killed three snakes with my nunchuck. Crossbow had throttled an immense snapping turtle; he assured us that the turtles were safe to eat, while some of the most innocuous-looking fish were full of subtle poisons. We picked pink leeches from Crossbow’s back while it cleaned the turtle with a tiny dissection scalpel, the only knife we had left.

  Day in the marsh had been full of the cries of birds, but with night they slept and the night was alive with ghastly roars from furry mammalian crocodiles. Glowing blobs of swamp gas drifted over the waters. A few yards from our campsite we heard something huge emerge from the water, splashing and washing. We sat quietly until we heard it blunder off into the trees.

  “The marsh drains into a major river a few miles from this spot,” said Crossbow cheerfully. Its long immersion in the water had done wonders for its morale. “By late tomorrow we’ll be strolling down the river to the sea.”

  We ate the turtle and fell into an exhausted stupor, trusting to our large bonfire to keep predators away. We slept almost twelve hours and awoke about six hours before dawn. We whiled away the time curing what was left of the turtle meat in the smoke. Anne cut my hair with the scalpel, leaving me with close-cropped stubs of rattling plastic.

  Just after dawn I climbed to the top of the largest tree on the island, hoping to get an overview that would help us avoid the worst of the swamp. From above, the swamp was a shattered mosaic of green sawgrass, dark peaty water, and white splotches of Mass material, pitted and threaded by sinkholes and canals. As my eyes followed a morning flock of white egrets, I saw something that shocked me. It was the glint of sunlight off the metallic sides of a pair of huge camera drones. There was no mistaking their silhouettes; they were blunt cylinders studded with audio pickups and trailing jointed manipulative arms. They were big ones; ten feet long at least. They were less than a mile away, cruising in a purposeful way over the swamp.

  I drew my own cameras in close, fearful lest it should spot them with a telephoto. After a moment my surprise and dread faded into curiosity. The drones glided noiselessly off to the west, and I relaxed. I climbed down the tree and told Anne and Crossbow about the drones. Anne was interested. “Are they common here?”

  “Hardly,” I said. “But drones are the only legal way to view the Mass. I wish I’d known who their operator was. It could mean plenty of trouble for us. The drones themselves may be harmless, but they could track us and inform on us. We’d better try to hide if we spot them again.” I hesitated. “Good God, what would happen if they caught me with my hair like this?”

  “What about your own cameras?” said Crossbow.

  “You don’t understand, Professor. Chairman, I mean. I can edit my own tapes. I mean, here I am—covered with mud—cropped to the scalp—dirt under the fingernails—an unsympathetic editor could make me look like a buffoon! It could damage me professionally! It’ll take an editor of genius to present this fiasco as the soul-stirring adventure I mean it to be.” I looked around quickly and reflexively, making sure that all my lenses were clean.

  We bolted down some chewy turtle meat and started slogging through t
he swamp again. While Crossbow wallowed unashamedly in the brackish water, Anne and I tried to pick our way through the firmest spots. Sawgrass cut us. Leeches nibbled our legs. Fetterbushes stuck their hooks in our skin and clothing. Broken milkworts drenched us with sweet greenish sap. Frogs clung to our heads. Algae plugged our nostrils. Silver darters tickled us and waterbirds flew at our heads, squawking, when we neared their nests. Our progress was maddeningly slow. Crossbow encouraged us, lolling on its back in the water, offering us the amused, confident advice that one gives to people without one’s natural advantages.

  Finally, when our legs trembled with exhaustion and our clothes and hair were caked with mud and pondweed, we discovered that the land was rising. The ponds grew shallower and were easily waded. Dry-earth trees, whitely blighted with Mass fur, appeared again. We found dirt that would support our weight.

  “We must have made a mistake,” Crossbow said, dragging itself out of the water with a reluctant frown. “The terrain should be falling, not rising. The swamp is supposed to drain here. Water can’t run uphill.”

  “Spare us, Professor,” I said, and Anne said, “It’s so lovely to be on dry land again. This is the right direction, isn’t it? It’ll get us to the sea, won’t it?”

  “I suppose so,” said Crossbow, “but it’s peculiar all the same.” We started walking overland, gaining our second wind now that the long frustration of the swamp was over. We had gone perhaps a mile through a small forest (“Intermediate growth,” sniffed Crossbow, “not full climax. Couldn’t be more than two hundred years old.”) when we heard a wind blowing and noticed the movement of the treetops. The trees stopped in a broken chaos of white limestone rocks, and when we clambered over the rocks we realized that we had come to the edge of a long escarpment.

  In the plain below us festered the center of the Mass. It was almost solid white, and resembled nothing else alive. We saw a nightmare landscape, twisted, contorted, visibly gummy and sticky, filled with lumpy spirals, convolutions, writhings of thick flabby fibers yards across. There were towers in it that might once have been trees, but they were draped with mangled, twisted strips and straps of sticky Mass fibers, as broad as highways. Parts of it seemed to seethe visibly even as we watched, like cells undergoing mitosis. Other areas were as wrinkled as the surface of a brain.

  Half a mile to the east the swamp drained out through a gap in the escarpment in a low waterfall. Mist shrouded the bottom of the fall, but we could see where the stream from the swamp met the sluggish river, and, miles to the east, we saw the glint of the sea.

  “This escarpment is a fault line,” Crossbow said. “Fairly recent, too; a matter of two or three centuries. This explains the peculiar geology of the swamp.” It leaned out precariously to examine the escarpment wall.

  “Do you expect us to march through that?” I said.

  Crossbow pretended not to hear me. “Look at those slickensides,” it mused. “And look at that dark cluster of cave openings in the escarpment wall. I think I can state what happened here. It was the immense weight of the Mass. It caused the underlying network of caves to collapse. This whole continent is riddled with caves, you know. Limestone dissolves very easily.”

  “Listen, I’m not trekking through that mess unless there’s absolutely no other possibility,” I said. “Just look at it! It’s ghastly! It’s moldy! It looks like Death’s cesspool! Isn’t there some way we can skirt around it?”

  Crossbow looked at me patiently. “Do you want to go back through the swamp? Look, we can descend by the falls, and then follow the river quite easily. It will be downhill all the way to the sea.”

  “How do we know it won’t collapse on us? What if we get stuck in it, knee deep? What if we’re eaten away by some kind of ravenous fungus? What if it eats our skin away and we sprout white fuzz all over our bodies.…”

  “Look at that!” said Anne, pointing.

  We looked and then leapt for the cover of a jumble of limestone boulders. It was a camera drone, almost certainly one of the two I had spotted above the swamp. It had the same tapered cylindrical body, the clusters of audio pickups, the pair of manipulative arms, cocked in a position of readiness like the arms of a preying mantis. It stalled momentarily in its patrol over the Mass, and then descended smoothly into one of the Mass’s irregular corrugations. Cautiously, we crept out from behind our cover.

  “I hope it didn’t spot us,” I said. “Those big drones have telephoto lenses and automatic tracking systems like you wouldn’t believe. And that one’s really big, it has room for all kinds of equipment. Infrareds, satellite hookups, odor analysis even.”

  “But could it possibly be looking for us?” said Anne.

  “Professor Angeluce has an interest in the Mass,” I said grimly. “And don’t think that a drone is helpless. Those manipulative arms are computer-controlled. They move fast and they don’t make mistakes. I wouldn’t care to trade punches with a drone.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Crossbow Moses. “Once we are inside the Mass it’ll be the merest good luck if it should find us.”

  “Hold on!” I said. “It’s obvious that you want to hustle us into the Mass, but you might at least take the time to think up a good reason for it. Stop treating us like children. I told you that I’m not going into that poisonous dump unless there’s no other choice.”

  Crossbow stuck its tongue into its cheek and crossed its arms. “Really, Arti, is this melodrama necessary? Your physical bravery should be beyond question. You’ve seen Mass material before. Did it bite you? Did it sting? What are you worried about? I’ve dealt with the Mass before. I give you my word as a microbiologist, and as an Academic, that you’ll come to no harm.” It hesitated at the look of open skepticism on my face. “Come now, Arti. The only reason for your fear is ignorance. It looks very impressive from this height, I know. Let me demystify it for you.”

  With a studied gesture it slipped into its lecturing attitude. “The Mass itself is made up of the Crossbow Body, its attendant micro-organisms, and elements of the Reverid gene pool. The micro-organisms are mostly advanced species of molds and yeasts, and they serve as a binder and an incredibly rich reserve of nutrients. The Crossbow Body traps genes, preserves them, and recombines them. It’s like a gigantic Petri dish, that covers whole square miles. When the genes are recombined, they form a new organism, which is nurtured by the nutrients in molds and yeasts. And it spawns not just simple mold cultures, but species of all kinds: insects, mammals, birds. It’s like a gene bank. And it’s a permanent guarantee against extinction. It is the ultimate advance in the evolutionary battle against death.”

  “You’re saying that birds grow in there?” I said incredulously. “Animals too? Without wombs to grow in? Without sperm cells or egg cells? And they grow to full maturity?”

  “Well, rarely,” admitted Crossbow. “Mostly they grow in little pockets of undifferentiated tissue, and then are broken down again by the Crossbow Body. But the number of captured genes is vastly increased every time that happens. When the concentration of genes of a single species reaches a certain critical point, then a full organism is sometimes produced. Of course its tissue is full of the Crossbow Body, and it serves as a vector for the distribution of the Body. And of course, if it dies, then the cells are broken down again and preserved in a new growth of the Body. It evades death, because its genetic constituents are preserved. The genes are the heart of life. The tissue is just an expression of the genes.”

  I looked out across the white, festering landscape. “I don’t see many ‘full-grown organisms’ down there. There are a few things that look like trees, or things that might have been trees.…”

  Crossbow shrugged. “Well, the growth of full organisms is a bit of an anachronism, anyway, isn’t it? There is no need for adult organisms when reproduction is handled by the Mass. The only real purpose they serve is to spread the Mass by wandering. And once the Mass has taken over the planet, there’ll be no need for that either.”

  “Ta
ken over the planet!” said Anne and I in unison.

  “An event in the distant future,” Crossbow assured us. “The Mass is in no hurry. For one thing, it will have to produce an aquatic form before it can move into the seas.”

  “But that’s horrible!” I said. “You call that living? Little bits of broken cells, trapped in white mush? No forests? No animals? No dance of predator and prey? No intricacy? No sensation? No intelligence?”

  “I tell you that the Mass transcends intelligence! Do you think it has no intricacy, because your great gross eyes can’t see it? On a molecular level, it is the most intricate creation in the known universe!”

  “But it’s just a mindless, devouring fungus!”

  “Mindless? Remember that the basis of thought and memory is molecular. RNA is the sister of DNA. The transfer of genetic material from unit to unit of the Crossbow Body is incredibly complex. Think of the amount of gestalt implied in such an intricate system! Think of the powerful bulwark it presents against the forces of disorder! I’m not saying that its function is perfect as yet—there are accidents, admittedly there are accidents. But intelligence is a function of gestalt—a very weak function, from a very small system! But the complexity here has produced a gestalt function that surpasses intelligence like a bonfire surpasses a spark! Don’t you realize—the Mass has defeated determinism! It has broken the rigid chains of evolution! It has become teleological! It is the quintessence of life—it is the enemy of entropy!” Crossbow looked searchingly into our faces. “How could words ever convince you?” it said. “I knew you could not be convinced until you had seen its power with your own eyes. That’s why we must march through it.”

  “How do we know it won’t grow on us and dissolve us?” I said.