The Artificial Kid

by Bruce Sterling

“I am a vector of the Crossbow Body. So is Moses Crossbow. Did we dissolve?”

  “You mean, if you die, you’ll turn into a mess of white pudding, like that stuff?”

  “The Body would dismantle my cells, yes. But that does not constitute death. My genetic content would be preserved. In all likelihood I would eventually be recreated. Whether I would be re-born in the full sense of the word depends on your definition of identity. I would be a clone. But all neuters are clones, of course.”

  “And if we’re contaminated by the Crossbow Body while we’re marching through the Mass, and we die, then we’ll also be dissolved into white goo? That’s what you’re saying?”

  “What’s so terrible about that?” Crossbow demanded. “If you died in the forest, you’d be eaten by beetles and toadstools. If you died in Telset, you’d be cremated, or—what do they call it? Reefed? Eaten by sharks and rays? Is that any better?”

  “Of course it isn’t,” Anne said vehemently. “What does it matter what happens to us if we have the misfortune to die? Our souls will be reabsorbed into the Infinite—these bodily shells will no longer be our concern. As long as it doesn’t attack us while we’re living, there’s no danger. Isn’t that so, Professor? Mr. Chairman, I mean?”

  “Exactly,” said Crossbow. “Come, we’ve wasted enough time in idle palaver. Let’s find a way to descend the escarpment. No doubt the water draining from the marsh has carved a descendible channel. Let’s try it.” Crossbow got to its feet and began marching along the lip of the escarpment.

  “I don’t like this,” I called after its retreating back, but it did not stop. After a moment Anne hurried after it. I had to choose between following Crossbow Moses, or plunging alone back into the swamp. That was no choice at all.

  On our way to the waterfall it rained hard, soaking us through. Crossbow would not seek shelter; it merely fluffed out its dry gills in a self-satisfied way and trudged on.

  The land sloped by the channel of the waterfall. The way was steep and slick. Mist from the last tumbling of the waterfall soaked us in an explosion of rainbows.

  We stopped at the gushing, roaring pool at the foot of the fall. Long knotted white extensions of Mass fiber, like crippled stems of thick ivy, clung to the limestone base of the escarpment, white against white. “I can’t go on,” I said. “Let’s pitch camp and catch a few hours’ sleep before we plunge into the worst of it.”

  “Not here,” Crossbow said. “Too scenic. It’s a natural place for a camera drone. Let’s seek shelter under that tree.”

  “Call that a tree?” I said, too tired even for derision. The object in question was tall, and it had a central column that might be considered a trunk, but its branches were long cable-like ribbon extensions that arced from the trunk to the ground. And the ground itself was bizarre. It had a certain granular quality—it was relatively dry—but it was not soil. It was milk-white crystals, loosely clumped, with puffs and domes of white fungus emerging from it. There were areas of round white lichen, like splashes of thick white paint.

  We hid ourselves in a small, shadowy area under the tangle of branches. They would shelter us from prying eyes.

  Anne and I pitched the tent. Crossbow dug its webbed fingers into one of the domes of white fungus. Crossbow tugged and twisted and the dome broke apart laterally like a splitting plate of mica. “Here, look,” Crossbow said.

  The dome was full of leaves. They looked like fossils, or more exactly, like plant specimens pressed flat between the pages of a book. Most of the leaves were ferns. They were perfectly formed, except for their whiteness and a touch of fuzziness.

  Anne looked at the leaves and then looked at Crossbow. “Why, it’s full of leaves, how marvelous,” she said, but her intonation suggested that the sight had given her a turn.

  I looked at the leaves. They gave me a crawly feeling. “What good does it do them to grow inside this pasty-looking lump?” I said. “They can’t see the light. Look how pale they are.”

  “Oh, they don’t need their chlorophyll, or any light,” Crossbow said. “The nutrients in the fungus supply all their needs. Notice how perfect they are—without blemish or disease. They stay like this until they either emerge as full specimens or are genetically dismantled and reabsorbed into the Crossbow Body. And if we dig a little deeper—” The neuter shredded its way into the bulk of the dome. “Look. There’s an insect.”

  A brown cricket, furred with white, crawled feebly out of a little pocket inside the white fungoid mass. It cleaned its feelers with its mandibles, then perked up and hopped off. “You’ll find other insects, too. Mantises. Centipedes. Even predators, produced without the necessity of killing their prey. Killing is wasteful. The Mass produces life without the necessity of death.”

  “But what happens when they get loose?” I said. “There’s nothing to eat here.”

  “Well, if they are born at the edge of the Mass, then they can sometimes enter the bordering ecosystem. Otherwise, they eat Mass material. They generally disintegrate then. If we’re lucky, we’ll find an animal in the process of disintegration. It’s a fascinating thing to watch. Often the Crossbow Bodies within them carry the seeds of other forms of life. Even as the old host breaks down, another species spontaneously takes form within its tissues and breaks free. It’s not painful. At least, it doesn’t seem to be.”

  “I can’t wait,” I said sourly. We slept the sleep of total exhaustion and awoke about three hours before sunset.

  We packed up and returned to the waterfall, then walked down the brook. The running water was full of green clumps of moss, small fish, and crustaceans, nibbling at the occasional blobs of Mass material washed in from the brook’s stagnant bywaters. The running water seemed to protect them, but the stagnant pools at the brook’s margin were scummed over with white. The bulging domes of fungus on the banks of the brook were full of Mass-grown pondweed and moss, as Crossbow proved by ripping one open. Others had been broken open from the inside by escaping animals.

  We waded down the brook, preferring the algae-slick rocks to the clammy touch of Mass material. Crossbow swam as usual, leaving Anne and I to flounder along as best we could. Bridges of mold arched over the brook, casting shadows on the rippling water, and there were small gravel islands, no bigger than stepping-stones, where the Mass had established a beachhead and sent up clusters of fuzz.

  When I could, I stopped to wash off the powder of spores. The touch of the Crossbow Body on my skin seemed to be driving my follicle mites wild with hunger. They were not native Reverid organisms—they were genetically altered, specially bred to protect my body from infection. They were devouring the Mass material wherever it touched me. They were fierce little creatures, and their digestive acids might be breaking down the Crossbow Body. I hoped so, anyway.

  The texture of the Mass material was, surprisingly, rather pleasant. The tops of the life-containing fungus domes, for instance, were rather rough, dry, and pebbly, like reptile leather. Even the white fuzz that was so typical of the Mass showed a surprisingly intricate configuration when viewed from close range: the ghostly outlines of leaves and branches, the pointillistic silhouettes of animals. Still, I touched it only when absolutely necessary. Anne shared my caution, but Crossbow was recklessly indifferent.

  Our quiet, wadeable stream ended at the white-mossed banks of a major river. It was sunset, so we decided to camp. We retreated to a dim nook in a lumpy, tortuous upheaval of Mass material; it was our only choice of shelter. Crossbow intended to sleep in the river, but changed its mind. Protruding from the brown water were the brow and bulging yellow eyes of some amphibious behemoth. The eyes were as wide across as the outstretched fingers of my hand. The body was hidden beneath the opaque peaty waters and its size was impossible to determine.

  “Should we keep watch?” I said as we set up the tent on a furry flat space between two wrinkled white knolls. “There’ll be no campfire tonight. There’s nothing to burn.”

  “It’s not likely that we’ll meet anythi
ng on land large enough to menace us,” Crossbow said. “The largest animals generally are disintegrated quickly. Besides, they don’t learn the mechanics of predation because prey is scarce and they have no parents to teach them. If one comes blundering by, we’ll hear it and wake up.” So we went to sleep.

  I woke up before midnight with a crawling sense of unease. I looked at Anne and Crossbow in the darkness inside the tent. Their breathing was quiet and even. I restored my cameras to full function and sat up. Anne stirred; it was crowded in the little tent, but I crept out without waking her. Crossbow always slept heavily, its old brain a riot of dreams.

  I looked up at the stars and saw an immense shape blocking them. It was a drone.

  It didn’t move. It had been watching our tent, perhaps for hours.

  The drone descended in absolute silence, its arms cocked in readiness. I readied my nunchuck to blast it, wondering whether I should cry out in alarm and reveal the presence of the others. With its infrared detectors it probably knew of them already.

  Its arm moved with blinding speed and snatched up one of my cameras. I howled in rage and blasted it at point blank range.

  A hole as big as my fist appeared in the thin metal of its underbelly. It sagged and listed to one side, but its arms were moving like lightning. It caught all my cameras with its jointed claws, one after another, as if it were plucking berries. I screamed piercingly and struck it as hard as I could on the elbow joint of one of its arms; the drone rocked slightly, and stuffed my last camera into a yawning storage aperture in its back.

  “You linking thief! Give them back!” I screamed, and for the first time I heard my voice crack and shriek alarmingly in its upper registers. I leapt into the air and smashed one of its sound pickups; shattered plastic flew in every direction, but the drone did not try to fight back. Instead, it began to rise, tilting visibly and making, for the first time, a faint, strained humming. But it rose steadily and began to drift off toward the east.

  “Leave me one, at least!” I begged, helpless now that it was out of my reach. I ran after it, hoping that its engines would fail, recklessly thrashing my way in the darkness through the knolls and walls and tendrils of the Mass. I could hear my cameras, faintly, complaining and buzzing as they tried to return to their master. A puffball burst under my hand and almost blinded me with spores; a few steps later, my feet caught in an ankle-high tangle of green vines and I went down on my face. In the half-second before I hit the ground I twisted and tried to roll, and the top of my head hit the ground and broke through a brittle white crust into a shallow pool of heavy, viscous fluid. A sharp, faintly pleasant chemical reek bit my nostrils. My scalp tingled where the fluid had touched it.

  Anne and Crossbow caught up with me and helped me to my feet, out of the litter of green vines and broken fungus domes. They half-supported me as I sobbed uncontrollably. I looked around, half-blinded with tears, and for the first time in seven years the familiar, cheery presence of my cameras was gone. Gone. They were all gone. I made a motion to tear my hair; not only was it cut short, but the top of my head was crusted with thick white goo that was already dripping over my brow and ears. I screamed in rage, my voice cracking again, and looked around red-eyed for something to kill. I whipped my nunchuck around, but then slowed it and dropped it as I came to a stunning realization: why should I bother? The gesture would be lost forever. No one would see it but Anne and Crossbow, and they were not able to appreciate it; besides, they would forget. I was reduced to the ephemeral impermanence of the uncameraed. All my actions had been robbed of their true content, their true meaning. I slumped to the ground, sobbing apathetically.

  I ignored Anne and Crossbow’s querulous attempts to console me; their words sounded like dry puppet voices. I said nothing. Crossbow went back to sleep, but Anne led me to the river, where she washed the crusted mush from my head. It stuck tenaciously. Some of it seemed to have soaked into the plastic coating on my hair. I washed my burning face in the murky water and stopped weeping. I could feel the muscles of my face growing rigid with bitterness. A fierce sulk came bubbling up like hot black oil from the cores of my bones. My face grew dark with congested blood. I trembled. “It’ll be all right,” Anne said. I turned on her, snarling, and she retreated to the tent.

  I stayed awake until morning, while my furious anger declined into despondent worthlessness. Sniffing back tears, sunk in a slough of self-pity, I seriously considered flinging myself into the river to drown. Only the fact that the gesture would be wasted caused me to hesitate and abandon the idea.

  By the time the first pale edge of morning lightened the sky, I had been awake ten hours straight, and I was exhausted and sick. My scalp tingled, and for the first time I felt the borderline nausea of hormone changeover. My suppressants had worn off, and a whole dancing, capering Harlequinade of male biochemicals were washing through my bloodstream, charging into hair follicles at lip and jaw and groin and armpit, triggering neotenic growth in my vocal cords, even badgering the pituitary into an atavistic state of alertness. I was too sick to notice the erotic effects, at least for the time being.

  Anne and Crossbow had been awake for several hours. At dawn they came down to the river to get me. “We must be on our way,” Crossbow said. “Now that the drone has located us, speed is of the essence.”

  “I’m sick,” I said. “Go on without me.”

  “A ridiculous attitude,” sniffed Crossbow. “Neither of us have cameras, but our zest for life is unimpaired. Consider how much worse things could be. The drone could have crushed us in our tent while we slept. Instead, it merely took your cameras. No doubt it was seeking news of the man it believes to be the Chairman. The drone’s operator knew that your cameras must have news on Moses Moses. If its intentions had been hostile, it could have attacked us. I believe it was controlled by a friend. One of your fellow tape craftsmen. Perhaps someone you know.”

  “You don’t understand,” I said. “My cameras are gone. It blinded me.” My voice croaked horribly. I put my face in my hands.

  “Arti, your forehead is blistered,” Anne said. “You need medical attention. Besides, once we get to Telset you can get more cameras.”

  I shook my head. “You don’t want to go with me, Anne. My suppressants have worn off. Hormones are turning me into an animal. I don’t know what’s happening to me. Besides, I’m worthless to you now. I’ve lost my cameras. I’m losing my identity, and that means I’ll lose my following and my fame. No one will recognize me. I’m a liability. Not an asset.”

  Anne shook her head. “You should never be ashamed of something you can’t help. Besides, there are just the three of us, now. We won’t tell anyone.”

  Crossbow folded its arms. “Why give up now? We’re on the riverbank! It’s just an easy day’s stroll to the seashore. Our difficulties are over. Stop sulking, Arti, it’s beneath you. Just get on your feet and follow my lead.”

  Anne helped me up as Crossbow ambled downstream, its feet sending up thin puffs of spores from the thick Mass fuzz blanketing the riverbank. It had gone less than ten strides when a thick crust collapsed beneath its weight and it fell with a heavy splash into a corrosive pool of thick white liquid.

  We rushed to the spot and started probing for Crossbow with the wooden pole we used to carry our tent and baggage. Minutes passed. We were about to despair when we felt a tug on the end of the pole. We pulled mightily and slowly dredged the neuter out of the thick, clinging fluid. Crossbow was clutching with both hands to the very end of the pole. It crawled out onto the pool’s margin on its hands and knees, completely drenched in a thick coat of the reeking stuff. It retched fluid, forcing it out of its stomach and lungs and gills, then began crawling feebly toward the river, coughing. It half-fell into the murky water and disappeared beneath the surface. White scum floated up behind it.

  The smell of the curdled white Mass fluid made my scalp start tingling again. There was already a network of tiny blisters across my brow and around my head, like a crown. S
urprisingly, they didn’t hurt, although the skin was red and swollen and swarming with follicle mites.

  I sat on a shelf of Mass fiber to wait for the neuter to resurface. For several minutes Anne stood by herself, staring thoughtfully into the white pool where the neuter had sunk. Then she came to sit beside me, but said nothing. We ate the last of our stores, and my hormone nausea subsided a little. Half an hour passed. Finally there was a burst of murky bubbles near the shore and Crossbow came slogging out.

  Its skin had bubbled up all over and detached itself in pockets from Crossbow’s flesh. The poor neuter’s skin was visibly waterlogged, and brown river water was seeping out of the blisters. Anne and I shrank back in horror. Crossbow coughed convulsively and spat out a thick white mouthful of mush. “I’m all right,” it croaked. “It doesn’t hurt.”

  “You’re dying!” I yelled. “It looks like third-degree burns!”

  “Just crust,” it replied. “Look, it peels right off.” It tugged at one of the blisters with webby, crusted hands and a wide strip of skin shredded off, revealing puffy white endodermis. “The only thing that hurts is these splinters in my hands. No, Anne, don’t touch them. I’ll be all right.” It drew in a deep breath of air. The expression on its face might have been resignation. The blisters made it hard to tell. “Don’t either of you touch me. I’ve ingested a great deal of the Crossbow Body. I don’t know the effects. They may be serious.”

  “Is there anything we can do?” Anne said sadly.

  “Of course. Follow me,” Crossbow said, and kept walking.

  Anne insisted that she lead the way, testing the firmness of the ground with our baggage pole, which she had washed clean. I carried our provisions on my shoulders while Anne probed the ground. Our progress was slow. Crossbow swam when it could, and the water seemed to help it. Most of the brown, blistered skin came off, but by noon the skin under the blisters was covered with little white bumpy colonies of Mass fur.

  We pitched our tent and rested. Crossbow was delirious. It kept mumbling things, little evocative fragments that made me weep for my recorder. Things like: “She loves power, not you. And you must say the same for her,” and, “Louise, you can’t mean that,” and, “But they’re all dead. They’ve been dead for centuries,” interspersed with bits and pieces of poetry and legal documents and scientific monographs. I was gray with exhaustion, nauseated with hormones and the sight of Crossbow’s skin. I vomited twice. Anne kept us alive. She led Crossbow to the water; its eyelids were heavy with fuzz and it was almost blind. She bathed my blistered forehead and didn’t flinch when a pocket of skin peeled away and revealed a tiny bud of green ivy, rooted in my skull.