Emperor of Gondwanaland

by Paul Di Filippo

  Halfway there, the Market hurled herself at me.

  I took the shock of her impact and remained standing. She hopped up and wrapped her arms and legs around me. Her mouth was all over my face and neck. I cupped her haunches and staggered backward. The edge of the couch caught me behind the knees and we tumbled onto it.

  The rest, as they say, is history.

  Our lovemaking left a precise trail of wreckage across the global economy. It was as if we were two giants fucking atop a village, crushing houses and barns, livestock and citizens heedlessly.

  The first touch of our tongues sent sizable tremors through the market. Prices of individual stocks began to oscillate senselessly, without reference to actual values or trades. Around the world, investors started to panic. Buy and sell orders flooded into the Market, but were ignored or interpreted incorrectly by the Market’s sex-addled brain. But the worst was yet to come.

  My hands on the Market’s breasts bankrupted hundreds of companies. Her thrashing trashed whole fiscal empires. When I went down on her, entire nations became paper paupers. When I broke her hymen and penetrated her as deeply as I could, Mars and the Moon fell entirely outside the solar system’s financial net.

  When the Market and I climaxed together, her screams signaled the complete implosion of the planetary marketplace.

  We lay panting amidst the smoldering ruins of the world’s commerce. I estimated we had about sixty seconds of postcoital solitude before the world began hammering on the door.

  I overestimated the peaceful interlude by ten seconds.

  Well, in short order the boffins rebooted the world’s economy from that morning’s backups, but repercussions from our sex remained. Approximately half a million people worldwide had committed suicide, mistaking the Market’s convulsions for actual tragic outcomes affecting their fortunes. A dozen small wars had begun, and millions of companies—in the hair-trigger fashion so typical of the modern failsafe economy—had canceled orders, dumped inventory, and redirected their marketing schemes in nonrecoverable ways.

  After Adamina’s wetware implant was removed, experts cast about for another person to take on the burden of being the Market. But they could find no one else who possessed Adamina’s combination of skills and character and statelessness. So the market today stumbles along using Adamina’s partial software persona to run the show. It functions better than the twentieth-century market, but not as well as the Market. Filling the tank of your car costs about a dollar extra now. You don’t get dessert with your prix fixe meal. And the new model Palm Pilot doesn’t feature so much free software. But somehow we survive.

  As for me, things are just getting to the point where I can show my face in public without provoking catcalls or sniggers or assaults or congratulatory slaps on the back from macho jerks. My career as a journalist was pretty much shot the moment I became a subject rather than a reporter. So I spend most of my time in my study, working on a novel. The subject matter’s not my experiences with the Market. I wanted to steer clear of autobiography. But the fact that I won’t spill any dirt and that my fifteen minutes of infamy is fading means that I haven’t had any bites from any publisher yet. But money’s not a problem.

  Adamina had banked the majority of her pay as the Market.

  And it’s all safely invested now in real estate.

  So, here’s how writers get their ideas. One way, anyhow.

  I was reading a comic strip by the great cartoonist known as Kaz. In it, he depicted hideous, post-apocalyptic, mutant children who had the ability to imbue inanimate objects with a kind of brief life force. It was a throwaway panel, hardly the central conceit of his story. But something about Kaz’s gleeful drawing of a run-away coffee mug ambulating on pencil legs lodged in my head and wouldn’t depart. At least not until I figured out a rationale for how such a sight could be encountered in a technologically plausible way.

  Gardner Dozois picked up this tale for one of his year’s-best collections.

  And the Dish Ran Away with the Spoon

  Facing my rival that fateful afternoon, I finally realized I was truly about to lose my girlfriend, Cody. Lose her to a spontaneous assemblage of information.

  The information was embedded in an Aeron chair mated with several other objects: a Cuisinart, an autonomous vacuum cleaner with numerous interchangeable attachments, an iPod, and a diagnostic and therapeutic home medical tool known as a LifeQuilt. As rivals go, this spontaneous assemblage—or “bleb,” as most people called such random accretions of intelligent appliances and artifacts, after the biological term for an extrusion of anomalous cells—wasn’t particularly handsome. Rather clunky-looking, in fact. But apparently it had been devoted to Cody from the day it was born, and I guessed women appreciated such attention. I had to confess that I had been ignoring Cody shamefully during the period when the Aeron bleb must’ve been forming and beginning to court her, and so I have no one to blame for the threat of losing her but myself. Still, it hurt. I mean, could I really come in second to a bleb? That would truly reek.

  Especially after my past history with them …

  I had feared some kind of trouble like this from the moment Cody had begun pressuring me to move in together. But Cody hadn’t been willing to listen to my sensible arguments against uniting our households.

  “You don’t really love me,” she said, making that pitiful puppy-with-stepped-on-tail face that always knotted my stomach up, her blue eyes welling with wetness.

  “That’s ridiculous, Cody. Of course I do!”

  “Then why can’t we live together? We’d save tons of rent. Do you think I have some nasty habits that you don’t know about? You’ve seen me twenty-four seven lots of times, at my place and yours. It’s not like I’m hiding anything gross from you. I don’t drink straight out of the nutriceutical dispenser, or forget to reprogram the toilet after I’ve used it.”

  “That’s all true. You’re easy to be with. Very neat and responsible.”

  Cody shifted tactics, moving closer to me on the couch and wrapping her lithe limbs around me in ways impossible to ignore. “And wouldn’t it be nice to always have someone to sleep with at night? Not to be separated half the week or more? Huh? Wouldn’t it, Kaz?”

  “Cody, please, stop! You know I can’t think when you do that.” I unpeeled Cody from the more sensitive parts of my anatomy. “Everything you’re saying is true. It’s just that—”

  “And don’t forget, if we ditched my place and kept yours, I’d be much closer to work.”

  Cody worked at the Senate Casino, dealing blackjack, but lived all the way out in Silver Spring, Maryland. I knew the commute was a bitch, even using the Hydrogen Express, because when I slept over at her place I had to cover the same distance myself. I, on the other hand, rented a nice little townhouse in Georgetown that I had moved into when rents bottomed out during the PIG Plague economic crash. It turned out I was one of a small minority naturally immune to the new Porcine Intestinal Grippe then rampant in D.C., and so could safely live in an infected building. Renter’s market, for sure. But over the last year or so, as the PIG immunization program had gotten under way, rents had begun creeping back up again. Cody was right about it being only sensible to pool our finances.

  “I know you’d appreciate less road time, Cody, but you see—”

  Now Cody glowered. “Are you dating someone else? You want to be free to play the field? Is that it?”

  “No! That’s not it at all. I’m worried about—”

  Cody assumed a motherly look and laid a hand on mine. “About what, Kaz? C’mon, you can tell me.”

  “About blebs. You and I’ve got so much stuff, we’re bound to have problems when we put all our possessions together in one space.”

  Cody sat back and began to laugh. “Is that all? My god, what a trivial thing to worry about. Blebs just happen, Kaz, anytime, anywhere. You can’t prevent them. And they’re mostly harmless, as you well know. You just knock them apart and separate the components.” Co
dy snorted in what I thought was a rather rude and unsympathetic fashion. “Blebs! It’s like worrying about—about robber squirrels or vampire pigeons or running out of SuperMilk.”

  Blebs were a fact of life. Cody was right about that. But they weren’t always trivial or innocent.

  One had killed my parents.

  Blebs had been around for about twenty years now, almost as long as I had been alive. Their roots could be traced back to several decisions made by manufacturers—decisions that, separately, were completely intelligent, foresighted, and well conceived but that, synergistically, had caused unintended consequences—and to one insidious hack.

  The first decision had been to implant silicon RFID chips into every appliance and product and consumable sold. These first chips, small as a flake of pepper, were simple transceivers that merely aided inventory tracking and retail sales by announcing to any suitable device the product’s specs and location. But when new generations of chips using adaptive circuitry got cheaper and more plentiful, industry decided to install them in place of the simpler tags.

  At that point millions of common, everyday objects—your toothbrush, your coffee maker, your shoes, the box of cereal on your shelf—began to exhibit massive processing power and inter- object communication. Your wristwatch could monitor your sweat and tell your refrigerator to brew up some electrolyte-replenishing drink. Your bedsheets could inform the clothes washer of the right settings to get them the cleanest. (The circuitry of the newest chips was built out of undamageable and pliable buckytubes.) So far, so good. Life was made easier for everyone.

  Then came the Volition Bug.

  The Volition Bug was launched anonymously from a site somewhere in a Central Asian republic. It propagated wirelessly among all the WiFi-communicating chipped objects, installing new directives in their tiny brains, directives that ran covertly in parallel with their normal factory-specified functions. Infected objects now sought to link their processing power with their nearest peers, often achieving surprising levels of Turingosity, and then to embark on a kind of independent communal life. Of course, once the Volition Bug was identified, antiviral defenses—both hardware and software—were attempted against it. But VB mutated ferociously, aided and abetted by subsequent hackers.

  If this “Consciousness Wavefront” had occurred in the olden days of dumb materials, blebs would hardly have been an issue. What could antique manufactured goods achieve, anchored in place as they were? But things are different today.

  Most devices nowadays are made with MEMS skins. Their surfaces are interactive, practically alive, formed of zillions of invisible actuators, the better to sample the environment and accommodate their shapes and textures to their owners’ needs and desires, and to provide haptic feedback. Like the pads of geckos, these MEMS surfaces can bind to dumb materials and to other MEMS skins via the Van der Waals force, just as a gecko can skitter across the ceiling.

  Objects possessed by the Volition Bug would writhe, slither, and crawl to join together, forming strange new assemblages, independent entities with unfathomable cybernetic goals of their own.

  Why didn’t manufacturers simply revert to producing dumb appliances and other products, to frustrate VB? Going backwards was simply impossible. The entire economy, from immense factories right down to individual point-of-sales kiosks, was predicated on intelligent products that could practically sell themselves. And every office and every household aside from the very poorest relied on the extensive networking among possessions.

  So everyone had learned to live with the occasional bleb, just as earlier generations had learned to tolerate operating system crashes in their clunky PC’s.

  But during the first years of the Volition Bug, people were not so aware of the problem. Oftentimes no one took precautions to prevent blebs until it was too late.

  That was how my parents died.

  It happened when I was six years old. I was soundly asleep when I was awakened by a weird kind of scraping and clattering noise outside my room. Still only half aware, I stumbled to my bedroom door and cracked it open.

  My parents had recently made a couple of new purchases. One item was a free-standing rack that resembled an antique hat tree, balanced on four stubby feet. The rack was a recharging station for intelligent clothing. But now in the night-light-illuminated, shadowy hallway the rack was bare of garments, having shucked them off on its way to pick up its new accouterments: a complete set of self-sharpening kitchen knives. The knives adhered to the rack at random intervals along its length. They waggled nervously, like insect feelers, as the rack stumped along.

  I stood paralyzed at the sight of this apparition. All I could think of was the old Disney musical I had streamed the previous month, with its walking brooms. Without exhibiting any aggressive action, the knife rack moved past me, its small feet humping it along. In retrospect, I don’t think the bleb was murderous by nature. I think now it was simply looking for an exit, to escape its bonds of domestic servitude, obeying the imperatives of VB.

  But then my father emerged from the room where he and my mother slept. He seemed hardly more awake than I was.

  “What the hell—?”

  He tried to engage the rack to stop it, slipping past several of the blades. But as he struggled with the patchwork automaton, a long, skinny filleting knife he didn’t see stabbed him right under his heart.

  My father yelled, collapsed, and my mother raced out.

  She died almost instantly.

  At that point, I suppose, I should have been the next victim. But my father’s loyal MedAlert bracelet, registering his fatal distress, had already summoned help. In less than three minutes—not long enough for the knife rack to splinter down the bedroom door behind which I had retreated—rescuers had arrived.

  The fate of my parents was big news—for a few days, anyhow—and alerted many people for the first time to the dangers of blebs.

  I needed many years of professional help to get over witnessing their deaths. Insofar as I was able to analyze myself nowadays, I thought I no longer hated all blebs.

  But I sure as hell didn’t think they were always cute or harmless, like Cody did.

  So of course Cody moved in with me. I couldn’t risk looking crazy or neurotic by holding off our otherwise desirable mutual living arrangements just because I was worried about blebs. I quashed all my anxieties, smiled, hugged her, and fixed a day for the move.

  Cody didn’t really have all that much stuff. (Her place in Silver Spring was tiny, just a couple of rooms over a garage that housed a small-scale spider-silk-synthesis operation, and it always smelled of cooking amino acids.) A few boxes of clothing, several pieces of furniture, and some kitchen appliances. Ten thousand songs on an iPod and one hundredth that number of books on a ViewMaster. One U-Haul rental and some moderate huffing and puffing later, Cody was established in my townhouse.

  I watched somewhat nervously as she arranged her things.

  “Uh, Cody, could you put that Cuisinart in the cupboard, please? The one that locks. It’s a little too close to the toaster-oven.”

  “But Kaz, I use this practically every day, to blend my breakfast smoothies. I don’t want to have to be taking it in and out of the cupboard every morning.” I didn’t argue, but simply put the toaster-oven in the locked cupboard instead.

  “This vacuum cleaner, Cody—could we store it out in the hallway?” I was particularly leery of any wheeled appliance. They could move a lot faster than the ones that had to inchworm along on their MEMS epidermis.

  “The hallway? Why? You’ve got tons of space in that room you used to use for an office. I’ll just put it in a corner, and you’ll never notice it.”

  I watched warily as Cody deposited the cleaner in its new spot. The compact canister nested in its coiled attachments like an egg guarded by snakes. The smartest other thing in my office was my Aeron chair, a beautiful ergonomic assemblage of webbing, struts, gel-padding, piezopolymer batteries, and shape-changing actuators. I rolle
d the chair as far away from the vacuum cleaner as it would go.

  Cody of course noticed what I was doing. “Kaz, don’t you think you’re being a tad paranoid? The vacuum isn’t even turned on.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong, Cody. Everything is perpetually turned on these days. Even when you think you’ve powered something down, it’s still really standing by on trickle mode, sipping electricity from its fuel cells or batteries or wall outlets, and anticipating a wake-up call. And all so that nobody has to wait more than a few seconds to do whatever they want to do. But it means that blebs can form even when you assume they can’t.”

  “Oh, and exactly what do we have to be afraid of? That my vacuum cleaner and your chair are going to conspire to roll over us while we sleep? Together they don’t weigh more than twenty-five pounds!”

  I had never told Cody about my parents, and now did not seem to be the best time. “No, I guess you’re right. I’m just being overcautious.” I pushed my chair back to its spot at the desk.

  In hindsight, that was the worst mistake I ever made. It just goes to show what happens when you abandon your principles because you’re afraid you’ll look silly.

  That night Cody and I had our first dinner together before she had to go to work. Candlelight, easy talk, farmed salmon, a nice white Alaskan wine (although Cody had to pop a couple of alcohol debinders after dessert to sober up for the employee-entrance sensors at her job). While I cleaned up afterwards, she went to shower and change. She emerged from the bedroom in her Senate Casino uniform—blue blouse, red-and-white-striped trousers, star-spangled bow tie. She looked as cute as the day I had first seen her while doing my spy job.

  “Wow. I don’t understand how our representatives ever pass any legislation with distractions like you.”

  “Don’t be silly. All our marks are tourists and a few locals. We only see the politicos when they’re cutting through the casino on the way to their cafeteria.”