Emperor of Gondwanaland

by Paul Di Filippo

  I gave her a hug and kiss and was about to tell her to be careful on the subway when I caught movement at floor level out the corner of my eye.

  The first bleb in our new joint household had spontaneously formed. It consisted of our two toothbrushes and the bathroom drinking glass. The toothbrushes had fastened themselves to the lower quarter of the tumbler, bristle-ends uppermost and facing out, so that they extended like little legs. Their blunt ends served as feet. Scissoring rapidly, the stiltlike toothbrush legs carried the tumbler toward the half-opened door through which Cody had been about to depart.

  I squealed like a rabbit and jerked back out of Cody’s embrace, and she said, “Kaz, what—?”

  Then she spotted the bleb—and laughed!

  She bent over and scooped up the creature. Without any hesitation, she tore its legs off, the Van der Waals forces producing a distinct Velcro-separating noise as the MEMS surfaces parted.

  “Well, I guess we’ll have to keep all the glasses in the kitchen from now on. It’s cute, though, isn’t it, how your toothbrush and mine knew how to cooperate so well.”

  I squeezed out a queasy laugh. “Heh-heh, yeah, cute—”

  I worked for Aunty, at their big headquarters next to the Pentagon. After six years in Aunty’s employ, I had reached a fairly responsible position. My job was to ride herd on several dozen freelance operatives, working out of their homes. These operatives in their turn were shepherds for a suite of semi-autonomous software packages. At this lowest level, where the raw data first got processed, these software agents kept busy around the clock, monitoring the nation’s millions of audio-video feeds, trolling for suspicious activities that might threaten homeland security. When the software caught something problematic, it would flag the home operator’s attention. The freelancer would decide whether to dismiss the alarm as harmless, to investigate further, to contact a relevant government agency, or to kick up the incident to my level for more sophisticated and experienced parsing, both human and heuristic.

  Between them, the software and the home operators were pretty darn efficient, handling 99 percent of all the feed. I dealt with the final 1 percent from my crew, which amounted to about one hundred cases in a standard six-hour shift. This was a lesser workload than the home operators endured, and the pay was better.

  The only drawback was having to retina in at headquarters, instead of getting to hang around all the creature comforts of home. Passing under the big sign that said TIA four days a week felt like surrendering part of myself to Aunty in a way that working at home for her had never occasioned.

  After two-plus decades of existence, Aunty loomed large but benignly in the lives of most citizens, even if they couldn’t say what her initials stood for anymore. I myself wasn’t even sure. The agency that had begun as Total Information Awareness, then become Terrorist Information Awareness, had changed to Tactical Information Awareness about seven years ago, after the global terrorism fad had evaporated as a threat. But I seemed to recall another name change since then. Whatever Aunty’s initials stood for, she continued to accumulate scads of real-time information about the activities of the country’s citizens, without seeming to abuse the power of the feed. As a full-time government employee, I felt no more compunctions about working for Aunty than I had experienced as a freelancer. I had grown up with Aunty always around.

  I knew the freelancer’s grind well, since right up until a year ago I had been one myself. That period was when I had invested in my expensive Aeron chair, a necessity rather than an indulgence, when you were chained by the seat of your pants to the ViewMaster for six hours a day.

  It was as a freelancer that I had first met Cody.

  One of my software agents had alerted me to some suspicious activity at the employee entrance to the Senate Casino just before shift change, a guy hanging around longer than the allowable parameters for innocent dallying. The Hummingbird drone lurking silently and near-invisibly above him reported no weapons signatures, so I made the decision to keep on monitoring. Turned out he was just the husband of one of the casino workers, looking to surprise his weary wife in person with an invitation to dinner. As I watched the happy little scene play out, my attention was snagged by one of the incoming night-shift workers. The woman was more sweet-looking than sexy. Her walk conformed to Gait Pattern Number ALZ-605, which I had always found particularly alluring. Facial recognition routines brought up her name, Cody Sheckley, and her vital stats.

  I had never used Aunty’s powers for personal gain before, and I felt a little guilty about doing so now. But I rationalized my small transgression by reasoning that if I had simply spotted Cody on the street in person and had approached her to ask her name, no one would have thought twice about the innocence of such an encounter. In this case, the first step, finding out who she was, had simply been conducted virtually, by drone proxy.

  A few nights later I visited the blackjack tables at the Senate Casino. After downing two stiff Jerrymanders, I worked up the courage to approach Cody in person.

  The rest was history—the steps of our courtship undoubtedly all safely tucked away in Aunty’s files.

  Living with Cody proved quite pleasant. All the advantages she had enumerated—plus others—manifested themselves from the first day. Even the disparity in our working hours proved no more than a minor inconvenience. Cody’s stint at the casino filled her hours from 9 p.m. to 3 a.m. My day at Aunty’s ran from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. When Cody got home in the wee hours of the morning, we still managed to get a few hours of that promised bundling time together in bed, before I had to get up for work. And when I got home in the afternoon, she was up and lively and ready to do stuff before she had to show up at the Senate. Afternoons were often when we had sex, for instance. Everything seemed fine.

  I recall one afternoon, when I was massaging Cody’s feet prior to her departure for the casino. She appreciated such attention in preparation for her physically demanding job.

  “Now aren’t you glad we decided to live together, Kaz?”

  “I have to admit that weekends are a lot more enjoyable now.”

  “Just weekends?” Cody asked, stretching sensuously.

  She got docked for being half an hour late that day, but insisted later it was worth it.

  But despite such easygoing routines, I found that I still couldn’t stop worrying about blebs. Since that first occurrence with the toothbrushes and tumbler, I had been on the alert for any more domestic incidents. I took to shuffling appliances from room to room, so that they wouldn’t conspire. I knew this was foolish, since every chipped device was capable of communicating over fairly long distances by relaying message packets one to another. But still I had an intuition that physical proximity mattered in bleb formation. Cody kept complaining about not being able to find anything when she needed it, but I just brushed off her mild ire jokingly, and kept up my prophylactic measures. When a few weeks had passed without any trouble, I began to feel relieved.

  Then I encountered the sock ball.

  Cody and I had let the dirty laundry pile up. We were having too much fun together to bother with chores, and when each of us was alone in the townhouse, we tended spend a lot of time with ViewMaster and iPod, enjoying music and media that the other person didn’t necessarily want to share.

  It was during one such evening, after Cody had left me on my own, that the sock ball manifested.

  My attention was drawn away from my book by a thumping on the closed bedroom door. Immediately wary, I got up to investigate.

  When I tentatively opened the door a crack, something shot out and thumped me on the ankle.

  I hopped backwards on one foot. A patchwork cloth sphere about as big as a croquet ball was zooming toward the front door.

  I managed to trap the ball under an overturned wastebasket weighted down with a two-liter bottle of Mango Coke. It bounced around frantically inside, raising a racket like an insane drum solo. Wearing a pair of oven mitts, I dared to reach in and grab the sphere.<
br />
  It was composed of Cody’s socks and mine, tightly wrapped around a kernel consisting of a travel-sized alarm clock. Cody’s socks featured MEMS massage soles, a necessity for her job, which involved hours of standing. My own socks were standard models, but still featured plenty of processing power.

  Having disassembled the sock ball, I did all the laundry and made sure to put Cody’s socks and mine in separate drawers.

  The incident completely unnerved me. I felt certain that other blebs, possibly larger and more dangerous, were going to spontaneously assemble themselves in the house.

  From that day on I began to get more and more paranoid.

  Handling one hundred potential security incidents per shift had become second nature for me. I hardly had to exert myself at all to earn my high job-performance ratings. Previously I had used whatever patches of downtime occurred to read mystery novels on my ViewMaster. (I liked Gifford Jain’s series about Yanika Zapsu, a female Turkish private eye transplanted to Palestine.) But once I became obsessed with the danger of blebs in my home, I began to utilize Aunty’s omnipresent network illicitly, to monitor my neighborhood and townhouse.

  The first thing I did when I got to work at nine in the morning, duties permitting, was to send a Damselfly to check up on Cody. It was summertime, late June, and my window air conditioners were in place against the average ninety-plus D.C. temperatures. But the seals around the units were imperfect, and it was easy to maneuver the little entologue UAV into my house. Once inside, I made a circuit of all the rooms, checking that my possessions weren’t conspiring against me and possibly threatening the woman I loved.

  Mostly I found Cody sleeping peacefully, until about noon. The lines of her relaxed, unconscious face tugged at my heart, while simultaneously inspiring me to greater vigilance. There was no way I was going to let her suffer the same fate as my parents. From noon until the end of my shift, I caught intermittent snatches of an awake Cody doing simple, everyday things. Painting her nails, eating a sandwich, streaming a soap opera, writing to her mother, who lived in Italy now, having taken a five-year contract as supplemental labor in the service industry to offset that low-procreating country’s dearth of workers.

  But every once in a while, I saw something that troubled me.

  One morning I noticed that Cody was favoring one foot as she walked about the house. She had developed a heel spur, I knew, and hadn’t bothered yet to have it repaired. As I watched through the Damselfly clinging to the ceiling (routines automatically inverted the upside-down image for me), Cody limped to the closet and took out the LifeQuilt I had bought when I had a lower-back injury. Wearing the earbuds of her pocketed iPod, she carried the medical device not to the couch or bedroom, but to my former office. There, she lowered herself into my Aeron chair.

  The chair instantly responded to her presence, contorting itself supportively around her like an astronaut’s cradle, subtly alleviating any incipient muscle strains. Cody dropped the LifeQuilt onto her feet, and that smart blanket enwrapped her lower appendages. Issuing orders to the LifeQuilt through her iPod, Cody activated its massage functions. She sighed blissfully and leaned back, the chair reconforming to her supine position. She got her music going and closed her eyes.

  In the corner of the office the vacuum cleaner began to stir. Its hose lifted a few inches, the tip of its nozzle sniffing the air.

  I freaked. But what was I to do? The Damselfly wasn’t configured to speak a warning, and even if it could, doing so would have betrayed that I was spying on Cody. I was about to send it buzzing down at her, to at least get her to open her eyes to the insidious bleb formation going on around her. But just then the vacuum cleaner subsided into inactivity, its hose collapsing around the canister.

  For fifteen more minutes I watched, anticipating the spontaneous generation of a bleb involving the chair, the iPod, the blanket, and the vacuum. But nothing happened, and soon Cody had shut off the LifeQuilt and arisen, going about her day.

  Meanwhile, five official windows on my ViewMaster were pulsing and pinging, demanding my attention. Reluctantly, I returned to my job.

  When I got home that afternoon, I still hadn’t figured out any way of advising Cody against putting together such a powerful combination of artificially intelligent devices ever again. Anything I said would make her suspicious about the source of my caution. I couldn’t have her imagining I was monitoring her through Aunty’s feed. Even though of course I was.

  In the end, I made a few tentative suggestions about junking or selling the Aeron chair, since I never used it anymore. But Cody said, “No way, Kaz. That thing is like a day at the spa.”

  I backed down from my superficially illogical demands. There was no way I could make my case without confessing to being a paranoid voyeur. I would just have to assume that the nexus of four devices Cody had assembled didn’t represent any critical mass of blebdom.

  And I would’ve been correct, and Cody would’ve been safe, if it weren’t for that damned Cuisinart.

  When I wasn’t doing my job for Aunty or spying on Cody, I frequently took to roaming the city, looking for blebs, seeking to understand them, to learn how to forestall them. That senseless activity wearied me, wore my good nature down, and left me lousy, inattentive company for Cody during the hours we shared. Our relationship was tumbling rapidly downhill.

  “What do you mean, you’ve got to go out now, Kaz? I’ve only got an hour left till work. I thought we could stream that show together I’ve been wanting to see. You know, ‘Temporary Autonomous Zone Romance.’”

  “Later, maybe. Right now I just—I just need some exercise.”

  “Can I come with you then?”

  “No, not today—”

  But despite Cody’s baffled entreaties and occasional tears, I couldn’t seem to stop myself.

  The fact that I encountered blebs everywhere did nothing to reassure me, or lessen what I now realize had become a mania.

  And a lonely mania at that. No one else seemed concerned about these accidental automatons. There was no official Bleb Patrol, no corps of bounty hunters looking to take down rogue Segways driven by Xerox machines. (I saw such a combo once). Everyone seemed as blithely indifferent to these runaway products as Cody was.

  Except for me.

  In store windows, I would see blebs accidentally formed by proximity of the wares being displayed. An electric razor had mated with a digital camera and a massage wand to produce something that looked like a futuristic cannon. A dozen pairs of hinged salad tongs became the millipede legs for a rice cooker whose interior housed a coffee-bean grinder. A toy truck at F. A. O. Schwarz’s was almost invisible beneath a carapace of symbiotically accreted Lego blocks, so that it resembled an odd, wheeled dinosaur.

  In other store windows, the retailers had deliberately created blebs, in a trendy, devil-may-care fashion, risking damage to their merchandise. Several adjacent mannequins in one display at Nordstrom’s were draped with so many intelligent clothes and accessories (necklaces, designer surgical masks, scarves) that the whole diorama was alive with spontaneous movement, like the waving of undersea fronds.

  Out on the street the occasional escaped bleb crossed my path. One night on Fifteenth Street, near the Treasury Department, I encountered a woman’s purse riding a skateboard. The bleb was moving along at a good clip, heading toward Lafayette Square, and I hastened after it. In the park it escaped me by whizzing under some shrubbery. Down on my knees, I peered into the leafy darkness. The colorful chip-laser eyes of a dozen blebs glared in a hostile fashion at me, and I yelped and scuttled backwards.

  Just before everything exploded at home in my face, I went to a mashpit.

  I was wandering through a rough district on the southeastern side of the city, a neighborhood where Aunty’s surveillance attempts often met with countermeasures of varying effectiveness: motion camouflage, anti-sense spoofing, candle-power bombs. A young kid was handing out small squares of paper on a corner and I took one. It featured a
n address and the invitation:

  midnight mashpit madness!!!

  bring your staunchest, veebingest bleb!!!

  thousand-dollar prize to the winner!!!

  The scene of the mashpit was an abandoned factory, where a ten-dollar admission was taken at the door. Littered with rusting bioreactors, the place was packed with a crowd on makeshift bleachers. I saw every type of person, from suits to crusties, young to old, male and female.

  A circular arena, lit by industrial work lights on tripods, had been formed by stacking plastic milk crates five high, then dropping rebar through them into holes drilled in the cement floor. I could smell a sweaty tension in the air. In the shadows near the arena entrance, handlers and their blebs awaited the commencement of the contest.

  Two kids next to me were debating the merits of different styles of bleb construction.

  “You won’t get a kickass mash without using at least one device that can function as a central server.”

  “That’s top-down crap! What about the ganglion-modeling, bottom-up approach?”

  The event began with owners launching two blebs into the arena. One construct consisted of a belt sander studded with vise grips and pliers; its opponent was a handleless autonomous lawn- mower ridden by a coffee maker. The combatants circled each other warily for a minute before engaging, whirring blades versus snapping jaws. It looked as if the sander was about to win, until the coffee maker squirted steaming liquid on it and shorted it out, eliciting loud cheers from the audience.

  I didn’t stay for the subsequent bouts. Watching the violent blebs had made me feel ill. Spilled fluids in the arena reminded me of my parents’ blood in the hallway. But much as I disliked the half-sentient battling creatures, the lusts of my fellow humans had disturbed me more.

  I got home just before Cody and pretended to be asleep when she climbed into bed, even as she tried to stir me awake for sex.