The Paul Di Filippo Megapack

by Pau Di Filippo

  Avouris had taken this change into account in his calculations, redoing his astromesh polling to reflect the changed gradients of Mirror Sickness. His old predictions, in fact, had nominated the world of Bricklebank as the next candidate for change after Wustner’s Weatherbolt. But the new dynamics had brought them here instead.

  And now the predicted moment was nearly at hand.

  Hemmed in by taut-nerved military personnel, Fayard and Rosy intently observed the big screen dominated by a view of the mottled sapphire that was Wangba-Szypyt IX.

  The anticipated moment came—

  —passed—

  —and passed again, with no evident change.

  Admiral Brice demanded, “Status groundside!”

  “No alterations, sir!”

  Avouris began to feel sick. “What of Bricklebank?”

  The communications officer reported no relevant news from that world, then hesitated at fresh data.

  “Admiral Brice, a mining colony in the Furbini system reports an uplift outbreak there!”

  “Belligerents?”

  “No, sir. The new aliens appear to be vegetative in origin.”

  A grim-faced Rosy clasped the hand of her lover in support. His voice weakly solicitous, Fayard Avouris contributed: “That would probably be the Hardaway Pitcher Plants. They already employ their vines like tentacles….”

  Admiral Brice glared at the hapless anthropologist. “Luckily, Professor, your incompetence has resulted in no harm to any innocents.”

  “I assure you, Admiral, the next time—”

  But the next predicted occurrence likewise failed to meet Avouris’s specifications.

  And after that, his services were no longer valued at a premium.

  * * * *

  What damnable factor had thrown off his careful plot of the contingent uplift instances? Avouris sensed that the errors were down to a faulty map of the Mirror Sickness. But his polling techniques and data-mining were watertight, as evidenced by his success at Wustner’s Weatherbolt.

  Therefore, he must be getting bad inputs. Could some cultural force manifesting only in the portion of the galaxy currently under examination be responsible?

  Avouris began a mental tour of his restored virtual topography of human culture.

  The Leatherheads of Xyella would speak truth only to fellow clansmen, but his polling of them had enlisted such informers.

  The Mudmen of Bitterfields offered the reverse of what they believed. A transparent fix.

  The Pingpanks of Stellwagen V radically modified all their speech with a complex vocabulary of mudras. Trivial to interpolate those gestures.

  The Perciasepians of Troutfalls—

  Some trained intuition made Avouris re-examine what he knew about this culture.

  Six months ago, unknown to an otherwise preoccupied Avouris, a prophet named Hardesty had manifested among the Perciasepians. Hardesty’s rubric? Simplicity itself!

  Optimism triumphed reality!

  Archived news reports revealed that the faddish ethos had spread like a plague, to the point that no Perciasepian nowadays would ever admit to any despair.

  Here was the blot in his calculations! The Perciasepians had denied any Mirror Sickness among them.

  Hastily, Avouris took his Perciasepian datapoints from half a year ago, prior to Hardesty’s advent, added in some compensatory factors, and reformulated his maps.

  Eureka!

  The office of Ina Glinka Narozhylenko had never witnessed such an intemperate visitor. Bursting into Rosy’s inner sanctum, Avouris found the agent occupied with the minor and semi-humiliating tasks she had been assigned since the debacle of sponsoring Avouris.

  “Bofoellesskaber! Bofoelleskaber!”

  “Fayard, please. What does that nonsense mean?”

  “It’s the place where the next uplift outbreak will happen! You’ve got to tell the Directorate!”

  “They want no part of you or me.”

  “Then we’ll just have to go alone to prove we’re right.”

  “I cannot secure a ship from the Okhranka this time.”

  “We’ll rent one! What good are my savings now? Are you with me?”

  Rosy sighed. “Who would take care of you otherwise?”

  * * * *

  Once more, Rosy kicked at a plant resembling a green hassock. The vegetable furniture emitted a squeak from its punctured bladders, and collapsed fractionally into itself.

  “Damn that cheating shipyard! And damn me for trusting them!”

  Sitting on another living ottoman, Fayard nursed his contusions and sighed. “Please, Rosy, no more self-recriminations. Your skills are the only reason we are still alive.”

  Some yards distant, the crumpled hulk of an old Pryton’s Nebulaskimmer still exuded vital fluids into the lush turf of Bofoellesskaber, at the terminus of a mile-long gouge in the planet’s rich soil. The rental craft would never journey from star to star again.

  Rosy plopped down beside Fayard. “Granted. But I should have done a better pre-flight inspection. It’s just that we were in such a hurry—”

  “My fault entirely. But look at the bright side. We’re unharmed for the moment. When the uplift happens, chances are good that the new aliens will be benevolent. Their presence will register on the Directorate’s desktop, an expedition will arrive, and we’ll soon be safely home.”

  “I suppose….”

  “Let’s brace ourselves now. We can expect the change soon.”

  Fayard and Rosy hugged each other as they tried to anticipate what the uplift experience would feel like from planetside. Would the unknown phenomenon have any effect on their own constitutions? Might they be mutated in fast-forward fashion?

  A subliminal shiver like the kiss of a ghost resonated through them. The moment must have come! But outwardly, nothing had changed.

  “We must be distant from any new alien settlement on this world…,” ventured Avouris.

  “Fayard, look!”

  Rosy was pointing skyward.

  Bofoellesskaber’s single sun had been replaced by three.

  A voice spoke in their heads: Welcome to your future. I am the World Thinker, humanity’s final heir.

  * * * *

  As the World Thinker patiently explained things to his accidental visitors, his work was practically child’s play, here in a period some two billion years removed from Fayard and Rosy’s time.

  Viewing the past and selecting a planet with the best potential for uplift, and in a galactic location where it would subsequently do the most good to mitigate Mirror Sickness, this demiurge would abstract the world entire from its native era. Brought forward to the far future and installed in this artificial star system whose three suns could be modulated to provide just the right spectrum that would mimic the original stellar environment, the world was ready for development.

  The World Thinker next approached the species chosen for uplift treatment, tinkered with its genome to foster sentience, and then simply allowed Darwinian evolution to take its course over a few hundred or thousand millennia. No acceleration necessary. The alien culture would develop naturally in situ. When judged ripe, the whole world would be translated back to Fayard and Rosy’s era without more than a single unit of Planck time having ticked by in the eyes of the human observers in the past, thus making a whole race appear to arise instantaneously out of nowhere.

  “But why?” asked Avouris. Despite receiving no visible sign of the World Thinker, Fayard had conceived an image of the being from its mental projections, an image which consorted nicely with a fussy old neurotic and knowledge-heavy librarian from his own undergraduate days.

  A note of resigned sadness filtered into the World Thinker’s speech. To render myself non-existent.

  The native timeline known to the World Thinker had never exhibited any sentience save humanity. The cosmic human civilization had succumbed to wave after wave of Mirror Sickness, resulting in myriad ugly apocalyptic crashes and warped resurgences, an endless
cycle of inbred frustration and soul miasma that had culminated in the World Thinker’s own lonely damaged birth at the end of human history.

  I am an imperfect thing, half mad and so much less than I could have been. I bear within me the entire record of humanity’s bitter isolation. But it occurred to me that I could remake the past, to engender a better scenario. So I chose your era as the pivotal moment to install change, and began to seed it with alien sentience.

  Rosy interrupted. “But if you still exist, then your plan did not work. Your seeding occurred two billion years ago, and yet you remain. You should have vanished instantly upon first conceiving of your scheme.”

  A faint sense of laughter seemed to permeate the next words of the World Thinker.

  But then how would the scheme ever have been carried out to result in my vanishing? No, the chronal paradoxes are unresolved. Am I operating across multiple timelines, living in one and tinkering with another, or do all my actions occur only in one strand of the multiverse? Maybe I am improving the continuum nextdoor to mine. Is that yours, or not? In any case, I have no choice but to continue. Humanity cannot develop in a healthy manner without alien peers. I am testament to that premise.

  The three suns of Bofoellesskaber were now setting, and the air grew chill. Fayard and Rosy held each other more tightly.

  “What’s to become of us?” Avouris asked.

  Your presence will allow me to fulfill one last seeding, the most crucial of all. Don’t worry: I will visit you from time to time with aid.

  Realization struck Avouris like a blow. “Surely such a sophisticated entity as yourself will not endorse such a cliché!”

  No reply was forthcoming. Instantly their surroundings had altered.

  The air, the light, the smells, the sounds—all possessed a primeval rightness, an ancestral gravity.

  Rosy laughed with a touch of grimness. “Earth! Would you care to guess the date?”

  Avouris sighed, then chuckled. “Far enough back, my dear, that there will be no constraints on our family size whatsoever, I imagine.”

  SPECTER-BOMBING THE BEER GOGGLES

  Firpo Manzello was looking to get lucky. He hadn’t had sex in three weeks, and was beginning to fear he never would again. Yotta-toxic, serkku!

  Part of the carnal drought involved Firpo’s job. He worked for the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, in their Public Works Department, Sewer Division, Rogue Transgenic Squad. Firpo’s job involved descending into the subterranean labyrinth of utility tunnels with his team each morning and cleaning up whatever escaped the filters and traps of the numerous biotech plants in the city. Most days, the team’s quarry was nothing more challenging than some errant slime mold or motile vat-cortex. But from time to time, more complex organisms got loose. Firpo still bore crosshatched scars on his ankles and calves from tangling with a pride of anomalocaris. Believe me, serkku, those things could bite! What the hell had the fabbers been thinking when they endowed the monster shrimps with that pincer equipment? Lots of good eating there in the grabbers, but still—

  Firpo’s job description itself wasn’t the actual problem. Some women actually found his duties sexy. Great White Hunter/Urban Superhero Guardian and all that. No, the hard nut was how Firpo smelled after a day at work. Heavy aromatics in those sewers! Even industrial-strength odor-remediation ribozymes from TraumaTech failed to eliminate every molecule of stench. Hard to get close to a babe when you reeked even faintly of seaweed-fermenting yeast strains.

  But a liberal dose of Hack’s Bodyspray could generally mask Firpo’s signature smell at least long enough for him to make a love connection. The other, greater part of his problem was his erotic selectivity.

  Firpo had developed a kink, hardwired now in his neurons by way, way too much gameplay in the online universe of ElfQuest. (A geezer at age twenty-eight, Firpo had prefered the old-fashioned platform over the augmented reality live-action version.) SAD, the experts called Firpo’s kink. Sympathetic Avatar Dysmorphia, brought on by excessive somatic identification with one’s virtual self and peers. Although he managed to kick his gamer addiction, he could only get turned on by women who looked like elves. Needless to say, such real-life women were a tiny minority on the dating scene. True, there was a small community of modded and cosplay elves at MIT. But Firpo had kinda aged out of that scene, and dramatically burned some bridges.

  That left him only one choice really if he wanted to get laid.

  He was going to have to download the Beer Goggles app.

  The Beer Goggles app was a piece of augmented reality software that ran on your memtax. It changed the user’s visual perception of other humans, overlaying onto them whatever physical parameters the user dictated. Beer Goggles would allow Firpo to perceive every woman as an elf. Or so he had been assured by the vendor’s sales pitch. He had not actually used the app yet. Before today, the thought of downloading it into his phone felt too much like defeat, giving in to his neurosis and carrying around a talisman of his deviance. He kept telling himself that he could beat his kink and get normal. But three celibate weeks had proved he was too weak to defeat his kink.

  So, eager to be loved again, Firpo took the decisive step.

  First he popped in a new pair of memtax. The brief interval when his naked eyes beheld the world, when unmediated photons struck his rods and cones, seemed weird and incomplete, as if he had been stripped of one of his senses.

  Memtax were living contact lenses built out of jellyfish proteins laced with graphene circuitry and an RGB chromatophore micromatrix. They subsisted by drinking the wearer’s tears, lasted forty-eight hours, and a year’s supply came free with most annual phone contracts. Possessing only minimal memory and processing power (about as much as turn of the century PC), they had just one function: painting the user’s retinas with high-res realtime imagery. Oh, yeah: their outward-facing side replicated the user’s iris and pupil—or any other image the user chose.

  The memtax were übertoothed to Firpo’s phone, which in turn rode the cognitive E3 cellular network to the vast global cloud.

  After losing his expensive smartphone several times in the sewers, even when secured in a supposedly failsafe holster, Firpo had invested in a wearable phone, now strapped to his wrist. The size of a sports watch, the phone ran on a thermopile that converted Firpo’s excess bodyheat to electricity. It also served as a bodymonitor with continuous transdermal monitoring, sending telemetry back to the squad’s HQ while Firpo squelched through the sewers, wearing his memtax, übertoothed earbuds and a piezoelectric conduction mic strung on an innocuous locket around Firpo’s throat.

  Firpo’s haptic bling—a smartring on each finger—completed his toolkit.

  The Memtax settled into place and booted up. The Apple-Asustek app store icon hovered in the upper left corner of Firpo’s field of vision, seemingly as real as the rest of his kitchen. He spread the icon open with a two-fingered gesture, his Haptic User Interface rings providing the tactile sensation of cutting a trough in a bowl of porridge. He quickly found Beer Goggles, and, for €3.99, downloaded it.

  He started the little augie program running and directed it to the ElfQuest MMORPG site for its templates. The game had ten million players, over half of whom were women with distinct avatars. With that many images to choose from, the AI in Beer Goggles would certainly be able to overlay all the women Firpo could possibly meet in his lifetime with non-repeating masks.

  The neat thing about Beer Googles was that it only came online when the user got drunk, as determined by his phone’s measurement of the ethanol levels in his sweat. The app said it was operative now, but of course Firpo wasn’t drunk. Yet he wanted to test it, so he overrode its defaults to bring it immediately online. Then he looked outside.

  Rents were too high in Cambridge for Firpo to afford living there, and the city did not demand residence within its borders as a term of his employment, so he lived in a cheap neighborhood in Charlestown. His quarters were a leaky, drafty houseboat moored at a lou
che marina protruding practically from the base of the Bunker Hill Monument. Connected to the hungry sea, the rising waters of the Charles and Mystic Rivers had reached partway up Breed’s Hill, drowning the old street-level neighborhood. The repurposed district had a certain gritty charm. Firpo always enjoyed watching the scuba divers below his boat, circulating through the drowned tenements in search of archaeological tidbits.

  A Duck Tour was offloading a group of sightseers at an adjacent commercial dock. Judging by the snatches of excited conversation that drifted to him through his open window and by the appearance of the men, Firpo suspected the tourists hailed from Singapore or Malaysia. But judging by the women—old, young, fat, lithe, tall, short—the group hailed from Abode, exotic world of two moons, Wolfriders and Sun Folk. Long pointy ears, big slanted lantern eyes, golden skin, heart-shaped delicate faces.

  Firpo hurriedly dropped the shade on his window, his sudden arousal painfully pressing against his pants. He took Beer Goggles offline, and then brought up the active lifestreams of three of his posse from the Rogue Transgenic Squad, teleking them and arranging to meet them at the Cantab that evening.

  Plenty of time to elven-ify the female world when he reached the bar.

  * * * *

  The house band at the Cantab Lounge, Jasmine Mofongo, pounded out their bhangra-bachata so loud that Firpo had to recalibrate his earbuds to filter out most of the music before he could hear his friends talk. Illumined like a cross between a hospital ward and a Victorian opium den, the Cantab was old, grotty and cramped, its staff rude and capricious, but the place felt like home to Firpo and his squad mates. They often came here straight from the showers after work, and had never once been called out for being a tad whiffy. The patrons were simply grateful for the protection from roaming sewer shoggoths, a popular urban legend. (One excessively wasted female patron claimed to have been attacked once by a pseudopod emerging from the Cantab toilets.)

  Being a Saturday inching toward midnight, the joint was jamming. Firpo and his three friends had been lucky to get stools at the long scarred bar. A score of booty-shakers thronged the small dance floor. Balky heat pumps chuffed to chill the place, to little effect. The early June temps had averaged high nineties all week, and now the heat was baked into the building’s old skeleton, mere prelude to August torture.