The Paul Di Filippo Megapack

by Pau Di Filippo

  “Planck’s Constant dropping!”

  “Boltzmann’s Constant increasing—up to one point three eight zero four two—”

  “Avogadro’s Constant falling. Down by point zero zero zero zero zero zero three!”

  A phone rings; someone answers. She listens, then drops the receiver, white-faced.

  “That was Cerro Tololo Observatory. Hubble’s Constant is changing!”

  A hot wind blows out of the ring, smiting Carr. He grows dizzy, puts a hand to his head. It seems he can see the distant single headlight of a train approaching out of the tiny circle, hear its mad whistle. A set of railroad tracks suddenly snaps into being, leading out of the concentric rings of the annulus, across the floor, where they sever cables and pipes, and through the wall of the soundstage, which has opened in a train-shaped hole.

  Carr feels at last that he has to speak, all the enormous responsibility devolving on him. Everyone’s shocked faces are imploring him. But what to say? What words can possibly sum up the utter finality of the disastrous mission?

  At last it comes to him, the phrase tripping over his unwieldy tongue:

  “Tha—tha—that’s all, folks!”

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Isaac Asimov often told the story of how he wrote a tale about aliens who lived at the top of Mount Everest and prevented any humans from reaching the summit. That story had the misfortune to appear in print the same month Sir Edmund Hillary reached the top of that peak.

  Likewise, my story below saw print just as Who Framed Roger Rabbit debuted in thousands of theaters around the planet. I had never heard of the original novel or its author prior to that fine film. But now, instantly, my story looked like a total copycat production, rendered minor by comparison to Gary Wolfe’s masterpiece. Of course, it was parallel evolution, not theft, but try telling that to anyone then. I hope in the decades that have passed, my claim seems more plausible.

  Science Fiction Eye was the top critical zine of the immediate post-cyberpunk era, and published only one fiction issue. I felt proud to be a part of its excellence for all but the first installment.

  ADVENTURES IN COGNITIVE HOMOGAMY: A LOVE STORY

  Handsome Kioga Matson, waking from a fitful programmed microsleep imperfectly contoured by the experimental orexin-modulating drug Ailurexant he had self-prescribed, and landing once again in yet another of those Science Parks that constituted his insular and discontiguous adopted homeland, a quasi-state composed of homogenous R&D and prototyping sites in a globe-girdling network of exclusive brainpower, had to pause a moment on consciousness’s hazier edges, an interzone fuzzed also by an ongoing bad episode of Kyoto Duck Flu against which he had been administering a powdered antiviral inhalant from NexBio, DAS939, in order to recall exactly what antiquated nation-state now hosted him.

  Looking blurrily out the window as the SonicStar plane taxied, he saw a line of modest mountains ringing, at some distance, the small corporate landing field. So this could not be Kalundborg in Denmark nor Seletar in Singapore nor Granta in the United Kingdom. But it could very well have been Sunlight in Montana, USA, or Acheson in Canada or Baikampady in India. Very disorienting.

  A glimpse of some lush emerald tropical vegetation caused the knowledge of his current destination to click into place in his memory. He had come down in Parque Arví, Medellín, Colombia. Along with other boffins Kioga was to participate in a presentation for MercoSur trade reps, his field of expertise being industrial metabolics. And he was also to spend a full glorious twenty-four hours in the presence of his fiancée, Mallory Sloper, whom he had not seen in six whole weeks.

  In theory, what bliss!

  And yet, Kioga found himself strangely unexcited at the prospect of reconnecting with his bride-to-be. He imagined with some degree of accuracy that much of their private time here would be spent firming up the endless details of their elaborate wedding next year—details that had already consumed a myriad of online hours when apart—and that rather too little time would be spent with any kind of preferable bedroom athletics. This skewed ratio of work to fun irked Kioga, and he had to strive hard to convince himself that everything would be different after they were married.

  As the groundcrew wheeled a set of steps up to the opening hatch of the jet, Matson sneezed suddenly with contaminatory gale force. He fumbled out a packet of tissues and evacuated his nostrils, preparatory to blasting another hit of DAS939 into his sinuses. That task done, he woke his nap-silenced phone and, feeling somewhat guilty at his ingratitude toward Mallory’s majestic and unyielding love, rang her up. She’d be happy if he checked in immediately upon landing and disgruntled if he didn’t—though she would never admit her displeasure, instead merely affecting a certain sharpness of voice that cloaked ostensibly jovial phrases in sonic barbed wire.

  The superfine patrician bonestructure of his beloved’s face, wrapped in seemingly poreless peachy flesh finer than spidersilk, filled his phone’s retina+ display. Since last telephonically encountered, Mallory had changed her hairstyle to a platinum pixie cut layered with living crimson pinfeathers that tapped her scalp’s blood supply to stay perpetually vibrant.

  “Darling! You beat me to Colombia. And I so wanted to be there to meet you! But the Osaka conference ran long.”

  “It’s just as well. I’m a bit under the weather. La grippe canard. I can use a little downtime first.”

  “Well, I’m somewhere over the Pacific at the moment. ETA about two hours from now.”

  “Fine. You can wake your Prince Charming with a kiss.”

  “But of course! And then—”

  Kioga brightened. “And then?”

  “We simply have to discuss the guest list!”

  Kioga suppressed a wince. The dreaded guest list discussion had already occupied one-hundred-and-fifty-two-point-five hours of his life. He knew the stat precisely from totalling all the automatically tagged hours in his lifelog. Sometimes it seemed that this endless parsing of the relative affinity bonds of friends, relatives and business associates would extend into infinity, finding an angel-winged Kioga still indecisively parcelling out seats in the heavenly cloudbanks.

  “Of course. I can’t wait. See you soon.”

  “Mwah! Bye for now, lover.”

  * * * *

  Lodgings for braintrust gypsies at Parque Arví were, of course, more or less identical with the facilities at a hundred other Science Parks, an organically efficient architecture and interior design that bespoke a kind of stern technocratic accomodation with the needs of the flesh and spirit, acknowledging that a measured slight amount of earned pampering was conducive to productivity and creativity, while any hints of hedonism would amount to a venal betrayal of a sacred, semi-public trust, not to mention stockholder bottomline expectations.

  Kioga’s phone checked him in as he walked through the lobby, instantly making his location known to everyone in his social and business networks. Greetings and memos filled his message queue, but the phone flagged nothing for his immediate attention. A message from Jimmy Velvet, declaring boisterously that Jimmy himself would imminently be “hot-cradling in Parque Arví,” lifted Kioga’s spirits. Any time spent with Mr. James Swinburne Vervet would involve exotic inebriants, Planck-level conversation, and possible rousing altercations with offended pecksniffs and grundies of all stripes. But right now, Kioga felt relieved to have a couple of hours to himself.

  Up in his room Kioga unpacked his small bag, his essential invariant kit. He propped a dented, military-hardened, brushed aluminum digital picture frame on his dresser top. A memento of his recently deceased (?) mother, Brenda, the frame cycled through photos of the Matson family: a sprawling, well-fed, bright-eyed Anglo clan, jolly as a whitebread Christmas pudding with one dark little raisin embedded.

  Kioga regarded that selfsame grownup raisin in the smart mirror over the dresser. (The mirror flashed a mild warning that his body temperature was one-point-seven degrees above normal, courtesy of la grippe canard.) Six-two, burnt sienna skin
, hair buzzed almost to nullity, at age twenty-eight he resembled, some said, Uganda’s still vibrant elder statesman, President Frank Mugisha.

  Not exactly a phenotype in conformity with his adopted kin.

  Twenty-five years ago, in 2015, Brenda Matson had been a KBR mercenary attached to the USA’s AFRICOM forces based in Entebbe, Uganda, where they waged a cat-and-mouse contest with the fighters of al-Shabaab. Captured after a fierce firefight in the bush, Brenda Matson had been removed to a tiny remote village on the shores of Lake Kioga that hosted the terrorist cell. There she had been securely bound and dumped into a big multifamily hut, all gnarly poles, mud-walls and palm-thatched roof. Hot, smelly, claustrophobia-inducing, with manic house geckos skittering every which way.

  Brenda’s training served to tamp down but not utterly eradicate a fear that threated to swell to panic if she should divert her will for a second. Her zip-tied wrists and ankles ached. Everyone she could see, from the male fighters to the women and adolescents, were heavily armed with Chinese weapons. Everyone, in short, except for Brenda and a very charming naked boychild of three. Oddly enough, the neglected toddler, ignored by the chattering flustered and hyperactive adults, had gravitated instinctively to Brenda, eventually falling asleep against her cramped side while, numb, nervous, hungry and stinking, Brenda awaited rescue.

  Within a few hours of the geo-stabilization of her transponder-chipped person, and following an indetectible UAV survey of the scene, AFRICOM softly deposited a Bee Hive in the middle of the village.

  From the armaments package emerged hundreds of lethal thumb-sized aerial drones, rocketing on burst chemical propellants. The pack of angry discriminating bees promptly drilled straight through the skulls of all the belligerents before their fingers could even compress a trigger, leaving Brenda and the little, suddenly wailing boy the only living inhabitants of the carnage.

  When the AFRICOM forces came for her, Brenda thought she was fine.

  But that didn’t explain why she insisted irrationally on squeezing the lone young survivor tight to her chest and refusing to be parted from him, while issuing mad threats of physical assault against her comrades, even while she was being carried on a stretcher into the waiting copter.

  Kioga Matson often rehearsed this chapter of his autobiography. He recalled nothing genuine of the fateful incident, but had heard the tale so many times that he had developed vivid false memories of it. Yet oddly enough, they were all channeled from his mother’s POV. He saw himself clutched to her chest as if in some Nollywood biopic of Brenda’s life.

  Kioga’s adoption into an upper-middle-class American family ensured that, barring some grand personal failure of character, ill health or a suite of implacable vices he would slide effortlessly into the meritocracy. He failed to encounter even a whiff of racism in the exclusive enlightened realms through which he sailed as a boy and teen and young adult; developed his propensity for economics and science into expertise in the field of industrial metabolism—the displine of charting and optimizing how raw materials and energy were turned into products and waste; and his departure from graduate school at the laudable age of twenty-three found him firmly emplaced in the Science Park network, earning an admirable salary and feeling generally fulfilled.

  His engagement to Mallory Sloper, powerful witch of the carbon-sequestration wizard clan, whom he had met three years ago at an epochal gathering in Migdal HaEmek, Israel, only reinforced his feelings of good fortune and gratitude.

  He hoped he had thanked his mother often enough for giving him this wonderful life, so far above the global norm and so far above his lot at birth. There would be no more such filial opportunities to render gratitude and love. After her exemplary stint as a grunt, Brenda Matson had graduated into the spectral ranks of international spook-dom, and just last year had gone missing in the mountains of Khövsgöl, Mongolia, on the track of a subversive group calling itself Lex Talionis.

  * * * *

  Turning away from the dresser mirror, Kioga once more affirmed his own happiness with how his life had developed.

  And yet—and yet—there was one wordless part of him, buried deep and generally ignored, that still dwelled in prelapsarian bliss on the simple shores of his natal lake.

  Kioga forwent another dose of Ailurexant and yet got a surprisingly solid natural nap. He awoke at noon—the presentation was scheduled for 2 PM—and, refreshed and wearing a trig new Buddy Cheetah smart suit in fawn and aurora orange, ambled to the commissary.

  The air here in vegetation-rich, manicured Parque Arví was wholesome and fragrant. No noise penetrated the pastoral campus from the city of five million people—rich and poor, struggling and well-off—that stretched away in all directions from the base of the lofty enclave, extending also in ramshackle vertiginous barrios halfway up the mountainside until the squatters encountered the lethal perimeter of the Science Park.

  An energetic conversational knot occupied the lobby of the dining hall, and Kioga was startled to spot Mallory thoroughly engaged with a host of fellow savants, some of whom Kioga recognized, others not. He came up behind his fiancée and gently clasped her elbow.

  “Oh, hello, dear, how are you?” She pecked his cheek. “Stuart and I got so busy on the flight talking about the latest exciting work out of Biorecro that we just couldn’t break away. They’ve increased the uptake in their transgenic poplar trees by fifteen percent!”

  Stuart Holliston, tan and swimmer-fit, bestowed upon Kioga a smile dangerously close to a smirk. “Your lovely woman has some great notions about how to monetize this, Matson. If you’re not careful, she’s going to make you both filthy rich.”

  “Oh, I’m decidedly high-maintenance, Stuart. A regular luxury sink. I’ll spend her money faster than those poplars suck up CO2.”

  Kioga waited a moment for Mallory to break off and accompany him to table, but she showed no signs of wanting to flee present company. So he simply said, “I’m very hungry, so I’ll see you after the presentation.”

  He walked into the dining hall feeling crestfallen and sad.

  But sight of Jimmy Velvet seated at a table and surrounded by seemingly every waitress in the commissary cheered Kioga immensely. He strode over.

  Jimmy familiarly held the hand of one young uniformed woman, a native beauty, and chattered in rapidfire Spanish that caused her to grin and nod. Finished, he kissed her hand and she departed, giggling, with her fellow refectory angels.

  “Ky, my ligand! You’re just in time! I’ve only now promoted a bottle of Valdivieso 2035 from that brilliant lass. What a peach! And that gorgeous rump! As for the wine, it’s a trifling Chilean Champagne. Undoubtedly inferior to the Veuve Clicquot you regularly bathe in, but needs must. Not on the menu, but the Director has a private stock. Join me, lig, join me!”

  The wine arrived in a homeostatic chiller, along with two giant bowls of steaming ajiaco soup, with succulent avocado on the side. Kioga realized then just how famished he was. He forked up the floating encobbed corn from his bowl and stripped it clean in well under sixty seconds. Jimmy matched him, bite for bite. The cold bubbly went down smoothly and seemed not to interact badly with Kioga’s meds, leaving him feeling bouyant and vivid. And for business purposes, he could always pop a tab of Null-borracho if necessary.

  Their hearty soup finished, awaiting the dessert of bocadillo and panelitas (guava and panela candy), Jimmy dabbed neatly at his lips with a cloth napkin. “So, I see Mallory is networking up a storm while she’s here. And we’ve got the presentation in an hour or so. Does all that leave any time or spirit whatsoever for a little mattress gymnastics? Or will you be debating candied almonds versus cocktail wienies until the wee hours of this splendid, moon-kissed tropical night?”

  Kioga winced. He felt he had to defend Mallory against the very charges he himself had been harboring a little while ago. “Come on now, Jim, she’s not at all like that. You’re being much too harsh on the woman I’m going to spend the rest of my life with.”

  �
�Better I speak now than when the matrimonial saddle is fully cinched.”

  “I’m certain the orgiastic noises spilling from my quarters tonight will shock the entire staff.”

  “Hrm. Well, if you find yourself at loose ends this evening, be advised that I and some others are heading into the city. The Zona Rosa, Poblado ’hood. The Parque Lleras district, to be precise. Many, many square blocks of wanton women, inveigling intoxicants, hip-oiling music and fingerfoods of the gods. Or so I’ve been promised.”

  “Thanks. But I know I’ll be extremely busy with my own exclusive amorous affairs.”

  “Your phone knows my phone, lig. Hey, look at the time! We’re due a mile away a week ago! What are they using for personal transport here? Not those cheesy little Tata PicoPods! Oh, my word! My spine will never be the same….”

  Kioga tried to spot Mallory as they rushed out, but she was nowhere to be seen.

  Large yet somehow intimate, with its reconfigurable walls and fixtures, the conference room already held all the expectant and highly polished Mercosur representatives when Jimmy and Kioga arrived. Kioga felt pleased that he was not the last braintruster to show up. In fact, Mallory and Stuart kept everyone waiting till a whole ninety seconds past the scheduled start of the presentation. His fiancée smiled hastily at him, squeezed his shoulder in the manner of a sports teammate in passing, then settled down at her assigned seat.

  The group presentation went well, thought Kioga, although, truth be told, he gave only half his concentration to the speeches, even including his own part. The only slight glitch occurred when Jimmy, explaining the efficacy of the new options for seabed mining, his speciality, likened the process to “hoovering vomit off a Scotsman.” But aside from that gaffe, the Mercosur suits seemed well pleased with the valuable new insights and profit-enhancing technologies presented to them.

  When the meeting broke up, the time was almost seven PM. Kioga hastened to Mallory’s side, intent on cutting her out of the herd.