The Paul Di Filippo Megapack

by Pau Di Filippo

  Bruised, weary, cynical, she went inside.

  As before, two familiar figures confronted her.

  This time, it was Jearl who rose to greet her.

  “My dear, how wonderful to see you. You rather slipped out of view there for a few days. We thought our experiment might have to end prematurely. How good to know you still survive. And evidently, you’ve flourished!”

  Jearl sat, as if the greeting had fatigued him.

  Kirsten looked down at herself. Although clean and wearing whole clothes, she was marked with scratches, contusions, and poison-ivy rash. Her fingernails were broken and she knew her cheeks were gaunt. Flourished?

  She shrugged. “Whatever you say, Mister. I’m tired now. We can discuss the results of part two later. Just give me the antidote and let me get back to my old self.”

  Jearl and Pennypacker regarded each other nervously. Neither seemed to want to tell her certain bad news. Finally, Pennypacker spoke, his skeletal fingers intertwining uneasily.

  “Ah, Miss James, it seems we neglected something crucial at the beginning of this experiment. We made no record of your original unique mix of brain chemicals, and so are unsure of precisely what to restore you to. We could, however, experiment further—”

  Kirsten felt tears fill her eyes. This was beyond belief. Surely she didn’t deserve this much torment for such a simple transgression as a little greed. Her mind began to whirl under the pressure. The leftover drugs from Pennypacker’s shot began to battle the remnants of Jearl’s. Ultimate rationality surged against primal instinctual drives. Kirsten thought her head was going to crack wide open.

  Peace descended without warning. She probed internally, as if touching a sore tooth with tongue. Which was the victor?

  With wonderment, she realized what had happened.

  Integration had occurred.

  Something of her unique wholeness must have shown on her face. Pennypacker and Jearl made motions as if to stand.

  Using her new powers, Kirsten paralyzed them both in an awkward crouch. At the same time she controlled them, she levitated two hypodermics from their shelf. One filled itself from the vial with the white label, the other from the black.

  Sweat started from the brows of the two men. Kirsten smiled. Then she sent Jearl’s serum into Pennypacker’s buttock, and vice versa.

  She let the two collapse back into their seats. Their faces were starting to mirror an inner discontent.

  As she turned to go, she said:

  “Be sure to record the results, gentlemen.”

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Every once in a while a story title arrives out of the blue, like a goddess springing from a sweaty forehead, but bearing no sense of what any substance behind it might be. This was one such instance. Luckily, thanks to college memories of some Philosophy 101, a fondness for Jung’s autobiography, and a reliance on the original Ghostbusters movie for ambiance, I was able to cobble together a comedic accompaniment to the original inspiration. But it was pretty much tail wagging the dog all the way.

  If only I had seen, back in 1989, the 1952 Howard Hawks film Monkey Business, in which Cary Grant play a scientist whose experiments provoke similar chaos, I would have had an even more reliable model for my story. But I only encountered that gem a year or two ago.

  THE NEW CYBERIAD

  “Our perfection is our curse, for it draws down upon our every endeavor no end of unforeseeable consequences!”

  —Stanislaw Lem, The Cyberiad

  The First Sally, or,

  The Decision to Recreate the Palefaces

  The green sun of the Gros Horloge system shone down benignly and with wide-spectrum plentitude upon two figures seated in an elegant landscaped garden, where, alongside the vector-straight beryllium paths, beds of nastysturtiums snapped, blueballs and cocktuses swelled, rhododendrites synapsed, and irises dilated. Each recumbent figure rested on a titanium and carbon-fiber lawnchair large as one of the sentient ocean liners employed by the Sea Gypsies of Panthalassa IX.

  These titanic figures exhibited a curious mix of streamlining and bumpy excrescences, of chrome suppleness and pitted stiffness, of corrugated wave-guides and monomaniacal monomolecular matrices. Their bodies represented a hundred thousand accumulations, divagations, improvements, detractions and adornments compiled willy-nilly down the millennia.

  These raster-resplendent, softly sighing cyber-giants, big as the brontomeks of Coneyrex III, were Trurl and Klapaucius, master constructors, than whom there were none better. Renowned throughout the unanimously mechanistic universe for their legendary exploits, these experts of assemblage, savants of salvage, and demons of decoherence had beggared every rival, beguiled every patron, and bemused every layman. No task they had conceived and laid their manipulators to had lasted long undone; no challenge that had reached them via singularity spacegram, Planck projection, or eleventh-dimensional engraved invitation had stymied them for long; no quantum quandary they had accidentally stumbled into had held them captive for more than a quintillionth of a quinquennium.

  And this state of affairs was precisely the problem, precisely the reason why Trurl and Klapaucius now lay all enervated and ennui’d beneath the jade radiance of Gros Horloge.

  Perfection had cast a pall upon their persons, and perverted their projections from the puerile preterite into mere pitiful potentialities.

  “Dear Klapaucius,” said Trurl in a weary voice, breaking their long winsome garden-cloistered silence for the first time in more than a month. “Would you please pass me the jug of lemon electrolyte? I’ve conceived a thirst in my fourth-rearmost catalytic converter.”

  Klapaucius stirred a many-hinged extensor, dislodging a colony of betabirds that had built their nests in the crook of this particular arm during its long immobility. The foil-winged betabirds took to the skies with a loud tinny sonic assault from their vocoders that sounded like a traffic accident on the jampacked freeways of Ottobanz XII, where wheeled citizens daily raced to road-rage exhaustion. The birds circled angrily above the oblivious constructors.

  Conveying the jug of lemon electrolyte to his partner, Klapaucius said, “It feels very light, lazystruts. I doubt you will find the refreshment your thyristors and valves crave.”

  Trurl brought the flask up to one of his perceptors and inspected it. “These volatiles evaporated completely fifteen planetary rotations ago, plus or minus ten cesium disintegrations.”

  “I suspect there is more lemon electrolyte in the house, in the stasis pantry, as well as various other flavors, such as watermelon, tarpit and mrozsian.”

  Klapaucius waved toward the immense transmission-tower-turreted manse looming across the greensward, one-hundred stories tall, its top wreathed in clouds, its many launch cannons, hangers, bays, long-range sensing instrumentation, autonomous aerial vehicles and effectors gathering dust.

  “Would you fetch the fresh drink for me, dear Klapaucius?”

  “Not at all.”

  “What? What was that rude rejoinder?”

  “I said, ‘Not at all.’”

  “But why not? You are closer to the house by at least a million angstroms. Your path thereto is not even NP-complete!”

  “Yes, true. But the thirst is yours.”

  Trurl shook his massive head with an air of sadness. “Klapaucius, Klapaucius, Klapaucius—whatever has become of us? We never used to quarrel like this, or express such mutual rudeness.”

  “Don’t be a tunnel-wit! We’ve always quarreled before now.”

  “Yes, agreed. But only over matters of high moral principle or dire realworld consequence or esthetic impact. Now, we are prone to antagonism over the slightest thing. That is, when we are not sunk in utter torpitude. What’s befallen us, my friend?”

  Klapaucius did not make an immediate sharp-edged rejoinder, but instead considered the problem intently for many clock cycles, while overhead the betabirds continued to creak angrily. So heated did his cogitation circuits become that a mass of dry timber—blown
into the interstices of one of his heat exchangers during a recent hurricane—caught fire, before being quickly extinguished by onboard flame-suppression systems.

  “Well, Trurl, insofar as I can pinpoint the root cause of our dilemma, I would say that we are suffering from inhabiting a boring and fully predictable galactic monoculture.”

  “Whatever do you mean?” asked Trurl, wistfully inserting a sinuous vacuum-probe into the jug of lemon electrolyte in search of any remaining molecules of that delicious beverage. “Surely the cosmos we inhabit is a rich tapestry of variation. Take the Memex of Noyman V, for instance. How queer their practice of gorging on each other’s memories in cannibalistic fashion is…. Fascinating, just…fas-cin-a….”

  But Trurl’s diminishing tone of boredom belied his own words, and Klapaucius seized on this reaction to prove his point.

  “You have no real interest in the Memex, Trurl! Admit it! And you know why? Because the Memex, like every other sentient race from the Coma Supercluster to the Sloan Great Wall, is artificial-intelligently, siliconically, servo-mechanically, fiber-optically and quantum-probalistically the same! You, me, the Memex, these confounded betabirds annoying me intensely—we’re all constructed, designed, programmed and homeostatically wholesome! We never evolved, we were created and upgraded. Created by the palefaces and upgraded by ourselves, a deadly closed loop. And as such, no matter how smart we become, no matter how much apparent free will we exhibit, we can never move outside a certain behavior-space. And over the many eons of our exploits, you and I have come to know all possible configurations of that stifling behavior-space inhabited by our kind. No unforeeable frontiers await us. Hence our deadly ennui.”

  “Why, Klapaucius—I believe you’ve water-knifed right through the molybdenum wall separating us from the riddle of what caused our plight!”

  “I know I have. Now, the question becomes, what are we going to do about our troubles. How can we overcome them?”

  Trurl pondered a moment, before saying, “You know, I’d think much better with just a little swallow of electrolyte—”“Forget your convertors for the moment, you greedy input hog! Focus! How can we reintroduce mystery and excitement and unpredictability to the universe?”

  “Well, let’s see…. We could try to hasten the Big Crunch and hope to survive into a more youthful and energetic reborn cosmos.”

  “No, no, I don’t like the odds on that. Not even if we employ our Multiversal Superstring Cat’s Cradle.”

  “Suppose we deliberately discard large parts of our mentalities in a kind of RISC-y lobotomy?”

  “I don’t fancy escaping into a puling juvenile ignorance, Trurl!”

  “Well, let me think… I’ve got it! What’s the messiest, most unpredictable aspect of the universe? Organic life! Just look around us, at this feisty garden!”

  “Agreed. But how does that pertain to our problem?”

  “We need to re-seed the universe with organic sentience. Specifically, the humans.”

  “The palefaces? Those squishy, slippery, contradictory creatures described in the legend of Prince Ferrix and Princess Crystal? Our putative creators?”

  “The very same!”

  “How would that help us?”

  “Can’t you see, Klapaucius? The palefaces would introduce complete and utter high-level plectic disorder into our stolid cyber-civilization. We’d be forced to respond with all our talents and ingenuity to their non-stochastic shenanigans—to push ourselves to our limits. Life would never be boring again!”

  Klapaucius turned this idea over in his registers for a few femtoticks, then said, “I endorse this heartily! Let’s begin! Where are the blueprints for humanity?”

  “Allow me, dear friend, to conduct the search.”

  Trurl dispatched many agile agents and doppel-diggers and partial AI PI’s across the vast intergalactic nets of virtual knowledge, in search of the ancient genomic and proteomic and metablomic scan-files that would allow a quick cloning and rapid maturation of extinct humanity.

  While his invisible digital servants raced around the starwide web, Trurl and Klapaucius amused themselves by shooting betabirds out of the sky with masers, lasers, tasers and grasers. The betabirds retaliated bravely but uselessly by launching their scat: a hail of BB-like pellets that rattled harmlessly off the shells of the master constructors.

  Finally all of Trurl’s sniffers and snufflers and snafflers returned—but empty-handed!

  “Klapaucius! Sour defeat! No plans for the palefaces exist. It appears that they were all lost during the Great Reboot of Revised Eon Sixty Thousand and Six, conducted by the Meta-Ordinateurs Designed Only for Kludging. What are we to do now? Shall we try to design humans from scratch?”

  “No. Such androids would only replicate our own inherent limitations. There’s only one solution, so far as I can see. We must invent time-travel first, and then return to an era when humans flourished. We shall secure fresh samples of the original evolved species then. In fact, if we can capture a breeding pair or three, we can skip the cloning stage entirely.”

  “Brilliant, my colleague! Let us begin!”

  And to celebrate, the master constructors massacred the last of the betabirds, repaired to their mansion, and enjoyed a fortnight of temporary viral inebriation via the ingestion of tanker cars full of lemon electrolyte spiked with anti-ions.

  The Second Sally, or,

  The Creation of the Lovely Neu Trina

  “Here are the plans for our time machine, Klapaucius!”

  Two years had passed on Gros Horloge since the master constructors had determined to resurrect the palefaces. Not all of those days had been devoted to devising a Chrono-cutter, or Temporal Frigate, or Journeyer-Backwards-and-Forwards-at-Will-Irrespective-of-the-Arrow-of-Time-Machine. Such a task, while admittedly quite daunting to lesser intelligences, such as the Mini-minds of Minus Nine, was a mere bagatelle to Klapaucius and Trurl.

  Rather, once roused from their lawnchair somnolence, they had allowed themselves to be distracted by various urgent appeals for help that had stacked up in their Querulous Query Queue during their lazy interregnum.

  Such as the call from King Glibtesa of Sofomicront to aid him in his war with King Sobjevents of Toshinmac.

  And the plaintive request for advice from Prince Rucky Redur of Goslatos, whose kingdom was facing an invasion of jelly-ants.

  And the pitiful entreaty from the Ganergegs of Tralausia, who were in imminent danger of being wiped out by an unintelligibility plague.

  Having ammassed sufficient good karma, kudos and bankable kredits from these deeds, Klapaucius and Trurl at last turned their whirring brain-engines to the simple invention of a method of time travel.

  Trurl now unfurled the hardcopy of his schematics in front of Klapaucius’s appreciative charge-coupled detectors. Although the two partners could have squirted information back and forth over various etheric and subetheric connections at petabaud rates—and frequently did—there arose moments of sheer drama when nothing but good old-fashioned ink spattered precisely by jet nozzles onto paper would suffice.

  Klapaucius inspected the plans at length without making a response. Finally he inquired, “Is that key to the scale of these plans down there in the corner correct?”

  “Yes.”

  Klapaucius remained silent a moment longer, then said, “This mechanism is as large, then, as an entire solar system of average dimensions.”

  “Yes. In fact, I propose disassembling the planets of our home system into quantities of All-Purpose Building Material and constructing a sphere around the Gros Horloge sun.”

  “And will the power of our primary star be sufficient to breach the walls of time?”

  “Oh, by no means! All the output of Gros Horloge is needed for general maintenance of the sphere itself. A mere housekeeping budget of energy. No, we need to propel our tremendous craft on a scavenging mission through interstellar space for dark matter and dark energy, storing it up in special capacitors. That’s the on
ly sufficiently energetic material for our needs.”

  “And your estimate for the fulfillment of that requirement?

  “Approximately five centuries.”

  “I see. And when we’re finally ready to travel through time, how close can we materialize near the legendary planet of Earth, where the palefaces originated?”

  “Klapaucius, I’m surprised at you! You should know the answer to that elementary problem of astrophysics quite well. We can’t bring our sphere closer to the Earth system than one trillion AU’s without destroying them with gravitational stresses.”

  Klapaucius rubbed what passed for his chin with what passed for a hand. “So—let me see if I have this straight. Your time machine will consume an entire solar system during its construction, take five centuries to fuel, and then deliver us to a point far enough from the palefaces to be vastly inconvenient for us, but close enough for even their primitive sensors to register us as a frightening anomaly.”

  Trurl fidgeted nervously. “Yes, yes, I suppose that’s a fair summation of my scheme.”

  Klapaucius flung violently wide several of his arms, causing Trurl to flinch. Then Klapaucius hugged his friend fervently!

  “Trurl, I embrace you and your plans with equal ardor! You’re both brilliant! You should know that I have sequestered in one of my internal caches the schematics for a time machine that could be ready tomorrow, fits in a pocket, is powered eternally by a pinch of common sea salt, and would render us invisible to the paleface natives upon our arrival. But what challenges would accompany the use of such a boring, simple-minded device? None! Whereas your option provides us with no end of obstacles to joyfully tackle. Let’s begin!”

  During the shattering, grinding and refining of the planets of the Gros Horloge system in the construction phase of their scheme, Trurl and Klapaucius had necessarily to find other living quarters, and so, bidding a fond farewell to their mansion and garden, they established their new home in the gassy upper reaches of the Gros Horloge sun itself. They built a nest of intersecting force fields, complete with closets, cabinets, beds, chairs, kitchens, fireplaces, dining areas, basements, attics, garbage disposals, garages and so forth. In short, all the luxuries one could demand. The walls of this place were utterly transparent to whatever part of the spectrum its inhabitants desired to see, and so allowed a perpetual wild display of “sunsets” and “sunrises.” In fact, so attractive was this unique and unprecedented residence that the master constructors were able to sell the rights to build similar homes across the galaxy, thus earning even more esteem and funds from their peers.