That's not counting the single GameBoy he has let slip, the one he's counting on to gain him access to the shelter.
going to ground
You take what you're dealt and you deal with it.
– Poppy
easy access
Son stakes out the bunker, deploying himself on a low ridge close enough to the entrance he can make out an empty brandy bottle, not yet dissed, and an abandoned catchbag in the moonlight. He watches. The GameBoy will come.
The full moon pulls on the landscape. Since Son began this watch, the dusty haze has surged two or three centimeters against his ankles. Where did that last GameBoy get to? He's starting to think he might have to spend the night crouched here, which, given his current condition, would be far from ideal. Dragons are creeping closer, at least two of them. Could be his blur mantle is failing, and they're homing in on the stink from his wound.
•
Here we go.
His quarry has given itself away. It's standing right out in the open where Son reckons the bunker entrance is hidden. The GameBoy picks up the catchbag and holds it to his face. At first Son thinks it's nuzzling the bag, maybe even licking it. Then he realizes it's weeping. Never mind Poppy is dead, his voice provides the commentary: "If that don't beat all. A grown GameBoy, crying."
Son flips the cord from his catchbag over its head and garrotes it. Easy as can be. The GameBoy is so amazingly careless you'd think it wanted to die. This time, instead of nearly taking the head off the way he did with the guard, Son only pulls hard enough that the cord saws into the skin, hard enough to close off the windpipe. The GameBoy thrashes back and forth, working fingers slick with blood between cord and neck. Son throws his weight into it, spins them both into the bunker's primary security area, where they go to their knees.
It hurts to breathe now. Son thinks his ribs must be cracked.
The GameBoy's struggles die away as the securiscope emerges in response to the victim's key implant. The silly goose of a machine proffers its ritual invitation to a visual handshake, a whacky over‐and‐under ogle indifferent to what it finds, familiar retina or laser‐gun target. Son wobbles as he stands to drag the GameBoy closer, this tough sonofabitch who refuses to die. Its eyes are still bugging out when Son rams one of them up against the securiscope. He cuts the key implant out and stuffs it in a corner of his catchbag.
The airlock, a sophisticated two‐stage affair, works fine. Son enjoys the advantage of Poppy's Special Forces experience, which taught him that most people simply used the original default access code—12345 [year of installation] abcde, no special characters or caps or anything. Since nearly all these shelters were built in the years 2034–2039, Son takes less than two minutes to hack his way in.
And not a minute too soon. Behind him, crunch of bone and hiss of satisfaction announces a clean‐up crew attending to the last GameBoy.
scavenging the scavengers
Son knows dragon dens that smell better. These creatures were slobs. Bones and junk lie scattered everywhere.
Besides the forcefield security bubble, there's light and air‐con, thanks to a Oboku‐Higgs plasma battery, which generates both its own force‐field container and the energy it leaks upon demand. Auntie used to say that this technology was the answer to the energy needs of a world that destroyed itself before it could take advantage of the fix.
Another door stands in the wall to Son's right. It has a combo lock to yet another pressurized chamber, probably leading to a storeroom. Once, this would have qualified as a premium bunker. But the lock isn't set to any default he knows. It occurs to him that the GameBoys couldn't crack it either, since if they had, given their generally lackadaisical attitude, they would have never bothered to relock the door. Scratchmarks around the lock confirm this theory.
Sleeping pallets lie strewn in a far corner of the room. On a low table among them sits a plastic basket full of bottles. Some are clear glass, some are tinted green or brown. They contain a variety of pills and capsules. Dietary supplements, Son reckons, though most of the bottles have no labels. One opaque white plastic bottle does have: Super Multi‐Vitamins. Expiry date: 14 February 2017. He turns a green bottle in his hand to read "peace …serenity …sleep." Most of the print is illegible.
Against the opposite wall, a vintage digital monitor stares vacantly back at him, the first real TV he has ever seen. Electronically blank, the screen is nevertheless scribbled with runes, most of it gibberish, so far as Son is concerned. A couple of big red characters might be Chinese. Square in the middle of the screen, though, big black English letters spell out REALITY. Down in the right‐hand corner, a smaller, less careful inscription reads, "Fix me, fix me, fix me." Squatting to squint at it, Son also finds a tiny sticker with faded print that says "Delicious New Zealand."
On a tray on the floor in front of the TV sit two pairs of what he recognizes as immersion goggles. These must be an early version; they include nothing resembling the neural jacks Poppy used to rail against. Oddly, the goggles are twined with yellow and blue plastic flowers. Beside them sits a sealed foil packet of Armageddon Self Detonating Popcorn. "Fine hellsapoppin' fun." Two empty glass Coca‐Cola bottles complete the tray's inventory.
Beside the tray rests a plate patterned with blue‐and‐white birds and flowers. It holds a heap of little colored sticks and ashes, a bone and a bright yellow toy, a sports flitter with stubby cruise‐control wings and twin rockets, probably a pre‐'30s model. There's also a jar. It contains desiccated sprigs of something organic. A real soil‐grown plant, it looks like. Son nearly cuts his hand, he has to twist so hard to get the threaded metal lid off. He sniffs at the jar and sneezes. Then he breathes deeply at its mouth three times, savors a lingering scent of something nice, oddly evocative.
•
On a plain straight‐backed chair beside the TV, an object rests under a floppy hat woven from some ancient fiber. Son lifts the hat to discover a human skull, a brown patch on its crown polished to a high shine, maybe by finger oils. What must be a neural jack dangles from a socket installed in one temple. Son replaces the hat.
In strange symmetry with the skull, the lifelike head of a blonde woman rests on a broad meter‐long woodsim plank shelf above the TV. Son recognizes this as a bot, part of one, anyway. It's the first actual bot he has ever seen. Its eyes are closed, long lashes resting against pallid cheeks. He lifts the head to find a jack dangling from its neck, different from the one on the skull.
The shelf holds an array of objects. Either side of the head sprawl two Barbie dolls, one pinkish and the other chocolate colored. Real antiques, they predate the anatomically correct Barbies that Son has seen, a number of times, in a book. Someone has added crude breast and crotch details with a pen. A variety of other items are arrayed like offerings around it and on trays below it on the floor. A fancy glass flagon with faceted stopper stands empty, bracketed by a whiskey bottle, also empty, and a toy sports car. There's a lipstick, like the one Auntie used every Homeland Day and on Poppy's birthday. It was her last, she said. (She wore a hint of it for Son, one day not long ago.)
These collections are islands of tidiness in the mess. Together, he suspects, they represent some type of shrine. He wonders whether this is supposed to be a shrine to the TV, or whether the TV and the rest of it together represent a shrine to something else.
Bottom line, the shrine works. Because there on the plate, under the flitter, rests a plastic flatpack of antibiotics, no part of the GameBoy booty from the Bunker.
There's more. This shrine may involve very big mojo indeed. What Son really wants right now is something to eat and, standing there in front of it wishing, he notices a patch of dull metal amid the tatty plastic flower garlands. Lifting the flowers away with a spearstick, he finds a tin can of something. It has no label, but he bets it's food. His good idea: Eat some stuff right away, the way Auntie said you should, and only then drop the antibiotics.
Hunger grabs hard enough to make him dizzy, never
mind he doesn't even know what he's got here. "The chef's surprise," as Poppy liked to describe Auntie's new dishes, what she preferred to call culinary essays. Son pulls his knife, places the point inside the rim, and hammers its butt with the heel of his hand. The puncture elicits one gasp from the can and another from Son as he inhales the exquisite odor of potted meat. He saws his blade most of the way around the perimeter of the top and then pries it back. It isn't corned beef. In fact, he doesn't know what it is, though he does know it isn't from the Bunker. He lifts some of the pasty substance out on the point of his knife. It tastes stronger than any meat he's ever had, but it's good. He finishes it right there, still on his feet.
The expiry date on the meds is 2027. Could antibiotics this old be dangerous? Hardly matters, given his life prospects. He pops six caps from their plastic bubbles and tosses them down on top of the meat, stashes the rest in his catchbag. He sees no water at hand, and treats himself to a sip from his canteen. No emergency, perhaps, but a special occasion. And who's to say no?
He checks out the shelf again, where a bowl crudely woven from four colors of wire contains two shiny balls. They exactly resemble the hemmelite bearings they find around Ahuk Hole. He hefts them in two hands, finds one is lighter than the other. That's odd.
Whatever doesn't have a clear use is a liability. That's basic. But these bearings could make effective projectiles, if needed. Or a Poppy‐style mace. So, he drops them into his catchbag. They go thunk‐clong against the canned goods and each other, one of them emitting more of a bell tone than the other.
He decides to eat one can of the corned beef from the Bunker, partly because he's hungry and partly because he needs to reduce the weight of what he's packing. If he leaves the pears for breakfast, he can skip the early‐morning hunt. "Luxury, luxury," as Poppy might have said.
Plus, this makes more room in his bag for the balls.
•
Returning to the locked door, once again he tries the same code that worked on the main airlock. Nothing happens. Then he taps in edcba–5302–54321. A piece of cake, as Poppy liked to say.
But the GameBoys had been wasting their time. Son steps inside to find nothing except a long room crammed with ammo boxes, automatic rifles, rocket launchers on floor‐to‐ceiling steel racks—all the small arms you can imagine. All of it useless. One area is full of camping gear, again all useless, except for the bundles of tent poles, which are hemmelite, who can say why.
Especially in days past, the Boogoo was voracious when it came to anything that smacked of complexity. The weapons that Poppy stockpiled back in the Bunker, for example—the hurricane guns, the depleted‐uranium ammunition, the grenades—all proved useless as soon as you took them outside. The Boogoo would diss them within seconds, and you were lucky if, despite the blur mantle, it didn't diss you as well. One of Poppy's favorite laments was that if only they had proper hemmelite weapons, they'd be okay. As it is, they made do with scavenged knives and wires and suchlike composed of hemmelite. This blur‐proof substance had the useful property of being so chemically inert that it didn't exist as far as nanobot disassemblers were concerned. Their spearsticks were originally designed as tent‐rods, part of a CNB warfare cache Poppy salvaged back before Son was born; the catchbags were adapted from drogue chutes and pouches for survival tents.
Still, their pre‐Boogoo weapons served a therapeutic purpose. After a hard day on the hunt Poppy liked to sit quietly, eyes closed, and field‐strip a hurricane gun blind, never mind Auntie would tell him he should never do this at the dining table.
Son's grief slams him again, this grief complicated by that tinge of relief at Poppy's passing, at the resolution of a situation that yesterday seemed irresolvable.
A quick look around the GameBoy's arsenal reveals no hard rations, no hemmelite artifacts, nothing of real interest.
•
Do what he will, he can't get the TV to work. No surprise there, given the GameBoys used the monitor for a memo pad. But he can't resist trying. Imagine actually watching something on TV.
Well fed for the moment, and hoping the meds kick in soon, he sits on a mattress and takes the balls out for another look.
The bearings are featureless, the glassy gray‐black of hemmelite. He hefts them again. One of them isn't as heavy as it should be. He raps it with the saw edge of his knife and gets a dull bellnote. That's not standard, either. But there's no sign of a seam, no features whatsoever, beyond a distorted reflection of his own face spread out over the little globe.
He holds it up and turns it in the light. He squints harder, though without his prosthetic blur lenses this hardly makes any difference. Nevertheless, he spots a fine equatorial line that he missed earlier. He wipes both hands and ball on the mattress, which makes them dirtier, then tries rubbing the balls with his catchbag. He grabs a hemisphere in each hand and twists. There's a distinct click, and the two halves disengage, just a bit. He twists and tugs, cautiously, but they refuse to come apart. He pulls them gently away from each other and twists again. This elicits another click, louder than the first. The third time, he's rewarded with a sonorous chime, and the sphere separates into two equal parts, one in each hand. He sets one down on the ground, and looks at the other.
Whatever it is, this device is surely qubital, and Poppy always warned against exposing yourself to the Powers That Be. Despite himself, Son looks around the room, but nothing has changed. Then something snaps his attention back to the blonde. Her eyes are open. They stare blankly, deeply blue.
His hackles rise. He whirls toward a hint of movement, sees a solitary roach scuttle across the floor and vanish.
whole world in his hands
The eyes in the blonde head continue to stare. Son moves the floppy hat from the skull to the blonde head and pulls the brim down in front.
Then he turns his attention back to the metal hemisphere. He holds a dimensionless void in the palm of his hand. As he gazes into its depths, a glowing sphere emerges together with an assortment of smaller gemlike objects. He recognizes Saturn by its rings, Jupiter by the Great Red Spot, which rotates out of sight as he watches. Mars is rusty red. Pre‐Boogoo Earth glistens blue‐green patched with white. Son is filled with wonder. He holds the entire solar system in his hand, Earth's moon a tiny silver crescent in its orbit of the planet.
Digital and then qubital technology provided the world with tools and toys beyond imagining. But Poppy outlawed all "digital crap" and "pretend realities." Even TV was banned in the Bunker.
•
Meanwhile, Auntie was suffering a real crisis. And Poppy was aware of some of it; he kept telling her to shape up—this is the world we've got, he said, and it's our job to make the best of it. If only we had wallscreens, she'd reply, she might not feel the Bunker closing in on her the way it did. Even videos would help, though GR escapes would be best.
Poppy always said that Worlds UnLtd and their generated realities, magifacturing and the ProvideAlls, the Dolls—everything qubital, at least by the year 2025 or thereabouts—was part of IndraNet. So anywhere you had anything qubital, anywhere you might be, the Powers That Be had a fix on you. "They could watch you," he said. "And listen to you." IndraNet was infinitely redundant. The ultimate backup system. Every part of it contained every other part and, at least to whoever held the strings, every part was equally visible from every other part. Things couldn't get much more totalitarian.
At least until what was left of humanity was relegated to the malls. Quarantined. "And mark this, chum. Even out here, IndraNet remains in place. And I intend for us to stay clear of it."
What that meant for the Bunker was, "No digital media, much less any of that qubital shit. And no bots. This bunker is my world, and those are my rules."
"Our world," Auntie told him.
"Yeah. Our world. And my rules."
Auntie called Poppy a Luddite asshole, which didn't piss him off because he probably didn't know what she was talking about.
•
&n
bsp; Auntie told Son about some of it, nearly miraculous in its sophistication, and he read more. But technology had maybe moved beyond either the printed records in the Bunker or Auntie's general knowledge. What he holds in his hand now amazes him, never mind planetary motions are clearly accelerated, and relative orbital distances can't be true to scale.
"Oh, yeah?" Here's Poppy back with him. "So what's it good for? What does it do?" That hardly matters. Any possible utility it might have pales beside its coolness factor. Son almost tests its depths with a finger, then thinks better of it. Two essential rules of survival: never put your hand into unexamined holes or crevices, and never touch something you're unfamiliar with.
Wherever did the GameBoys find this thing? Did they actually use it for anything? Maybe it was nothing but loot become object of brute worship. Maybe they never even opened it.
Spellbound, Son has neglected the other hemisphere, the one on the floor at his feet. He picks it up and looks. All it contains is a strange volume of dimensionless space, at once fist sized and as big as the universe. He shakes it, turns it this way and that in the light, holds it upside down. Nothing.
He returns to the solar system and peers into it again. This time he can't resist extending an exploratory forefinger until, about a centimeter short, he senses a tingle. He advances the finger a tad more. Sun and planets abruptly rush to meet him, and he jerks back. "Holy shit!" he says. The sun pops right out of its cup and, cherry‐size, blazes at him. Now the sun and its planets snap back into place. He probes again, this time more cautiously. Still in exaggerated motion relative to one another and to the sun, the planets rise toward him till Jupiter's surface fills the cup with colorful detail. Son experiments. He moves his finger to the side, and Jupiter rolls out of the way so he can coax Earth up to the point stormfront clouds swirl over Asia and the Pacific. Green land masses tell him this is a pre‐Boogoo Earth. He moves his finger a hair closer and gasps. Briefly, before the Earth turns farther, conglomerations of near‐microscopic diamonds glitter in the night at the edge of the world. City lights. Probably in what used to be Europe.
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