At times I wax truly lyrical.
The three‐legged wooden stool under the sink remains there till it's needed. At this moment Noi is sitting in the sink washing her parts and, as always, the sink is threatening to come away from the wall, never mind Noi can't weigh more than forty kilos.
"Noi," I ask her. "Are you cleaning up or just playing with yourself?" I like Noi, but if I'm going to write any despatch worth reading I have to concentrate. "Go on, now. Get out of here. Chop, chop, okay?"
"Okay," she answers me. She climbs down, puts the stool back under the sink, says "Cannot see" when she tries to check herself in the mirror, goes "Bye‐bye" and departs the way she's supposed to, closing the door behind her. The calendar swings on its nail, swishka‐swishka, as Noi clumps down the staircase trying not to fall off her high‐heeled platform shoes. It's nice. Much better than having her simply vanish.
My one window looks across a dark space at the blank wall of an adjacent building, some bar, its name doesn't come to mind, that used to be there back in mondoland Bangkok. It hasn't been fully specified in the program, so when you exit Boon Doc's and stand on the street outside, all you're supposed to see are a couple of food vendors' carts, a few hazy barfront facsimiles. Except for Shaky Jake's. Shaky's bright pink and red and mauve sign stands sharp and clear, the dependent tail on the Y in "Shaky" a porky red go‐go pole with pink go‐go girl attached. The whole sign suffers spasmodic neon fits, just the way it used to. Hey, that's not bad. Nicely Turned Phrases'R'Us.
So my Soi Awol features Boon Doc's and Shaky's and, aside from that, nothing but ill‐defined faxes of a hotdog stand, a somtam lady with fiery papaya salad for the girls, and a stall with little metal tables and stools where you can score some noodles. Shadowy girls come out to tout their bars; anonymous figures pass by, not many, low‐rez ebees with about one Western woman tourist for every twenty‐five men. Only because I like it that way. All of it rendered inside the same cozy magic circle as it was in the Worlds UnLtd version.
This Aeolian Bangkok is like a sim of a simulation. Current technology could give me way higher‐rez reality than the original. But I like my nostalgia, so I'm a fan of the early Genesis world‐processors. Their bleary approximations—the slipping and sliding in and out of one magic circle and then another—they have the texture of soft‐focus girlie calendars and beery carouses.
At the same time, verisimilitude rules, OK! And any simulation worth living in has to include occasional roaches in the noodle soup. Because life just isn't life without roaches in the soup. As Leary likes to say, life is sweet and sour, and the sweet is all the sweeter for the sour. Not to mention trouble and pain are what drive us to new heights. Not homo saps in general, of course. Only real people.
•
And here's the thing: The malls, mondoland as a whole, are clinically defunct. So, this generated reality of ours, Aeolia, is probably the only world we have worth talking about. But you can already see signs of serious roaches lurking in this fine kettle of qubital soup. Yours truly prominent among them, never mind I'm really a lizard. Trouble and pain? Let's put it this way: There's reason to suspect some things are way rotten in the State of Aeolia.
Though I will abide. Whatever happens, the Lizard plans to be the last man standing.
emergences
You think this is the only world God gave us?
– Gran‐Gran
face2face
Cisco and Dee Zu stand there hand in hand. Liberated. The vast sunlit space is shocking.
"I'll be back." Toot says.
"Wait," Cisco says.
"No time. Talk later." Sky's shaggy little bot avatar, their guide out of the cave system, disappears back down the way they've just come.
•
Plumes of smoke still issue from the green masses around them, marking cracks and holes that lead into the dark labyrinth beneath them, the bunkerbuster‐blasted ruins of Living End.
Dee Zu blinks against the brightness of the day. Her eyes, uptilted and set wide of a pert nose, are dark amber flecked with gold. Overall, her face presents a genetic history of twenty‐first century globalization. It's almost unnaturally symmetrical, though this isn't the recurring fad for super‐symmetrical physiognomies among mallster avatars. This is her wet master. The real stuff.
That part of her psyche in charge of smiles, a sardonic imp, destroys the symmetry, tugging her full lips up to one side. "Lost something?" she asks.
"Only looking," Cisco replies, smiling back. He's stunned at her actual presence, at the real smell of her.
She steps away from him and, having fewer toes than she's used to, she loses her balance. He reaches to steady her, but she's already spinning in a slow circle, sinking one‐legged nearly to the ground before coming erect again, turning the recovery of her balance into a graceful pirouette, the supple economy of movement familiar to him from their many Worlds and holotank encounters. She punches lightly at his proffered hand, just a tap to show she's stable again, in control. It's all there: her pure feminine grace, her directness, a latent capacity for mayhem normally associated only with strong men. Her crooked grin.
The mortal density of her wet master lends her more authenticity than the highest‐rez holotank telep or Worlds avatar ever did. This is the real Dee Zu.
•
Cisco has much to tell Dee Zu.
For example, she doesn't even know who Brian is. Not really. She has only ever met his Eddie Eight telep in the tanks. So how to tell her the wet Brian is dead? Crushed under tons of falling limestone during the bombardment of Living End. Cisco witnessed this with his own eyes. Yet he needs to explain to her that Brian still isn't dead enough. Cisco also watched Leary and Ellie die. The fact they've also survived their deaths is more welcome, but no less difficult to explain.
They're still alive, as Cisco is himself, in Aeolia. Sky calls them scendents. Sky herself is a scendent, the first of them. Meanwhile, Cisco is essentially different from the others. Uniquely, he's both alive here, in mondoland, and he's alive there, in Aeolia. The only wet with a scendent backup.
And how can he tell Dee Zu that she has no scendent, that she may never have one?
To the best of his knowledge, only two wet humans in this whole world have survived: Dee Zu and himself. The difference is, she's alive but hasn't ascended. Sky says she can't, at least not the way she is. That leaves her far more vulnerable than Cisco. What it is, he's essentially immortal and she isn't, an insupportable asymmetry. His main concern, then, must be to keep Dee Zu alive while they prepare her for scendence.
So, their current situation isn't ideal. They stand outside, naked and unarmed, innocents in a new world outside the malls, outside the Worlds, and now outside Living End, Brian the Evil Canadian's subterranean lair, which lies in ruins.
•
Dee Zu leans against Cisco, tries to conceal the fact she's still tottering.
"Are you okay?" he asks.
"Okay," she replies. "Okay."
Her toes are healing; the skin has grown back over the wounds. And the rest of her burns are looking better. The medibots work fast.
Cisco's own injuries are clearing up nicely. Squeezing the shoulder elicits no more than a dull ache, though Brian and Sweetie mangled it when they removed the hardware HIID, the heads‐up internal informational display device, that connected him to Sky and the Lode. Sweetie only pretended to probe around looking for his HIID. She and Brian knew perfectly well where it was in the first place. Whatever. The other holes and bites and whatnot are well on the mend. It's amazing the way his medibots could at the same time assemble a stealth WalkAbout to replace his HIID. Neither has Cisco found the opportunity to explain that to Dee Zu.
Dee Zu touches his hand. The only other time he has come into contact with another wet human, at least since his early childhood, of which he has little recollection, was when he helped Leary back in the cave. And of course during all the intimate contact with Sweetie, which he'd prefer to forget.
<
br /> Now he and Dee Zu stand here alive and within arm's reach of each other. Their wet masters. Face2face. He's even more in love than he thought he was.
"What are you looking at?" she asks him. "What's wrong?"
There's nothing wrong. He gazes at her lush chocolate‐cinnamon‐cream skin and short‐cropped black hair. Until now he has only ever seen her teleps, qubital avatars in his holotank or in the Worlds. None of them, in all their variety, compared to this. "It's really you," he says.
She rewards him with a laugh. "And you were expecting maybe whom?"
"I mean, it's the really real you. The wet Dee Zu."
"A good song title."
"Ha, ha."
"So now what?"
"We defend ourselves."
"Against what?"
"Against everything."
"How about allies? Maybe there's someone we can team up with."
"Are you serious?"
in eden
The sun burns hot on Son's bare skin where he watches from a hollow atop a rise one hundred meters inside the border, inside an Eden that has been breached and invaded. Nothing remains sacred.
The same breeze that delivers maddening aromas of cooked meat carries a confusion of crunches and snorts and scrabble of claw. A dragon, obscenely free of blur mantle and part of a general feeding frenzy, cracks into a carbonized meatball, what's left of a pig or monkey. Son spotted a few such items scattered around a satray burn just inside the border. The dragon drops the meatball and whirls to snap at a smaller specimen that's trying to take a piece out of its hindquarters.
•
Son's own mantle has dropped off. Otherwise the crossing was uneventful, everything else maybe too distracted to notice his mad dash.
The border has broken down. The resident mini‐Boogoo's watchtowers and boogooman army have subsided, the dust congregating in giant flattened dustballs, coalescing into a tide that surges up some ravines and out of sight. Now swarms of all types and sizes are backed up on the other side, jockeying to be next in line to make the move. A bio‐blur riot creeps, scurries, and ripples across into Eden, mantles falling away to reveal a crazy mob of animals.
The bios are throwing caution to the winds. The stealth, the stalking strategies give way to a let‐it‐all‐hang‐out, right‐up‐there‐in‐your‐face abandon. It reminds Son of Gran‐Gran's "when lambs lie down with lions" palaver, except many of these lambs quickly become history. This is totally nuts.
Smoke still rises from the forest along the border and deeper inside Eden, where animals traipse about foraging in the open. A chittering cloud of bats issues from a smoking hole in the terrain, never mind it's broad daylight. Outside Eden, the bomb craters have long since filled with dust. Inside, still‐smoking craters are alive with movement and surprise. Some of the emergent creatures Son can't identify, others he has only ever seen in books. That scaly anteater, for instance, was a favorite character in one of Auntie's stories when he was a boy. Unused to the light, probably, it blinks and shuffles about looking bleary before it curls up in a tight ball against the approach of a large pig. A snake, beautifully patterned, as big around as Son's thigh and maybe four meters long, wraps itself around another pig, though the victim's former swarm‐mates clearly don't care. It's every man for himself. These scenes are like trying to read a foreign language, familiar only in part from what he's heard or read.
He has lost track of the GameBoys he spotted earlier among the various bio‐blurs dithering along the other side of the border. He'd wanted to think the ones he killed last night were the last of them. It's true that humans are themselves weed species, but GameBoys are far weedier and as hard to exterminate as roaches.
Movement off to the west and south of the border alerts him to a half‐dozen other boogoomen that threaten to substantiate out of the overburden. This often signals nearby human‐type activity, GameBoys for example. Monkeyswarms can also trigger boogoomen, mind you. Or maybe local gusts are whipping up dust devils, end of story. Son squints hard but, without prosthetic blur lenses, he can't telescope the view.
He also sees movement directly north, where jungle meets the base of a rust‐stained limestone cliff‐face. Humanoid figures lurk in the shadow of an overhang. More GameBoys? Or could these be the knievels he spotted a day ago as they barreled through the godbolt holocaust?
•
No doubt mondoland is fast changing, but this past couple of days Son's unease is being fed by something else. He can't shake a vague sense of other realms impinging on what, until so recently, was the familiar world of the ken. The malls are probably gone, and Gran‐Gran's heaven and hell are malarkey. The only other worlds Son knows are the ones from Auntie's books, and they're gone forever. Where else could there be?
"Bottom line," Poppy would say. "Things are what they are, and we deal with this world we've got."
That sentiment could kick Gran‐Gran into flat‐out fulmination mode. "You think this is all there is?" she'd ask him. "You think this is the world God gave us?"
Poppy would snort derisively. "Go ahead and wait for your Heaven if you want to. But this is what we've got. So live with it. Or don't."
"You listen to me. Everybody listen, especially you, Sonny. There are more worlds than you know, and this one is just the shitty end of the stick." Gran‐Gran would narrow her eyes in that classic glare and say, "Which is no more than we deserve."
This is Son's world. All he has. All that's left. So, he'll deal with it.
mutiny
This is Brian's world. He specified it, and he runs the show. So why is he uneasy?
"You're Brian, right?"
These two characters are clearly tourists. They showed up at the door and Keeow let them in. Ever since, they've been sitting there nursing co‐las and ignoring Wow and the other girls. That in itself tells Brian they aren't part of the program.
These are no random wallpaper ebees designed to show up from time to time, never too many at once and sometimes none at all, in the interests of both verisimilitude and relieving Brian's chronic boredom. To put some spark into life, if that's what Aeolian existence is. It's much like rearranging the furniture, back in the old days, an attempt to enliven a dreary existence.
No, these are scendents. Not wet scendents like Brian, or Leary and Ellie. They're posits, composites built from personality components stashed in the Lode. These things are Sky's doing. Toss in a bit of this and some of that, stir it up; hit the qubital slop with a bolt of lightning or something, and presto. A scendent ebee, supposedly autonomous, standing there looking all around and saying what the fuck.
Till now, however, Boon Doc's itself has been spared the posit infestation. What Brian is looking at here is against the rules. A wet scendent's Aeolian space is meant to be that scendent's domain, governed by that scendent's rules.
"Can we join you?" asks the intruder on the right.
"We'd like to talk," says the intruder on the left.
As far as Brian can see, there isn't a lot to tell them apart. Then the one on the left says," My name is Gordon," and the one on the right says, "My name is Abdul." Abdul is blond, and Gordon is dark‐haired and swarthy. Abdul is taller, while Gordon is stockier. They both have standard mid‐Atlantic accents and speak in excessively polite tones.
"What the fuck?" Brian tells them. "How did you get in here?"
"Through the door." They could be Mormon missionaries, if only they wore white shirts and ties and, in Abdul's case, if he weren't named Abdul.
"You're posits. You need permission."
Gordon gestures toward Keeow, or maybe Dinky Toy, and says, "The lady let us in."
"In this world," says Brian, "I'm the one who issues permits."
Abdul brushes this claim aside. "We would like to talk," he says.
"Can we talk?" Gordon asks.
Dinky Toy has come awake. She's standing there offering to help Big Guy pick himself up off the floor. "You buy me co‐la," she tells him.
"What?"
he says.
"You buy me co‐la." She repeats this loudly enough to rouse Keeow, who sits up and also says, "You buy me co‐la." Big Guy tells them to go ahead and have co‐las. "Have all the goddamned co‐las you want." Then he staggers over to the bar and takes up where he left off watching Wow pretend to dance.
"Why did you fight that man?" Gordon asks Brian.
"That's not a man. That's wallpaper. Not even a proper ebee. Anyway," Brian says, "I need you to get out of here. Now. I've got no use for your kind in here." He looks at these two off‐the‐shelf composite personalities and realizes that, never mind their respective hair and skin types, their different builds, he has no idea which posit is which.
"We want to talk to you."
"Bye‐ee." Brian flexes his muscles and glowers.
"You have issues," Abdul says.
"'I have issues.'" Brian flexes some more and he smirks. He likes his current persona. He scratches at his balls and sniffs his fingers; they smell like testicular sweat, which tells him Bangkok World is better set up than he's sometimes willing to grant. "Unless you two cupcakes want a couple of punches in the head," he says, "I suggest you leave. Use the same door you came in."
"You are interesting. We wanted to see you."
"What are you talking about? Who are you?"
Notwithstanding Brian's reaction, Gordon and Abdul have adopted reverential attitudes. "Everybody wants to see Bangkok," says Gordon. "It's all the rage. And you're ascended from an original wet resident. A true founder."
"We want your advice," Abdul says.
"I've already given you all the advice you need. You'd best get the fuck out of here."
Something prompts Brian to get up and go over to the window by the couch. It's constructed of frosted glass blocks that smear the pink‐blue‐golden neon from Soi Awol, except for one clear porthole. Brian tells Keeow to shift her lazy ass so he can see outside. She shifts, giving no sign she notices that Brian is bare‐bollocks naked.
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