Genesis 2.0

by Collin Piprell

  Soi Awol is crammed with tourists, the kind of thing bar owners up and down the street used to pray for and never got in the original Soi Awol. And some of the bars that are supposed to be mere faxes—no more than blurry impressions of the way things once were—are now fully defined, open to steady streams of what can only be posits. Wallpaper ebees are part of the original design. Some local human color, basically. But now there's spam.

  Brian turns back to Gordon and Abdul and asks, "What's going on?"

  "What do you mean?" says Abdul.

  "The street is full of you fuckers."

  "Soi Awol has been declared part of Historical Old Bangkok."

  A scendent is a qubitally restored person with no need of a circulatory system. So it's maybe only out of long habit that the veins in Brian's temples are throbbing. "Boon Doc's is a wet‐scendent home base," he says. "This is my world. And it's strictly off limits to your kind." He takes another look outside. The street is even more crowded than when he last looked. All these yahoos parading up and down gaping at whatever it is they're gaping at, nodding and smiling at all and sundry. So when did Brian's rules regarding Soi Awol cease to apply?

  "We came to look," Gordon tells him. "But we also need information."

  "All you need to know is this: You should head off out that door now. Or you can wait till you're all fucked up and hurting and then leave."

  "You have to tell us what we need to know."

  "Get out."

  "This is an Aeolian Heritage site, and, as such, it's open to all Aeolians."

  This is ebee insubordination taken to absurd limits, a qubital mutiny. And Brian doesn't like it. He evokes his control console; it doesn't appear.

  •

  Brian moves to Plan B, transitioning smoothly from Boon Doc's proper to his hidey‐hole behind the mirror. The first time he tried it, before he ironed out some bugs both in the program and in his own mind, this trick almost toppled him over into eternal panic. One more fly in the Aeolian ointment: If you go uncomfortably crazy, suicide isn't an option. And a life sentence becomes a very long sentence indeed.

  despatch from hell ~ mass tourism

  This time it was easy. Ha‐ha. And I laugh because Abdul and Gordon, all unawares, are still sitting downstairs with my doppelgänger.

  Anyway, this is much the same shit I used to get away with in the holotanks and Worlds. The better part of me is up here in what I call a quantum deke. Where I can compose this despatch while our two posit friends, oblivious, chat away with a lesser part of me downstairs in the bar. Autonomous ebees they may be, composite scendents, they are nevertheless stupid.

  The real trick, though, is pulling off this scam without Sky or any other part of MOM getting wind of it.

  •

  Let me take you on a quick tour of the street outside. (Like magic, eh? But no. This is merely a scene from a stroll I took something like an hour ago, though I'm writing about it as though it's happening right now. I can't compose any of this stuff where MOM can see it. Best to keep these despatches low‐key. Invisible, in fact.)

  Throngs of people, lots more than in the old days, make way for the few cars prowling through before closing again in their wakes. Through the cacophony of music leaking from bars, only dimly specified for the most part, you can hear the standard Siren songs from the standard wallpaper bargirls.

  "Han'sum man! You cum in."

  "Have lay‐dee too mutt. You cum in‐sigh."

  See over there? Keeow is taking a noodle break, sitting on a metal stool at a little metal table on the street outside Boon Doc's. Notice the way she firms up as I approach? Same with her immediate surrounds, including the bright red plastic toilet‐roll dispenser on her table. That tells you what a posh operation this is. Beside the toilet paper stands a clear plastic container of toothpicks; a steel box of forks, spoons, and chopsticks; and a steel condiments tray with four glass jars. Other dining suites are strewn along the road, teensy tables and stools maybe awaiting a party of hobbits, illuminated by naked electric light bulbs strung on wires overhead and the occasional pale headlights of some passing fax of a car. Each ill‐resolved ensemble in this ghostly archipelago is sited three or four meters apart in our snug microcosm, none more than a rough sketch till you get up close and then look right at it.

  This was the way of the Worlds. You always remained at the center of a higher‐rez sphere provided by the reality engines in response to their reading of your POV. The world resolved itself as you attended to it, and faded when you looked away. I specified my Bangkok World using an ancient Genesis reality engine, already obsolete by the mid‐'30s, though I did upgrade it with a later‐vintage world processor. Still, it was limited. Economies of memory and process meant that, outside higher‐rez special features, your magic circle extended at best four meters in diameter.

  Now I lean over Keeow's shoulder and, wanting to see that all is as it should be, I slip a hand inside her halter‐top.

  "Aroi, mai?" I say. Delicious?

  Here at the center of this local hi‐rez circle, I see the pores in her skin, the bubbles of an old vaccination scar. I lean right in toward her bowl where I see the blackish shells on the ends of the bean sprouts. I spot a baby cockroach stewing among the sprouts and dried shrimps and fishballs and things, smell the chili and lime and stuff. I smell my hand after I remove it from Keeow's top.

  "Aroi mahk!" she answers me. Very delicious.

  Outside of that, everywhere on my periphery, even when I turn to focus on it, Soi Awol circa Bangkok 1984 mainly presents a blurry impression of bright lights/big city, rich potential for pussy galore. Everything is almost as it should be.

  •

  It's almost right. Though there's way more pedestrian traffic than my specs call for. And most of the extras out there aren't wallpaper; they're posits. They've got that additional density. Something else I find disturbing. The background skyscrapers I had looming behind the rows of bars on either side of the street? They've dwindled. And they're no longer mere wallpaper pasted against a dimensionless sky; they look like solid concrete and glass buildings.

  We're getting more than a population boom, then. Someone or something is fucking with the magic‐circle parameters, upping both the extension and the rez of my Bangkok without so much as a by your leave. Look there, for example. On the other side of Boon Doc's. What should be the merest ghost of an old bar has gone hi‐rez.

  Fuck me. It's Pussisimus. I was barred for life there, back around 1983. For some reason Puk, the mamasan, didn't like me. The only positive thing your maiden aunt might have said about that joint, there was no donkey show. I could have one now, if I liked, but Bangkok never actually featured donkeys in the old days and verisimilitude rules, eh? Pussisimus did have snakes. Pythons, usually. And it had the rest of the old standards: the ping‐pong girl, the cigarette girl, the rubber lesbian fuck, the blowgun girl, and the marker‐pen girl. The whole shtick.

  The only time I patronized the joint was when I had out‐of‐town visitors to impress. Back in the day, Leary would never go into Pussisimus. He said it made him feel like an idiot. I have to say those shows even made me feel silly, at times. Then I'd get angry, first with myself just for being there and then with everybody else. Shit. Now I remember. What happened that time I got thrown out, wheelchair and all.

  Interesting thought. The specs say it's always 15 July 1984, here in Soi Awol. Does that mean I'm still welcome in Pussisimus? I wasn't thrown out till 1986, eh?

  Wait. What am I talking about? This is my Bangkok; I can do anything I want.

  •

  I hated Aeolia from the start. And things have been going downhill ever since. Little stuff, some of it not so little. It's starting to freak me out.

  I get these touches of metaphysical malaise. Think about it. I'm basically trapped inside somebody else's mind. This can't be good. But it gets worse. This other mind I'm trapped inside? It's deranged. For starters, MOM has a serious problem with MPD/DID. Basically, she's a
snake pit of warring alter egos. On top of that, I've got parts of two other persons trapped inside me. You can count on it; anytime I find myself in full stride, like alpha male plus, Rabbit kicks in. Or worse, Sweetie makes an appearance and I start to giggle. Then, as though all that's not enough, this horrible existential convolution that is me, here in my world such as it is, has started to fear suffocation under the weight of posits beyond number, my CQ readings hitting pathological levels.

  I don't want to sound like a complainer, but I might be the victim of some colossal cosmic fuckup. Sentenced to life with no parole, life in this case meaning forever or thereabouts. So you should be impressed I'm staying sane enough to record these matters in what is, if I do say so myself, fairly literate prose.

  •

  How can I say all this shit and not worry about a severe ass‐kicking from MOM? Because she can't read it. She has no idea I'm here. Because the better part of me isn't really down in the bar, where my telep sits checking the place out, eyeballing a couple of posit tourists who are eyeballing me right back in a way that makes me wonder.

  But here's the kicker: It's not in my room upstairs, either. It's here, on the other side of the Looking Glass in my little home away from Heaven. Hey, this setup impresses me. I guess I can say it if I want to: I'm about as cool as it gets. Way outré, my friends. I'm parked here, so low profile that even MOM, who sees every sparrow fall, has no idea.

  So I'm writing these Despatches from Hell. Biding my time, chronicling events here against a future that'll probably never arrive. But what the fuck. Whatever.

  don't think

  It's just before dusk. About the time, back when, Leary would be looking forward to the first whiff of night‐blooming jasmine. The air has been full of it all day, though, so he has to look forward to other things. Sunsets, for example, one thing Bangkok's traffic pollution used to be good for.

  Half a dozen crows fly overhead, headed west by southwest into a fiery sunset. Then there's a flash in the sky to the north. Leary looks to see the roseate belly of an airliner as, on its approach to Bangkok Airport, it banks away from the setting sun. He thinks about this plane, and he thinks about the flying street vendor. Then, for the first time in many years, over a century in fact, he refuses to think about blowing up a plane in mid air.

  He went through a phase when he was a kid where he was afraid to think certain things. Not really scared of it, but only as if. When he saw a plane in the sky, for example, he'd try not to imagine it exploding in flames. He'd panic a bit and look away, afraid of willing a disaster. Years later, he read a magazine story talking about quantum mechanics and multiple universes; the writer argued that anything anybody can think of will some day, somehow, happen. That also reminded him of his childhood fear, though that article never said anything about it happening right away, just because somebody thought it. Still, it suggested fearful responsibility.

  He tries to think the posits away, tries not to wish harmful things on them at the same time. But the constant tread of passersby and the clamor at the front gate remain constant. Tomorrow, recent experience suggests, will be worse, and the day after that worse again.

  •

  Leary isn't happy with this trick of thinking stuff into being, of bestowing actuality, if he isn't careful, on any passing whimsy. But how can you be careful? It's like trying not to think of "rhinoceros." And with that thought Leary anxiously scans the gardens, dwells on the shadows under the trees and in the bushes. No rhinos, so far as he can tell. He's not serious about this, he tells himself, though, same as when he was little, he can't help feeling uneasy.

  "Ellie?" he calls.

  "What is it?" She's upstairs.

  "You okay?"

  "Fine."

  "Good."

  Their Bangkok is like a Worlds UnLtd GR world, and yet it isn't. He and Ellie, and Sky and Brian, are part of Aeolia in ways they could never have been in the old Worlds. Leary knows there's no point in dwelling on this, and he tells himself to forget about it and get on with enjoying things as best he can and not worry about the rest. Though that's easier said than done.

  Just when he was getting the hang of such things as being immortal, for example, and living here inside MOM's head, sort of, with Ellie come back from the dead, Sky dropped another bomb on him. They're all suffering from "temporal disjunction." If he understands this, which he probably doesn't, the scendents are living way faster, here in Aeolia, than the folks down there in mondoland. It doesn't feel like they're in a supersonic fast lane—and they're immortal anyway, so what the heck—though now Sky tells him Cisco and Dee Zu are still less than a day out of the cave. Meanwhile, months have passed up here. Wherever that really is. And the posits are evolving in ways he doesn't understand.

  So, what's a body to make of it all?

  Even immortality isn't all it's sometimes cracked up to be. It's like trying to do something without a deadline. It removes an existential undertow, a sense of urgency that helps people focus, get on with doing things while there's still time.

  Aeolia is starting to look less and less like a Heaven he wants anything to do with. They need to talk to Sky.

  despatch from hell ~ eternity shrinks

  We need to talk to Sky. This is not the deal she promised us. Of course, what can you expect from a machine? And basically she is just a machine, no matter what airs she puts on for our benefit.

  For our benefit? I don't think so.

  Here's another thing. I don't believe Sky's in control any more. This posit population explosion? It's freaking her out as badly as it is the rest of us. That's what I think. And what a scary thought. God isn't just nuts, she's incompetent.

  •

  So, what's gone haywire?

  Two heads are better than one, no doubt. So three heads are better still. What the fuck, let's shoot the wad. Let a thousand flowers bloom! No. Let's make it all the heads you can imagine. The more the merrier, eh? Infinite heads. Whoa! I know. Let's make it an infinite number of heads in an infinite number of parallel worlds, and still counting. Because where could the posit hordes be coming from?

  Wait a minute. I forget. Why did we need a bunch of heads in the first place? Oh, yeah. Ideas. Ideas of the Good. Ideas about what to do next, and why, and how to accomplish it. All to serve Sky's project, the Creative Emergence of a Better World. Step right up, folks. See it here, watch subjectivity kick objecthood's ass in a great no‐holds‐barred cosmic slamdown.

  And it's Darwin rules, OK! Survival of the fittest ideas. So Sky gives us Aeolia, this huge many‐headed hoedown, this Symposium of Symposiums, this mental monsoon, and Bob's your uncle. Natural selection tells us what we really need, or want, or whatever. Real‐time therapy for the masses. So we know what our real values and priorities are, minute to minute, and how to go about achieving this shit and then it monitors progress in the light of changing circumstances, posts updates on all the good news, and plots where we go next.

  •

  Creative emergence rules, OK! Or else it doesn't, depending on how things go.

  Out of nowhere and, with Sky's notion of a "temporal disjunction," in nearly no time, we achieve a boundless twittering gabfest. Meet our new Great Leader: The Invisible Hand of the Twit. Our Pollyanna Policymaker‐in‐Chief. Our God du Jour, and MOM backs off to play eminence grise. Except the godly gabfest isn't paying attention to her anymore. Now, in fact, you get the idea even our MOM has no idea what's going on, or she'd do something to contain developments.

  We're running out of time. No time, no time.

  Shut up, Rabbit. Relax.

  Better still, Sky should shut it down. Because what she calls creative emergence, even if we grant it's something real, needs natural selection. Yet natural selection depends on novelty, and this Boundless Babbitry, the Great Positivity, isn't generating the mutations we need. No more novelty. Mai mee. No have. Conflict and fucked‐uppedness are the engines of progress, yet the Positivity wants to turn everything safely vanilla. And that's
the basic problem.

  What we're getting? It's a qubital PlagueBot, with the posits standing in for blurs. The Great and Growing Positivity threatens to turn every bit of sentient energy into more of itself. And the grand evolutionary project, Sky's "creative emergence," gets a massive injection of lead in the ass. We see the eruption of truly pathological Babbitry. Terminal mediocrapitous boredom. Total stagnation.

  Call it science fiction if you like, but what isn't science fiction these days? I've just fought off the urge to insert a smiley face. Fuck me. I worry about myself.

  I'm guessing this Boundless Babbitry is about as stupid as the PlagueBot. What can look like intelligence is only algorithmic schooling behavior, brainless and ultimately pointless. It all means nothing. Life as confection. Homo jello. This is homo sap homojellofied, sapped of spunk and devoid of diversity. People jam. Zoomer maxhappiness vacuum‐packed and secured against all threat of novelty or unhealthy excitement. Pain is evil, so outlaw pain. Long live the Maxhappy Millennium.

  But that's no real story. It's the exact opposite. We're left with no history, no herstory, no future anyone can work toward. The good story Sky thought she had going for her just isn't working out. All we're getting is information. Current event as breaking news. An endless now with no real context. And there's a growing sameness about what passes for event, aside from the posit boom and the crowd‐sourcing of old Bangkok, which are themselves both on a fast‐track to stultification of a world‐historical quality.

  Something is seriously wrong with our 1,00011001+n flowers, on the "here are a bunch of new ideas" front. All we've got is a giant riff‐off. Mashups'R'Us. The posits are going way retro with a mashup of Bangkok "the way she was." What's the good of that? They're also building more of themselves. Lots more of them. Or at least somebody is.

  A fucked‐up version of Bangkok jammed to the rafters with posits. This is the supreme end of evolution? More like some cosmic plot just to piss me and Leary off. There's got to be more to creative emergence than that.