Creative emergence? The great and growing Positivity is like a black hole. What few real people we've got left ride an existential event horizon, the edge of extinction, at the mercy of this thing's power to grab individuals and smear them all over the collectivity.
Another way of looking at it: I refer you to the fine old Canadian game of beerhunter, also long extinct, where the prize is you get to whack a can of beer, punch the top, and point it down your throat. But imagine this: Instead of shotgunning the beer you get this amazing explosion of froth. Millions and millions of tiny bubbles of mediocrity start to expand and proliferate at the same time till the universe is jammed from end to end and top to bottom with security bubbles, smothering any chance of fun and adventure. Next thing you know, you'd might as well be at a Mazola Oil party swaddled in bubblewrap and wearing three rubbers at the same time. Let the good times roll.
Not.
My editor is firing awkward‐metaphor alerts at me, never mind it has never played beerhunter, much less joined a Mazola Oil party, and is in no way qualified to make judgments in this matter.
In fact, let me tell you what posits do. Not that I want to piss on Sky's new evolutionary directions parade, but here's a nice rumor for you, and you heard it first right here: Aeolia may be about to implode under the gravitational force of new citizens beyond number, suffocating Casa Leary and Soi Awol along with everything else.
I'm not saying that's the way things really are. But this exponential boom in posits plus their compulsive reiwikifying of something's notion of how things used to be could almost be the flipside of the near‐gray goo scenario and the PlagueBot's blind drive to eat complexity. But how could that be, and where are things headed from here? We have to ask what it all means.
Hey, but there's also good news. My holiday in Hell, even with no time off for good behavior, may fall well short of eternal.
The real lesson we learn from all this? Sky isn't nearly as smart as she thinks she is. And it's past time we had a serious talk with her.
video night in Aeolia
Leary's laughing at a black‐and‐white episode of The Honeymooners, mid‐twentieth century vintage. He also laughs at Ellie's reaction to Jackie Gleason, who brandishes a fist at Alice, offering his wife a bang‐zoom trip to the moon.
Then the monitor goes blank. A moment later, new images appear.
Leary rocks back on the sofa, hooks a punch into thin air as foreground materializes right up there in his face. "What the heck?" he says, grabbing the remote and thrusting it at the screen, thumbing buttons to no avail. What he first takes for a documentary movie in ultra hi‐rez 3D shows impact craters smoking against a jungle background. A scaly anteater claws its way free of freshly torn earth and stands there blinking in the sun. Then it curls up in a ball at the avid approach of a large boar with tusks.
"Gosh almighty," Leary says.
Ellie is rapt. "Calm down, now," she says, sitting forward right into the action.
•
At the outset, Leary and Ellie legislated the rules of their world here in Aeolia. And never mind they and their world are fundamentally qubital in nature, they've banned qubital devices as anachronistic. This is their Bangkok home the way they want to remember it, and they specified nothing but pre‐digital, much less qubital, domestic communications. "It's a matter of principle," Leary says. Their one television set, for example, shows nothing but pre‐interactive, pre‐3D stuff. Even the remote control was a concession, after Ellie said there was no need to go to extremes.
There's another reason for the ban on things qubital in their home. Leary wants to believe that MOM and the Lode respect scendent rights to privacy. Even back in the Mall, Leary had never cared for IndraNet and this notion of infinite redundancy. Part of it was that, at least in principle, MOM could see and hear every darn thing the mallsters ever did. Everything they ever thought, if you could believe some people, which Leary didn't, necessarily.
•
However indignant he is at this current breach of the specs, Leary also finds himself impressed at the vital density of these 3D images. He resists an impulse to reach out and touch a boulder, surreal in its existential heft. But what's happening—who or what is messing with the house rules?
"Hi." The cheery voice is followed by a quick tap‐tap on the door to the storage space under the stairs to the second floor. The door swings open. "Sorry," Sky says. "I am going to have to use your TV for something outside the specs'."
Never mind that, since when did their storage space double as a jump portal? Enough is enough. This is way out of order; exactly the kind of stuff that needs serious discussion. "Now you hang on a minute, here," Leary says.
"No time for that. Cisco is in trouble. Yes. And Dee Zu. We need to help them."
The view has panned to another scene. Cisco and Dee Zu are standing outside, exposed and too heedless of that.
meet the neighbors
"Good God," Dee Zu says.
The thing has no feet. It drags itself along on its elbows over fifty meters of bedrock as it crosses the border into Living End. Two others follow. These aren't slowjoes. They're too substantial to be blur soldiers, too well articulated.
This individual and his two companions are wearing the blur mantles that allowed Cisco and Dee Zu to make their respective ways through this terrain from their delivery pods to Living End only a day ago. But as soon as they cross into the bio enclave, their dusty cocoons start sloughing off in patches. Then the pair of footed individuals let slip the remains of their nanobot coats, which hit the ground in soft explosions of dust. The footless one, a heavyset adult male, lies on his face, motionless. The same satray that burned his feet off probably also cauterized the stumps. The last strikes came hours ago, so he must've been a strong man to make it as far as he has.
But now he's dead. Or so it appears, since his companions, a youngish woman and a wiry, dark‐skinned man crouch beside him and begin tearing at him with their teeth. The woman is having more luck than the guy, who shows signs of toothache. But it turns out the fellow they are feeding on isn't dead after all, because he starts making I'd‐rather‐you‐don't‐eat‐me noises. So his wiry friend finds a sizeable rock and brings it down on his head a couple of times, hard enough to crack it open. This ends the protests and, fortuitously enough from the wiry guy's perspective, presents a spill of brain tissue, which is easier to handle if you have only a few teeth and sore ones at that.
From where Cisco and Dee Zu lie in their hiding place, they can hear the unlovely duet of suckings and slurps, gulpings and burps; but no part of this recycling session makes them hungry. Judging by the ritual scarring across their chests and shoulders, these are relic GameBoys.
The woman stands for a moment, maybe needing to stretch her legs. Blood runs down across her breasts and tummy into the thick bush at her crotch. Cisco is close enough that he can see the raddled skin of an otherwise taut belly, and he wonders how it got that way. Birth stretch marks seem unlikely. People don't have babies anymore. The Anti‐Madonna virus, following hot on the heels of the Madonna virus and epidemic immaculate conceptions, saw to that many years ago.
The woman looks Cisco's way for a moment, but plainly sees nothing amiss. She crouches back down to business, back to swallowing gobbets of flesh, hardly chewing, head back and throat working furiously to get the meat down. Could be her molars hurt. Any surviving GameBoys went feral before the advent of medibots, and dentists must be as extinct as dodos.
"How are your toes?" Cisco asks Dee Zu in a whisper.
"Okay," she replies. "Not bad. Growing back."
The feeding noises from the GameBoys stop, refocusing Cisco's attention just as Dee Zu whispers, "Look!"
A fat carpet of dust about seven meters in diameter zigzags across the bedrock boundary. Like a giant colonial amoeba on speedopamine, it morphs as it comes, dodges other animated patches, divides to bypass a large creature mantled in dust and then rejoins to make its endplay across the border.
Within seconds of entering the biological enclave, the swarm disintegrates as its mantle falls away to reveal a loose association of monkeys. Some of them scamper off to explore.
Twenty or so of the others gather in a semi‐circle around the scene of the GameBoy feast. The man and woman stand back to back, trying to watch everywhere at once. The monkeys shriek and bellow, present fearsome grimaces full of canine teeth. The biggest one advances to within two meters of the humans, who shrink closer together. Another one, a smaller specimen than the patriarch, leaps in behind the GameBoys to grab a handful of raw flesh and yank, which merely has the effect of rolling their companion's body over so its ruined head faces Cisco and Dee Zu, the beard matted with blood and dust. The live man makes an unconvincing show of lunging at the interloper. The monkey lets go of the goods and backs off at the same time two more romp in from the other side to tear at the corpse with their teeth. One of them, after a quick tug‐of‐war, wins the testicles. The rest of the swarm hang back to chatter and whoop.
The humans spin this way and that, looking for an escape route. But now the circle has closed. The woman spits out a chunk of meat that she has held in her mouth all this time, just in time to scream as one monkey takes one of her legs in a bloody hug. Another leaps up onto her back and sets its teeth into the side of her face. One of the smallest monkeys, little more than a baby, snatches up the morsel the woman expelled a moment ago. Now the woman's scream becomes a gargle, blood frothing at her throat as she goes down under the weight of diners. Her companion succumbs just as quickly, although less noisily.
There is little squabbling among the monkeys over the spoils, given three such large pieces of meat. Still, not much remains a few minutes later, and the ratswarm does squabble over what's left. A roachswarm, ghastly without its blur mantle, shivers and waits.
"So," says Dee Zu. "That was scary."
"The monkeys or the people?"
"Both."
Sated, finally, the monkeys and their successors scatter off deeper into Living End in search of farther horizons. The border area goes mostly quiet.
when you're hot
"Do the toes still hurt?"
"Not really." Dee Zu looks down at her naked body, smeared with dried mud from the cave, scratched by thorns, burned by satrays, bruised by who knows what. "But I'm filthy. I've never been this dirty."
Cisco sits beside her, also naked, also the victim of violent encounters with his world. He's enthralled by a symphony of odors and scents, some of them Dee Zu's. What he smells now bears scant resemblance to what he was given in his encounters with this woman in GR Worlds. "Generated realities can appear realer than real," Leary once told him, back in his holotank in the Mall. "But real reality still offers something the qubits don't." And he'd been right.
He misses Leary. That's the Leary he spoke to in Aeolia not many hours before, the same one, more or less, who died in Living End a few hours before that. Cisco remains amazed at all that has happened since he fled the disintegration of Eastern Seaboard, USA (ESUSA) Mall. Could that have been only two days ago?
Dee Zu is charming when she wrinkles her nose. "You stink," she tells him.
Keeping an eye on their surrounds, Cisco is engaged in an internal confab, a Lode‐assisted orientation. Bacterial wastes, he learns, are responsible for most of the smells. His WalkAbout also conveys grounds for surprise that he and Dee Zu are so thoroughly colonized by bacteria this soon after escaping the Mall.
It's surprising that any bacteria survived the PlagueBot. For sure, few survived internal mall operations management, where all but the most essential bio and machine microorganisms were anathema. Admit the wrong bio‐engineered or mutant virus, or a feral nanobot self‐replicator, and it would have quickly sterilized the malls, the last human enclaves on Earth, of higher biological life. But never mind all the defenses, all MOM's neurotically careful management. Now the malls, both ESUSA and ESSEA, maybe the last of them, lie breached and ruined. Yeah, well.
Dee Zu conducts a nuzzling investigation into local species of Cisco stink. He finds this at once embarrassing and, despite residual shock from what they've just witnessed, nice.
Here they are, both of them still alive and pretty well in this anomalous patch of life on the other side of the planet from their former home. However alien this still‐smoldering oasis with its tame PlagueBot and all its subterranean installations lying wrecked beneath them, what lies beyond the border, back the way they came yesterday, looks worse still. Much worse. It could be another planet, or a GR World gone bad—the type of nightmare, in fact, that both Cisco and Dee Zu, in their capacity as Worlds UnLtd test pilots, were trained to identify and, where possible, fix.
•
Dee Zu also stinks, much of it a good stink. Cisco inhales the heady perfume and feels himself invaded with power.
"Maybe you should put that away for now." Dee Zu points and little Cisco points back.
"Come on," Big Cisco gives her his most boyish grin. "Let's do it. Wet sex."
Dee Zu is Dee Zu, after all, and she straddles him without further ado. This isn't entirely reckless, mind you, since they do it sitting up so Cisco can watch behind her while she watches behind him. It doesn't last long, but it's good. It has an urgency and depth he never experienced when they did it in the Worlds, no matter how imaginatively. Maybe the threat of imminent death, so recently demonstrated, has something to do with the way things go.
•
They sit there a bit longer, Dee Zu's legs still locked behind Cisco. He breathes deep of her, buries his face in her hair. Then he goes back to scenting this strange world, still burning in patches, smelling of charred wood and flesh and things.
And this world, their world now, watches back. Though it's anything but clear who or what might be watching. Or from where.
they're watching you
Video night in Aeolia has heated up. Leary, for one, reckons this stuff should be x‐rated, though he'll admit what they're watching now beats armored anteaters under siege.
"This is stupid." Sky's huggy‐feely pose slips, and her slighted sex‐kitten persona shows its claws. "He went down there to rescue that woman. Not to fuck her in the middle of all hell breaking loose." If only she'd said "heck" instead of "hell," it could have been Leary himself speaking. And of course Leary would prefer to describe what they're doing as "making love" or "messing around."
"What do you care?" Ellie asks her. "You promised he'd be dead within minutes of returning to mondoland anyway."
"But he is down there now. Yes. And he might be of use to me. To us."
"So what do we do?" Leary asks. "Just watch?"
"Be quiet," Sky says, tapping at a perfect incisor with a perfect fingernail. "I'm thinking." She says this, even though Sky is really MOM, the greatest intelligence in history, and surely more than capable of thinking and listening to Leary at the same time.
Leary clicks through the channel buttons on the remote, but they all show the same scene: Dee Zu straddles Cisco's lap, and they sit there and they sit. It would be boring, if you discounted the suspense, the knowledge that so many different things could kill them at any moment. Leary should be more worried than he already is; Sky's presence must be giving him a sense of false security.
Meanwhile, Ellie is fully as worried as she should be. "Are we just going to sit here?" she says to Sky. "What's the point of watching this stuff if we're not going to do something?"
But Cisco and Dee Zu continue to sit and watch down there in mondoland, and Sky, Leary, and Ellie continue to sit and watch here in Aeolia.
Ellie turns to Leary and asks, "Do you think Cisco knows we're watching?"
He's surprised she doesn't look more worried at that prospect.
•
Sky alternates. At times she's intent on the screen, where nothing much is happening, and at other times, judging by the way the light in her limpid green eyes fades, she's off in a sphere way beyond this one.
"Hey, Lek," Leary tells the w
allpaper maid, only because it's better than doing nothing. "Bring me a nice Jack on ice, okay?" Lek appears out of nowhere a minute later with the goods. "Thanks," he says. It isn't especially warm in the room, but out of long habit, he swipes the old‐fashioned glass back and forth across his forehead before taking a sip. He winces at this GR fax of fine Kentucky whiskey and bangs the glass down on the coffee table.
"Don't …" Ellie subsides before she gets well started, no doubt remembering there's nothing you can do to wreck qubital furniture.
Leary applies the glass to cooling his brain once again and adopts a reflective expression. "What we're seeing here," he says, "puts me in mind of one time way back before global warming really set in."
"Wow," says Ellie. "You are old, aren't you?"
"That's right, but I just get better and better. Anyway, I was hiking up on Baffin Island. I was with this woman I'd met and her husky, a retired sled dog she said needed an outing… Have I told you this one before, Ellie?"
"I don't believe you have. So there you were, wandering around on Baffin Island and you just happened to bump into this woman and her sled dog?"
"Yeah."
For her part, Sky remains glued to developments, or lack of them, on the screen.
"So," Leary continues, "we were walking up this river valley into the mountains. It was the Arctic summer, so you didn't get real snow and ice till you hit a hundred and fifty meters above tundra, but you got ice still hanging up high on the riverbanks, and it caught us in a crossfire of reflected sunlight like a furnace. That's why she stripped down to her pants. Just to stay cool. And after a time one thing led to another, the way it does. Before you knew it, my parka was spread on a nice patch of sun‐warmed heather, this dwarf variety you used to get up there? When you crushed it, its fragrance was really something. Especially since you didn't get so many smells, as a rule, way up there in that part of the world. Whatever. Next thing there I was, butt to the sky."
"What a lovely image," Ellie says.
"Yeah. And next thing the dog …Tuktu was his name; how's that for a memory? Tuktu decided to make a Leary sandwich."
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