Genesis 2.0

by Collin Piprell

  "Brian? Be careful, okay?" She gives Leary a smile, pops a kanom, and washes it down with a sip of tea. Another advantage of Aeolia, you can eat all you want with impunity, not that Ellie eats any more than she ever did, maybe less. No worries about her figure now, anyway. Her kiss tastes of coconut.

  Leary pussyfoots his way across the lawn and along the wall. He hasn't been out in the lane since just after they set up their Bangkok home and they went out to see if things looked right from outside. Not long after that, outside itself started to go weird, and neither he nor Ellie have felt much like leaving their compound again. Until now. Now he wants to see what's happening out there. It's not that he's been going stir crazy, exactly—it's wonderful to be together with Ellie again, of course—but this new sense of mission carries a welcome tinge of excitement.

  He waits for a lull in posit pressure on the gate so he can squeeze out.

  posit jam

  It's worse than he suspected.

  "Excuse me," Leary says. "Darn it." He pushes straight‐armed at the gate, shoving back against the crowd. Then he puts both elbows into play, meaning to clear a path out of there.

  "Hey," says a large Germanic gentleman. "Be careful."

  "Yeah, yeah."

  He's hemmed in on all sides by posits. Men and women, no children in sight, they're dressed in conventional late‐twentieth century styles in a wild variety of colors. Many of them are supposed to be Thais, though more appear to be foreigners, Chinese, Indians or Westerners, with flashes of African and Arab throughout the mob. There's nearly every imaginable racial type and hair style, sexual orientation and clothing fashion. Despite that, an overall sameness dulls the whole scene. Never mind these composite personalities are meant to be autonomous ebees, electronic beings but intelligent and self‐aware for all of that. Despite all the chatter and ebb and flow, a wallpaper quality saps the crowd of vitality. Even the posit indignation seemed kind of pro forma.

  Leary himself is genuinely teed off. This is his laneway—this is his world, come to that—and these creatures are invading his privacy. He shoves hard enough to send a be‐turbanned Sikh sprawling on his butt. The Sikh merely says, "Ow! That hurt." Back in the real world, back before Aeolia, back before the malls and the Troubles, your average Sikh would have responded in kind. Before this one gets back to his feet he's almost run over by one of the few cars still negotiating the throngs, its wallpaper driver tooting the horn and nudging his way through. Back in the day, there were fewer people and more cars.

  A middle‐aged Caucasian lady with an umbrella marches up to Leary and says, "There is a queue, you know."

  "For what? What are you talking about?"

  There's some stereotyping afoot, here in this crowd of posits, though Leary doesn't know what to make of that. Backing off from the umbrella, he steps down hard on the toes of a Thai man in sandals. Probably because this was the Land of Smiles, the guy gives him a big smile, not a happy one.

  "Sorry," Leary says, though he isn't. And now he's beset by several assorted Westerners and what he takes to be Japanese, all of them armed with old cameras, the ones you loaded with light‐sensitive chemical film.

  "Look! It's him."

  "Wait."

  "It's one of them."

  "Smile!"

  Caught in a photographic crossfire without so much as a by‐your‐leave, Leary drops all pretence at civility. "Out of my friggin' way." He shoves enough posits aside that he can close the gate and lock it again. "Gosh," he says.

  Some of the stereotyping might actually be his own doing, something in the Bangkok World specs, though it occurs to him that, even back in the real world, Japanese in groups had a touch of posit about them.

  •

  Tattered Kloster Beer parasols, part of the original design, stand over against the wall. Their owners, none the worse for wear following their earlier aerial adventure, stand obscured by the press of tourists, if that's what they are.

  Last time Leary was out here he suffered massive nostalgia at this sim of Bangkok past, however partial it might have been. He'd looked up and down the lane to see no one but wallpaper vendors and dogs, a few kids playing. A congregation of four or five motorcycle‐taxi drivers were draped about their bikes parked halfway down the way, roughly where an increasingly soft‐focus world faded to misty diffusion at the Sukhumvit Road end of the laneway. One of the drivers had stepped out to wave, offering his services, though there was nowhere to deliver anyone.

  This time it's different. The soft‐focus frontiers at either end of the street have sharpened to reveal trees and residential compound walls extending as far as they ever did way back in the twentieth century. The motorcycle taxi drivers are there, many more of them than before, and they're wearing numbered vests, an anachronism, since back in the specified period motorcycle taxis weren't yet legal. And the rest of the wallpaper is still there. Except the food vendors have multiplied tenfold, and who specified that? Posit customers are lined up to sample their dishes. Overall, the assembly doesn't sound cheerful, exactly, but overall the chatter and din is positive in tone.

  Then the happy hullabaloo turns electric.

  "Leary!"

  "It's Leary!"

  "Look, look. It's one of them."

  "He's come out!"

  There's lots more, most of it unintelligible. And now the posits are pressing in, tugging at him and asking him questions.

  "Gosh darn it." It's silly to react to ebees in this way, but he does anyway. "Back off." Jumping as high as he can, he waves an arm at the motorcycle taxi drivers down the way.

  "Please. Can we go inside?"

  "We want to see inside."

  "Leary's home! And Ellie's."

  "We are your friends."

  "Your fans!"

  "Hey! Take it easy."

  "We want to talk to you."

  "Gosh darn it." Leary is sputtering. Threatened with a group hug, he writhes away and says, "Go on, now. Just frig off, okay?" He jumps and waves at the motorcycle taxi driver again.

  "Where is Ellie?"

  "Frig off," Leary suggests. He's raising fists like gnarled clubs when the motorcycle wheels up.

  "Where you go?" the driver asks him.

  Belying his age, apparent or real, Leary swings a leg over the back of the bike. "Just drive," he says. "Sukhumvit. Sukhumvit Road, and pai reow reow." Back in the old days, if you told a Bangkok motorcycle taxi driver to go fast that meant you wanted to go very fast indeed.

  "Holy cow!" Leary says. This driver scores full points for realism.

  •

  They speed away down the soi and out into the bustle and roar of Sukhumvit Road. Someone has specified scent of diesel blended with street‐food aromas and a hint of incense. The traffic is all it ever was and more, the sidewalks even more packed with people and vendors. You have to wonder who's behind the expansion. And how did they know Leary likes the smell of diesel fumes?

  He looks back over his shoulder to where some of the posits from outside his gate surge from the mouth of the soi, a flash flood of relentless fans.

  "Okay, okay," he tells his driver. "Stop here."

  "Hundred baht."

  "No way."

  "No problem. No charge."

  Wow. There's an anomaly for you. Whatever. He has no money anyway. This is Aeolia.

  It's hot, standing there on the sidewalk. One more touch of verisimilitude. Meanwhile, other pedestrians have joined the surge of posits as they draw near. This is a real mob. Leary hails a passing "taxi‐meter" and climbs in. A few of his pursuers bang on the side panels as they pull away.

  "Where you go?"

  "Soi Awol."

  "Mai kowchai. No unnerstan'."

  "Soi 23, darn it."

  "You want massage?"

  Some things never change, no matter what version of Bangkok you find yourself in. "Just drive, okay?" Arctic air‐conditioning, the one good thing that's happened since he left his compound, is blowing into the back seat.

&n
bsp; "Croco‐dai farm?"

  "Drive, don't talk."

  The wallpaper driver shuts up and drives, neglecting to mention either his cousin's gem shop or the Floating Market. Which isn't authentic, though it is nice.

  •

  The passing scenes evoke a snarl of conflicted nostalgia and outrage. Mostly, this could pass as part of the Worlds UnLtd late twentieth‐century Bangkok World that Leary specified when he still lived in ESSEA Mall, or the Sukhumvit Road home he and Ellie have constructed here in Aeolia. Yet these new sections of town are different. Some parts are right, but others are modeled on later versions of the city. For example, they never got this many Chinese and Indians till the late 2010s. And those stacked skywalks soaring this way and that above the pavements didn't emerge till the '20s. Aside from anachronisms such as those double‐decker buses stuffed with tourists—one of them painted up like a big iPhone, its super‐vivid screen a window on a tankful of happy people—the traffic is what it's supposed to be. The stuttering, wheezing, stop‐and‐go torrent extends off into the wherever. Motorcycles percolate up among the cars and tuk‐tuks, the vendors with bicycle carts, the dirty great buses belching black smoke, everything simmering, the whole city shimmering in the afternoon heat.

  Leary's driver tsks at the traffic, which nevertheless refuses to move. He's vibrating; his wet template might well have been wired on yah ba, on speed. He sees an opening and stands on the gas. Then he brakes. He bangs the heels of his hands on the wheel, rolls his head back till the vertebrae crackle, ducks his head to wipe his face on his sleeve, pops a cough drop and sucks it loudly; it smells of eucalyptus. He takes a slug out of a bottle of Red Bull energy drink, though back then it should still be called Kratingdaeng, steps hard on the gas again and then brakes just short of rear‐ending the car in front of them.

  What an excellent piece of wallpaper. Who, or what, managed these details? Maybe the guy is actually a posit. Mostly, though, the drivers are wallpaper, as are most of their passengers.

  Whatever. Back in their Worlds test‐pilot days, it's what the Kid and Dee Zu, or Ellie, a generation before them—she was one of the first test pilots—would have called the magic circle. And Aeolia must enjoy unlimited process and memory resources, because the magic circle is expanding out of all reason. Now Leary can see down sidestreets to where parallels meet at infinity. At the same time the rez cranks up to excruciatingly sharp levels. And the high‐rise skyline over there, no longer a mere mural of unrealistically tall wallpaper skyscrapers pasted against a flat sky, shrinks in on itself, substantiates as solid buildings. The clouds up above look like real clouds, though that part is easy.

  •

  The posits are both denser than their wallpaper counterparts and more animated. But the wallpaper people at least pass themselves off as distinct individuals, whereas the posits tend to school. That's how Leary thinks of it, anyway. Currents of emergent order amid otherwise anarchistic mobs. Groups of three or four or six verge on locking into sync, over and over again, before falling back into looser associations.

  Judging by their expressions, you'd think they're enthralled by everything they see. Groups of them stand gawking in front of shop windows. Other groups migrate in formation to places they can cross through the stalled traffic. One school coalesces, like fish on a coral head, around a cart stacked high with hairy green‐and‐red rambutans. Everybody's wearing eerily similar expressions and, for a moment, Leary has this creepy feeling each group is an only loosely organized individual organism.

  Back in the old days, Christian missionaries and suchlike often assumed most people went around broken in one way or another, always in need of a nice smarmy injection of emotional glue. This is like that. Squalls of huggy cohesion tug at the posit throngs. Leary's skin crawls, though the closest group‐hug outbreak remains five meters distant on the other side of the taxi window glass.

  And people aren't built so you can get a hundred of them hugging each other in any meaningful way. But these are posits, and the lot of them, thousands and thousands, are clearly tending to swarm. Hug units come together in twos and threes and more. With each individual encounter, they swap a few posits. It's like an elaborate dance, self‐organization along invisible lines of energy.

  Except for the wallpaper ebees. The vendors, the beggars, the knots of motorcycle‐taxi drivers continue to go about their business, which is mostly hanging around supplying color and chatting about whatever bare‐bone ebees chat about, the various species of wallpaper each displaying its own programmed stereotype, none much more animated than something painted on a backdrop set.

  sacred spaces

  In the old days, Bangkok taxi drivers sometimes liked to show respect for roadside temples and shrines. They'd let the steering wheel go and bring their hands together up to their brow to wai everything from cultural monuments to shopping‐mall spirit houses. Even by those standards, this driver is way zoomerist, because here he is wai‐ing a friggin' billboard. All the while doing the "Look, Ma, no hands" thing at the wheel.

  And these billboards are themselves out of their right time; Leary and Ellie's Bangkok predates these high‐tech blights on the urban landscape. It wasn't till the end of the 2010s that the city got all but paved over with condos, shopping malls, banks, and 7‐Elevens, everything encrusted with a fungus of satellite dishes and advertisements, including these huge digitalized billboards. What he's looking at here, however, goes beyond commercialism.

  Aeolia has clearly evolved a MOM cult and, more than mere dreckads these are blatant props, propagandads, rather than simple direct ads. Back in the securistats and, later, in the malls, each applied the same technology, using the cranium as a receiver. The difference was, props generally broadcasted such hogwash as the maxhappy zoomerist partyline, while dreckads targeted individuals with personalized mod, mineowndata, messages.

  At first glance, the three billboards are identical. The one on the other side of this intersection presents a gigantic black‐and‐white mandala. Squinting, Leary can see thousands of tiny versions of the same, strangely agitated pollywogs turning and turning inside the larger ying and yang. Bright slogans in primary colors emerge from this hectic swarm and then recede back in again.

  Boundless possibility

  MOM the Great Shapegiver

  Great Ground & Medium of Our Being

  Aeolian Millennium

  Leary's taxi takes off amid a smoky scramble of screeching two‐stroke motorcycles, a vehicular Claymore mine exploding in advance of the cars, tuk‐tuks and trucks that roar away from the green light in pursuit. As the taxi clears the intersection, a similar black‐and‐white pollywog stew on the second billboard gives rise to more vivid messages.

  Be all we can be

  We can be anything we posit

  Immaculate conception of persons & worlds without end

  Aeolian Millennium

  And from a third:

  We are MOM

  We are the World

  The end & the all

  Aeolian Millennium

  Take one virtual World of Worlds, a machine intelligence that thinks it knows better, add a passel of posits, stir, and Bob's your uncle. Instant religion.

  •

  "Traffic jam," the driver says. Then, the way Thai taxi drivers have always done, this one takes to popping blackheads from his nose in the rearview mirror.

  More authenticity: the traffic is horrendous, which is never a surprise in Bangkok. But it's getting unreasonably worse, and more posits are appearing on the street with every passing minute.

  At the same time, patches of local order are breaking out amid the general chaos. Amid the smoking, buzzing swarms of two‐stroke motorbikes, stretches of car traffic are schooling. And they're not applying the largely informal rules that somehow kept the city fluid in the old days. This is something different. His own taxi is now moving at an erratic walking pace, staying about two meters from the pickup truck ahead so as not to impede the erratic currents of motorbi
kes weaving between them.

  "Hey," Leary says.

  "Arai, na?" What?

  "Can't you drive any faster?"

  They stop again. Yet another iPhone bus stands stalled on the other side of the street, wheezing more and blacker hydrocarbons than buses of that late vintage ever did. Still, the smoke is truer to period than the full‐bus smartphone ad. And here's another deft touch. Just ahead of Leary's taxi on his side of the street, a scabby street dog with a crumpled muzzle, half‐healed souvenir of some cruel mishap, lies sheltered beneath a sandwich‐board ad for the Bangkok Post. Leary takes a hit of nostalgia off the front‐page photo and caption: "Prem gets Kukrit's blessing." Oddly alert for wallpaper, the dog locks on to Leary or, at least, on to the smoked glass of his car window. As soon as Leary notices, the dog's attention returns to the traffic, its contorted face eloquent of patience, turning and turning.

  Meanwhile, everything on the street has seized up and the pedestrian posit traffic is coagulating. Across the street, one posit conglomerate breaks away, even as it swells with more huggy hangers‐on and wheels toward the iPhone bus. The many‐legged humanoid phalanx lines up on the edge of the sidewalk and sidles along till it disappears from view behind the bus.

  Leary is still wondering about that when the big iPhone bus shrinks longitudinally by three meters and flattens to one deck. At the same time, it morphs into a Kodachrome light‐sensitive photographic film box displaying smaller, more old‐fashioned and lower‐rez images of happy people.

  "Gosh," says Leary.

  Whatever's happening, it's more than sticky clusterhugs. Leary thinks this, at the same time he thinks this can't be right. This posit compaction is like an editorial committee revising Aeolian reality on the go. Now they've got the bus right. But how could they have known; and who's wielding the blue pencil?

  The oncoming traffic breaks up a little, and the retro‐evolved bus moves off to reveal the editorial committee, which extends a thicket of arms toward Leary's taxi. It turns out they're signaling their intention to cross the road. Leary checks to see the doors are locked and the windows secured.

  "Drive!" he says, knowing it's futile.