Genesis 2.0

by Collin Piprell

  "No tourniquet," she says. "It'll only slow the medibots down."

  "You're going to bleed to death. Unless the blurs take you first."

  "Then I guess it's too late."

  "What're you talking about?"

  "Look." She twists her body, uncrosses her legs to display the stump. "I've bled out already."

  For the bleeding has nearly stopped.

  "Holy shit."

  "Medibots."

  "Wow."

  •

  "Are you okay?" he asks her.

  "How many times are you going to ask me that? I'm great."

  "Really?"

  "Well, yeah. I love getting my foot chewed off. You nitwit."

  Like she still thinks this whole trip is a joke. Big fun. She's way too careless. Not stupid, but she believes she's bulletproof. Same mistake her friend made. "You've got to pay more attention," Son tells her. However much fun this world may be at times, it's no game.

  "Seriously," he says.

  "Seriously, what? You want to know what bothers me most about losing my foot? My new toes were nearly back to normal."

  Still joking. No getting around it, she's a liability. And Poppy always said a stupid comrade, or a reckless one, was worse than an enemy. That's because you aren't generally looking to have a comrade kill you, though you wind up just as dead. So you treat these people the same way you do any useless or dangerous thing. You get rid of them. Fast. That's basic.

  The way she's looking at the end of her leg, where her foot should be, you could imagine this toe situation pisses her off nearly as much as Son does. But the bleeding has stopped and a thin, pasty muck covers the stump.

  It was his fault, of course. That's how Son reads her expression. How could he have let this happen?

  "Relax," she tells him. "It doesn't hurt all that much. Let's see your hand."

  Relax? Jesus Christ. He looks at his wound again, catchbag cord still dangling in the other hand, wondering if he'll need a tourniquet no matter what she says. Never mind the stump is sealing over with an oddly agitated layer like a composite skin. A gray skin.

  "Look at that," he says, holding up what's left of this hand. "It's like we've got a mini‐boogooman war going on here."

  That's what he says, and he tries a grin, but losing part of his hand bothers him. He wonders whether he can remain as calm about things as this mallster is doing. "And it seems the medibots have wrestled the blurs to a draw."

  "You've lost two fingers," she says. "Pinkie and ring finger. Plus half the heel of your hand." Her assessment is matter of fact, not to mention redundant, since Son's WalkAbout has delivered a damage report. Plus he can see for himself what the situation is.

  "Never mind," he says. "Part of one finger was already gone." This isn't the time to tell her about the cleaver and cutting board game with Poppy back in the Bunker. A good way to quicken reflexes. Son had never seen Auntie so angry, Gran‐Gran mopping blood and Poppy saying, "He'll be faster next time, won't he?" And maybe he has been—he did keep most of the hand.

  Just the sight of Dee Zu's tautly plump breasts at this range registers deep in his belly. Such is the power of imagination that these two notions, plumpness and tautness, become palpable qualities in the palms of his hands. Strange. In his right hand, where his two fingers aren't, he also feels a terrible pain, but mostly when he looks at Dee Zu's stump.

  He also feels a degree of liberation. He realizes he's better off without the little finger, that handy escape hatch. At the same time, he finds the remaining fingers on his maimed hand aren't as strong as they should be, and he finds it hard to believe the missing bits are going to regenerate.

  Gran‐Gran always said everything was going to hell, had been from the get‐go. This past couple of days have proved her right, in some ways. In other ways, things have actually been looking up.

  He can get along with this woman. A booby she may be, but she's a feisty booby. In fact, she's a knievel to the bone. A beautiful knievel.

  thinking like prey

  "So Mr. Polly Angulation. What went wrong just now?"

  "You stuck your foot in where it wasn't meant to go."

  "No, no. Before that. How did we miss that thing till too late? I mean what with all that polyangulation and paying attention and everything."

  She sounds like her friend. Cisco. Though her grin, however rueful, remains a grin. A nice one. "I was just getting used to having all my toes back. And now look."

  Never mind she's a mallster and a smartass and a dangerous booby in terms of survival value, this woman has redeeming qualities. And she's smart, there's no doubting that. So she can learn. Not only that, she's tough. No marshmallow. He's pleased he didn't kill this woman after all. Bottom line, Son has nobody else now. She has to pass for family.

  "Yoo, hoo. Are you listening? Pay attention."

  Anyway, just look at her eyes. "Maybe I goofed up a bit," he says.

  "My teacher."

  What he doesn't tell her yet, that ambush was the most complicated bio‐blur collaboration he has ever seen. And the roachtrap. How was it they just happened to travel that way? Poppy always said to mistrust coincidences. Unless of course this area is littered with roachtraps, so the encounter was almost inevitable. Jesus. Maybe the place is also infested with roachmen.

  "Now what?" she says.

  "We go more slowly for awhile."

  "So wise."

  "Even if you had both feet. We'd still have to go slow. At least till we get clear of this limestone basin."

  "What's special about this area?"

  "It'll be full of sinkholes. Who knows how many of them have lensed over."

  "A roachtrap mine field."

  "Nobody could expect that ambush to work if there was only one roachtrap. How would they know we'd go exactly that way?"

  "Who are 'they'?"

  "I don't know. It. The Boogoo. Whatever."

  "Are there likely to be more advanced‐model slowjoes?"

  "Can't say. But best we stay alert."

  "'Stay alert.' Should I be taking notes, O Great Teacher?"

  "Ha, ha."

  •

  "How are you doing?" Son says.

  She hauls up on her leg and turns its stump to the light. "Healing," she replies. "It's dry."

  "No way."

  "Way. It itches like a sonofabitch."

  He laughs. "That's good."

  "You suppose?"

  "If you're itching, you can't be dead."

  "So funny."

  "What?"

  "Never mind."

  "What about my hand?"

  "They're building you a new dick‐end. A new hand should be a piece of cake."

  "Ha, ha."

  "Don't scratch at it," she tells him.

  •

  "So," she says. "Tell me again."

  "What?"

  "About the watching and the modeling and so on."

  "I wasn't doing it right," he says.

  "Explain."

  "The watching. I was watching like I was the prey. Reacting too hot, cooling too slow. Like Poppy always said: 'Think like prey and you are prey.' And he was right."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "You don't see clearly when you're uptight. If the signs are going to speak together, you need to relax. Think like a hunter, watch like a predator, yeah?"

  "Sort of yeah."

  "Predators see signs as opportunities, bits of possible strategies. If you think like prey, you're scared of what you might find. You look for things you think will help you, remaining blind to things you haven't thought of or didn't know before."

  "Same signs, different ways of seeing them?"

  "Something like that. Adrenaline is good. Though too much of it will get you killed. You need to stay both wired and loose, alert but cool."

  "Cool."

  He watches her have a go at looking both alert and loose. She looks good when she's loose.

  ticket to ride

  Son sneak
s a look at his hand about every two seconds, though he's pretending it doesn't bother him.

  "What about you?" he says. "Are you okay?"

  "Sure."

  Dee Zu is impressed at his nonchalance, hokum though it might be.

  "No problem," she says.

  •

  In some ways, she's better than okay.

  Even the most realistic Worlds were tweaked. The same went for the views out their holoports, what passed in the malls for windows. As Leary used to say: MOM went ahead and cosmeticized the whole of mallster existence. But out here it's the real deal. Wysiwyg. What you see is what you get. Though you can't actually see most of it.

  Still, this lunatic landscape reminds Dee Zu of the Worlds. Except of course worlders could always hit the bail button. Worlding was always gaming, basically. Whatever happened, at least in test‐certified Worlds, you could reset, come back to play another day. Mondoland, on the other hand, is hot and dusty, barren of sensual pleasure and mortally dangerous. And however surprising the Worlds may have been, they were never this unpredictable. Not in ways that really signified. Normally they wouldn't kill you, for example.

  Despite everything, though, she's excited. Never mind that Cisco's gone missing and could be dead; never mind she herself is living from moment to moment in this crazy place on borrowed time. "If I was worlding this place as a test pilot," she tells Son, "I'd quarantine it. Too unpredictable. We need more rules. And more escape hatches."

  "Escape hatches?"

  "Ways to bail out when things get too hairy."

  "There is a way out of here."

  "Yeah?"

  "Yeah. Poppy used to say the exit's always right there, just about anywhere you look."

  True enough. A wrong move in this place can mean more than sliding down the Worlds UnLtd test‐pilot rankings.

  Besides which, Worlders could steer developments. If Dee Zu has any control here, she has yet to discover what it is.

  •

  Gravity itself weighs heavier than it ought to, here in mondoland. What also weighs too heavy on her is this boy pretending to manhood. He needs to back off. Give her room to breathe.

  Meanwhile, the sun is going down.

  "Enough," he says. "We make camp here tonight."

  "Bivouac? Sky says keep moving."

  "I don't care what she says. Tonight we're sleeping. You can't travel on that foot yet."

  "I can if I have to."

  "We'll park up under that overhang." He points to a dark shadow on a bluff off to the east.

  holed up

  Dee Zu extends her right arm to brace herself against an outcrop of rock. "I've got it," she says, shoving at Son with her remaining hand. "I'm good."

  Then she topples, and Son steps back in to catch her.

  "I'm okay," she says. But she doesn't push him away.

  "Let me see." Ever so gently, Son touches the stump of her ankle. "How does it feel?"

  "It burns. Plus it's like I'm getting a hundred shocks a second. But not as bad as last time."

  "Nerve damage," Son tells her. "It'll clear up soon enough."

  "You're sure about that, are you?"

  "Yes," he replies, though really he has no idea.

  •

  Her stump is protected from without by tame blurs and from within by medibots. It's like a composite skin, a peculiarly agitated membrane, as though bio and Boogoo have established an uneasy alliance between two species of tiny bot. It's the same with his hand.

  "How nice for us," Dee Zu says. "The last man and last woman on Earth finally have something in common."

  "What we've got in common," he says. "Slow‐mover's badges, one apiece. Walking wounded and, the way we're going, soon dead."

  "Well, thank you, Mr. Smiley Face."

  "You tell me the bright side."

  "Look at the good karma we're banking for Aeolia."

  "Do I qualify for a ticket yet?"

  She says nothing.

  •

  They lie together in the lee of the overhang. Son has wedged the butts of their spearsticks into stone niches, business ends pointed from inside their hidey‐hole at the darkening world outside.

  Their mantles are back.

  "What's going on?"

  "Seems the Boogoo is cozying up again."

  "Why now?"

  "I have no idea. Ask the Lode." In fact he has already elicited a "no data" by way of his WalkAbout.

  "We can't see our reconstruction sites any more."

  "It's too dark anyway."

  "Can we share a mantle?"

  "I don't know." He and Poppy had wondered about that, but risking this sort of unknown served no obvious advantage, so they'd never tried.

  "Other animals do it."

  "Our very own swarm of two?"

  "Yeah."

  "So snug. We can snuggle."

  "Snuggle?" The mere thought warms him. "We want a three‐sixty surveillance bubble," he tells her. Fancy words for keeping a sharp lookout. "So we need to get back2back."

  swarm of two

  The hard ridges of Son's back press against her through their combined mantles, and she squirms at him till she's comfortable. Her segment of their world here under the overhang, certified free of other occupants, is pure blackness. Facing outwards, she sees a sector of starlit sky partly washed out by the glow from the shoe ad. The moon is swelling up from behind some dunes.

  She stares dutifully into what is mostly a void in every direction she's able to. It's going to be a long night. Their separate mantles do provide insulation, and the night has yet to get well started, but already she feels a chill. She gropes behind her for Son's hand. Their blurry fingers interlock as though guided by an automatic docking procedure. He squeezes back, gently, reassuringly. It must be his good hand.

  They don't swarm.

  •

  The only other person Dee Zu knows who ever had a real father was Cisco. That couldn't be the same, though, given he didn't even know about the relationship till a couple of days ago. Cisco also knows his mother now, at least her resurrected ebee. This "scendent" Ellie. He was a toddler when she killed herself, and oblivious. Leary, his father, is dead. His wet master is dead, anyway; a GR Leary, what Cisco calls a scendent, remains alive in Aeolia.

  Her account of Cisco's scendent probably confused Son. Another way of explaining it, Aeolian Leary is like a Worlds avatar derived from Leary's wet master, except now his wet is dead, which doesn't matter because a copy of one‐to‐one density is embodied in the Lode. It inhabits a GR realm they're calling Aeolia, which is something like part of Sky's mind. That's clear enough. She smiles at herself in the dark.

  All the while, goes the story, her own WalkAbout is feeding these fine experiences into the Lode. And this is fleshing out a qubital version of herself and, given enough conflict and pain plus maybe a bolt of lightning, she might also ascend to Aeolia and everlasting life as an autonomous ebee.

  Son now has a WalkAbout of his own, so maybe he's also laying up pain and turmoil against a day he'll join the Aeolians, this heavenly host which, at last count, included Cisco, Leary, Ellie, this guy Brian and Sky. Again she thinks it's too bad the boy beside her couldn't lode the stuff about first losing his father and then the rest of his family all on the same day. Then she shudders at this taint of survivalist pragmatism.

  "Are you awake?" Son whispers.

  "It's my watch, isn't it? Get some sleep."

  •

  The moon, half obscured by the golden hamburger logo, has risen high enough to illuminate an aura of dust that frosts the terrain. She keeps a hand on one of the sentry spearsticks and waits for movement, or sound or smell or something, to alert her to threat. But the night remains quiet, provisionally innocuous.

  Her hand, still interlaced with Son's, prickles.

  "Are you awake?" he says.

  "Yes."

  The first frenetic tingle segues into a slower alternation of furry and smooth. A small jolt precedes the touch of
Son's actual skin before the tingling‐cum‐oscillation hurtles down her arm, across her shoulders and chest, down her back and arms and legs and back up to envelop her head. The end of her leg, where the foot should be, reports a special buzz.

  "What's this?" Dee Zu asks, trying to keep the dread out of her voice.

  "I think we're swarming."

  And just like that, they're two people sharing one mantle. So cozy. The boogooey tingle and pulse give way to a heady blend of his and her scents, a long luxuriant sensation of skin against skin, a scratch of toenail against calf. A caress of hand, a bump of hip.

  "Careful!" Dee Zu says. "My foot."

  "Sorry." Nothing about his hand.

  They roll over face2face to nuzzle and kiss. Their legs intertwine, lubricious leakings and expeditious adjustments soon accomplish another nearly automatic docking procedure. Now it's all belly2belly. What a surprise.

  Dee Zu tries not to think about Cisco. Anyway, he'd understand. Under the circumstances, probably, and everything.

  And so things go for some time.

  Son's wetness reminds her of the taste and feel of real meat in her mouth. The earthy mix of disgust and prurience, of taboo and sublime, disturbs her. But in a positive way, the scent of death as a celebration of life. Son's odor is dirtier than Cisco's. Maybe it's because many of Cisco's bacteria were recent acquisitions, while Son's body has been colonized for longer. An olfactory flashback to Cisco's sharp, almost botanical scent weaves contending strands of guilt and lust into the carnal heat that Son's earthier, more animal odor has kindled.

  The smells, the mere idea of wet human contact arouse her. Amazing. Where's her life‐long mallster phobia regarding microbes? She's flooded with a mix of emotional messages largely missing—or more obviously contrived, more mediated—in the generated realities of the holotanks and the Worlds. The malls were sterile, isolating, filtered, denatured, adulterated. And it may be that the Worlds generators cosmeticized aspects of their worlding experiences in the same way the holoport views had. They never so much as hinted at anything as gruesome as the stench of death that issued from a roachtrap, something that, unlike the earthy smells of wet sex and real meat, celebrated nothing that wanted celebrating.

  And it's crazy, because her current HQ would probably be acceptable back in ESUSA Mall. Even her CQ might make the grade. Enough to stave off PR, at least.