Genesis 2.0

by Collin Piprell

  Physical messages—letters, basically— became the most secure method of intercontinental communication toward the end of the Troubles, at least for really critical information. When you didn't need speed‐of‐light delivery, it was best to rely on letters or cognitive implants. Quantum encryption of any conceivable type was compromised by GameBoy hackers who only wanted to access attack‐and‐defense sat systems for real time, real shit gaming, an interesting development that arose in the depths of the Troubles. Some claimed it was distinct from activities initiated by the ITZ, the international terrorist superorganism, though others argued that pretty much all instances of shitkicking were by then at least indirectly ITZ‐related.

  In any case, the pod was designed to accommodate a single postman, whose main function was to ensure, if the pod were hijacked or otherwise misdirected into enemy hands, that the mail was totally and irretrievably annihilated. One person was plenty.

  Son is amazed. "And how do you know all this?" he says.

  "I'm a test pilot, remember? Satellite Shoot'em Up was a hot gameWorld five years ago or so; in fact it was Cisco who originally cleared it for general mallster consumption. Security considerations were no longer a concern; any related systems were long defunct."

  "Wow."

  "Yeah. And GameBoys gaming with the armed sat systems about ten years before that was probably what spelled an end to civilian GPS updating."

  "No more positioning satellites to triangulate on?"

  "Exactly. Not commercial ones, anyway."

  "One last thing."

  "Yeah?"

  "We should assume that Satellite Shoot'em Up was as historically and technically accurate as Worlds UnLtd could make it."

  "And?"

  "Are you ready for this? Postmen were keen to ensure they didn't inadvertently trigger the laser shredder."

  "The laser shredder."

  "Postmen often carried cognitive data implants as well. Where loss of secret information was threatened, the mail disposal unit also vaporized the mailman in the process. In the Worlds, that spelled game over."

  "And there's a laser shredder in here with us?"

  "I'd imagine so."

  "Nice."

  "Same went for the neurotoxic IED teeth that provided an equivalent fail‐safe for cognitive data implants."

  "Holy shit."

  "Yeah. Postmen weren't big on hard candy."

  •

  There's a console, but the only controls are for air‐conditioning and view panels.

  "All we have to do is relax and enjoy the ride, Dee Zu says. "Our flight program is pre‐programmed. Fly by wire."

  "A beam‐rider."

  "A what?"

  "It's a beam‐rider. Poppy used to talk about missiles that rode on laser beams."

  "Can we try not to think of this as a missile? My God."

  "Sorry."

  "Safe journey."

  "Whoa," Son says. "Did your Lode just wish us good luck?"

  "That was the pod. The Lode is still down."

  "How long is this trip supposed to take?"

  "Can you squeeze over? The other way. Thanks."

  "Are you hungry?"

  "Not just now."

  The launch tube extends and rotates in preparation. It's all very gentle and reassuring. Their shared tanglenet, a primitive ancestor of forcefield worlding cradles, tenses and relaxes in response to shifts in gravitational orientation.

  "Ready for launch," says the voice.

  There's an unholy BANG, and the tanglenet draws them even more intimately together and holds them there against G‐forces that threaten to pull the skin off their faces.

  funride

  The console includes an air‐conditioning control and one other that switches between nose‐cone, tail‐section and side views from the pod. Son tries for a close‐up of woogly skies, but they're flying too high and too fast.

  The Boogoo‐enshrouded land stretches to the blue‐black curve of the horizon. The highest he has ever been before is the northern end of Long Lookout Ridge. And he can see the ocean. Aside from the glimpse the GPS projector gave them, the seas were no more than a rumor of mystery to the south. Jesus. They cover more of the planet than the Boogoo does. This is amazing.

  More amazing, this beautiful woman lies naked beside him. And, amazing thing upon amazing thing, his dick, which presses hard as a spearstick up against her belly, sports a turtleneck.

  "It's hot," Dee Zu says. "Can I adjust the air‐con?"

  Son has discovered the emergency landing rations. "Can I open these?" he says.

  "Those are emergency rations."

  "Yeah. But I'm hungry."

  The crackers are bad enough they take his mind off the cheese. He also saws his way into something called Spam®, which comes in a thick plastic sleeve. It tastes like the time, after Auntie lost her foot, the Boogoo wouldn't let them out of the Bunker and Gran‐Gran held bits back from the recycler and pressed them into something she flash‐baked and called meaty loaf.

  "That looks like real magifactured meat," Dee Zu tells him.

  He tries slicing it onto crackers from a cheese pack. "Yum," he says, and winces. He has eaten nothing since they left Eden, aside from the pears. And one monkey leg. A bit of pig.

  "Look at that," Dee Zu says. "You've got crumbs everywhere."

  what a lovely excursion

  Son crowded her even back on the ground where the PlagueBot extended from horizon to horizon under the great bowl of the sky. He swarmed her even before they wound up crammed together in the hold of a mail delivery pod. Now he's all over her at the same time he tries to ingest whatever else of organic origin he can find. All the while, afraid he might miss something, he rotates among the various viewports. What you get when someone lives his entire young life in a hole in the ground. You'd think this is the best thing that's ever happened to him.

  "Look!" he says. "Look at that."

  She suffers from acrophobia, and looks only because she wants to know what might have changed since her earlier flight.

  Earth's crackled surface may well reflect untold numbers of PlagueBot territorial warlords, their bedrock bounds wind‐scoured clean. The crackled effect she saw on the earlier trip from ESUSA Mall has given way to a web of lines, some bold, others so fine as to be nearly invisible.

  "Your toes are working?" he says.

  "Seem to be." She scratches at his calf with her new toenails, truly impressed at the stir of Son's response against her belly. He says he's a real man, and maybe he is at that.

  She's moved that this boy would share the last pears in the world with her. And that he'd lose a hand, at least part of one, saving her from the roach thing. That he'd shield her from the wrath of gods with his mortal body. Meanwhile she has nothing to give him in return except herself. So she does. Perhaps energized still by the syrup and by Son's animal odor, she gives him a wild, if tightly constrained, ride. Despite everything. Despite the medibot construction sites that remain at the ends of their respective appendages and the close quarters of a intercontinental ballistic pod built for one. Never mind thoughts of Cisco have the carnal heat shot through with currents of guilt.

  Son himself is clearly having flashbacks to both the swarm of two and the pod session just past. And nothing shall keep Little Son from its appointed mission in life, which is to poke and poke till it can poke no more. Though that mission shouldn't interfere with the rest of this lovely excursion, so let's also eat and look out the porthole at the same time. It's hard not to feel some fondness for him, but really he's just a kid. A fairly annoying kid.

  Dee Zu is the veteran of legless snake‐World orgies, even one grotesque World, never made available to the mallster hoi polloi, where she, and all the other teleps, were nothing but a train of enormous hermaphroditic male‐female sex organs comprised mostly of protopathic sensors—the most ancient, most sensual means of touch. She has had synesthetic sex, hive sex and tri‐species sex. Now she can add wet sex seasoned with a view
of the Earth's curvature plus plenty of adolescent enthusiasm and accents of acrophobia.

  She's looking out a viewport over Son's shoulder, just as he's looking out another over hers, when a sense of immense grandeur blows her orgasm out of all proportion.

  "That was nice," says Dee Zu.

  "Yeah," he replies. "Yeah."

  Okay. That's the food and sex out of the way. And never mind that more important matters than scratching Son's itches, or her own, are pressing, now she only has to deal with this boy's curiosity.

  •

  "So," he says. "We're down here."

  "Down here?"

  "Okay, up here in this pod. But down here in mondoland. At the same time, up there somewhere else, other people are doing other things."

  "I guess."

  "And this other place is where, exactly?"

  "I told you, I don't know."

  "This Lode we talk to, that's in Aeolia?"

  "Aeolia is part of the Lode. And part of MOM."

  "So where is MOM when she's at home?"

  "She's part of the Lode."

  "And the Lode is where?"

  "MOM is the Lode. The Lode and lots more. She's the Lode aware of itself. Something like that."

  "MOM is alive?"

  "Yes."

  "So the WalkAbout lets us talk to MOM, not the Lode."

  "When you ask for information, it's generally the Lode that delivers. When your WalkAbout is issuing advice and instructions, that's MOM."

  "And what's happened to Sky?"

  "Sky is one part of MOM, one of her personality alters. Cisco calls her 'Sky.' I know her—him—as 'Tor.' Tor is male."

  "You shared a lover, and it was a machine?"

  "Yes."

  "You're kidding me."

  "No."

  "Really glad you've cleared all that up."

  "Sky and Tor are two sides of Sky, two genders anyway, who is herself only one side of MOM." There. That should keep him quiet for a moment. Here they are hurtling through the stratosphere toward who knows what in a midwestern USA wasteland, and she's being interrogated regarding things that would be hard enough to explain to this feral boy even supposing she weren't describing what, as of only a few hours ago, may well have become counterfactuals.

  "So not only do you have gods looking after you, you get to bonk them."

  "Yeah," she says. "Our very own pet Olympians." Of course he has no idea what she's talking about.

  "It's amazing."

  "What is?"

  "All that information, right there when you ask for it. But can you trust it?"

  "Let's put it this way. That information is what's left after the whole human race kicks the world to see what happens, and kicks it again and again, for thousands of years kicking it this way and that way and rechecking the consequences. So, yes. It's fairly reliable."

  She can tell that Son is subvocalizing, having another go at raising the Lode. "Are the WalkAbouts going to come back inline?" he says.

  "I hope so."

  Because first and foremost, if they don't, Cisco's survival chances shrink to unacceptable levels. For now, the Lode is down. And if the Lode's down, then the scendents, including Cisco, are down. And his wet master, if he's still alive, lies back the way they've come, on the other side of the planet. Now the rest of it, survival and so on, loses its urgency.

  They're headed halfway around the planet to retrieve a codestring from someone hidden deep in an underground crypt. That's if they can find him, if he's alive, and if he's willing and able to recall and then relinquish this information.

  Never mind. She has nothing better to do. Not till she gets a line on Cisco.

  dreamtime

  He is here. Wherever that is and whoever he might be.

  •

  At minus one hundred and ninety‐six degrees Celsius (minus three hundred and eight‐five degrees Fahrenheit), live brain tissue, normally a buttery substance you can cut with a bread knife, becomes hard as rock. You'd want a power saw or laser scalpel to slice it up. Cellular growth and maintenance have ceased. Electrochemical processes have ceased and, consequently, so has cognition. Or so scientists have believed. But quantum‐level synaptic activity still fuels neural process, however slow and uncertain. It generates all‐but‐imperceptible waveforms that register as images, sometimes other sensations, within this person who knows no history, no personality.

  •

  This could be a dream. He doesn't know. He is all the land watching skywards. His dreaming, if it is dreaming, features a woman's face between him and the sky. He watches, seeks his reflection in the eyes but sees nothing except, just maybe, a glint of movement. He wants to hear what this woman says, just as he wants nothing whatsoever to happen. For all his wanting, he wishes for nothing to lead to anything else, for fear that whatever emerges from this endless now will prove unbearable.

  He feels himself erect. And so it must have always been. For all process has stalled. Time is not, but even if it were, would that this now never end. He could live in the moment forever. And, for an eon, so he does.

  •

  This is a slow dream. A timeless series of unconnected images. Now his member is erect. But no story emerges to explain the rigidity. No special object or promise of lust. The succession of images and sensations have no order, no beginning or end. No coherence beyond the fact they are his. But who is he? This question has no answer so long as there is no story.

  •

  All is inverted, now, and he has no memory of inversion. He is the sky watching groundwards, where grassy plains roll to the horizon. A spine of snow‐capped wooded mountains stands far to the west; a clean steel‐and‐glass city breaks the eastern skyline. A solitary mountain, a rough pyramid with grassy lower reaches rising to sheer stony outcrops, stands on the plain below. The sky, and the land, is immense, and his spirit fills the whole of it. Warm breeze frozen against his brow, he views all the land from high against the cloud‐flecked blue orb. The living processes below him also lie frozen, all development deferred. He has observed these herds grazing for an age, watched cowboys ride fence, going nowhere. Pasture land, aspen copses, wheat fields, the vast land traversed by rivers, roads, and rail lines, a one‐to‐one scale map of life and commerce in deep suspension, cars, trains, riverboats forever still yet charged with intention. All this and more he watches from a point outside time at the same time he dwells within this scene, one with the world encompassed in his vision.

  •

  From his godlike vantage, pasted against the great bowl of the sky, he is serial witness, in the theater of his dreaming mind, to chaos—asynchronous existence strobe‐lit only rarely, one freeze‐frame at a time. Any future is unimaginable because a future requires participation in some story. That, in turn, necessitates a history, and he has no past. Only the random succession of images that is no real succession, given that he remains outside time.

  •

  A solitary, pyramid‐shaped hill stands below, blasted bare. Many kilometers to the west, Gaia's bones lie buckled, a desolate mountain range strung from southern gloom to northern in shades of black and brown touched with pink from florid holes in the overcast. He sees this at the same time he is the overcast. He is the sky watching the land.

  In this dream, he has been extruded over the great bowl of the sky from whence his watching encompasses the land. Within this scene, all process is suspended. All the rich history and life and potential that it would evoke remain only inchoate. To the east, the blackened ribs of a city rise from a scorched plain. Nothing happens, nothing can happen. Half‐molten mechanical carcasses litter streets that divide up the skeletal remains of highrise canyons, these among the last monuments constructed by a late expression of the primordial microbial superorganism that ruled this world for three and a half billion years—from another, much earlier time, not long after the birth of the planet, when the rocks ceased to eddy and flow like hellacious rivers and the seas filled instead with water. He doesn't kno
w how, but he knows this.

  Now, he knows this. At other times he does not, for at those times he simply isn't. Whoever it is he may be. Then (imagine a "then"), like the quantum particles that wink in and out amid the frigid synapses of rock‐hard neurons, appearing and as quickly disappearing again, he emerges from nothingness. There is no time. No time when he isn't, and no time passes when he is. Whoever he is. Now ("now" is all there is) he has emerged into a nightmare. His watching, on some level of cold intellection, is unrelenting horror, the more horrific for the near‐absolute cessation of time and process. He watches, uncomprehending and hopeless. There is only now, and he is in Hell. In this nightmare, he is the sky watching a vast landscape, at once encompassing it and able to discern its minutest detail. Unable to stop watching; unable to so much as blink.

  All that he surveys is acutely this way and no other way for always. Yet it is deeply wrong. Agonizingly inappropriate. In the same way, he senses the impossibility of his own being. He is no one, yet he is here, now. A nightmare in which he absolutely needs to be not here, not now. But now is all there is; this is all there is, the watching and the watched forever and ever. Frozen rivers and slides of molten rock, ridged and pitted plains scattered with dark cinder. To the southeast, after some kilometers, there remains nothing that lies within his power to discern. All has been homogenized in soft gray focus as by an advancing tide of dust. Except there is no advance, no perceptible process.

  •

  He who dreams is comfortable, overall. He floats in a bath of liquid nitrogen in pitch dark one thousand meters beneath a pyramidal granite mountain in what used to be the State of Utah, the United Securistats of America. He has been here, in his mind, for untold eons. In time, he has waited here for thirty‐four years. Sometimes he feels a world of loss, sometimes he only wants to hear what the woman with the beautiful eyes has to say. Sometimes he just watches.

  On Earth's surface, far above the dark crypt of his abiding, an overburden of gray dust stretches in every direction from the stark pyramidal hill to the horizon and beyond, swaddling the globe, extending its domain everywhere the seas haven't claimed all the way to hills and plains on the other side of the planet.