"What?" What Poppy must have sometimes felt at Auntie's love of fancy words.
"Never mind."
Here's the thing. Every time you activate the ball's sub‐projector level it drives the Boogoo nuts, and new boogoothings start to appear. Novel emergences. As though each screw‐up with the ball adds to the Boogoo's repertoire. How could that be?
a harsh editor
Never mind how entertaining these metaphors may be, the Boogoo proves a harsh editor.
The area around the wreckage of the attack squadron goes mushy and begins to swirl. In rapid succession—whumpf, whumpf, whumpf, whumpf—what remains of the copters is pulled back into the Boogoo. The whirlpool slows to a stop and, before it closes, the hole in its center burps a small drone, not a fleye but similar.
The drone nearly flutters clear of the ground before skittering over the surface of the Boogoo to ogle first Dee Zu and then Son, who tries to stab it with a spearstick.
"Should you be doing that?" Dee Zu asks.
Never mind. The drone abruptly goes the way of the helicopters, slurped up right there at their feet.
"So now you're going to tell me what's happening, right?"
"No," says Son. "I'm not."
"Because you have no idea."
"That's correct."
•
"This is amazing," he says.
Dee Zu has watched Son watching developments. He really is just a boy. What happened to the survivalist schtick? He's enjoying this. It's like the Watcher of All Watchers meets the Spectacle of All Spectacles.
She doesn't share his enthusiasm. Their role in proceedings is too passive. They're little more than spectators. Even in the wildest Worlds, she always retained at least some control over outcomes, never found herself so completely at the mercy of events.
It's like one time, back in ESUSA Mall, when Dee Zu's Doll served up a "wild mushroom soup with sherry and cream," maybe getting the mushroom species wrong, or the chemistry or something. Whatever. It was like Dee Zu was back in a test World when all she wanted was dinner and a vid. For a couple of hours she was treated to a wild smorgasbord of cryptomajigs, with her walls, floor, ceiling and furniture all apparently set to outdo one another on the "let's surprise the shit out of Dee Zu" front by growing all manner of things, some of them pretty weird, and waving them around at her. (A funny thing, even after she came down off the high, her apartment remained strangely restive for a while.) This stuff that's happening with the PlagueBot now, it reminds her of that.
boogoo gets the willies
More sporators arise until a whole field of wobbly pods atop giant beanstalks reach for the sky.
"Try the GPS again," she says. "There must be a clue somewhere in its databank."
Just as Dee Zu did earlier while dicking around with the rings on the gadget, Son lapses into the taboo zone. The one that gave Sky the willies.
"Oops," he says.
His skull buzzes with the audio prop before the holo visual appears a couple of meters off the ground in front of them.
~ NuEu ~
Evolution by design
Engineering your own futures
From wherever it hides, the dreckmill, or propagator or whatever it is, conjures an impossibly complex molecule, a bizarre riff off illustrations he has seen in Auntie's biohistory textbooks, its component atoms coded in bright colors, more vivid than anything they've yet seen. It comes together from lesser molecules and extends to the limits of its bubble shield before spiraling in on itself, intricating and then intricating some more in a series of infolding twists and compactions before turning itself inside‐out and blossoming as a triple helix Mobius strip. Then they get the rest of it.
Affiliated with
EZIC Cryonic Term Deposits
A subsidiary of Goddling World Realities
All of that proves to be no more than prelude.
•
The entire Boogoo shrugs up, a total distraction from any remaining props.
"This is scary," Dee Zu says in a calm voice.
The rustle of untold quadrillions of nanobots culminates in a delicate roar. Maximum white noise, it muffles all other sound. It smothers thought. It subdues the will to act among all creatures other than the Boogoo itself. An immense superorganism emerges from the closet as a psychedelic party animal. In some way beyond his ken, maybe by way of Auntie, these images come to Son. But they remain inadequate.
Poppy should be here to see this. Son can hear him nagging about the evils of imagination and daydreaming, saying how the Boogoo is in no way alive, and these things are all in Son's head. Whatever. Inside his head or outside it, this world is coming to resemble a giant hallucination.
"And what is this, exactly?" Dee Zu says. Now she sounds more irritated than scared.
"The Boogoo has gone gaga," Son says. He tries to thread the two hemispheres together again at the same time he tries not to miss any of what's going on.
A new crop of sporators burst open in unison to ejaculate their loads and, together with the ruins of the wall and everything else in sight, they collapse into a tidal surge that converges on Son and Dee Zu. And the madness touches Son, because for a moment he imagines the Boogoo is coming to get his ball. The advancing ocean of blurs extends as far as they can see to the north and the south of them. The base of the near wall briefly teems with panicky swarms, mostly rats and roaches, he thinks, while a couple of big cats race to escape the onslaught.
But there's more. Lots more. All the world's nanobot disassemblers have turned wizard assemblers. Miniscule humanoids swarm the approaching verge, while in the distance loom one‐hundred‐meter figures that stride purposefully in and out of existence, no sooner emerging from the blur matrix than they submerge again.
"It's a scaling problem," Dee Zu replies.
"Yeah?"
"You'd see this in the Worlds sometimes. Not often. Usually the scaling would skew in proportion—everything larger, or everything smaller."
"Interesting. But I think we'd better make a move."
"This is less like error, more like messing around. An experiment. As though your Boogoo has realized it can build things, and it's playing with the controls."
"Testing the parameters."
"Yeah."
Poppy spins in his hole with exasperation. "The Boogoo can't 'realize' anything. It isn't conscious, okay? It doesn't think." That proposition becomes less and less likely, at the same time Son also hears Poppy say, "Make a move, chum."
"So," Dee Zu says. "What do we now?"
"Dunno."
"Run?"
mashups'r'us
"Run!" Son says. "Follow me."
Dee Zu's new foot works okay. Not too bad, anyway. She runs as fast as she can, not because she believes Son has a real plan, only because she sees nothing better to do under the circumstances. Maybe his proposal they share a life in a GameBoy hole in the ground wasn't such a bad idea after all.
He's headed for the steps.
•
The steps end at a featureless platform carved into the rockface and backed by rough stone.
"Nice knowing you," Dee Zu tells him, breathing hard as they reach the platform.
"We aren't dead yet."
"Really?" She looks back the way they've come.
A feverish 3D kaleidoscopic tide, the Boogoo boils with a variegated conglomerate of shapes familiar and unfamiliar, some outlandish, each sized arbitrarily. Amorphous entities flop out of the slow onrush, other things flutter and flap and collapse back into the Boogoo maelstrom as though it has incorporated templates of everything it ever assimilated, both substantial and conceptual, and now wants to express the whole lot all at once. A giant figure, vaguely anthropomorphic, surfs the lip of this roistering chaos.
Son grasps his spearstick in both hands and makes a threatening advance, whether toward the surfer or toward the Boogoo as a whole, Dee Zu can't say. But say what you like, the boy has balls.
One big mystery. These phenomena are
somehow keyed to Son's and her POV. How could that be? And why?
Stick‐insect cranes erect a manic frieze of teetering structures on one side of the deluge. On its other side, a tumbling avalanche of molecules, bewildering geometries the size of small buildings, decimate a forest of wind turbines or enormous hydras or something. A pack of what look like velociraptors straight out of Jurassic Jungle World, five of them turquoise, one purple, races out the path of the molecules. An ancient biplane lurches along on the verge of leaving the ground yet still tethered to the blur substrate. Siamese‐twin apes on wheels slalom between the remaining molecules, though how their wheels turn is a mystery. Never mind. This biocontraption springs legs like landing gear as soon as it hits the bottom of the slope. Ahead of the leisurely onrush, two pre‐flitter cars race around a track that substantiates a few meters ahead of them, as they proceed, and disappears a similar distance behind.
"Jesus Christ," says Son. He lowers his weapon and leans back against the blank rockface. "Now what?"
"End of the road," Dee Zu says. "Let's have a hug."
"Okay."
•
"Look at that!" he says.
At first she sees nothing exceptional aside from another pair of wheeled apes hurtling down one shoulder of the Boogoo. Then she spots it. An old friend, an UltraArmagirdian, has emerged from the trough of this slow tsunami. She blinks, and when she reopens her eyes there are two Ultras. Then four. They grind and rip through the lesser apparitions between them and where Son and Dee Zu seek admittance to Happy Chillin. They have fewer arms than the earlier models and, something new, lots of tentacles. Like the squidpod before them, furthermore, these creatures expel dark facsimiles of themselves. Unlike with the squidpod, instead of disappearing as they advance these clones firm up, assimilating Boogoo substance and then ejecting doppelgängers of their own, an ever‐growing phalanx of warbots, a writhing wall of tentacles, their numbers booming exponentially. And you can hear them.
This is bad.
"I really like you," Son says.
"What?"
"I wanted you to know."
Then there's another voice. Up close and intimate, though not as intimate as a dreckad. "Password?" it says, as cheery as can be.
They look all around for the source of this voice.
"What password?" Dee Zu says.
"The initial password, please."
"Son?"
"Dunno."
"EDDIE EIGHT." She tries the first that comes to mind out of the dozen Sky offloaded on them.
"And now from our second visitor."
"Eddie Eight?" Son says, sounding not very hopeful.
"Correct," says the voice, at once prim and pleased.
"So lucky," Dee Zu says.
Back the way they've come, the whole landscape heaves and morphs as the Boogoo maelstrom piles up against an invisible arc.
"A force‐field bubble?" Son says.
"Talk about the nick of time."
They have another hug.
gameboy bunkers aren't so bad
"Hi!"
Dee Zu peers over Son's shoulder and Son peers over hers, again seeking the source of this voice.
"Password, please."
Looking all around, they step away from their hug to stand back2back.
"Eddie Eight," says Son.
"No."
"No?"
"The second password, please." The tone remains friendly, positive. "Please be informed: Twenty‐one seconds remain before you are removed."
Dee Zu looks even harder.
"Nineteen seconds."
There's nobody there.
"Over here." A toothy grin hovers about head height three meters from where Son and Dee Zu stand poised as for combat. "Can you see me?"
"Holy shit," Son says.
"Holy shit," says Dee Zu.
"Just a sec', okay?" An exuberant quiff of red hair materializes above the teeth. The rest of the face follows, the body close behind. This apparition firms up, never ceases smiling. "There are formalities to which we must attend." The holo balloons up, shrinks, swells again, sputters in and out, wavers and then holds at something larger than life‐sized. It wears a candy‐stripe suit, shiny white shoes and a big red bow tie.
Without further ado, it says: "Ten seconds remain before you are terminated."
"MO SENT ME," Dee Zu says, dipping once more into the assortment of passwords Sky gave them.
"Thank you," the holo replies.
The holo wavers a moment and turns to Son, "Five seconds," it tells him.
"Mo sent me. Jesus Christ. Mo sent me."
"Once is sufficient. Thank you." It steps back and bows with a flourish, sweeping one arm toward the hillside behind. At that, a bright orange‐and‐yellow holo storefront appears where only a blank cliff‐face loomed a moment before. A gaily lit riot of ever‐shifting color flashes its message above the door, maybe a real one.
Happy Chillin
Abide with us in confidence
An authorized subsidiary of
EZIC Cryonic Term Deposits
Meanwhile the holo guardian has vanished.
"Hey!" Son hollers. "Open up."
A door in the storefront opens to reveal a candy‐stripe holo, maybe the same one.
"Welcome, my friends! Welcome to Happy Chillin. My name is Bentley."
Aside from a faint medicinal reek, the air inside has the sterile quality of the malls.
happy chillin
We offer unsurpassed care in perpetuity or until prevailing circumstances permit the implementation of client revival in a viable condition.
– Bentley
just do it
Son has never before been inside a place with a ceiling this high, not even the pod station. It's enough to disorient him.
Directly ahead, a giant holographic wall poster presents a slogan, letters described in bright colors that shift according to some giddy design.
Abide with us in faith
And their host himself projects nearly delirious good will. Never mind he'd been prepared to exterminate them minutes before.
"Welcome, welcome!" Bentley says.
The smile is twice too broad for any human being, as though Bentley's head were hinged in the middle. What Poppy called a shit‐eating grin. And Poppy would have called Son a shit‐headed idiot for standing here gaping at these gleaming teeth.
"Our only desire is to facilitate your wishes."
Heaven can wait!
"What the hell?" Son raises his spearstick and looks for the source of this voice that's banging around inside his head.
Death is always premature
"Just another dreckad," Dee Zu tells him. "Relax."
"Hi," Bentley says.
"Hi," Dee Zu says.
"Welcome. I will serve as your host for the duration of your stay."
Son says, "Hi."
"And this," Bentley indicates a new arrival, "is my OK₂GO general‐purpose utilibot. My factotum."
The utilibot has six identical double‐jointed limbs and a central body like a double‐ended non‐hoodie dickhead, sporting single eyes above and below, slits for pupils. Two more legs, and it might resemble a vaguely obscene octopus. Standing an average meter and a half tall, it rolls hand over hand toward them, an insectile‐cephalopod‐machine circus tumbler. It stops and gazes down at them with its currently upper‐most eye. It has no personality.
"Please let it take your baggage."
Son backs away and says, "I'll keep it, thanks."
The utilibot, a fleet crabwise ninja, sidles to where it can restrain Son with two arms while using two others to seize spearstick and catchbag. Dee Zu simply lays her stick down on the floor and steps away from it.
"The OK₂GO serves as my hands and legs," Bentley says, "when material actions must be undertaken."
"Okay," says Son. His knife screeches off the utilibot without leaving a scratch, and the bot relieves Son of his last weapon with an ease bordering on sleight
of hand. It releases Son without comment.
"The Dickhead," Dee Zu says.
"What?" Son asks.
"We can call him the Dickhead."
A new voice begs to differ. "We can call him a Jack of all trades."
"Or a Jill," adds yet another voice, identical to the first.
"Our androgynous factotum."
Bentley smiles brilliantly. "I'd like you to meet TeDee," he says.
"Hi!"
"And TeDum."
"Hi!"
Two identical bots present themselves, fluid silvery eggs about a meter through their vertical axis, featureless except for shinier ridges outlining gullible big eyes and grinning mouths roughly where, if eggs had bellies, their bellies would be. They move on plump hindquarter limbs that look sculpted from mercury to stand either side of the Dickhead.
"Meet our OK₂GO."
"Our general personal assistant."
"Multi‐talented."
"Many limbed."
"Multitasking made easy."
"OK₂GO."
"TeDee and TeDum are my ditherbot consultancy. They help me think, when there's thinking to be done."
"Class‐A ditherbots."
"One pair."
"Advanced problem solving."
"We aim to oblige."
"Our forté."
"Our métier."
"Our thing."
"Working together."
"Bicognitively brilliant."
"Sometimes."
"If we do say so ourselves."
"I do."
"And I do."
"Till death do us part."
"Hahahaha."
"Jesus Christ," says Son.
"If you have questions, feel free to ask."
"Enough." Dee Zu turns to Bentley and says, "What is this place, exactly?"
"Happy Chillin," says TeDee.
"Chill, citizens," TeDum says.
"Bide a wee with us."
"Who are you?" Son says.
"Advanced cryogenics institution."
"Fully authorized."
"Location: Utah, the United Securistats of America."
"Established 2022."
"Still operational as of 2056."
"As of now."
"We have vacancies."
"No thanks," Son says.
"You may stay."
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