Genesis 2.0

by Collin Piprell

  Shortly after they established their bivouac, Son got a full‐blown prop.

  Maxhappiness!

  All gain, no pain

  The too‐cheery message erupted without warning right inside his head. There was more, but it bumbled off into barely audible nonsense.

  "No pain." As though the Troubles hadn't been pain. What kind of world were these booby voices promoting? This thought brings Poppy alive to express surprise the Boogoo had any appetite for the leftovers.

  Son's WalkAbout remains silent. Almost silent. Over the past few days, he gets unintelligible fragments in anonymous voices. Not props. Something else, and he believes they're coming via his WalkAbout. Weird. He can reliably stir up chatter by subvocalizing things like, "Yo, who is this?"

  And what about that gizmo his medibots reported, back in Eden? Maybe it's related to the recurring ache in his gut. The medibots reckoned it mated with his WalkAbout, and what might a marriage between a WalkAbout and an evolved blurball accomplish that a mere WalkAbout couldn't?

  Go ahead, Poppy would say. Ask yourself these damnfool questions, imagine all manner of fantastical stories. Then tell me what good it does you.

  The fact remains, both he and the Land continue to change in obscure ways, some of them maybe dangerous. It's hard to say. But Son watches. He wants to think he's learning to read the Land.

  He still isn't sure what's happened to the weed species of old. Pigs and monkeys aren't swarming; in fact he rarely spots individual specimens. He does stay alert, however, and a spearstick is never beyond reach. Any surviving dragons keep an even lower profile.

  Long Lookout Ridge remains his favorite spot, now as it was in the days of the Boogoo. Though it can be hard to position himself close to the exact station he used to adopt. Too often he has to shift his vantage point, finding a new growth of something or another blocking his view. Things change at a rate they never did in the old days, which still seems like just a month or two ago.

  •

  Halfway back to camp he meets Dee Zu on her way to find him.

  "Come," she says. "You have to see this."

  just a house

  "What the hell is it?" Dee Zu says.

  She points to their temporary home by the creek. The lean‐to is now obscured by a clump of trees, one of them huge and spreading. Something else lies partly shaded by the big tree. "It looks like a roof," she says.

  "It's a house." With a pitched roof.

  How likely is that? Son's first thought, it's really a Sham lying in wait. Then he thinks it probably isn't, but why take a chance? "We'll follow along behind that low ridge," he says. "Keep down out of sight. We'll come in from the north."

  Dee Zu says it looks more like a rough sketch of a one‐story house, maybe a child's 3D printout. It's surrounded on four sides by a mound of soil running about fifty meters a side.

  Son watches it and watches it till Dee Zu says, "To hell with this. Let's have a look."

  "No," he says. "It's best we wait."

  The Bylar lean‐to remains their base for two more days, during which time the house does nothing except sit there.

  •

  Lying awake outside the lean‐to beneath a pale green bioluminescent sky delicately woogled against moon and assorted orbital logos, Son listens to siftings and stirrings, soft gnashings from the direction of the house.

  This morning the garbage pit was neater than it was yesterday. More cleanly geometrical. And Son could swear the perimeter mound was higher. For her part, Dee Zu claims things look more inviting each morning, that it's becoming a Homestead worth the name.

  Son's ready to concede. Maybe it is just a house.

  Dee Zu still has stomach problems, especially in the mornings, and a better home would likely be good for her. She needs to rest.

  hamburgers & ponchos

  Physically, Son is feeling one hundred percent these days. Dee Zu isn't. Not yet. Though she says she's better.

  Their house is comfortable. And comfortably furnished, for the most part. How can you explain that? Son only has to lapse into Poppy mode to see the comfortable bed and so on as bait for a trap. He hasn't shared that particular vision with Dee Zu; he knows how she'd react.

  The perimeter wall continues to grow taller day by day, just as the garbage pit has been evolving into something very different. Yesterday, for example, it sprouted mushroom‐like items the size of Son's head. They were purple with white spots. He sliced off a sample, the thing was brown inside, and ate it. It was good. And he was still alive come morning.

  So he took these "mushrooms" and chopped them fine together with big bean‐like things Dee Zu picked off a tree up along the creek somewhere and some peppery bark of his own discovery. Then he mashed all this together with dried and ground "corn" kernels and water, and fried up patties that tasted something like hamburgers.

  "Something like," Dee Zu said. "That's true."

  •

  Dee Zu describes their new, improved pit as a combination "dispose‐all" and "provide‐all." A Doll, in short. One chief agent of civilization's end, according to Poppy's standard history of the world. Maybe because of that, Son himself prefers to call it their pit. However you want to describe the thing, it's pretty amazing. It's like their compost heap has eliminated the middleman—you merely toss your wastes into it and, as if in exchange, it coughs up things of use. Stuff often not related in any obvious way to what you fed it.

  Sometimes, though, waste disposal itself was eerily akin to placing an order. Take the way it recycled their by‐now tattered and threadbare Happy Chillin tunics. They'd already noticed orangey‐purple stains on the pit, especially after a rain. (The food they harvested from it tasted better for days afterwards, or so Son, at least, claimed.) Not long after the advent of the stains, while foodstuffs continued to emerge from one side of the pit, an orangey‐purple film began appearing on the other side. Something like the microbial mats they used to find around Ahuk Hole. If they let the film grow for a day or two, they could lift it off and dry it in the sun. Just playing around, mind you, seeing what was what. The films varied in color, thickness and density.

  "It looks like tiny vines, or maybe algae," Son said when they first investigated, thinking back to Auntie's biology books.

  "That's amazing," said Dee Zu. "Look. They've grown this way and that. She tugged at the sheet. "They've woven themselves together." The strands sprung back into place as soon as she let go.

  In short, the pit has been providing pieces of cloth. As if it recognized their need for a new wardrobe. And now the biofilm fibers, generally red‐orange‐brown in color, are evolving simple patterns.

  They've made ponchos from the pieces of cloth, cutting holes in them for their heads. Not all that stylish, but they'll learn to do better.

  "Unless our Doll beats us to it," Dee Zu says.

  a living land

  The morning after the mushroom hamburgers, Dee Zu is wracked with cramps and nausea. Son is okay, even though he ate three burgers to her one.

  "The Doll has never poisoned us before," she says. "It's probably something else."

  Son isn't reassured. Doesn't matter, she tells him. She wants him out of the house.

  After a couple of hours she's feeling better. In fact she decides to join him up on Long Lookout where he watches.

  •

  "Look at that!" she says, pointing toward the flatlands south of them.

  It's a streak of tigers, the biggest Son has seen, dozens of them. If it's only been twenty‐two years, where the hell have all these things come from?

  "Tigers."

  "Yeah," he says. "Though we're supposed to be still‐sitting, so it's best not to move, okay? And try not to make so much noise."

  Auntie told him these animals went extinct early in the twenty‐first century. But he has seen hordes of tigers at a time undulating together across the plains. Luckily that's the extent of their repertoire so far. Son has concluded they must be grazing on the grassy vegetation
. Dee Zu laughs at this idea of herbivore tigers, ask how they could chew grass with those teeth. Maybe, then, they're munching away at unseen animals. Could it be the ratswarms' role in this new world is feeding tigers? Or maybe these tigers have herbivore teeth. In any case they don't appear dangerous.

  "So what's happening?" Dee Zu asks. "It's like the Land has gone into conservationist hyperdrive."

  One tiger good, many tigers better. Merely one of many puzzling features the Land has been throwing up at them.

  The herd breaks up into smaller groups to flow around big grassy hummocks and merge again before disappearing over a hillside. Then one of the grassy hillocks explodes, flying apart as a flock of birds. Flying creatures, anyway. He can't make out details. He remembers Dee Zu's story of her Doll's magic mushroom soup, back in ESSEA Mall, and he wonders about the purple mushrooms.

  "That's unbelievable," she says.

  She has seen it too, which argues against the magic mushrooms theory. The Land has rarely been this exuberant since the Boogie. It makes him nervous.

  Then a stand of bamboo goes all limp and loose, collapsing and disappearing as its elements crawl away.

  "Those were snakes," Dee Zu says.

  "Maybe."

  "They looked like snakes."

  "Yeah."

  "I hate snakes."

  "So you've said."

  •

  Son gazes westwards, beyond where the crypto‐bamboos stood, to where he believes the GameBoy bunker lies. Where he discovered the balls. Even from here, he can see that part of the terrain has changed in many ways, and he's not sure he could find the bunker if he did go looking. Anyway, what good would it be? The ban on weapons stands, so the arsenal would probably prove useless. And Son would still have to dice with the over‐and‐under scanner just to gain access. But he'll cross that bridge when he comes to it.

  He adds the bunker to his inventory, another potential asset in time of some uncertain need. For one thing, he remains uncomfortable with their having set up so close to the hole, and he can't shake the idea they're going to need an escape plan.

  He hefts the hemmelite ball in the palm of his hand and ponders their situation.

  •

  "When I'm better," Dee Zu says, "can you take me for a walk over there? Over among those trees?"

  "Let me do some more scouting first."

  "So who appointed you alpha test pilot? I'm the expert, remember?"

  Maybe he is being over‐cautious. A notion that arouses Poppy: "You'd rather be over‐cautious or you'd rather be dead?" Whatever. Those woods and meadows he has explored so far are like parks.

  His cautious forays reveal clean and tidy forest floors. He has watched a patch of floor rise to swarm a tree trunk. When he approached it with a stick to investigate, the swarm slumped back to ground and, within seconds, he couldn't tell it from any other part of the surface. It's too soon to say, but he suspects some patches are evolved roachswarms, while others are something else. Dead wood, the detritus of a thriving ecosystem, living and dying and living again, is kept clear by composite cleanerswarms. These may include roaches and big legoitic ant‐bots modeled after self‐organizers. Like the robotic ants from that huge composite snake back in Eden. It's hard to say, though. And Son remains reluctant to get close enough to a cleanerswarm to find out for sure.

  Green things, plants, have snaked up at him the way dust tendrils used to in the Boogoo. Vines rise from the ground or, once, drop from a tree‐branch overhead, to coil about a leg or arm, tugging gently as though testing him, or maybe only tasting, before they relent. So far they have always let him go. Though he's left with a feeling that his release is only ever provisional. That he remains on probation.

  Legoite is Son's term for the evolved fogbot material that mantles their world. Like the plastic Lego building blocks he played with as a boy back in the Bunker. Except the building blocks of the Land are animate. Sometimes, for example, the entire forest floor seems alive. It shifts and shimmies, as though tilling the scatter of organic debris from beneath. All of Earth's surface, what they can see of it, may well be alive.

  "I need to get away from the Homestead," Dee Zu tells him.

  "We need to learn more first," he says.

  She throws up.

  making itself a home

  For the past half‐month, they've been sleeping in the house.

  Not that Son is comfortable with this even now. He says he suffers from insomnia, same as Poppy used to do. Maybe that's why he's still lying abed with the morning sun high overhead. It's past time to wake up—they've got a situation to deal with.

  Dee Zu gives him a shake. "Come look at this," she says.

  Son slips a poncho over his head en route to the bedroom doorway, where he says, "That's a stairway."

  "So observant. Notice there's also a whole other room. Where our flower garden used to be."

  Broad polished planks of a dark‐grained material, it's probably supposed to be wood, cover the floor of the new room. There's a door and two windows. A big dining table stands at one end of the room together with six matching chairs. Across from the dining area a stairway ascends through the ceiling.

  "Wait here," Son says. Hefting a spearstick in one hand and his knife in the other, he proceeds upstairs. Some of the stairs squeak.

  Meanwhile Dee Zu goes over to the door. The old‐fashioned latch works fine once she realizes you turn the knob rather than push it. She experiments with opening and closing the door a few times. Then she goes over to venture a look through the window. Right outside lies a flower bed. It's bigger than yesterday's model. And it contains a greater variety of plants, including a mixed black and blue border, flowers she has never seen before.

  "You've got to see this," Son calls down to her from the second floor that wasn't there when they went to bed the evening before.

  Dee Zu squeaks up the stairs to discover three more bedrooms, two of them with bathrooms. One has a big balcony overlooking the yard. That's where she finds Son, bouncing cautiously on the balls of his feet, maybe thinking the balcony could be a descendent of the roachtrap, or the lounger fleye‐trap or something. It offers a view of the creek and wooded hills beyond.

  "Did you hear anything last night?" he asks her.

  "No."

  "So where did all this come from?"

  "Same place the first floor did, I guess."

  "Take a look at the perimeter wall," he says.

  "What about it?"

  "It's higher again."

  Son tries to flush the toilet in the master bedroom. It doesn't work.

  Dee Zu also has a try. "There's no way it could work," she says. "This is only a pro forma approximation to some ancient technology."

  "I don't follow."

  "Either it's merely meant to resemble a functional toilet, or else it hasn't finished evolving."

  "Right."

  "Bottom line," Dee Zu says. "The toilet is non‐functional."

  "Let's try the bed." Son tugs at his tunic as he heads toward the big sleeping platform. "Maybe that works."

  •

  Her breasts are fuller, gravity weighing heavier, one more way the world is changing. They tingle under the intensity of Son's gaze. And they ache when he comes closer and cups them, first one and then the other, in his hands.

  "Go easy," she tells him. "You're hurting me."

  His touch becomes so gentle she doesn't know which tingle is what as she stands tiptoe to meet his lips. She closes her eyes and sees the man she loves, feels no guilt on that account. They try the bed.

  •

  She senses other changes in her body, and she can't shake the idea the medibots screwed up her defrosting. She thinks of Lee, imagines her own body rotting from the inside out. She's more tired than she should be, and she gets queasy spells. Like mild flashbacks to the post‐Happy Chillin hangover. It doesn't help that Son stinks of his horniness.

  "When did you last have a bath?" she asks him.

  For
the most part, though, the malaise in her gut has cleared up. Or at least changed. Right now she's craving meat. Hot greasy meat. Which is odd, under the circumstances.

  "It works fine," Son says.

  "What does?"

  "The bed."

  "Oh. Yeah."

  where mantas go at night

  He leaves her in bed and goes out onto the new balcony. A storm is brewing. He can smell it, and his little finger, the gray one, aches.

  Clouds to the north throb with lightning. Son counts one thousand, two thousand, three thousand before the thunder rolls across to where he listens. The big tree in front of him thrashes in a gust of wind, and fat raindrops splatter the yard, chill him where he stands naked on the balcony. A bolt of lightning strikes closer than it takes to say one thousand before its thunder crashes at them.

  Right away this crash is taken up in a chain reaction, a crackling ring, a long serial explosion that races out from the strike point, a massive firestorm that lights up much of the sky.

  "What's that?" Dee Zu stands behind him. "My God. What's going on?"

  "Exploding mantas," he says. "That's my guess."

  "The answer to where mantas go at night."

  "Microbial gas, I reckon." Not for nothing did he live sixteen years in the Bunker with biohistorian Auntie. "Hydrogen or methane."

  And so the ken grows.

  They stand in the door to the balcony, silent, waiting. But what could top the spectacle they've just witnessed?

  "Incredible," Dee Zu finally says. Her voice is weak, trembling with cold.

  "Back to bed," he tells her.

  "That was amazing, wasn't it?"

  "Yeah. Go back to bed. You're sick."

  Anyway, the show is over. There are no more exploding skies. Lightning continues to flash, and the rainstorm proper arrives. They both go back inside.

  Son gnaws on his finger for a while before he falls asleep. He fears Dee Zu's illness is something serious.