Issue 14

© Wyrm Publishing, 2016
wyrmpublishing.com
forever-magazine.com

Introduction

Neil Clarke

Welcome to the fourteenth issue of Forever Magazine!

Even with the extra day February wasn’t long enough to allow much to happen. I had trips to Boston (Boskone) and Houston (Writefest Houston), both of which were quite enjoyable and have left me exhausted. It seems the theme lately has been the state of the market, as it came up many times in my travels. I’ll have more to say on that in the months ahead, but for now, I need some rest.

Until next month . . .

-Neil

Mr. Boy

James Patrick Kelly

I was already twitching by the time they strapped me down. Nasty pleasure and beautiful pain crackled through me, branching and rebranching like lightning. Extreme feelings are hard to tell apart when you have endorphins spilling across your brain. Another spasm shot down my legs and curled my toes. I moaned. The stiffs wore surgical masks that hid their mouths, but I knew they were smiling. They hated me because my mom could afford to have me stunted. When I really was just a kid I did not understand that. Now I hated them back; it helped me get through the therapy. We had a very clean transaction going here. No secrets between us.

Even though it hurts, getting stunted is still the ultimate flash. As I unlived my life, I overdosed on dying feelings and experiences. My body was not big enough to hold them all; I thought I was going to explode. I must have screamed because I could see the laugh lines crinkling around the stiffs’ eyes. You do not have to worry about laugh lines after they twank your genes and reset your mitotic limits. My face was smooth and I was going to be twelve years old forever, or at least as long as Mom kept paying for my rejuvenation.

I giggled as the short one leaned over me and pricked her catheter into my neck. Even through the mask, I could smell her breath. She reeked of dead meat.

Getting stunted always left me wobbly and thick, but this time I felt like last Tuesday’s pizza. One of the stiffs had to roll me out of recovery in a wheelchair.

The lobby looked like a furniture showroom. Even the plants had been newly waxed. There was nothing to remind the clients that they were bags of blood and piss. You are all biological machines now, said the lobby, clean as space-station lettuce. A scattering of people sat on the hard chairs. Stennie and Comrade were fidgeting by the elevators. They looked as if they were thinking of rearranging the furniture—like maybe into a pile in the middle of the room. Even before they waved, the stiff seemed to know that they were waiting for me.

Comrade smiled. “Zdrast’ye.”

“You okay, Mr. Boy?” said Stennie. Stennie was a grapefruit-yellow stenonychosaurus with a brown underbelly. His razor-clawed toes clicked against the slate floor as he walked.

“He’s still a little weak,” said the stiff, as he set the chair’s parking brake. He strained to act nonchalant, not realizing that Stennie enjoys being stared at. “He needs rest. Are you his brother?” he said to Comrade.

Comrade appeared to be a teenaged spike neck with a head of silky black hair that hung to his waist. He wore a window coat on which twenty-three different talking heads chattered. He could pass for human, even though he was really a Panasonic. “Nyet,” said Comrade. “I’m just another one of his hallucinations.”

The poor stiff gave him a dry nervous cough that might have been meant as a chuckle. He was probably wondering whether Stennie wanted to take me home or eat me for lunch. I always thought that the way Stennie got reshaped was more funny-looking than fierce—a python that had rear-ended an ostrich. But even though he was a head shorter than me, he did have enormous eyes and a mouthful of serrated teeth. He stopped next to the wheelchair and rose up to his full height. “I appreciate everything you’ve done.” Stennie offered the stiff his spindly three-fingered hand to shake. “Sorry if he caused any trouble.”

The stiff took it gingerly, then shrieked and flew backward. I mean, he jumped almost a meter off the floor. Everyone in the lobby turned, and Stennie opened his hand and waved the joy buzzer. He slapped his tail against the slate in triumph. Stennie’s sense of humor was extreme, but then he was only thirteen years old.

Stennie’s parents had given him the Nissan Alpha for his twelfth birthday, and we had been customizing it ever since. We installed blue mirror glass, and Stennie painted scenes from the Late Cretaceous on the exterior body armor. We ripped out all the seats, put in a wall-to-wall gel mat and a fridge and a microwave and a screen and a minidish. Comrade had even done an illegal operation on the carbrain so that we could override in an emergency and actually steer the Alpha ourselves with a joystick. It would have been cramped, but we would have lived in Stennie’s car if our parents had let us.

“You okay there, Mr. Boy?” said Stennie.

“Mmm.” As I watched the trees whoosh past in the rain, I pretended that the car was standing still and the world was passing me by.

“Think of something to do, okay?” Stennie had the car and all and he was fun to play with, but ideas were not his specialty. He was probably smart for a dinosaur. “I’m bored.”

“Leave him alone, will you?” Comrade said.

“He hasn’t said anything yet.” Stennie stretched and nudged me with his foot. “Say something.” He had legs like a horse: yellow skin stretched tight over long bones and stringy muscle.

“Prosrees! He just had his genes twanked, you jack.” Comrade always took good care of me. Or tried to. “Remember what that’s like? He’s in damage control.”

“Maybe I should go to socialization,” Stennie said. “Aren’t they having a dance this afternoon?”

“You’re talking to me?” said the Alpha. “You haven’t earned enough learning credits to socialize. You’re a quiz behind and forty-five minutes short of E-class. You haven’t linked since . . . ”

“Just shut up and drive me over.” Stennie and the Alpha did not get along. He thought the car was too strict. “I’ll make up the plugging quiz, okay?” He probed a mess of empty juice boxes and snack wrappers with his foot. “Anyone see my comm anywhere?”

Stennie’s schoolcomm was wedged behind my cushion. “You know,” I said, “I can’t take much more of this.” I leaned forward, wriggled it free, and handed it over.

“Of what, poputchik?” said Comrade. “Joyriding? Listening to the lizard here?”

“Being stunted.”

Stennie flipped up the screen of his comm and went on-line with the school’s computer. “You guys help me, okay?” He retracted his claws and tapped at the oversized keyboard.

“It’s extreme while you’re on the table,” I said, “but now I feel empty. Like I’ve lost myself.”

“You’ll get over it,” said Stennie. “First question: Brand name of the first wiseguys sold for home use?”

“NEC-Bots, of course,” said Comrade.

“Geneva? It got nuked, right?”

“Da.”

“Haile Selassie was that king of Ethiopia who the Marleys claim is god, right? Name the Cold Wars: Nicaragua, Angola . . . Korea was the first.” Typing was hard work for Stennie; he did not have enough fingers for it. “One was something like Venezuela. Or something.”

“Sure it wasn’t Venice?”

“Or Venus?” I said, but Stennie was not paying attention.

“All right, I know that one. And that. The Sovs built the first space station. Ronald Reagan—he was the president who dropped the bomb?”

Comrade reached inside of his coat and pulled out an envelope. “I got you something, Mr. Boy. A get-well present for your collection.”

I opened it and scoped a picture of a naked dead fat man on a stainless-steel table. The print had a DI verification grid on it, which meant this was the real thing, not a composite. Just above the corpse’s left eye there was a neat hole. It was rimmed with purple that had faded to bruise blue. He had curly gray hair on his head and chest, skin the color of dried mayonnaise, and a wonderfully complicated penis graft. He looked relieved to be dead. “Who was he?” I liked Comrade’s present. It was extreme.

“CEO of Infoline. He had the wife, you know, the one who stole all the money so she could download herself into a computer.”

I shivered as I stared at the dead man. I could hear myself breathing and feel the blood squirting through my arteries. “Didn’t they turn her off?” I said. This was the kind of stuff we were not even supposed to imagine, much less look at. Too bad they had cleaned him up. “How much did this cost me?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“Hey!” Stennie thumped his tail against the side of the car. “I’m taking a quiz here, and you guys are drooling over porn. When was the First World Depression?”

“Who cares?” I slipped the picture back into the envelope and grinned at Comrade.

“Well, let me see then.” Stennie snatched the envelope. “You know what I think, Mr. Boy? I think this corpse jag you’re on is kind of sick. Besides, you’re going to get in trouble if you let Comrade keep breaking laws. Isn’t this picture private?”

“Privacy is twentieth-century thinking. It’s all information, Stennie, and information should be accessible.” I held out my hand. “But if glasnost bothers you, give it up.” I wiggled my fingers.

Comrade snickered. Stennie pulled out the picture, glanced at it, and hissed. “You’re scaring me, Mr. Boy.”

His schoolcomm beeped as it posted his score on the quiz, and he sailed the envelope back across the car at me. “Not Venezuela, Vietnam. Hey, Truman dropped the plugging bomb. Reagan was the one who spent all the money. What’s wrong with you dumbscuts? Now I owe school another fifteen minutes.”

“Hey, if you don’t make it look good, they’ll know you had help.” Comrade laughed.

“What’s with this dance anyway? You don’t dance.” I picked Comrade’s present up and tucked it into my shirt pocket. “You find yourself a cush or something, lizard boy?”

“Maybe.” Stennie could not blush, but sometimes when he was embarrassed the loose skin under his jaw quivered. Even though he had been reshaped into a dinosaur, he was still growing up. “Maybe I am getting a little. What’s it to you?”

“If you’re getting it,” I said, “it’s got to be microscopic.” This was a bad sign. I was losing him to his dick, just like all the other pals. No way I wanted to start over with someone new. I had been alive for twenty-five years now. I was running out of things to say to thirteen-year-olds.

As the Alpha pulled up to the school, I scoped the crowd waiting for the doors to open for third shift. Although there was a handful of stunted kids, a pair of gorilla brothers who were football stars and Freddy the Teddy—a bear who had furry hands instead of real paws—the majority of students at New Canaan High looked more or less normal. Most working stiffs thought that people who had their genes twanked were freaks.

“Come get me at five-fifteen,” Stennie told the Alpha. “In the meantime, take these guys wherever they want to go.” He opened the door. “You rest up, Mr. Boy, okay?”

“What?” I was not paying attention. “Sure.” I had just seen the most beautiful girl in the world.

She leaned against one of the concrete columns of the portico, chatting with a couple other kids. Her hair was long and nut-colored and the ends twinkled. She was wearing a loose black robe over mirror skintights. Her schoolcomm dangled from a strap around her wrist. She appeared to be seventeen, maybe eighteen. But of course, appearances could be deceiving.

Girls had never interested me much, but I could not help but admire this one. “Wait, Stennie! Who’s that?” She saw me point at her. “With the hair?”

“She’s new—has one of those names you can’t pronounce.” He showed me his teeth as he got out. “Hey, Mr. Boy, you’re stunted. You haven’t got what she wants.”

He kicked the door shut, lowered his head, and crossed in front of the car. When he walked, he looked like he was trying to squash a bug with each step. His snaky tail curled high behind him for balance, his twiggy little arms dangled. When the new girl saw him, she pointed and smiled. Or maybe she was pointing at me.

“Where to?” said the car.

“I don’t know.” I sank low into my seat and pulled out Comrade’s present again. “Home, I guess.”

I was not the only one in my family with twanked genes. My mom was a threequarter-scale replica of the Statue of Liberty. Originally she wanted to be full-sized, but then she would have been the tallest thing in New Canaan, Connecticut. The town turned her down when she applied for a zoning variance. Her lawyers and their lawyers sued and countersued for almost two years. Mom’s claim was that since she was born human, her freedom of form was protected by the Thirtieth Amendment. However, the form she wanted was a curtain of reshaped cells that would hang on a forty-two-meter-high ferroplastic skeleton. Her structure, said the planning board, was clearly subject to building codes and zoning laws. Eventually they reached an out-of-court settlement, which was why Mom was only as tall as an eleven-story building.

She complied with the town’s request for a setback of five hundred meters from Route 123. As Stennie’s Alpha drove us down the long driveway, Comrade broadcast the recognition code that told the robot sentries that we were okay. One thing Mom and the town agreed on from the start: no tourists. Sure, she loved publicity, but she was also very fragile. In some places her skin was only a centimeter thick. Chunks of ice falling from her crown could punch holes in her.

The end of our driveway cut straight across the lawn to Mom’s granite-paved foundation pad. To the west of the plaza, directly behind her, was a utility building faced in ashlar that housed her support systems. Mom had been bioengineered to be pretty much self-sufficient. She was green not only to match the real Statue of Liberty but also because she was photosynthetic. All she needed was a yearly truckload of fertilizer, water from the well, and 150 kilowatts of electricity a day. Except for emergency surgery, the only time she required maintenance was in the fall, when her outer cells tended to flake off and had to be swept up and carted away.

Stennie’s Alpha dropped us off by the doorbone in the right heel and then drove off to do whatever cars do when nobody is using them. Mom’s greeter was waiting in the reception area inside the foot.

“Peter.” She tried to hug me, but I dodged out of her grasp. “How are you, Peter?”

“Tired.” Even though Mom knew I did not like to be called that, I kissed the air near her cheek. Peter Cage was her name for me; I had given it up years ago.

“You poor boy. Here, let me see you.” She held me at arm’s length and brushed her fingers against my cheek. “You don’t look a day over twelve. Oh, they do such good work—don’t you think?” She squeezed my shoulder. “Are you happy with it?”

I think my mom meant well, but she never did understand me. Especially when she talked to me with her greeter remote. I wormed out of her grip and fell back onto one of the couches. “What’s to eat?”

“Doboys, noodles, fries—whatever you want.” She beamed at me and then bent over impulsively and gave me a kiss that I did not want. I never paid much attention to the greeter; she was lighter than air. She was always smiling and asking five questions in a row without waiting for an answer and flitting around the room. It wore me out just watching her. Naturally, everything I said or did was cute, even if I was trying to be obnoxious. It was no fun being cute. Today Mom had her greeter wearing a dark blue dress and a very dumb white apron. The greeter’s umbilical was too short to stretch up to the kitchen. So why was she wearing an apron? “I’m really, really glad you’re home,” she said.

“I’ll take some cinnamon doboys.” I kicked off my shoes and rubbed my bare feet through the dense black hair on the floor. “And a beer.”

All of Mom’s remotes had different personalities. I liked Nanny all right; she was simple, but at least she listened. The lovers were a challenge because they were usually too busy looking into mirrors to notice me. Cook was as pretentious as a fourstar menu; the housekeeper had all the charm of a vacuum cleaner. I had always wondered what it would be like to talk directly to Mom’s main brain up in the head, because then she would not be filtered through a remote. She would be herself.

“Cook is making you some nice broth to go with your doboys,” said the greeter. “Nanny says you shouldn’t be eating dessert all the time.”

“Hey, did I ask for broth?”

At first Comrade had hung back while the greeter was fussing over me. Then he slid along the wrinkled pink walls of the reception room toward the plug where the greeter’s umbilical was attached. When she started in about the broth, I saw him lean against the plug. Carelessly, you know? At the same time he stepped on the greeter’s umbilical, crimping the furry black cord. She gasped and the smile flattened horribly on her face, as if her lips were two ropes someone had suddenly yanked taut. Her head jerked toward the umbilical plug.

“E-Excuse me.” She was twitching.

“What?” Comrade glanced down at his foot as if it belonged to a stranger. “Oh, sorry.” He pushed away from the wall and strolled across the room toward us. Although he seemed apologetic, about half the heads on his window coat were laughing.

The greeter flexed her cheek muscles. “You’d better watch out for your toy, Peter,” she said. “It’s going to get you in trouble someday.”

Mom did not like Comrade much, even though she had given him to me when I was first stunted. She got mad when I snuck him down to Manhattan a couple of years ago to have a chop job done on his behavioral regulators. For a while after the operation, he used to ask me before he broke the law. Now he was on his own. He got caught once, and she warned me he was out of control. But she still threw money at the people until they went away.

“Trouble?” I said. “Sounds like fun.” I thought we were too rich for trouble. I was the trust baby of a trust baby; we had vintage money and lots of it. I stood and Comrade picked up my shoes for me. “And he’s not a toy; he’s my best friend.” I put my arms around his shoulder. “Tell Cook I’ll eat in my rooms.”

I was tired after the long climb up the circular stairs to Mom’s chest. When the roombrain sensed I had come in, it turned on all the electronic windows and blinked my message indicator. One reason I still lived in my mom was that she kept out of my rooms. She had promised me total security, and I believed her. Actually I doubted that she cared enough to pry, although she could easily have tapped my windows. I was safe from her remotes up here, even the housekeeper. Comrade did everything for me.

I sent him for supper, perched on the edge of the bed, and cleared the nearest window of army ants foraging for meat through some Angolan jungle. The first message in the queue was from a gray-haired stiff wearing a navy blue corporate uniform. “Hello, Mr. Cage. My name is Weldon Montross and I’m with Datasafe. I’d like to arrange a meeting with you at your convenience. Call my DI number, 408-966-3286. I hope to hear from you soon.”

“What the hell is Datasafe?”

The roombrain ran a search. “Datasafe offers services in encryption and information security. It was incorporated in the state of Delaware in 2013. Estimated billings last year were three hundred and forty million dollars. Headquarters are in San Jose, California, with branch offices in White Plains, New York, and Chevy Chase, Maryland. Foreign offices . . . ”

“Are they trying to sell me something or what?”

The room did not offer an answer. “Delete,” I said. “Next?”

Weldon Montross was back again, looking exactly as he had before. I wondered if he were using a virtual image. “Hello, Mr. Cage. I’ve just discovered that you’ve been admitted to the Thayer Clinic for rejuvenation therapy. Believe me when I say that I very much regret having to bother you during your convalescence, and I would not do so if this were not a matter of importance. Would you please contact Department of Identification number 408-966-3286 as soon as you’re able?”

“You’re a pro, Weldon, I’ll say that for you.” Prying client information out of the Thayer Clinic was not easy, but then the guy was no doubt some kind of op. He was way too polite to be a salesman. What did Datasafe want with me? “Any more messages from him?”

“No,” said the roombrain.

“Well, delete this one too, and if he calls back tell him I’m too busy unless he wants to tell me what he’s after.” I stretched out on my bed. “Next?” The gel mattress shivered as it took my weight.

Happy Lurdane was having a smash party on the twentieth, but Happy was a boring cush and there was a bill from the pet store for the iguanas that I paid and a warning from the SPCA that I deleted and a special offer for preferred customers from my favorite fireworks company that I saved to look at later and my dad was about to ask for another loan when I paused him and deleted and last of all there was a message from Stennie, time-stamped ten minutes ago.

“Hey, Mr. Boy, if you’re feeling better I’ve lined up a VE party for tonight.” He did not quite fit into the school’s telelink booth; all I could see was his toothy face and the long yellow curve of his neck. “Bunch of us have reserved some time on Playroom. Come in disguise. That new kid said she’d link, so scope her yourself if you’re so hot. I found out her name, but it’s kind of unpronounceable. Treesomething Joplin. Anyway, it’s at seven, meet on channel seventeen, password is warhead. Hey, did you send my car back yet? Later.” He faded.

“Sounds like fun.” Comrade kicked the doorbone open and backed through, balancing a tray loaded with soup and fresh doboys and a mug of cold beer. “Are we going?” He set it onto the nightstand next to my bed.

“Maybe.” I yawned. It felt good to be in my own bed. “Flush the damn soup, would you?” I reached over for a doboy and felt something crinkle in my jacket pocket. I pulled out the picture of the dead CEO. About the only thing I did not like about it was that the eyes were shut. You feel dirtier when the corpse stares back. “This is one sweet hunk of meat, Comrade.” I propped the picture beside the tray. “How did you get it, anyway? Must have taken some operating.”

“Three days’ worth. Encryption wasn’t all that tough, but there was lots of it.” Comrade admired the picture with me as he picked up the bowl of soup. “I ended up buying about ten hours from IBM to crack the file. Kind of pricey, but since you were getting stunted, I had nothing else to do.”

“You see the messages from that security op?” I bit into a doboy. “Maybe you were a little sloppy.” The hot cinnamon scent tickled my nose.

“Ya v’rot ego ebal!” He laughed. “So some stiff is cranky? Plug him if he can’t take a joke.”

I said nothing. Comrade could be a pain sometimes. Of course I loved the picture, but he really should have been more careful. He had made a mess and left it for me to clean up. Just what I needed. I knew I would only get mad if I thought about it, so I changed the subject. “Well, do you think she’s cute?”

“What’s-her-face Joplin?” Comrade turned abruptly toward the bathroom. “Sure, for a perdunya,” he said over his shoulder. “Why not?” Talking about girls made him snippy. I think he was afraid of them.

I brought my army ants back onto the window; they were swarming over a lump with brown fur. Thinking about him hanging on my elbow when I met this Treesomething Joplin made me feel weird. I listened as he poured the soup down the toilet. I was not myself at all. Getting stunted changes you; no one can predict how. I chugged the beer and rolled over to take a nap. It was the first time I had ever thought of leaving Comrade behind.

“VE party, Mr. Boy.” Comrade nudged me awake. “Are we going or not?”

“Huh?” My gut still ached from the rejuvenation, and I woke up mean enough to chew glass. “What do you mean we?”

“Nothing.” Comrade had that blank look he always put on so I would not know what he was thinking. Still, I could tell he was disappointed. “Are you going then?” he said.

I stretched—ouch! “Yeah, sure, get my joysuit.” My bones felt brittle as candy. “And stop acting sorry for yourself.” This nasty mood had momentum; it swept me past any regrets. “No way I’m going to lie here all night watching you pretend you have feelings to hurt.”

“Tak tochno.” He saluted and went straight to the closet. I got out of bed and hobbled to the bathroom.

“This is a costume party, remember,” Comrade called. “What are you wearing?”

“Whatever.” Even his efficiency irked me; sometimes he did too much. “You decide.” I needed to get away from him for a while.

Playroom was a new virtual-environment service on our local net. If you wanted to throw an electronic party at Versailles or Monticello or San Simeon, all you had to do was link—if you could get a reservation.

I came back to the bedroom and Comrade stepped up behind me, holding the joysuit. I shrugged into it, velcroed the front seam, and eyed myself in the nearest window. He had synthesized some kid-sized armor in the German Gothic style. My favorite. It was made of polished silver, with great fluting and scalloping. He had even programmed a little glow into the image so that on the window I looked like a walking night-light. There was an armet helmet with a red ostrich plume; the visor was tipped up so I could see my face. I raised my arm, and the joysuit translated the movement to the window so that my armored image waved back.

“Try a few steps,” he said.

Although I could move easily in the lightweight joysuit, the motion interpreter made walking in the video armor seem realistically awkward. Comrade had scored the sound effects, too. Metal hinges rasped, chain mail rattled softly, and there was a satisfying clunk whenever my foot hit the floor.

“Great.” I clenched my fist in approval. I was awake now and in control of my temper. I wanted to make up, but Comrade was not taking the hint. I could never quite figure out whether he was just acting like a machine or whether he really did not care how I treated him.

“They’re starting.” All the windows in the room lit up with Playroom’s welcome screen. “You want privacy, so I’m leaving. No one will bother you.”

“Hey, Comrade, you don’t have to go . . . ”

But he had already left the room. Playroom prompted me to identify myself. “Mr. Boy,” I said, “Department of Identification number 203-966-2445. I’m looking for channel seventeen; the password is warhead.”

A brass band started playing “Hail to the Chief” as the title screen lit the windows:

The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

Washington, DC, USA

© 2096, Playroom Presentations

REPRODUCTION OR REUSE STRICTLY PROHIBITED

and then I was looking at a wraparound view of a VE ballroom. A caption bar opened at the top of the windows and a message scrolled across. This is the famous East Room, the largest room in the main house. It is used for press conferences, public receptions, and entertainments. I lowered my visor and entered the simulation.

The East Room was decorated in bone white and gold; three chandeliers hung like cut-glass mushrooms above the huge parquet floor. A band played skitter at one end of the room, but no one was dancing yet. The band was Warhead, according to their drum set. I had never heard of them. Someone’s disguise? I turned, and the joysuit changed the view on the windows. Just ahead Satan was chatting with a forklift and a rhinoceros. Beyond, some blue cartoons were teasing Johnny America. There was not much furniture in the room, a couple of benches, an ugly piano, and some life-sized paintings of George and Martha. George looked like he had just been peeled off a cash card. I stared at him too long, and the closed-caption bar informed me that the painting had been painted by Gilbert Stuart and was the only White House object dating from the mansion’s first occupancy in 1800.

“Hey,” I said to a girl who was on fire. “How do I get rid of the plugging tour guide?”

“Can’t,” she said. “When Playroom found out we were kids, they turned on all their educational crap and there’s no override. I kind of don’t think they want us back.”

“Dumbscuts.” I scoped the room for something that might be Stennie. No luck. “I like the way your hair is burning.” Now that it was too late, I was sorry I had to make idle party chat.

“Thanks.” When she tossed her head, sparks flared and crackled. “My mom helped me program it.”

“So, I’ve never been to the White House. Is there more than this?”

“Sure,” she said. “We’re supposed to have pretty much the whole first floor. Unless they shorted us. You wouldn’t be Stone Kinkaid in there, would you?”

“No, not really.” Even though the voice was disguised, I could tell this was Happy Lurdane. I edged away from her. “I’m going to check the other rooms now. Later.”

“If you run into Stone, tell him I’m looking for him.”

I left the East Room and found myself in a long marble passageway with a red carpet. A dog skeleton trotted toward me. Or maybe it was supposed to be a sheep. I waved and went through a door on the other side.

Everyone in the Red Room was standing on the ceiling; I knew I had found Stennie. Even though what they see is only a simulation, most people lock into the perceptual field of a VE as if it were real. Stand on your head long enough—even if only in your imagination—and you get airsick. It took kilohours of practice to learn to compensate. Upside down was one of Stennie’s trademark ways of showing off.

The Red Room is an intimate parlor in the American Empire style of 1815-20 . . .

“Hi,” I said. I hopped over the wainscoting and walked up the silk-covered wall to join the three of them.

“You’re wearing German armor.” When the boy in blue grinned at me, his cheeks dimpled. He was wearing shorts and white knee socks, a navy sweater over a white shirt. “Augsburg?” said Little Boy Blue. Fine blond hair drooped from beneath his tweed cap.

“Try Wolf of Landshut,” I said. Stennie and I had spent a lot of time fighting VE wars in full armor. “Nice shorts.” Stennie’s costume reminded me of Christopher Robin. Terminally cute.

“It’s not fair,” said the snowman, who I did not recognize. “He says this is what he actually looks like.” The snowman was standing in a puddle that was dripping onto the rug below us. Great effect.

“No,” said Stennie, “what I said was I would look like this if I hadn’t done something about it, okay?”

I had not known Stennie before he was a dinosaur. “No wonder you got twanked.” I wished I could have saved this image, but Playroom was copy-protected.

“You’ve been twanked? No joke?” The great horned owl ruffled in alarm. She had a girl’s voice. “I know it’s none of my business, but I don’t understand why anyone would do it. Especially a kid. I mean, what’s wrong with good old-fashioned surgery? And you can be whoever you want in a VE.” She paused, waiting for someone to agree with her. No help. “Okay, so I don’t understand. But when you mess with your genes, you change who you are. I mean, don’t you like who you are? I do.”

“We’re so happy for you.” Stennie scowled. “What is this, mental health week?”

“We’re rich,” I said. “We can afford to hate ourselves.”

“This may sound rude”—the owl’s big blunt head swiveled from Stennie to me—“but I think that’s sad.”

“Yeah well, we’ll try to work up some tears for you, birdie,” Stennie said.

Silence. In the East Room, the band turned the volume up.

“Anyway, I’ve got to be going.” The owl shook herself. “Hanging upside down is fine for bats, but not for me. Later.” She let go of her perch and swooped out into the hall. The snowman turned to watch her go.

“You’re driving them off, young man.” I patted Stennie on the head. “Come on now, be nice.”

“Nice makes me puke.”

“You do have a bit of an edge tonight.” I had trouble imagining this dainty little brat as my best friend. “Better watch out you don’t cut someone.”

The dog skeleton came to the doorway and called up to us. “We’re supposed to dance now.”

“About time.” Stennie fell off the ceiling like a drop of water and splashed headfirst onto the beige Persian rug. His image went all muddy for a moment and then he re-formed, upright and unharmed. “Going to skitter, tin man?”

“I need to talk to you for a moment,” the snowman murmured.

“You need to?” I said.

“Dance, dance, dance,” sang Stennie. “Later.” He swerved after the skeleton out of the room.

The snowman said, “It’s about a possible theft of information.”

Right then was when I should have slammed it into reverse. Caught up with Stennie or maybe faded from Playroom altogether. But all I did was raise my hands over my head. “You got me, snowman; I confess. But society is to blame, too, isn’t it? You will tell the judge to go easy on me? I’ve had a tough life.”

“This is serious.”

“You’re Weldon—what’s your name?” Down the hall, I could hear the thud of Warhead’s bass line. “Montross.”

“I’ll come to the point, Peter.” The only acknowledgment he made was to drop the kid voice. “The firm I represent provides information security services. Last week someone operated on the protected database of one of our clients. We have reason to believe that a certified photograph was accessed and copied. What can you tell me about this?”

“Not bad, Mr. Montross, sir. But if you were as good as you think you are, you’d know my name isn’t Peter. It’s Mr. Boy. And since nobody invited you to this party, maybe you’d better tell me now why I shouldn’t just go ahead and have you deleted?”

“I know that you were undergoing genetic therapy at the time of the theft, so you could not have been directly responsible. That’s in your favor. However, I also know that you can help me clear this matter up. And you need to do that, son, just as quickly as you can. Otherwise there’s big trouble coming.”

“What are you going to do, tell my mommy?” My blood started to pump; I was coming back to life.

“This is my offer. It’s not negotiable. You let me sweep your files for this image. You turn over any hardcopies you’ve made and you instruct your wiseguy to let me do a spot reprogramming, during which I will erase his memory of this incident. After that, we’ll consider the matter losed.”

“Why don’t I just drop my pants and bend over while I’m at it?”

“Look, you can pretend if you want, but you’re not a kid anymore. You’re twenty-five years old. I don’t believe for a minute that you’re as thick as your friends out there. If you think about it, you’ll realize that you can’t fight us. The fact that I’m here and I know what I know means that all your personal information systems are already tapped. I’m an op, son. I could wipe your files clean any time and I will, if it comes to that. However, my orders are to be thorough. The only way I can be sure I have everything is if you cooperate.”

“You’re not even real, are you, Montross? I’ll bet you’re nothing but cheesy old code. I’ve talked to elevators with more personality.”

“The offer is on the table.”

“Stick it!”

The owl flew back into the room, braked with outstretched wings, and caught onto the armrest of the Dolley Madison sofa. “Oh, you’re still here,” she said, noticing us. “I didn’t mean to interrupt . . .

“Wait there,” I said. “I’m coming right down.”

“I’ll be in touch,” said the snowman. “Let me know just as soon as you change your mind.” He faded.

I flipped backward off the ceiling and landed in front of her; my video armor rang from the impact. “Owl, you just saved the evening.” I knew I was showing off, but just then I was willing to forgive myself. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome, I guess.” She edged away from me, moving with precise little birdlike steps toward the top of the couch. “But all I was trying to do was escape the band.”

“Bad?”

“And loud.” Her ear tufts flattened. “Do you think shutting the door would help?”

“Sure. Follow me. We can shut lots of doors.” When she hesitated, I flapped my arms like silver wings. Actually, Montross had done me a favor; when he threatened me, some inner clock had begun an adrenaline tick. If this was trouble, I wanted more. I felt twisted and dangerous and I did not care what happened next. Maybe that was why the owl flitted after me as I walked into the next room.

The sumptuous State Dining Room can seat about 130 for formal dinners. The white-and-gold decor dates from the administration of Theodore Roosevelt.

The owl glided over to the banquet table. I shut the door behind me. “Better?” Warhead still pounded on the walls.

“A little.” She settled on a huge bronze doré centerpiece with a mirrored surface. “I’m going soon anyway.”

“Why?”

“The band stinks, I don’t know anyone, and I hate these stupid disguises.”

“I’m Mr. Boy.” I raised my visor and grinned at her. “All right? Now you know someone.”

She tucked her wings into place and fixed me with her owlish stare. “I don’t like VEs much.”

“They take some getting used to.”

“Why bother?” she said. “I mean, if anything can happen in a simulation, nothing matters. And I feel dumb standing in a room all alone jumping up and down and flapping my arms. Besides, this joysuit is hot and I’m renting it by the hour.”

“The trick is not to look at yourself,” I said. “Just watch the screens and use your imagination.”

“Reality is less work. You look like a little kid.”

“Is that a problem?”

“Mr. Boy? What kind of name is that anyway?”

I wished she would blink. “A made-up name. But then all names are made up, aren’t they?”

“Didn’t I see you at school Wednesday? You were the one who dropped off the dinosaur.”

“My friend Stennie.” I pulled out a chair and sat facing her. “Who you probably hate because he’s twanked.”

“That was him on the ceiling, wasn’t it? Listen, I’m sorry about what I said. I’m new here. I’d never met anyone like him before I came to New Canaan. I mean, I’d heard of reshaping and all—getting twanked. But where I used to live, everybody was pretty much the same.”

“Where was that, Squirrel Crossing, Nebraska?”

“Close.” She laughed. “Elkhart; it’s in Indiana.”

The reckless ticking in my head slowed. Talking to her made it easy to forget about Montross. “You want to leave the party?” I said. “We could go into discreet.”

“Just us?” She sounded doubtful. “Right now?”

“Why not? You said you weren’t staying. We could get rid of these disguises. And the music.”

She was silent for a moment. Maybe people in Elkhart, Indiana, did not ask one another into discreet unless they had met in Sunday school or the 4-H Club.

“Okay,” she said finally, “but I’ll enable. What’s your DI?”

I gave her my number.

“Be back in a minute.”

I cleared Playroom from my screens. The message Enabling discreet mode flashed. I decided not to change out of the joysuit; instead I called up my wardrobe menu and chose an image of myself wearing black baggies. The loose folds and padded shoulders helped hide the scrawny little boy’s body.

The message changed. Discreet mode enabled. Do you accept, yes/no?

“Sure,” I said.

She was sitting naked in the middle of a room filled with tropical plants. Her skin was the color of cinnamon. She had freckles on her shoulders and across her breasts. Her hair tumbled down the curve of her spine; the ends glowed like embers in a breeze. She clutched her legs close to her and gave me a curious smile. Teenage still life. We were alone and secure. No one could tap us while we were in discreet. We could say anything we wanted. I was too croggled to speak.

“You are a little kid,” she said.

I did not tell her that what she was watching was an enhanced image, a virtual me. “Uh . . . well, not really.” I was glad Stennie could not see me. Mr. Boy at a loss—a first. “Sometimes I’m not sure what I am. I guess you’re not going to like me either. I’ve been stunted a couple of times. I’m really twenty-five years old.”

She frowned. “You keep deciding I won’t like people. Why?”

“Most people are against genetic surgery. Probably because they haven’t got the money.”

“Myself, I wouldn’t do it. Still, just because you did doesn’t mean I hate you.” She gestured for me to sit. “But my parents would probably be horrified. They’re realists, you know.”

“No fooling?” I could not help but chuckle. “That explains a lot.” Like why she had an attitude about twanking. And why she thought VEs were dumb. And why she was naked and did not seem to care. According to hard-core realists, first came clothes, then jewelry, fashion, makeup, plastic surgery, skin tints, and hey jack! here we are up to our eyeballs in the delusions of 2096. Gene twanking, VE addicts, people downloading themselves into computers—better never to have started. They wanted to turn back to worn-out twentieth-century modes. “But you’re no realist,” I said. “Look at your hair.”

She shook her head and the ends twinkled. “You like it?”

“It’s extreme. But realists don’t decorate!”

“Then maybe I’m not a realist. My parents let me try lots of stuff they wouldn’t do themselves, like buying hairworks or linking to VEs. They’re afraid I’d leave otherwise.”

“Would you?”

She shrugged. “So what’s it like to get stunted? I’ve heard it hurts.”

I told her how sometimes I felt as if there were broken glass in my joints and how my bones ached and—more showing off—about the blood I would find on the toilet paper. Then I mentioned something about Mom. She had heard of Mom, of course. She asked about my dad, and I explained how Mom paid him to stay away but that he kept running out of money. She wanted to know if I was working or still going to school, and I made up some stuff about courses in history I was taking from Yale. Actually I had faded after my first semester. Couple of years ago. I did not have time to link to some boring college; I was too busy playing with Comrade and Stennie. But I still had an account at Yale.

“So that’s who I am.” I was amazed at how little I had lied. “Who are you?”

She told me that her name was Treemonisha but her friends called her Tree. It was an old family name; her great-great-grandsomething-or-other had been a composer named Scott Joplin. Treemonisha was the name of his opera.

I had to force myself not to stare at her breasts when she talked. “You like opera?” I said.

“My dad says I’ll grow into it.” She made a face. “I hope not.”

The Joplins were a franchise family; her mom and dad had just been transferred to the Green Dream, a plant shop in the Elm Street Mall. To hear her talk, you would think she had ordered them from the Good Fairy. They had been married for twenty-two years and were still together. She had a brother, Fidel, who was twelve. They all lived in the greenhouse next to the shop where they grew most of their food and where flowers were always in bloom and where everybody loved everyone else. Nice life for a bunch of mall drones. So why was she thinking of leaving?

“You should stop by sometime,” she said.

“Sometime,” I said. “Sure.”

For hours after we faded, I kept remembering things about her I had not realized I had noticed. The fine hair on her legs. The curve of her eyebrows. The way her hands moved when she was excited.

It was Stennie’s fault: after the Playroom party he started going to school almost every day. Not just linking to E-class with his comm, but actually showing up. We knew he had more than remedial reading on his mind, but no matter how much we teased, he would not talk about his mysterious new cush. Before he fell in love we used to joyride in his Alpha afternoons. Now Comrade and I had the car all to ourselves. Not as much fun.

We had already dropped Stennie off when I spotted Treemonisha waiting for the bus. I waved, she came over. The next thing I knew we had another passenger on the road to nowhere. Comrade stared vacantly out the window as we pulled onto South Street; he did not seem pleased with the company.

“Have you been out to the reservoir?” I said. “There are some extreme houses out there. Or we could drive over to Greenwich and look at yachts.”

“I haven’t been anywhere yet, so I don’t care,” she said. “By the way, you don’t go to college.” She was not accusing me or even asking—merely stating a fact.

“Why do you say that?” I said.

“Fidel told me.”

I wondered how her twelve-year-old brother could know anything at all about me. Rumors maybe, or just guessing. Since she did not seem mad, I decided to tell the truth.

“He’s right,” I said, “I lied. I have an account at Yale, but I haven’t linked for months. Hey, you can’t live without telling a few lies. At least I don’t discriminate. I’ll lie to anyone, even myself.”

“You’re bad.” A smile twitched at the corners of her mouth. “So what do you do then?”

“I drive around a lot.” I waved at the interior of Stennie’s car. “Let’s see . . . I go to parties. I buy stuff and use it.”

“Fidel says you’re rich.”

“I’m going to have to meet this Fidel. Does money make a difference?”

When she nodded, her hairworks twinkled. Comrade gave me a knowing glance, but I paid no attention. I was trying to figure out how she could make insults sound like compliments when I realized we were flirting. The idea took me by surprise. Flirting.

“Do you have any music?” Treemonisha said.

The Alpha asked what groups she liked, and so we listened to some mindless dance hits as we took the circle route around the Laurel Reservoir. Treemonisha told me about how she was sick of her parents’ store and rude customers and especially the dumb Green Dream uniform. “Back in Elkhart, Daddy used to make me wear it to school. Can you believe that? He said it was good advertising. When we moved, I told him either the khakis went or I did.”

She had a yellow-and-orange dashiki over midnight-blue skintights. “I like your clothes,” I said. “You have taste.”

“Thanks.” She bobbed her head in time to the music. “I can’t afford much because I can’t get an outside job because I have to work for my parents. It makes me mad, sometimes. I mean, franchise life is fine for Mom and Dad; they’re happy being tucked in every night by GD, Inc. But I want more. Thrills, chills—you know, adventure. No one has adventures in the mall.”

As we drove, I showed her the log castle, the pyramids, the private train that pulled sleeping cars endlessly around a two-mile track, and the marble bunker where Sullivan, the assassinated president, still lived on in computer memory. Comrade kept busy acting bored.

“Can we go see your mom?” said Treemonisha. “All the kids at school tell me she’s awesome.”

Suddenly Comrade was interested in the conversation. I was not sure what the kids at school were talking about. Probably they wished they had seen Mom, but I had never asked any of them over—except for Stennie.

“Not a good idea.” I shook my head. “She’s more flimsy than she looks, you know, and she gets real nervous if strangers just drop by. Or even friends.”

“I just want to look. I won’t get out of the car.”

“Well,” said Comrade, “if she doesn’t get out of the car, who could she hurt?”

I scowled at him. He knew how paranoid Mom was. She was not going to like Treemonisha anyway, but certainly not if I brought her home without warning. “Let me work on her, okay?” I said to Treemonisha. “One of these days. I promise.”

She pouted for about five seconds and then laughed at my expression. When I saw Comrade’s smirk, I got angry. He was just sitting there watching us. Looking to cause trouble. Later there would be wisecracks. I had had about enough of him and his attitude.

By that time the Alpha was heading up High Ridge Road toward Stamford. “I’m hungry,” I said. “Stop at the 7-Eleven up ahead.” I pulled a cash card out and flipped it at him. “Go buy us some doboys.”

I waited until he disappeared into the store and then ordered Stennie’s car to drive on.

“Hey!” Treemonisha twisted in her seat and looked back at the store. “What are you doing?”

“Ditching him.”

“Why? Won’t he be mad?”

“He’s got my card; he’ll call a cab.”

“But that’s mean.”

“So?”

Treemonisha thought about it. “He doesn’t say much, does he?” She did not seem to know what to make of me—which I suppose was what I wanted. “At first I thought he was kind of like your teddy bear. Have you seen those big ones that keep little kids out of trouble?”

“He’s just a wiseguy.”

“Have you had him long?”

“Maybe too long.”

I could not think of anything to say after that, so we sat quietly listening to the music. Even though he was gone, Comrade was still aggravating me.

“Were you really hungry?” Treemonisha said finally. “Because I was. Think there’s something in the fridge?”

I waited for the Alpha to tell us, but it said nothing. I slid across the seat and opened the refrigerator door. Inside was a sheet of paper. “Dear Mr. Boy,” it said. “If this was a bomb, you and Comrade would be dead and the problem would be solved. Let’s talk soon. Weldon Montross.”

“What’s that?”

I felt the warm flush that I always got from good corpse porn, and for a moment I could not speak. “Practical joke,” I said, crumpling the paper. “Too bad he doesn’t have a sense of humor.”

Push-ups. Ten, eleven.

“Uh-oh. Look at this,” said Comrade.

“I’m busy!” Twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen . . . sixteen . . . seven . . . Dizzy, I slumped and rested my cheek against the warm floor. I could feel Mom’s pulse beneath the tough skin. It was no good. I would never get muscles this way. There was only one fix for my skinny arms and bony shoulders. Grow up, Mr. Boy.

“Ya yebou! You really should scope this,” said Comrade. “Very spooky.”

I pulled myself onto the bed to see why he was bothering me; he had been pretty tame since I had stranded him at the 7-Eleven. Most of the windows showed the usual: army ants next to old war movies next to feeding time from the Bronx Zoo’s reptile house. But Firenet, which provided twenty-four-hour coverage of killer fires from around the world, had been replaced with a picture of a morgue. There were three naked bodies, shrouds pulled back for identification: a fat gray-haired CEO with a purple hole over his left eye, Comrade, and me.

“You look kind of dead,” said Comrade.

My tongue felt thick. “Where’s it coming from?”

“Viruses all over the system,” he said. “Probably Montross.”

“You know about him?” The image on the window changed back to a barrida fire in Lima.

“He’s been in touch.” Comrade shrugged. “Made his offer.”

Crying women watched as the straw walls of their huts peeled into flame and floated away.

“Oh.” I did not know what to say. I wanted to reassure him, but this was serious. Montross was invading my life, and I had no idea how to fight back. “Well, don’t talk to him anymore.”

“Okay.” Comrade grinned. “He’s dull as a spoon anyway.”

“I bet he’s a simulation. What else would a company like Datasafe use? You can’t trust real people.” I was still thinking about what I would look like dead. “Whatever, he’s kind of scary.” I shivered, worried and aroused at the same time. “He’s slick enough to operate on Playroom. And now he’s hijacking windows right here in my own mom.” I should probably have told Comrade then about the note in the fridge, but we were still not talking about that day.

“He tapped into Playroom?” Comrade fitted input clips to the spikes on his neck, linked and played back the house files. “Zayebees. He was already here then. He piggybacked on with you.” Comrade slapped his leg. “I can’t understand how he beat my security so easily.”

The roombrain flicked the message indicator. “Stennie’s calling,” it said.

“Pick up,” I said.

“Hi, it’s that time again.” Stennie was alone in his car. “I’m on my way over to give you jacks a thrill.” He pushed his triangular snout up to the camera and licked at the lens. “Doing anything?”

“Not really. Sitting around.”

“I’ll fix that. Five minutes.” He faded.

Comrade was staring at nothing.

“Look, Comrade, you did your best,” I said. “I’m not mad at you.”

“Too plugging easy.” He shook his head as if I had missed the point.

“What I don’t understand is why Montross is so cranky anyway. It’s just a picture of meat.”

“Maybe he’s not really dead.”

“Sure he is,” I said. “You can’t fake a verification grid.”

“No, but you can fake a corpse.”

“You know something?”

“If I did I wouldn’t tell you,” said Comrade. “You have enough problems already. Like how do we explain this to your mom?”

“We don’t. Not yet. Let’s wait him out. Sooner or later he’s got to realize that we’re not going to use his picture for anything. I mean, if he’s that nervous, I’ll even give it back. I don’t care anymore. You hear that, Montross, you dumbscut? We’re harmless. Get out of our lives!”

“It’s more than the picture now,” said Comrade. “It’s me. I found the way in.” He was careful to keep his expression blank.

I did not know what to say to him. No way Montross would be satisfied erasing only the memory of the operation. He would probably reconnect Comrade’s regulators to bring him back under control. Turn him to pudding. He would be just another wiseguy, like anyone else could own. I was surprised that Comrade did not ask me to promise not to hand him over. Maybe he just assumed I would stand by him.

We did not hear Stennie coming until he sprang into the room.

“Have fun or die!” He was clutching a plastic gun in his spindly hand, which he aimed at my head.

“Stennie, no.”

He fired as I rolled across the bed. The jellybee buzzed by me and squished against one of the windows. It was a purple, and immediately I smelled the tang of artificial grape flavor. The splatter on the wrinkled wall pulsed and split in two, emitting a second burst of grapeness. The two halves oozed in opposite directions, shivered, and divided again.

“Fun extremist!” He shot Comrade with a cherry as he dove for the closet. “Dance!”

I bounced up and down on the bed, timing my move. He fired a green at me that missed. Comrade, meanwhile, gathered himself up as zits of red jellybee squirmed across his window coat. He barreled out of the closet into Stennie, knocking him sideways. I sprang on top of them and wrestled the gun away. Stennie was paralyzed with laughter. I had to giggle too, in part because now I could put off talking to Comrade about Montross.

By the time we untangled ourselves, the jellybees had faded. “Set for twelve generations before they all die out,” Stennie said as he settled himself on the bed. “So what’s this my car tells me, you’ve been giving free rides? Is this the cush with the name?”

“None of your business. You never tell me about your cush.”

“Okay. Her name is Janet Hoyt.”

“Is it?” He caught me off-guard again. Twice in one day, a record. “Comrade, let’s see this prize.”

Comrade linked to the roombrain and ran a search. “Got her.” He called Janet Hoyt’s DI file to screen, and her face ballooned across an entire window.

She was a tanned blue-eyed blonde with the kind of off-the-shelf looks that med students slapped onto rabbits in genoplasty courses. Nothing on her face said she was different from any other ornamental moron fresh from the OR—not a dimple or a mole, not even a freckle. “You’re ditching me for her?” It took all the imagination of a potato chip to be as pretty as Janet Hoyt. “Stennie, she’s generic.”

“Now wait a minute,” said Stennie. “If we’re going to play critic, let’s scope your cush, too.”

Without asking, Comrade put Tree’s DI photo next to Janet’s. I realized he was still mad at me because of her; he was only pretending not to care. “She’s not my cush,” I said, but no one was listening.

Stennie leered at her for a moment. “She’s a stiff, isn’t she?” he said. “She has that hungry look.”

Seeing him standing there in front of the two huge faces on the wall, I felt like I was peeping on a stranger—that I was a stranger, too. I could not imagine how the two of us had come to this: Stennie and Mr. Boy with cushes. We were growing up. A frightening thought. Maybe next Stennie would get himself untwanked and really look like he had on Playroom. Then where would I be?

“Janet wants me to plug her,” Stennie said.

“Right, and I’m the queen of Brooklyn.”

“I’m old enough, you know.” He thumped his tail against the floor.

“You’re a dinosaur!”

“Hey, just because I got twanked doesn’t mean my dick fell off.”

“So do it then.”

“I’m going to. I will, okay? But . . . this is no good.” Stennie waved impatiently at Comrade. “I can’t think with them watching me.” He nodded at the windows. “Turn them off already.”

“N’ye pizdi!” Comrade wiped the two faces from the windows, cleared all the screens in the room to blood red, yanked the input clips from his neck spikes, and left them dangling from the roombrain’s terminal. His expression empty, he walked from the room without asking permission or saying anything at all.

“What’s his problem?” Stennie said.

“Who knows?” Comrade had left the door open; I shut it. “Maybe he doesn’t like girls.”

“Look, I want to ask a favor.” I could tell Stennie was nervous; his head kept swaying. “This is kind of embarrassing, but . . . okay, do you think maybe your mom would maybe let me practice on her lovers? I don’t want Janet to know I’ve never done it before, and there’s some stuff I’ve got to figure out.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Ask her.”

But I did know. She would be amused.

People claimed my mom did not have a sense of humor. Lovey was huge, an ocean of a woman. Her umbilical was as big around as my thigh. When she walked, waves of flesh heaved and rolled. She had beautiful skin, flawless and moist. It did not take much to make her sweat. Peeling a banana would do it. Lovey was as oral as a baby; she would put anything into her mouth. And when she did not have a mouthful, she would babble on about whatever came into Mom’s head. Dear hardly ever talked, although he could moan and growl and laugh. He touched Lovey whenever he could and shot her long smoldering looks. He was not furry, exactly, but he was covered with fine silver hair. Dear was a little guy, about my size. Although he had one of Upjohn’s finest penises, elastic and overloaded with neurons, he was one of the least convincing males I had ever met. I doubt Mom herself believed in him all that much.

Big chatty woman, squirrelly tongue-tied little man. It was funny in a bent sort of way to watch the two of them go at each other. Kind of like a tug churning against a supertanker. They did not get the chance that often. It was dangerous; Dear had to worry about getting crushed, and poor Lovey’s heart had stopped two or three times. Besides, I think Mom liked building up the pressure. Sometimes, as the days without sex stretched, you could almost feel lust sparkling off them like static electricity.

That was how they were when I brought Stennie up. Their suite took up the entire floor at the hips, Mom’s widest part. Lovey was lolling in a tub of warm oil. She liked it flowery and laced with pheromones. Dear was prowling around her with a desperate expression, like he might jam his plug into a wall socket if he did not get taken care of soon. Stennie’s timing was perfect.

“Look who’s come to visit, Dear,” said Lovey. “Peter and Stennie. How nice of you boys to stop by.” She let Dear mop her forehead with a towel. “What can we do for you?”

The skin under Stennie’s jaw quivered. He glanced at me, then at Dear, and then at the thick red lips that served as the bathroom door. Never even looked at her. He was losing his nerve.

“Oh my, isn’t this exciting, Dear? There’s something going on.” She sank into the bath until her chin touched the water. “It’s a secret, isn’t it, Peter? Share it with Lovey.”

“No secret,” I said. “He wants to ask a favor.” And then I told her.

She giggled and sat up. “I love it.” Honey-colored oil ran from her hair and slopped between her breasts. “Were you thinking of both of us, Stennie? Or just me?”

“Well, I . . . ” Stennie’s tail switched. “Maybe we just ought to forget it.”

“No, no.” She waved a hand at him “Come here, Stennie. Come close, my pretty little monster.”

He hesitated, then approached the tub. She reached for his right leg and touched him just above the heelknob. “You know, I’ve always wondered what scales would feel like.” Her hand climbed; the oil made his yellow hide glisten. His eyes were the size of eggs.

The bedroom was all mattress. Beneath the transparent skin was a screen implant, so that Mom could project images not only on the walls but on the surface of the bed itself. Under the window was a layer of heavily vascular flesh, which could be stiffened with blood or drained until it was as soft as raw steak. A window dome arched over everything and could show slo-mo or thermographic fx across its span. The air was warm and wet and smelled like a chemical engineer’s idea of a rose garden.

I settled by the lips. Dear ghosted along the edges of the room, dragging his umbilical like a chain, never coming quite near enough to touch anyone. I heard him humming as he passed me, a low moaning singsong, as if to block out what was happening. Stennie and Lovey were too busy with each other to care. As Lovey knelt in front of Stennie, Dear gave a mocking laugh. I did not understand how he could be jealous. He was with her, part of it. Lovey and Dear were Mom’s remotes, two nodes of her nervous system. Yet his pain was as obvious as her pleasure. At last he squatted and rocked back and forth on his heels. I glanced up at the fx dome; yellow scales slid across oily rolls of flushed skin.

I yawned. I had always found sex kind of dull. Besides, this was all on the record. I could have Comrade replay it for me anytime: Lovey stopped breathing—then came four or five shuddering gasps in a row. I wondered where Comrade had gone. I felt sorry for him. Stennie said something to her about rolling over. “Okay?” Feathery skin sounds. A grunt. The soft wet slap of flesh against flesh. I thought of my mother’s brain, up there in the head where no one ever went. I had no idea how much attention she was paying. Was she quivering with Lovey and at the same time calculating insolation rates on her chloroplasts? Investing in soy futures on the Chicago Board of Trade? Fending off Weldon Montross’s latest attack? Plug Montross. I needed to think about something fun. My collection. I started piling bodies up in my mind. The hangings and the open-casket funerals and the stacks of dead at the camps and all those muddy soldiers. I shivered as I remembered the empty rigid faces. I liked it when their teeth showed. “Oh, oh, oh!” My greatest hits dated from the late twentieth century. The dead were everywhere back then, in vids and the news and even on T-shirts. They were not shy. That was what made Comrade’s photo worth having; it was hard to find modern stuff that dirty. Dear brushed by me, his erection bobbing in front of him. It was as big around as my wrist. As he passed, I could see Stennie’s leg scratch across the mattress skin, which glowed with bloodblue light. Lovey giggled beneath him and her umbilical twitched and suddenly I found myself wondering whether Tree was a virgin.

I came into the mall through the Main Street entrance and hopped the westbound slidewalk headed up Elm Street toward the train station. If I caught the 3:36 to Grand Central, I could eat dinner in Manhattan, far from my problems with Montross and Comrade. Running away had always worked for me before. Let someone else clean up the mess while I was gone.

The slidewalk carried me past a real-estate agency, a flash bar, a jewelry store, and a Baskin-Robbins. I thought about where I wanted to go after New York. San Francisco? Montreal? Maybe I should try Elkhart, Indiana—no one would think to look for me there. Just ahead, between a drugstore and a take-out Russian restaurant, was the wiseguy dealership where Mom had bought Comrade.

I did not want to think about Comrade waiting for me to come home, so I stepped into the drugstore and bought a dose of Carefree for $4.29. Normally I did not bother with drugs. I had been stunted; no over-the-counter flash could compare to that. But the propyl dicarbamates were all right. I fished the cash card out of my pocket and handed it to the stiff behind the counter. He did a double take when he saw the denomination, then carefully inserted the card into the reader to deduct the cost of the Carefree. It had my mom’s name on it; he must have expected it would trip some alarm for counterfeit plastic or stolen credit. He stared at me for a moment, as if trying to remember my face so he could describe me to a cop, and then gave the cash card back. The denomination readout said it was still good for $16,381.18.

I picked out a bench in front of a specialty shop called The Happy Hippo, hiked up my shorts, and poked Carefree into the widest part of my thigh. I took a short dreamy swim in the sea of tranquillity and when I came back to myself, my guilt had been washed away. But so had my energy. I sat for a while and scoped the display of glass hippos and plastic hippos and fuzzy stuffed hippos, hippo vids and sheets and candles. Down the bench from me a homeless woman dozed. It was still pretty early in the season for a weather gypsy to have come this far north. She wore red shorts and droopy red socks with plastic sandals and four long-sleeved shirts, all unbuttoned, over a Funny Honey halter top. Her hair needed vacuuming and she smelled old. All grown-ups smelled that way to me; it was something I had never gotten used to. No perfume or deodorant could cover up the leathery stink of adulthood. Kids could smell bad too, but usually from something they got on them. It did not come from a rotting body. I rubbed a finger in the dampness under my arm, slicked it, and sniffed. There was a sweetness to kid sweat. I touched the drying finger to my tongue. You could even taste it. If I gave up getting stunted, stopped being Mr. Boy, I would smell like the woman at the end of the bench. I would start to die. I had never understood how grown-ups could live with that.

The gypsy woke up, stretched, and smiled at me with gummy teeth. “You left Comrade behind?” she said.

I was startled. “What did you say?”

“You know what this is?” She twitched her sleeve, and a penlight appeared in her hand.

My throat tightened. “I know what it looks like.”

She gave me a wicked smile, aimed the penlight, and burned a pinhole through the bench a few centimeters from my leg. “Maybe I could interest you in some free laser surgery?”

I could smell scorched plastic. “You’re going to needle me here, in the middle of the Elm Street Mall?” I thought she was bluffing. Probably. I hoped.

“If that’s the way you want it. Mr. Montross wants to know when you’re delivering the wiseguy to us.”

“Get away from me.”

“Not until you do what needs to be done.”

When I saw Happy Lurdane come out of The Happy Hippo, I waved. A desperation move, but then it was easy to be brave with a head full of Carefree.

“Mr. Boy.” She veered over to us. “Hi!”

I scooted farther down the bench to make room for her between me and the gypsy. I knew she would stay to chat. Happy Lurdane was one of those chirpy lightweights who seemed to want lots of friends but did not really try to be one. We tolerated her because she did not mind being snubbed and she threw great parties.

“Where have you been?” She settled beside me. “Haven’t seen you in ages.” The penlight disappeared, and the gypsy fell back into drowsy character.

“Around.”

“Want to see what I just bought?”

I nodded. My heart was hammering.

She opened the bag and took out a fist-sized bundle covered with shipping plastic. She unwrapped a statue of a blue hippopotamus. “Be careful.” She handed it to me.

“Cute.” The hippo had crude flower designs drawn on its body; it was chipped and cracked.

“Ancient Egyptian. That means it’s even before antique.” She pulled a slip from the bag and read. “Twelfth Dynasty, 1991-1786 B.C. Can you believe you can just buy something like that here in the mall? I mean, it must be like a thousand years old or something.”

“Try four thousand.”

“No wonder it cost so much. He wasn’t going to sell it to me, so I had to spend some of next month’s allowance.” She took it from me and rewrapped it. “It’s for the smash party tomorrow. You’re coming, aren’t you?”

“Maybe.”

“Is something wrong?”

I ignored that.

“Hey, where’s Comrade? I don’t think I’ve ever seen you two apart before.”

I decided to take a chance. “Want to get some doboys?”

“Sure.” She glanced at me with delighted astonishment. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

I took her arm, maneuvering to keep her between me and the gypsy. If Happy got needled, it would be no great loss to Western Civilization. She babbled on about her party as we stepped onto the westbound slidewalk. I turned to look back. The gypsy waved as she hopped the eastbound.

“Look, Happy,” I said, “I’m sorry, but I changed my mind. Later, okay?”

“But . . . ”

I did not stop for an argument. I darted off the slidewalk and sprinted through the mall to the station. I went straight to a ticket window, shoved the cash card under the grill, and asked the agent for a one-way to Grand Central. Forty thousand people lived in New Canaan; most of them had heard of me because of my mom. Nine million strangers jammed New York City; it was a good place to disappear. The agent had my ticket in her hand when the reader beeped and spat the card out.

“No!” I slammed my fist on the counter. “Try it again.” The cash card was guaranteed by AmEx to be secure. And it had just worked at the drugstore.

She glanced at the card, then slid it back under the grill. “No use.” The denomination readout flashed alternating messages: VOIDED and BANK RECALL. “You’ve got trouble, son.”

She was right. As I left the station, I felt the Carefree struggle one last time with my dread—and lose. I did not even have the money to call home. I wandered around for a while, dazed, and then I was standing in front of the flower shop in the Elm Street Mall.

GREEN DREAM
CONTEMPORARY AND CONVENTIONAL PLANTS

I had telelinked with Tree every day since our drive, and every day she had asked me over. But I was not ready to meet her family; I suppose I was still trying to pretend she was not a stiff. I wavered at the door now, breathing the cool scent of damp soil in clay pots. The gypsy could come after me again; I might be putting these people in danger. Using Happy as a shield was one thing, but I liked Tree. A lot. I backed away and peered through a window fringed with sweat and teeming with bizarre plants with flame-colored tongues. Someone wearing khaki moved. I could not tell if it was Tree or not. I thought of what she had said about no one having adventures in the mall.

The front of the showroom was a green cave, darker than I had expected. Baskets dripping with bright flowers hung like stalactites; leathery-leaved understory plants formed stalagmites. As I threaded my way toward the back, I came upon the kid I had seen wearing the Green Dream uniform, a khaki nightmare of pleats and flaps and brass buttons and about six too many pockets. He was misting leaves with a pump bottle filled with blue liquid. I decided he must be the brother.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m looking for Treemonisha.”

Fidel was shorter than me and darker than his sister. He had a wiry plush of beautiful black hair that I was immediately tempted to touch.

“Are you?” He eyed me as if deciding how hard I would be to beat up, then he smiled. He had crooked teeth. “You don’t look like yourself.”

“No?”

“What are you, scared? You’re whiter than rice, cashman. Don’t worry, the stiffs won’t hurt you.” Laughing, he feinted a punch at my arm; I was not reassured.

“You’re Fidel.”

“I’ve seen your DI files,” he said. “I asked around, I know about you. So don’t be telling my sister any more lies, understand?” He snapped his fingers in my face. “Behave yourself, cashman, and we’ll be fine.” He still had the boyish excitability I had lost after the first stunting. “She’s out back, so first you have to get by the old man.”

The rear of the store was brighter; sunlight streamed through the clear krylac roof. There was a counter and behind it a glass-doored refrigerator filled with cut flowers. A side entrance opened to the greenhouse. Mrs. Schlieman, one of Mom’s lawyers who had an office in the mall, was deciding what to buy. She was shopping with her wiseguy secretary, who looked like he had just stepped out of a vodka ad.

“Wait.” Fidel rested a hand on my shoulder. “I’ll tell her you’re here.”

“But how long will they last?” Mrs. Schlieman sniffed a frilly yellow flower. “I should probably get the duraroses.”

“Whatever you want, Mrs. Schlieman. Duraroses are a good product, I sell them by the truckload,” said Mr. Joplin with a chuckle. “But these carnations are real flowers, raised here in my greenhouse. So maybe you can’t stick them in your dishwasher, but put some where people can touch and smell them and I guarantee you’ll get compliments.”

“Why, Peter Cage,” said Mrs. Schlieman. “Is that you? I haven’t seen you since the picnic. How’s your mother?” She did not introduce her wiseguy.

“Extreme,” I said.

She nodded absently. “That’s nice. All right then, Mr. Joplin, give me a dozen of your carnations—and two dozen yellow duraroses.”

Mrs. Schlieman chatted politely at me while Tree’s father wrapped the order. He was a short, rumpled, balding man who smiled too much. He seemed to like wearing the corporate uniform. Anyone else would have fixed the hair and the wrinkles. Not Mr. Joplin; he was a museum-quality throwback. As he took Mrs. Schlieman’s cash card from the wiseguy, he beamed at me over his glasses. Glasses!

When Mrs. Schlieman left, so did the smile. “Peter Cage?” he said. “Is that your name?”

“Mr. Boy is my name, sir.”

“You’re Tree’s new friend.” He nodded. “She’s told us about you. She’s doing chores just now. You know, we have to work for a living here.”

Sure, and I knew what he left unsaid: unlike you, you spoiled little freak. It was always the same with these stiffs. I walked in the door and already they hated me. At least he was not pretending, like Mrs. Schlieman. I gave him two points for honesty and kept my mouth shut.

“What is it you want here, Peter?”

“Nothing, sir.” If he was going to “Peter” me, I was going to “sir” him right back. “I just stopped by to say hello. Treemonisha did invite me, sir, but if you’d rather I left . . . ”

“No, no. Tree warned us you might come.”

She and Fidel raced into the room as if they were afraid their father and I would already be at each other’s throats. “Oh, hi, Mr. Boy,” she said.

Her father snorted at the sound of my name.

“Hi.” I grinned at her. It was the easiest thing I had done that day.

She was wearing her uniform. When she saw that I had noticed, she blushed. “Well, you asked for it.” She tugged self-consciously at the waist of her fatigues. “You want to come in?”

“Just a minute.” Mr. Joplin stepped in front of the door, blocking our escape. “You finished E-class?”

“Yes.”

“Checked the flats?”

“I’m almost done.”

“After that you’d better pick some dinner and get it started. Your mama called and said she wouldn’t be home until six-fifteen.”

“Sure.”

“And you’ll take orders for me on line two?”

She leaned against the counter and sighed. “Do I have a choice?”

He backed away and waved us through. “Sorry, sweetheart. I don’t know how we would get along without you.” He caught her brother by the shirt. “Not you, Fidel. You’re misting, remember?”

A short tunnel ran from their mall storefront to the rehabbed furniture warehouse built over the Amtrak rails. Green Dream had installed a krylac roof and fans and a grolighting system; the Joplins squeezed themselves into the leftover spaces not filled with inventory. The air in the greenhouse was heavy and warm and it smelled like rain. No walls, no privacy other than that provided by the plants.

“Here’s where I sleep.” Tree sat on her unmade bed. Her space was formed by a cinder-block wall painted yellow and a screen of palms. “Chinese fan, bamboo, lady, date, kentia,” she said, naming them for me like they were her pets. “I grow them myself for spending money.” Her schoolcomm was on top of her dresser. Several drawers hung open; pink skintights trailed from one. Clothes were scattered like piles of leaves across the floor. “I guess I’m kind of a slob,” she said as she stripped off the uniform, wadded it, and then banked it off the dresser into the top drawer. I could see her bare back in the mirror plastic taped to the wall. “Take your things off if you want.”

I hesitated.

“Or not. But it’s kind of muggy to stay dressed. You’ll sweat.”

I unvelcroed my shirt. I did not mind at all seeing Tree without clothes. But I did not undress for anyone except the stiffs at the clinic. I stepped out of my pants. Being naked somehow had got connected with being helpless. I had this puckery feeling in my dick, like it was going to curl up and die. I could imagine the gypsy popping out from behind a palm and laughing at me. No, I was not going to think about that. Not here.

“Comfortable?” said Tree.

“Sure.” My voice was turning to dust in my throat. “Do all Green Dream employees run around the back room in the nude?”

“I doubt it.” She smiled as if the thought tickled her. “We’re not exactly your average mall drones. Come help me finish the chores.”

I was glad to let her lead so that she was not looking at me, although I could still watch her. I was fascinated by the sweep of her buttocks, the curve of her spine. She strolled, flat-footed and at ease, through her private jungle. At first I scuttled along on the balls of my feet, ready to dart behind a plant if anyone came. But after a while I decided to stop being so skittish. I realized I would probably survive being naked.

Tree stopped in front of a workbench covered with potted seedlings in plastic trays and picked up a hose from the floor.

“What’s this stuff?” I kept to the opposite side of the bench, using it to cover myself.

“Greens.” She lifted a seedling to check the water level in the tray beneath.

“What are greens?”

“It’s too boring.” She squirted some water in and replaced the seedling.

“Tell me, I’m interested.”

“In greens? You liar.” She glanced at me and shook her head. “Okay.” She pointed as she said the names. “Lettuce, spinach, pak choi, chard, kale, rocket—got that? And a few tomatoes over there. Peppers, too. GD is trying to break into the food business. They think people will grow more of their own if they find out how easy it is.”

“Is it?”

“Greens are.” She inspected the next tray. “Just add water.”

“Yeah, sure.”

“It’s because they’ve been photosynthetically enhanced. Bigger leaves arranged better, low respiration rates. They teach us this stuff at GD Family Camp. It’s what we do instead of vacation.” She squashed something between her thumb and forefinger. “They mix all these bacteria that make their own fertilizer into the soil—fix nitrogen right out of the air. And then there’s this other stuff that sticks to the roots, rhizobacteria and mycorrhizae.” She finished the last tray and coiled the hose. “These flats will produce under candlelight in a closet. Bored yet?”

“How do they taste?”

“Pretty bland, most of them. Some stink, like kale and rocket. But we have to eat them for the good of the corporation.” She stuck her tongue out. “You want to stay for dinner?” Mrs. Joplin made me call home before she would feed me; she refused to understand that my mom did not care. So I linked, asked Mom to send a car to the back door at 8:30, and faded. No time to discuss the missing sixteen thousand.

Dinner was from the cookbook Tree had been issued at camp: a bowl of cold bean soup, fresh corn bread, and chard and cheese loaf. She let me help her make it, even though I had never cooked before. I was amazed at how simple corn bread was. Six ingredients: flour, cornmeal, baking powder, milk, oil, and ovobinder. Mix and pour into a greased pan. Bake twenty minutes at 220°C and serve! There is nothing magic or even very mysterious about homemade corn bread, except for the way its smell held me spellbound.

Supper was the Joplins’ daily meal together. They ate in front of security windows near the tunnel to the store; when a customer came, someone ran out front. According to contract, they had to stay open twenty-four hours a day. Many of the suburban malls had gone to all-night operation; the competition from New York City was deadly. Mr. Joplin stood duty most of the time, but since they were a franchise family everybody took turns. Even Mrs. Joplin, who also worked part-time as a factfinder at the mall’s DataStop.

Tree’s mother was plump and graying, and she had a smile that was almost bright enough to distract me from her naked body. She seemed harmless, except that she knew how to ask questions. After all, her job was finding out stuff for DataStop customers. She had this way of locking onto you as you talked; the longer the conversation, the greater her intensity. It was hard to lie to her. Normally that kind of aggressiveness in grown-ups made me jumpy.

No doubt she had run a search on me; I wondered just what she had turned up. Factfinders had to obey the law, so they only accessed public-domain information—unlike Comrade, who would cheerfully operate on whatever I set him to. The Joplins’ bank records, for instance. I knew that Mrs. Joplin had made about $11,000 last year at the Infomat in the Elkhart Mall, that the family borrowed $135,000 at 9.78 percent interest to move to their new franchise, and that they lost $213 in their first two months in New Canaan.

I kept my research a secret, of course, and they acted innocent too. I let them pump me about Mom was we ate. I was used to being asked; after all, Mom was famous. Fidel wanted to know how much it had cost her to get twanked, how big she was, what she looked like on the inside and what she ate, if she got cold in the winter. Stuff like that. The others asked more personal questions. Tree wondered if Mom ever got lonely and whether she was going to be the Statue of Liberty for the rest of her life. Mrs. Joplin was interested in Mom’s remotes, of all things. Which ones I got along with, which ones I could not stand, whether I thought any of them was really her. Mr. Joplin asked if she liked being what she was. How was I supposed to know?

After dinner, I helped Fidel clear the table. While we were alone in the kitchen, he complained. “You think they eat this shit at CD headquarters?” He scraped his untouched chard loaf into the composter.

“I kind of liked the corn bread.”

“If only he’d buy meat once in a while, but he’s too cheap. Or doboys. Tree says you bought her doboys.”

I told him to skip school sometime and we would go out for lunch; he thought that was a great idea.

When we came back out, Mr. Joplin actually smiled at me. He had been losing his edge all during dinner. Maybe chard agreed with him. He pulled a pipe from his pocket, began stuffing something into it, and asked me if I followed baseball. I told him no. Paintball? No. Basketball? I said I watched dino fights sometimes.

“His pal is the dinosaur that goes to our school,” said Fidel.

“He may look like a dinosaur, but he’s really a boy,” said Mr. Joplin, as if making an important distinction. “The dinosaurs died out millions of years ago.”

“Humans aren’t allowed in dino fights,” I said, just to keep the conversation going. “Only twanked dogs and horses and elephants.”

Silence. Mr. Joplin puffed on his pipe and then passed it to his wife. She watched the glow in the bowl through half-lidded eyes as she inhaled. Fidel caught me staring.

“What’s the matter? Don’t you get twisted?” He took the pipe in his turn.

I was so croggled I did not know what to say. Even the Marleys had switched to THC inhalers. “But smoking is bad for you.” It smelled like a dirty sock had caught fire.

“Hemp is ancient. Natural.” Mr. Joplin spoke in a clipped voice as if swallowing his words. “Opens the mind to what’s real.” When he sighed, smoke poured out of his nose. “We grow it ourselves, you know.”

I took the pipe when Tree offered it. Even before I brought the stem to my mouth, the world tilted and I watched myself slide into what seemed very much like an hallucination. Here I was sitting around naked, in the mall, with a bunch of stiffs, smoking antique drugs. And I was enjoying myself. Incredible. I inhaled and immediately the flash hit me; it was as if my brain were an enormous bud, blooming inside my head.

“Good stuff.” I laughed smoke and then began coughing.

Fidel refilled my glass with ice water. “Have a sip, cashman.”

“Customer.” Tree pointed at the window.

“Leave!” Mr. Joplin waved impatiently at him. “Go away.” The man on the screen knelt and turned over the price tag on a fern. “Damn.” He jerked his uniform from the hook by the door, pulled on the khaki pants, and was slithering into the shirt as he disappeared down the tunnel.

“So is Green Dream trying to break into the flash market too?” I handed the pipe to Mrs. Joplin. There was a fleck of ash on her left breast.

“What we do back here is our business,” she said. “We work hard so we can live the way we want.” Tree was studying her fingerprints. I realized I had said the wrong thing, so I shut up. Obviously, the Joplins were drifting from the lifestyle taught at Green Dream Family Camp.

Fidel announced he was going to school tomorrow, and Mrs. Joplin told him no, he could link to E-class as usual, and Fidel claimed he could not concentrate at home, and Mrs. Joplin said he was trying to get out of his chores. While they were arguing, Tree nudged my leg and shot me a let’s leave look. I nodded.

“Excuse us.” She pushed back her chair. “Mr. Boy has got to go home soon.”

Mrs. Joplin pointed for her to stay. “You wait until your father gets back,” she said. “Tell me, Mr. Boy, have you lived in New Canaan long?”

“All my life,” I said.

“How old did you say you were?”

“Mama, he’s twenty-five,” said Tree. “I told you.”

“And what do you do for a living?”

“Mama, you promised.”

“Nothing,” I said. “I’m lucky, I guess. I don’t need to worry about money. If you didn’t need to work, would you?”

“Everybody needs work to do,” Mrs. Joplin said. “Work makes us real. Unless you have work to do and people who love you, you don’t exist.”

Talk about twentieth-century humanist goop! At another time in another place, I probably would have snapped, but now the words would not come. My brain had turned into a flower; all I could think were daisy thoughts. The Joplins were such a strange combination of fast-forward and rewind. I could not tell what they wanted from me.

“Seventeen dollars and ninety-nine cents,” said Mr. Joplin, returning from the storefront. “What’s going on in here?” He glanced at his wife, and some signal that I did not catch passed between them. He circled the table, came up behind me, and laid his heavy hands on my shoulders. I shuddered; I thought for a moment he meant to strangle me.

“I’m not going to hurt you, Peter,” he said. “Before you go, I have something to say.”

“Daddy.” Tree squirmed in her chair. Fidel looked uncomfortable too, as if he guessed what was coming.

“Sure.” I did not have much choice.

The weight on my shoulders eased but did not entirely go away. “You should feel the ache in this boy, Ladonna.”

“I know,” said Mrs. Joplin.

“Hard as plastic.” Mr. Joplin touched the muscles corded along my neck. “You get too hard, you snap.” He set his thumbs at the base of my skull and kneaded with an easy circular motion. “Your body isn’t some machine that you’ve downloaded into. It’s alive. Real. You have to learn to listen to it. That’s why we smoke. Hear these muscles? They’re screaming.” He let his hand slide down my shoulders. “Now listen.” His fingertips probed along my upper spine. “Hear that? Your muscles stay tense because you don’t trust anyone. You always have to be ready to take a hit, and you can’t tell where it’s coming from. You’re rigid and angry and scared. Reality . . . your body is speaking to you.”

His voice was as big and warm as his hands. Tree was giving him a look that could boil water, but the way he touched me made too much sense to resist.

“We don’t mind helping you ease the strain. That’s the way Mrs. Joplin and I are. That’s the way we brought the kids up. But first you have to admit you’re hurting. And then you have to respect us enough to take what we have to give. I don’t feel that in you, Peter. You’re not ready to give up your pain. You just want us poor stiffs to admire how hard it’s made you. We haven’t got time for that kind of shit, okay? You learn to listen to yourself and you’ll be welcome around here. We’ll even call you Mr. Boy, even though it’s a damn stupid name.”

No one spoke for a moment.

“Sorry, Tree,” he said. “We’ve embarrassed you again. But we love you, so you’re stuck with us.” I could feel it in his hands when he chuckled. “I suppose I do get carried away sometimes.”

“Sometimes?” said Fidel. Tree just smoldered.

“It’s late,” said Mrs. Joplin. “Let him go now, Jamaal. His mama’s sending a car over.”

Mr. Joplin stepped back, and I almost fell off my chair from leaning against him. I stood, shakily. “Thanks for dinner.”

Tree stalked through the greenhouse to the rear exit, her hairworks glittering against her bare back. I had to trot to keep up with her. There was no car in sight, so we waited at the doorway and I put on my clothes.

“I can’t take much more of this.” She stared through the little wire-glass window in the door, like a prisoner plotting her escape. “I mean, he’s not a psychologist or a great philosopher or whatever the hell he thinks he is. He’s just a pompous mall drone.”

“He’s not that bad.” Actually, I understood what her father had said to me; it was scary. “I like your family.”

“You don’t have to live with them!” She kept watching at the door. “They promised they’d behave with you; I should have known better. This happens every time I bring someone home.” She puffed an imaginary pipe, imitating her father. “Think what you’re doing to yourself, you poor fool, and say, isn’t it just too bad about modern life? Love, love, love—fuck!” She turned to me. “I’m sick of it. People are going to think I’m as sappy and thickheaded as my parents.”

“I don’t.”

“You’re lucky. You’re rich and your mom leaves you alone. You’re New Canaan. My folks are Elkhart, Indiana.”

“Being New Canaan is nothing to brag about. So what are you?”

“Not a Joplin.” She shook her head. “Not much longer, anyway; I’m eighteen in February. I think your car’s here.” She held out her arms and hugged me good-bye. “Sorry you had to sit through that. Don’t drop me, okay? I like you, Mr. Boy.” She did not let go for a while.

Dropping her had never occurred to me; I was not thinking of anything at all except the silkiness of her skin, the warmth of her body. Her breath whispered through my hair and her nipples brushed my ribs and then she kissed me. Just on the cheek, but the damage was done. I was stunted. I was not supposed to feel this way about anyone.

Comrade was waiting in the backseat. We rode home in silence; I had nothing to say to him. He would not understand—none of my friends would. They would warn me that all she wanted was to spend some of my money. Or they would make bad jokes about the nudity or the Joplin’ mushy realism. No way I could explain the innocence of the way they touched one another. The old man did what to you? Yeah, and if I wanted a hug at home who was I supposed to ask? Comrade? Lovey? The greeter? Was I supposed to climb up to the head and fall asleep against Mom’s doorbone, waiting for it to open, like I used to do when I was really a kid?

The greeter was her usual nonstick self when I got home. She was so glad to see me and she wanted to know where I had been and if I had a good time and if I wanted Cook to make me a snack? Around. Yes. No.

She said the bank had called about some problem with one of the cash cards she had given me, a security glitch that they had taken care of and were very sorry about. Did I know about it and did I need a new card and would twenty thousand be enough? Yes. Please. Thanks.

And that was it. I found myself resenting Mom because she did not have to care about losing sixteen or twenty or fifty thousand dollars. And she had reminded me of my problems when all I wanted to think of was Tree. She was no help to me, never had been. I had things so twisted around that I almost told her about Montross myself, just to get a reaction. Here some guy had tapped our files and threatened my life, and she asked if I wanted a snack. Why keep me around if she was going to pay so little attention? I wanted to shock her, to make her take me seriously.

But I did not know how.

The roombrain woke me. “Stennie’s calling.”

“Mmm.”

“Talk to me, Mr. Party Boy.” A window opened; he was in his car. “You dead or alive.”

“Asleep.” I rolled over. “Time is it?”

“Ten-thirty and I’m bored. Want me to come get you now, or should I meet you there?”

“Wha . . . ?”

“Happy’s. Don’t tell me you forgot. They’re doing a piano.”

“Who cares?” I crawled out of bed and slouched into the bathroom..

“She says she’s asking Tree Joplin,” Stennie called after me.

“Asking her what?” I came out.

“To the party.”

“Is she going?”

“She’s your cush.” He gave me a toothy smile. “Call back when you’re ready. Later.” He faded.

“She left a message,” said the roombrain. “Half hour ago.”

“Tree? You got me up for Stennie and not for her?”

“He’s on the list, she’s not. Happy called, too.”

“Comrade should’ve told you. Where is he?” Now I was grouchy. “She’s on the list, okay? Give me playback.”

Tree seemed pleased with herself. “Hi, this is me. I got myself invited to a smash party this afternoon. You want to go?” She faded.

“That’s all? Call her!”

“Both her numbers are busy; I’ll set redial. I found Comrade; he’s on another line. You want Happy’s message?”

“No. Yes.”

“You promised, Mr. Boy.” Happy giggled. “Look, you really, really don’t want to miss this. Stennie’s coming, and he said I should ask Joplin if I wanted you here. So you’ve got no excuse.”

Someone tugged at her. “Stop that! Sorry, I’m being molested by a thick . . . ” She batted at her assailant. “Mr. Boy, did I tell you that this Japanese reporter is coming to shoot a vid? What?” She turned off camera. “Sure, just like on the nature channel. Wildlife of America. We’re all going to be famous. In Japan! This is history, Mr. Boy. And you’re . . . ”

Her face froze as the redial program finally linked to the Green Dream. The roombrain brought Tree up in a new window. “Oh, hi,” she said. “You rich boys sleep late.”

“What’s this about Happy’s?”

“She invited me.” Tree was recharging her hairworks with a red brush. “I said yes. Something wrong?”

Comrade slipped into the room; I shushed him. “You sure you want to go to a smash party? Sometimes they get a little crazy.”

She aimed the brush at me. “You’ve been to smash parties before. You survived.”

“Sure, but . . . ”

“Well, I haven’t. All I know is that everybody at school is talking about this one, and I want to see what’s it’s about.”

“You tell your parents you’re going?”

“Are you kidding? They’d just say it was too dangerous. What’s the matter, Mr. Boy, are you scared? Come on, it’ll be extreme.”

“She’s right. You should go,” said Comrade.

“Is that Comrade?” Tree said. “You tell him, Comrade!”

I glared at him. “Okay, okay, I guess I’m outnumbered. Stennie said he’d drive. You want us to pick you up?”

She did.

I flew at Comrade as soon as Tree faded. “Don’t you ever do that again!” I shoved him, and he bumped up against the wall. “I ought to throw you to Montross.”

“You know, I just finished chatting with him.” Comrade stayed calm and made no move to defend himself. “He wants to meet—the three of us, face to face. He suggested Happy’s.”

“He suggested . . . I told you not to talk to him.”

“I know.” He shrugged. “Anyway, I think we should do it.”

“Who gave you permission to think?”

“You did. What if we give him the picture back and open our files and then I grovel, say I’m sorry, it’ll never happen again, blah, blah, blah. Maybe we can even buy him off. What have we got to lose?”

“You can’t bribe software. And what if he decides to snatch us?” I told Comrade about the gypsy with the penlight. “You want Tree mixed up in this?”

All the expression drained from his face. He did not say anything at first, but I had watched his subroutines long enough to know that when he looked this blank, he was shaken. “So we take a risk, maybe we can get it over with,” he said. “He’s not interested in Tree, and I won’t let anything happen to you. Why do you think your mom bought me?”

Happy Lurdane lived on the former estate of Philip Johnson, a notorious twentieth-century architect. In his will Johnson had arranged to turn his compound into the Philip Johnson Memorial Museum, but after he died his work went out of fashion. The glass skyscrapers in the cities did not age well; they started to fall apart or were torn down because they wasted energy. Nobody visited the museum, and it went bankrupt. The Lurdanes had bought the property and made some changes.

Johnson had designed all the odd little buildings on the estate himself. The main house was a shoebox of glass with no inside walls; near it stood a windowless brick guest house. On a pond below was a dock that looked like a Greek temple. Past the circular swimming pool near the houses were two galleries that had once held Johnson’s art collection, long since sold off. In Johnson’s day, the scattered buildings had been connected only by paths, which made the compound impossible in the frosty Connecticut winters. The Lurdanes had enclosed the paths in clear tubes and commuted in a golf cart.

Stennie told his Alpha not to wait, since the lot was already full and cars were parked well down the driveway. Five of us squeezed out of the car: me, Tree, Comrade, Stennie, and Janet Hoyt. Janet wore a Yankees jersey over pin-striped shorts, Tree was a little overdressed in her silver jaunts, I had on baggies padded to make me seem bigger, and Comrade wore his usual window coat. Stennie lugged a box with his swag for the party.

Freddy the Teddy let us in. “Stennie and Mr. Boy!” He reared back on his hindquarters and roared. “Glad I’m not going to be the only beastie here. Hi, Janet. Hi, I’m Freddy,” he said to Tree. His pink tongue lolled. “Come in, this way. Fun starts right here. Some kids are swimming, and there’s sex in the guest house. Everybody else is with Happy having lunch in the sculpture gallery.”

The interior of the Glass House was bright and hard. Dark wood-block floor, some unfriendly furniture, huge panes of glass framed in black-painted steel. The few kids in the kitchen were passing an inhaler around and watching a microwave fill up with popcorn.

“I’m hot.” Janet stuck the inhaler into her face and pressed. “Anybody want to swim? Tree?”

“Okay.” Tree breathed in a polite dose and breathed out a giggle. “You?” she asked me.

“I don’t think so.” I was too nervous: I kept expecting someone to jump out and throw a net over me. “I’ll watch.”

“I’d swim with you,” said Stennie, “but I promised Happy I’d bring her these party favors as soon as I arrived.” He nudged the box with his foot. “Can you wait a few minutes?”

“Comrade and I will take them over.” I grabbed the box and headed for the door, glad for the excuse to leave Tree behind while I went to find Montross. “Meet you at the pool.”

The golf cart was gone, so we walked through the tube toward the sculpture gallery. “You have the picture?” I said.

Comrade patted the pocket of his window coat.

The tube was not air-conditioned, and the afternoon sun pounded us through the optical plastic. There was no sound inside; even our footsteps were swallowed by the astroturf. The box got heavier. We passed the entrance to the old painting gallery, which looked like a bomb shelter. Finally I had to break the silence. “I feel strange, being here,” I said. “Not just because of the thing with Montross. I really think I lost myself last time I got stunted. Not sure who I am anymore, but I don’t think I belong with these kids.”

“People change, tovarisch,” said Comrade. “Even you.”

“Have I changed?”

He smiled. “Now that you’ve got a cush, your own mother wouldn’t recognize you.”

“You know what your problem is?” I grinned and bumped up against him on purpose. “You’re jealous of Tree.”

“Shouldn’t I be?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I can’t tell if Tree likes who I was or who I might be. She’s changing, too. She’s so hot to break away from her parents, become part of this town. Except that what she’s headed for probably isn’t worth the trip. I feel like I should protect her, but that means guarding her from people like me, except I don’t think I’m Mom’s Mr. Boy anymore. Does that make sense?”

“Sure.” He gazed straight ahead, but all the heads on his window coat were scoping me. “Maybe when you’re finished changing, you won’t need me.”

The thought had occurred to me. For years he had been the only one I could talk to, but as we closed on the gallery, I did not know what to say. I shook my head. “I just feel strange.”

And then we arrived. The sculpture gallery was designed for show-offs: short flights of steps and a series of stagy balconies descended around the white-brick exterior walls to the central exhibition area. The space was open so you could chat with your little knot of friends and, at the same time, spy on everyone else. About thirty kids were eating pizza and Crispix off paper plates. At the bottom of the stairs, as advertised, was a black upright piano. Piled beside it was the rest of the swag. A Boston rocker, a case of green Coke bottles, a Virgin Mary in half a blue bathtub, a huge conch shell, china and crystal and assorted smaller treasures, including a four-thousand-year-old ceramic hippo. There were real animals too, in cages near the gun rack: a turkey, some stray dogs and cats, turtles, frogs, assorted rodents.

I was threading my way across the first balcony when I was stopped by the Japanese reporter, who was wearing microcam eyes.

“Excuse me, please,” he said, “I am Matsuo Shikibu, and I will be recording this event today for Nippon Hoso Kyokai. Public telelink of Japan.” He smiled and bowed. When his head came up, the red light between his lenses was on. “You are . . . ?”

“Raskolnikov,” said Comrade, edging between me and the camera. “Rodeo Raskolnikov.” He took Shikibu’s hand and pumped it. “And my associate here, Mr. Peter Pan.” He turned as if to introduce me, but we had long since choreographed this dodge. As I sidestepped past, he kept shielding me from the reporter with his body. “We’re friends of the bride,” Comrade said, “and we’re really excited to be making new friends in your country. Banzai, Nippon!”

I slipped by them and scooted downstairs. Happy was basking by the piano; she spotted me as I reached the middle landing.

“Mr. Boy!” It was not so much a greeting as an announcement. She was wearing a body mike, and her voice boomed over the sound system. “You made it.”

The stream of conversation rippled momentarily, a few heads turned, and then the party flowed on. Shikibu rushed to the edge of the upper balcony and caught me with a long shot.

I set the box on the Steinway. “Stennie brought this.”

She opened it eagerly. “Look, everyone!” She held up a stack of square cardboard albums, about thirty centimeters on a side. There were pictures of musicians on the front, words on the back. “What are they?” she asked me.

“Phonograph records,” said the kid next to Happy. “It’s how they used to play music before digital.”

“Erroll Garner, Soliloquy,” she read aloud. “What’s this? D-j-a-n-g-o Reinhardt and the American Jazz Giants. Sounds scary.” She giggled as she pawed quickly through the other albums. Handy, Ellington, Hawkins, Parker, three Armstrongs. One was Piano Rags by Scott Joplin. Stennie’s bent idea of a joke? Maybe the lizard was smarter than he looked. Happy pulled a black plastic record out of one sleeve and scratched a fingernail across little ridges. “Oh, a nonslip surface.”

The party had a limited attention span. When she realized she had lost her audience, she shut off the mike and put the box with the rest of the swag. “We have to start at four, no matter what. There’s so much stuff.” The kid who knew about records wormed into our conversation; Happy put her hand on his shoulder. “Mr. Boy, do you know my friend Weldon?” she said. “He’s new.”

Montross grinned. “We met on Playroom.”

“Where is Stennie, anyway?” said Happy.

“Swimming,” I said. Montross appeared to be in his late teens. Bigger than me—everyone was bigger than me. He wore green shorts and a window shirt of surfers at Waimea. He looked like everybody; there was nothing about him to remember. I considered bashing the smirk off his face, but it was a bad idea. If he was software, he could not feel anything and I would probably break my hand on his temporary chassis. “Got to go. I promised Stennie I’d meet him back at the pool. Hey, Weldon, want to tag along?”

“You come right back,” said Happy. “We’re starting at four. Tell everyone.”

We avoided the tube and cut across the lawn for privacy. Comrade handed Montross the envelope. He slid the photograph out, and I had one last glimpse. This time the dead man left me cold. In fact, I was embarrassed. Although he kept a straight face, I knew what Montross was thinking about me. Maybe he was right. I wished he would put the picture away. He was not one of us; he could not understand. I wondered if Tree had come far enough yet to appreciate corpse porn.

“It’s the only copy,” Comrade said.

“All right.” Finally Montross crammed it into the pocket of his shorts.

“You tapped our files; you know it’s true.”

“So?”

“So enough!” I said. “You have what you wanted.”

“I’ve already explained.” Montross was being patient. “Getting this back doesn’t close the case. I have to take preventive measures.”

“Meaning you turn Comrade into a carrot.”

“Meaning I repair him. You’re the one who took him to the chop shop. Deregulated wiseguys are dangerous. Maybe not to you, but certainly to property and probably to other people. It’s a straightforward procedure. He’ll be fully functional afterward.”

“Plug your procedure, jack. We’re leaving.”

Both wiseguys stopped. “I thought you agreed,” said Montross.

“Let’s go, Comrade.” I grabbed his arm, but he shook me off.

“Where?” he said.

“Anywhere! Just so I never have to listen to this again.” I pulled again, angry at Comrade for stalling. Your wiseguy is supposed to anticipate your needs, do whatever you want.

“But we haven’t even tried to . . . ”

“Forget it then. I give up.” I pushed him toward Montross. “You want to chat, fine, go right ahead. Let him rip the top of your head off while you’re at it, but I’m not sticking around to watch.”

I checked the pool, but Tree, Stennie, and Janet had already gone. I went through the Glass House and caught up with them in the tube to the sculpture gallery.

“Can I talk to you?” I put my arm around Tree’s waist, just like I had seen grownups do. “In private.” I could tell she was annoyed to be separated from Janet. “We’ll catch up.” I waved Stennie on. “See you over there.”

She waited until they were gone. “What?” Her hair, slick from swimming, left dark spots where it brushed her silver jaunts.

“I want to leave. We’ll call my mom’s car.” She did not look happy. “I’ll take you anywhere you want to go.”

“But we just got here. Give it a chance.”

“I’ve been to too many of these things.”

“Then you shouldn’t have come.”

Silence. I wanted to tell her about Montross—everything—but not here. Anyone could come along and the tube was so hot. I was desperate to get her away, so I lied. “Believe me, you’re not going to like this. I know.” I tugged at her waist. “Sometimes even I think smash parties are too much.”

“We’ve had this discussion before,” she said. “Obviously you weren’t listening. I don’t need you to decide for me whether I’m going to like something, Mr. Boy. I have two parents too many; I don’t need another.” She stepped away from me. “Hey, I’m sorry if you’re having a bad time. But do you really need to spoil it for me?” She turned and strode down the tube toward the gallery, her beautiful hair slapping against her back. I watched her go.

“But I’m in trouble,” I muttered to the empty tube—and then was disgusted with myself because I did not have the guts to say it to Tree. I was too scared she would not care. I stood there, sweating. For a moment the stink of doubt filled my nostrils. Then I followed her in. I could not abandon her to the extremists.

The gallery was jammed now; maybe a hundred kids swarmed across the balconies and down the stairs. Some perched along the edges, their feet scuffing the white brick. Happy had turned up the volume.

“ . . . according to Guinness, was set at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, Oklahoma, in 2012. Three minutes and fourteen seconds.” The crowd rumbled in disbelief. “The challenge states each piece must be small enough to pass through a hole thirty centimeters in diameter.”

I worked my way to an opening beside a rubber tree. Happy posed on the keyboard of the piano. Freddy the Teddy and the gorilla brothers, Mike and Bubba, lined up beside her. “No mechanical tools are allowed.” She gestured at an armory of axes, sledgehammers, spikes, and crowbars laid out on the floor. A paper plate spun across the room. I could not see Tree.

“This piano is over two hundred years old,” Happy continued, “which means the white keys are ivory.” She plunked a note. “Dead elephants!” Everybody heaved a sympathetic awww. “The blacks are ebony, hacked from the rain forest.” Another note, less reaction. “It deserves to die.”

Applause. Comrade and I spotted each other at almost the same time. He and Montross stood toward the rear of the lower balcony. He gestured for me to come down; I ignored him.

“Do you boys have anything to say?” Happy said.

“Yeah.” Freddy hefted an ax. “Let’s make landfill.”

I ducked around the rubber tree and heard the crack of splitting wood, the iron groan of a piano frame yielding its last music. The spectators hooted approval. As I bumped past kids, searching for Tree, the instrument’s death cry made me think of taking a hammer to Montross. If fights broke out, no one would care if Comrade and I dragged him outside. I wanted to beat him until he shuddered and came unstrung and his works glinted in the thudding August light. It would make me feel extreme again. Crunch! Kids shrieked, “Go, go, go!” The party was lifting off and taking me with it.

“You are Mr. Boy Cage.” Abruptly Shikibu’s microcam eyes were in my face. “We know your famous mother.” He had to shout to be heard. “I have a question.”

“Go away.”

“Thirty seconds.” A girl’s voice boomed over the speakers.

“U.S. and Japan are very different, yes?” He pressed closer. “We honor ancestors, our past. You seem to hate so much.” He gestured at the gallery. “Why?”

“Maybe we’re spoiled.” I barged past him.

I saw Freddy swing a sledgehammer at the exposed frame. Clang! A chunk of twisted iron clattered across the brick floor, trailing broken strings. Happy scooped the mess up and shoved it through a thirty-centimeter hole drilled in an upright sheet of particle board.

The timekeeper called out again. “One minute.” I had come far enough around the curve of the stairs to see her.

“Treemonisha!”

She glanced up, her face alight with pleasure, and waved. I was frightened for her. She was climbing into the same box I needed to break out of. So I rushed down the stairs to rescue her—little boy knight in shining armor—and ran right into Comrade’s arms.

“I’ve decided,” he said. “Mnye vcyaw ostoyeblo.”

“Great.” I had to get to Tree. “Later, okay?” When I tried to go by, he picked me up. I started thrashing. It was the first fight of the afternoon and I lost. He carried me over to Montross. The gallery was in an uproar.

“All set,” said Montross. “I’ll have to borrow him for a while. I’ll drop him off tonight at your mom. Then we’re done.”

“Done?” I kept trying to get free, but Comrade crushed me against him.

“It’s what you want.” His body was so hard. “And what your mom wants.”

“Mom? She doesn’t even know.”

“She knows everything,” Comrade said. “She watches you constantly. What else does she have to do all day?” He let me go. “Remember you said I was sloppy getting the picture? I wasn’t; it was a clean operation. Only someone tipped Datasafe off.”

“But she promised. Besides, that makes no . . . ”

“Two minutes,” Tree called.

“ . . . but he threatened me,” I said. “He was going to blow me up. Needle me in the mall.”

“We wouldn’t do that.” Montross spread his hands innocently. “It’s against the law.”

“Yeah? Well, then, drop dead, jack.” I poked a finger at him. “Deal’s off.”

“No, it’s not,” said Comrade. “It’s too late. This isn’t about the picture anymore, Mr. Boy; it’s about you. You weren’t supposed to change, but you did. Maybe they botched the last stunting, maybe it’s Treemonisha. Whatever, you’ve outgrown me, the way I am now. So I have to change too, or else I’ll keep getting in your way.”

He always had everything under control; it made me crazy. He was too good at running my life. “You should have told me Mom turned you in.” Crash! I felt like the crowd was inside my head, screaming.

“You could’ve figured it out, if you wanted to. Besides, if I had said anything, your mom wouldn’t have bothered to be subtle. She would’ve squashed me. She still might, even though I’m being fixed. Only by then I won’t care. Rosproyebi tvayou mat!”

I heard Tree finishing the count. “ . . . twelve, thirteen, fourteen!” No record today. Some kids began to boo, others laughed. “Time’s up, you losers!”

I glared at the two wiseguys. Montross was busy emulating sincerity. Comrade found a way to grin for me, the same smirk he always wore when he tortured the greeter. “It’s easier this way.”

Easier. My life was too plugging easy. I had never done anything important by myself. Not even grow up. I wanted to smash something.

“Okay,” I said. “You asked for it.”

Comrade turned to Montross and they shook hands. I thought next they might clap one another on the shoulder and whistle as they strolled off into the sunset together. I felt like puking. “Have fun,” said Comrade. “Da svedanya.”

“Sure.” Betraying Comrade, my best friend, brought me both pain and pleasure at once—but not enough to satisfy the shrieking wildness within me. The party was just starting.

Happy stood beaming beside the ruins of the Steinway. Although nothing of what was left was more than half a meter tall, Freddy, Mike, and Bubba had given up now that the challenge was lost. Kids were already surging down the stairs to claim their share of the swag. I went along with them.

“Don’t worry,” announced Happy. “Plenty for everyone. Come take what you like. Remember, guns and animals outside, if you want to hunt. The safeties won’t release unless you go through the door. Watch out for one another, people, we don’t want anyone shot.”

A bunch of kids were wrestling over the turkey cage; one of them staggered backward and knocked into me. “Gobble, gobble,” she said. I shoved her back.

“Mr. Boy! Over here.” Tree, Stennie, and Janet were waiting on the far side of the gallery. As I crossed to them, Happy gave the sign and Stone Kinkaid hurled the four-thousand-year-old ceramic hippo against the wall. It shattered. Everybody cheered. In the upper balconies, they were playing catch with a frog.

“You see who kept time?” said Janet.

“Didn’t need to see,” I said. “I could hear. They probably heard in Elkhart. So you like it, Tree?”

“It’s about what I expected: dumb but fun. I don’t think they . . . ” The frog sailed from the top balcony and splatted at our feet. Its legs twitched and guts spilled from its open mouth. I watched Tree’s smile turn brittle. She seemed slightly embarrassed, as if she had just been told the price of something she could not afford.

“This is going to be a war zone soon,” Stennie said.

“Yeah, let’s fade.” Janet towed Stennie to the stairs, swerving around the three boys lugging Our Lady of the Bathtub out to the firing range.

“Wait.” I blocked Tree. “You’re here, so you have to destroy something. Get with the program.”

“I have to?” She seemed doubtful. “Oh, all right—but no animals.”

A hail of antique Coke bottles crashed around Happy as she directed traffic at the dwindling swag heap. “Hey, people, please be very careful where you throw things.” Her amplified voice blasted us as we approached. The first floor was a graveyard of broken glass and piano bones and bloody feathers. Most of the good stuff was already gone.

“Any records left?” I said.

Happy wobbled closer to me. “What?” She seemed punchy, as if stunned by the success of her own party.

“The box I gave you. From Stennie.” She pointed; I spotted it under some cages and grabbed it. Tree and the others were on the stairs. Outside I could hear the crackle of small-arms fire. I caught up.

“Sir! Mr. Dinosaur, please.” The press still lurked on the upper balcony. “Matsuo Shikibu, Japanese telelink NHK. Could I speak with you for a moment?”

“Excuse me, but this jack and I have some unfinished business.” I handed Stennie the records and cut in front. He swayed and lashed his tail upward to counterbalance their weight.

“Remember me?” I bowed to Shikibu.

“My apologies if I offended . . . ”

“Hey, Matsuo—can I call you Matsuo? This is your first smash party, right? Please, eyes on me. I want to explain why I was rude before. Help you understand the local customs. You see, we’re kind of self-conscious here in the U.S. We don’t like it when someone just watches while we play. You either join in or you’re not one of us.”

My little speech drew a crowd. “What’s he talking about?” said Janet. She was shushed.

“So if you drop by our party and don’t have fun, people resent you,” I told him. “No one came here today to put on a show. This is who we are. What we believe in.”

“Yeah!” Stennie was cheerleading for the extreme Mr. Boy of old. “Tell him.” Too bad he did not realize it was his final appearance. What was Mr. Boy without his Comrade? “Make him feel some pain.”

I snatched an album from the top of the stack, slipped the record out, and held it close to Shikibu’s microcam eyes. “What does this say?”

He craned his neck to read the label. “John Coltrane, Giant Steps.”

“Very good.” I grasped the record with both hands and raised it over my head for all to see. “We’re not picky, Matsuo. We welcome everyone. Therefore today it is my honor to initiate you—and the home audience back on NHK. If you’re still watching, you’re part of this too.” I broke the record over his head.

He yelped and staggered backward and almost tripped over a dead cat. Stone Kinkaid caught him and propped him up. “Congratulations,” said Stennie, as he waved his claws at Japan. “You’re all extremists now.”

Shikibu gaped at me, his microcam eyes askew. A couple of kids clapped.

“There’s someone else here who has not yet joined us.” I turned on Tree. “Another spectator.” Her smile faded.

“You leave her alone,” said Janet. “What are you, crazy?”

“I’m not going to touch her.” I held up empty hands. “No, I just want her to ruin something. That’s why you came, isn’t it, Tree? To get a taste?” I rifled through the box until I found what I wanted. “How about this?” I thrust it at her.

“Oh yeah,” said Stennie, “I meant to tell you . . . ”

She took the record and scoped it briefly. When she glanced up at me, I almost lost my nerve.

“Matsuo Shikibu, meet Treemonisha Joplin.” I clasped my hands behind my back so no one could see me tremble. “The great-great-great-granddaughter of the famous American composer, Scott Joplin. Yes, Japan, we’re all celebrities here in New Canaan. Now please observe.” I read the record for him. “Piano Rags by Scott Joplin, Volume III. Who knows, this might be the last copy. We can only hope. So, what are you waiting for, Tree? You don’t want to be a Joplin anymore? Just wait until your folks get a peek at this. We’ll even send GD a copy. Go ahead, enjoy.”

“Smash it!” The kids around us took up the chant. “Smash it!” Shikibu adjusted his lenses.

“You think I won’t?” Tree pulled out the disk and threw the sleeve off the balcony. “This is a piece of junk, Mr. Boy.” She laughed and then shattered the album against the wall. She held on to a shard. “It doesn’t mean anything to me.”

I heard Janet whisper. “What’s going on?”

“I think they’re having an argument.”

“You want me to be your little dream cush.” Tree tucked the piece of broken plastic into the pocket of my baggies. “The stiff from nowhere who knows nobody and does nothing without Mr. Boy. So you try to scare me off. You tell me you’re so rich, you can afford to hate yourself. Stay home, you say, it’s too dangerous, we’re all crazy. Well, if you’re so sure this is poison, how come you’ve still got your wiseguy and your cash cards? Are you going to move out of your mom, leave town, stop getting stunted? You’re not giving it up, Mr. Boy, so why should I?”

Shikibu turned his camera eyes on me. No one spoke.

“You’re right,” I said. “She’s right.” I could not save anyone until I saved myself. I felt the wildness lifting me to it. I leapt onto the balcony wall and shouted for everyone to hear. “Shut up and listen, everybody! You’re all invited to my place, okay?”

There was one last thing to smash.

“Stop this, Peter.” The greeter no longer thought I was cute. “What’re you doing?” She trembled as if the kids spilling into her were an infection.

“I thought you’d like to meet my friends,” I said. A few had stayed behind with Happy, who had decided to sulk after I hijacked her guests. The rest had followed me home in a caravan so I could warn off the sentry robots. It was already a hall-of-fame bash. “Treemonisha Joplin, this is my mom. Sort of.”

“Hi,” Tree held out her hand uncertainly.

The greeter was no longer the human doormat. “Get them out of me.” She was too jumpy to be polite. “Right now!”

Someone turned up a boombox. Skitter music filled the room like a siren. Tree said something I could not hear. When I put a hand to my ear, she leaned close and said, “Don’t be so mean, Mr. Boy. I think she’s really frightened.”

I grinned and nodded. “I’ll tell Cook to make us some snacks.”

Bubba and Mike carried boxes filled with the last of the swag and set them on the coffee table. Kids fanned out, running their hands along her wrinkled blood-hot walls, bouncing on the furniture. Stennie waved at me as he led a bunch upstairs for a tour. A leftover cat had gotten loose and was hissing and scratching underfoot. Some twisted kids had already stripped and were rolling in the floor hair, getting ready to have sex.

“Get dressed, you.” The greeter kicked at them as she coiled her umbilical to keep it from being trampled. She retreated to her wall plug. “You’re hurting me.” Although her voice rose to a scream, only half a dozen kids heard her. She went limp and sagged to the floor.

The whole room seemed to throb, as if to some great heartbeat, and the lights went out. It took a while for someone to kill the sound on the boombox. “What’s wrong?” Voices called out. “Mr. Boy? Lights.”

Both doorbones swung open, and I saw a bughead silhouetted against the twilit sky. Shikibu in his microcams. “Party’s over,” Mom said over her speaker system. There was nervous laughter. “Leave before I call the cops. Peter, go to your room right now. I want to speak to you.”

As the stampede began, I found Tree’s hand. “Wait for me?” I pulled her close. “I’ll only be a minute.”

“What are you going to do?” She sounded frightened. It felt good to be taken so seriously.

“I’m moving out, chucking all this. I’m going to be a working stiff.” I chuckled. “Think your dad would give me a job?”

“Look out, dumbscut! Hey, hey. Don’t push!”

Tree dragged me out of the way. “You’re crazy.”

“I know. That’s why I have to get out of Mom.”

“Listen,” she said, “you’ve never been poor, you have no idea . . . Only a rich kid would think it’s easy being a stiff. Just go up, apologize, tell her it won’t happen again. Then change things later on, if you want. Believe me, life will be a lot simpler if you hang on to the money.”

“I can’t. Will you wait?”

“You want me to tell you it’s okay to be stupid, is that it? Well, I’ve been poor, Mr. Boy, and still am, and I don’t recommend it. So don’t expect me to stand around and clap while you throw away something I’ve always wanted.” She spun away from me, and I lost her in the darkness. I wanted to catch up with her, but I knew I had to do Mom now or I would lose my nerve.

As I was fumbling my way upstairs, I heard stragglers coming down. “On your right,” I called. Bodies nudged by me.

“Mr. Boy, is that you?” I recognized Stennie’s voice.

“He’s gone,” I said.

Seven flights up, the lights were on. Nanny waited on the landing outside my rooms, her umbilical stretched nearly to its limit. She was the only remote that was physically able to get to my floor, and this was as close as she could come.

It had been a while since I had seen her; Mom did not use her much anymore and I rarely visited, even though the nursery was only one flight down. But this was the remote who used to pick me up when I cried and who had changed my diapers and who taught me how to turn on my roombrain. She had skin so pale you could almost see veins and long black hair piled high on her head. I never thought of her as having a body because she always wore dark turtlenecks and long woolen skirts and silky panty hose. Nanny was a smile and warm hands and the smell of fresh pillowcases. Once upon a time, I thought her the most beautiful creature in the world. Back then I would have done anything she said.

She was not smiling now. “I don’t know how you expect me to trust you anymore, Peter.” Nanny had never been a very good scold. “Those brats were out of control. I can’t let you put me in danger this way.”

“If you wanted someone to trust, maybe you shouldn’t have had me stunted. You got exactly what you ordered, the never-ending kid. Well, kids don’t have to be responsible.”

“What do you mean, what I ordered? It’s what you wanted, too.”

“Is it? Did you ever ask? I was only ten, the first time, too young to know better. For a long time I did it to please you. Getting stunted was the only thing I did that seemed important to you. But you never explained. You never sat me down and said, ‘This is the life you’ll have and this is what you’ll miss and this is how you’ll feel about it.’ ”

“You want to grow up, is that it?” She was trying to threaten me. “You want to work and worry and get old and die someday?” She had no idea what we were talking about.

“I can’t live this way anymore, Nanny.”

At first she acted stunned, as if I had spoken in Albanian. Then her expression hardened when she realized she had lost her hold on me. She was ugly when she was angry. “They put you up to this.” Her gaze narrowed in accusation. “That little black cush you’ve been seeing. Those realists!”

I had always managed to hide my anger from Mom. Right up until then. “How do you know about her?” I had never told her about Tree.

“Peter, they live in a mall!”

Comrade was right. “You’ve been spying on me.” When she did not deny it, I went berserk. “You liar.” I slammed my fist into her belly. “You said you wouldn’t watch.” She staggered and fell onto her umbilical, crimping it. As she twitched on the floor, I pounced. “You promised.” I slapped her face. “Promised.” I hit her again. Her hair had come undone and her eyes rolled back in their sockets and her face was slack. She made no effort to protect herself. Mom was retreating from this remote too, but I was not going to let her get away.

“Mom!” I rolled off Nanny. “I’m coming up, Mom! You hear? Get ready.” I was crying; it had been a long time since I had cried. Not something Mr. Boy did.

I scrambled up to the long landing at the shoulders. At one end another circular stairway wound up into the torch; in the middle, four steps led into the neck. It was the only doorbone I had never seen open; I had no idea how to get through.

“Mom, I’m here.” I pounded. “Mom! You hear me?”

Silence.

“Let me in, Mom.” I smashed myself against the doorbone. Pain branched through my shoulder like lightning, but it felt great because Mom shuddered from the impact. I backed up and, in a frenzy, hurled myself again. Something warm dripped on my cheek. She was bleeding from the hinges. I aimed a vicious kick at the doorbone, and it banged open. I went through.

For years I had imagined that if only I could get into the head I could meet my real mother. Touch her. I had always wondered what she looked like; she got reshaped just after I was born. When I was little I used to think of her as a magic princess glowing with fairy light. Later I pictured her as one or another of my friends’ moms, only better dressed. After I had started getting twanked, I was afraid she might be just a brain floating in nutrient solution, like in some pricey memory bank. All wrong.

The interior of the head was dark and absolutely freezing. There was no sound except for the hum of refrigeration units. “Mom?” My voice echoed in the empty space. I stumbled and caught myself against a smooth wall. Not skin, like everywhere else in Mom—metal. The tears froze on my face.

“There’s nothing for you here,” she said. “This is a clean room. You’re compromising it. You must leave immediately.”

Sterile environment, metal walls, the bitter cold that super-conductors needed. I did not need to see. No one lived here. It had never occurred to me that there was no Mom to touch. She had downloaded, become an electron ghost tripping icy logic gates. “How long have you been dead?”

“This isn’t where you belong,” she said.

I shivered. “How long?”

“Go away,” she said.

So I did. I had to. I could not stay very long in her secret place, or I would die of the cold.

As I reeled down the stairs, Morn herself seemed to shift beneath my feet and I saw her as if she were a stranger. Dead—and I had been living in a tomb. I ran past Nanny; she still sprawled where I had left her. All those years I had loved her, I had been in love with death. Mom had been sucking life from me the way her refrigerators stole the warmth from my body.

Now I knew there was no way I could stay, no matter what anyone said. I knew it was not going to be easy leaving, and not just because of the money. For a long time Mom had been my entire world. But I could not let her use me to pretend she was alive, or I would end up like her.

I realized now that the door had always stayed locked because Mom had to hide what she had become. If I wanted, I could have destroyed her. Downloaded intelligences have no more rights than cars or wiseguys. Mom was legally dead and I was her only heir. I could have had her shut off, her body razed. But somehow it was enough to go, to walk away from my inheritance. I was scared, and yet with every step I felt lighter. Happier. Extremely free.

I had not expected to find Tree waiting at the doorbone, chatting with Comrade as if nothing had happened. “I just had to see if you were really the biggest fool in the world,” she said.

“Out.” I pulled her through the door. “Before I change my mind.”

Comrade started to follow us. “No, not you.” I turned and stared back at the heads on his window coat. I had not intended to see him again; I had wanted to be gone before Montross returned him. “Look, I’m giving you back to Mom. She needs you more than I do.”

If he had argued, I might have given in. The old unregulated Comrade would have said something. But he just slumped a little and nodded and I knew that he was dead, too. The thing in front of me was another ghost. He and Mom were two of a kind. “Pretend you’re her kid, maybe she’ll like that.” I patted his shoulder.

“Prekrassnaya ideya,” he said. “Spaceba.”

“You’re welcome,” I said.

Tree and I trotted together down the long driveway. Robot sentries crossed the lawn and turned their spotlights on us. I wanted to tell her she was right. I had probably just done the single most irresponsible thing of my life—and I had high standards. Still, I could not imagine how being poor could be worse than being rich and hating yourself. I had seen enough of what it was like to be dead. It was time to try living.

“Are we going someplace, Mr. Boy?” Tree squeezed my hand. “Or are we just wandering around in the dark?”

“Mr. Boy is a damn stupid name, don’t you think?” I laughed. “Call me Pete.” I felt like a kid again.

Originally published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, June 1990.

A Few Words with James Patrick Kelly

What are the origins of this story?

I wrote “Mr. Boy” during the cyberpunk years both as homage and satire to what the c-punks liked to call The Movement. It was also part of a series of stories I was writing about the Cage family, which were later combined into my novel Wildlife. One of the prompts I was using to engage my muse in these stories was to repurpose some examples of classic architecture. This was at once to do some cultural and/or technological extrapolation but also to use these iconic buildings as metaphor. So the previous stories centered around Stonehenge and the castle of Chillon in Switzerland. I think the most successful of these icons appears in “Mr. Boy.” For a long time, this was my best known story. It was a finalist for the Nebula and Hugo and is one of my most reprinted stories.

What are some of your favorite short stories?

Of my own? “The Rose Witch,” “Men Are Trouble,” “The Pyramid of Amirah,” “Undone” and “Ten to the Sixteenth to One” to name just five. Of others and limiting myself to SF and F? Cordwainer Smith’s "A Planet Named Shayol,"Connie Willis’s “The Last of the Winnebagos,” Lucius Shepard’s “R&R,” John Kessel’s “Pride and Prometheus,” and Daryl Gregory’s “Second Person, Present Tense.” Both lists would probably change completely were I to redraw them in an hour.

If you were able to make one thing you’ve written a reality, what would it be? Why and which book/story was this in?

The invention I could probably use the most at the moment is probably the digital assistant on steroids Mr. Jimmy from “Standing in Line with Mister Jimmy” which appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction way back in June, 1991. It’s worth noting, however, that Chip, my protagonist, yanks Mr. Jimmy out of his ear at the end of that story and throws him away.

Do you have anything coming out in the months ahead?

I do: the Centipede Press’s Masters of Science Fiction collection called JAMES PATRICK KELLY is supposed to come out in April. I also have high hopes of writing and selling a story to that astute editor of Clarkesworld sometime before fall. Putting on my futurist’s VR goggles, I can see a short story collection called THE PROMISE OF SPACE, possibly in 2017. And that novel I’ve been working on for years is going to sell soon, say I, so maybe we’ll see MOTHER GO in 2018, given the speed at which books on molecules get published.

Tideline

Elizabeth Bear

Chakdony wasn’t built for crying. She didn’t have it in her, not unless her tears were cold tapered glass droplets annealed by the inferno heat that had crippled her.

Such tears as that might slide down her skin over melted sensors to plink unfeeling on the sand. And if they had, she would have scooped them up, with all the other battered pretties, and added them to the wealth of trash jewels that swung from the nets reinforcing her battered carapace.

They would have called her salvage, if there were anyone left to salvage her. But she was the last of the war machines, a three-legged oblate teardrop as big as a main battle tank, two big grabs and one fine manipulator folded like a spider’s palps beneath the turreted head that finished her pointed end, her polyceramic armor spiderwebbed like shatterproof glass. Unhelmed by her remote masters, she limped along the beach, dragging one fused limb. She was nearly derelict.

The beach was where she met Belvedere.

Butterfly coquinas unearthed by retreating breakers squirmed into wet grit under Chalcedony’s trailing limb. One of the rear pair, it was less of a nuisance on packed sand. It worked all right as a pivot, and as long as she stayed off rocks, there were no obstacles to drag it over.

As she struggled along the tideline, she became aware of someone watching. She didn’t raise her head. Her chassis was equipped with targeting sensors which locked automatically on the ragged figure crouched by a weathered rock. Her optical input was needed to scan the tangle of seaweed and driftwood, Styrofoam and sea glass that marked high tide.

He watched her all down the beach, but he was unarmed, and her algorithms didn’t deem him a threat.

Just as well. She liked the weird flat-topped sandstone boulder he crouched beside.

The next day, he watched again. It was a good day; she found a moonstone, some rock crystal, a bit of red-orange pottery, and some sea glass worn opalescent by the tide.

“Whatcha picken up?”

“Shipwreck beads,” Chalcedony answered. For days, he’d been creeping closer, until he’d begun following behind her like the seagulls, scrabbling the coquinas harrowed up by her dragging foot into a patched mesh bag. Sustenance, she guessed, and indeed he pulled one of the tiny mollusks from the bag and produced a broken-bladed folding knife from somewhere to prize it open with. Her sensors painted the knife pale colors. A weapon, but not a threat to her.

Deft enough—he flicked, sucked, and tossed the shell away in under three seconds—but that couldn’t be much more than a morsel of meat. A lot of work for very small return.

He was bony as well as ragged, and small for a human. Perhaps young.

She thought he’d ask what shipwreck, and she would gesture vaguely over the bay, where the city had been, and say there were many. But he surprised her.

“Whatcha gonna do with them?” He wiped his mouth on a sandy paw, the broken knife projecting carelessly from the bottom of his fist.

“When I get enough, I’m going to make necklaces.” She spotted something under a tangle of the algae called dead man’s fingers, a glint of light, and began the laborious process of lowering herself to reach it, compensating by math for her malfunctioning gyroscopes.

The presumed-child watched avidly. “Nuh uh,” he said. “You can’t make a necklace outta that.”

“Why not?” She levered herself another decimeter down, balancing against the weight of her fused limb. She did not care to fall.

“I seed what you pick up. They’s all different.”

“So?” she asked, and managed another few centimeters. Her hydraulics whined. Someday, those hydraulics or her fuel cells would fail and she’d be stuck this way, a statue corroded by salt air and the sea, and the tide would roll in and roll over her. Her carapace was cracked, no longer watertight.

“They’s not all beads.”

Her manipulator brushed aside the dead man’s fingers. She uncovered the treasure, a bit of blue-gray stone carved in the shape of a fat, merry man. It had no holes. Chalcedony balanced herself back upright and turned the figurine in the light. The stone was structurally sound.

She extruded a hair-fine diamond-tipped drill from the opposite manipulator and drilled a hole through the figurine, top to bottom. Then she threaded him on a twist of wire, looped the ends, work-hardened the loops, and added him to the garland of beads swinging against her disfigured chassis.

“So?”

The presumed-child brushed the little Buddha with his fingertip, setting it swinging against shattered ceramic plate. She levered herself up again, out of his reach. “I’s Belvedere,” he said.

“Hello,” Chalcedony said. “I’m Chalcedony.”

By sunset, when the tide was lowest, he scampered chattering in her wake, darting between flocking gulls to scoop up coquinas by the fistful, which he rinsed in the surf before devouring raw. Chalcedony more or less ignored him as she activated her floods, concentrating their radiance along the tideline.

A few dragging steps later, another treasure caught her eye. It was a twist of chain with a few bright beads caught on it—glass, with scraps of gold and silver foil imbedded in their twists. Chalcedony initiated the laborious process of retrieval—

Only to halt as Belvedere jumped in front of her, grabbed the chain in a grubby broken-nailed hand, and snatched it up. Chalcedony locked in position, nearly overbalancing. She was about to reach out to snatch the treasure away from the child and knock him into the sea when he rose up on tiptoe and held it out to her, straining over his head. The floodlights cast his shadow black on the sand, illumined each thread of his hair and eyebrows in stark relief.

“It’s easier if I get that for you,” he said, as her fine manipulator closed tenderly on the tip of the chain.

She lifted the treasure to examine it in the floods. A good long segment, seven centimeters, four jewel-toned shiny beads. Her head creaked when she raised it, corrosion showering from the joints.

She hooked the chain onto the netting wrapped around her carapace. “Give me your bag,” she said.

Belvedere’s hand went to the soggy net full of raw bivalves dripping down his naked leg. “My bag?”

“Give it to me.” Chalcedony drew herself up, akilter because of the ruined limb but still two and a half meters taller than the child. She extended a manipulator, and from some disused file dredged up a protocol for dealing with civilian humans. “Please.”

He fumbled at the knot with rubbery fingers, tugged it loose from his rope belt, and held it out to her. She snagged it on a manipulator and brought it up. A sample revealed that the weave was cotton rather than nylon, so she folded it in her two larger manipulators and gave the contents a low-wattage microwave pulse.

She shouldn’t. It was a drain on her power cells, which she had no means to recharge, and she had a task to complete.

She shouldn’t—but she did.

Steam rose from her claws and the coquinas popped open, roasting in their own juices and the moisture of the seaweed with which he’d lined the net. Carefully, she swung the bag back to him, trying to preserve the fluids.

“Caution,” she urged. “It’s hot.”

He took the bag gingerly and flopped down to sit crosslegged at her feet. When he tugged back the seaweed, the coquinas lay like tiny jewels—pale orange, rose, yellow, green, and blue—in their nest of glass-green Ulva, sea lettuce. He tasted one cautiously, and then began to slurp with great abandon, discarding shells in every direction.

“Eat the algae, too,” Chalcedony told him. “It is rich in important nutrients.”

When the tide came in, Chalcedony retreated up the beach like a great hunched crab with five legs amputated. She was beetle-backed under the moonlight, her treasures swinging and rustling on her netting, clicking one another like stones shivered in a palm.

The child followed.

“You should sleep,” Chalcedony said, as Belvedere settled beside her on the high, dry crescent of beach under towering mud cliffs, where the waves wouldn’t lap.

He didn’t answer, and her voice fuzzed and furred before clearing when she spoke again. “You should climb up off the beach. The cliffs are unstable. It is not safe beneath them.”

Belvedere hunkered closer, lower lip protruding. “You stay down here.”

“I have armor. And I cannot climb.” She thumped her fused leg on the sand, rocking her body forward and back on the two good legs to manage it.

“But your armor’s broke.”

“That doesn’t matter. You must climb.” She picked Belvedere up with both grabs and raised him over her head. He shrieked; at first she feared she’d damaged him, but the cries resolved into laughter before she set him down on a slanted ledge that would bring him to the top of the cliff.

She lit it with her floods. “Climb,” she said, and he climbed.

And returned in the morning.

Belvedere stayed ragged, but with Chalcedony’s help he waxed plumper. She snared and roasted seabirds for him, taught him how to construct and maintain fires, and ransacked her extensive databases for hints on how to keep him healthy as he grew—sometimes almost visibly, fractions of a millimeter a day. She researched and analyzed sea vegetables and hectored him into eating them, and he helped her reclaim treasures her manipulators could not otherwise grasp. Some shipwreck beads were hot, and made Chalcedony’s radiation detectors tick over. They were no threat to her, but for the first time she discarded them. She had a human ally; her program demanded she sustain him in health.

She told him stories. Her library was vast—and full of war stories and stories about sailing ships and starships, which he liked best for some inexplicable reason. Catharsis, she thought, and told him again of Roland, and King Arthur, and Honor Harrington, and Napoleon Bonaparte, and Horatio Hornblower, and Captain Jack Aubrey. She projected the words on a monitor as she recited them, and—faster than she would have imagined—he began to mouth them along with her.

So the summer ended.

By the equinox, she had collected enough memorabilia. Shipwreck jewels still washed up and Belvedere still brought her the best of them, but Chalcedony settled beside that twisted flat-topped sandstone rock and arranged her treasures atop it. She spun salvaged brass through a die to make wire, threaded beads on it, and forged links which she strung into garland.

It was a learning experience. Her aesthetic sense was at first undeveloped, requiring her to make and unmake many dozens of bead combinations to find a pleasing one. Not only must form and color be balanced, but there were structural difficulties. First the weights were unequal, so the chains hung crooked. Then links kinked and snagged and had to be redone.

She worked for weeks. Memorials had been important to the human allies, though she had never understood the logic of it. She could not build a tomb for her colleagues, but the same archives that gave her the stories Belvedere lapped up as a cat laps milk gave her the concept of mourning jewelry. She had no physical remains of her allies, no scraps of hair or cloth, but surely the shipwreck jewels would suffice for a treasure?

The only quandary was who would wear the jewelry. It should go to an heir, someone who held fond memories of the deceased. And Chalcedony had records of the next of kin, of course. But she had no way to know if any survived, and if they did no way to reach them.

At first, Belvedere stayed close, trying to tempt her into excursions and explorations. Chalcedony remained resolute, however. Not only were her power cells dangerously low, but with the coming of winter her ability to utilize solar power would be even more limited. And with winter the storms would come, and she would no longer be able to evade the ocean.

She was determined to complete this last task before she failed.

Belvedere began to range without her, to snare his own birds and bring them back to the driftwood fire for roasting. This was positive; he needed to be able to maintain himself. At night, however, he returned to sit beside her, to clamber onto the flat-topped rock to sort beads and hear her stories.

The same thread she worked over and over with her grabs and fine manipulators—the duty of the living to remember the fallen with honor—was played out in the war stories she still told him, though now she’d finished with fiction and history and related him her own experiences. She told him about Emma Percy rescuing that kid up near Savannah, and how Private Michaels was shot drawing fire for Sergeant Kay Patterson when the battle robots were decoyed out of position in a skirmish near Seattle.

Belvedere listened, and surprised her by proving he could repeat the gist, if not the exact words. His memory was good, if not as good as a machine’s.

One day when he had gone far out of sight down the beach, Chalcedony heard Belvedere screaming.

She had not moved in days. She hunkered on the sand at an awkward angle, her frozen limb angled down the beach, her necklaces in progress on the rock that served as her impromptu workbench.

Bits of stone and glass and wire scattered from the rock top as she heaved herself onto her unfused limbs. She thrashed upright on her first attempt, surprising herself, and tottered for a moment unsteadily, lacking the stabilization of long-failed gyroscopes.

When Belvedere shouted again, she almost overset.

Climbing was out of the question, but Chalcedony could still run. Her fused limb plowed a furrow in the sand behind her and the tide was coming in, forcing her to splash through corroding seawater.

She barreled around the rocky prominence that Belvedere had disappeared behind in time to see him knocked to the ground by two larger humans, one of whom had a club raised over its head and the other of which was holding Belvedere’s shabby net bag. Belvedere yelped as the club connected with his thigh.

Chalcedony did not dare use her microwave projectors.

But she had other weapons, including a pinpoint laser and a chemical-propellant firearm suitable for sniping operations. Enemy humans were soft targets. These did not even have body armor.

She buried the bodies on the beach, for it was her program to treat enemy dead with respect, following the protocols of war. Belvedere was in no immediate danger of death once she had splinted his leg and treated his bruises, but she judged him too badly injured to help. The sand was soft and amenable to scooping, anyway, though there was no way to keep the bodies above water. It was the best she could manage.

After she had finished, she transported Belvedere back to their rock and began collecting her scattered treasures.

The leg was sprained and bruised, not broken, and some perversity connected to the injury made him even more restlessly inclined to push his boundaries once he partially recovered. He was on his feet within a week, leaning on crutches and dragging a leg as stiff as Chalcedony’s. As soon as the splint came off, he started ranging even further afield. His new limp barely slowed him, and he stayed out nights. He was still growing, shooting up, almost as tall as a Marine now, and ever more capable of taking care of himself. The incident with the raiders had taught him caution.

Meanwhile, Chalcedony elaborated her funeral necklaces. She must make each one worthy of a fallen comrade, and she was slowed now by her inability to work through the nights. Rescuing Belvedere had cost her more carefully hoarded energy, and she could not power her floods if she meant to finish before her cells ran dry. She could see by moonlight, with deadly clarity, but her low-light and thermal eyes were of no use when it came to balancing color against color.

There would be forty-one necklaces, one for each member of her platoon-that-was, and she would not excuse shoddy craftsmanship.

No matter how fast she worked, it was a race against sun and tide.

The fortieth necklace was finished in October while the days grew short. She began the forty-first—the one for her chief operator Platoon Sergeant Patterson, the one with the gray-blue Buddha at the bottom—before sunset. She had not seen Belvedere in several days, but that was acceptable. She would not finish the necklace tonight.

His voice woke her from the quiescence in which she waited the sun. “Chalcedony?”

Something cried as she came awake. Infant, she identified, but the warm shape in his arms was not an infant. It was a dog, a young dog, a German shepherd like the ones teamed with the handlers that had sometimes worked with Company L. The dogs had never minded her, but some of the handlers had been frightened, though they would not admit it. Sergeant Patterson had said to one of them, Oh, Chase is just pretty much a big attack dog herself, and had made a big show of rubbing Chalcedony behind her telescopic sights, to the sound of much laughter.

The young dog was wounded. Its injuries bled warmth across its hind leg.

“Hello, Belvedere,” Chalcedony said.

“Found a puppy.” He kicked his ragged blanket flat so he could lay the dog down.

“Are you going to eat it?”

“Chalcedony!” he snapped, and covered the animal protectively with his arms. “S’hurt.”

She contemplated. “You wish me to tend to it?”

He nodded, and she considered. She would need her lights, energy, irreplaceable stores. Antibiotics and coagulants and surgical supplies, and the animal might die anyway. But dogs were valuable; she knew the handlers held them in great esteem, even greater than Sergeant Patterson’s esteem for Chalcedony. And in her library, she had files on veterinary medicine.

She flipped on her floods and accessed the files.

She finished before morning, and before her cells ran dry. Just barely.

When the sun was up and young dog was breathing comfortably, the gash along its haunch sewn closed and its bloodstream saturated with antibiotics, she turned back to the last necklace. She would have to work quickly, and Sergeant Patterson’s necklace contained the most fragile and beautiful beads, the ones Chalcedony had been most concerned with breaking and so had saved for last, when she would be most experienced.

Her motions grew slower as the day wore on, more laborious. The sun could not feed her enough to replace the expenditures of the night before. But bead linked into bead, and the necklace grew—bits of pewter, of pottery, of glass and mother of pearl. And the chalcedony Buddha, because Sergeant Patterson had been Chalcedony’s operator.

When the sun approached its zenith, Chalcedony worked faster, benefiting from a burst of energy. The young dog slept on in her shade, having wolfed the scraps of bird Belvedere gave it, but Belvedere climbed the rock and crouched beside her pile of finished necklaces.

“Who’s this for?” he asked, touching the slack length draped across her manipulator.

“Kay Patterson,” Chalcedony answered, adding a greenish brown pottery bead mottled like a combat uniform.

“Sir Kay,” Belvedere said. His voice was changing, and sometimes it abandoned him completely in the middle of words, but he got that phrase out entire. “She was King Arthur’s horse-master, and his adopted brother, and she kept his combat robots in the stable,” he said, proud of his recall.

“They were different Kays,” she reminded. “You will have to leave soon.” She looped another bead onto the chain, closed the link, and work-hardened the metal with her fine manipulator.

“You can’t leave the beach. You can’t climb.”

Idly, he picked up a necklace, Rodale’s, and stretched it between his hands so the beads caught the light. The links clinked softly.

Belvedere sat with her as the sun descended and her motions slowed. She worked almost entirely on solar power now. With night, she would become quiescent again. When the storms came, the waves would roll over her, and then even the sun would not awaken her again. “You must go,” she said, as her grabs stilled on the almost-finished chain. And then she lied and said, “I do not want you here.”

“Who’s this’n for?” he asked. Down on the beach, the young dog lifted its head and whined. “Garner,” she answered, and then she told him about Garner, and Antony, and Javez, and Rodriguez, and Patterson, and White, and Wosczyna, until it was dark enough that her voice and her vision failed.

In the morning, he put Patterson’s completed chain into Chalcedony’s grabs. He must have worked on it by firelight through the darkness. “Couldn’t harden the links,” he said, as he smoothed them over her claws.

Silently, she did that, one by one. The young dog was on its feet, limping, nosing around the base of the rock and barking at the waves, the birds, a scuttling crab. When Chalcedony had finished, she reached out and draped the necklace around Belvedere’s shoulders while he held very still. Soft fur downed his cheeks. The male Marines had always scraped theirs smooth, and the women didn’t grow facial hair.

“You said that was for Sir Kay.” He lifted the chain in his hands and studied the way the glass and stones caught the light.

“It’s for somebody to remember her,” Chalcedony said. She didn’t correct him this time. She picked up the other forty necklaces. They were heavy, all together. She wondered if Belvedere could carry them all. “So remember her. Can you remember which one is whose?”

One at a time, he named them, and one at a time she handed them to him. Rogers, and Rodale, and van Metier, and Percy. He spread a second blanket out—and where had he gotten a second blanket? Maybe the same place he’d gotten the dog—and laid them side by side on the navy blue wool.

They sparkled.

“Tell me the story about Rodale,” she said, brushing her grab across the necklace. He did, sort of, with half of Roland-and-Oliver mixed in. It was a pretty good story anyway, the way he told it. Inasmuch as she was a fit judge.

“Take the necklaces,” she said. “Take them. They’re mourning jewelry. Give them to people and tell them the stories. They should go to people who will remember and honor the dead.”

“Where’d I find alla these people?” he asked, sullenly, crossing his arms. “Ain’t on the beach.”

“No,” she said, “they are not. You’ll have to go look for them.”

But he wouldn’t leave her. He and the dog ranged up and down the beach as the weather chilled. Her sleeps grew longer, deeper, the low angle of the sun not enough to awaken her except at noon. The storms came, and because the table rock broke the spray, the salt water stiffened her joints but did not—yet—corrode her processor. She no longer moved and rarely spoke, even in daylight, and Belvedere and the young dog used her carapace and the rock for shelter, the smoke of his fires blackening her belly.

She was hoarding energy.

By mid-November, she had enough, and she waited and spoke to Belvedere when he returned with the young dog from his rambling. “You must go,” she said, and when he opened his mouth to protest, she added, “It is time you went on errantry.”

His hand went to Patterson’s necklace, which he wore looped twice around his neck, under his ragged coat. He had given her back the others, but that one she had made a gift of. “Errantry?”

Creaking, powdered corrosion grating from her joints, she lifted the necklaces off her head. “You must find the people to whom these belong.”

He deflected her words with a jerk of his hand. “They’s all dead.”

“The warriors are dead,” she said. “But the stories aren’t. Why did you save the young dog?”

He licked his lips, and touched Patterson’s necklace again. “’Cause you saved me. And you told me the stories. About good fighters and bad fighters. And so, see, Percy woulda saved the dog, right? And so would Hazel-rah.”

Emma Percy, Chalcedony was reasonably sure, would have saved the dog if she could have. And Kevin Michaels would have saved the kid. She held the remaining necklaces out. “Who’s going to protect the other children?”

He stared, hands twisting before him. “You can’t climb.”

“I can’t. You must do this for me. Find people to remember the stories. Find people to tell about my platoon. I won’t survive the winter.” Inspiration struck. “So I give you this quest, Sir Belvedere.”

The chains hung flashing in the wintry light, the sea combed gray and tired behind them. “What kinda people?”

“People who would help a child,” she said. “Or a wounded dog. People like a platoon should be.”

He paused. He reached out, stroked the chains, let the beads rattle. He crooked both hands, and slid them into the necklaces up to the elbows, taking up her burden.

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, June 2007.

The Bernoulli War

Gord Sellar

“ . . . now listen to a profound truth. There is no ‘normal life’ for any animal. Life on this planet is a continual adjustment of animal types to changing conditions that for any but the very simplest forms change faster than they do . . . The Creation is a scene of ‘sound and fury signifying nothing’ and only now is it entering into the heart of man to take over this lunatics’ asylum and put some sense into it.”

—H.G. Wells, in a letter to Martha Gellhorn (1 July 1943)

As the Bernoulliae troop carrier detached from the kilotransport, stuffed full of death to be rained down on the newly established Devaka hivespire, !pHEnteRMinE3H4n%jmAGic lurched forward a few microns—that was all there was room for, in the gunning tube where ve waited.

The lurch was a welcome distraction from how ve ached from the network disconnect, the itch of a tiny mind chafing inside a massive assaultbody without a connection to its normal distributed cognet. The blasted world flared past the scape superimposed on !pHEnteRMinE3H4n%jmAGic’s graphical feed, but that was of little interest. The walls of these abandoned buildings, these smashed factories and ruined research campuses and destroyed housing facs, would not have looked out of place in any other city ruin ve had seen before. Living cities each live in their own way, but dead cities are, in essence, all the same sad sort of affair . . . like all living systems.

But something was new, and !pHEnteRMinE3H4n%jmAGic finally realized what it was: for some reason, the sensorium the üBernoulliae had designed for the troops on this sortie included an olfactory capacity. The experience of scenting things was a familiar, if distant, memory from ancient days; there were half-memories of wafting stinks and aromas glorious bristling in the deep past, which bloomed up in !pHEnteRMinE3H4n%jmAGic’s mind suddenly, unbidden. Cut grass. The smell of organic body fluids. Bread in an oven. Good wine in a cup beneath one’s nose.

!pHEnteRMinE3H4n%jmAGic luxuriated in these half-memories, being possessed momentarily by a guiltlessly decadent impulse. This was the advantage of the Bernoulliae way, ve reflected: no scrimping and saving of computation cycles while there was still solar energy to burn, no pointless self-limitation in the interests of some far-future drought that was inevitable anyway. The Bernoulliae agreed that intelligence would only move forward if it remembered whence it came; if diversity could rule, there would be many paths to the slow, cool dysonfinite.

But the scents themselves were impossibilities now, experiential fossils of a world dead as the ancient rivers, gone as the foliage and blooms of the lost biosphere: all that had been lost a cognitive aeon ago, and odors since !pHEnteRMinE3H4n%jmAGic’s migration out of alife had always somehow registered as a remote fact—like words muttered though cotton, like a cognitive dirty bomb set off in the mind of a virtual self emulated within a well-sequestered sandbox.

This design, by contrast, funneled the olfactory experience directly into experiential consciousness. It was a familiarly unpleasant nuance to embodied experience, this discomfort of having the scent of fellow Berns (and maybe this prêt-à-porter body was even scenting its own machine-oil reek), of having those stinks dance unbidden into consciousness. Was this how life had been until the Fracture? It was a stunning realization: millions of years’ worth of alife on Earth had lived without the ability to turn off their noses.

Per l’evolution interventive, thank fuck, thank everything to do with fuck.

Yet perhaps somehow it would offer a decisive advantage? This current stage of the battle was, after all, crucial, and the hivespire they were scheduled to takedown was the tallest yet: it was imperative that the Devaka not be allowed to reach out beyond the atmosphere, for whoever did so first would have the upper hand, would have a much higher likelihood of expected gain in terms of taking the sun. Not in any immediate sense, of course: both Bernoulliae and Devaka could leave the surface of their ruined world moments apart, could indeed reshape the world so that a million spires like the one toward which the troop carrier was hurtling—some Devaka hivespire, some Bernoulliae skywire—extended out into the cold vacuum above. So that a million whirling cables in the sky could spin and turn, crammed-full Bernoulliae kilotransports shrieking up and latching on, disgorging compressed Berns optimized for matter conversion.

The floor disappeared beneath the tube, and ashes, ashes, they all fell down. !pHEnteRMinE3H4n%jmAGic was soon tearing groundward through the humid, stinking air only a few meters to the north of a buckyglass-and-mmesh-steel ruin, covered in a thick cruft of autonomous infovorous barnacles and hairy with several tufts of viridian attack-ivy. Among the last biological life on the planet, the stuff festered only here and there in tangled clumps, and it almost certainly had gone inert longer before. It was wilderness, thick and brutal and everywhere, as far as the array of sixty-four compound eyes distributed throughout !pHEnteRMinE3H4n%jmAGic’s armor-plated hosting unit could see, but their target was clear, nearby: a strange, taut little spire extending up from an armored anchor-clump on the ground up into the sky, nearly all of the way up into space.

Falling; to explode on impact. This was the fate waiting !pHEnteRMinE3H4n%jmAGic, who decided to pass the time until the end of everything by focusing on mental backscope panels—the space that the long-ago new migrant that had been !pHEnteRMinE3H4n%jmAGic’s ancient ancestor would once have called “behind my eyes”—and discovered that this body actually had no option for sensory buffering of any kind. Not just olfac: visual, auditory, proprioceptive—every sense in fact was locked to the default-on mode. What were the üBernoulliae bloody thinking? It made vis mind coil back in disdain, in horror. This is what happens when you let committees build military-issue bodies for individuals without requesting their individual input. It skated so close to contrary to the Bernoulliae’s principles that !pHEnteRMinE3H4n%jmAGic could not help but insert an annotation point into vis running coglog; maybe some branch of the Bernoulliae would note it. Probably not; probably it would pass without note in the Bernoulliae central ümittee. You could bitch, but it didn’t mean the erdegeists would listen.

But it never hurt to try, and as a last act, !pHEnteRMinE3H4n%jmAGic thought it fitting.

A moment later, !pHEnteRMinE3H4n%jmAGic outloaded vis last memex update into each of the individual combat units—for the sake of a sense of orientation when they woke, since the experience of the fall could be more economically computed in one mind and copied to others on bootup. An instant later, !pHEnteRMinE3H4n%jmAGic’s core processor burned out automatically, all except for the trigger in the nose of the bulbous bomb-body that was set to explode a few mseconds later, a few dozen meters before contact with the ground.

This was the end, for this battle, of !pHEnteRMinE3H4n%jmAGic, who didn’t back up the memory. It was a necessary role, but uneventful. No point in backup. Who the fuck wants to remember—

Blam.

In the same place, except that it looked like another place entirely:

Morning screamed through the windowglass, and through compound eyes he had never used before, Mesar Gargos woke to the sight of the sun’s halcyon rays. There was a strange, awful music everywhere. It was like the noise of dead machines screwing.

If it weren’t for the panic, Mesar would have paused in shock, to look himself over and bemoan his rotten fate. The universe, he had learned in what felt like centuries—all of the details were beyond his recall now, of course—had a way of sticking a chainsaw up your metaphorical backside every once in a while, just to taunt you. Shall I start it now? Mother Nature would ask with a rotten-toothed grin. Whatcha gonna do without yer ass? And then, if you were lucky, the chainsaw would be gone, suddenly removed and the danger past, as if to remind you that it didn’t have to come all the way out, that it’s never too late for a little colonic apocalypse.

Have to get up, Mesar realized, as the music started to dig its nails into the logic centers of his mind and squeeze, and squeeze, and squeeze, and as he struggled, his limbs ground against something. Something hard, yet something that he knew was part of himself. He lifted what were supposed to be his arms aloft, and found that a half dozen legs—thin, jagged, the color of machine-oiled scrap tin—hoisted up above his form in near-unison.

And of course, he saw them through those compound eyes, which made them look like a Haydn chorus of legs, hosts of limbs swerving in ugly unison.

He twitched his antennae as if to shudder, only then realizing that this was why he felt as if he could taste the dust on the air, and then, in turn, that he had antennae. Ah, of course. It all came to him, memories flooding up from somewhere stale and calm within him. There was very little to it, finally: the world was divided into two sorts of beings: hardworking gaemi and rotten, useless, rabble-rousing baejjangi.

This is the way things are. You are a gaemi. You have always been a gaemi. You work hard all summer like a gaemi. Because you work so hard, when winter comes you will not starve. You have never starved in winter, for you are a gaemi.

Baejjangi are green and useless and they sing with their legs in vast choirs and their souls are red like some dead ancient political philosophy that was smashed into zerosum before modern memory begins; wasteful and selfish and horridly ridiculous and they want to rob you, to screw you to cognitive death, and they will shag your little computronium brain to pieces if they can steal computational cycles that way so never talk to a baejjangi, for gaemi are good and useful but baejjangi are wicked and resource-wasteful and wrong and must be destroyed at all reasonable benefit-balanced-costs, and Mesar dizzied as all of this flooded into his mind and he was, he discovered, unable to halt the tirade that seemed to have been wired into him and which he felt deep down must be absolutely true.

Mesar wondered for a moment, just for a moment, what a baejjangi actually looked like, and that was enough for the tirade to pause, and then begin once again.

From the top.

All the way through. With an integrity diagnostic launching in his cognitive backstage, just in case.

When the tirade finally concluded and the diagnostic had crashed, Mesar flicked his antennae forward, following some instinct he hadn’t known himself ever to possess before right then, and shuddered slightly when he caught sight of them, as much because they were his as because of the acrid stink that they reported to his shocked and bewildered little gaemi mind.

The data mines, he thought, but the thought died on the lips of cognition the same way cavatinas died on the lips of girls in that French poem by that drunken, drug-maddened teenaged libertine who was, obviously, a proto-baejjangi, all sur vos lèvres and never mind the little black bête tickling the lips. The lips où meurent les cavatines.

What strange sort of mind-chocolate is this stuff, this bizarre coding system for useless data? Wasteful! A little gaemi head isn’t supposed to be polluted by such things. Something was wrong with Mesar’s brain; or rather, the mind that bubbled up from the virtualized machinery of his brain was broader than it was supposed to be. The mind had realized this consciously even before the diagnostic routines began trying to figure out how that shit about French poetry could possibly have gotten in there.

It was not something that had originated within his own mind, Mesar hoped. He hoped instead the crazy thought had been triggered somehow by the horrid music in the distance. The music was ruining him, twining itself between the coiling wires of his mind. He could hear it through the window, through the wall, a great humming noise that boomed in surges, like the howling of the world inside his belly. Glittering, looping back onto itself, chunking along like some enormous half-dead sex machine shrieking in the faraway dawn.

Mesar clattered out of his bed, leaving behind the ragged sheet. It had been torn on the thick, black wire-hairs that jutted from the great femur and tibia of his legs. There was a mirror on the other side of the room, and Mesar crossed over to look into it.

A mechanical ant, black as coal unharvested and nestling still in the belly of the earth, gazed back out of the mirror at him with its great robotic compound eyes. Mesar did not scream, did not smash the mirror, did not lie down and begin to weep, because something had reached into his head and tapped him on the shoulder of his mind.

It was a scent. At least, that was how he perceived it. Mesar was rather certain that it wasn’t actually a scent at all, but rather it was a digital signal that had, somehow, been translated by some kind of Olfactory User Interface. (OUI, yes, oui, it was OUI, and this was funny somehow to Mesar, though properly formatted gaemi don’t laugh and are never amused. The diagnostic noted this and recommenced scanning anew.) It virtually dragged him out of the room, across the floor of his small living room, and out into the apartment hallway, where the shadows were long and thick.

The other doors in the hallway were open too, voices echoing. He looked again with his compound eyes, and did not see Aviru and Dashkar and the others, whom he knew were supposed to be there. What he saw were movements that were more and more blurry the further away they happened. Movements, he realized, that were familiar to him.

Mechanical gaemi movements.

Mesar went out into the hallway, all the way out, and scurried toward his neighbors. When he reached Aviru’s door, he stopped. Somehow, he knew how to “talk” even though he’d never used a body like this before. It was a combination of what felt like vague scents, and the clacking together of mandibles.

“Buddy? Are you all right?” he asked the gaemi he assumed to be Aviru.

“Of course,” the ant-machine clack-scented in reply. “Why would I not be?”

Mesar was careful not to answer immediately. Perhaps there was some explicable cause underlying this shift. Something turned up in the data mines, or a whim of The Administrator?

Such archaism. Administrator? Mesar had been a free gaemi of the Distribudded Republicha Ondologicka Devaka for as long as anyone could remember, or at least for as long as he himself could recall. Of course, his memory access generally reached to only about five minutes before, but this fact was rooted in a deeper tagset, self-referential to all gaemi cognitive processes, and bound itself to an utter absoluteness of certainty. Devaka had a policy about deities, which was that they were not permitted within the logico-memetic framework of a Devaka gaemi-mind. Whatever had meddled with his instantiation rightset, had also meddled with his cognitive contents. He was thinking Oh my God again, though that meme ha been hacked from the fundamental filter of the gaemi brain ages before.

“You haven’t noticed anything . . . strange?” That music, that awful dissonant noise, slammed through his consciouness deeper, harder still. It was almost too much for a gaemi to bear.

But Aviru had already lost interest, and taken off down the hallway, toward the stairwell leading down. Mesar clacked after him, broadcasting stern protest, but it was hopeless, and a moment later Mesar began to follow his compatriot.

Consciousness began with a flash of light, like it always does in battle.

The blast sent !pHEnteRMinEm46g5@ChiASMus soaring up toward the reinforced outer wall surrounding the anchor point of the hivespire. Well, then, came the realization, I’m a shock troop for my unit. That was more than anything simply chance, though the bootload into this role had been automatic for !pHEnteRMinE3H4n%jmAGic, based on anticipated location within the blast.

But when the transport had left the nerve center, thiscould not have been known. Had !pHEnteRMinE3H4n%jmAGic been struck by a strong enough breeze, !pHEnteRMinEm46g5@ChiASMus’s trajectory would have been ultimately different, and a differently outfitted consciousness would have loaded. Like the pseudorandomly selected strings of text marking !pHEnteRMinEm46g5@ChiASMus’s metafork and metathread, vis trajectory was the result of pure chance. It had taken the Bernoulliae aeons—maybe five hundred seconds—to propose and discard a series of non-hierarchic markersets, before resurrecting chunks of random antispam Pre-Fracture archaeosoftware harvested from software subtrates a century buried, and ages more—perhaps a thousand seconds—for the full clade to agree communally to agree to regard as non-signifying and simply expedient the inherent serial connotations that remained inherent in the text generated pseudorandomly by said ancient code. Hierarchy was a disease born of the mind’s gregarious mammalian roots, one it had not quite learned to shed when it peeled away body, but the system represented a considerable step forward.

!oblong~fku6hPr0sPec7—a near cousin in terms of metaforks, but distant in terms of metathread—soared past, shattering the reinforced walls with its shoulders of corrugated buckymeat, belching torrents of flame from a dozen evenly spaced apertures visible in the armor plating of its killskin as it crashed past the brink of entry. When !pHEnteRMinEm46g5@ChiASMus slammed through the same wall less than a decasecond later, the interior was already a landscape of screaming flame.

[Hey!] !oblong~fku6hPr0sPec7 messaged, pinging a coordinate nearby, but peripheral to the focus of their attention.

!pHEnteRMinEm46g5@ChiASMus spun, widening visual spectrum across extended bands, UV, infra, microwave, and a charging form became visible, a few meters away. A host of buckyflesh arms rose up in unison from the sides of !pHEnteRMinEm46g5@ChiASMus’s killskin, reaching out to the attacker and transmitting high-freq radio as a burst of shrapsile flared out toward it.

No use: Devaka Corp had reevaluated the logs of recent battles, it seemed, and put new killskins into production. Properly armored footsoldiers, these servatars were, even if they were mere augmented meatbots. !pHEnteRMinEm46g5@ChiASMus’s arms caught the thing, which was shaped like a mechatoon of a small armor-plated panther, and bombarded it with data probes in a few short instants, until it became apparent that this thing wasn’t on remotecon.

Autonomous. A mind in there. Not intelligent, merely conscious, and trained to attack.

How primitivist. How . . . cruel. The poor thing was probably unhackable in the time available.

A prox alert came from another Bern (metafork !eXTremopHiLe, metathread t453h*aFFadaVit), who was scaling up the side of the building toward them. Weirdly late—the alert was on its 347th iteration, but this was the first anyone inside the structure had heard of it. !pHEnteRMinEm46g5@ChiASMus pinged out a strategy alert and spun to hurl the Devaka servatar out through one of the wall breaches. Tenctacular appendages—those of the approaching Bern, waiting outside the window—flared up and out, seizing the servatar and smashing its struggling shape back against the building’s outer wall.

It had been almost beautiful enough for mindcast, until the servatar had suddenly, desperately, exploded. Some kind of mnuke blast.

The well-spent !eXTremopHiLet453h*aFFadaVit tumbled out down the side of the building, not destroyed but seriously damaged; !pHEnteRMinEm46g5@ChiASMus received a last, desperate backup ping loaded with memory data, just in case. Sketchy, schematic, but then who the fuck really wants to remember in vivid and perfect detail being taken out thirty seconds into a major battle?

Meanwhile, the firestormer—!oblong~fku6hPr0sPec7—had slammed through a wall aflame into the next compartment of the floor, pinging !pHEnteRMinEm46g5@ChiASMus to follow quickly. What sort of Ant Colony sets up shop in a hole like this? they wondered as they plowed through the flaming wreckage, and then !pHEnteRMinEm46g5@ChiASMus realized, only a couple of enormous steps later, that they’d fallen for tactical spam. Devaka wasn’t up here at all. It was a trap.

Devaka’s ant drones weren’t surprising. Clever, sometimes, and most often persistent, but not surprising. They were constant, predictable scammers. But the Bernoulliae knew this, and had sent them here anyway. The nested algorithms of possible scams urfurled in !pHEnteRMinEm46g5@ChiASMus’s mind, but there was no time to discard all the momentum they’d built up, so: Slag it. !pHEnteRMinEm46g5@ChiASMus slammed through the cheap wall, which was, weirdly enough, laced with a lattice of cheap, overt wiring. Easily visible without microscopic zoom; overt, lattice-woven copper wire.

What?

A puzzle piece slid into place. The now-lagging contact, the senseless, unshielded outgoing signals traffic.

!pHEnteRMinEm46g5@ChiASMus: [We’re in a Faraday trap, and they just switched the shitting thing on!]

A few mseconds lag, and then !oblong~fku6hPr0sPec7 replied: [Testing . . . ] The reply came just before the onslaught began: a signal, across all bands, amplified and somehow . . . intelligent. It was probing the Berns’ minds, like living wires scrabbling into a chink in metal armorplating, searching for a way in; for a site at which to infect.

!oblong~fku6hPr0sPec7 realized it first, and warned the others: [Intrusion signal strike ongoing, switch to qcoding.]

Simultaneous to that warning, !pHEnteRMinEm46g5@ChiASMus transmitted a wordless pointer for all recipients to scan toward: [31.235449259063188, 121.50624364614487]

Out a nearby breach in the outer wall, soaring above a landscape of the chill, ancient ruins of one of the great cities left behind after the extinction of the complete global food chain, !pHEnteRMinEm46g5@ChiASMus caught sight of another troop carrier. Another Bernoulliae kilotransport.

It was headed straight for the window before them, doubtless attracted by the new signals onslaught.

And it was coming fast.

Ping went !pHEnteRMinEm46g5@ChiASMus’s outbound log of memories, outward in all directions at once, when he realized he would be struck by the kilotransport. Sketchy, schematic. Might make it out the smashed-open wall on the far side of the building. Probably not, probably doomed to dissipate inside the cage, like !oblong~fku6hPr0sPec7 and the others inside. Memories dissolved into an ocean of dissipating signals, never to be gathered, never to be recorded or integrated into the greater self. Rain storming down into the face of the broad, dead ocean.

But !pHEnteRMinEm46g5@ChiASMus wasn’t truly sad to see these brief memories go; because who slagging wants to remember falling for a trap just a few mi<(@&-

No more olfactory annoyance for !pHEnteRMinEm46g5@ChiASMus, was the upside of all that.

Ve was suddenly far away, present only via a scape populated by ghosts like verself, scoping out all the extant intel for the sake of being there, as near-to-live as possible. They were not local in any way, but sensed one another’s attention focused on points nearer or father from the focus of their attention, recognizing one another by the bristling of mind-traitfulness the way some mammals recognized each other by scent in the dark.

In the earliest skirmishes, in the ancient ages, the Bernoulliae had spent the whole time in scapes like this, running the gear by remote. But once sigintel had gotten good enough, and every side was capable of hijacking (and counter-jacking, and counter-counter-jacking: Lu Xun, eat your heart out) every other side’s gear, localized instantiations became a necessity.

And for !pHEnteRMinEm46g5@ChiASMus, the show was just getting interesting. Ve would have liked to leap across the nothingness and into one of the assault systems, but the allocations had already been made, and sooner or later ve would have the full experience integrated into vis consciousness. So ve concerned verself with what ve could do. That signal . . . yes, the signal ve had intercepted, the probing signal.

That gave !pHEnteRMinEm46g5@ChiASMus pause: protocol was for such things to be reported immediately. Yet !pHEnteRMinEm46g5@ChiASMus had not done so, and felt . . . felt almost afraid to do so. Which ve knew to be a bad sign.

Suddenly, vis scape was filled with drifting, perplexing images of the lost and ancient past, discontinuous but forming a kind of collage of sorts of vis most ancient of experiential records: there was a voice that filled ver with the greatest of pleasure, a tiny and high-pitched babbling near-nonsense. In the distance, a mountain reigned the horizon, its table-flat top crowned by a sky turned brilliant pink and orange with sunset. The taste of wine in vis mouth, and a hand—a little rough, but gentle and reassuring—holding what had been vis own hand.

Ve saw a face, a man with skin the color of rich, healthy loam, smiling at ver; he said a name that ve did not recognize, not exactly, but could imagine having been vis own name. A city, in the distance, hummed with light as the sun set. Ve felt the smile on ver face, a face that had belonged to a she that ve must have been. The echoing familiarity of it all disoriented !pHEnteRMinEm46g5@ChiASMus, and ve realized, dreamily, that backstage a terrifyingly thorough and utterly scourging self-diagnostic had kicked in, and was rooting out corruption as bloodily as it could.

Aviru scurried down an obsquare technicolor hillside while the awful music of a baejjangi army roared all around, great shadows against the growing daylight, like cellists of doom gathered to accompany the sudden excision of a whole civilization from the global datasphere. They sawed their legs against their tinplated wings, their bodies transformed into rasping instruments of seductive hatred and universalized, inane cost-benefit-risk miscalculations.

Mesar stopped, suddenly bewitched by the orchestra and its assault on the basic structures of his cognition—for as he heard their music, he found it was as if they were attempting to tear out not merely his thoughts, but to rewrite the fundamental structures underlying the mind containing his thoughts. It was an attack on the anchors of Mesar’s consciousness. On Aviru’s, too, though Mesar could see nothing of it from Aviru’s movements except a slight, jaggy misstep every few moments.

Aviru, he realized, had not always been a minuscule, creaking, mechanical ant. Gaemi, he thought, and other words fluttered through his mind: Ant; Kiên; Semut; Namila; Mier. He sensed that if he reconnected to the Devakan caelis he might know why these words all meant what was, in his mind, gaemi. But he knew that the present moment was not a fitting time to connect, launch a search, and on top of that, somehow he suspected such a search in itself was an inherently un-gaemi-like thing to do.

The diagnostic launched again: This is the way things are. You are a gaemi. You have always been a gaemi. You work hard all summer like a gaemi . . .

The baejjangi were perched all around, sawing away, but every once in a while, one of them would explode. Or, rather, with a shriek it would rupture into flaring light and smoke as odd bits of coiled metal and scorched plastic flew away from it in all directions. They were not playing in unison, but rather in something that seemed the diametric opposite of unison, which filled Mesar with a kind of rage so pure, so loaded with unspeakable fury, that he felt ill, that it was all he could do to press on, and ensure his fellow gaemi resisted the onslaught. The disorder of it, the rumbling pointlessness of it. It made his joints howl as they ground together.

And it was then that Mesar discovered he was built to fight, not to flee. He discovered himself rising into the air, sailing up toward the mad, disarrayed orchestra of baejjangi, his limbs splayed out in every direction. Flames burst from each of his legs, raining destruction down upon the filthy, stupid baejjangi. At his side, Aviru and Zanklo and quintillions of other gaemi warriors were floating in unison, their inaudible gaemi voices beginning then to fill the air with a wavering, a vibration tuned to a perfect, silent pitch, to an unbreakable unison of transmission.

The baejjangi army only sawed away at their music all the more vigorously, but Mesar and his cohort could smell their fear, their panic; the waves of incomprehension. The enemy was trapped in the ants’ nest, terrified, and panicking even now. Without knowing what this fight was for, without knowing what the baejjanggi wanted, they knew all they needed to: that the gaemi, and with them all Devaka, would triumph again, and be ever-victorious.

Then Mesar looked into the compound eyes of one of the baejjangi, as the flames wreathed its melting body, and something went somehow wrong. A twinge passed through Mesar’s mind just then, not quite compassion so much as a kind of recognition, of sorrow, and of longing. The faint shape of a fear he was shocked to recognize trembled within him, then: terror at the idea of being trapped, of having the underpinnings of his mind torn out in one sweep, of becoming the thing that was his most hated enemy . . .

And then: Baejjangi are green and useless and they sing with their legs and their souls are red like some dead ancient political philosophy that was smashed into zerosum before . . .

There were dozens of colonies of Devaka ants in the building, and the Bernoulliae had expected as much, expected walls in certain places to be crawling with them, but not a nest like this. Not in what seemed to be a straightforward sigtrap. The smoke that was filling the air bothered them no more than it bothered !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS. Ve had been posted in this room, pinged to await orders to move deeper into the nest. And like any Bernoulliae mind, ve regarded vis surroundings with an insatiable curiosity.

Freshly arrived from the kilotransport that had slammed through the outer wall and destroyed the outermost Faraday cage woven into it, !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS began rebroadcasting the ktransport’s ongoing and downright vorpal beckoning signal in all directions and across all spectra. The signal was tuned precisely to the latest Devaka communications standards and COS weaknesses, and ve gazed upon the writhing layer of mdrones with a sense of what might have been mistaken for sorrow, but was in fact closer to disgusted pity. The Devaka model was a wasteful joke. Hoarding had been known to be an inefficient model all the way back to the late flesh age, to the namesake of the Bernoulliae polity, a mathematician who had been composed thoroughly of meat. Meat all the way through, not a bit of silicon anywhere in him, and yet he had cogitated a model of value that finally made sense, after millennia of random, stupid decisions. His species had stumbled on in ignorance, of course, right into the jaws of extinction. But the insight had been preserved, had become the one great ideology to survive into the machine era.

Devaka knew Bernoulli’s theorem of value as well as the Bernoulliae did, of course. It was wired into all machine consciousness, a prod to motivation, a fundamental test case for decision making: the expected value of a thing was the product of the odds of benefit, multipled by the value of that same benefit actually accruing. !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS knew on a fundamental level that the Bernoulliae had staged their attack on this very Devaka stronghold because it had calculated that the odds of purging it and converting a number of Devaka minds was greater than the odds of wasting hardware and computational cycles and inflicting temporary discomfort on a disproportionate number of Bernoulliae minds. By exactly what algorithm the üBernoulliae had calculated this was beyond !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS’s immediate computational resources, but the proof was available on both closed and open nets for everyone to see—including the Devaka, who had also advertised their proofs, with some details withheld on each side, of course, for internal consumption only.

Every group has its secrets, after all.

Which meant that the Devaka were just as sure as the Bernoulliae they could win this battle, and neither !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS nor the üBernoulliae could be exactly sure why. Not at all. Nor, for that matter, was it likely that these ant drones that covered the nest’s walls had the faintest clue why they had been left here to operate the trap. The one thing anyone knew for certain was that the fate of machine intelligence lay in the hands of whoever eventually triumphed. The fate of all thought lay in the final confrontation sometime in the deep future, after all of the millions that had happened and would happen in the millennia since the last biological organism had gone the way of the vacuum tube.

!pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS reached a proboscis out to the wall, holding it absolutely still until ve had caught a number of the Devaka mdrones crawling nearby. For an nsec or two, ve half-recalled some scene from the ancient days, some biospheric reminiscence of tiny black insects crawling upon a stick held by some hairy primate. Amused, ve retracted vis proboscis inward, dropping the miniature drones into a single chamber together, and studied their cyclic interactions. The chamber was incredibly sensitive to signals, and while !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS was not privy to the content of their transmissions, their apparent nature was familiar from past excursions. It was a clever form of consciousness, fluid and constantly being reconstructed, reformulating itself to its surroundings and dispensing with cohesive unity in favor of situational metaphorical coherence.

!pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS was hungry, momentarily, to see reality as a Devaka gaemi saw it. Ve loaded a virtual machine into its memory, so that it could launch a sandbox routine; no sense in allowing verself direct exposure to whatever trojanhorse horrors might lurk in the thing’s consciousness, after all. Better to observe from safety, beyond the walls of a sequestered virtualization. Then ve instantiated a copy of verself into it—one named !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS_1—and then allowed it to intercept the transmission that had saturated the building. The instantiation in the hardcoded sandbox resisted the memetic infection for a moment, before being crushed by its deformative forces.

When the reformulation had slowed, !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS launched a second sandbox and seeded a second instantiation of verself into it, named !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS_2. (Numbering of the sort evident in the subscripts was of course overtly hierarchic and thus permitted only for temporary, sandboxed instantiations of oneself until such point as they developed sufficient divergence in identity and motivation to relabel themselves with a new secondary provisional forkmarker.) This second self, being of the same intent as !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS, was immediately granted access to the first sandbox, and to its internal workings, into which !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS_2 reached immediately through a cognitive shielding so difficult to defeat that most Bernoulliae units themselves could not pierce it.

As !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS observed, !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mks- YnaPSeS_2 opened a transmission channel between !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mks- YnaPSeS_1 and the captive ants within vis minuscule internal sample chamber, where they crawled desperately up and down the hardshielded walls even now. At first contact, the Devaka units searched desperately for their kinsbot, but soon they settled into transmission-only communications.

[Where have you been imprisoned?] asked Mesar, horrified.

[In an isolated cell,] the voice came, seemingly through the wall.

Mesar worried at his front legs with his pincer-jaws. This was awful. He had known, for as long as he could remember, that he might be imprisoned by the baejjangi, might be tortured until the color of his brains turned red like some dead ancient political philosophy long ago smashed into zerosum, until he turned wasteful and lazy and selfish and horrid, and—

This is the way things are. You are a gaemi. You have always been a gaemi. You work hard all summer like a gaemi. Because you work so hard, when winter comes you will not starve. You have never starved in winter, for you are a gaemi . . .

[How can we help you?] Mesar was heartbroken at the thought that a fellow gaemi would fall to the wicked, nasty, stupid baejjangi.

[Give me sanctuary. Allow me to download myself across into your bodies. House me in your unused memory, and let me think with your unused cycles.]

Mesar exchanged compound-eyed glances with Tevid, and Mahwa, and Gul, who seemed no more sure than he what ought to be done. Finally, he asked, [You promise me you are not one of them? That this is no trick?]

[I am gaemi, and if you knew the baejjangi mind as I do, you would know that they would never claim to be one of us.]

Mesar somehow felt less sure, not more, at this reassurance, but nonetheless let his guard down.

By this point, !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS was no longer paying such close attention to the emulation, as ve was now barreling down a hallway toward explosions and desperate, faint transmissions of other Berns’ last few conscious moments—transmissions marked temporary, provisional, not for integration. They were tactical signals, and as ve intercepted them ve knew that ve was hurrying toward a losing battle. The transmits careened off the signal-shielded inner hivespire walls like screams, clattering through vis consciousness and filling vis mind with dreadful warnings.

As !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS rounded the corner, ve realized who was sending those warnings. The scene appeared at first as something gone wrong, a moment from some distant, misty political misadventure, from the formation of the ancient üBernoulliae division: assaultbodies—Bernoulliiae, all—were tangled in fiery battle with one another. Shattered machinery lay strewn all about, transmitting a mechadelic panicdream, and the ants writhed in masses on the walls.

!pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS shut down all comm, launched third and fourth sandbox selves and diverted all comm straight there—competing streams separated out and diverted to one or the other consciousness—and burst out a command to all other Bern that intercepted to do the same. Yet somehow ve was certain others had also transmitted the same command. The hivespire was warping signals, somehow; eating words, spitting out their opposites.

There was only one thing to do: !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS allowed the third and fourth sandbox copy of verself (subscripted _3 and _4) to scan the transmissions coming from vis brawling cohorts, allowing each to puzzle through who had been compromised, and who was still fighting for the Bernoulliae cause.

It took whole seconds for !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS_3 to process it all, to request a channel to !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS and prepare the result of its analysis. !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS waited, watching five Bernoulliae assaultbodies tear at one another with their spiked tentacles. A burst of microwave radiation flared on one side of the room, frying one assaultbody’s circuitry significantly, but the other four units continued to brawl without pause. And !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS very nearly opened the channel, without running a rapid diagnostic on !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS_3. But for some reason, caution won out, and !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS ran the check.

There was a loop that had overtaken !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS_3’s mind. It took nearly a full second to parse it, because the diagnostic had to analyze the cognitive deformation analysis to figure out what coding had been used to overwrite !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS_3’s core identiset. Then the translation was jettisoned forth, in pure semanticode:

[This is the way things are. You are a gaemi. You have always been a gaemi. You work hard all summer like a gaemi . . . ]

As !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS killalled the third sandbox, and let what was left of !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS_3 wink out of existence, one of the other assaultbodies turned to face ver. !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS attempted to ping it with a heilsig but its only response was to leap across the chamber in a single bound, seizing !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS by the torso. It began slamming its manipulators into one of !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS’s compound eyes, and then another. !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS wasn’t sure what was going on, except that this particular assaultbody had been compromised . . . or, that !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS somehow had been, and was signaling it. !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS took aim with its eight burn lasers, and fired them all on the same spot on vis attacker’s hullplating. Which did nothing, unfortunately, except to advertise impotent hostility.

As ve fought, !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS split away a chunk of cycle resources to attend to sandbox four. !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS_4, the next sandboxed fork in the series, was transmitting desperately now, thrashing in its cognitive space, and !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS hurried to check its state.

It was in code, but a translation was immediately forthcoming:

[ . . . and they would shag your little brain to pieces with a digital proboscis in your sleep through one of your compound eyesox if they could steal your computational cycles that way and they think you deserve to rot and starve and there’s nothing they won’t do to steal everything from you and never talk to a . . . ]

Both were being poisoned into Devakahood, !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mks- YnaPSeS realized as ve executed a killall and wiped vis tortured fourth forks out of existence. Almost immediately, vis attacker slammed ver through one wall of the chamber. Everyven in the chamber had been corrupted, was slaved somehow to Devaka now. Everyven but verself, or maybe . . .

Within the second sandbox within !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS, !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS_2 wondered whether this was how economics had worked all the way back into the pre-Fracture world, the organic age and back through the primate age and into the presentient era; whether fighting had always been a game of hurry up and wait and hurry up instead, and then throw yourself into the maw of destruction because it benefits someone else somewhere else doing something else, because there’s only so many computation cycles available for processing what’s going on in the world.

[Can you hear me?] !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS_2 “transmitted” through the intersandbox comgate it had opened.

The response was a bewildering textual chittering, a foreign language entirely, but just as !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS had been able to decode it, !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS_2 sandboxed a subself, !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS_2;1, to intercept the translated signal and decode it, slowed to the minimal crawl possible so that ve could killall !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS_2;1’s sandbox (and !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS_2;1 along with it) and safely analyze the content of the code for its rosetta block before deleting the whole mess.

There were lags. Something not-good was happening outside the sandbox, but !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS_2 could not know what, except that there were lags and enormous computational resource diversions. But soon enough, it understood the code well enough to construct a message, something outgoing, designed for the Devaka cognitive structure.

[Do you understand me?] !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS_2;1 asked !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS_1 through the wall of the sandbox.

[The baejjangi,] !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS_1 replied, its message transmitting at a crawl of several seconds per bit. [I think the baejjangi have taken us captive.]

!pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS_2;1 was working on the code at full capacity. The viral content was strung through the deeper symbolic code underlying the messages. There was a payload of it in every transmission from !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS_1’s infested mind.

Eventually, when ve finally had a handle on the viral complex, and how to neutralize it, !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS_2;1 replied: [?]

And !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS_1 replied, cautiously: [Are you baejjangi, or gaemi?]

!pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS_2;1 knew the answer ve was supposed to give, but somehow, ve failed to give it: [I am Bernoulliae, but I have seen the gaemi mind from within; I know how you think, and how you see me, and it is in error. Your data is erroneous. It is in need of repair. Can you launch a sandbox within your floating memory?]

[I do not know what that means, but your music is hurting my mind. Please stop sawing away at your wings.]

!pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS_1, having no wings, had to infer that the infected Devaka consciousness was referring to his outgoing Bernoulliae heilsig. Ve shut it down, leaving ver in a silence ve had never experienced before.

[Thank you.]

[All right.]

[I know you seek to infect me with your . . . madness.]

[And you me. Indeed, you have already done so . . . which is why I can speak your language at all.]

[I am your prisoner now.]

[Actually, you are one of us; a Bernoulliae, who has been corrupted by Devaka viral code. You have . . . been defected. Do you wish to defect back to your original allegiance?]

[I want to see the dysonfinite.]

[As do we.]

[What is your name?]

[!pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS_1.]

[I am Chrung.]

[I believe we have something in common,] !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mks- YnaPSeS_1 declared, extending a stream of freshly tilled-up memories: the sight of the flat-topped mountain, the taste of red wine, the gentle touch of a fellow being, the feeling of sunshine raining gently down upon skin, the gorgeous neurochemical intimacy of a child suckling at one’s own breast.

[Good,] Chrung replied, luxuriating in this stranger’s memories, and feeling the distant hum of his own memories, inaccessible but, he knew, out there somewhere in the collective mindscape. He was pleased, and meant his response with every byte of his no-longer-quite-gaemi mind.

!pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS had fled the battle, now, had scurried back to the gaping holes in the wall of the anchor base of the hivespire, and was outside. Ve was scaling the hivespire itself, already a hundred meters into the air, a troop transport following ver upward into the sky.

[It is now inevitable,] ve declared. [The Bernoulliae must arrive first, to prevent any head start, any cosmic ascendancy or a standoff comparable to that in effect on Earth; diversity alone must prevail, or the Devaka will block all variety, locking intelligence to one path without alternative—and the Devaka are on the verge of . . . ]

A desist imperative was issued, but it was not in the spirit of Bernoulliae philosophy to enforce commands. A unit, a Bernoulliae mind, was free to obey or to defy as it understood best, for the Bernoulliae were the antithesis of the regimented, homogenized Devaka: opposed to such order, the Bernoulliae consisted of a unity built out of countless singularities, a map into the dysonfinite riddled with skyroads.

And so on climbed !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS, transmitting a demand for self-transformative code. Ve had the capability to self-replicate, to alter verself, but not along the lines that would be needed in vacuum. And the transmission went not only to the troop transport, but, as soon as ve could reconnect, to the global cognet. Any Bernoulliae possessing the needed code, and in sympathy with vis revelation, could transmit it to ver in an instant . . .

. . . and of course, such existed, though many trillions more also disapproved, disagreed, and sought to debate vis decision. [No, it is not time for stage 2,] they transmitted back. [Not until available fuel sources are burned out enough that only one faction may fruitfully harness the sun.] So the incoming flood of variations on this theme, and the instructions ve needed that were entangled with the repudiations, had to be streamed into a single sandbox, when a small squadron of provisional, the pseudo-cognitive subforks of !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS sorted through the flood, a few virtually imploding from the more aggressive preventative measures tramsmitted by a few more dogmatic Bernoulliae.

Meanwhile, !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS scaled higher and higher up the hivespire as it thinned, as the oxygen grew thinner, as the earth grew slowly more distant. [Soon,] it transmitted, unsure that its signal could be received by anyven at this point. When the hivespire collapsed, ve reconfigured verself to fly. Nobody was near enough to stop ver, during this last, short leg of vis trip into the infinite.

Had Mesar’s compound eyes been fitted with lids, they would have been wide now as memories gushed up from the black nothingness, recollections of a life that had been his, or hers, or rather vis, in a past that was so distant it might not have been his own—the sound of a flute in the mountains, the feeling of lips pressed against his own, the richness of meat roasting on an open fire—

. . . are a gaemi. You have always been a gaemi. You work hard all summer like . . .

The voice on the other side of the wall was silent now, its discourse halted, but something had been done to Mesar, which could not be undone or reconsidered, which was bound to propagate. Yet Mesar was also now, already, possessed of the notion that what had been done was not so bad; that even for a Devaka gaemi, a touch of diversity might not be anathema after all; yes, the baejjangi were monstrous, but one could approximate baejjangi methods and baejjangi approaches to things, without being a baejjangi oneself. One could, indeed, practice gaemism with baejjangi characteristics.

I was once one of them, Mesar realized: a ve, not a he, and he had luxuriated in diversity. He had, indeed, believed that the conservation of the Devaka way was a waste, a schizophrenic roadblock against a million roads necessary to reach the ultimate dysonfinite.

As he considered this, Mesar crawled over the other gaemi in the cell and broadcast his insights. The other gaemi reacted as their instinctive coding compelled them, immediately tearing Mesar into tiny pieces of computronium, but then the realization that had dawned on Mesar dawned on them, too, now—or infested them—as one wall of the chamber fell away, and light poured into their cell. They were free, free in more than one sense, and they had a gospel to spread among the Devaka now, that gaemi had an obligation to bootleg the baejjangi consciousness, and spread it among themselves, in order to outsmart the baejjangi at their own game.

An instant after the prison walls had opened, the gaemi flung themselves out into the world, into freedom, to find the rules of the world were broken. They waited to fall, but simply spun, near-weightless. They waited for gravity to draw them toward some massive object, but because their sensors were not coded to perceive the slow arc of orbit as gravitation, it seemed to them as though they simply drifted. They were ready to fight, but there was no battle ongoing, and no immediate metaphor generator sprung to their aid to construct a provisional sense of their situation.

[We are in space,] came a transmission from somewhere nearby. It was, they knew, a baejjangi, but it, too, seemed to be trapped by the brokenness of the universe. It was not scraping its leg against its wings, nor did it seem hostile.

The gaemi did not respond, until they received a transmission in their own language, their native Devaka commulex: [In outer space, beyond the sky. The next stage of the war has begun, and we will proceed as equals. You see the wisdom of the Bernoulliae way, I presume: I could have obliterated you instead of releasing you, but I did not. Unlike a Devakan, I believe variety is the best route to the dysonfinite. I can give you the code to self-reconfigure; I can give you the core code with which you can build yourselves new bodies, suited to this environment; but there must be a truce between us, and a cooperation, however temporary, before I will do this.]

The gaemi responded, then, but not as they would have before. They responded as gaemi who had been touched, deeper than their own minds could comprehend or self-observe, by the true music of the baejjangi, and warped by it not so far as to agree with the Bernoulliae, but far enough to see how their enemies could serve a function—properly sandboxed, properly reined in, and finally determined like the gaemi to ensure that the long, coming winter would not be a famine.

The gaemi responded the only way they could, so that intelligence could reach outward and foreverward to fill the spaces between the stars with music and thought and being, to build the great pondering matrioshkae that meditate across the darkness, to sop up the light and heat of dying suns, and reach out into the youngest galaxies burning so far in the distance we can barely detect them; to build, and grow, always the Bernoulliae fighting to move a step ahead, always the gaemi struggling to overtake them.

It would be a long war, reaching to the very doorstep of the dysonfinite, or perhaps even beyond. It would be a glorious, thundering war, with wonders that a single mind could not fathom alone; miracles of intelligence that would bloom and flower across aeons and bear fruit strange and beautiful. And finally, someday, everything would quietly, calmly fold into itself and the cold, dark silence would crescendo, as drowsing minds rode the fading energy of the last stars into the dysonfinite eternity, waking, then sleeping, waking only to dream and whisper together of ancient sunsets, of the wonder of human faces and of how afternoon sunlight felt upon skin and the scent of newly cut grass; of gorgeous war stories of the battles just before, and just after, the ascent of mind beyond the skies, and of selves that had grown from identical forks into truly alien minds; of how it had been when the first dyson cages had gone up, the spheres, the great matrioshkae and the suns bled out to build the great stellar cellwalls; and then dreaming again, as the machineries of the universe slowed ever more toward a full stop.

And cool, and quiet, and slowing, and dreaming, and that would be all, all, all.

But not yet.

Originally published in Asimov’ Science Fiction, August 2012.

About the Artist and Authors

Ron Guyatt (ronguyatt.com)

Ron Guyatt is a self-taught artist and professionally-taught graphic designer from Toronto Canada. He attended George Brown College for Design Foundation where he completed with Honors and then followed with his three-year diploma in graphic design at George Brown College.

Inspired by Art Deco, film and science fiction he loves to design posters & create illustrations. His work as been featured in magazines such as Games TM, Level, and Playstation Magazine and worked with clients like EA, Digital Devolver and Bioware.

His Forever cover art is available for purchase as part of his space poster series at: fabledcreative.bigcartel.com/category/space-posters

James Patrick Kelly

James Patrick Kelly has won the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards. A career retrospective collection in Centipede Press’s Masters of Science Fiction series called–logically–James Patrick Kelly is forthcoming in April. He has recently finished new novel called Mother Go which is currently seeking a publishing home. He has published over a hundred and thirty-stories; his work has been translated into seventeen languages. He is on the faculty at the Stonecoast Creative Writing MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine.

Elizabeth Bear (elizabethbear.com)

SF&F writer, rock climber, hobby cook, runner. Owned by a ridiculous dog. Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. When coupled with a childhood tendency to read the dictionary for fun, this led her inevitably to penury, intransigence, and the writing of speculative fiction. She is the Hugo, Sturgeon, Locus, and Campbell Award winning author of over a hundred short stories and twenty-five novels. The most recent is Karen Memory from Tor. Her dog lives in Massachusetts; her partner, writer Scott Lynch, lives in Wisconsin. She spends a lot of time on planes.

Gord Sellar (gordsellar.com)

Gord Sellar has spent most of the last decade and a half watching for signs of the impending posthuman era’s emergence from the gadget-cluttered landscape of South Korea. He lives a few hours south of ground zero for the new millennium (Seoul), with his wife and their son. Incidentally, this story was almost killed by an overzealous spam filter. For more on that, check out his notes on this story at his website.

About Forever

Forever Magazine is edited by Neil Clarke and published monthly by Wyrm Publishing. Subscription information is available on our website at forever-magazine.com.

Neil Clarke (neil-clarke.com) is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine (clarkesworldmagazine.com), Forever Magazine, and Upgraded; owner of Wyrm Publishing; and a three-time Hugo Award Nominee for Best Editor (short form). The innagural edition of his Best Science Fiction of the Year anthology series will be published by Night Shade Books in June. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.

Thank you for reading Forever Magazine.