Paul Di Filippo - WikiWorld

In the morning, Cherry said, “Yeah, I think I could get used to living here real fast.”

My Dad was a garbageman.

Okay, so not really. He didn’t wear overalls or hang from the back of a truck or heft dripping sacks of coffee grounds and banana peels. Dad’s job was strictly white-collar. His fingers were more often found on a keyboard than a trash compactor. He was in charge of the Barnstable Transfer Station, a seventy-acre “disposium” where recyclables were lifted from the waste-stream, and whatever couldn’t be commercially repurposed was neatly and sterilely buried. But I like to tell people he was a garbageman just to get their instant, unschooled reactions. If they turn up their noses, chances are they won’t make it onto my friends list.

I remember Dad taking me to work once in a while on Saturdays. He proudly showed off the dump’s little store, stocked with the prize items his workers had rescued.

“Look at this, Russ. A first edition Jack London. Tales of the Fish Patrol . Can you believe it?”

I was five years old, and had just gotten my first pair of spex, providing rudimentary access to what passed for the ubik back then. I wasn’t impressed.

“I can read that right now, Dad, if I wanted to.”

Dad looked crestfallen. “That digital text is just information, son. This is a book ! And best of all, it’s mongo .”

I tried to look up mongo in the ubik, like I had been taught, but couldn’t find it in my dictionary. “What’s mongo, Dad?”

“A moment of grace. A small victory over entropy.”

“Huh?”

“It’s any treasure you reclaim from the edge of destruction, Russ. There’s no thrill like making a mongo strike.”

I looked at the book with new eyes. And that’s when I got hooked.

From then on, mongo became my life.

That initial epiphany occurred over twenty years ago. Barnstable is long drowned, fish swimming through the barnacled timbers of the disposium store, and my folks live in Helena now. But I haven’t forgotten the lessons my Dad taught me.

The Gogo Goggins has strong winches for hauling really big finds up into the air. But mostly I deal in small yet valuable stuff. With strap-on gills, a smartskin suit, MEMS flippers and a MHD underwater sled packing ten thousand candlepower of searchlights, I pick through the drowned world of the Cape Cod Archipelago and vicinity.

The coastal regions of the world now host the largest caches of treasure the world has ever seen. Entire cities whose contents could not be entirely rescued in advance of the encroaching waters. All there as salvage for the taking, pursuant to many, many post-flood legal rulings.

Once I’m under the water, my contact with the ubik cut off, relying just on the processing power in my SCURF, I’m alone with my thoughts and the sensations of the dive. The romance of treasure-hunting takes over. Who knows what I might find? Jewellery, monogrammed plates from a famous restaurant, statues, coins— Whatever I bring up, I generally sell with no problems, either over the ubik or at the old-fashioned marketplace on the mainland.

It’s a weird way of earning your living, I know. Some people might find it morbid, spending so much time amid these ghostly drowned ruins. (And to answer the first question anyone asks: yes, I’ve encountered skeletons, but none of them have shown the slightest inclination to attack.)

But I don’t find my job morbid at all.

I’m under the spell of mongo.

One of the first outings Cherry and I went on, after she moved in with me, was down to undersea Provincetown. It’s an easy dive. Practically nothing to find there, since amateurs have picked it clean. But by the same token, all the hazards are well-charted.

Cherry seemed to enjoy the expedition, spending hours slipping through the aquatic streets with wide eyes behind her mask. Once back aboard the Gogo Goggins , drying her thick hair with a towel, she said, “That was stringy, Russ! Lots of fun.”

“You think you might like tossing in with me? You know, becoming business partners? We’d make good isk. Not that we need to earn much, like you said. And you could give up the illegal stuff—”

“Give up the Oyster Pirates? Never! That’s my heritage! And to be honest with you, babe, there’s just not enough thrills in your line of work.”

Just as I was addicted to mongo, Cherry was hooked on plundering the shellfish farms, outwitting the guards and owners and escaping with her booty. Myself, I knew I’d be a nervous wreck doing that for a living. (She took me out one night on a raid; when the PEP discharges started sizzling through the air close to my head, I dropped to the deck of the Soft Grind (which possessed a lot of speed belied by its appearance) and didn’t stand up again till we reached home. Meanwhile, Cherry was alternately shouting curses at our pursuers and emitting bloodthirsty laughs.)

Luckily, we were able to reconcile our different lifestyles quite nicely. I simply switched to night work. Once I was deep enough below the surface, I had to rely on artificial lights even during the daytime anyhow.

Several nights each week, you’d find us motoring off side by side in our respective boats. Eventually our paths would diverge, signalled by a dangerous kiss across the narrow gap between our bobbing boats. As I headed toward whatever nexus of sunken loot I had charted, I’d catch up on ubik matters, writing dialogue for One Step Closer to Nowhere , the sitcom that had replaced Naomi Instanton , or monitoring border crossings for an hourly rate for the Minute Men.

Cherry and I would meet back home on my little island, which Cherry had christened “Sandybump.” We’d sleep till noon or later, then have fun during the day.

A lot of that fun seemed to involve Foolty “FooDog” Fontal.

During all the years we hung out together, we never learned where FooDog actually lived. He seemed reluctant to divulge the location of his digs, protective of his security and privacy even with his friends. (And recalling how easily he had stolen Cherry’s identity from my friends list, who could blame him at worrying about unintentional data-sharing?) FooDog’s various business, recreational and hobbyist pursuits had involved him with lots of shady characters and inequitable dealings, and he existed, I soon realized, just one step ahead—or perhaps laterally abaft—of various grudge-holders.

I should hasten to say that FooDog’s dealings were never—or seldom—truly unethical or self-serving. It’s just that his wide-ranging enthusiasms respected no borders, sacred cows or intellectual property rights.

But despite his lack of a public meatspace address, FooDog could always be contacted through the ubik, and me and Cherry would often meet him somewhere for what invariably turned out to be an adventure of the most hyphy dimensions.

I remember one day in November….

We grabbed a zipcar, FooDog slung several duffels in the interior storage space, and we headed north to New Hampshire. FooDog refused to tell us where we were heading till it was too late to turn back.

“We’re going to climb Mount Washington? Are you nuts?” I picked up the feed from the Weather Observatory atop the peak. “There’s a blizzard going on right now!”

“Precisely the conditions I need for my experiment.”

The normal daily high temperature atop the peak at this time of the year was thirteen degrees Farenheit. The record low was minus-twenty. In 1934, the Observatory had recorded the biggest wind ever experienced on the planet: 231 MPH. There were taller places and colder places and windier places and places with worse weather. But Mount Washington managed to combine generous slices of all these pies into a unique killer confection.