James Kelly - Rewired - The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology

She rolls off his hips and carefully uses the last of the superglue to gum her labia together. Humans don’t produce seminiferous plugs, and although she’s fertile she wants to be absolutely sure: the glue will last for a day or two. She feels hot and flushed, almost out of control. Boiling to death with febrile expectancy, now she’s nailed him down at last.

When she removes his glasses his eyes are naked and vulnerable, stripped down to the human kernel of his nearly transcendent mind. “You can come and sign the marriage license tomorrow morning after breakfast,” she whispers in his ear: “otherwise my lawyers will be in touch. Your parents will want a ceremony, but we can arrange that later.”

He looks as if he has something to say, so she finally relents and loosens the gag: kisses him tenderly on one cheek. He swallows, coughs, then looks away. “Why? Why do it this way?”

She taps him on the chest: “property rights.” She pauses for a moment’s thought: there’s a huge ideological chasm to bridge, after all. “You finally convinced me about this agalmic thing of yours, this giving everything away for brownie points. I wasn’t going to lose you to a bunch of lobsters or uploaded kittens, or whatever else is going to inherit this smart matter singularity you’re busy creating. So I decided to take what’s mine first. Who knows? In a few months I’ll give you back a new intelligence, and you can look after it to your heart’s content.”

“But you didn’t need to do it this way — ”

“Didn’t I?” She slides off the bed and pulls down her dress. “You give too much away too easily, Manny! Slow down, or there won’t be anything left.” Leaning over the bed she dribbles acetone onto the fingers of his left hand, then unlocks the cuff: puts the bottle conveniently close to hand so he can untangle himself.

“See you tomorrow. Remember, after breakfast.”

She’s in the doorway when he calls: “but you didn’t say why!”

“Think of it as spreading your memes around,” she says; blows a kiss at him and closes the door. She bends down and thoughtfully places another cardboard box containing an uploaded kitten right outside it. Then she returns to her suite to make arrangements for the alchemical wedding.

Sterling to Kessel, 14 March 1987:

“What’s the real motive behind ‘sense of wonder’? Is it the benevolent urge to reveal cosmic mysteries, to act as the Jungian Wise Old Man to the innocent hobbits of the world? Or is it closer to the tangily malignant motives of pranksters and conjurers, the kinds of guys who’d spike your Coke with angel dust, or publicly steal your underwear for fun?”

Film critic James Harvey suggests that postwar film noir is the dark obverse of pre-wwII screwball comedy. The key to understanding both, Harvey says, is realizing that it’s all about the women. Independent, out-of-control, sexy women make trouble, and men are a step behind, trying to figure them out and restore order to the world they’ve deranged. In addition, both screwball and noir invoke a (comically or tragically) absurd universe.

Much classic CP draws on film noir. The plot is a thicket of cross-purposes, machinations beneath the surface must be unraveled, and in the end the world is out of the hero’s control anyway. “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown,” says the cop at the despairing end of one of the greatest noir films.

In this story, Paul Di Filippo performs a jujitsu flip on CP’S dark games, and whether he realizes it or not, validates Harvey’s theory. Hey presto — comedy!

The first indication Bash Applebrook received that all was not right with his world happened over breakfast on the morning of Tuesday, June 25, 2029.

The newspaper he was reading turned into a movie screen.

Bash was instantly jerked out of his fascination with the current headline (MERCOSUR FREETER MAKES SPINTRONICS BREAKTHRU!). His jagged reaction caused some Metanomics Plus nutrishake to spill from his cup onto the table-top, where it was quickly absorbed.

Looking at the clock on the wall — a display made of redacted fish scales whose mutable refractiveness substituted for ancient LEDS — as if to reassure himself that he hadn’t been thrown entirely out of the time stream, Bash sought to gain some perspective on this alarming occurrence.

In itself, this transformation of his newspaper boded no ill. Such things happened millions of times daily around the globe, thanks to proteopape . And since Bash himself was the much-lauded, well-rewarded inventor of proteopape, he was positively the last person in the world to be astounded by the medium’s capacity for change.

There was only one problem.

Bash had not instructed his newspaper to swap functions.

This impulsive, inexplicable toggling by his highly reliable newspaper scared Bash very much. Proteopape simply did not do such things. Eleven years ago, Bash had first engineered the substance with innumerable safeguards, backups and firewalls specifically intended to prevent just such herky-jerky transitions. In all the time since, out of billions of uses, there had been no recorded instances of proteopape malfunctioning. Even when sustaining up to seventy-five-percent damage, proteopape continued to maintain functionality. (Beyond such limits, proteopape would just shut down altogether.) The miracle material that had transformed so much of the twenty-first century’s media landscape simply did not crash.

And if proteopape were suddenly to develop a glitch — Well, imagining the immense and catastrophic repercussions from any flaws in the ubiquitous material raised shivers with the magnitude of tsunamis along Bash’s spine.

Having assimilated the very possibility that his fabled invention could behave in unpredictable ways, Bash gave his newspaper a shake, hoping to expunge this anomaly by the most primitive of engineering tactics. But the newspaper stubbornly continued to function as a movie screen, so Bash focused for clues on the actual movie being displayed across his ex-newspaper.

This particular sheet of proteopape on which Bash had been reading his newspaper measured approximately two feet by three feet. Possessing the stiffness and texture of heavy-bond dumb-paper, yet not quite as rigid as parchment, this sheet of proteopape had been folded in half vertically, producing four different faces, two outer and two inner. A bit old-fashioned, Bash preferred to read his newspaper on multiple pages, allowing him to refer backwards if he wished simply by eyeballing a previous face of his newspaper. Of course, upon finishing with the fourth page of the paper, Bash simply turned back to the front, where the fifth page was now automatically displayed, with pages six, seven and eight following.

But now every page revealed only the same movie, a quartet of active images. Bash turned the newspaper upside down, hoping to erase the unrequested show, but the inscribed sensors in the newspaper merely registered the new orientation and flipped the movie upright again.

Bash recognized the leering face of Groucho Marx, one of his father’s favorite actors. Groucho wore some kind of ridiculous military uniform. Duck Soup , then. Now Margaret Dumont entered the scene, all dowager-haughty. But although the actions of the actors were canonically familiar, the conversation that followed bore no resemblance to any extant Hollywood script.

“So,” said Groucho, in his familiar intonations which the MEMS speakers of the proteopape reproduced with high fidelity, “the little lady who wants to waste her mind and talents on artsy-fartsy stuff finally deigns to show up. Well, I’m afraid I’ve lost all interest in whatever crap you wanted me to watch.”