James Kelly - Rewired - The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology

Bash considered this speech for a short time.

“You were proud of me?”

Dagny grinned. “Do porn stars have sex?”

Bash blushed. “So, when is this awards thing?”

Some years back, Kenmore Square had been turned into a woonerf . The Dutch term meant literally “living yard,” and referred to the practice of converting urban streets from vehicular to pedestrian usage. The formerly confusing nexus of several Boston avenues beneath the famed Citgo sign (now a giant sheet of laminated proteopape, like all modern billboards and exterior signage) had been transformed into a pleasant public venue carpeted with high-foot-traffic-sustaining redactive grasses and mosses and crisscrossed by flagstone paths.

On this early evening of June 12, the temperature registered typical for Neo-Venusian New England, a balmy ninety-two-degrees Fahrenheit. The Square was crowded with strolling shoppers, picnickers, café patrons, club and moviegoers. Children squealed as they played on the public squishy sculptures and under the spray of intricately dancing cyber-fountains. Patrolling autonomes — creeping, hopping and stalking, their patternizing optics and tanglefoot projectors and beanbag-gun snouts and spray-nozzles of liquid banana peel swivelling according to odd self-grown heuristics — maintained vigilance against any possible disrupters of the peace. A lone cop mounted on his compact StreetCamel added a layer of human oversight (the random manure dumps were a small price to pay for this layer of protection).

Bash and Dagny had parked her fuel-cell-powered Argentinian rental, a 2027 Gaucho, several blocks away. They entered the Square now on foot from the south, via Newbury Street, engaged in earnest conversation.

“Mutability, Bash! Mutability rules! We’re all Buddhists now, acknowledging change as paramount. Nothing fixed or solid, no hierarchies of originals and copies, nothing stable from one minute to the next. Every variant equally privileged. That’s what proteopape’s all about! Media and content are one. Can’t you see it? Your invention undermined all the old paradigms. First editions, signed canvases, original film negatives — Those terms mean nothing anymore, and our art should reflect that.”

Bash struggled to counter Dagny’s passionate, illogical and scary assertions. (Carried to its extreme, her philosophy led to a world of complete isotropic chaos, Bash felt.) But the novelty of arguing face-to-face with a living interlocutor had him slightly flustered. “I just can’t buy all that, Dag. Proteopape is just a means of transmission and display. The contents and value of what’s being displayed don’t change just because the surface they’re displayed on might show something different the next minute. Look, suppose I used this store window here to display some paintings, changing the paintings by hand every ten seconds. That would be a very slow analog representation of what proteopape does. Would the canvases I chose to exhibit be suddenly deracinated or transformed by this treatment? I don’t think so.”

“Your analogy sucks! The canvases are still physical objects in your instance. But anything on proteopape has been digitized and rendered virtual. Once that happens, all the old standards collapse.”

Their seemingly irresolvable argument had brought them to the door of their destination: a club with a proteopape display in an acid-yellow neon font naming it the Antiquarium. The display kept changing sinuously from letters into some kind of sea serpent and back. A long line of patrons awaited entrance.

A tall bald guy walking up and down the line was handing out small proteopape broadsides for some product or service or exhibition. Those in the queue who accepted the advertisements either folded the pages and tucked them into their pockets, or crumpled them up and threw them to the turf, where the little screens continued to flash a twisted mosaic of information. Bash remembered the first time he had seen someone so carelessly discard his invention, and how he had winced. But he had quickly become reconciled to the thoughtless disposal of so much cheap processing power, and aside from the littering aspect, the common action no longer bothered him.

Dagny turned to Bash and gripped both his hands in a surprisingly touching show of sincerity. “Let’s drop all this futile talk. I think that once you see some of the stuff on display tonight — the awards ceremony features extensive clips, you know — you’ll come around to my viewpoint. Or at least admit that it’s a valid basis for further discussion.”

“Well, I can’t promise anything. But I’m keeping an open mind.”

“That’s all I ask. Now follow me. We don’t have to stand in line here with the fans.”

The stage door entrance behind the club, monitored by a chicly scaled Antiquarium employee, granted them exclusive entry into the club. Bash snuffled the funky odor of old spilled beer, drummer sweat and various smokable drugs and experienced a grand moment of disorientation. Where was he? How had he ended up here?

But Dagny’s swift maneuvering of Bash across the empty club’s main dance floor gave him no time to savor his jamais vu .

Crossing the expanse, Bash saw the exhibits that gave the club its name. Dozens of huge aquariums dotted the cavernous space. They hosted creepy-crawly redactors whose appearance was based on the Burgess Shale fossils, but whose actual germ lines derived from common modern fishes and crustaceans. In tank after tank, stubby-winged Anomalocarises crawled over the jutting spikes of Hallucigenias, while slithering Opabinias waggled their long pincered snouts.

Bash felt as if he had entered a particularly bad dream. This whole night, from the tedious argument with Dagny up to this surreal display, was not proceeding as cheerfully as he had hoped.

Workers in STAFF Tshirts were setting up folding chairs in ranks across the dance floor, while others were positioning a lectern onstage and rigging a huge sheet of proteopape behind the podium. As Bash exited the main floor he saw the proteopape come alive:

FIFTH ANNUAL WOODY AWARDS SPONSORED BY MUD BUG SPORTS CLOTHES NASHVILLE SITAR STUDIO XYLLELLA COSMETICS AND THE HUBSTER DUBSTERS

Below these names was a caricature of a familiar bespectacled nebbish, executed by Hirschfeld (well into his second century, the ‘borged artist, once revived, was still alive and active in his exoskeleton and SecondSkin).

Now Dagny had dragged Bash into a dressing room of some sort, crowded with people in various states of undress and makeup. They passed through this organized confusion into the club’s Green Room. Here, the atmosphere was both less frenetic yet tenser.

“Bash, I want you to meet some special friends. Holland Flanders — ”

Bash shook the hand of a well-muscled fellow wearing a wife-beater and cargo shorts, whose bare arms seemed to be slowly exuding miniscule flakes of golden glitter.

“Cricket Licklider — ”

The petite woman wore a suit of vaguely Japanese-looking crocodile-skin armor, and blinked reptilian eyes. Contacts or redactions, Bash could not discern.

“Roger Mexicorn — ”

This wraithlike, long-haired lad sported banana-yellow skin, and reminded Bash of a certain doomed albino from the literature of the fantastic.

“Lester Schill — ”

Bash thought this besuited, bearded guy the most normal, until he clasped Schill’s palm and received a distinct erotic tingle from some kind of bioelectrical implant.

“ — and Indicia Diddums.”

Indicia’s broad face cracked in a smile that revealed a set of fangs that any barracuda would have envied.

“These are some of the Hubster Dubsters, Bash. My fellow auteurs. They’re all up for one or more Woodies tonight.”