James Kelly - Rewired - The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology

“Best Transformation of Comedy to Tragedy” naturally followed the award Dagny had won. Then came “Musical into Nonmusical” and vice versa. “Subtext Foregrounded” and “Mockumentaries” were succeeded by the award for “Bomb Defusing,” the object of which category was apparently to rob a suspenseful film of any suspense. “Idiot Plotting” featured all the characters exchanging moronic dialogue and offering the stupidest of motives for their actions. “Comic Book Narration” forced the actors to summarize aloud all their actions, and also to indulge in long-winded speeches during any fight scenes. “Gender Swap” found all the males dubbed with female voices, and contrariwise. “Ethnic Mismatch” covered the introduction of inappropriate foreign accents.

Bash’s father had been born in 1970. During Bash’s childhood, he had discovered a stash of magazines that York Applebrook had accumulated during his own childhood. Fascinated by the antiques, Bash had devoured the pile of Mad magazines, only half-understanding yet still laughing at parodies of movies old before he had been born. At the wise old age often, however, Bash had put aside the jejune drolleries of “the usual gang of idiots.”

Tonight felt like being trapped in a giant issue of Mad . Bash simply could not believe that all these supposedly mature adults felt that such juvenile skewing of classic films constituted a new and exciting art form. And somehow his invention of proteopape had catalyzed this stale quasi-dadaist display. Bash experienced a sense of shame.

He did not of course let Dagny know how he felt. Her pleasure in winning and in the victories of her peers prevented any such honesty. And, selfishly, Bash still thrilled to her kiss. The conversation with Cricket Licklider had made the possibility of post-Woodies sex with Dagny more vivid. No point in sacrificing the first likelihood of unmonied intercourse in two years on the altar of stubborn opinionated speechifying.

Finally the tedious ceremony ended. The assembled auteurs from around the globe split into cliques and adjourned to various other venues to celebrate or weep. Bash found himself accompanying Dagny, the Hubster Dubsters and a pack of hangers-on to a bar called The Weeping Gorilla, whose decorative motif involved the lugubrious anthropoid posed with various celebrities. There Bash consumed rather too much alcohol, rather too little food, and a handful of unidentified drugs.

Somehow Bash found himself naked in a hotel room with Dagny. Sex occurred in lurid kaleidoscopic intervals of consciousness. Afterwards, Bash remembered very little of the perhaps enjoyable experience.

But much to his dismay, he clearly recalled some boastful pillow talk afterwards.

“Hadda put a trapdoor in pro’eopape during testing. Lemme get inna operating system to debug. Still in there! Yup, never took it out, nobody ever found it neither. Every single sheet, still got a secret backdoor!”

Dagny, eyes shuttered, made sleepy noises. But, as evidenced by the subversion of Bash’s Boston Globe on the morning of June 25, when his newspaper had played a symbolical version of their harsh breakup on the shoals of Bash’s eventual honesty during their aborted second date, she had plainly heard every word.

Bash stood up from the breakfast table. His dead newspaper continued slowly to absorb the juices of his abandoned breakfast. The fish-scale wall clock morphed to a new minute. Everything looked hopeless.

Dagny Winsome had hacked the hidden trapdoor in proteopape, the existence of which no one had ever suspected until he blurted it out. Why hadn’t he eliminated that feature before releasing his invention? Hubris, sheer hubris. Bash had wanted to feel as if he could reclaim his brainchild from the world’s embrace at anytime. The operating system trapdoor represented apron strings he couldn’t bring himself to cut. And what was the appalling result of his parental vanity?

Now Dagny could commandeer every uniquely identifiable scrap of the ether-driven miracle medium and turn it to her own purposes. For the moment, her only motivation to tamper appeared to consist of expressing her displeasure with Bash. For that small blessing, Bash was grateful. But how long would it take before Dagny’s congenital impishness seduced her into broader culture jamming? This was the woman, after all, who had drugged one of MIT’S deans as he slept, and brought him to awaken in a scrupulously exact mockup of his entire apartment exactly three-quarters scale.

Bash felt like diving into bed and pulling the covers over his head. But a moment’s reflection stiffened his resolve. No one was going to mess with his proteopape and get away with it! Too much of the world’s economy and culture relied on the medium just to abandon it. He would simply have to track Dagny down and attempt to reason with her.

As his first move, Bash took out his telephone. His telephone was simply a stiffened strip of proteopape. His defunct newspaper would once have served the purpose as well, but most people kept a dedicated phone on their persons, if for nothing else than to receive incoming calls when they were out of reach of other proteopape surfaces, and also to serve as their unique intelligent tag identifying them to I 2entities.

Bash folded the phone into a little hollow pyramid and stood it on the table. The GlobeSpeak logo appeared instantly: a goofy anthropomorphic chatting globe inked by Robert Crumb, every appearance of which earned the heirs of the artist one milli-cent. (Given the volume of world communication, Sophie Crumb now owned most of southern France.) Bash ordered the phone to search for Cricket Licklider. Within a few seconds her face replaced the logo, while the cameras in Bash’s phone reciprocated with his image.

Cricket grinned. “I knew you’d come looking for some of the good stuff eventually, Bashie-boy.”

“No, it’s not like that. I appreciate your attention, really I do, but I need to find Dagny.”

Frowning, Cricket said, “You lost your girlfriend? Too bad. Why should I help you find her?”

“Because she’s going to destroy proteopape if I don’t stop her. Where would that leave you and your fellow Dubsters? Where would that leave any of us for that matter?”

This dire news secured Cricket’s interest, widening her iguana eyes. “Holy shit! Well, Christ, I don’t know what to say. I haven’t seen her since the Woodies. She might not even be in town anymore.”

“Can you get the rest of your crew together? Maybe one of them knows something useful.”

“I’ll do my best. Meet us at the clubhouse in an hour.”

Cricket cut the transmission, but not before uploading the relevant address to Bash’s phone.

Bash decided that a shave and a shower would help settle his nerves.

In the bathroom, Bash lathered up his face in the proteopape mirror: a sheet that digitized his image in real time and displayed it unreversed. The mirror also ran a small window in which a live newscast streamed. As Bash listened intently for any bulletins regarding the public malfunctioning of proteopape, he took his antique Mach3 razor down from the wall cabinet’s shelf and then sudsed his face from a spray can. Having been raised in a simple-living household, Bash still retained many old-fashioned habits, such as actually shaving. He drew the first swath through the foam up his neck and under his chin.

Without warning, his mirror suddenly hosted the leering face of Charles Laughton as the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Bash yelped and cut himself. The Hunchback chortled, then vanished. And now his mirror was as dead as his newspaper.

Cursing Dagny, Bash located a small analogue mirror at the bottom of a closet and finished shaving. He put a proteopape band-aid on the cut, and the band-aid instantly assumed the exact texture and coloration of the skin it covered (with cut edited out), becoming effectively invisible.