Paul Di Filippo - After the Collapse

The scene in my memtax also displayed a bunch of useful supplementary data: our GPS location, thumbnails of other people running FarmEarth in our neighborhood, a window showing a view of the surface above our location, weather reports—common stuff like that. If I wanted to, I could bring up the individual unique ID numbers on the fish, and even for each single bacteria.

I got a hold of the effectuator assigned to me, feeling its controls through my haptic finger bling, and made it swerve at the machine being run by Anuta.

“Hey, Crispy Critter, watch it!” she said with that sexy Bollywood accent of hers.

Mumphs was not pleased. “Mr. Tanjuatco, you will please concentrate on the task at hand. Now, students, last week’s Hurricane Norbert churned up a swath of relatively shallow sediment north of our present site, revealing a lode of undigested hydrocarbons. It’s up to us to clean them up. Let’s drive these hungry bugs to the site.”

Williedell and Cheo and I made cowboy whoops, while the girls just clucked their tongues and got busy. Pretty soon, using water jets and shaped sonics aboard the effectuators, we had created a big invisible water bubble full of bugs that we could move at will. We headed north, over anemones and octopi, coral and brittle stars. Things looked pretty good, I had to say, considering all the crap the Gulf had been through. That’s what made FarmEarth so rewarding and addictive, seeing how you could improve on these old tragedies.

But herding bugs underwater was hardly high-profile or awesome, no matter how real the resulting upgrades were. It was basically like spinning the composter at your home: a useful duty that stunk.

We soon got the bugs to the site and mooshed them into the tarry glop where they could start remediating.

“Nom, nom, nom,” said Mallory. Mallory had the best sense of humor for a girl I had ever seen.

“Nom, nom, nom,” I answered back. Then all six of us were nom-nom-noming away, while Mumphs pretended not to find it funny.

But even that joke wore out after a while, and our task of keeping the bugs centered on their meal, rotating fresh stock in to replace sated ones, got so boring I was practically falling asleep.

Eventually, Mumphs said, “Okay, we have a quorum of replacement Farmers lined up, so you can all log out.”

I came out of FarmEarth a little disoriented, like people always do, especially when you’ve been stewarding in a really unusual environment. I didn’t know how my brother Benno kept any sense of reality after he spent so much time in so many exotic FarmEarth settings. The familiar Greenpatch itself looked odd to me, like my friends should have been fishes or something, instead of people. I could tell the others were feeling the same way, and so we broke up for the day with some quiet goodbyes.

By the time I got home, to find my fave supper of goat empanadas and cassava-leaf stew laid on by Dad, with both Moms able to be there too, I had already forgotten how bored and disappointed playing FarmEarth had left me.

But apparently, Cheo had not.

* * * *

The vertical play surface at Gecko Guy’s Climbzone was made out of MEMs, just like a pair of memtax. To the naked eye, the climbing surface looked like a gray plastic wall studded with permanent handholds and footholds, little grippable irregular nubbins. But the composition of near-nanoscopic addressable scales meant that the wall was instantly and infinitely configurable.

Which is why, halfway up the six-meter climb, I suddenly felt the hold under my right hand, which was supporting all my weight, evaporate, sending me scrabbling wildly for another.

But every square centimeter within my reach was flat.

The floor, even though padded, was a long way off, and of course I had no safety line.

So even though I was reluctant to grebnard out, I activated the artificial setae in my gloves and booties, and slammed them against the wall.

One glove and one bootie stuck, slowing me enough to position my second hand and foot. I clung flat to the wall, catching my breath, then began to scuttle like a crab to the nearest projecting holds, the setae making ripping sounds as they pulled away each time.

A few meters to my left, Williedell laughed and called out, “Ha-ha, Crispy had to go gecko!”

“Yeah, like you never did three times last week! Race you to the top!”

Starting to scramble upward as fast as I could, I risked a glance at Anuta to see if she were laughing at my lameness. But she wasn’t even looking my way, just hanging in place and gossiping with Mallory and Vernice.

Sometimes I think girls have no real sense of competition.

But then I remember how much attention they pay to their stupid clothes.

Williedell and I reached the top of the wall at roughly the same time, and gave each other a fist bump.

Down on the floor, Cheo hailed us. “Hey, Crispian, almost got you that time, didn’t I!”

Cheo’s parents owned the Climbzone, and so the five of us got to play for free in the slowest hours—like now, eight AM on a Sunday. Cheo had to work a few hours on the weekends—mainly just handing out gloves and booties and instructing newbies—so he couldn’t climb with us. Of course, he had access via his memtax to the wall controls, and had disappeared my handhold on purpose.

I yelled back, “Next time we’re eating underwater goo, you’re getting a face full!”

For some reason, my silly remark made Cheo look sober and thoughtful. “Hey, guys, c’mon down! I want to talk about something with you.”

The girls must have been paying some attention to our antics, because they responded to Cheo’s request and began lowering themselves to the floor. Pretty soon, all five of us were gathered around Cheo.

There were no other paying customers at the moment.

“Let me just close up the place for a few minutes.”

Cheo locked the entrance doors and posted a public augie sign saying BACK IN FIFTEEN MINUTES. Then we all went and sat at the snack bar. As always, Williedell made sure we were all supplied with drinks. We joked that he was going to grow up to be flight attendant on a Amazonian aerostat—but we didn’t make the joke too often, since he flared up sensitive about always instinctively acting the host. (I think he got those hospitality habits because he was the oldest in his semi-dysfunctional family and always taking care of his sibs.)

Cheo looked us up and down and then said, “Who’s happy with our sludge-eating FarmEarth assignments? Anyone?”

“Nope.” “Not me.” “I swear I can taste oil and sardines after every run.”

That last from Mallory.

“And you know we’ve got at least another six months of this kind of drudgery until we ramp up maybe half a level, right?”

Groans all around.

“Well, what would you say if I could get us playing at a higher level right away? Maybe even at master status!”

Vernice said, “Oh, sure, and how’re you gonna do that? I could see if Crispy here maybe said he had a way to bribe his Aunt Zoysia. She’s got real enchufe .”

“Yeah, well, I know someone with real enchufe too. My brother.”

Everyone fell silent. Then Anuta said quietly, “But Cheo, your brother is in prison.”

As far as we all knew, this was true. Cheo’s big brother Adán had got five years for subverting FarmEarth. He had misused effectuators to cultivate a few hectares of chiba in the middle of the Pantanal reserve. The charges against him, however, had nothing to do with the actual dope, because of course chiba was legal as chewing gum. But he had misappropriated public resources, avoided excise taxes on his crop, and indirectly caused the death of a colony of protected capybaras by diverting the effectuators that might have been used to save them from some bushmeat poachers. Net punishment: five years hospitality from the federales .