Ribofunk

Distributed Mind

All his life, Greenlaw had felt inexplicably cheated, an itchy sensation similar to contracting a virtuality virus, sometimes localized in his chest, sometimes in his head, occasionally even disrupting the hypertactility of his long slim multisegmented fingers. Something invaluable and irreplaceable had been stolen from him, he was convinced, although he could name neither the prize nor the thief. Or rather, he had had different suspicions of varying certainties over the course of the past century, one succeeding another as the circumstances of his life changed.

Greenlaw was one of the few members of his cohort gestated and birthed the old fashioned baseline way. Neither Incyte Yoot Chutes nor splice hostmothers of even the redoubtable Possum cultivar were acceptable to his parents, hardline Viridians both, their philosophy the source of his very name. Thus Greenlaw had entered the world at an extreme disadvantage, compared to his already wetwired, chomskied peers. Why, he hadn't spoken his first words till after a whole six months of strictly neohomeopathic trope dosing!

So of course for a time it had been easy to blame his parents, Soil and Sunflower, for any failures he encountered in his schooling and among his peers. One counselor, an Andy Panda, had even confirmed these sentiments in so many words, offering to file a retroactive punitive suit on his behalf, a step Greenlaw felt somehow disinclined to take.

But Greenlaw's harsh feelings toward his parents had evaporated when he attained his majority, and Soil and Sunflower, honoring the most extreme of Viridian tenets, had undergone voluntary euthanasia, offering their future resource-consumption-units back to a generally unappreciative rich world.

Unfortunately, they left the twelve-year-old Greenlaw with few monetary resources. To escape the lite-servo class he had been born into and finance the further trope doses that he hoped would lead to a good job in the symbol analysis class, he was forced to rent out his personal wetware, a resource whose valuable deepest structures were still unduplicatable, even by qubitic processors.

At scheduled times each day, a certain portion of his brain's computational cycles was placed in an online pool available to anyone with a project and sufficient eft. The precious time lost to him, spent as part of a worldwide parallel processing network, caused him to focus his resentments on all those better off than he, leading to a brief flirtation with the Plus-Fourierists.

The inevitable disillusionment arrived with the Plus-Fourierist-sponsored assassination of the entire Executive Council of the World Trade Organization, and Greenlaw's

distaste turned toward politics in general. By this point he had gotten his first job, at Molecular Tools. The company had paid for several somatic and cellular enhancements, his first sartorizations. And there he had fallen in love.

Her name was Anemone, and at first Greenlaw was afraid she was Viridian, although that would have been hard to reconcile with her job as leader of MT's Santa Claus project. But he learned that her floral name simply followed a family tradition. Relieved, he had surrendered his heart for the first time.

Greenlaw, youthfully eager, wondered why it took so long for them to have sex. But he eventually learned: Anemone was a maff, a fully functioning hermaphrodite, with a female lover whose consent to Greenlaw's inclusion in the menage Anemone had been courting.

The sight of the two of them in his bed surprised him one night when he returned home. Anemone's peculiar genital arrangements, dilated and tumescent under the basal woman's ministrations, aroused in him Viridian prejudices he hadn't known existed, and he fled.

Years would pass before he could feel easy around women, who became the latest culprits in his search for what was missing from his life. He buried himself in his work, progressing rapidly, moving from one firm to another: Innovir, Hemazyne, BioCogent. Finally, a valuable commodity, he had settled in at Procept. There, he had finally met his lifemate, Stroma, beloved afferent to his efferent. She of the coarse mottled pelt and seductive prehensile lips and nipples, syrinx-trilled laughter and witty chatter. His and his alone,

her minor mods acceptable to the more sophisticated man he had become.

Happy in his work and his home, Greenlaw's unease had subsided somewhat, although it never quite vanished. The hapless child born to Soil and Sunflower had been essentially replaced by a new self-made construct.

Then, after satisfying decades of personal advancement, decades in which his work had helped change the world, easy decades which had lulled him into almost forgetting the mysterious theft of his birthright, had come the ultimate tragedy, which Greenlaw came to believe he had been proactively intuiting all his life. A tragedy the ultimate blame for which was frustratingly diffuse and shared.

Wild mocklife had devoured Greenlaw's native bioregion.

Objectively and inclusively viewed, these were the victims and spoils of the plague:

A sprawling infrastructure measured at 1.2 Є 10 to the fifth power plectic units (on the revised Santa Fe scale).

Ten million citizens of both Peej and Haj status.

Uncounted vars from a thousand controlled mixes, as well as innumerable illicit sports, volunteers, and devolves.

Thirty million multiform kibes of varying turingity.

And finally, unreckoned teratonnes of biomass and inorganics, both basal and sartorized.

Subjectively and selectively, Greenlaw mourned these:

His lovingly grown zomehome. His entire chromocohort, however much they had teased him as a child. His

proxies and splices. Those of his semisentient splinters and shards and snippets which had been unable to scatter themselves safely elsewhere across the telecosm.

And Stroma, the one woman he had ever been able to love, so alluringly bez kompleksov, as his Snowy friends might say.

Gone, all gone. Yet still mockingly there, parading about in their charade of daily life. Active unknowing ghosts, simulacra transfigured by the mass of rogue silicrobes known as the Urblastema or-by those who still had the energy for poetic coinages-the Panplasmodaemonium.

And the ultimate irony: it was Greenlaw's job to stop such things from happening. During the infiltration and ingestion of his own region he had, in fact, been halfway around the globe, supervising the defenses of another beleaguered metroplex.

Greenlaw was good at his job. His efforts had been successful. The assault on the antipodal NewZee plex had been repelled, its citizenry saved.

As if any of that mattered to him now.

The cordon sanitaire around Greenlaw's contaminated bioregion was staffed partly by members of his own commensal crada, the DizDek team from Procept. The teamer in charge was one Haj Bambang, with whom Greenlaw had often worked.

Moving away from his organiform flier parked on the outskirts of the encampment, with 'crobe-attenuated sunlight painting the scene around him in muted hues, Greenlaw

strode now toward the command nexus of the defense. One of his personal kibes,' carrying a large sealed bip container, obediently trailed him.

Amidst the organized activity of Procept kibes, vars, and commensals, Bambang stood, his seemingly unfocused stare revealing that he was obviously busy scanning his retinally displayed shimmerstats. Sensations of tension and hope were nearly tangible here, thought Greenlaw.

As Greenlaw approached, Bambang brought his awareness back to primary reality, catching sight of Greenlaw in the process. The Indoasian's broad cinnamon face wrinkled in a mixture of respect, happiness, and just a trace of wariness.

''Peej Greenlaw," said Bambang respectfully. They threw signs at each other, hyperarticulated hand-flexures of lineage and association. "Good to see you. Are you perhaps coming to take command?"

Greenlaw sighed. Duty, professional jealousy, they seemed so unreal now…

"No," he answered, "not at all. I'm sure you're doing a fine job, although I haven't tapped any status reports since the announcement of the engulfment. No, this visit is strictly personal."

In his habitual gesture of relief, Bambang fingered the Procept tattoon that rotated on his cheek, nanometers below his epidermis.

The innocent gesture sent Greenlaw's linear thought processes into a chaotic whirl. Suddenly, for the first time in his long life, he saw the ubiquitous loyal silicrobes that

formed Bambang's tattoon-and his own, for that matter-as the actual nonsomatic invaders that they were.

Was the Urblastema merely a tattoon on the surface of Gaia?

No. For unlike an obedient assemblage of silicrobes, it was intent on devouring its host.

And we did it to ourselves, thought Greenlaw ruefully. I helped every step of the way. No one else is to blame.

Onboard Xaos Tools wetware located in the bulge of his encephalocele came online, and the nonlinear vortex of emotions and thoughts damped agreeably down. Without the mod's invaluable aid, Greenlaw suspected, he would have been a grief-racked casualty in some Humana House by now.

"Personal?" echoed Bambang. He tickled up a fresh datum. "Oh, yes, I see… My condolences, Peej Greenlaw. May the principles of the First Self-Organizer be of comfort to you now in your hour of distress."

Greenlaw waved the offered solace away, as useless in its own fashion as his parents' Viridian principles. "I was never a true believer, Haj. And it would be most ironic now for me to worship that principle which, more or less, has stolen away from me all I once cherished."

"But Peej, surely you cannot repudiate the sacred principles, despite their perversion by the Urblastema… "

Bambang broke off, sensing that theological fencing was highly unsuitable to Greenlaw's current mood. He changed topics.

"Would you care to survey our defenses, Peej? We have a continuous line of shuggoths patrolling the entire perimeter

to deal with macroscopic surface assaults. The entire atmospheric column above the afflicted zone is saturated with killer assemblages in the submicron range, as well as shoals of airsharks. Additionally, we've established positive-flow wind curtains and backup pressure fronts, with the help of GlobalMet. As for the subsurface measures-"

Greenlaw interrupted. "That was the route by which the Urblastem a a ttacked, wasn't it?"

Bambang appeared embarrassed. "Yes indeed, Peej. Apparently, after the defeat of the Urb at Chiplex, a small remnant portion escaped deep underground. Unknown to us, it had developed means of encysting itself against a magma environment. Our mopup survey unfortunately stopped at Region D Prime of the lower mantle. Consequently, the Urb was able to utilize magma veins as a means of travel, surfacing well away from anywhere we expected it to appear."

"And what of contamination of the lithosphere in general?"

"Models are still being grown in many simorg spheres, of course. But the best guess is that no widespread infection of the crust yet exists. The Urb-seed was small and weak and seemed to spend very few cycles doubling itself. Thank the First for the limits of one over e-squared! For some reason, it appeared intent on breaking through to the surface as soon as possible. A desire to deal with us unpredictable lifeforms first? Perhaps underground conditions were not optimal?… "

Despite himself, Greenlaw found his curiosity piqued. "That just doesn't make sense. It could have remained hidden safely for years, building itself up into an unconquerable

mass. Converting the globe from the inside out, it could have taken us completely by surprise. Instead, it tipped its hand by a premature assault. Frankly, I'm baffled."

"Perhaps luck was simply on our side."

Greenlaw smiled wryly. "Another superstition I find hard to credit."

Bambang erected a cold facade employed usually only with noncommensals, becoming completely professional. As if to indicate that Greenlaw's options were limited, he said, "Shall we tour the defenses then?"

"I think not. I have other plans."

"May I hear them?"

"Certainly. They are contained in a single sentence."

"Which is?"

"I'm going in."

Bambang's eyes widened to their utmost. Five whole seconds passed by Greenlaw's onboard clock before the Indoasian found it possible to speak.

"Madness! Even if you're intent on committing melancholy suicide, is it also necessary to contribute your corpse and talents to the Urb?"

"Spare me the melodramatics, please. I have no intention of dying. I will be using a new falseskin wholebody sheath which is immune to infection. Or so the crad a a ssures me."

Bambang considered. "Even so, is it proper for one of our senior operatives to risk his life in a field trial?"

"I have an additional goal, the personal matter to which I referred. I intend to bring back a piece of my mate."

Bambang understood at once. "She had no offsite storage of splinters or shards then? She was never godelized or fredkinated? Not even a snippet? I see. Too bad."

Greenlaw nodded. He had tried many times to convince Stroma to allow herself to be neurally mapped, but she had always refused, laughingly regarding such measures as paranoid and unnecessary.

Bambang continued. "So nothing of her mental patternings remains outside the clutches of the Urb. And you wish to replicate her. But you know we cannot allow you to bring an Urb-seed out. The danger is too great."

"It will be contained within an onboard vesicle of the same impermeable material. Completely safe. And Procept approves. They would like a captive piece of the Urb to experiment on."

"Allow me to confirm all this, Peej."

"Permission granted."

Bambang went unfocused. When he returned, his dour expression was overlaid with respect and awe.

"May I personally escort you to the borders of the zone, Peej?"

"It would be my pleasure, Haj."

Grateful for the sheer essential humanity of his commensal, Greenlaw impulsively stuck out one of his long-fingered hands for an old-fashioned shake.

As Bambang gripped Greenlaw's proffered hand, a wave of disorientation and deja vu swept over Greenlaw. For lengthy seconds, Greenlaw felt as if he were reiterating a scene he had lived through a hundred times before. The

ground seemed to shift beneath him, the world whirl, and, startled, he broke contact.

"Are you well?" Bambang asked, plainly concerned.

Greenlaw felt onboard compensators swing into action. Primary reality stabilized.

"I've been existing on microsleep for a week," Greenlaw explained. "But I can go another few hours."

Bambang threw a sign acknowledging Supremacy of Somatopsychic Autonomy.

The two men, accompanied by Greenlaw's single kibe and Bambang's whole devoted flock, began to walk toward a line of what appeared, at this distance, to be a range of white hillocks, curiously wavering.

The men passed a squad of Sinochem Assault Beetles and DarMol Scout Giraffes. A crew from Bechtel-Kanematsu-Gosho was supervising kibes who were laying lines of buckytubes that would carry circulating superhot plasma: its release would be a last-ditch suicide defense.

As the group drew closer, the hillocks grew larger and larger, resolving themselves into separate entities. Finally they towered over the humans, more like living mountains, mobile indeed.

Twenty meters tall, bloated, white as paste, each topped by a normal-sized human rider who appeared dwarfed, the shuggoths shluffed noisily along in their continuous patrol, flattened ellipsoids massing as much as two basal blue whales apiece, separated from each other by only a quarter body-length. A damp soil odor typical of mycotronic creatures filled the air.

From time to time feelers and pseudopods erupted from the shuggoths' upper surfaces at random, to sample the environment.

"An impressive sight," commented Greenlaw. "Although how the Urblastema regards them is a matter we might speculate on."

Bambang bristled. "Your remark smells of defeatism, Peej-if I may be frank. I understand your distress, but we have a duty to crad a a nd humanity to maintain our professionalism. The Urb, after all, is not invulnerable. As you well know, it relies on speed and bulk in its attack. If we can overwhelm it on either of those two fronts, then we stand a chance. Even as we speak, vast quantities of the new petahertz dizdeks are flowing down the feeder lines to the reservoirs of the splash-cannons you can see here. Soon, we will repel this incursion, as we have all others."

"Leaving behind an ocean of disassembled, deconstructed slop. Plenty of raw feedstock. But not what was once here. Not what the Urb consumed. The people and trees and homes. Never that."

"I'm sorry, Peej. But we will rebuild. And repopulate. If that is any consolation to you."

Greenlaw sighed. "I suppose it will have to be. But enough talk. I wish to enter the zone now. Kibe-the box, please."

The obedient mechanism opened the lid of the medium-sized biopoly container it held.

Revealed was what appeared to be an undifferentiated mass of thick semiliquid like mercury, silvery and reflective.

"You mentioned speed as a defense, Haj Bambang. Here you see the ultimate in that line. This falseskin presents no stable molecular identity onto which the Urb can latch. Entirely chameleonic. It shifts through a thousand random cellular identities a second, its surface a kaleidoscope of antigens, while still maintaining its large-scale integrity. Unable to latch on long enough to unriddle the nature of its victim, the Urb is frustrated and cannot usurp and convert the material. Nor, obviously, what it protects."

Greenlaw turned to the box and plunged his hands in.

The liquid ran up his arms like twin snakes swallowing.

In seconds, Greenlaw was sheathed completely in silver, his eyes and mouth reduced to mild depressions, his nose plugged, his ears capped.

The kibe closed the lid on the empty box.

Bambang eyed the argent, statue-like form of his senior commensal. Plainly, the Indoasian was running a search through some little-accessed data trees.

Bambang spoke. "Mid to late twentieth century. A medium called 'comics'…"

Operating now entirely on inner metabolic reserves, tapping sensory feeds that ranged from satellites to the analog-vision of the falseskin itself, Greenlaw smiled at Bambang's expression, the falseskin flowing over his parted lips like a seamless membrane.

"Exactly. I need only what I believe the reedpair authors called 'a stick' to appear completely in character." Greenlaw's words resounded normally, transmitted by vibra-

tions of the falseskin. "Now, can you afford to slow those creatures down just a bit?"

"Certainly. But only for seconds."

A wave of deceleration propagated clockwise around the necklace of shuggoths, counter to their direction of travel.

Greenlaw tensed his leg muscles, the falseskin likewise responding, incrementing his normal abilities.

A gap opened in the line.

At enhanced speed, without a final goodbye, Greenlaw sprinted for the opening.

And was through.

The realm of humanity and its obedient creations was behind him.

Now, there was nothing but the Urb.

And, most horribly of all, it was a domain of utter normality.

Greenlaw found himself standing in an orchard of fabric trees, the line of shuggoths a full half-klick behind him.

The scene was the essence of peace. The broad black leaves of the fabric trees waved peacefully in the perpetual wind from outside. Long draperies of fabric hanging down from the underside of the secretory branch-nodes rustled gently, tartan and paisley. Judging from their length, they had apparently just been harvested, for they did not even touch the ground. A chorus of insect life reached his shielded ears. From the underbrush bolted a basal rabbit, followed by a sinuous baseline snake.

No aberrations.

Yet utterly false.

Suddenly, Greenlaw felt the ground immediately beneath his soles come alive. He did not move. Soon, the probing of the mock soil subsided.

He hadn't realized he had been tensed against the attack until it ceased. Initiating a relaxant cascade within himself, Greenlaw moved toward the closest tree. Stopping next to it, he lashed out at its trunk with a kick.

"Urb! Wake up!"

Unnaturally, the curtains of fabric moved quickly to envelop him, tasting, seeking to analyze and convert. Again, he did not resist. After a few seconds they slowly, reluctantly withdrew.

A pair of bark lips formed on the trunk of the "tree."

"What are you?" said the Urb in an innocuous tenon.

Greenlaw spoke with a bravado he barely felt. To be actually conversing with this monstrosity surpassed all rational thinking.

"Your doom, Urb. Your extinction."

"You are small, alone, unsupported. No tiny system so isolated can be self sufficient for long. Soon you will have to come out of your shell. Then I shall be you, and you me."

The lips were subsumed back into the tree, and the conversation was clearly at an end.

The Urb did not sound concerned. Did it understand emotions, threats, and bluffs? What had it retained of the million human personalities and memories it had swallowed? How much had been integrated into the core of its being?

Greenlaw knew that the original biological codings of the converted inhabitants of his region-animal, var, human,

plant, and virus-no longer existed as such. The original proteins and nucleotides and parabases had all been converted to crafty rogue silicrobes identical to those that had mutated and escaped a dreadful five years ago. The same applied to all the unlucky inorganics of the region, down to an unknown depth.

Isotropy reigned.

The ultimate monoculture.

The orchard, the grass, the rabbit, the snake, the very crust: all these were now composed of Urb-stuff masquerading as what it had consumed. The simulation was perfect and complete until examined on a molecular level. Had Greenlaw, for instance, chosen to break off a branch of his recent interlocutor, to his ears it would have snapped convincingly, to his normal vision it would have revealed typical grain and texture, oozed the requisite sap.

The Urb, as best they understood, was able to draw directly somehow on the ultradense original information stored in sheldrakean morphic fields for its disguise. The templates of all that it had engulfed were available to it for instant replication. A feat currently beyond human abilities.

Whether a captured piece of Urb-stuff would allow Greenlaw to retrieve from those selfsame fields the information patterns of his mate, Stroma, was not certain. He had only the tentative promises of his crada that such might be possible.

Some of the morphic specialists claimed that any portion of Urb-stuff within his reach here in the orchard would have sufficed for his purposes. Others felt that the stuff

forming the simulacrum of his wife would naturally resonate most strongly with the patterns he sought. Greenlaw did not quite know whom to believe. Perhaps the wisest course would be to snatch and run now, attain the safety beyond the shuggoths.

But his protective sheath seemed to be working as promised.

Any knowledge he could collect might help the defenders.

And he did so want to see Stroma.

Even her ghost.

The Urb had been right about one thing, however. His time here was limited by his inner reserves.

Moving swiftly, Greenlaw soon left the orchard far behind.

A busy road presented itself. Traffic crawled, hopped and skittered, bound in one direction toward Greenlaw's residence in a luxurious neighborhood of tree towers and zomehomes on the outskirts of the plex.

False, all a sham, Greenlaw kept reminding himself. He felt the neo-emotion known as sehnsucht, a wave of longing for the unattainable, mixed with nostalgi a a nd grief. Harshly, he damped the neomote signal down.

Stepping into traffic, Greenlaw halted a two-rider tumblebug.

The driver was a slim fellow wearing the tattoon of the telecosm maintenance crada.

''What's your trouble, Peej? And why the envirosuit?"

Greenlaw played the Urb's game. "I can't explain now. May I have a ride?"

The cryptohuman formed of Urb-stuff hesitated realistically before agreeing. "Certainly. Hop aboard."

Greenlaw climbed on the tumblebug, and, after allowing a cargo-crawler to pass on the left, its driver took off.

Greenlaw remained silent for the trip-which took less time than running would have and conserved his resources as well-and the driver seemed reluctant to initiate conversation.

Was the Urb toying with him? All it would take to defeat Greenlaw would be to immobilize him in any of a hundred different ways until he either suffocated or opened up. Was the Urb (whose motives no one had ever fathomed) so intent on its simulation that it could not react to Greenlaw's unique presence?

There was no certainty. None.

Greenlaw settled back into his seat.

Finally, they arrived at his destination, the periphery of his residential district.

Greenlaw turned to the driver. "If I were to ram my fist into your chest right now and squeeze your heart to Urb-pulp, you'd die horribly, I'm sure, and quite convincingly. But what would you really feel?"

The Urb did not relax his role. The cryptohuman assumed a look of terror. "Get-get out! I'm sending a nine-eleven instantly!"

Greenlaw dismounted and walked away.

Down noontime-empty streets, past Urb-children playing on Urb-grass, Urb-augie doggies watching over them…

One final turn brought him face to face with his home.

From the inside, the falseskin absorbed his tears.

Greenlaw entered.

Stroma lay on an organiform couch, her pelt lustrous, nothing concealed. Her languid arms reached up for him, her nipples curled convulsively.

"I was just wishing you were here," she said, her voice a knife through Greenlaw's ears.

He knew then he had to put an end to this dangerous game.

Taking one of Stroma's offered hands, Greenlaw snapped off her left index finger.

There was no shout of pain, no scream.

The Urb had chosen to shut down the pseudo-Strom a a nd manifest itself.

"Again, you've failed," said the Urb through Stroma's lips, her wounded hand "bleeding" profusely onto the couch.

Almost against his will, Greenlaw said, "How so, Urb? And what do you mean, 'again'?"

"This is approximately the five-hundredth time we have run this sequence, and still you persist in hating me."

Greenlaw laughed. "So, you do understand bluffing! A fine attempt, Urb. But now I'm leaving."

Greenlaw turned to go.

"No. Stop."

Greenlaw's legs were no longer under his control. He found himself forced to turn, to face Stroma.

Her finger was restored. Greenlaw's hand unclenched by itself, and the fragment he held dropped to the carpet, there to be absorbed.

His voice at least still seemed his own. "I-I don't understand. How did you get past the falseskin?… "

Stroma syrinx-laughed in her familiar manner. "Silly! I am your suit."

With her words, his silver falseskin melted off him and disappeared.

He stood unprotected against the Urb.

"And I'm you too," added Stroma.

At that instant, he knew it was true.

Information had just flooded into him, explaining the ache of his vanished birthright at last.

Three centuries ago, the Urb had conquered all.

The mysteriously unfollowed winning strategy Greenlaw had outlined to Bambang had indeed been implemented. Lurking deep inside the globe, the Panplasmodemonium had built itself up until it had erupted unstoppably everywhere.

And now–

"And now," said Stroma tenderly, "I try to understand everything I am. Gaia, whose still-living molten center I encyst, was incredibly information-deep and information-dense. To measure Her in your old-fashioned plectic units would require an exponent larger than the number of atoms in the universe. The only way for me to grasp Her has been to recapitulate Her whole history since Her formation, on an accelerated scale. The endgame, though, is particularly puzzling. This incident with your mate, for example-Very deep."

Greenlaw sat down wearily on the couch. Stroma put her arms around him. He flinched, then forced himself to relax.

"What of your puppets, Urb, when you've parsed it all?"

"Not puppets. Beloved components, say rather. Were you never grateful and kind to your own cells? Eventually, I believe I'll withdraw, grant you real free will-almost without limits. Allow you all to forget I even exist. Modify myself so that no trace of me can be detected even on the submolecular level. Be content to dwell beneath the surface of things. Your species, after all, will be a most useful vehicle for meeting others."

"Others?"

Stroma laughed. "But of course. After all, this is not the only planet in the galaxy."

Then Stroma turned toward him-

And the Urb gently and sincerely kissed itself.