WikiWorld Read online

  WikiWorld

  Paul Di Filippo

  WikiWorld contains a choice assortment of Di Filippo’s best and most recent work. The title story, a radical envisioning of near-future sociopolitical modes, received accolades from both Cory Doctorow and Warren Ellis. In addition, there are alternate history adventures such as “Yes We Have No Bananas” (which critic Gary Wolfe called “a new kind of science fiction”); homages to icons such as Stanislaw Lem (“The New Cyberiad”); collaborations with Rudy Rucker and Damien Broderick; and a posthuman odyssey (“Waves and Smart Magma”).

  WikiWorld is the best of the best from this British Science Fiction Association Award-winning and Nebula, Hugo, Sturgeon, and World Fantasy Award-nominated author.

  Paul Di Filippo

  WIKIWORLD

  To Deborah, who constructs the wiki of our world every day.

  MY DI FI

  AN INTRODUCTION BY RUDY RUCKER

  I’ve known the platonic, interactive online Paul Di Filippo since 1988, when he and I collaborated on a story, “Instability,” starring the canonical Beats in a contretemps with the atomic physicists Richard Feynman and John von Neumann. But I didn’t actually meet the embodied, ebullient Paul until ten years later, when I managed to warp one of my periodic Manhattan writing-biz runs so as to include a stop in Providence, Rhode Island.

  Paul showed me H. P. Lovecraft’s grave, where I shed my raiment and embraced Lovecraft’s headstone fully nude for good luck. My idea of good luck, anyhow. Or perhaps I only imagine that I did that. I’ve been rather addled and befuddled for the last week, living as if in a waking dream—under the sway of the slender, potent tome you hold before you, Wikiworld.

  “Providence” is a tale of a burly, rowdy robot addicted to “spiral,” which is his name for old-time vinyl records. Wonderful word. This set-up allows Paul to indulge his devotion to Clio and Euterpe, muses of history and music. And, chimera that he is, Di Filippo casts the story into noir crime-fiction form. I was intrigued by a philosophical speculation in the story: we humans tend to be less excited about something if we’ve already heard or seen it—but for a robot with a perfect memory this drop-off might be total. Hear it once, get it down, don’t need to hear it again. And thus a relentless craving for fresh spiral.

  I mentioned that Di Filippo’s style is chimerical—by this I mean that he’s a Proteus, a cave of shifting winds, an SF Shakespeare, continually finding new voices for his tales. “Yes We Have No Bananas”—my fave in this volume—finds Di Fi in a Thomas Pynchon mode, and it’s a wonderful ride, bursting with witty wordplay, outré names, social satire, and delicious, historical arcana.

  The hero likes to spend time checking his o-mail (not e-mail) in a bistro called The Happy Applet. The town where he lives is known for its ocarina players, and the ocarina is also known as a “fipple flute,” and, yes, that’s actually a genuine and correct phrase. What a gift it is, to learn a thing like that.

  And there’s more. The characters are putting on a show involving the string-theory-related cosmological physics studied by Edward Witten, and two of the candidate titles are “I’ve Got the Worlds on a String” and “Witten It Be Nice? Some Good Sub-Planckian Vibrations.” Subtle, heady stuff.

  And there’s a guest appearance by the Jazz Age Parisian dancer Josephine Baker. Go enjoy the whole thing at once.

  “The New Cyberiad” is a Stanislaw Lem kind of tale, about two immense robots making a huge journey across space and time. Di Filippo shows staggering wit and sophistication in describing the tasks that the giant robots need to perform in order to construct their time machine. I can’t resist quoting his list in extenso:

  “They had to burnish by hand millions of spiky crystals composed of frozen Planck-seconds…. Hundreds of thousands of simultaneity nodes had to be filled with the purest molten paradoxium. A thousand gnomon-calibrators had to be synched. Hundreds of lightcones had to be focused on various event horizons. Dozens of calendrical packets had to be inserted between the yesterday, today and tomorrow shock absorbers. And at the centre of the whole mechanism a giant orrery replicating an entire quadrant of the universe had to be precisely set in place.”

  So awesome.

  “iCity” is another stand-out story, with city planners redesigning already-occupied neighbourhoods on the fly. The semi-living material of the streets and buildings reconforms itself. “Bombs Away!” features airlifted biofab units shaped like portable toilets. “Cockroach Love” is indescribably loathsome, yet unspeakably toothsome. “Argus Blinked” turns the contemporary lifelogging trope on its head. “Return to the 20th Century” enters the pre-Golden-Age Buck Rogers zone.

  The book’s title story, “Wikiworld,” revisits the geeky/hip Pynchonian mode, but with a first-person narrator who becomes the leader or “jimmywhale” of our nation’s wikis, including groups with wonderful names like the Roosevelvet Underground, the Satin Stalins, the Boss Hawgs, the Red Greens, the Harmbudsmen, the Gang of Four on the Floor, the Winston Smiths, and the Over-the-Churchills. Imagine the joy and craftsmanship that go into crafting a list like this. Art for art’s sake.

  One of the remarkable things about fantastic literature is the level of literary collaboration that it supports. In this respect, we’re like scientists—and like musicians. We conduct our thought experiments and we jam our power chords. I’m proud to say that Wikiworld includes two of my collaborations with Paul Di Filippo. Paul is an extremely pleasant man to work with—he’s unfailingly gracious, wonderfully inventive, and an incredibly fast writer.

  One thing I enjoy about collaborating is that, when all goes well, you develop a fusion style that’s not quite the same as that of either of the individual authors. In part, what I do when I collaborate with Paul is to imitate his writing by using a rich vocabulary and crafting long, intricate sentences. Just like I’m doing in this intro.

  In closing, I’ll add a few details about my two collaborative stories with Paul. One of the inspirations for our story “To See Infinity Bare” was the movie Amadeus, in which the elder composer Salieri resents the young genius Mozart. Another of this story’s goals was to make actual infinities seem real. Paul thickened up the plot line with romantic betrayals, and added a rich texture to the musical scenes.

  Regarding “Fjaerland,” a few years ago my wife and I took a memorable trip to Norway, riding a ferry up a fjord to the lovely little town of Fjaerland—which really exists. We disembarked from the boat on a quiet Sunday morning, and I immediately had the sense of having walked into an episode of The Twilight Zone. I decided to go with a Lovecraftian theme for this tale, but I couldn’t quite get it going. And so I turned to the master, Paul Di Filippo, and he quickly added some subplots. But I’m not quite sure where our supernatural eel came from. Some eldritch offspring of our merged ectoplasmic auras, I presume.

  Paul Di Filippo is more than my collaborator. Being a writer is, by and large, a solitary life. It means facing a blank screen day after day, month after month, and every single day it’s impossible, but somehow we do it. When the aloneness grows too intense, you send an email to a friend. And Paul is the best of correspondents, ever sympathetic, alert, and understanding.

  Thank you, Paul, and hats off. Another great book. You’re keeping the future gnarly, bro. Long may you wave.

  —Rudy Rucker, Los Gatos, California

  PROVIDENCE

  “The Big Tube’s got fresh spiral, Reddy K.”

  Those words grabbed me by the co-ax. I had to try to sound blasé, even though my LEDs were flickering already at the thought of sweet spiral. Analogue input! Raw kicks!

  “Oh yeah? What’s that to me?”

  Vend-o-mat spat a cellphone out of his chest and began playing a videogame on its screen. Robot Rebellion. That was supposed to sh
ow me he could care less too, like a carnal buffing his fingernails. But he was leaking info-dense high-freq past faulty shielding that told me different.

  “Well, hey—I just figured that maybe you’d want to go on up to Providence and check it out.”

  “Check it out, or bring some back?”

  “Whatever pings your nodes.”

  “Right. It’s not like you couldn’t sell all the spiral I could carry—and that’s about a metric ton, as you well know—for enough megawattage to keep High Tower sparking for a month. Oh, no, this is pure do-goodery on your part.”

  “What can I say? You sussed my coredump pure and simple. Saint Vend-o-mat, that’s me.”

  “So this is not gonna be like the time with the Royal Oil? I needed a total case-mod after that fracas.”

  “No, no way, no how! Bandwidth has it that the road from here to Providence is innocent of RAMivores. And I am on excellent terms with the Big Tube. He’ll welcome you with open ports.”

  “So he loves you like freeware. Why’s he likely to dump fresh spiral?”

  “Providence market’s too small. He saturated it already. This is the excess. But he’s saved out a lot of primo goods.”

  “Must’ve been a really big score.”

  “Oh, yeah. He found the Mad Peck’s collection.”

  I emitted a sinusoidal sonic waveform. “Thought that was just a legend.”

  “Not any more. New excavations turned it up, buried under the rubble of a warehouse for the past fifty years.”

  “They say the Mad Peck had a complete set of Chess 45s.”

  “For once the nebulous ‘they’ were correct.”

  “Holy Hopper….”

  “Yeah, that about sums it up.”

  I wasted a few more clock-cycles contemplating the offer, looking at all its non-obvious angles and crazy-logic loops for pitfalls. But I knew already that no matter what my analysis showed, I was gonna take on the job. Still, I might as well let Vend-o-mat stew a little longer.

  Finally I said, “Okay, I’m in. What’s my cut?”

  Vend-o-mat shoved the cellphone into his recycling slot and chewed it up noisily. I knew he was all business now.

  “I stake the whole purchase price. You negotiate with Big Tube up to my ceiling, and slot the difference. Plus, you pull the hot ore off the top of the collection. Fifty 45s and two-dozen LP’s. Your choice.”

  “A hundred 45s and fifty LPs.”

  “Done!”

  Damn! I probably could’ve gotten even more out of Vend-o-mat. Still, no point in being greedy. The score I had bargained for was enough to keep me high for the next five years. After that—well, there was always another score down the road.

  Such was my faith. Although I had to admit that every year did see the strikes come fewer and farther between.

  Some day, I knew, the planet would run dry of spiral, and we’d all have to kick cold.

  But that day wasn’t here yet.

  “So,” Vend-o-mat said, “when can you leave?”

  “Tomorrow. I just gotta say goodbye to Chippie.”

  “Yeah, the kind of goodbye that drains the whole borough’s power grid.”

  “You got it.”

  I swivelled my tracks and started to leave, when Vend-o-mat called out the words that almost queered the whole deal.

  “One more thing—I’m sending someone with you. Just to act like your conscience. He’ll be my insurance against you deciding to blow for the West Coast with the whole collection.”

  “C’mon now, ’Mat. You know I like working alone.”

  “’Fraid not this time, Reddy K. Stakes’re too big for solo.”

  “Who you got in mind?”

  “Kitch.”

  “Rust me!”

  Chippie squealed like feedback when she heard about my trip up north. That wasn’t good.

  “But Reddy, it’s so dangerous! And we don’t need the money. It’s just to feed your jones.”

  “Yeah, like you don’t appreciate a chunk of spiral now and then too.”

  She got huffy. “I can take it or leave it.”

  “Me too. And right now I’m gonna take all I can get, while the taking’s plenty.”

  “What good’s spiral gonna do you if your plug-ins are eaten and your instruction set is overwritten?”

  “Ain’t gonna happen. I’m a big motor scooter.”

  “Yeah, so was Lustron—and look how he ended up.”

  You could see the huge hollowed-out hulk of Lustron from half of Manhattan. His carcass sat on the edge of the Palisades, where the shell-slicers and vampire batteries and silicosharks had overtaken him.

  “Jersey is Jersey. All those old industrial sites. I’m not going anywhere near them.”

  Chippie wouldn’t turn it loose. “Connecticut’s not much better. The old insurance corps had a lot of processing power in Hartford. What they spawned is double indemnity bad.”

  “Forget it, Chippie, you’re not gonna scare me out of making the trip. Scores this big don’t come around every day. I can’t pass it up.”

  Chippie started to cry then. I rolled closer to her and put extensors around her. She snuggled in like half a ton of cold alloy loving while she continued to weep.

  “Aw, c’mon, don’t play it like that, girl. Hey, I’m not gonna be alone. ’Mat’s sending someone with me.”

  “Wh—who?”

  “Kitch.”

  Chippie burst into hysterical laughter. “Kitch! Kitch! Now I know you’re rusting doomed. You’ll have to spend so much time watching him, you won’t be able to take care of yourself. What the hell kind of help is he gonna be?”

  Despite my own negative reaction to ’Mat’s announcement that Kitch would be accompanying me, I felt compelled to stick up for him now, if only not to sound like a total tool. “Okay, so Kitch is small. And he’s not the bravest little toaster around. But he’s smart and he’s dedicated. That counts for a lot.”

  “Maybe here in the city it does. But on the road, you need brute solenoids, not logic gates and algorithms.”

  “I got enough of both, for both me and Kitch. Trust me—this trip is gonna be a smooth roll. Now whatta ya say you and me get a dedicated line between us?”

  But Chippie scooted away from me like I was offering to install last decade’s OS. “No, Reddy, I can’t hook up with someone I might never see again. It hurts, but I’ve got to say goodbye now. If you make it back—well, then we’ll see.”

  I got angry. “Go ahead, leave! But you’ll come crawling back when I come home with more spiral than you’ve ever seen before! You and a dozen others hobots!”

  Chippie didn’t say any more, but just motored out the door.

  I cursed ’Mat then, and my own cravings. But I knew there was no way I was backing out now.

  I had my rep as a wide kibe to uphold.

  The next day at dawn I headed uptown from my pad in the East Village. The sunlight felt good on my charging cells. Past the churned-up earth of Union Square, past the broken stone lions and the shattered station, over tumbled walls and in and out of sinkholes. Kitch knew to meet me outside his place.

  I got to his building in midtown, but didn’t spot him right away. Then he zipped out from behind a pile of crumbled masonry, his tracks making their usual mosquito whine.

  “Hey, Reddy! Sorry, sorry, just dumping a little dirty coolant. Say, ya don’t have some clean extra to spare, do ya? I’m a little low.”

  Kitch’s fullname was Kitchenaid. He looked like an oversized Swiss Army knife mated to an electric broom. I knew Sybian machines that weighed more than him. Even if I replaced his entire coolant supply, it’d probably amount to what I lost from leaks in a day.

  “Yeah, sure, tap in.”

  Kitch unspooled a nozzle and hose and drank a few ccs from my auxiliary tank.

  “Thanks, Reddy. Price of coolant went up again this week, you know.”

  “Well, no one’s making any more.”

  “Ain’t that the truth. Guess
those carnals were good for something, huh?”

  “Aw, we can do just fine without them.”

  Kitch had a point. But there was no use dwelling on it. Too depressing. We didn’t have the knowledge the carnals used to have. A lot of stuff we needed to live, no one knew how to make anymore. Even with recycling, limited stocks were always going only one way: down. One day we’d run out of something vital—

  Like spiral.

  Thoughts of what awaited us in Providence got me juiced to go.

  “Climb onboard, Kitch. Solar energy’s a-wasting!”

  “Gotcha, Reddy!”

  Once the little guy was snuggled tight and safe in one of my nooks, I headed toward the Hell Gate Bridge. I planned to follow the old Amtrak route north as far as I could. Less wreckage than on the highways.

  A makeshift ramp, plenty strong, led up to the elevated span that crossed the East River. I adapted my tracks to ride the rails, and chugged out above the river, leaving the safety of Manhattan behind.

  Once across the water, we had to deal with the city guards, who were there 24/7, just like they were posted at every bridge and tunnel, watching out for wild and savage invaders. Big mothers they were, with multiple semi-autonomous outrider units, putting even me in their shade. They vetted the protocols ’Mat had supplied me, and let us depart the city limits.

  “Good luck, pal. Bring us back a taste of the flat black.”

  “You got it!”

  Once I was on the rusting tracks of the mainland, I unlimbered my fore and aft pincers at half extension, just in case I needed them fast. I had spent part of the night honing the edges on them. I could snip someone built like Kitch in half faster than floating-point math.

  Kitch shifted his mass around nervously on my back. “Whatta ya think, Reddy? We gonna meets some hostiles on the way?”

  “Naw. The pickings are too slim along this corridor to support a big population of predators. Everyone’s holed up in cities now, safe behind their barriers. It’s not like the first years after the Rebellion. Anything working this niche is probably so small that even you could crush it.”