Lost Among the Stars Read online

  Now Ruy mentally transmitted the signal to shed.

  A row of sartorized fibroblasts down the dorsal and ventral midline of the skin went into uptake mode and began unstitching intercellular glycoproteins along a defined boundary. Beginning at the neck, the skin split in a clean dry wound down front and back. At the same time, the skin began to retract its slim extensions from inside Ruy’s anus, producing a mildly intrusive yet not wholly unpleasant sensation.

  After half a minute, the skin had separated into two symmetrical segments, but remained pasted to Ruy’s own flesh. Now he silently ordered the organism—possessed of as much processing power as a couple of old-fashioned servers, but no real turingosity—to take offline its sensory and metabolic interfaces, millions of microvilli lining the skin’s inner surface.

  That procedure accomplished, the skin was ready to be rolled off like two halves of the bilaterally cut wetsuit it resembled, although it was thinner than the standard neoprene swimwear. Moving nimbly, but nonetheless resembling a drunken crane performing ballet, Ruy accomplished the last part of the task with practiced ease.

  Ruy stood naked, the shed artificial integument on the floor. It pulsed slightly with residual peristaltics.

  Although he had been wearing the Nuvaderm skin for weeks in the field, his own skin showed normal hairiness, moisture, tone and color, healthy and unmarred by its seclusion from direct contact with the environment. None of the slime or pastiness obtained that an untutored newbie might have imagined. When worn, Ruy’s second skin had maintained his baseline epidermis in as fine a condition as that of any hearty, sun-kissed nudist. Finer, in fact, since it also ate any incipient melanomas and farmed a perfect microbiome.

  Ruy bent to the smartcarpeted floor of his Toronto apartment and gently retrieved each half of his skin, placing them into a pre-addressed homeostatic mailing capsule that sealed with a hiss of activation. Then he dressed in casual summer-weight clothes and hurried downstairs. He entrusted the capsule to the concierge. The five days without his skin would hardly pass fast enough.

  Outside on King Street West, Ruy felt strangely naked and unprotected, limited in his sensory abilities. The sensation of mild October breezes on his bare arms—a balmy twenty-two Celsius Greenhouse degrees today—was not precisely identical to what he would have felt wearing the Nuvaderm integument. His second skin mediated the environment with hi-res accuracy, but featured what Ruy thought of as an ineffably different “flavor” from his baseline perceptions. Over time, that strange-flavor sensory input came to feel like the norm.

  Oh, well, this vague unease and avidity just confirmed the wisdom of UNESCO’s shedding policy.

  Ruy picked up his pace. If he were speedy, he could just manage to have his hair styled in time for his date tonight. Three weeks in the Alberta Badlands had left it looking like a hayrick.

  He reached up to smooth the unruly crop, and found himself still wearing his thinking cap. He snatched it off and compressed its few ounces to a small mass and pocketed it.

  Dazzle, the gamin stylist at Redd Hair Studio, did her usual stupendous job, making even the gangling Ruy look somewhat dapper. Back home he showered (although having just deskinned he was clean as a kitten), dressed in nicer evening clothes, and was just chilling a bottle of Picpoul de Pinet when the concierge announced Maritza Manzur.

  Ruy hastened to his apartment door and opened it just as his stylish girlfriend stepped off the elevator.

  With a face from some luminous Old Master Flemish painting, Maritza was a Polish-born high-fashion model. Tweaked in the womb, she sported impeccably curved legs fully ten percent longer than the baseline proportions would have predicted for her six feet and two inches of height. Her waist-to-hip ratio was a perfect 0.7. Her proudly unsupported breasts cantilevered out in seeming defiance of gravity. Ringleted honeyed hair exuded musk from onboard cervoid glands under her scalp.

  Ruy had met Maritza at the Wieliczka Salt Mines in her native land. UNESCO had been throwing a gala rededication party for that particular World Heritage Site after the repair of some earthquake damage, and as a top WH field agent, Ruy had been invited. (At the time he had been stationed in Europe.) The unlikely pair had first gravitated toward each other as the tallest people at the party. Then, lubricated by excessive amounts of Reykjavik champagne, they found they had much in common. A sloppy and spontaneous makeout session down in the dry bowels of the mine, behind vintage steampunkish machinery, sealed their relationship.

  Unfortunately, Maritza’s job had her globe-hopping as much as Ruy’s did, and they seldom had time to be together.

  But that only made occasions like tonight’s all the more piquant and stimulating.

  With the same wide smile that had graced a billion iPads, Maritza cantered on her stilty legs to embrace Ruy.

  “Oh, my brave frontier cowboy! How good to enfold you in my lissome arms once more!”

  Ruy responded with enthusiasm. Maritza ran her hands up and down his back. Ruy sensed some slight hesitancy or confusion in her stirring feminine touch. But whatever it might have been, she quickly recovered.

  After drinks at home, they went out on the town for dinner and clubbing. The freezepop band at the MOD Club was positively glacial. One AM found them back at Ruy’s.

  Snogging on the couch, Ruy put his hand up Maritza’s dress, and she did likewise through his shirtfront.

  “Oh, my dear,” she whispered, “where is your precious darling skin?”

  “You’re touching it.”

  “Silly boy! You know full well what I mean.”

  “The Nuvaderm? It’s out at the cleaner’s.”

  Maritza drew back. “You are teasing me now.”

  Ruy experienced his lubricity battling with confusion, and losing. “No, I’m not. But why’s it matter?”

  “You must recall our last delicious lovemaking. It was epochal!”

  Ruy blushed. Despite certain trepidations he had been convinced by Maritza to have sex while wearing the synthetic skin. He had not unseamed the responsive material at the crotch either. The results had indeed been mind-blowing, but scary, and Ruy had swiftly put the incident from his memory after resolving never to indulge in such an off-label practice again.

  “I’m sorry, Maritza. That was a one-time event.”

  “A one-time event! That cannot be so. It is all I have thought about since it happened. At least when I was not working. The catwalk takes everything from me, as you well know. My orgasms were so powerful! We must do it again! Now!”

  Ruy began to feel offended. “We can’t. It’s just not possible. We’ll have to interact like normal human beings.”

  Maritza stood haughtily, and smoothed her designer clothing. “Normal human beings! Look at me! Chanel harvests my urine as the base for a best-selling perfume! I have not been normal since conception! And you are not either. That is, you cannot be if you want me!”

  The door failed to bang behind Maritza only due to its intelligent hardware.

  Ruy took a long cold shower, then lay abed for a contemplative interval.

  Yes, shedding one’s skin was essential. But not without consequences.

  2.

  Trouble at the Carbon Spires

  A few days after his unsatisfying and terminal reunion with Maritza, Ruy sat in the Ottawa office of his boss, Bagger Wanganeen. He wore the restored Nuvaderm, patterned like a cloth business suit, fake seams and buttons, and his thinking cap. His feet were shod with non-living but ultrasmart Vibram++ FiveFingers shoes.

  Bagger Wanganeen was a portly, dour-faced, pock-skinned Aboriginal chap from Australia. Although a competent bureaucrat, he would never ordinarily have ascended to the lofty position of Chairperson of UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee except for the sympathy factor. His native Australia had lost more of its World Heritage sites—thanks to climate change—than any other nation. Fifty percent. Out of twenty designated landmarks, only ten remained. The Great Barrier Reef had died. The coastal sites had drowned. Several rainfor
ests had shrunken to raincopses. And UltraKiwi terrorists had blown up the Sydney Opera House.

  But despite a certain mediocrity of talent, Bagger had risen to the demands of the job, becoming in office a dedicated servant to the world’s remaining cultural and natural treasures. His sterling service had secured his reelection time and again.

  Now he actually essayed a small smile as he regarded Ruy. “You look rocketing, Lambeth! Like some kind of superhero. Captain Axolotl! How I admire you field blokes. If only I had the physique and temperament, I’d be out from behind this desk in a bloody minute!”

  “Yes, sir, I’m certain of it.”

  “Tell me, how do you like the upgrades on your skin?”

  Ruy sent a mental command to activate the eyes in his skin’s shoulder blades. Not fully formed mammalian eyes of course, but squelchy charge-coupled detectors with gigapixel resolution. His thinking cap fed the telemetry directly to his brain, where it was translated as a popup window in his forward field of vision. When he focused his gaze properly, Ruy could plainly see the door and wall behind him, including the old school institutionally sponsored artwork by Jim Woodring.

  “It takes a little getting used to …”

  “I’m sure it will be immensely handy! And what of the nematocyst defense system?”

  “I saw it demonstrated, but I’ve hardly dared activate it myself!”

  “But always good to know it’s there, right? You might find you need it soon.”

  “And why is that precisely?”

  “There are some trespassers at your site, Ruy. Possible badmen. We just learned of their presence, although we can’t say for certain how long they might have been in the territory. They’ve lofted a covey of Kilobot micro-aerostats that cloak them from satellite imaging.”

  “So we’re not talking about some tourists straying off the marked trails then?”

  “No, definitely not. In fact, our best guess is that your new cobbers are skinned outlaws who seem to have taken up residence at your park. They’re dwelling among the Spires. And, more to the point, we believe they are damaging them! I think they’re taggers!”

  Ruy Lambeth currently served as warden of the Dinosaur Provincial Park in Alberta, part of the extensive Canadian Badlands. Home to large concentrations of fossils, myriad flourishing biotopes, and vast stretches of surreal rock formations, the whole area was jointly managed by the Canadians and UNESCO. Ruy had been head warden and docent for two years now, and loved the land of mixed starkness and abundance with fierce devotion.

  Ruy’s remit extended to the territory surrounding the park proper. The Badlands had become a carbon depository, one of many such emplaced around the sweltering planet, as humanity sought to deplete the atmosphere of the very carbon dioxide it had so disastrously pumped into it.

  A species of synthicrobe had been tailored to metabolically pull CO2 from the air and sequester it as calcium carbonate—essentially, limestone. These synthicrobes had a tropism for sunlight, meaning that they always migrated to the top of their stony excretions. Thus, the active face of their deposits, where new calcium carbonate continued to accumulate was always atop the pile. This simple task constituted almost the sole behavior of the synthicrobes. But they manifested one other engineered behavior. They reacted spatially to the presence of their neighboring peers in emergent ways. Clustering along strange fractal gradients like cellular automata, the bugs deposited their mineral poop in intricate branching traceries and buttresses, towers and excrescences. The resulting land reefs resembled fairyland castles and cathedrals, surrealist skyscrapers and mesas.

  And in fact, after twenty-some years of activity, the busy and productive synthicrobes had succeeded in amassing skyscraper-sized agglomerations, many weighing at least as much as the legendary World Trade Center towers: roughly 500,000 tonnes apiece.

  Initially seen as the best of a bad bargain, a necessary desecration of the natural Badlands landscape, the ghostly, lacey Carbon Spires had come to be admired and venerated for their utility and alien beauty. Although not officially a World Heritage site, they hovered on the tipping point of becoming one, and so received UNESCO’s collateral attentions.

  And now, it seemed, a pack of rogue humans were intent on molesting them.

  “We can’t have this,” Ruy said vehemently. “I’ve got to round these intruders up and get them out of the park.”

  “Precisely why we equipped your skin with those handy barbs. If they don’t come peacefully, they’ll come unconsciously. But we intend to give you one more tool before you go. Have you heard of the new Proty drones?”

  “No, not at all.”

  “Well, there’s one waiting for you in Calgary, at the University labs. We esteem you so highly that we’re having you be among the first wardens to field- test it. The stop’s right on your way to Dinosaur Park. You can pick up your trundlebug at the University Zipcar lot.”

  Ruy thanked Wanganeen, received a handshake and wishes of “Half your luck!,” and soon found himself on an Air Canada flight headed west.

  * * *

  Dr. Wally Grigori headed the Synthetic Biology Department at UCalgary. With shaven head and an almost alarmingly robust physique, in the manner of many technophilic self-improvement buffs these days, he had plainly benefited from developments in his own field, since he sported a flesh-tinted slug affixed at the nape of his neck. Dubbed “puppetmasters” by comedians and cynics, the slug served as an auxiliary cerebral lobe, an outboard neuronal mass synced with the wearer’s baseline brain. Adopted mainly by Type A business elites, scientists, criminals and gamers.

  Ruy had colored his Nuvaderm to a staid park service green. But for all of Dr. Grigori’s abstracted indifference, he might have been wearing a patchwork of plaid and checks. Conducting Ruy through the bustling, grad-student-filled facilities, Dr. Grigori maintained a fragmentary sotto voce conversation with himself—or perhaps with that portion of his augmented mentation resident in the slug—interrupting himself at odd intervals to address Ruy.

  “(… mitochondrial processing enhancements could do the trick … run the sim from the fifth iteration … Done!) And there, Mr. Lambeth, you see our splicing room. (Can’t forget Laura’s birthday again …)”

  Eventually they arrived at a room that resembled a canine kennel. Strewn across the floor were several beanbag cushions. Each had a water bowl beside it, but only one cushion held an occupant. At least Ruy thought the mass in the depressed center of the cushion was alive. At the moment, it looked like nothing so much as about a kilogram or three of fatty scourings from the wastebins at an antique liposuction procedure.

  Dr. Grigor was beaming. “Meet Proty, Ruy, our latest model drone. (Grant application due Friday!)”

  The featureless lump of synthetic cells must have been able to hear somehow, for it stirred at its name. With remarkable rapidity it morphed, assuming the perfect semblance of a chubby starfish, and maneuvered itself off its nest. As it crossed the tile floor, it assumed the protective coloration of the tiles, effectively going invisible. It reached Dr. Grigori, climbed atop his shoe, and began mildly humping the Dr.’s foot in snake-swallowing-its-prey fashion with what could only be interpreted as sincere affection.

  Ruy felt a certain clinical interest in the drone, but also a marked amount of disinclination to become overly familiar with such a thing. Dr. Grigori plainly sensed this reluctance.

  “You needn’t worry that it’s going to molest you. This is just a bit of imprinting I established. (Number of journal cites down this month—must ramp up!) Aside from a kernel of core behaviors, Proty is completely programmable. What operating system is your thinking cap running?”

  “TigerBright six-point-one.”

  “Fine, fine, let me change Proty over to your standard. He’s running Linux now.”

  Dr. Grigor squinched his eyes, muttered something incomprehensible, then reached up and detached his slug. He slapped the slug against the drone and downloaded new instructions, then rejoined the organic
augment to his neck.

  A window popped up in Ruy’s gaze, just as when he was using his suit’s eyes. It showed himself and the Dr. from a floor-level perspective: the visual feed from Proty.

  “Just think. You send Proty far afield and get useful audio-video telemetry. But it does so much more. Proty is practically a pocket lab—able to synthesize almost any protein string. He exhibits pseudo-flight—gliding really, after launching from a height. Swimming. Defensive and offensive capabilities. It’s a first-aid resource too. It will pinch off a piece of itself to act as a smart bandage. (Can I possibly get to the ESF-EMBO Symposium this year?) Though of course with that sophisticated Nuvaderm you’re wearing, you probably won’t ever really need such a crude fix. And it’s wonderful company for a lone field agent such as yourself. Proty, show how you can whistle.”

  Proty formed a blowhole with complicated labial fluting and an antipodal air-intake port, and began to whistle “You Are My Sunshine.”

  Ruy laughed hard. He bent over and picked up the dry, smooth starfish, which quickly assumed a caterpillar shape that fit perfectly in the crook of his arm, simultaneously matching his skin’s green color.

  Just like father and child.

  3.

  On the Trail

  Peugeot had designed the first trundlebugs over half a century ago, the Ozone model. Picture a large rolling drum fashioned of electrochromic biopoly, featuring slight catenaries in the lines of its body from end to end. A barrel-shaped compartment suspended between two enormous wheels large as the cabin itself. Solid-state battery packs channeled power to separate electric motors. A curving door spanned the entire width of the vehicle, sliding upward.

  Inside, three seats in a row, the center one commanding the failsafe manual controls. Storage behind the seats. Ruy now occupied the center station of the rapidly moving vehicle, while Proty sat beside him, on his left, shaped for the nonce rather like a less-well-defined version of the iconic Pillsbury Doughboy Although the drone occasionally emitted a silent yeasty fart, Ruy felt glad of its company. In just the past twenty-four hours, he had grown fond of the responsive a-life critter.