Ribofunk

Paul Di Filippo

My sincere thanks to Andy Watson, for years of computorial and editorial expertise!

To all the contributors to and sharers of my gene-pool, both ancient and contemporary, direct and collateral, known and unknown; and to Deborah, my fellow experimenter in all matters biological.

Biology is an extraordinarily digestive science. It throws out a number of broad experimental generalizations, and then sets out to bring into harmony or relation with these an infinitely multifarious collection of phenomena. The little streaks upon the germinating area of an egg, the nervous movements of an impatient horse, the trick of a calculating boy, the senses of a fish, the fungus at the root of a garden flower, and the slime upon a seawet rock—ten thousand such things bear their witness and are illuminated. And not only did these tentacular generalizations gather together all the facts of natural history and comparative anatomy together, but they seemed always stretching out further and further into a world of interests that lay altogether outside their legitimate bounds.

— H. G. Wells,
Ann Veronica

Biology is the natural domain of diversity as physics is the domain of unity.

— Freeman Dyson,
Infinite In All Directions

Physics is a special case of biology.

— John Casti,
Complexification

ONE NIGHT IN TELEVISION CITY

I’m frictionless, molars, so don’t point those flashlights at me. I ain’t going nowhere, you can see that clear as hubble. Just like superwire, I got no resistance, so why doncha all just gimme some slack?

What’d you say, molar? Your lifter’s got a noisy fan—it’s interferring with your signal. How’d I get up here? That’s an easy one. I just climbed. But I got a better one for you.

Now that I ain’t no Dudley Dendrite anymore, how the fuck am I gonna get down?

* * *

Just a few short hours ago it was six o’clock on a Saturday night like any other, and I was sitting in a metamilk bar called the Slak Shak, feeling sorry for myself for a number of good and sufficient reasons. I was down so low there wasn’t an angstrom’s worth of difference between me and a microbe. You see, I had no sleeve, I had no set, I had no eft. Chances were I wasn’t gonna get any of ’em anytime soon, either. The prospect was enough to make me wanna float away on whatever latest toxic corewipe the Shak was offering.

I asked the table for the barlist. It was all the usual bugjuice and horsesweat, except for a new item called Needlestrength-Nine. I ordered a dose, and it came in a cup of cold frothy milk sprinkled with cinnamon. I downed it all in two gulps, the whole nasty mess of transporter proteins and neurotropins, a stew of long-chain molecules that were some konky biobrujo’s idea of blister-packed heaven.

All it did was make me feel like I had a cavity behind my eyes filled with shuttle-fuel. My personal sitspecs still looked as lousy as a rat’s shaved ass.

That’s the trouble with the tropes and strobers you can buy in the metamilk bars: they’re all kid’s stuff, G-rated holobytes. If you want a real slick kick, some black meds, then you got to belong to a set, preferably one with a smash watson boasting a clean labkit. A Fermenta, or Wellcome, or Cetus rig, say. Even an Ortho’ll do.

But as I said, I had no set, nor any prospect of being invited into one. Not that I’d leap at an invite to just any old one, you latch. Some of the sets were too toxic for me.

So there I sat with a skull full of liquid oxygen, feeling just like the Challenger before liftoff, more bummed than before I had zero-balanced my eft on the useless drink. I was licking the cinammon off the rim of the glass when who should slope in but my one buddy, Casio.

Casio was a little younger ’n me, about fifteen. He was skinny and white and had more acne than a worker in a dioxin factory. He coulda had skin as clear as anyone else’s, but he was always forgetting to use his epicream. He wore a few strands of grafted fiberoptics in his brown hair, an imipolex vest that bubbled constantly like some kinda slime mold, a pair of parchment pants, and a dozen jelly-bracelets on his left forearm.

“Hey, Dez,” said Casio, rapping knuckles with me, “how’s it climbing?”

Casio didn’t have no set neither, but it didn’t seem to bother him like it bothered me. He was always up, always smiling and happy. Maybe it had to do with his music, which was his whole life. It seemed to give him something he could always fall back on. I had never seen him really down. Sometimes it made me wanna choke the shit outa him.

“Not so good, molar. Life looks emptier’n the belly of a Taiwanese baby with the z-virus craps.”

Casio pulled up a seat. “Ain’t things working out with Chuckie?”

I groaned. Why I had ever fantasized aloud to Casio about Chuckie and me, I couldn’t now say. I musta really been in microgravity that day. “Just forget about Charlotte and me, will you do me that large fave? There’s nothing between us, nothing, you latch?”

Casio looked puzzled. “Nothing? Whadda ya mean? The way you talked, I thought she was your best sleeve.”

“No, you got it all wrong, molar, we was both wasted, remember? …”

Casio’s vest extruded a long wavy stalk that bulged into a ball at its tip before being resorbed. “Gee, Dez, I wish I had known all this before. I been talking you two up as a hot item all around TeeVeeCee.”

My heart swelled up big as the bicep on a metasteroid freak and whooshed up into my throat. “No, molar, say it ain’t so.…”

“Gee, Dez, I’m sorry.…”

I was in deep gurry now all right. I could see it clear as M31 in the hubblescope. Fish entrails up to the nose.

Chuckie was Turbo’s sleeve. Turbo was headman of the Body Artists. The Body Artists were the prime set in Televison City. I was as the dirt between their perpetually bare toes.

I pushed back my seat. The Slak Shak was too hot now. Everbody knew I floated there.

“Casio, I feel like a walk. Wanna come?”

“Yeah, sure.”

T Street—the big north-south boulevard wide as old Park Ave that was Television City’s main crawl (it ran from 59th all the way to 72nd)—was packed with citizens and greenies, morphs and gullas, all looking for the heart of Saturday night, just like the old song by that growly chigger has it. The sparkle and glitter was all turned up to eleven, but TeeVeeCee looked kinda old to me that night, underneath its amber-red-green-blue neo-neon maquillage. The whole mini-city on the banks of the Hudson was thirty years old now, after all, and though that was nothing compared to the rest of Nuevo York, it was starting to get on. I tried to imagine being nearly twice as old as I was now and figured I’d be kinda creaky myself by then.

All the scrawls laid down by the sets on any and every blank surface didn’t help the city’s looks any either. Fast as the cleanup crews sprayed the paint-eating bugs on the graffiti, the sets nozzled more. These were just a few that Casio and I passed:

PUT A CRICK IN YOUR DICK.

STROBE YOUR LOBES.

BOOT IT OR SHOOT IT.

HOLLOW? SWALLOW. FOLLOW.

SIN, ASP! SAID THE SYNAPSE.

MATCH IT, BATCH IT, LATCH IT.

BEAT THE BARRIER!

SNAP THE GAP!

AXE YOUR AXONS.

KEEP YOUR RECEPTORS FILLED.

“Where we going, Dez?” asked Casio, snapping off one of his jelly-bracelets for me to munch on.

“Oh, noplace special,” I said around a mouthful of sweat-metabolizing symbiote that tasted like strawberries. “We’ll just wander around a bit and see what we can see.”

All the time I was wondering if I even dared to go home to my scat, if I’d find Turbo and his set waiting there for me, with a word or two to say about me talking so big about his sleeve.

Well, we soon came upon a guy with his car pulled over to the curb with the hood up. He was poking at the ceramic fuel-cell with a screwdriver, like he hoped to fix it that way.

“That’s a hundred-thirty-two horsepower Malaysian model, ain’t it?” asked Casio.

“Yeah,” the guy said morosely.

“I heard they’re all worth bugshit.”

The guy got mad then and started waving the screwdriver at us. “Get the hell out of here, you nosey punks!”

Casio slid a gold jelly-bracelet off his arm, tossed it at the guy, and said, “Run!”

We ran.

Around a corner, we stopped, panting.

“What was it?” I said.

“Nothing too nasty. Just rotten eggs and superstik.”

We fell down laughing.

When we were walking again, we tried following a couple of gullas. We could tell by their government-issue suits that they were fresh out of one of the floating midocean relocation camps, and we were hoping to diddle them for some eft. But they talked so funny that we didn’t even know how to scam them.

“We go jeepney now up favela way?”

“No, mon, first me wan’ some ramen.”

“How fix?”

“We loop.”

“And be zeks? Don’ vex me, dumgulla. You talkin’ like a manga now, mon.”

After that we tailed a fattie for a while. We couldn’t make up our minds if it was a male or female or what. It was dressed in enough billowing silk to outfit a parachute club and walked with an asexual waddle. It went into the fancy helmsley at 65th, to meet its client no doubt.

“I hate those fatties,” said Casio. “Why would anyone want to weigh more than what’s healthy, if they don’t have to?”

“Why would anyone keep his stupid zits if he didn’t have to?”

Casio looked hurt. “That’s different, Dez. You know I just forget my cream. It’s not like I wanna.”

I felt bad for hurtin’ Casio then. Here he was, my only proxy, keeping me company while I tried to straighten out in my head how I was gonna get trump with Turbo and his set, and I had to go and insult him.

I put an arm around his shoulders. “Sorry, molar. Listen, just wipe it like I never said it, and let’s have us a good time. You got any eft?”

“A little …”

“Well, let’s spend it! The fluid eft gathers no taxes, es verdad? Should we hit Club GaAs?”

Casio brightened. “Yeah! The Nerveless are playing tonight. Maybe Ginko’ll let me sit in.”

“Sounds trump. Let’s go.”

Overhead the wetworkers—both private and government dirty-harrys—cruised by on their lifters, the jetfans blowing hot on our necks, even from their high altitude. Standing in the center of their flying cages, gloved mitts gripping their joystix, with their owleyes on, they roved TeeVeeCee, alert for signs of rumble, bumble, or stumble, whereupon they would swoop down and chill the heat with tingly shockers or even flashlights, should the sitspecs dictate.

Club GaAs occupied a fraction of the million square feet of empty building that had once housed one of the old television networks that had given TeeVeeCee its name. Ever since the free networks had been absorbed into the metamedium, the building had gone begging for tenants. Technically speaking, it was still tenantless, since Club GaAs was squatting there illegally.