The Scab's Progress
by Paul Di Filippo and Bruce Sterling


The federal bio-containment center was a diatom the size of the Disney Matterhorn.
It perched on fractal struts in a particularly charmless district of Nevada, where the
waterless white sands swarmed with toxic vermin.

The entomopter scissored its dragonfly wings, conveying Ribo Zombie above the
desert wastes. This was always the best part of the program: the part where Ribo
Zombie lovingly checked out all his cool new gear before launching into action. As a
top-ranking scab from the otaku-pirate underground, Ribo Zombie owned reactive
gloves with slashproof ligaments and sandwiched Kevlar-polysaccharide. He owned
a mother-of-pearl crash helmet, hung with daring insouciance on the scaled wall of
the 'mopter's cockpit. And those Nevada desert boots!—like something built by
Tolkien orcs with day-jobs at Nike.

Accompanying the infamous RZ was his legendary and much-merchandised familiar,
Skratchy Kat. Every scab owned a familiar: they were the totem animals of the
gene-pirate scene. The custom dated back to the birth of the scab subculture, when
tree-spiking Earth Firsters and obsessive dog breeders had jointly discovered the
benefits of outlaw genetic engineering.

With a flash of emerald eyes the supercat rose from the armored lap of the daring
scab. Skratchy Kat had some much cooler name in the Japanese collectors' market.
He'd been designed in Tokyo, and was a deft Pocket-Monster commingling of eight
spliced species of felines and viverines, with the look, the collector cachet, and
(judging by his stuffed-toy version) plenty of the smell of a civet cat. Ribo Zombie,
despite frequent on-screen cameos by busty-babe groupies, had never enjoyed any
steady feminine relationship. What true love there was in his life flowed between
man and cat.

Clickable product-placement hot-tags were displayed on the 'mopter screens as Ribo
Zombie's aircraft winged in for the kill. The ads sold magnums of cheap, post-
Greenhouse Reykjavík Champagne. Ringside tix to a Celebrity Deathmatch
(splatter-shields extra). Entomopter rentals in Vegas, with a rapid, low-cost divorce
optional.

Then, wham! Inertia hit the settling aircraft, gypsum-sand flew like pulverized
wallboard, and the entomopter's chitinous canopy accordioned open. Ribo Zombie
vaulted to the glistening sands, clutching his cat to his armored bosom. He set the
beast free with a brief, comradely exchange of meows, then sealed his facemask,
pulled a monster pistol, and plucked a retro-chic pineapple grenade from his
bandolier.

A pair of crystalline robot snakes fell to concussive explosions. Alluring vibrators
disoriented the numerous toxic scorpions in the vicinity. Three snarling jackalopes
fell to a well-aimed hail of dumdums. Meanwhile the dauntless cat, whose hide
beneath fluffy fur was as tough as industrial Teflon, had found a way through the
first hedge-barrier of barrel cacti.

The pair entered a maze of cholla. The famously vicious Southwestern cholla cactus,
whose sausage-link segments bore thorns the size of fishhooks, had been rumored
from time immemorial to leap free and stab travelers from sheer spite. A soupçon of
Venus flytrap genes had turned this Pecos Pete tall-tale vaporware into grisly
functionality. Ribo Zombie had to opt for brute force: the steely wand of a back-
mounted flamethrower leapt into his wiry combat-gloves. Ignited in a pupil-searing
blast, the flaming mutant cholla whipped and flopped like epileptic spaghetti. Then
RZ and the faithful Skratchy were clambering up the limestone leg of the Federal
cache.

Anyone who had gotten this far could be justly exposed to the worst and most
glamorous gizmos ever cooked up by the Softwar Department's Counter-
Bioterrorism Corps.

The ducts of the diatom structure yawned open and deployed a lethal arsenal of
spore-grenade launchers, strangling vegetable bolas, and whole glittering clouds of
hotwired fleas and mosquitos. Any scab worth his yeast knew that those insect
vectors were stuffed to bursting with swift and ghastly illnesses, pneumonic plague
and necrotizing fasciitis among the friendlier ones.

"This must be the part where the cat saves him," said Tupper McClanahan, all cozy
in her throw rug on her end of the couch.

Startled out of his absorption, yet patiently indulgent, Fearon McClanahan froze the
screen with a tapped command to the petcocks on the feedlines. "What was that,
darling? I thought you were reading."

"I was." Smiling, Tupper held up a vintage Swamp Thing comic that had cost fully
ten percent of one month's trust-fund check. "But I always enjoy the parts of this
show that feature the cat. Remember when we clicked on those high-protein kitty
treats, during last week's cat sequence? Weeble loved those things."
Fearon looked down from the ergonomic couch to the spotless bulk of his snoring
pig, Weeble. Weeble had outgrown the size and weight described in his
documentation, but he made a fine hassock.

"Weeble loves anything we feed him. His omnivorous nature is part of his factory
specs, remember? I told you we'd save a ton on garbage bills."

"Sweetie, I never complain about Weeble. Weeble is your familiar, so Weeble is fine.
I've only observed that it might be a good idea if we got a bigger place."

Fearon disliked being interrupted while viewing his favorite outlaw stealth download.
He positively squirmed whenever Tupper sneakily angled around the subject of a
new place with more room. More room meant a nursery. And a nursery meant a
child. Fearon swerved to a change of topic.

"How can you expect Skratchy Kat to get Ribo Zombie out of this fix? Do you have
any idea what those flying bolas do to human flesh?"

"The cat gets him out of trouble every time. Kids love that cat."

"Look, honey: kids are not the target demographic. This show isn't studio-
greenlighted or even indie-syndicated, okay? You know as well as I do that this is
outlaw media. Totally underground guerrilla infotainment, virally distributed. There
are laws on the books—unenforced, sure, but still extant—that make it illegal for us
even to watch this thing. After all, Ribo Zombie is a biological terrorist who's
robbing a Federal stash!"

"If it's not a kid's show, why is that cute little cartoon in the corner of the screen?"

"That's his grafitti icon! The sign of his street-wise authenticity."

Tupper gazed at him with limpid spousal pity. "Then who edits all his raw footage
and adds the special effects?"

"Oh, well, that's just the Vegas Mafia. The Mafia keeps up with modern times: no
more Rat Pack crooners and gangsta rappers! Nowadays they cut licensing deals
with freeware culture heroes like Ribo Zombie, lone wolf recombinants bent on
bringing hot goo to the masses."

Tupper waved her comic as a visual aid. "I still bet the cat's gonna save him.
Because none of that makes any difference to the archetypical narrative dynamics."

Fearon sighed. He opened a new window on his gelatinous screen and accessed
certain data. "Okay, look. You know what runs security on Federal Biosequestration
Sites like that one? Military-grade, laminated, mouse brains. You know how smart
that stuff is? A couple of cubic inches of murine brain has more processing power
than every computer ever deployed in the twentieth century. Plus, mouse brain is
unhackable. Computer viruses, no problem. Electromagnetic pulse doesn't affect it.
No power source to disrupt, since neurons run on blood sugar. That stuff is
indestructible."

Tupper shrugged. "Just turn your show back on."

Skratchy was poised at a vulnerable crack in the diatom's roof. The cat began
copiously to pee.

When the trickling urine reached the olfactory sensors wired to the mouse brains,
the controlling network went berserk. Ancient murine anti-predator instincts
swamped the cybernetic instructions, triggering terrified flight responses. Mis-aimed
spore bomblets thudded harmlessly to the soil, whizzing bolas wreaked havoc
through the innocent vegetation below, and vent ports spewed contaminated steam
and liquid nitrogen.

Cursing the zany but dangerous fusillade, Ribo Zombie set to work with a back-
mounted hydraulic can opener.

Glum and silent, Fearon gripped his jaw. His hooded eyes glazed over as Ribo
Zombie crept through surreal diorama of waist-high wells, HVAC systems and
plumbing. Every flick of Ribo Zombie's hand torch revealed a glimpse of some new
and unspeakable mutant wonder, half concealed in ambient support fluids: yellow
gruel, jade-colored hair gel, blue oatmeal, ruby maple syrup.…

"Oh, honey," said Tupper at last, "don't take it so hard."

"You were right," Fearon grumbled. His voice rose. "Is that what you want me to
say? You were right! You're always right!"

"It's just my skill with semiotic touchstones, which I've derived from years of
reading graphic novels. But look, dear, here's the part you always love, when he
finally lays his hands on the wetware. Honey, look at him stealing that weird
cantaloupe with the big throbbing arteries on it. Now he'll go back to his clottage
and clump, just like he does every episode, and sooner or later something really
uptaking and neoteric will show up on your favorite auction site."

"Like I couldn't brew up stuff twice as potent myself."

"Of course you could, dear. Especially now, since we can afford the best equipment.
With my inheritance kicking in, we can devote your dad's legacy to your hobby. All
that stock your dad left can go straight to your hardware fetish, while my money
allows us to ditch this creepy old condo and buy a new modern house. Duckback
roof, slowglass windows, olivine patio—"Tupper sighed deeply and dramatically.
"Real quality, Fearon."



                                        ·····



Predictably, Malvern Brakhage showed up at their doorstep in the company of
disaster.
"Rogue mitosis, Fearon my man. They've shut down Mixogen and called out the
HazMat Squad."

"You're kidding? Mixogen? I thought they followed code."

"Hell no! The outbreak's all over downtown. Just thought I'd drop by for a newsy
look at your high-bandwidth feed."

Fearon gazed with no small disdain on his bullet-headed fellow scab. Malvern had
the thin fixed grin of a live medical student in a room full of cadavers. He wore his
customary black leather lab coat and baggy cargo pants, their buttoned pockets
bulging with Ziploc baggies of semi-legal jello.

"It's Malvern!" he yelled at the kitchen, where Tupper was leafing through
catalogues.

"How about some nutriceuticals?" said Malvern. "Our mental edges require
immediate sharpening." Malvern pulled his slumbering weasel, Spike, from a lab
coat pocket and set it on his shoulder. The weasel—biotechnically speaking, Spike
was mostly an ermine—immediately became the nicest-looking thing about the
man. Spike's lustrous fur gave Malvern the dashing air of a Renaissance prince, if
you recalled that Renaissance princes were mostly unprincipled bush-league tyrants
who would poison anyone within reach.

Malvern ambled hungrily into the kitchen.

"How have you been, Malvern?" said Tupper brightly.

"I'm great, babe." Malvern pulled a clamp-topped German beer bottle from his
jacket. "You up for a nice warm brewski?"

"Don't drink that," Fearon warned his wife.
"Brewed it personally," said Malvern, hurt. "I'll just leave it here in case you change
your mind." Malvern plonked the heavy bottle onto the scarred Formica.

Raised a rich, self-assured, decorous girl, Tupper possessed the good breeding and
manners to tolerate Malvern's flagrant transgressive behavior. Fearon remembered
when he, too, had received adoring looks from Tupper—as a bright idealist who
understood the true, liberating potential of biotech, an underground scholar who
bowed to none in his arcane mastery of plasmid vectors. Unlike Malvern, whose
scab popularity was mostly due to his lack of squeamishness.

Malvern was louche and farouche, so, as was his wont, he began looting Tupper's
kitchen fridge. "Liberty's gutters are crawling!" Malvern declaimed, fingersnapping a
bit to suit his with-it scab-rap. "It's a bug-crash of awesome proportions, and I urge
forthwith we reap some peptides from the meltdown."

"Time spent in reconnaissance is never wasted," countered Fearon. He herded the
unmannerly scab back to the parlor.

With deft stabs of his carpalled fingertips, Fearon used the parlor wallscreen to
access Fusing Nuclei—the all-biomed news site favored by the happening hipsters of
scabdom.

Tupper, pillar of support that she was, soon slid in with a bounty of hotwired
snackfood. Instinctively, both men shared with their familiars, Fearon dropping
creamy tidbits to his pig while Malvern reached salty gobbets up and back to his
neck-hugging weasel.

Shoulder to shoulder on the parlor couch, Malvern and Fearon fixed their jittering
attention on the unfolding urban catastrophe.

The living pixels in the electrojelly cohered into the familiar image of Wet Willie,
FN's star business reporter. Wet Willie, dashingly clad in his customary splatterproof
trenchcoat, had framed himself in the shot of a residential Miami skyscraper. The
pastel Neo-Deco walls were sheathed in pearly slime. Wriggling like a nautch
dancer, the thick, undulating goo gleamed in Florida's Greenhouse sunlight. Local
bystanders congregated in their flowered shirts, sun hats, and sandals, gawking
from outside the crowd-control pylons. The tainted skyscraper was under careful
attack by truck-mounted glorp cannons, their nozzles channeling high-pressure
fingers against the slimy pink walls.

"That's a major outbreak all right," said Fearon. "Since when was Liberty City
clearstanced for wet production?"

"As if," chuckled Malvern.
Wet Willie was killing network lagtime with a patch of infodump. "Liberty City was
once an impoverished slum. That was before Miami urbstanced into the liveliest
nexus of the modern Immunosance, fueled by low-rent but ingenious Caribbean
bioneers. When super-immune systems became the hottest somatic upgrade since
osteojolt, Liberty City upgraded into today's thriving district of artlofts and
hotshops.

"But today that immuconomic quality of life is threatened! The ninth floor of this
building houses a startup named Mixogen. The cause of this rampaging outbreak
remains speculative, except that the fearsome name of Ribo Zombie is already
whispered by knowing insiders."

"I might have known," grunted Malvern.

Fearon clicked the RZ hotlink. Ribo Zombie's ninja-masked publicity photo appeared
on the network's vanity page. "Ribo Zombie, the Legendary King of scabs—whose
thrilling sub rosa exploits are brought to you each week by Fusing Nuclei, in strict
accordance with the revised Freedom of Information Act and without legal or ethical
endorsement! Click here to join the growing horde of cutting-edge bioneers who
enjoy weekly shipments of his liberated specimens direct to their small office/home
office wetware labs.…"

Fearon valved off the nutrient flowline to the screen and stood abruptly up,
spooking the sensitive Weeble. "That showboating scumbag! You'd think he'd
invented scabbing! I hate him! Let's scramble, Mal."

"Yo!" concurred Malvern. "Let's bail forthwith, and bag something hot from the
slop."

Fearon assembled his scab gear from closets and shelves throughout the small
apartment, Weeble loyally dogging his heels. The process took some time, since a
scab's top-end hardware determined his peer ranking in the demimonde of scabdom
(a peer ranking stored by retrovirus, then collated globally by swapping saliva-laden
tabs of blotter paper).

Devoted years of feral genetic hobbyism had brought Fearon a veritable galaxy of
condoms, shrinkwrap, blotter kits, polymer resins, phase gels, reagents, femto-
injectors serum vials, canisters, aerosols, splat-pistols, whole bandoliers of
buckybombs, padded cases, gloves, goggles, netting, cameras, tubes, cylinder
dispensers of pliofilm—the whole assemblage tucked with a fly fisherman's neurotic
care into an intricate system of packs, satchels, and strap-ons.
Tupper watched silently, her expression neutral shading to displeased. Even the
dense and tactless Malvern could sense the marital tension.

"Lemme boot up my car. Meet you behind the wheel, Fearo my pard."

Tupper accompanied Fearon to the apartment door, still saying nothing as her man
clicked together disassembled instruments, untelescoped his sampling staff,
tightened buckles across chest and hips, and mated sticky-backed equipment to
special patches on his vest and splashproof chaps.

Rigged out to his satisfaction, Fearon leaned in for a farewell kiss. Tupper merely
offered her cheek.

"Aw, come on, honey, don't be that way! You know a man's gotta follow his bliss:
which in my special case is a raw, hairy-eyed lifestyle on the bleeding edge of the
genetic frontier."

"Fearon McClanahan, if you come back smeared with colloid, you're not setting one
foot onto my clean rug."

"I'll really wash up this time, I promise."

"And pick up some fresh goat's-milk prestogurt!"

"I'm with the sequence."

Fearon dashed and clattered down the stairs, his nutraceutically enhanced mind
already filled with plans and anticipations. Weeble barreled behind.

Malvern's algal-powered roadster sat by the curb, its fuelcell thrumming. Malvern
emptied the tapering trunk, converting it into an open-air rumble seat for Weeble,
who bounded in like a jet-propelled fifty-liter drum. The weasel Spike occupied a
crash-hammock slung behind the driver's seat. Fearon wedged himself into the
passenger's seat, and they were off with a pale electric scream.

After shattering a random variety of Miami traffic laws, the two scabs departed
Malvern's street-smart vehicle to creep and skulk the last two blocks to the ongoing
bio-Chernobyl. The federal swab authorities had thrown their usual cordon in place,
enough to halt the influx of civilian lookyloos, but penetrating the perimeter was
child's play for well-equipped scabs. Fearon and Malvern simply sprayed themselves
and their lab animals with chameleon-shifting shrinkwrap, then strolled through the
impotent ring of ultrasonic pylons. They then crept through the shattered glass,
found the code-obligatory wheelchair access, and laboriously sneaked up to the
ninth floor.
"Well, we're inside just fine," said Fearon, puffing for breath through the shredded
shrinkwrap on his lips.

Malvern helped himself to a secretary's abandoned lunch. "Better check Fusing
Nuclei for word on the fates of our rivals."

Fearon consulted his handheld. "They just collared Harry the Brewer.
'Impersonating a Disease-Control Officer.' "

"What a lack of gusto and panache. That guy's just not serious."

Malvern peered down streetward through a goo-dripping window. The glorp-cannon
salvos had been supplemented by strafing ornithopter runs of uptake inhibitors and
counter-metabolizers. The battling federal defenders of humanity's physiological
integrity were using combined-arms tactics. Clearly the forces of law and order were
sensing victory. They usually did.

"How much of this hot glop you think we ought to kipe?" Malvern asked.

"Well, all of it. Everything Weeble can eat."

"You don't mind risking ol' Weeble?"

"He's not a pig for nothing, you know. Besides, I just upgraded his digestive tract."
Fearon scratched the pig affectionately.

Malvern Velcroed his weasel Spike into the animal's crittercam. The weasel eagerly
scampered off on point, as Malvern offered remote guidance and surveillance with
his handheld.

"Out-of-Control Kevin uses video bees," remarked Fearon as they trudged forward
with a rattle of sampling equipment. "Little teensy cameras mounted on their teensy
insect backs. It's an emergent network phenomenon, he says."

"That's just Oldstyle Silicon Valley," Malvern dismissed. "Besides, a weasel never
gets sucked into a jet engine."

The well-trained Spike had nailed the target, and the outlaw wetware was fizzing
like cheap champagne. It was a wonder that the floor of the high-rise had withstood
the sheer weight of criminal mischief. Mixogen was no mere R&D lab. It was a full-
scale production facility. Some ingenious soul had purchased the junked remains of
an Orlando aquasport resort, all the pumps, slides, and water-park sprinklers.
Kiddie wading pools had been retrofitted with big gooey glaciers of serum support
gel. The plastic fishtanks were filled to overflowing with raw biomass. Metastasizing
cells had backed up into the genetic moonshine somehow, causing a violent bloom
and a methane explosion as frothy as lemon meringue. The animal stench was
indescribable.

"What stale hell is this?" said Malvern, gaping at a broken tub that brimmed with a
demonic assemblage of horns, hoofs, hide, fur, and dewclaws.

"I take that to be widely variegated forms of mammalian epidermal expression."
Fearon restrained his pig with difficulty. The rotting smell of the monstrous meat
had triggered Weeble's appetite.

"Do I look like I was born yesterday?" snorted Malvern. "You're missing the point.
Nobody can maintain a hybridoma with that gross level of genetic variety! Nothing
with horns ever has talons! Ungulates and felines don't even have the same
chromosome number."

Window plastic shattered. A wall-crawling police robot broke into the genetic
speakeasy. It closed its gecko feet with a sound like Venetian blinds, and deployed a
bristling panoply of lenses and spigots.

"Amscray," Malvern suggested. The duo and their animal familiars retreated from
the swab machine's clumsy surveillance. In their absence came a loud frosty hiss as
the police bot unleashed a sterilizing fog of Bose-Einstein condensate.

A new scent had Spike's attention, and it set Malvern off at a trot. They entered an
office warren of glassblock and steel.

The Mixogen executive had died at her post. She sprawled before her desktop in her
ergonomic chair, still in her business suit but reeking of musk and decay. Her
swollen, veiny head was the size of a peach basket.

Fearon closed his dropped jaw and zipped up his Kevlar vest. "Jeez, Malvern,
another entrepreneur-related fatality! How high do you think her SAT got before she
blew?"

"Aw, man—she must have been totally off the IQ scale. Look at the size of her
frontal lobes. She's like a six-pack of Wittgensteins."

Malvern shuddered as Spike the weasel tunneled to safety up his pants leg. Fearon
wiped the sweat from his own pulsing forehead. The stench of the rot was making
his head swim. It was certainly good to know that his fully-modern immune system
would never allow a bacteria or virus to live in his body without his permission.

Malvern crept closer, clicking flash-shots from his digicam. "Check out that hair on
her legs and feet."
"I've heard about this," marvelled Fearon. "Bonobo hybridoma. She's half chimp!
Because that super-neural technique requires … so they say … a tactical retreat
down the primate ladder before you can make that tremendous evolutionary rush
for breakthrough extropian intelligence." He broke off short as he saw Weeble
eagerly licking the drippy pool of ooze below the dead woman's chair. "Knock it off,
Weeble!"

"Where'd the stiff get the stuff?"

"I'm as eager to know that as you are, so I'd suggest swiping her desktop," said
Fearon craftily. "Not only would this seriously retard police investigation, but
absconding with the criminal evidence would likely shelter many colleagues in the
scab underground, who might be righteously grateful to us, and therefore boost our
rankings."

"Excellent tactics, my man!" said Malvern, punching his fist in his open palm. "So
let's just fall to sampling, shall we? How many stomachs is Weeble packing now?"

"Five, in addition to his baseline digestive one."

"Man, if I had your kind of money … Okay, lemme see … Cut a tendril from that
kinesthetically active goo, snatch a sample from that wading-pool of sushi-barf—
and, whoa, check the widget that the babe here is clutching."

From one contorted corpse-mitt peeked a gel-based pocket lab. Malvern popped the
datastorage and slipped the honey-colored hockey puck into his capacious scabbing
vest. With a murmured apology, Fearon pressed the the tip of his sampling-staff to
the woman's bloated skull, and pneumatically shot a tracer into the proper cortical
depths. Weeble fastidiously chomped the mass of gray cells. The prize slid safe into
the pig's gullet, behind a closing gastric valve.

They triumphantly skulked from the reeking, cracking high-rise, deftly avoiding
police surveillance and nasty street-spatters of gutter-goo. Malvern's getaway car
rushed obediently to meet them. While Malvern slid through traffic, Fearon
dispensed reward treats to the happy Spike and Weeble.

"Mal, you set to work dredging that gel-drive, okay? I'll load all these tissue samples
into my code-crackers. I should have some preliminary results for us by, uhm …
well, a week or so."

"Yeah, that's what you promised when we scored that hot jellyfish from those Rasta
scabs in Key West."
"Hey, they used protein-encrypted gattaca! There was nothing I could do about
that."

"You're always hanging fire after the coup, Fearon. If you can't unzip some heavy-
duty DNA in your chintzy little bedroom lab, then let's find a man who can."

Fearon set his sturdy jaw. "Are you implying that I lack biotechnical potency?"

"Maybe you're getting there. But you're still no match for old Kemp Kingseed. He's a
fossil, but he's still got the juice."

"Look, there's a MarthaMart!" Fearon parried.

They wheeled with a screech of tires into the mylar lot around the MarthaMart, and
handed the car to the bunny-suited attendant. The men and their animals made
extensive use of the fully-shielded privacy of the decon chambers. All four beings
soon emerged as innocent of contaminants as virgin latex.

"Thank goodness for the local franchise of the goddess of perfection," said Fearon
contentedly. "Tupper will have no cause to complain of my task-consequent
domestic disorder! Wait a minute—I think she wanted me to buy something."

They entered the brick-and-mortar retail floor of the MarthaMart, Fearon racking his
enhanced memory for Tupper's instructions, but to no avail. In the end he loaded
his wiry shopping basket with pop bottles, gloop cans, some recycled squip, and a
spare vial of oven-cleaning bugs.

The two scabs rode home pensively. Malvern motored off to his scuzzy bachelor
digs, leaving Fearon to trudge with spousal anxiety upstairs. What a bringdown from
the heights of scab achievement, this husbandly failure.

Fearon faced an expectant Tupper as he reached the landing. Dismally, he handed
over the shopping bag. "Here you go. Whatever it was you wanted, I'm sure I didn't
buy it." Then he brightened. "Got some primo mutant brain-mass in the pig's
innards, though."



                                       ·····
Five days later, Fearon faced an irate Malvern. Fearon hedged and backfilled for half
an hour, displaying histo-printouts, some scanning-microscope cinema, even some
corny artificial-life simulations.

Malvern examined the bloodstained end of his ivory toothpick. "Face defeat, Fearon.
That bolus in the feedline was just pfisteria. The tendril is an everyday hybridoma of
liana, earthworm, and slime mold. As for the sushi puke, it's just the usual
chemosynthetic complex of abyssal tubeworms. So cut to the chase, pard. What's
with those explosively ultra-smart cortical cells?"

"Okay, I admit it, you're right, I'm screwed. I can't make any sense of them at all.
Wildly oscillating expression-inhibition loops, silent genes, jumping genes, junk DNA
that suddenly reconfigures itself and takes control—I've never seen such a stew. It
reads like a Martian road map."

Malvern squinched his batrachian eyes. "A confession of true scabbing lameitude.
Pasting a 'Kick Me, I'm Blind' sign on your back. Have I correctly summarized your
utter wussiness?"

Fearon kept his temper. "Look, as long as we're both discreet about our little
adventure downtown, we're not risking any of our vital reputation in the rough-and-
tumble process of scab peer-review."

"You've wasted five precious days in which Ribo Zombie might radically beat us to
the punch! If this news gets out, your league standings will fall quicker than an
Italian government." Malvern groaned theatrically. "Do you know how long it's been
since my groundbreaking investigative fieldwork was properly acknowledged? I can't
even buy a citation."

Fearon's anger transmuted to embarrassment. "You'll get your quotes and
footnotes, Malvern. I'll just shotgun those genetics to bits, and subcontract the
sequences around the globe. Then no single individual will get enough of the big
picture to know what we've been working on."

Malvern tugged irritably at the taut plastic wrapper of a Pynchonian British toffee.
"Man, you've completely lost your edge! Everybody is just a synapse away from
everybody else these days! If you hire a bunch of scabs on the net, they'll just
search-engine each other out, and patch everything back together. It's high time we
consulted Dr. Kingseed."

"Oh, Malvern, I hate asking Kemp for favors. He's such a bringdown billjoy when it
comes to hot breakthrough technologies! Besides, he always treats me like I'm
some website intern from the days of Internet slave labor."

"Quit whining. This is serious work."

"Plus, that cobwebby decor in Kemp's retrofunky domicile! All those ultra-rotten
Hirst assemblages—they'd creep anybody out."

Malvern sighed. "You never talked this way before you got married."
Fearon waved a hand at Tupper's tasteful wallpaper. "Can I help it if I now grok
interior decor?"

"Let's face some facts, my man: Dr. Kemp Kingseed has the orthogonal genius of
the primeval hacker. After all, his startup companies pushed the Immunosance past
its original tipping point. Tell the missus we're heading out, and let's scramble
headlong for the Next New Thing like all true-blue scabs must do."

Tupper was busy in her tiny office at her own career, moderating her virtual agora
on twentieth-century graphic narrative. She accepted Fearon's news with only half
her attention. "Have fun, dear." She returned to her webcam. "Now, Kirbybuff,
could you please clarify your thesis on Tintin and Snowy as precursor culture-heroes
of the Immunosance?"

Weeble and Malvern, Spike and Fearon sought out an abandoned petroleum
distribution facility down by the waterfront. Always the financial bottom-feeder, the
canny Kemp Kingseed had snapped up the wrecked facility after the abject collapse
of the fossil-fuel industry. At one point in his checkered career, the reclusive hermit-
genius had tried to turn the maze of steampipes and rusting storage tanks into a
child-friendly industrial-heritage theme park. Legal problems had undercut his
project, leaving the aged digital entrepreneur haunting the ruins of yet another
vast, collapsed scheme.

An enormous spiderweb, its sticky threads thick as supertanker hawsers, hung over
the rusting tanks like some Victorian antimacassar of the gods.

Malvern examined the unstable tangle of spidery cables. "We'd better leave Weeble
down here."

"But I never, ever want to leave dear Weeble!"

"Just paste a crittercam on him and have him patrol for us on point." Malvern
looked at the pig critically. "He sure looks green around the gills since he ate that
chick's brain. You sure he's okay?"

"Weeble is fine. He's some pig."

The visitors began their climb. Halfway up the tank's curving wall, Kemp Kingseed's
familiar, Shelob, scuttled from her lair in the black pipe of a giant smokestack. She
was a spider as big as a walrus. The ghastly arachnid reeked of vinegar.

"It's those big corny spider-legs," said Malvern, hiding his visceral fear in a thin
shroud of scientific objectivity. "You'd think old Kingseed had never heard of the
cube-square law!"
"Huh?" grunted Fearon, clinging to a sticky cable.

"Look, the proportions go all wrong if you blow them up a thousand times life-size.
For one thing, insects breathe through spiracles! Insects don't have lungs. An insect
as big as a walrus couldn't even breathe!"

"Arachnids aren't insects, Malvern."

"It's just a big robot with some cheap spider chitin grown on it. That's the only
explanation that makes rational sense."

The unspeakable monster retreated to her lair, and the climbers moved thankfully
on.

Kemp Kingseed's lab was a giant hornet's nest. The big papery office had been
grown inside a giant empty fuel tank. Kingseed had always resented the
skyrocketing publication costs in academic research. So he had cut to the chase,
and built his entire laboratory out of mulched back issues of Cell and Nature
Genomics.

Kingseed had enormous lamp-goggle eyeglasses, tufts of snowy hair on his skull,
and impressive white bristles in his withered ears. The ancient Internet mogul still
wore his time-honored Versace labcoat, over baggy green ripstop pants and rotting
Chuck Taylor hightops.

"Africa," he told them, after examining their swiped goodies.

"'Africa?'"

"I never thought I'd see those sequences again." Kingseed removed his swimmy
lenses to dab at his moist red eyes with a swatch of lab paper. "Those were our
heroic days. The world's most advanced technicians, fighting for the planet's
environmental survival! Of course we completely failed, and the planet's ecosystem
totally collapsed. But at least we didn't suck up to politicians."

Kingseed looked at them sharply. "Lousy, fake-rebel pimps like that Ribo Zombie,
turned into big phony pop stars. Why, in my generation, we were the real, authentic
transgressive-dissident pop stars! Napster … Freenet … GNU/Linux … Man, that was
the stuff!"

Kingseed beat vaguely at the air with his wrinkled fist. "Well, when the Greenhouse
started really cooking us, we had to invent the Immunosance. We had no choice at
that point, because it was the only way to survive. But every hideous thing we did
to save the planet was totally UN-approved! Big swarms of rich-guy NGOs were
backing us, straight out of the WTO and the Davos Forum. We even had security
clearances. It was all for the public good!"

Malvern and Fearon exchanged wary glances.

Kingseed scowled at them. "Malvern, how much weasel flesh do you have in your
personal genetic makeup?"

"Practically none, Dr. Kingseed!" Malvern demurred. "Just a few plasmids in my
epidermal expression."

"Well, see, that's the vital difference between your decadent times and my heroic
age. Back in my day, people were incredibly anxious and fussy about genetic
contamination. They expected people and animals to have clean, unpolluted, fully
natural genelines. But then, of course, the Greenhouse Effect destroyed the natural
ecosystem. Only the thoroughly unnatural and the totally hyped-up could thrive in
that kind of crisis. Civilization always collapsed worst where the habitats were most
nearly natural. So the continent of Africa was, well, pretty much obliterated."

"Oh, we're with the story," Fearon assured him. "We're totally with it heart-of-
darkness-wise."

"'Ha!" barked Kingseed. "You pampered punks got no idea what genuine chaos
looks like! It was incredibly awful! Guerrilla armies of African mercenaries grabbed
all our state-of-the-art lab equipment. They were looting … burning … and once the
narco-terror crowd moved in from the Golden Triangle, it got mondo bizarre!"

Malvern shrugged. "So how tough can it be? You just get on a plane and go look."
He looked at Fearon. "You get on planes, don't you, Fearon?"

"Sure. Cars, sleds, waterskis, you bet I get on planes."

Kingseed raised a chiding finger. "We were desperate to save all those endangered
species, so we just started packing them into anything that looked like it would
survive the climate disruption. Elephant DNA spliced into cacti, rhino sequences
tucked into fungi … and hey, we were the good guys. You should have seen what
the ruthless terrorists were up to."

Malvern picked a fragment from his molars, examined it thoughtfully, and ate it.
"Look Dr. Kingseed, all this ancient history's really edifying, but I still don't get it
with the swollen, exploding brain part."

"That's also what Ribo Zombie wanted to know."

Fearon stiffened. "Ribo Zombie came here? What did you tell him?"
"I told that sorry punk nothing! Not one word did he get out of me! He's been
sniffing around my crib, but I chased him back to his media coverage and his high-
priced market consultants."

Malvern offered a smacking epidermal high-five. "Kemp, you are one uptaking guru!
You're the Miami swamp yoda, dad!"

"I kinda like you two kids, so let me cluetrain you in. Ever seen NATO military
chimp-brain? If you know how to tuck globs of digitally altered chimp brain into your
own glial cells—and I'm not saying that's painless—then you can radically jazz your
own cortex. Just swell your head up like a mushroom puffball." Kingseed gazed at
them soberly. "It runs on DNA storage, that's the secret. Really, really long strands
of DNA. We're talking like infinite Turing-tape strands of gattaca."

"Kemp," said Fearon kindly, "why don't you come along with us to Africa? You spend
too much time in this toxic old factory with that big smelly spider. It'll do you good
to get some fresh jungle air. Besides, we clearly require a wise native guide, given
this situation."

"Are you two clowns really claiming that you wanna pursue this score to Africa?"

"Oh sure, Ghana, Guinea, whatever. We'll just nick over to the Dark Continent duty-
free and check it out for the weekend. Come on, Kemp, we're scabs! We got
cameras, we got credit cards! It's a cakewalk!"

Kingseed knotted his snowy eyebrows. "Every sane human being fled out of Africa
decades ago. It's the dark side of the Immunosance. Even the Red Cross ran off
screaming."

" 'Red Cross,' " said Malvern to Fearon. The two of them were unable to restrain
their hearty laughter. " 'Red Cross.' "What ineffectual lame-os! Man, that's rich."

"Okay, sure, have it your own way," Kingseed muttered. "I'll just go sherlock my
oldest dead-media and scare up some tech-specs." He retreated to his vespine inner
sanctum. Antic rummaging noises followed.

Fearon patiently sank into a classic corrugated Gehry chair. Malvern raided
Kingseed's tiny bachelor kitchen, appropriating a platter of honey-guarana snack
cubes. "What a cool pad this rich geezer's got!" Malvern said, munching. "I am
digging how the natural light piped in through fiber-optic channels renders this fuel-
tank so potent for lab work."

"This place is a stinking dump. Sure, he's rich, but that just means he'll overcharge
us."
Malvern sternly cleared his throat. "Let's get something straight, partner. I haven't
posted a scab acquisition since late last year! And you're in no better shape, with
married life putting such a crimp in your scabbing. If we expect to pull down big-
time decals and sponsorships, we've just got to beat Ribo Zombie to a major find.
And this one is definitely ours by right."

After a moment, Fearon nodded in grim commitment. It was impossible to duck a
straight-out scab challenge like this one—not if he expected to face himself in the
mirror.

Kingseed emerged from his papery attic, his glasses askew and the wild pastures of
his hair scampering with dustbunnies. He bore a raven in a splintery bamboo cage,
along with a moldy fistful of stippled paper strips.

"Candybytes! I stored all the African data on candybytes! They were my bonanza for
the child educational market. Edible paper, tasty sugar substrate, info-rich secret
ingredients! "

"Hey yeah!" said Malvern nostalgically. "I used to eat candybytes as a little kid in
my Time-Warner-Disney Creche. So now one of us has to gobble your moldy old
lemon-drops?" Malvern was clearly nothing loath.

"No need for that, I brought old Heckle here. Heckle is my verbal output device."

Fearon examined the raven's cage. "This featherbag looks as old as a Victrola."

Kingseed set a moldy data strip atop a table, then released Heckle. The dark bird
hopped unerringly to the start of the tape, and began to peck and eat. As Heckle's
living read-head ingested and interpreted the coded candybytes, the raven jumped
around the table like a fairy chess knight, a corvine Turing Train.

"How is a raven like a writing desk?" murmured Kemp.

Heckle shivered, stretched his glossy wings, and went Delphic. In a croaky,
midnight-dreary voice, the neurally-possessed bird delivered a strange tale.

A desperate group of Noahs and Appleseeds, Goodalls and Cousteaus, Leakeys and
Fosseys had gathered up Africa's endangered flora and fauna, then packed the
executable genetic information away into a most marvelous container: the
Panspecific Mycoblastula. The Panspecific Mycoblastula was an immortal chimeric
fungal ball of awesome storage capacity, a filamentously aggressive bloody tripe-
wad, a motile Darwinian lights-and-liver battle-slimeslug.
Shivering with mute attention, Fearon brandished his handheld, carefully recording
every cawed and revelatory word. Naturally the device also displayed the point of
view of Weeble's crittercam.

Suddenly, Fearon glimpsed a shocking scene. Weeble was under attack!

There was no mistaking the infamous Skratchy Kat, who had been trying, without
success, to skulk around Kingseed's industrial estate. Weeble's porcine war cry
emerged tinnily from the little speakers. The crittercam's transmission whipsawed in
frenzy.

"Sic him, Weeble! Hoof that feline spy!"

Gamely obeying his master's voice, the pig launched his bulk at the top-of-the-line
postfeline. A howling combat ensued, Fearon's pig getting the worse of it. Then
Shelob the multi-ton spider joined the fray. Skratchy Kat quickly saw the sense of
retreat. When the transmission stabilized, the superstar's familiar had vanished.
Weeble grunted proudly. The crittercam bobbed rhythmically as the potent porker
licked his wounds with antiseptic tongue.

"You the man, Fearon! Your awesome pig kicked that cat's ass!"

Kingseed scratched his head glumly. "You had a crittercam channel open to your pig
this whole time, didn't you?"

Fearon grimaced, clutching his handheld. "Well, of course I did! I didn't want my
Weeble to feel all lonely."

"Ribo Zombie's cat was watergating your pig. Ribo Zombie must have heard
everything we said up here. I hope he didn't record those GPS coordinates."

The possessed raven was still cackling spastically, as the last crackles of embedded
data spooled through its postcorvine speech centers. Heckle was recaged and
rewarded with a tray of crickets.

Suddenly, Fearon's handheld spoke up in a sinister basso. It was the incoming voice
of Ribo Zombie himself. "So the Panspecific Mycoblastula is in Sierra Leone. It is a
savage territory, ruled by the mighty bushsoldier, Prince Kissy Mental. He is a
ferocious cannibal who would chew you small-timers up like aphrodisiac gum! So
Malvern and Fearon—take heed of my street-wisdom. I have the top-line hardware,
and now, thanks to you, I have the data as well. Save yourselves the trouble, just
go home."
"Gumshoe on up here, you washed-up ponce!" said startled Malvern, dissed to the
bone. "My fearsome weasel will go sloppy seconds on your big fat cat!"

Kingseed stretched forth his liver-spotted mitt. "Turn off those handhelds, boys."

When Fearon and Malvern had bashfully powered down their devices, the old guru
removed an antique pager from his lab bench. He played his horny thumb across
the rudimentary keypad.

"A pager?" Malvern goggled. "Why not, like, jungle drums?"

"Pipe down. You pampered modern lamers can't even manage elementary anti-
surveillance. While one obsolescent pager is useless—two are a secure link."

Kingseed read the archaic glyphs off the tiny screen. "I can see that my contact in
Freetown, Dr. Herbert Zoster, is still operational. With his help, you might yet beat
Zombie to this prize." Kingseed looked up. "After allowing Ribo Zombie to bug my
very home, I expect no less from you. You'd better come through this time, or
never show your faces again at the Tallahassee ScabCon. With your dalkon shields—
or on them, boys."

"Lofty! We're outta here pronto! Thanks a lot, gramps."



                                       ·····



Tupper was very alarmed about Africa. After an initial tearful outburst, hot meals
around Fearon's house became as rare as whales and pandas. Domestic
conversation died down to apologetic bursts of dingbat-decorated e-mail. Their sex
life, always sensually satisfactory and emotionally deep, became as chilly as the last
few lonely glaciers of Greenhouse Greenland. Glum but determined, Fearon made
no complaint.
On the day of his brave departure—his important gear stowed in two carry-on bags,
save for that which Weeble wore in khaki-colored saddle-style pouches—Fearon
paused at the door of their flat. Tupper sat morosely on the couch, pretending to
surf the screen. For thirty seconds the display showed an ad from AT&T (Advanced
Transcription and Totipotency) touting their latest telomere upgrades. Fearon was,
of course, transfixed. But then Tupper changed channels, and he refocused
mournfully for a last homesick look at his frosty spouse.

"I must leave you now, Tuppence honey, to meet Malvern at the docks." Even the
use of her pet name failed to break her reserve. "Darling, I know this hurts your
feelings, but think of it this way: my love for you is true because I'm true to my
own true self. Malvern and I will be in and out of that tropical squalor in a mere
week or two, with minimal lysis all around. But if I don't come back right away—or
even, well, forever—I want you to know without you, I'm nothing. You're the
feminine mitochondrium in my dissolute masculine plasm, baby."

Nothing. Fearon turned to leave, hand on the doorknob. Tupper swept him up in an
embrace from behind, causing Weeble to grunt in surprise. Fearon slithered around
within the cage of her arms to face her, and she mashed her lips into his.

Malvern's insistent pounding woke the lovers up. Hastily, Fearon redonned his
outfit, bestowed a final peck on Tupper's tear-slicked cheek, and made his exit.

"A little trouble getting away?" Malvern leered.

"Not really. You?"

"Well, my landlady made me pay the next month's rent in advance. Oh, and if I'm
dead, she gets to sell all my stuff."

"Harsh."

"Just the kind of treatment I expect."



                                         ·····



Still flushed from the fever-shots at U.S. Customs, the two globetrotting scabs
watched the receding coast of America from the deck of their Cuba-bound ferry, the
Gloria Estefan.
"I hate all swabs," said Malvern, belching as his innards rebooted.

Fearon clutched his squirming belly. "We could have picked better weather. These
ferocious Caribbean hurricane waves—"

"What 'waves'? We're still in the harbor."

"Oh, my Lord—"

After a pitching, greenish sea-trip, Cuba hove into view. The City of Havana,
menaced by rising seas, had been relocated up the Cuban coast through a massive
levy on socialist labor. The crazy effort had more or less succeeded, though it
looked as if every historic building in the city had been picked up and dropped.
Debarking in the fragrant faux-joy of the highly colored tropics, the eager duo
hastened to the airfield—for only the cowboy Cubans still maintained direct air-
flights to the wrecked and smoldering shell of the Dark Continent.

Mi Amiga Flicka was a hydrogen-lightened cargolifter of Appaloosa-patterned
horsehide. The buoyant lift was generated by onboard horse stomachs, modified to
spew hydrogen instead of the usual methane. A tanker truck, using a long boom-
arm, pumped a potent microbial oatmeal into the tethered dirigible's feedstock
reservoirs.

"There's a microbrewery on board," Malvern said with a travel agent's phony glee.
"Works off grain mash just like a horse does! Cerveza muy potenta, you can bet."

A freestanding bamboo elevator ratcheted them up to the zeppelin's passenger
module, which hung like a zippered saddlebag from the buoyant horsehide belly.

The bio-zep's passenger cabin featured a zebrahide mess hall that doubled as a
ballroom, with a tiny bandstand and a touchingly antique mirrorball. The Cuban
stewards, to spare weight and space, were all jockey-sized.

Fearon and Malvern discovered that their web-booked "stateroom" was slightly
smaller than a standard street toilet. Every feature of the tiny suite folded,
collapsed, inverted, everted, or required assembly from scattered parts.

"I don't think I can get used to peeing in the same pipe that dispenses that
legendary microbrew," said Fearon. Less finicky, Malvern had already tapped and
sampled a glass of the golden boutique cerveza. "Life is a closed loop, Fearon."

"But where will the pig sleep?"

They found their way to the observation lounge for the departure of the giant
gasbag. With practiced ease, the crew detached blimp-hook from mooring mast.
The bacterial fuel cells kicked over the myosin motors, the props began to windmill
and the craft surged eastward with all the verve and speed of a spavined nag.

Malvern was already deep into his third cerveza. "Once we get our hands on that
wodge of extinct gene-chains, our names are forever golden! It'll be vino, gyno, and
techno all the way!"

"Let's not count our chimeras till they're decanted, Mal. We're barely puttering
along, and I keep thinking of Ribo Zombie and his highly publicized private
entomopter."
"Ribo Zombie's a fat show-biz phony, he's all talk! We're heavy-duty street-level
chicos from Miami! It's just no contest."

"Hmmph. We'd better vortal in to Fusing Nuclei and check out the continuing
coverage."

Fearon found a spot where the zep's horsehide was thinnest, and tapped an
overhead satellite feed. The gel screen of his handheld flashed the familiar Fusing
Nuclei logo.

"In his one-man supercavitating sub, Ribo Zombie and Skratchy Kat speed toward
the grim no-man's land of sub-Saharan Africa! What weird and wonderful
adventures await our intrepid lone-wolf scab and his plucky familiar? Does carnal
love lurk in some dusky native bosom? Log on Monday for the realtime landing of
RZ and Skratchy upon the sludge-sloshing shores of African doom! And remember,
kids—Skratchy Kat cards, toys, and collectibles are available only through Nintendo-
Benz—"

"Did they say 'Monday'?" Malvern screeched. "Monday is tomorrow! We're already
royally boned!"

"Malvern, please, the straights are staring at us. Ribo Zombie can't prospect all of
Africa through all those old UN emplacements. Kingseed found us an expert native
guide, remember? Dr. Herbie Zoster."

Malvern stifled his despair. "You really think this native scab has got the stuff?"

Fearon smiled. "Well, he's not a scab quite like us, but he's definitely our type! I
checked out his online resumé! He's pumped, ripped, and buff, plus he's wily and
streetsmart. Herbie Zoster has been a mercenary, an explorer, an archaeologist,
even the dictator of an offshore datahaven. Once we hook up with him, this ought
to be a waltz."

In the airborne hours that followed, Malvern sampled a foretaste of the vino, gyno
and techno, while Fearon repeatedly wrote and erased apologetical e-mail to his
wife. Then came their scheduled arrival over the melancholy ruins of Freetown—and
a dismaying formal announcement by the ship's Captain.

"What do you mean, you can't moor?" demanded Malvern.

Their captain, a roguish and dapper, yet intensely competent fellow named Luis
Sendero, removed his cap and slicked back the two macaw feathers anchored at his
temple. "The local caudillo, Prince Kissy Mental, has incited his people to burn down
our trading facilities. One learns to expect these little setbacks in the African trade.
Honoring our contracts, we shall parachute to earth the goods we bring, unless they
are not paid for—in which case, they are dumped anyway, yet receive no parachute.
As for you two Yankees and your two animals—you are the only passengers who
want to land in Sierra Leone. If you wish to touch down, you must parachute just as
the cargo."

After much blustering, whuffling, and whining, Fearon, Malvern, and Weeble stood
at the open hatch of Mi Amiga Flicka, parachutes strapped insecurely on, ripcords
wired to a rusty cable, while the exotic scents of the rainy African landscape wafted
to their nostrils.

Wistfully, they watched their luggage recede to the scarred red earth. Then, with
Spike clutched to his breast, Malvern closed his eyes and boldly tumbled overboard.
Fearon watched closely as his colleague's fabric chute successfully bloomed. Only
then did he make up his mind to go through with it. He booted the reluctant Weeble
into airy space, and followed suit.



                                       ·····
"Outsiders never bring us anything but garbage," mumbled Dr. Zoster.

"Is it Cuban garbage?" said Malvern, tucking into their host's goat-and-pepper soup
with a crude wooden spoon. "Because if it is, you're getting ripped off even in terms
of trash."

"No. They're always Cubans bringing it, but it's everybody's garbage that is dumped
on Africa. Africa's cargo-cult prayers have been answered with debris. But perhaps
any sufficiently advanced garbage is indistinguishable from magic."

Fearon surreptitiously fed the peppery cabrito to his pig. He was having a hard time
successfully relating to Dr. Herbie Zoster. It had never occurred to him that elderly
Kemp Kingseed and tough, sunburnt Herbie Zoster were such close kin.

In point of fact, Herbie Zoster was Kingseed's younger clone. And it didn't require
Jungian analysis to see that, just like most clones, Zoster bitterly resented the
egotistical man who had created him. This was very clearly the greatest appeal of
life in Africa for Dr. Herbie Zoster. Africa was the one continent guaranteed to make
him as much unlike Kemp Kingseed as possible.

Skin tinted dark as mahogany, callused and wiry, dotted with many thorn scratches,
parasites, and gunshot wounds, Zoster still bore some resemblance to Kingseed—
about as much as a battle-scarred hyena to an aging bloodhound.
"What exactly do people dump around here?" said Malvern with interest.

Zoster mournfully chewed the last remnant of a baked yam and spat the skin into
the darkness outside their thatched hut. Something with great glowing eyes
pounced upon it instantly, with a rasp and a snarl. "You're familiar with the
Immunosance?'"

"Oh yeah, sure!" said Malvern artlessly, "we're from Miami."

"That new Genetic Age completely replaced the Nuclear Age, the Space Age, and
the Information Age."

"Good riddance," Malvern offered. "You got any more of that cabrito stew? It's fine
stuff!"

Zoster rang a crude brass bell. A limping, turbaned manservant dragged himself
into their thatched hut, tugging a bubbling bucket of chow.

"The difficulty with massive technological advance," said Zoster, spooning the
steamy goop, "is that it obsolesces the previous means of production. When the
Immunosance arrived, omnipresent industries already covered all the advanced
countries." Zoster paused to pump vigorously at a spring-loaded homemade crank,
which caused the light-bulb overhead to brighten to its full thirty watts. "There
simply was no room to install the new bioindustrial revolution. But a revolution was
very necessary anyway. So all the previous junk had to go. The only major
planetary area with massive dumping grounds was—and still is—Africa."

Zoster rubbed at his crank-stiffened forearm and sighed. "Sometimes they promote
the garbage and sell it to us Africans. Sometimes they drop it anonymously. But
nevertheless—no matter how we struggle or resist—the very worst always ends up
here in Africa, no matter what."

"I'm with the sequence," said Malvern, pausing to belch. "So what's the 411 about
this fabled Panspecific Mycoblastula?"

Zoster straightened, an expression of awe toughening his face below his canvas
hatbrim. "That is garbage of a very special kind. Because the Panspecific
Mycoblastula is an entire, outmoded natural ecosystem. It is the last wild continent,
completely wadded up and compressed by foreign technicians!"

Fearon considered this gnomic remark. He found it profoundly encouraging. "We
understand the gravity of this matter, Dr. Zoster. Malvern and I feel that we can
make this very worth your while. Time is of the essence. When can we start?"
Zoster scraped the dirt floor with his worn boot-heel. "I'll have to hire a train of
native bearers. I'll have to obtain supplies. We will be risking our lives, of course.…
What can you offer us in return for that?"

"A case of soft drinks?" said Malvern.

Fearon leaned forward intently. "Transistor radios? Antibiotics? How about some
plumbing?"

Zoster smiled for the first time, with a flash of gold teeth. "Call me Herbie."



                                         ·····



Zoster extended a callused fingertip. It bore a single ant, the size and color of a
sesame seed.
"This is the largest organism in the world."

"So I heard," Malvern interjected glibly. "Just like the fire-ants invading America,
right? They went through a Darwinian bottleneck and came out supercharged
sisters, genetically identical even under different queens. They spread across the
whole USA smoother than marshmallow fluff."

Zoster wiped his sweating stubbled jaw with a filthy bandanna. "These ants were
produced four decades ago. They carry rhizotropic fungi, to fertilize crops with
nitrogen. But their breeders overdesigned them. These ants cause tremendous
fertile growth in vegetation, but they're also immune to insect diseases and
parasites. The swabs finally wiped them out in America, but Africa has no swabs.
We have no public health services, no telephones, no roads. So from Timbuktu to
Capetown, cloned ants have spread in a massive wave, a single super-organism big
as Africa."

Malvern shook his head in superior pity. "That's what you get for trusting in swabs,
man. Any major dude could've told those corporate criminals that top-down
hierarchies never work out. Now, the approach you Third Worlders need is a viral
marketing, appropriate-technology pitch …"

Zoster actually seemed impressed by Malvern's foolish bravado, and engaged the
foreign scab in earnest jargon-laced discussion, leaving Fearon to trudge along in an
unspeaking fug of sweat-dripping, alien jungle heat. Though Zoster was the only
one armed, the trio of scabs boldly led their little expedition through a tangle of
feral trails, much-aided by their satellite surveillance maps and GPS locators.
Five native bearers trailed the parade, fully laden-down with scab-baggage and
provisions. The bare-chested, bare-legged, dhoti-clad locals exhibited various useful
bodily mods, such as dorsal water storage humps, toughened and splayed feet, and
dirty grub-excavating claws that could shred a stump in seconds. They also sported
less rational cosmetic changes, including slowly moving cicatrices (really migratory
subepidermal symbiotic worms) and enlarged ears augmented with elephant
musculature. The rhythmic flapping of the porters' ears produced a gentle creaking
that colorfully punctuated their impenetrable sibilant language.

The tormented landscape of Sierra Leone had been thoroughly reclaimed by a
clapped-out mutant jungle. War, poverty, disease, starvation—the Four Landrovers
of the African Apocalypse—had long since been and gone, bringing a drastic human
population crash that beggared the Black Death, and ceding the continent to
resurgent flora and fauna.

These local flora and fauna were, however, radically human-altered, recovering
from an across-the-board apocalypse even more severe and scourging than the
grisly one suffered by humans. Having come through the grinding hopper of a
bioterror, they were no longer "creatures" but "evolutures." Trees writhed, leaves
crawled, insects croaked, lizards bunny-hopped, mammals flew, flowers pinched,
vines slithered, and mushrooms burrowed. The fish, clumsily re-engineered for the
surging Greenhouse realities of rising seas, lay in the jungle trails burping like
lungfish. When stepped upon, they almost seemed to speak.

The explorers found themselves navigating a former highway to some long-buried
city, presumably Bayau or Moyamba, to judge by the outdated websites. Post-
natural oddities lay atop an armature of ruins, revealing the Ozymandias lessons of
industrial hubris. A mound of translucent jello assumed the outlines of a car,
including a dimly perceived skeletal driver and passengers. Oil-slick–colored orchids
vomited from windows and doors. With the descending dusk invigorating flocks of
winged post-urban rats, the travelers made camp. Zoster popped up a pair of tents
for the expedition's leaders and their animals, while the locals assembled a humble
jungle igloo of fronds and thorns.

After sharing a few freeze-dried packets of slumgullion, the expedition sank into
weary sleep. Fearon was so bone-tired that he somehow tolerated Malvern's nasal
whistling and Zoster's stifled dream shouts.

He awoke before the others. He unseamed the tent flap and poked his head out into
the early sunshine.
Their encampment was surrounded by marauders. Spindly scouts, blank-eyed and
scarcely human, were watching the pop-tents and leaning on pig-iron spears.

Fearon ducked his head back and roused his compatriots, who silently scrambled
into their clothes. Heads clustered like coconuts, the three of them peered through
a fingernail's width of tent-flap.

Warrior-reinforcements now arrived in ancient Jeeps, carrying anti-aircraft guns and
rocket-propelled grenades.

"It's Kissy Mental's Bush Army," whispered Zoster. He pawed hurriedly through a
pack, coming up with a pair of mechanical boots.

"Okay, girls, listen up," Zoster whispered, shoving and clamping his feet in the
piston-heavy footgear. "I have a plan. When I yank this overhead pull-tab, this tent
unpops. That should startle the scouts out there, maybe enough to cover our
getaway. We all race off at top speed just the way we came. If either of you
survive, feel free to rendezvous back at my place."

Zoster hefted his gun, their only weapon. He dug the toe of each boot into a switch
on the heel of its mate, and his boots began to chuff and emit small puffs of
exhaust.

"Gasoline-powered seven-league boots," Zoster explained, seeing their stricken
expressions. "South African Army surplus. There's no need for roads with these
things, but with skill and practice, you can pronk along like a gazelle at thirty, forty
miles an hour."

"You really believe we can outrun these jungle marauders?" Malvern asked.

"I don't have to outrun them; I only have to outrun you."

Zoster triggered the tent and dashed off at once, firing his pistol at random. The
pistons of his boots gave off great blasting backfires, which catapulted him away
with vast stainless-steel lunges.

Stunned and in terror, Malvern and Fearon stumbled out of the crumpling tent,
coughing on Zoster's exhaust. By the time they straightened up and regained their
vision, they were firmly in the grip of Prince Kissy Mental's troops.

The savage warriors attacked the second pop-tent with their machetes. They quickly
grappled and snaffled the struggling Spike and Weeble.

"Chill, Spike!"
"Weeble, hang loose!"

The animals obeyed, though the cruel grip of their captors promised the worst.

The minions of the Prince were far too distanced from humanity to have any merely
ethnic identity. Instead, they shared a certain fungal sheen, a somatype evident in
their thallophytic pallor and exopthalmic gaze. Several of the marauders, wounded
by Zoster's wild shots, were calmly stuffing various grasses and leaves into the
gaping suety holes in their arms, legs, and chests.

A working squad now dismantled the igloo of the expedition's bearers, pausing to
munch meditatively on the greenery of the cut fronds. The panic-stricken bearers
gabbled in obvious terror, but offered no resistance. A group of Kissy Mental's
warriors, with enormous heads and great toothy jaws, decamped from a rusty Jeep.
They unshouldered indestructible Russian automatic rifles and decisively emptied
their clips into the hut. Pathetic screams came from the ruined igloo. The warriors
then demolished the walls and hauled out the dead and wounded victims, to
dispassionately tear them limb from limb.

The Army then assembled a new booty of meat, to bear it back up the trail to their
camp. Reeking of sweat and formic acid, the inhuman natives bound the hands of
Fearon and Malvern with tough lengths of grass. They strung Weeble and Spike to a
shoulder-pole, where the terrified beasts dangled like piñatas.

Then the antmen forced the quartet of prisoners forward on the quick march. As the
party passed through the fetid jungle, the Army paused periodically to empty their
automatic weapons at anything that moved. Whatever victim fell to earth would be
swiftly chopped to chunks and added to the head-borne packages of the rampaging
mass.

Within the hour, Fearon and Malvern were delivered whole to Prince Kissy Mental.

Deliberately, Fearon focused his attention on the Prince's throne, so as to spare
himself the sight of the monster within it. The Army's portable throne was a row of
three first-class airplane seats, with the armrests removed to accomodate the
Prince's vast posthuman bulk. The throne perched atop a mobile palanquin,
juryrigged from rebar, chipboard, and astroturf. A system of crutches and tethers
supported and eased the Prince's vast, teratological skull.

The trophy captives were shoved forward at spearpoint through a knee-deep heap
of cargo-cult gadgets.

"Holy smallpox!" whispered Malvern. "This bossman's half-chimp and half-ant!"
"That doesn't leave any percentage for human, Mal."

The thrust of a spear-butt knocked Fearon to his knees. Kissy Mental's coarse-
haired carcass, barrel-chested to support the swollen needs of the head, was
sketched like a Roquefort cheese with massive blue veins. The Prince's vast pulpy
neck marked the transition zone to a formerly human skull whose sutures had long
since burst under pressure, to be patched with big, red, shiny plates of antlike
chitin. Kissy Mental's head was bigger than the prize-winning pumpkin at a 4-H
Fair—even when "4-H" meant "Homeostasis, Haplotypes, Histogenesis, and
Hypertrophy."

Fearon slitted his eyes, rising to his feet. He was terrified, but the thought of never
seeing Tupper again somehow put iron in his soul. To imagine that he might
someday be home again, safe with his beloved—that prospect was worth any
sacrifice. There had to be some method to bargain with their captor.

"Malvern, how bright do you think this guy is? You suppose he's got any English?"

"He's got to be at least as intelligent as British royalty."

With an effort that set his bloated heart booming like a tribal drum, the Prince lifted
both his hairy arms, and beckoned. Their captors pushed Mal and Fear right up
against the throne. The Prince unleashed a flock of personal fleas. Biting, lancing,
and sucking, the tasters lavishly sampled the flesh of Fearon and Malvern, and
returned to their master. After quietly munching a few of the blood-gorged
familiars, the Prince silently brooded, the tiny bloodshot eyes in his enormous skull
blinking like LEDs. He then gestured for a courtier to ascend into the presence. The
bangled, headdressed ant-man hopped up and, well-trained, sucked a thin clear
excretion from the Prince's rugose left nipple.

Smacking his lips, the lieutenant decrypted his proteinaceous commands, in a
sudden frenzy of dancing, shouting, and ritual gesticulation.

Swiftly the Army rushed into swarming action, trampling one another in an ardent
need to lift the Prince's throne upon their shoulders. Once they had their
entomological kingpin up and in lolling motion, the Army milled forward in a violent
rolling surge, employing their machetes on anything in their path.

A quintet of burly footmen pushed Malvern and Fearon behind the bluish exhaust of
an ancient military jeep. The flesh of the butchered bearers had been crudely
wrapped in broad green leaves and dumped into the back of the vehicle.
Malvern muttered sullenly below the grumbles of the engine. "That scumbag Zoster
… All clones are inherently degraded copies. Man, if we ever get out of this pinch,
it's no more Mr. Nice Guy."

"Uh, sure, that's the old scab spirit, Mal."

"Hey, look!"

Fearon followed Malvern's jerking head-nod. A split-off subdivision of the trampling
Army had dragged another commensal organism from the spooked depths of the
mutant forest. It was a large, rust-eaten, canary-yellow New Beetle, scribbled over
with arcane pheremonal runes. Its engine long gone, the wreck rolled solely through
the juggernaut heaving of the Army.

"Isn't that the 2015 New Beetle?" said Fearon. "The Sport Utility version, the one
they ramped up big as a stretch HumVee?"

"Yeah, the Screw-the-Greenhouse Special! Looks like they removed the sunroof and
moonroof, and taped all the windows shut! But what the hell can they have inside?
Whatever it is, it's all mashed up and squirmy against the glass—"

A skinny Ant Army courtier vaulted and scrambled onto the top of the sealed
vehicle. With gingerly care, he stuffed a bloody wad of meat in through the missing
moonroof.

From out of the adjacent gaping sunroof emerged a hydralike bouquet of
heterogenous animal parts: tails, paws, snouts, beaks, ears. Snarls, farts, bellows
and chitterings ensued.

At length, a sudden flow of syrupy exudate drooled out the tailpipe, caught by an
eager cluster of Ant Army workers cupping their empty helmets.

"They've got the Panspecific Mycoblastula in there!"

The soldiers drained every spatter of milky juice, jittering crazily and licking one
another's lips and fingers.

"I do wish I had a camera," said Fearon wistfully. "It's very hard to watch a sight
like this without one."

"Look, they're feeding our bearers into that thing!" marvelled Malvern. "What do
you suppose it's doing with all that human DNA? Must be kind of a partially-human
genetic mole rat thing going on in there."
Another expectant crowd hovered at the Beetle's tailpipe, their mold-spotted
helmets at the ready. They had not long to wait, for a fleshy diet of protein from the
butchered bearers seemed to suit the Panspecific Mycoblastula to a T.

Sweating and pale-faced, Malvern could only say, "If they were breakfast, when's
lunch?"



                                         ·····



Fearon had never envisioned such brutal slogging, so much sheer physical work in
the simple effort of eating and staying alive. The Prince's Army marched well-nigh
constantly, bulldozing the landscape in a whirl of guns and knives. Anything they
themselves could not devour was fed to the Mycoblastula. Nature knew no waste, so
the writhing abomination trapped in the Volkswagen was a panspecific glutton, an
always-boiling somatic stewpot. It especially doted on high-end mammalian life, but
detritus of all kinds was shoved through the sunroof to sate its needs: bark, leaves,
twigs, grubs, and beetles. Especially beetles. In sheer number of species, most of
everything living was always beetles.
Then came the turn of their familiars.

It seemed at first that those unique beasts had somehow earned the favor of Prince
Kissy Mental. Placed onboard his rollicking throne, the trussed Spike and Weeble
had been subjected to much rough cossetting and petting, their peculiar high-tech
flesh seeming to particularly strike the Prince's fancy.

But such good fortune could not last. After noon of their first day of captivity, the
bored Prince, without warning, snapped Spike's neck and flung the dead weasel in
the path of the painted Volkswagen. Attendants snatched the weasel up and stuffed
Spike in. The poor beast promptly lined an alimentary canal.

Witnessing this atrocity, Malvern roared and attempted to rush forward. A thorough
walloping with boots and spear-butts persuaded him otherwise.

Then Weeble was booted meanly off the dais. Two hungry warriors scrambled to
load the porker upside down onto a shoulder-carried spear. Weeble's piteous grunts
lanced through Fearon, but at least he could console himself that, unlike Spike, his
pig still lived.

But finally, footsore, hungry, and beset by migraines, his immune system drained
by constant microbial assault, Fearon admitted despair. It was dead obvious that he
and Malvern were simply doomed. There was just no real question that they were
going to be killed and hideously devoured, all through their naïve desire for mere
fame, money, and professional technical advancement.

When they were finally allowed to collapse for the night on the edge of a marshy
savannah, Fearon sought to clear his conscience.

"Mal, I know it's over, but think of all the good times we've had together. At least I
never sold Florida real estate, like my Dad. A short life and a merry one, right? Die
young and leave a beautiful corpse. Hope I die before I get—"

"Fearon, I'm fed up with your sunnysided optimism! You rich-kid idiot, you always
had it easy and got all the breaks! You think that rebellion is some kind of game!
Well, let me tell you, if I had just one chance to live through this, I'd never waste
another minute on nutty dilettante crap. I'd go right for the top of the food chain.
Let me be the guy on top of life, let me be the winner, just for once!" Malvern's
battered face was livid. "From this day forth, if I have to lie, or cheat, or steal, or
kill … aw, what's the use? We're ant meat! I'll never even get the chance!"

Fearon was stunned into silence. There seemed nothing left to say. He lapsed into a
sweaty doze amidst a singing mosquito swarm, consoling himself with a few last
visions of his beloved Tupper. Maybe she'd remarry after learning of his death.
Instead of following her sweet romantic heart, this time she'd wisely marry some
straight guy, someone normal and dependable. Someone who would cherish her,
and look after her, and take her rather large inheritance with the seriousness it
deserved. How bitterly he regretted his every past unkindness, his every act of self-
indulgence and neglect. The spouses of romantic rebels really had it rough.

In the morning, the hungry natives advanced on Weeble, and now it was Fearon's
turn to shout, jump up and be clouted down.

With practiced moves the natives slashed off Weeble's front limbs near the shoulder
joints. The unfortunate Weeble protested in a frenzy of squealing, but his assailants
knew all too well what they were doing. Once done, they carefully cauterized the
porker's foreparts and placed him in a padded stretcher, which was still marked with
an ancient logo from the Red Cross.

They then gleefully roasted the pig's severed limbs, producing an enticing aroma
Fearon and Malvern fought to abhor. The crisped breakfast ham was delivered with
all due ceremony to Prince Kissy Mental, whose delight in this repast was truly
devilish to watch. Clearly the Ant Army didn't get pig very often, least of all a pig
with large transgenic patches of human flesh. A pig that good you just couldn't eat
all at once.
By evening, Fearon and Malvern were next on the menu. The two scabs were
hustled front and center as the locals fed a roaring bonfire. A crooked pair of nasty
wooden spits were prepared. Then Fearon and Malvern had their bonds cut through,
and their clothes stripped off by a forest of groping hands.

The two captives were gripped and hustled and frogmarched as the happy Army
commenced a manic dance around their sacred Volkswagen, ululating and keening
in a thudding of drums. The evil vehicle oscillated from motion within, in time with
the posthuman singing. Lit by the setting sun and the licking flames of the cannibal
bonfire, big chimeric chunks of roiling Panspecific Mycoblastula tissue throbbed and
slobbered against the glass.

Suddenly a brilliant Klieg light framed the scene, with an 80-decibel airborne
rendition of "Ride of the Valkyries."

"Hit the dirt!" yelped Malvern, yanking free from his captor's grip and casting
himself on his face.

Ribo Zombie's entomopter swept low in a strafing run. The cursed Volkswagen
exploded in a titanic gout of lymph, blood, bone fragments, and venom, splattering
Fearon—but not Malvern—from head to toe with quintessence of Mycoblastula.

Natives dropped and spun under the chattering impact of advanced armaments.
Drenched with spew, Fearon crawled away from the Volkswagen, wiping slime from
his face.

Dead or dying natives lay in crazy windrows, like genetically modified corn after a
stiff British protest. Now Ribo Zombie made a second run, his theatrical lighting
deftly picking out victims. His stagey attack centered, naturally, on the most
dramatic element among the panicking Army, Prince Kissy Mental himself. The
Prince struggled to flee the crimson targeting lasers, but his enormous head was
strapped to his throne in a host of attachments. Swift and computer-sure came the
next burst of gunfire. Prince Kissy Mental's abandoned head swung futilely from its
tethers, a watermelon in a net.

Leaping and capering in grief and anguish, the demoralized Army scattered into the
woods.

A swarm of mobile cameras wasped around the scene, carefully checking for proper
angles and lighting. Right on cue, descending majestically from the darkening tropic
sky came Ribo Zombie himself, crash-helmet burnished and gleaming, combat boots
blazoned with logos.
Skratchy Kat leaped from Zombie's shoulder to strike a proud pose by the Prince's
still-smoking corpse. The superstar scab blew nonexistent trailing smoke from the
unused barrels of his pearl-handled sidearms, then advanced on the cowering
Fearon and Malvern.

"Nice try, punks, but you got in way over your head." Ribo Zombie gestured at a
hovering camera. "You've been really great footage ever since your capture,
though. Now get the hell out of camera range, and go find some clothes or
something. That Panspecific Mycoblastula is all mine."

Rising from his hands and knees with a look of insensate rage, Malvern lunged up
and dashed madly into the underbrush.

"What's keeping you?" boomed Ribo Zombie at Fearon.

Fearon looked down at his hands. Miniature parrot feathers were sprouting from his
knuckles.

"Interesting outbreak of spontaneous mutation," Ribo Zombie noted. "I'll check that
out just as soon as I get my trophy shot."

Advancing on the bullet-riddled Volkswagen, Ribo Zombie telescoped a razor-
pincered probe. As the triumphant conqueror dipped his instrument into the
quivering mass, Malvern charged him with a levelled spear.

The crude weapon could not penetrate Ribo Zombie's armor, but the force of the
rush bounced the superstar scab against the side of the car. Quick as lightning a
bloodied briar snaked through a gaping bullet hole and clamped the super-scab
tight.

Then even more viscous and untoward tentacles emerged from the engine
compartment, and a voracious sucking, gurgling struggle commenced.

Malvern, still naked, appropriated the fallen crash helmet with the help of a spear
haft. "Look, it liquefied him instantly and sucked all the soup clean out! Dry as a
bone inside. And the readouts still work on the eyepieces!"

After donning the helmet, a suspiciously close fit, Malvern warily retrieved Ribo
Zombie's armored suit, which lay in its high-tech abandonment like the nacreous
shell of a hermit crab. A puzzled Skratchy Kat crept forward. After a despondent
sniff at the emptied boots, the bereaved familiar let out a continuous yowl.

"Knock it off, Skratchy," Malvern commanded. "We're all hurting here. Just be a
man."
Swiftly shifting allegiances, Skratchy Kat supinely rubbed against Malvern's
glistening shins.

"Now to confiscate his cameras for a little judicious editing of his unfortunate
demise." Malvern shook his helmeted head. "You can cover for me, right, Fearon?
Just tell everybody that Malvern Brakhage died in the jungle. You should probably
leave out the part about them wanting to eat us."

Fearon struggled to dress himself with some khaki integuments from a nearby
casualty. "Malvern, I can't fit inside these clothes."

"What's your problem?"

"I'm growing a tail. And my claws don't fit in these boots." Fearon pounded the side
of his head with his feathery knuckles. "Are you glowing, or do I have night vision
all of a sudden?"

Malvern tapped his helmet with a wiry glove. "You're not telling me you're massively
infected now, are you?"

"Well, technically speaking, Malvern, I'm the 'infection' in this situation, because the
Mycoblastula's share of our joint DNA is a lot more extensive than mine is."

"Huh. Well, that development obviously tears it." Malvern backed off cautiously,
tugging at this last few zips and buckles on his stolen armor to assure an airtight
seal. "I'll route you some advanced biomedical help … if there's any available in the
local airspace." He cleared his throat with a sudden rasp of helmet-mounted
speakers. "In any case, the sooner I clear out of here for civilization, the better."

All too soon, the sound of the departing entomopter had died away. After searching
throught the carnage, pausing periodically as his spine and knees unhinged, Fearon
located the still-breathing body of his beloved pig. Then he dragged the stretcher to
an abandoned Jeep.



                                        ·····



"And then Daddy smelled the pollution from civilization with his new nose, from
miles away, so he knew he'd reached the island of Fernando Po, where the UN still
keeps bases. So despite the tragic death of his best friend Malvern, Daddy knew
that everything was going to be all right. Life would go on!"
Fearon was narrating his exploit to the embryo in Tupper's womb via a state-of-the-
art fetal interface, the GestaPhone. Seated on the comfy Laura Ashley couch in their
bright new stilt house behind the dikes of Pensacola Beach, Tupper smiled
indulgently at her husband's oft-polished tale.

"When the nice people on the island saw Daddy's credit cards, Daddy and Weeble
were both quickly stabilized. Not exactly like we were before, mind you, but
rendered healthy enough for the long trip back home to Miami. Then the press
coverage started, and, well son, someday I'll tell you about how Daddy dealt with
the challenges of fame and fortune."

"And wasn't Mommy glad to see Daddy again!" Tupper chimed in. "A little upset at
first about the claws and fur. But luckily, Daddy and Mommy had been careful to set
aside sperm samples while Daddy was still playing his scab games. So their story
had a real happy ending when Daddy finally settled down and Baby Boy was safely
engineered."

Fearon detached the suction cup terminal from Tupper's bare protuberant stomach.
"Weeble, would you take these, please?"

The companionable pig reached up deftly, plucked the GestaPhones out of Fearon's
grasp, and moved off with an awkward lope. Weeble's strange gait was due to his
new forelimbs, a nifty pair of pig-proportioned human arms.

Tupper covered her womb with her frilled maternity blouse and glanced at the clock.
"Isn't your favorite show on now?"

"Shucks, we don't have to watch every single episode.…"

"Oh, honey, I love this show, it's my favorite, now that I don't have to worry about
you getting all caught up in it!"

They nestled on the responsive couch, Tupper stroking the fish-scaled patch on
Fearon's cheek while receiving the absent-minded caresses of his long tigerish tail.
She activated the big wet screen, cohering a close-up of Ribo Zombie in the height
of a ferocious rant.

"Keeping it real, folks, still keeping it real! I make this challenge to all my fellow
scabs, those who are down with the Zombie and those who dis him, those who
frown on him and those who kiss him. Yes, you sorry posers all know who you are.
But check this out—who am I?"

Fearon sighed for a world well lost. And yet, after all—there was always the next
generation.
                                        The End



                                       Glossary
1) entomopter, noun: a small flying vehicle whose wings employ elaborate,
scissoring insectoid principles of movement, rather than avian ones; abbreviated as
'mopter. (find in story)

2) ribo, adjective: all-purpose prefix derived from the transcriptive cellular
organelle, the ribosome; indicative of bioengineering. (find in story)

3 ) scab, noun: a biohacker. (find in story)

4) otaku, noun: Japanese term for obsessive nerds, trivia buffs. (find in story)

5) polysaccharide, noun: an organic polymer such as chitin. (find in story)

6) familiar, noun: the customary modified-animal partner of a scab. (find in story)

7) hot-tag, noun: clickable, animated icons. (find in story)

8) jackalope, noun: the legendary antlered rabbit of Wyoming, now reified. (find in
story)

9) HVAC, noun: heating, ventilation, air-conditioning system. (find in story)

10) wetware, noun: programmed organic components; software in living form. (find
in story)

11) clottage, noun: residence of a scab. (find in story)

12) clump, verb: to enjoy meditative solitary downtime (find in story)

13) uptaking, adjective: a term of scably approbation. (find in story)

14) neoteric, adjective: a term of scably approbation. (find in story)

15) duckback, noun: a water-resistant building material. (find in story)

16) slowglass, noun: glass in which light moves at a radically different speed than it
does elsewhere; term invented by Bob Shaw. (find in story)

17) olivine, noun: a naturally occuring gemstone used as a building material. (find
in story)

18) HazMat, noun: hazardous materials. (find in story)

19) jello, noun: culture and transport medium. (find in story)

20) nutriceutical, noun: a foodstuff modified with various synthetic compounds
meant to enhance mental or physical performance. (find in story)

21) glorp, noun: an antibiological sterilizing agent used by swabs. (find in story)

22) infodump, noun: large undigested portion of factoids. (find in story)

23) Immunosance, noun: the Immunological Renaissance, the Genetic Age. (find in
story)

24) bioneer, noun: a bioengineering pioneer. (find in story)

25) femto-injector, noun: a delivery unit capable of perfusing substances through
various membranes without making a macroscopic entry wound. (find in story)

26) buckybomb, noun: an explosive in a carbon buckminsterfullerene shell. (find in
story)

27) pliofilm, noun: all-purpose millipore wrap. (find in story)

28) prestogurt, noun: instant yogurt modified to be a nutriceutical.

29) swab, noun: governmental and private agents of bioregulation; the cops;
antagonists to every scab. (find in story)

30) lookyloo, noun: a gaping bystander at a public spectacle, usually the cause of
secondary accidents. (find in story)

31) crittercam, noun: small audio-video transmitter mounted on animals. (find in
story)
32) Bose-Einstein condensate, noun: ultra-frigid state of matter. (find in story)

33) extropian, noun, adjective: one who subscribes to a set of radical, wild-eyed
optimistic prophecies regarding mankind's glorious high-tech future. (find in story)

34) gel-drive, noun: organic data-storage unit. (find in story)

35) gattaca, noun: DNA; any substrate that holds genetic information. (find in
story)

36) gloop, noun: a foodstuff. (find in story)

37) squip, noun: a foodstuff. (find in story)

38) billjoy, noun: a doomsayer; derived from Bill Joy, a fretful member of the
twentieth-century digerati. (find in story)

39) NGO, noun: non-governmental organization. (find in story)

40) WTO, noun: World Trade Organization. (find in story)

41) candybytes, noun: an educational nutriceutical. (find in story)

42) Panspecific Mycoblastula, noun: a MacGuffin. (find in story)

43) lysis, noun: cell destruction. (find in story)

44) bio-zep, noun: a pseudo-living, lighter-than-air zeppelin. (find in story)

45) vortal, noun, verb: virtual portal. (find in story)

46) supercavitation, noun: process of underwater travel employing leading air
pockets. (find in story)

47) evoluture, noun: an artificially evolved creature. (find in story)

48) somatype, noun: the visible expression of gattaca. (find in story)

49) thallophytic, adjective: mushroom-like. (find in story)
50) exopthalmic, adjective: pop-eyed. (find in story)

51) 4-H, noun: an amateurs' club, primarily for children, that focuses on
homeostasis (bodily maintenance through negative feedback circuits), haplotypes
(gamete amounts of DNA), histogenesis (cell differentiation from general to
specific), and hypertrophy (gigantism). (find in story)