different Cho, a better Cho, the best Cho, and now I’m going to show old Vincent how to make life!”
“And what, then there’ll be two Genesis Projects 2.0, two natures, two humanities?”
“
At least
two.”
In the meantime, Autumn Glory had spread across most of the networked matter on the Charles River. Dozens of irigotchi were bustling about at the steel feet of Bartek and Dagenskyoll, arranging the leaves and branches into beautiful fractal mandalas, like Tibetan sand mantras. Bartek immediately blew them away towards the trash heap, but this didn’t seem to bother the melancholy vector of the Matternet/irigotchi. It just began again, this time scrawling symmetrical graffiti patterns on the Mothernet surfaces of the buildings and paths. A few days earlier, Bartek had watched from the roof of the Media Lab as irigotchi vectors as large as five or even ten square kilometers flowed across the MIT Mothernet. Then at night-time they had shone as the last remaining lights on the Boston skyline.
“And you?” asked Dagenskyoll, scraping metal over Bartek’s metal in a brutal echo of the chummy affections of the body. “What’s in it for you? Apart from revenge.”
“I want the impossible, of course. The same as everybody else: a return to Paradise,” said Bartek, turning off the blower and hoisting the giggling Alicia up onto his shoulder. “If you start work from scratch on Homo sapiens, I want to raise him my way. From epigenesis to bedtime stories. Not like here. Here it was just a freestyle experiment. They didn’t know what they were doing.”
“Nobody knew the first time around, either.”
“The first time?”
“Yeah, in Paradise. Evolution. From the amoeba. The natural history of mankind. That was pretty much freestyle, wasn’t it?”
Bartek paused in a meaningful silence (no emote was still a kind of emote).
“Do you know what the ‘minuses’ are in Project slang? I’d show you if we had time. Jarlinka keeps them in formaldehyde next to his comics. Some of them even look like that: straight out of Marvel. They treat litter number one like the birth of Christ. It was only years later that they started to clock the whole Project back to it, recombination after recombination. Before that, they’d racked up more than a dozen botched attempts at epigenesis. In theory, the DNA was all hunky-dory, but it gave birth to a monster. Or it didn’t make it that far, just withering away in the incubator womb. Those are the ‘minuses’: litters minus one, minus two, minus five, minus fifteen.”
“Fuck. Then what about us in Paradise? If you count back the billions of years in time, we were all… what? A civilization of minuses?”
“Ha! Life minus.”
They reached the mound of leaves and Alicia leapt down from Bartek’s head straight onto the backs and arms of the irigotchi.
“Hurray for me! Hurray for them! Hurray!”
Bartek cranked the blower up to full power, knelt down, and held the nozzle at an angle off the ground so that Alicia and her parade of irigotchi ran straight into the rushing blast of air. It blew them up off their feet and sent them soaring in an arc over a good few meters, flailing their little arms, legs, tails, feelers, and wings, before plopping with squeals of delight into the pillowy pile of leaves.
For a moment, Flea Circus seized the whole Matternet along Amherst Alley, so that even the lamps on the paths and the lights in the MIT windows flickered to the rhythm of Bartek’s hurricanes.
“So much for all your cleaning.”
Bartek emoted the broadest Shrek grin.
“But they’re having a whale of a time!”
“Hurray! Hurray! Hurray!”
“Are you really ready for this? To leave her and all of them?” asked Dagenskyoll, pointing an infrared beam at Alicia, who was rolling about in the leaves and shouting at the incoming cuddly toys. “You’ll never see them again. They won’t let you near them.”
“I know.”
“This is your
“And what, then there’ll be two Genesis Projects 2.0, two natures, two humanities?”
“
At least
two.”
In the meantime, Autumn Glory had spread across most of the networked matter on the Charles River. Dozens of irigotchi were bustling about at the steel feet of Bartek and Dagenskyoll, arranging the leaves and branches into beautiful fractal mandalas, like Tibetan sand mantras. Bartek immediately blew them away towards the trash heap, but this didn’t seem to bother the melancholy vector of the Matternet/irigotchi. It just began again, this time scrawling symmetrical graffiti patterns on the Mothernet surfaces of the buildings and paths. A few days earlier, Bartek had watched from the roof of the Media Lab as irigotchi vectors as large as five or even ten square kilometers flowed across the MIT Mothernet. Then at night-time they had shone as the last remaining lights on the Boston skyline.
“And you?” asked Dagenskyoll, scraping metal over Bartek’s metal in a brutal echo of the chummy affections of the body. “What’s in it for you? Apart from revenge.”
“I want the impossible, of course. The same as everybody else: a return to Paradise,” said Bartek, turning off the blower and hoisting the giggling Alicia up onto his shoulder. “If you start work from scratch on Homo sapiens, I want to raise him my way. From epigenesis to bedtime stories. Not like here. Here it was just a freestyle experiment. They didn’t know what they were doing.”
“Nobody knew the first time around, either.”
“The first time?”
“Yeah, in Paradise. Evolution. From the amoeba. The natural history of mankind. That was pretty much freestyle, wasn’t it?”
Bartek paused in a meaningful silence (no emote was still a kind of emote).
“Do you know what the ‘minuses’ are in Project slang? I’d show you if we had time. Jarlinka keeps them in formaldehyde next to his comics. Some of them even look like that: straight out of Marvel. They treat litter number one like the birth of Christ. It was only years later that they started to clock the whole Project back to it, recombination after recombination. Before that, they’d racked up more than a dozen botched attempts at epigenesis. In theory, the DNA was all hunky-dory, but it gave birth to a monster. Or it didn’t make it that far, just withering away in the incubator womb. Those are the ‘minuses’: litters minus one, minus two, minus five, minus fifteen.”
“Fuck. Then what about us in Paradise? If you count back the billions of years in time, we were all… what? A civilization of minuses?”
“Ha! Life minus.”
They reached the mound of leaves and Alicia leapt down from Bartek’s head straight onto the backs and arms of the irigotchi.
“Hurray for me! Hurray for them! Hurray!”
Bartek cranked the blower up to full power, knelt down, and held the nozzle at an angle off the ground so that Alicia and her parade of irigotchi ran straight into the rushing blast of air. It blew them up off their feet and sent them soaring in an arc over a good few meters, flailing their little arms, legs, tails, feelers, and wings, before plopping with squeals of delight into the pillowy pile of leaves.
For a moment, Flea Circus seized the whole Matternet along Amherst Alley, so that even the lamps on the paths and the lights in the MIT windows flickered to the rhythm of Bartek’s hurricanes.
“So much for all your cleaning.”
Bartek emoted the broadest Shrek grin.
“But they’re having a whale of a time!”
“Hurray! Hurray! Hurray!”
“Are you really ready for this? To leave her and all of them?” asked Dagenskyoll, pointing an infrared beam at Alicia, who was rolling about in the leaves and shouting at the incoming cuddly toys. “You’ll never see them again. They won’t let you near them.”
“I know.”
“This is your
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