Transreal Cyberpunk (27 page)

When they arose, Stefan took the controls of the motorcycle so that Jayson could focus on finishing his wristlet. Lola, with her basket, sat on the rear fender, bright-eyed and chipper.

They discovered a path that bore heart-cheering human footprints. A river was nearby, running in the same direction they were traveling.

“Dig this,” said Jayson over Stefan’s shoulder. He shoved his hand forward to show off his completed wristband. It was beautiful; the light that fell upon it shattered into sparks of primary colors.

“Tongva,” murmured Lola, sniffing the air.

Part 3

colossal ant burst from a thicket of manzanita, bearing three fierce-looking natives. The riders were clutching the ant’s insectile bristles like Mongols holding a horse’s mane. They were deeply tanned men with filed teeth, floppy hair and bizarre patterns painted on their faces. Original Californians.

The Tongvans sprang at Jayson and Stefan; seconds later the boys were swathed in woven nets, wrapped up like pupas side by side.

The largest Tongvan leaned over Stefan. He was a wiry, dignified gentleman just over five feet tall. He’d painted an intricate pattern of fern-like scrolls around his eyes and mouth. He had a deeply skeptical, highly judgmental look, very much like an overworked immigration officer at LAX.

Lola sashayed forward and tapped the man on the shoulder. She straightened her time-worn leather shift, preened at her gray hair, and began talking in Tongvan, addressing him as “Angon.”

“Her husband!” Stefan hissed to Jayson.

It seemed Lola was telling Angon at length about what had happened to her in the impossibly complicated meantime since they’d last been together.

Angon tried to maintain his hard-guy expression, but as the facts sank in, his face began to quiver. Relative to Angon’s experience of time, it had only been a few days since Hyperio had kidnapped his young wife Lola. And now Lola was back—decades older, a sickly crone. Angon cracked and lost his composure. He rubbed his nose against Lola’s weathered cheek; the tears flowed.

“Aw,” said Jayson.

Angon glared down at the boys. He hollered in Tongvan and raised his flint tomahawk.

“Stick with me,” said Jayson, worming himself close to Stefan. “Abracadabra.”

Suddenly Jayson and Stefan were the size of rodents. They scampered through the nets and fled into the underbrush. The angry Tongvans crashed about while their ant mowed down ferns with her mandibles—but the boys had deftly taken shelter beneath the red parasol of a toadstool.

The giant ant lumbered off and the Tongvans abandoned their search. From their hiding place the boys watched the Tongvans wheeling Jayson’s motorcycle away, with Lola still talking.

“We’re not gonna fit in with these people at all,” said Stefan, “Hyperio was jiving us. We should head back to town right now. As it is, we’re gonna lose thirty years.”

“I say we push in further,” said Jayson. “I want to see that giant tar pit.” He studied his wristband. “What if I make us into giants and we just go grab my bike?” With a sudden popping sound, they grew back up to normal size—but no further. Jayson popped them a couple more times, trying to break through the barrier of normal scale.

“Stop it!” said Stefan, feeling dizzy and whiplashed. He steadied himself by grabbing Jayson’s arm. “Look at your wristband, dude, that link-pattern is asymmetric. You’re gonna need to weave a mirror image wristband if you want to make us grow.”

Jayson dropped them back to small size and cheesed his teeth at Stefan. “Okay, then for now we’ll be rats. Let’s skulk over and spy on the Tongvans. I want my bike back.”

The Tongvans were sitting in a semi-circle before a chiseled stone altar. Perched atop the altar was the red Indian Chief motorcycle. Skinny old Lola was entertaining the tribe by showing them the mambo. Angon looked deeply disheartened.

The boys heard a twitter, a subsonic roar. High above them, huge mandibles stood starkly outlined against the endless, towering cliffs. A monster hooked ant-foot, as thick and red and barky as any sequoia, pounded straight into the ragged fabric of space-time. The great jaws swooped down and snatched up the Indian motorcycle.

The whole canyon shivered as the titanic ant stalked away.

In the stunned excitement, Stefan and Jayson restored themselves to normal size and brazenly stole one of the natives’ dugout canoes. They sped down the river with no sign of Tongvan pursuit.

Deprived of his bike and sullen about it, Jayson worked steadily on another wrist band, while Stefan sat in the prow. He used a pointed Tongvan paddle to guide them past the rocks, logs, and silent alligators that adorned the stream.

The time dilation was accelerating. The visible sky was but a bright wriggle, and the days and nights pulsed so fast that the worm of sky was a steady dim glow. The high squiggle reminded Stefan of the tentative smile Emily Yu had worn when she talked of her hopes and dreams—all long gone by now. Decades were flying past, centuries.

Calamitous sounds came from the stream ahead: a roar, a trumpeting, and some sweet, pure music, a primitive universal sound like Peruvian pan pipes or Moroccan flute. And then rapids hove into view. This was the roar. Standing amid the rapids was a herd of twenty-foot-tall mammoths with immense curved tusks. This was the trumpeting.

“The wristband’s done! Let me fasten it on you, dog.”

“Beautiful.”

Upon donning his wristband, Stefan understood all. It took but the slightest effort of his will to grow them both to a height of fifty feet.

Gingerly they sloshed through the minor puddle of the rapids, scattering the little mammoths like poodles. The toy canoe bobbed ahead of them emptily—and suddenly disappeared. The river ended in an immense, scale-free cataract, tumbling into fog. Something vast and gleaming lay beyond.

Stefan shrank them back to a scale that felt more or less normal. They stood on a boulder by the falls, leaning on each other and panting for breath, taking in the staggering view.

It was an immense glistening lake, many miles across, with endless flocks of birds slowly wheeling above it. Ants scampered about on the lake’s mirrored surface, elegant as ballet dancers, some as big as ships, others like winged dust motes. Inconceivably vast ant-feelers projected like misty towers from the pit’s distant center. In some spots the ants tessellated together to make flowing tiled carpets. Eerie cosmic string music filled the air, the sound almost unbearably haunting and sweet.

“The canyon’s core,” breathed Jayson.

But here came one last meddling ant, ineluctable as a tax collector, an officious pinkish critter the size of a school-bus. Before the boys could manage to shrink or grow, she’d seized them both in her jaws. She carried them through the mist, squirming and howling—and dropped them like trash by the mouth of a cave near the base of the falls. She hurried off on other errands.

“What the hell?” said Stefan, rubbing his bruised shoulder.

Lying in the cave was Jayson’s motorcycle—a bit chewed and bent, but still functional. Next to it were the half-digested pieces of Stefan’s laptop, a few scraps of Hyperio’s map, and even the debris of that Tongvan canoe they’d just been riding.

“So the goddamned ants know all about us, huh?” said Jayson, rubbing his sore ribcage. “God, I hate them.”

“A single ant doesn’t know squat,” said Stefan. “Ants are like individual neurons. But, yeah, there’s some kind of emergent hive mind happening. Like a brain. Like an ultracluster computer. The hive sensed the cosmic harmony emanating from my house. Ants are natural-born collectors; once they got interested in us, they had to gather all the Stefan and Jayson artifacts into one spot.”

“They ruined the paint on my motorcycle, man,” fumed Jayson, not really listening.

A dog-sized yellow ant trotted up and regurgitated—a few hundred elderly cellphones.

“What is that?” cried Stefan, not wanting to believe what he saw.

“Your homemade supercomputer,” said Jayson, shaking his head. “My website.”

“My baskets of cell phones?” cried Stefan.. “They’re lugging all my phones here?” Stefan picked up a phone and opened it. The phone’s components were quite dead; munged by ant jaws and eaten away by stomach acids. Another yellow ant approached and burped up more phones. Perhaps a hundred more yellow ants were following in her wake.

A bit disconsolately, the boys wandered the shore of the giant lake. The edges were treacherous. Thin sheens of water glistened atop a viscous, sticky, string-based equivalent of tar. The string tar had claimed some victims, unfortunate beasts who couldn’t take the irregular sudden transitions of scale, their bodies warping like balloon animals, their overloaded tiny hearts bursting from the effort of pumping blood to heads swollen to the size of refrigerators. Tigers and wolves had feasted upon the dying creatures, and had fallen captive to the string-tar themselves. Flies and condors darted and zoomed above the deadly tar pools, their proportions changing in mid-flight. The pools stank of carrion.

It was sickening to even try and imagine how fast the world’s time was flowing relative to this forgotten place.

“My Calabi-Yau search program is lost to mankind,” mourned Stefan. “How will they ever learn the One True String Theory?”

“Maybe you whiffed on mankind,” said Jayson. “But I’d say you went over very big with the ants.”

“That’s true,” said Stefan, brightening just a bit. “And you know what—I bet the ants are in fact using my discovery to weave the world. Our discovery. They learned from touching your chain mail, too, Jayson. Twine dimension seven. Loop dimension eight.” Stefan was talking louder, puffing himself up. “The ants built our universe, yes, but we showed them how! It’s a closed causal loop. We’re the lords of creation.”

“If you’re God, how come we’re so screwed?” said Jayson. “We’ve gotta get out of here.”

Huge, tanker-like ants were skittering across the mirrored lake in a regular rhythm. The big ants were regurgitating food near the pit’s wheeling, starry center, then scurrying across the great gleaming lake to mount the inconceivably tall canyon walls, presumably to forage for food in the outer world.

“You thinking what I’m thinking?” said Stefan.

“Yeah,” said Jayson. “We hop a tanker ant and we ride it up those cliffs. We end up outside Hormiga Canyon.”

“The fast track to far-future L. A.,” said Stefan. “Let’s do it.”

“Help me with the bike.” said Jayson, turning back towards the cave.

“The what?”

“Come on, it’ll start. They built bikes to last, back then. We’ll do a stunt-man number. We’ll speed up, ride up that stone ramp over there, and we land on the back of a giant ant. That’ll be a bitchin’ effect.”

Stefan was doubtful, but of course Jayson’s plan worked. They landed like ant-lice on the hide of a tanker ant the size of a ship. The behemoth took no notice of them. The boys wedged themselves, and Jayson’s machine, among the giant ant’s weird organic landscape of chitinous pores and uncanny bristles. Then they held tight.

The tanker ant surged upwards, ever upwards and—emerged onto a sunlit, dusty California hilltop. She hesitated, tasting the air with her feelers. The boys rolled themselves and the bike off the ant’s back, sliding onto the familiar yellow grass. For her part, the ant headed into a nearby apricot orchard and began harvesting the fruit-laden trees whole.

Here outside the Canyon, the sun no longer moved in that frenetic fashion. This California sun was setting gently and respectably, in the west, the way a sun ought to set. The sun looked rather too weary, too large and too red. But sunsets were always like that.

Down the hillside was a long, dusty highway, a black, paved, four lane strip with white stripes down the middle. From the distance came a shining, metallic truck. As it passed them by, with a Doppler whoosh, it resolved into a long-haul ant, a rolling monster with a big-eyed head like a truck-cab, a fully-rounded cargo belly, and six stout red leg-axles, adorned with six big whirring black wheels.

Shielding their eyes, the boys followed the departing ant-truck with their gaze. There were sunlit towers scraping the horizon, gleaming and crystalline.

More vehicles passed then, in deft, high-speed cluster-groups of traffic. The whizzing cars and trucks were all segmented, six-wheeled, and scarily fast. Low-slung, gleamy speedsters. Burly station-wagons.

The boys wheeled the motorcycle downhill to the dusty edge of the busy freeway. Their hair was tossed by the backwash of passing ants.

One of the vehicles, a black and white one with large red eyes, slowed to give them a once-over. Luckily it didn’t stop.

Jayson sniffed the highway air. It smelled like burning booze poured over a fruitcake. “Well, they’ve got fuel,” he diagnosed.

“I wonder how ants managed to evolve internal combustion engines.”

“Heck, dog, I’m wondering how ants managed to evolve wheels.”

“In their own diffuse, distributed way, these ants have got some kind of mandible-grip on the laws of nature,” said Stefan. Gently he cleared his throat. “That’s largely thanks to me, I suppose.”

“Gotta be a filling station up this road somewhere,” said Jayson, ignoring him. “We’re down to our last quart.” He kicked his Indian into life. Stefan hopped on.