The Wakeful Wanderer's Guide to Disillusionment

Decay

It is impossible to separate a culture from its economy. The method by which we determine the value of goods and services colonizes our minds. It infects our very sense of self. An economy is more than a way to measure value. It is a deep code, constantly at work in all of our psyches, shaping and reshaping our identities, guiding our every decision.

– The Wakeful Wanderer's Guide, Vol. 3, line 12

["It was a rotting body. There was significant data loss."] thexted Hollerith44.

Genghis gazed at the crumbling buildings along the south edge of Central Park. ["I understand that, but it's been almost eight months."]

["We needed to go through the code line by line and reconstruct a lot of it. We don't even know what it is. Once we understood more of what he was working on, we got a better idea of how to put it back together. It's been a long process."] Hollerith44 thexted back.

["Do you think you have it now?"]

["Not really. It's unlike anything we've seen before. At first we thought there was a biological component to the process. There might still be. It's hard to tell."]

["But you have some idea what it was?"] Genghis saw a falcon, or maybe an eagle, perched atop the railing of a ruined penthouse. The bird cocked its head and dropped like a stone from the tall perch.

["It's definitely an algorithm, but that's not saying much,"] Hollerith44 replied. ["There are thousands of lines of documentation about trees. It seems to relate to the code. Large sections are missing from the docs. Other parts are corrupted."]

["Can you get it working in a simulation?"]

["I don't think so, Genghis. We don't know what it's for. As you know, most of our resources are allocated elsewhere right now."]

["I'm sorry to press,"] returned Genghis. ["I just hoped we could recover something useful. He was very excited about it but he kept it a secret and then he was murdered."]

A Category Six hurricane was moving northward across the Atlantic. There was a 73% chance it would hit the island the following day. Genghis watched the sky. It was clear and bright. There was no sign of the chaos coming their way.

["I understand your disappointment,"] Hollerith44 replied, ["but I don't see how whatever is in this mess relates to anything important. It looks like he was doing a dendrology study. It might be interesting to farm-techs. We can pass it along to them if you like."]

["No, don't do that,"] Genghis returned. ["I gathered enough about DASL6's work to know it wasn't just a study of trees. Keep digging."]

["Are you being funny?"]

["No."]

Genghis walked northward through the old park. The printed domes stood scattered throughout, clustered in places. He posted publicly to the residents that they should find a hurricane shelter before morning. Most people seemed to be ready. The homes here would stand against the wind, but the flooding would be bad along the lower ground. He sent a model of what might happen during a storm to be sure the inhabitants were aware of the danger.

He looked east at the tall white apartment buildings. There were still families living in them, phobic, disconnected, and surviving on old cans of food, unwilling to leave the life they lost in the city they loved. Genghis brought up an old film of Manhattan on a whim. Sidewalks were full of people, corner shops offered baked goods and coffee. People carried wallets and used pay phones. Women carried purses filled with objects they might need. Everyone had keys. Dirty vehicles flew down the avenues, blasting exhaust and barely missing each other in a complex dance Genghis would have attributed to a game engine if he didn't know it was created by individuals behind the controls, bringing years of practice to the dance. The noise was horrible. He wondered how people could have lived with it for so long.

He stopped watching the old clip and enjoyed the relative silence, interrupted by the cawing of a murder of crows, pecking something in the grass below a rocky hill. The body of a cat was being torn apart. Two of the crows looked his way, challenging him.

"Not interested," he said to the crows.

This island was Genghis' obsession. He loved it, but not the way the New Yorkers of old loved it. He could see the path of its evolution, encourage minor adjustments, look out for the safety of its inhabitants. His friends teasingly called him 'His Honor, The Mayor.' He didn't find it funny.

Something would have to be done about the metro-survivalists. Eventually, they would run out of supplies, if they hadn't already. Members of the surrounding tribes left offerings for them, but these were inconsistent. Many of the phobics were armed. Things would eventually get ugly. He made a note to discuss this with his tribe and see if they could come up with a plan to transition them. Some of their kids had left the apartment buildings to join the surrounding tribes, resulting in a mingling of cultures, phobic and upgraded, but the phobics were resolute in their antipathy for the Interconnected. It was going to be difficult.

It didn't help that the Interconnected were currently in disarray. Something had happened to Merit allocation. His own Merit had remained steady for years, but now it was wavering. Some new factors had been added to the calculation, and nobody could make sense of it. Giving upward wasn't working the way they expected. It threw everything off. Highly Merited people were frantically trying new offerings, unable to restore their state of wish-fulfillment. Lower Merited people suddenly found themselves accepting offerings they never expected. Maniacs were propagating nonsense stories around about the coming reunification and someone called The Scion. It was a mess.

This was why Hollerith44 was so annoyed with him. Most of the super-mods were working on ways to counteract the instability in the Merit algorithms. They had become incomprehensible even to the most upgraded among them. Genghis was taking up valuable cycles with work on the data recovered from DASL6 when those cycles were needed elsewhere. Genghis felt sure the data was important, but he couldn't say why. He had an intuition about the boy. Haskell was more than just a super-mod. He was inspired. Genghis needed to know what he had been working on.

After wandering through the park for an hour, sending his warnings to the inhabitants, he arrived at The Mad Hatter's Tea Party. Alice sat on one of the giant mushrooms with the hatter, the rabbit, two cats, and the dormouse, cast in bronze. The pavers had cracked and sunk under the assault of the repeated storms, but the statue stood firmly where it had been erected. A pigeon landed atop Alice's head, adding more guano to the mounds.

"Shoo!" called Genghis, waving his arms. The pigeon flew.

"Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe," he read from a plaque near the base.

Brush and trees pushed in around the stone circle. Trees could turn anything to rubble in almost no time, he thought. They stretch and grow. A hundred years is nothing to them.

"All mimsy," he said to himself.

The branches expanded into daylight, gulping carbon from the air. The roots reached out to crush the stones. They pushed deeper into earth for a drink.

Far away to the east, the storm spun furiously over the Atlantic. He checked its progress. Bermuda had been almost completely submerged. The probability of impact with his island was at 78%. This was going to be bad.

He looked at the statue again. Genghis counted six mushrooms. "Were the borogoves," he said to himself. He looked to the trees, the mushrooms, the sky. "Borogoves!" he shouted.

He pinged Hollerith44, who was busy. He left a message.

["It's borogoves! Ping me."]

The face of George T. Delacorte, Jr. grinned in the sun. Genghis grinned back.

END OF BOOK 2