months ago, A.B. had logged an ASBO against the man.
Safranski was a parkour. Harmless hobby—if conducted in the approved sports areas of the urbmon. But Safranski blithely parkour’d his ass all over the common spaces, often bumping into or startling people as he ricocheted from ledge to bench. After a bruising encounter with the aggressive urban bounder, A.B. had filed his protest, attaching AD tags to already filed but overlooked video footage of the offenses. Not altogether improbably, A.B.’s complaint had been the one to tip the scales against Safranski, sending him via police trundlebug to the nearest Sin Bin, for a punitively educational stay.
But now, all too undeniably, Safranski was back in New Perthpatna, and instantly in A.B.’s chance-met (?) face.
The buff, choleric, but laughably diminutive fellow glared at A.B., then said, spraying spittle upward, “You just better watch your ass night and day, Bang-a-gong, or you might find yourself doing a lâché from the roof without really meaning to.”
A.B. tapped his ear and, implicity, his implanted vib audio pickup. “Threats go from your lips to the ears of the wrathful Ekh Dagina—and to the ASBO Squad as well.”
Safranski glared with wild-eyed malice at A.B., then stalked off, his planar butt muscles, outlined beneath the tight fabric of his mango-colored plugsuit, somehow conveying further ire by their natural contortions.
A.B. smiled. Amazing how often people still forgot the panopticon nature of life nowadays, even after a century of increasing immersion in and extension of null-privacy. Familiarity bred forgetfulness. But it was best to always recall, at least subliminally, that everyone heard and saw everything equally these days. Just part of the Reboot Charter, allowing a society to function in which people could feel universally violated, universally empowered.
At the elevator banks closest to home, A.B. rode up to the two-hundred-and-first floor, home to the assigned space for the urbmon’s Power Administration Corps. Past the big active mural depicting drowned Perth, fishes swimming round the BHP Tower. Tags in the air led him to the workpod that Jeetu Kissoon had chosen for the time being.
Kissoon looked good for ninety-seven years old: he could have passed for A.B.’s slightly older brother, but not his father. Coffee-bean skin, snowy temples, laugh lines cut deep, only slightly counterbalanced by somber eyes.
When Kissoon had been born, all the old cities still existed, and many, many animals other than goats and chickens flourished. Kissoon had seen the cities abandoned, and the Big Biota Crash, as well as the whole Reboot. Hard for young A.B. to conceive. The man was a walking history lesson. A.B. tried to honor that.
But Kissoon’s next actions soon evoked a yawp of disrespectful protest from the younger man.
“Here are the two other Jocks I’ve assigned to accompany you.”
Interactive dossiers hung before A.B.’s gaze. He two-fingered through them swiftly, growing more stunned by the second. Finally he burst out: “You’re giving me a furry and a keek as helpers?”
“Tigerishka and Gershon Thales. They’re the best available. Live with them, and fix this glitch.”
Kissoon stabbed A.B. with a piercing stare, and A.B. realized this meatspace proximity had been demanded precisly to convey the intensity of Kissoon’s next words.
“Without power, we’re doomed.”
2.
45th Parallel Blues
Jet-assisted flight was globally interdicted. Not enough resources left to support regular commercial or recreational aviation. No military anywhere with a need to muster its own air force. Jet engines too harmful to a stressed atmosphere.
And besides, why travel?
Everywhere was the same. Vib served fine for most needs.
The habitable zone of Earth consisted of those lands—both historically familiar and newly disclosed from beneath vanished icepack—above the 45th parallel north, and below the 45th parallel south. The rest of the Earth’s landmass had been decertified or drowned: sand or surf.
The immemorial ecosystems of the remaining climactically tolerable territories had been devastated by Greenhouse change, then, ultimately and purposefully, wiped clean. Die-offs, migratory invaders, a fast-forward churn culminating in an engineered ecosphere. The new conditions supported no animals larger than mice, and only a monoculture of GM plants.
Giant aggressive hissing cockroaches, of course, still thrived.
A portion of humanity’s reduced domain hosted forests specially designed for maximum carbon uptake and sequestration. These fast-growing, long-lived hybrid trees blended the genomes of eucalyptus, loblolly pine and poplar, and had been dubbed “eulollypops.”
The bulk of the rest of the land was devoted to the crops necessary and sufficient to feed nine billion people: mainly quinoa, kale and soy, fertilized by human wastes. Sugarbeet plantations provided feedstock for bio-polymer production.
And then, on their compact footprints, the hundred-plus Reboot Cities, ringed by small but efficient goat and chicken farms.
Not a world conducive to sightseeing Grand Tours.
On each continent, a simple network of maglev trains, deliberately held to a sparse schedule, linked the Reboot Cities (except for the Sin Bins, which were sanitarily excluded from easy access to the network). Slow but luxurious aerostats serviced officials and businessmen. Travel between continents occurred on SkySail-equipped water ships. All travel was predicated on state-certified need.
And when anyone had to deviate from standard routes—such as a trio of Power Jockeys following the superconducting transmission lines south to France—they employed a trundlebug.
Peugeot had designed the first trundlebugs over a century ago, the Ozones. Picture a large rolling drum fashioned of electrochromic biopoly, featuring slight catenaries in the lines of its body from end to end. A barrel-shaped compartment suspended between two enormous wheels large as the cabin itself. Solid-state battery packs channeled power to separate electric motors. A curving door spanned the entire width of the vehicle, sliding upward.
Inside, three seats in a row, the center one commanding the failsafe manual controls. Storage behind the seats.
And in those seats:
Aurobindo Bandjalang working the joystick with primitive recreationist glee and vigor, rather than vibbing the trundlebug.
Tigerishka on his right and Gershon Thales on his left.
A tense silence reigned.
Tigerishka exuded a bored professionalism only slightly belied by a gently twitching tailtip and alertly cocked tufted ears. Her tigrine pelt poked out from the edges of her plugsuit, pretty furred face and graceful neck the largest bare expanse.
A.B. thought she smelled like a sexy stuffed toy. Disturbing.
She turned her slit-pupiled eyes away from the monotonous racing landscape for a while to gnaw delicately with sharp teeth at a wayward cuticle around one claw.
Furries chose to express non-inheritable parts of the genome of various extinct species within their own bodies,
