Genesis 2.0
Magic Circles Series, #2
by
Collin Piprell
Date of Publication:
October 5th 2017
Publisher: Common
Deer Press
Cover Artist: Ellie
Sipila
Genre: Sci-Fi,
Mystery Thriller
BLURB
A nanobot superorganism lays waste to the
Earth. Is this the apocalypse? Or does the world’s end harbor new beginnings?
Life will always find a way. Though some ways
are better than others.
Evolution on steroids and crack cocaine —the
most significant development since inanimate matter first gave rise to life.
You can’t predict novel evolutionary
developments, you recognize them only after they emerge.
Then you have to deal with them.
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Excerpt
“DO THE TOES still hurt?”
“Not
really.” Dee Zu looks down at her naked body, smeared with dried mud from the
cave, scratched by thorns, burned by satrays, bruised by who knows what. “But
I’m filthy. I’ve never been this dirty.”
Cisco
sits beside her, also naked, also the victim of violent encounters with his
world. He’s enthralled by a symphony of odors and scents, some of them Dee
Zu’s. What he smells now bears scant resemblance to what he was given in his
encounters with this woman in GR Worlds. “Generated realities can appear realer
than real,” Leary once told him, back in his holotank in the Mall. “But real
reality still offers something the qubits don’t.” And he’d been right.
He misses
Leary. That’s the Leary he spoke to in Aeolia not many hours before, the same
one, more or less, who died in Living End a few hours before that. Cisco
remains amazed at all that has happened since he fled the disintegration of
Eastern Seaboard, USA (ESUSA) Mall. Could that have been only two days ago?
Dee Zu is
charming when she wrinkles her nose. “You stink,” she tells him.
Keeping
an eye on their surrounds, Cisco is engaged in an internal confab, a
Lode-assisted orientation. Bacterial wastes, he learns, are responsible for
most of the smells. His WalkAbout also conveys grounds for surprise that he and
Dee Zu are so thoroughly colonized by bacteria this soon after escaping the
Mall.
It’s
surprising that any bacteria survived the PlagueBot. For sure, few survived
internal mall operations management, where all but the most essential bio and
machine microorganisms were anathema. Admit the wrong bio-engineered or mutant
virus, or a feral nanobot self-replicator, and it would have quickly sterilized
the malls, the last human enclaves on Earth, of higher biological life. But
never mind all the defenses, all MOM’s neurotically careful management. Now the
malls, both ESUSA and ESSEA, maybe the last of them, lie breached and ruined.
Yeah, well.
Dee Zu
conducts a nuzzling investigation into local species of Cisco stink. He finds
this at once embarrassing and, despite residual shock from what they’ve just
witnessed, nice.
Here they
are, both of them still alive and pretty well here in this anomalous patch of
life on the other side of the planet from their former home. However alien this
still-smoldering oasis with its tame PlagueBot and all its subterranean
installations lying wrecked beneath them, what lies beyond the border, back the
way they came yesterday, looks worse still. Much worse. It could be another
planet, or a GR World gone bad — the type of nightmare, in fact, that both
Cisco and Dee Zu, in their capacity as Worlds UnLtd test pilots, were trained
to identify and, where possible, fix.
*
Dee Zu
also stinks, much of it a good stink. Cisco inhales the heady perfume and feels
himself invaded with power.
“Maybe
you should put that away for now.” Dee Zu points and little Cisco points back.
“Come
on,” Big Cisco gives her his most boyish grin. “Let’s do it. Wet sex.”
Dee Zu is
Dee Zu, after all, and she straddles him without further ado. This isn’t
entirely reckless, mind you, since they do it sitting up so Cisco can watch
behind her while she watches behind him. It doesn’t last long, but it’s good.
It has an urgency and depth he never experienced when they did it in the
Worlds, no matter how imaginatively. Maybe the threat of imminent death, so
recently demonstrated, has something to do with the way things go.
*
They sit
there a bit longer, Dee Zu’s legs still locked behind Cisco. He breathes deep
of her, buries his face in her hair. Meanwhile she scents this strange world,
still burning in patches, smelling of charred wood and flesh and things. She
feels good. At the same time she continues to watch.
And this
world, their world now, watches back. Though it’s anything but clear who or
what might be watching. Or from where.
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Guest Post from Collin
Piprell
READINGS AS INSPIRATION
The
following – both reading for pleasure and theme reading for the Magic Circles
series – are among the non-fiction books in progress: Stuart Kauffman, At Home
in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity
(some years ago I read Kauffman’s Re-inventing the Sacred: A New View of
Science, Reason, and Religion, and found it compelling, if sometimes difficult
reading). In a similar vein, I’m reading Terrence W. Deacon, Incomplete Nature:
How Mind Emerged from Matter. I’ve also recently read Peter Wohlleben’s The
Hidden Life of Trees and Hold Still, Sally Mann’s memoir with photos.
My
fiction backlog includes Authority, the second in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern
Reach trilogy (I enjoyed Annihilation, the first). Jerusalem, by Alan Moore,
and A Horse Walks into a Bar, by David Grossman are also in the pipeline.
MUSIC AS INSPIRATION
Do you
listen to a playlist or music that helps the creative process? And if so, what
songs, artists, etc.
I listen
to everything from Miles Davis’ Live/Evil to Back’s Goldberg Variations. But I
go for the adrenaline-pumping music – jazz, blues, Latin American and African –
when I want to surf the feeling that I’m on top of things. More often I work
without a soundtrack.
Author Info
Collin Piprell is a Canadian
writer resident in Thailand. He has also lived in England, where he did
graduate work as a Canada Council Doctoral Fellow (later, a Social Sciences and
Humanities Fellow) in politics and philosophy at Pembroke College, Oxford; and
in Kuwait, where he learned to sail, water-ski and make a credible red wine in
plastic garbage bins.
In earlier years, he worked at a
wide variety of occupations, including four jobs as a driller and stope leader
in mines and tunnels in Ontario and Quebec. In later years he taught writing
courses at Thammasat University, Bangkok, freelanced as a writer and editor,
and published hundreds of articles on a wide variety of topics (most of these
pieces are pre-digital, hence effectively written on the wind). He is also the
author of short stories that appeared in Asian anthologies and magazines, as
well as five novels (a sixth forthcoming in 2018), a collection of short
stories, a collection of occasional pieces, a diving guide to Thailand, another
book on diving, and a book on Thailand’s coral reefs. He has also co-authored a
book on Thailand’s national parks.
Common Deer Press is publishing
the first three novels in his futuristic Magic Circles series.
Collin has another short novel
nearly ready to go, something he only reluctantly describes as magic realism.
Less nearly ready to go are novels he describes as a series of metaphysical
thrillers. Not to mention several Jack Shackaway comic thrillers, follow-ups to
Kicking Dogs. He also has a half-finished letter to his grandmother, dated 10
October 1991, saying thanks for the birthday gift.
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