Cyberpunk

under his chin, pulling his woolen coat tight. Finally, he limped to the decelerator strip and stepped off. He had to pause and breathe slowly three times before he reached the house.
    Inside the dim gonfab, he hung his coat on a transparent plastic hook. He wet his rough hands from a suspended water bag and placed cool palms over his weathered face.
    Without opening his Eyes™, he said “You may come out.”
    Metal rings supporting a curtained partition screeched apart and the boy emerged into a shaft of yellow dome light. The ragged wound in his cosmetic chest carapace gaped obscenely. His dilated mechanical irises audibly spiraled down to the size of two pinpricks, and the muted light illuminated a few blond hairs clinging anemone-like to his scalded plastic scalp. He was clutching the photograph of the blond boy and crying and had been for some time, but there was no sign of this on his crudely sculpted face.
    The old man saw the photograph.
    “I am sorry,” he said, and embraced the boy. He felt an electrical actuator poking rudely through the child’s tee shirt, like a compound fracture.
    “Please,” he whispered. “I will make things the way they were before.”
    But the boy shook his head. He looked up into the old man’s watery blue Eyes™. The room was silent except for the whirring of a fan. Then, very deliberately, the boy slid the glasses from the old man’s face, leaving the Ears™.
    The old man looked at the small, damaged machine with tired eyes full of love and sadness. When the thing spoke, the shocking hole opened in its cheek again and the old man heard the clear, piping voice of a long-dead little boy.
    “I love you, Grandpa,” it said.
    And these words were as true as sunlight.
    With deft fingers, the boy-thing reached up and pressed a button at the base of its own knobbed metal spine. There was a winding-down noise as all the day’s realization and shame and understanding faded away into nothingness.
    The boy blinked slowly and his hands settled down to his sides. He could not remember arriving, and he looked around in wonder. The gonfab was silent. The boy saw that he was holding a photograph of himself. And then the boy noticed the old man.
    “Grandpa?” asked the boy, very concerned. “Have you been crying?”
    The old man did not answer. Instead, he closed his eyes and turned away.

LIFE IN THE ANTHROPOCENE

----
    By Paul Di Filippo

    This story is indebted to Gaia Vince and her article in
New Scientist, “Surviving in a Warmer World.”

    1. SOLAR GIRDLE EMERGENCY
    Aurobindo Bandjalang got the emergency twing through his vib on the morning of August 8, 2121, while still at home in his expansive bachelor’s digs. At 1LDK, his living space was three times larger than most unmarried individuals enjoyed, but his high-status job as a Power Jockey for New Perthpatna earned him extra perks.
    While a short-lived infinitesimal flock of beard clippers grazed his face, A.B. had been showering and vibbing the weather feed for Reboot City Twelve: the more formal name for New Perthpatna.
    Sharing his shower stall but untouched by the water, beautiful weather idol Midori Mimosa delivered the feed.
    “Sunrise occurred this morning at three-oh-two A.M. Max temp projected to be a comfortable, shirtsleeves thirty degrees by noon. Sunset at ten-twenty-nine P.M. this evening. Cee-oh-two at four-hundred-and-fifty parts per million, a significant drop from levels at this time last year. Good work, Rebooters!”
    The new tweet/twinge/ping interrupted both the weather and A.B.’s ablutions. His vision greyed out for a few milliseconds as if a sheet of smoked glass had been slid in front of his MEMS contacts, and both his left palm and the sole of his left foot itched: Attention Demand 5.
    A.B.’s boss, Jeetu Kissoon, replaced Midori Mimosa under the sparsely downfalling water: a dismaying and disinvigorating substitution. But A.B.’s virt-in-body operating system allowed for no squelching of twings tagged AD4 and up. Departmental policy.
    Kissoon grinned and said, “Scrub faster, A.B. We need you here yesterday. I’ve got news of face-to-face magnitude.”
    “What’s the basic quench?”
    “Power transmission from the French farms is down by one percent. Sat photos show some kind of strange dust accumulation on a portion of the collectors. The on-site kybes can’t respond to the stuff with any positive remediation. Where’s it from, why now, and how do we stop it? We’ve got to