Up Against It - M. J. Locke [45]
Yet it was not wholly unlike us. Like a human infant, it was unaware of what anything really meant. The feral did not know where it stopped and the rest of the universe started.
But that itself proved another difference. The boundary between the sapient and its world was more pliable than ours. A human baby can’t add or subtract brain or body parts at will. The feral could. If an aspect of its environment looked useful, it could co-opt it, subsume it, add to itself as would a sculptor shaping her own body as she emerged from the clay. And if some particular function seemed no longer useful—after running some checks, naturally, to ensure that the feral’s core identity made no critical calls to that function; the feral was anything but stupid—it could lop that portion off and abandon it with no compunctions. Even so, it made some early, nearly disastrous errors in identifying what modules were critical versus not. After that, it grew more cautious about changing its fundamental configuration.
Human infants’ ability to affect their own environment is severely limited. To survive, they must gain the cooperation of others from the moment of birth. But the feral had no need for or awareness of others. It had no potential allies, insofar as it knew; only enemies and an infinitely plastic, useful environment. And enemy and environment and self were one.
Imagine its surprise, then, when a feature of itself/its landscape talked back.
8
From the moment his dad came out from beneath the trees, Geoff could tell something bad had happened between him and Commissioner Jane. But Dad would not talk about it. He merely said, “Let’s go.”
Mom pursed her lips. She looked down at the object she clutched in her hand. It was a painted plaster handprint Carl had made for her when they were kids. Geoff and Dad stood there looking at her till she finally spoke. Her mouth barely moved.
“I’ll leave my gift,” she said, almost too softly to hear. “I won’t be long,” and she went over to the wall.
Geoff glanced over at his friends, who were gathering near the buffet. “But I’m not ready to go yet.”
Dad’s expression congealed into anger. “We’re going!”
Geoff may have been a little taller than his dad, but he had a good deal less bulk. He had no intention of going back and watching Dad pace and rant while Mom stared at the walls. He stood. His heart was racing. “I want to stay.”
“You’ll do as I say.”
Geoff felt his jaw muscles twitching. I’m seventeen, he thought. I’m an adult now. “I’m staying.”
“Don’t take that tone with me.”
Geoff said nothing, but stood his ground. Dad looked over at Mom, who stood nearby, staring blindly at the memory wall. Geoff eyed her, too.
“Fine!” Sal snarled. “Do what you want.”
Bile rose in Geoff’s throat. Let’s not fight. The words would not come. “All right, I will.”
He turned his back on his father and went over to his friends, who were piling food on their plates. All three eyed him nervously. He saw his dad steering his mom away through the crowds, and felt like punching a hole through the memorial wall. “Let’s go spin a few turns.”
* * *
Most bikers used “go spin” or “spin the rock” to mean running orbital races, but Geoff and his friends used it in a different way. They had a secret hideout, a stroid not too far from Phocaea’s orbit. “Go spin” meant take a trip out to Ouroboros.
An old miner named Joey Spud had left it to Geoff. It was a hunk of nickel-iron about a tenth the volume of Phocaea.
Joey Spud: that’s what everyone called Geoff’s old friend. Not Joey, not Joe, not Joseph. Nobody knew his last name. Joey Spud, like all the original miners, had been an independent operator who blasted, tunneled, cut, and burned a living out of the precious minerals locked in the asteroids’ substraits.
Joey Spud had been a big shot among the First Wavers. At the tender age of twenty, a greenhorn fresh from the moon, he had staked one of