up to the equine sex we had vicariously experienced in FarmEarth.
I felt at that moment that maybe FarmEarth Master privileges were kept away from us kids for a reason.
And a few weeks later, when everything came crashing down, I was certain of it.
* * * *
My Moms and Dad were all out of the house that fateful late afternoon. I was lying in bed at home, bored and chewing up subsoils with my pals and their effectuators, eking out a conduit which we had been told, by Adan, represented the last few yards of tunnel, in accordance with our schematics, when I felt a poke in my ribs. I disengaged from FarmEarth, coming out of augie space, and saw my dull-faced brother Benno hovering over me.
“Crispian,” he said, “do you know where you are?”
“Yeah, sure, I’m eating up hydrocarbons in the Gulf. Nom, nom, nom, good little Crispy Critter.”
“Your statement exists in non-compliance with reality.”
“Oh, just go away, Benno, and leave me alone.”
I dived back into augie space, eager to get this boring “Angry Sister” assignment over with. We were all hoping that the next task Adan gave us would be more glamorous and exciting. We all wanted to feel that we were big, bold cyber-cowboys of the planet, riding Gaia’s range, on the lookout for eco-rustlers, repairing broken fences. But of course, even without star-quality assignments, we still had the illicit Master privileges to amuse—and scare —us.
“Hey,” said Mallory when I returned to our subterranean workspace, “where’d you go?”
“Yeah,” chimed in Vernice, “no slacking off!”
“Oh, it was just my stupid grebnard brother. He wanted to harass me about something.”
Cheo said, “That’s Benno, right? Isn’t his mom Zoysia van Vollenhoven? I heard he’s hot stuff in FarmEarth. Inherited all his Mom’s chops, plus more. Maybe he had something useful to tell you.”
“I doubt it. He’s probably just jealous of me now.”
Anuta sounded worried. “You don’t think he knows anything about what we’re doing?”
“No way. I just mean that he sees me playing FarmEarth eagerly all the time now, so he must have some idea I’m enjoying myself, and that pisses him off. He’s always been jealous of me.”
At that moment, I felt a hand clamp onto my ankle in meatspace, and I was dragged out of bed with a
“What exactly is the matter with you, Ben? Do you have a short-circuit in your strap-on brain?”
Benno’s normally impassive face showed as much emotion as it ever did, like say at Christmas, when he got some grebnard present he had always wanted. The massive agitation amounted to some squinted eyes and trembling lower lip.
“If you do not want to admit your ignorance, Crispian, I will simply tell you where you are. You are at these coordinates: sixty-three degrees, thirty-eight minutes north, and nineteen degrees, three minutes west.”
I didn’t bother using my memtax to look up that latitude and longitude, because I didn’t want to give Benno’s accusations any weight. So I just sarcastically asked, “And where exactly is that?”
“You and your crew of naive miscreants are almost directly underneath the Katla volcano in Iceland. How far down you are, I have not yet ascertained. But I would imagine that you are quite close to the magma reservoirs, and in imminent danger of tapping them with your tunnel. Other criminal crews spaced all around the volcano are in similar positions. May I remind you that whenever Katla has gone off in the past—the last time was in 1918—it discharged as much toxic substances per second as the combined fluid discharges of the Amazon, Mississippi, Nile, and Yangtze rivers.”
Holy shit! Could he be right? My voice quivered a little, even though I tried to control it. “And why would we be in such a place?”
“Because
Now I started to
Every school kid from first grade on knew about the Pinatubo Option, named after a famous volcanic incident of the last century. It was a geoengineering scheme of the highest magnitude, intended to flood the atmosphere with ash and other aerosols so as to cut global temperatures by a considerable fraction. Consensus wisdom had always figured it was too risky and uncontrollable a proposition.
“I cannot let you and your friends proceed with this. You must tell them to halt immediately.”
For a minute, I had almost felt myself on Benno’s side. But when he gave me that order in his know-it-all way, I instantly rebelled. All the years of growing up together, with him always the favored one, stuck in my throat.
“Like hell! We’re just doing what’s good for the planet in the fastest way possible.
Benno looked at me calmly with his stoney face. “I am a Master Class Steward, and you are not.”
“Well, Mr. Master Class Steward, try and stop me!”
I started to climb to my feet when Benno tackled me and knocked me back down!
We began to wrestle. I expected to pin Benno in a couple of seconds. But that wasn’t how things went.
I had always believed my brother was a total lardass from all his FarmEarth physical inactivity. How the heck was I supposed to know that he spent two hours every weekend in some kind of martial arts training? Was I in charge of his frigging schedule? We didn’t even share the same mito-Mom!
I found myself snaffled up in about half a minute, with Benno clamping both my wrists together behind my back with just one big strong hand.
And then, with the other hand, he rawly popped out my memtax, being none too gentle.
I felt blinded! Awake, yet separated from augie space for more than the short interval it takes to swap in fresh memtax, I couldn’t access the world’s knowledge, talk to my friends, or even recall what I had had for breakfast that morning.
Next Benno stripped me of my haptic bling. Then he said, “You wait right here.”
He left, locking the bedroom door behind him.
I sat on the bed, feeling empty and broken. I couldn’t even tell you now how much time passed.
The door opened and in walked Benno, followed by his mito-Mom, Zoysia van Vollenhoven.
Aunt Zoysia always inspired instant guilt in me. Not because of anything she said or did, or any overbearing, sneering attitude, but only because of the way she looked.
Aunt Zoysia was the sexiest female I knew—and not in any kind of bulimic high-fashion designer-label manner either, like those thoroughbreds the Brazilians engineer for the runways of the world. I always thought that if Gaia could have chosen to incarnate herself, she would have looked just like Aunt Zoysia, all overflowing breasts and hips and wild mane of hair, lush wide mouth, proud nose and piercing eyes. She practically radiated exuberant joy and heartiness and sensuality. In her presence, I always got an incipient stiffy, and since she was family—even though she and I shared no genes—the stiffy was always instantly accompanied by guilt.
But this was the one time I didn’t react in the usual manner, I felt so miserable.
Aunt Zoysia came over and sat on the mattress beside me and hugged me. Even those intimate circumstances did not stir up any horniness.
“Crispian, dear, Benno has described to me the trouble you’ve gotten into. It’s all right, I completely understand. You just wanted to play with the big boys. But now, I think you’ll admit, things have gone too far, and must be brought to a screeching halt. Benno?”
“Yes, mother?”
“Please find a fresh pair of memtax for your brother. We will slave Crispian’s to ours, and bring him along for the shutdown of
Benno went out and came back with new memtax in their organic blister pack. I wetted them and inserted them, and put on my restored haptic bling. I booted up all my apps, but still found myself a volitionless spectator to the shared augie space feed from Zoysia and Benno.
“All right, son, let’s take these sneaky bastards down.”
“Ready when you are, Mom.”
You know, I thought I was pretty slick with my Master Class privileges, could handle effectuators and the
