Juicy Ghosts by Rudy Rucker

Author:Rudy Rucker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: cyberpunk, transreal, science fiction, fantasy, gnarly, artificial intelligence, biopunk
Publisher: Rudy Rucker
Published: 2022-10-18T00:00:00+00:00

Carson Pflug

People say I’m an asshole, but I’m not.

I grew up in Cairo, Illinois, an impoverished, decaying town of two thousand souls, very much battered by climate change. A number of the locals are subsistence farmers, and a lot of them are Black. It’s the southern tiny tip ass end of the state, squashed into a soggy, crooked promontory where the Ohio River angles into the Mississippi.

The rich expanse of Southern Illinois is known as Little Egypt—an early local preacher compared it to the biblical land of Goshen by the Nile. In recent times, a fly-by-night entrepreneur opened a Cairo amusement park called Huck Finn’s Egypt, with jury-rigged pyramids, a sternwheeler, rowboats, and kritter versions of crocodiles. The monstrous reptiles ate several rowboat-renters. The park went bust.

Mother and Father ran the Cairo Country Store, selling food and farm supplies, and renting out ball walkers and thudhumpers for working the fields. Our house rested upon twenty-foot-high biotech tree stumps to stay clear of the floods.

I did the family’s accounting from early on, juggling numbers in the cloud. I’m good at visualizing financial flows. I see braided rivers and cities of canals with locks, sluicegates, pumps, dikes—and class-four rapids. I have a knack of training virtual bots to manipulate the currents to improve my gain.

By the time I finish high-school, I’ve tripled my parents’ holdings. They’re proud of me. Father suggests I get a business degree at the university in nearby Carbondale, find a wife, and settle into decrepit, end-of-the-line Cairo. Mother and I laugh at his idea. Obviously I can do better. Father doesn’t know much. And often he’s drunk.

I set my search-bots to exploring the archipelagoes of academia. My bots discover a sinuous passage that leads from lowly Cairo to a scholarship at the august and sophisticated University of Chicago. Right away, I enroll online. And then, without actually leaving Cairo yet, I parlay my status as a University of Chicago student into a slot as a student at UC Berkeley in sunny, high-tech CA. Playing on my disadvantaged Cairo roots, I score a UC scholarship than Chicago is offering.

I’m enjoying this new game, and I want to keep trading up. I’ll try for Yale. But Father tells me it’s time to get my ass out of his house—instead of lying in bed all day with my eyephones on. He’s miffed that I’m not going to Southern Illinois University in Carbondale.

“Do something real,” he storms. “Live a life. Get your head out of the cloud.”

“Shut your crack,” I tell him. “Another few days of this and I’ll be going to Oxford University in England.”

Father snatches off my eyephones and uproots my wireless router vine. Time for Berkeley. I pack my few possessions and ask one of our thudhumpers to drive me to the St. Louis airport. I intend to skip saying goodbye to Mother—I don’t want the big scene. But she catches up with me in the street. She takes out a paper envelope and hands me a small scrap of gristle from within.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.