IGMS Issue 15 by IGMS Read Free Book Online

said.
    In response, Levitz-Prolific hummed the opening bars of Fadid's culture opera.
    "You were supposed to delete that," Fadid said. The bacterial poet continued to sing an older version of a song Fadid had since revised. During a workshop meeting in the comet months earlier, Fadid had sent a draft version of his culture opera to the other artists; Levitz-Prolific must have saved his copy. Fadid shut out the radio frequency on which he sang, then the microwave channel the poet adopted, then the resonant signal the bacteria set up in his rental body, and a slew of other communication pathways that broadcast a bastardized version of his opera. There was a brief moment of silence, and then his culture opera, the work he'd spent two hundred years composing to win Kabime's heart, began to trickle in via intracellular transmission. Every single cell in Fadid's rental body contained nano-mites that housed a portion of his personality, just as every cell in Levitz-Prolific's bacterial culture contained the nano-mites in which his sentience sat. Where the nano-mites had direct contact, Levitz-Prolific issued a steady stream of information packets Fadid could never ignore. The poet was a buzz in the ear that wouldn't go away.
    "Go nova, Sol, and free us all from your tyranny," Fadid said. "I need a drink."
    Back out in Hilo's tunneled streets, he bought two bottles of papaya wine, stuffed one in his pocket while he drank the other. He wandered the streets for a while, trying to pass the time, but tomorrow would come no sooner and his opera continued to sound off-key inside his gonads.
    Preoccupied as he was, Fadid walked with the steady flow of foot, belly, pseudopodia, and wing traffic that moved through Hilo. It wasn't until the Polynesian architecture of the Second Kingdom Palace loomed over the heads of the crowd, revealed in a giant bell-shaped chamber excavated in the surrounding lava, that Fadid realized where the crowd had taken him. The site of the Lo'ihi real estate auction.
    Fadid followed the crowd through the palace's great double doors. Clairvoy Realty public perspective windows hung in the air beneath the bamboo timbers, and the windows looked in on what the realtors imagined life should look like on Lo'ihi. Homes floated above lava floes. Where the molten rock met the sea, spas were constructed, in which Lo'ihi's residents basked in salt-steam baths. Children with butterfly nets caught Pele's tears -- airborne pieces of glassy lava-rock.
    At the end of the great hall that led to the old King's audience chamber, the realtors had captured a tank full of molten Lo'ihi. The lava boiled in a transparent half-cylinder four metres long and a metre in diameter. Sentients of all shapes and sizes thronged about the tank , entranced by the liquid version of a material that was typically only encountered in its solid form.
    The lava entranced Fadid for different reasons.
    Seven thousand years ago, during that first dive to Lo'ihi, he and Kabime had considered themselves junior volcanologists, and had developed nano-mites that could survive within the heat of Lo'ihi's core and report back what they experienced. Later, when Kabime suggested they merge, it was Fadid who'd chosen the vessel for the theoretical personality that would result from their union: they would inhabit Lo'ihi herself. They modified the nano mites so that they could survive indefinitely in the lava, and expanded the mite's processing capabilities so they could host a new sentience that was a merger of both their personalities.
    They'd injected the modified mites into Lo'ihi, but then Fadid lost his nerve and suggested the pact instead of the immediate merger. Though he knew something died in their relationship the moment he suggested the pact, the two of them prepared the nano-mites so Lo'ihi would be ready for their merger when she rose to the surface. They encrypted the mites with their own base codes, the string of binary numbers as unique as a human's