SPECTER-BOMBING THE BEER GOGGLES

Firpo Manzello was looking to get lucky. He hadn’t had sex in three weeks, and was beginning to fear he never would again. Yotta-toxic, serkku!

Part of the carnal drought involved Firpo’s job. He worked for the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, in their Public Works Department, Sewer Division, Rogue Transgenic Squad. Firpo’s job involved descending into the subterranean labyrinth of utility tunnels with his team each morning and cleaning up whatever escaped the filters and traps of the numerous biotech plants in the city. Most days, the team’s quarry was nothing more challenging than some errant slime mold or motile vat-cortex. But from time to time, more complex organisms got loose. Firpo still bore crosshatched scars on his ankles and calves from tangling with a pride of anomalocaris. Believe me, serkku, those things could bite! What the hell had the fabbers been thinking when they endowed the monster shrimps with that pincer equipment? Lots of good eating there in the grabbers, but still—

Firpo’s job description itself wasn’t the actual problem. Some women actually found his duties sexy. Great White Hunter/Urban Superhero Guardian and all that. No, the hard nut was how Firpo smelled after a day at work. Heavy aromatics in those sewers! Even industrial-strength odor-remediation ribozymes from TraumaTech failed to eliminate every molecule of stench. Hard to get close to a babe when you reeked even faintly of seaweed-fermenting yeast strains.

But a liberal dose of Hack’s Bodyspray could generally mask Firpo’s signature smell at least long enough for him to make a love connection. The other, greater part of his problem was his erotic selectivity.

Firpo had developed a kink, hardwired now in his neurons by way, way too much gameplay in the online universe of ElfQuest. (A geezer at age twenty-eight, Firpo had prefered the old-fashioned platform over the augmented reality live-action version.) SAD, the experts called Firpo’s kink. Sympathetic Avatar Dysmorphia, brought on by excessive somatic identification with one’s virtual self and peers. Although he managed to kick his gamer addiction, he could only get turned on by women who looked like elves. Needless to say, such real-life women were a tiny minority on the dating scene. True, there was a small community of modded and cosplay elves at MIT. But Firpo had kinda aged out of that scene, and dramatically burned some bridges.

That left him only one choice really if he wanted to get laid.

He was going to have to download the Beer Goggles app.

The Beer Goggles app was a piece of augmented reality software that ran on your memtax. It changed the user’s visual perception of other humans, overlaying onto them whatever physical parameters the user dictated. Beer Goggles would allow Firpo to perceive every woman as an elf. Or so he had been assured by the vendor’s sales pitch. He had not actually used the app yet. Before today, the thought of downloading it into his phone felt too much like defeat, giving in to his neurosis and carrying around a talisman of his deviance. He kept telling himself that he could beat his kink and get normal. But three celibate weeks had proved he was too weak to defeat his kink.

So, eager to be loved again, Firpo took the decisive step.

First he popped in a new pair of memtax. The brief interval when his naked eyes beheld the world, when unmediated photons struck his rods and cones, seemed weird and incomplete, as if he had been stripped of one of his senses.

Memtax were living contact lenses built out of jellyfish proteins laced with graphene circuitry and an RGB chromatophore micromatrix. They subsisted by drinking the wearer’s tears, lasted forty-eight hours, and a year’s supply came free with most annual phone contracts. Possessing only minimal memory and processing power (about as much as turn of the century PC), they had just one function: painting the user’s retinas with high-res realtime imagery. Oh, yeah: their outward-facing side replicated the user’s iris and pupil—or any other image the user chose.

The memtax were übertoothed to Firpo’s phone, which in turn rode the cognitive E3 cellular network to the vast global cloud.

After losing his expensive smartphone several times in the sewers, even when secured in a supposedly failsafe holster, Firpo had invested in a wearable phone, now strapped to his wrist. The size of a sports watch, the phone ran on a thermopile that converted Firpo’s excess bodyheat to electricity. It also served as a bodymonitor with continuous transdermal monitoring, sending telemetry back to the squad’s HQ while Firpo squelched through the sewers, wearing his memtax, übertoothed earbuds and a piezoelectric conduction mic strung on an innocuous locket around Firpo’s throat.

Firpo’s haptic bling—a smartring on each finger—completed his toolkit.

The Memtax settled into place and booted up. The Apple-Asustek app store icon hovered in the upper left corner of Firpo’s field of vision, seemingly as real as the rest of his kitchen. He spread the icon open with a two-fingered gesture, his Haptic User Interface rings providing the tactile sensation of cutting a trough in a bowl of porridge. He quickly found Beer Goggles, and, for €3.99, downloaded it.

He started the little augie program running and directed it to the ElfQuest MMORPG site for its templates. The game had ten million players, over half of whom were women with distinct avatars. With that many images to choose from, the AI in Beer Goggles would certainly be able to overlay all the women Firpo could possibly meet in his lifetime with non-repeating masks.

The neat thing about Beer Googles was that it only came online when the user got drunk, as determined by his phone’s measurement of the ethanol levels in his sweat. The app said it was operative now, but of course Firpo wasn’t drunk. Yet he wanted to test it, so he overrode its defaults to bring it immediately online. Then he looked outside.

Rents were too high in Cambridge for Firpo to afford living there, and the city did not demand residence within its borders as a term of his employment, so he lived in a cheap neighborhood in Charlestown. His quarters were a leaky, drafty houseboat moored at a louche marina protruding practically from the base of the Bunker Hill Monument. Connected to the hungry sea, the rising waters of the Charles and Mystic Rivers had reached partway up Breed’s Hill, drowning the old street-level neighborhood. The repurposed district had a certain gritty charm. Firpo always enjoyed watching the scuba divers below his boat, circulating through the drowned tenements in search of archaeological tidbits.

A Duck Tour was offloading a group of sightseers at an adjacent commercial dock. Judging by the snatches of excited conversation that drifted to him through his open window and by the appearance of the men, Firpo suspected the tourists hailed from Singapore or Malaysia. But judging by the women—old, young, fat, lithe, tall, short—the group hailed from Abode, exotic world of two moons, Wolfriders and Sun Folk. Long pointy ears, big slanted lantern eyes, golden skin, heart-shaped delicate faces.

Firpo hurriedly dropped the shade on his window, his sudden arousal painfully pressing against his pants. He took Beer Goggles offline, and then brought up the active lifestreams of three of his posse from the Rogue Transgenic Squad, teleking them and arranging to meet them at the Cantab that evening.

Plenty of time to elven-ify the female world when he reached the bar.

* * * *

The house band at the Cantab Lounge, Jasmine Mofongo, pounded out their bhangra-bachata so loud that Firpo had to recalibrate his earbuds to filter out most of the music before he could hear his friends talk. Illumined like a cross between a hospital ward and a Victorian opium den, the Cantab was old, grotty and cramped, its staff rude and capricious, but the place felt like home to Firpo and his squad mates. They often came here straight from the showers after work, and had never once been called out for being a tad whiffy. The patrons were simply grateful for the protection from roaming sewer shoggoths, a popular urban legend. (One excessively wasted female patron claimed to have been attacked once by a pseudopod emerging from the Cantab toilets.)

Being a Saturday inching toward midnight, the joint was jamming. Firpo and his three friends had been lucky to get stools at the long scarred bar. A score of booty-shakers thronged the small dance floor. Balky heat pumps chuffed to chill the place, to little effect. The early June temps had averaged high nineties all week, and now the heat was baked into the building’s old skeleton, mere prelude to August torture.

Firpo was drinking a cocktail called “Important Intangible Cultural Property Number 86-1,” whose main component was the South Korean liquor munbaeju. The stuff was potent, and this was his second one. But he knew he wasn’t clinically drunk yet, because Beer Goggles had not kicked in one hundred percent. But the app’s stealthy oncoming seepage, an unadvertised surprise feature to Firpo, was tantalizing.

The app was using morphing algorithms to bring every woman closer to divine elfdom by degrees, the drunker Firpo got. Right now, all the females in the place looked like sixty-forty hybrids, with a preponderance of fey. Imbibing a third “Important Intangible Cultural Property Number 86-1,” should provide the tipping point.

Glancing to his right at Ellie Salo, Firpo jumped a hair to see how his co-worker had been transformed. Uncanny, serkku! Her familiar pleasantly wide mouth, squarish chin and broad nose seemed to have been shaved down and resculpted by an invisible plastic surgeon, and her olive skin was assuming amber tones. The upper curve of her ear was trending Spock-wise.

Sight of the partially elven-ified Ellie left Firpo feeling confused. He didn’t want to hit on Ellie, or even consider her as an erotic object. Sex with co-workers was generally a bad idea—imagine having a lover’s spat in the stenchy subterranean dark while some unknown critter was stalking you—and he knew Ellie too well to harbor any romantic notions. But if her transformation continued, he’d be unable to keep his hands off her. And more alarmingly, she might not object to his attentions.

Firpo said, “Scuse me a minute,” and got up to head to the john. Once there, opened the Beer Goggles app’s preferences. Much to his relief, he found a blacklist option and entered Ellie’s phone number. He returned to his stool and gave a small sigh to find Ellie looking completely like her baseline self. He downed another gulp of cocktail, and was rewarded with an intensification of estrogen elvishness everywhere else.

“So like I was saying,” Ellie continued, “I hear that Celexion has brought a tankful of space squids online.”

On the far side of Ellie hunkered Ismail Bazzy, a nervous scarecrow in Carhartt coveralls trimmed with nutria-fur accents. Ismail lived on the edge of constant worry and collapse, but this very hair-trigger, tripwire state had saved their bacon more than once.

“Oh, great,” Ismail said. “Now we can expect to encounter krakens. I’m putting in for a raise.”

From Firpo’s left, Alun Lovat spoke up. An unflappable and dapper British ex-pat out of demi-drowned Liverpool, Alun seemed the antimatter counterpart to Ismail. And yet his sangfroid had proven equally valuable in the trenches. “Oh, come now, Izzy, they’re only small chaps.”

“Yeah, sure, now they are. But once they escape into that devil’s broth—and you know damn well they will—then you just wait and see—”

“What’s Celexion doing with the squids anyhow?” Firpo asked, while he tried to ignore the increasing allure of the bevy of pub-crawling, beer-swigging, gyrating Galadriels circulating all around.

Ellie answered. “They’re extracting some kind of useful lipids from their synaptic vesicles. The cosmic-ray-induced mutations did something really weird to those orbital cephalopods.”

Firpo’s third drink had arrived, and he downed a slug.

That was all it took. Within seconds, every woman in the Cantab went full-bore elf. The effect was like when black-and-white Kansas turned to Technicolor Oz.

Firpo slid jerkily off his stool like an untrained robot fresh from the factory. Ellie looked quizzical. “You okay?”

“Uh, yeah, fine, swell. It’s just—I think I see somebody I know over there and I wanna say hello.”

Firpo wasn’t lying. The woman he saw across the room was a creature he had long been familiar with from his dreams. He began to make a beeline in her direction.

Alun chuckled. “Do nothing not in my playbook, my lad.” Ismail said, “Be careful!” Ellie, sounding slightly disappointed, said, “We’ll see you before we leave.”

Firpo just nodded absentmindedly. Jasmine Mofongo launched into their big hit, “Mi Dulce de Hyderabad,” a song Firpo always loved, but he never heard a note.

* * * *

The space between Firpo and the elf woman he had singled out disappeared without his conscious volition. Standing with her female pals, nursing a drink, she had watched Firpo approach with a wry and knowing amusement. Now within her intoxicating personal space, he found himself momentarily unable to utter a sound.

Although her squad of buddies all exhibited elvish allure in differing proportions, the Beer Goggles had created something special in this one woman, perhaps having had a superior baseline body to map onto. But there also existed something authentically vibrant in her stance and attitude, the way she comported herself. Facially, she looked exactly like Leetah of the Sun Folk: masses of wavy red hair through which poked enormous lynx-like ears; pool-like canted eyes, their green-painted lids echoing their emerald depths; arrowhead chin and complexion of buttery copper.

“Um,” Firpo stumbled. “Can I buy you a drink?”

“Got one.”

“Okay. Wanna dance?”

“Sure.”

Leetah handed off her glass to a pal, who sniffed discourteously (or was she whiffing Firpo’s eau de cloaca?), and they squished themselves into the sardine-thick dance floor pack.

Jasmine Mofongo segued into “You Say Somosa, I Say Pastelito,” perfect tune for a slow dance. Firpo took Leetah into his arms. He longed to stroke her impossibly tall and curvaceous ears, to see how well the haptic feedback matched the visuals, but he refrained.

After a few moments of sweaty shuffling more or less in place, Leetah said, “I’m just curious—what are you seeing when you look at me?”

Busted! Could he deny—?

“Don’t try to fool me. I saw from across the room how you went all googly when some kind of app kicked in. What is it?”

Why’d he have to pick a sharp, smart elf? Firpo resigned himself to starting over again, with some lesser goddess. But before he ditched her, he owed Leetah an answer, so he explained.

“Hmmm, well that’s not as icky as what I imagined.”

Firpo untensed. Maybe this could still go somewhere. “What about you? What are you seeing when you look at me?”

“The real you.”

“Not likely.”

“Fosho. I don’t do Ay-Are. No memtax.”

This perverse luddite revelation shocked Firpo more than getting caught out using Beer Goggles. Did he really want to get involved with such a modern primitive?

Undecided, and the song ending just then, he let Leetah lead him to a relatively quiet pocket in the room, near the entrance.

“No Ay-Are? How do you function?”

“Oh, I manage. But sometimes it is inconvenient. Like right now, for instance, you could save me a few steps if you order me another drink.”

Firpo teleked the Cantab’s bartender, and soon they had fresh cold glasses in hand via the Boston Dynamics servebot. Just in time, for Leetah was reverting gradually to human. Firpo boosted his blood alcohol, and she popped back to Rivendell.

“Hey, by the way, I’m Firpo Manzello.”

“Vicky Licorice.”

“Fosho?”

“It’s my pen name, but I’ve gotten to like it.”

“Would I have seen any of your stuff?”

“Only if you have a pre-schooler at home. Little Lost Dino Escapes the Vat? Little Lost Dino in Manhattan? Little Lost Dino Saves the Great Barrier Reef?”

“Sorry.”

“That’s okay. I can hardly stand to read them myself once they’re published.”

An hour or so of amiable, intermittently teasing conversation ensued—although hearing a beautiful elf discourse about Cambridge city politics was slightly disconcerting—and around midnight Firpo felt ready to try for a kiss.

Unfortunately, that was the exact moment when all hell broke loose.

Days later, crowdsourced and media reports had comprehensively pinned down the nature of the event, which came to be labeled “Apparition Eve.”

A coalition of monkeywrenchers—everyone from The Universal Grammar of Hate to Tragedians of the Commons—had hacked into augiespace with specter-bombing malware. Insidiously, their strikes arrived not all at once, but in a timed cascade where each new incident fed on prior confusion and chaos.

And one of the first, smaller assaults was against Firpo’s new app, Beer Googles.

Leaning forward boozily to kiss a receptive Vicky Licorice, Firpo experienced instant yotta-terror as a gunshot boomed in his ears and he watched Vicky’s head disintegrate in a bloody mist. He even had haptic feedback of a spasming body.

Firpo screamed like a pitchforked pig. For an infinite span of nauseous seconds, he was utterly convinced someone had randomly assassinated the woman in his arms.

But the non-reaction of the immediate bystanders—as well as Vicky’s own confused exclamations, issuing from the ruins of her face—alerted him otherwise. However realisitic, it had all happened only in AR.

Elsewhere around the bar, other apparent Beer Goggles users—not all of them males—were showing similar distress.

An augie intruder popped up in Firpo’s vision. The badass female warrior-type said, “Happy date-rape, bastard! Beer Goggles promotes violence to women! This has been a message from The Sisters of Lysistrata”

The specter dissolved in a spray of unicorn sparkles, but Vicky’s ruined countenance remained. Firpo couldn’t stand the horrible sight. Even as he awkwardly thumbed out his memtax, cursing, he found space to wonder how blowing up the heads of women could serve as the best possible anti-violence message.

The actual Vicky of course looked nothing like Leetah. A concerned expression filled a charming Latina face.

“What the fuck was that all about?”

His pulse slowing, Firpo told her. The other victims were calming down as well, and reconnecting with those they had seen killed.

Then the next attack struck.

A subset of the crowd shrieked and reared back from something invisible and threatening in the center of the Cantab. One woman screamed, “It’s hell! Hell’s opening up!” Another person yelled, “The teeth, the teeth!”

The shrieking of the damned filled Firpo’s earbuds, and he plucked those out too. Now he felt truly insensate. Without his own connection to augiespace, Firpo had no notion of what the horrified patrons were seeing or why they had been selected out of the crowd. He felt bewildered and helpless.

People were beginning to surge toward the narrow exit. A stampede seemed imminent.

Vicky took charge. She grabbed Firpo’s hand and pulled him outside.

The hot night air hit Firpo like a wool-padded sledgehammer. “My friends! They’re still in there!”

Firpo attempted to re-enter the Cantab, but the sound of exploding stacks of amplifiers stopped him. Specters must have tricked Jasmine Mofongo into some kind of “turn it to 11” mistake with their equipment. Suddenly a copious outflow of other fleeing patrons carried Firpo and Vicky out onto Massachusetts Avenue.

Dodging wild-eyed pedestrians, they regained the curb just in time. The orderly, scant flow of late-night vehicular traffic was disintegrating. Whatever specters the passing drivers were experiencing—children in the road, sudden sinkholes, giant kaiju, their dashboard telemetry red-lining—were causing them to swerve wildly and crash into lamposts, buildings and unfortunate pedestrians. The din was terrific: bending metal, fleshy impacts, sirens and screams.

Vicky pulled Firpo into the doorway of a shuttered store. “Your friends will have to manage on their own. The first responders will be here soon. We can’t do anything. We’ve got to get someplace safe. Where do you live?”

“Charlestown.”

“You’re closer. I’m way out in Waltham. Let’s go.”

Regaining a little more composure, Firpo took a step out from their sheltering niche, then stopped.

“What’s the matter?” Vicky said.

“I have no idea how to get home. I always followed the augie trail here.”

Vicky took some kind of antique handheld device out of her purse.

“What’s that?”

“GPS unit.”

“That must be fifty years old! It still works?”

“No memtax, you get creative. C’mon!”

They did not dare use the subway. The sound of titanic crashes emanating from underfoot was persuasion to stay aboveground. Even as cautious pedestrians, they ran into plenty of dangers. One of the worst was plummeting bodies, as baffled, specter-tormented victims were led to step from high windows and off rooftops that must have appeared to them as safe paths. Smokey fires contributed to the Dante’s Inferno atmosphere of a city in upheaval. Were other places under attack as well? Firpo had no way of knowing.

But eventually, after a few hours, Vicky and Firpo reached the relative safety of his houseboat and collapsed wearily into bed. After a few mumbled endearments, they both fell asleep.

And in the morning light, amidst the humbled wreckage of the city, augmented and physical, even without Beer Goggles, using just his naked eyes, a grateful Firpo discovered that Vicky looked plenty beautiful enough to drive all thoughts of Leetah and her kin forever from his mind.