The Ware Tetralogy - Rudy Rucker (popular ebook readers .TXT) 📗

class="calibre1">She nodded. “Sure.” There was something funny about how she had been sitting there… blank as a parked car. “I’ve sort of been waiting for you.”

“Well all right! Do they sell dope here?”

The hotel’s disembodied voice cut in. “What would be your pleasure, Mr. DeMentis?”

Sta-Hi considered. He wanted to be able to sleep… eventually.

“Give me a beer and a two-boost.” He glanced at the symmetrical, smiling face across the table. “And you?”

“The usual.”

“Very good, sir and madam,” the hotel murmured.

Seconds later a little door in the wall by their table popped open. A conveyor belt had brought the order. Sta-Hi’s two-boost was a shot-glass of clear liquid, sharp with solvents, bitter with alkaloids. The woman’s…

“What’s your name anyway?” Sta-Hi tossed off his foul-tasting potion. He’d be seeing colors for two hours.

“Misty.” She reached out to pick up the object she had ordered. The usual.

“What is that?” A too-high rush of panic was percolating up his spine. Fast stuff, the two-boost. The girl across from him was holding a little metal box, holding it to her temple…

She giggled suddenly, her eyes rolling. “It feels good.” She turned a dial on the little box and rubbed it back and forth on her forehead. “This year people say… wiggly?”

“You don’t live on Earth anymore?”

“Of course not.” Long silence. She ran the little box over her head like a barber’s clippers. “Wiggly.”

There was a burst of laughter from the young-marrieds. Someone had made an indecent suggestion. Probably the beefy guy pouring out more champagne.

Sta-Hi’s attention went back to the emptily pretty face across the table from him. He’d never seen anything like the thing she was rubbing on her head.

“What is that?” he asked again.

“An electromagnet,”

“You’re… you’re a bopper?”

“Well, sort of. I’m completely inorganic, if that’s what you mean. But I’m not self-contained. My brain is actually in BEX. I’m sort of a remote-controlled part of the spaceship.”

She flicked the little box back and forth in front of her eyes, enjoying the way the magnetic field lines moved the images around. “Wiggly. Can you teach me some more new slang?”

Before seeing his own robot double at the spaceport, Sta-Hi had never believed that he could mistake a machine for a person. And now it was happening again. Sitting here in the roar of the two-boost, he wished he was someplace else.

Misty leaned across the table, a smile tugging at the corners of her lips. “Did you really think I was human?”

“I don’t normally make dates with machines,” Sta-Hi blurted, and tried to recover with a joke. “I don’t even own a vibrator.”

He’d hurt her feelings. She turned up the dial on her magnet, blanking her face in an ecstasy that showed him her contempt.

Suddenly lonely, he reached out and pulled the hand with the electromagnet away from her temple.

“Talk to me, Misty.” He could feel the movements of his lips and talking tongue. Too high. He had a sudden horrible suspicion that everyone here was a robot. But, even so, the girl’s hand was warm under his, fleshy.

Sta-Hi’s beer sat untouched on the table-top between them. Misty blew part of the head away, took a sip, handed the glass to Sta-Hi. He sipped too. Thick, bitter.

“DEX brews this himself,” she remarked. “Do you like it?”

“It’s ok. But can you digest? Or is there a plastic bag you empty every… ”

Misty set down her magnet-box and twined her fingers with Sta-Hi’s. “You should think of me as a person. My personality is human. I still like eating and… and other things.” She dimpled prettily and traced a circle on Sta-Hi’s palm. “I don’t get to meet many stuzzy young guys just stewardessing the Ledge-Disky run…”

He pulled his hand away. “But how can you be human if you’re a machine?”

“Look,” Misty said patiently. “There used to be a young lady called Misty Nivlac who lived in Richmond, Virginia. Last spring Misty-girl hitchhiked to Daytona Beach for some brainsurfing. She fell in with a bad crowd. Really bad. A gang called the Little Kidders.”

The Little Kidders. Sta-Hi could still see their faces. That blonde girl who’d picked him up… Kristleen? And Berdoo, the skinny little guy wearing chains. Haf’N’Haf with all those missing teeth. And Phil, the leader, the big guy with the tattoo on his back.

“... got her brain-tape,” Misty was saying. “While BEX built a copy of her body. So now inside BEX there’s a perfect model of Misty-girl’s personality. BEX tells the model what to do, and the model runs… this.” She spread out her hands palm up. “Brand-new Misty-girl.”

“From what I hear,” Sta-Hi said as neutrally as possible, “the Little Kidders go around eating brains, not taping them.”

“You’ve heard of them?” Misty seemed surprised. “Well, it looks like they’re eating the brain. But one of them is a robot with a little laboratory inside his chest. He has all the equipment to get the memories out. The patterns. They get a lot of people’s brains that way. The big boppers are making a sort of library out of them. But most people don’t get their own robot-remote body like me. I’m just really… lucky.” She smiled again.

“I’m surprised you’re telling me all this,” Sta-Hi said finally. BEX... Misty… must really not know who he was. Whoever had fixed up their fake ID’s must not have had time to tell the others.

But maybe… and this would be much worse… maybe they did know perfectly well who he was. But he was already doomed, a walking dead man, just waiting for them to extract his brain-tape and send it down to Earth to run that Sta-Hi2 they had all set. You can tell anything to a man about to die.

“But BEX didn’t want me to,” Misty was saying. “You can’t hear him of course, but he’s been telling me to shut up the whole time. But he can’t make me. I still have my free will… it’s part of the brain-tape. I can do what I like.” She smiled into Sta-Hi’s eyes. There was a moment’s silence and then she started talking again.

“You wanted to know who I am. I gave you one answer. A robot-remote. A servo-unit operated by a program stored in a bopper spaceship. But… I’m still Misty-girl, too. The soul is the software, you know. The soft ware is what counts, the habits and the memories. The brain and the body are just meat, seeds for the organ-tanks.” She smiled uncertainly, took a pull at his beer, set it down. “Do you want to fuck?”

The sex was nice, but confusing. The whole situation kept going di-polar on Sta-Hi. One instant Misty would seem like a lovely warm girl who’d survived a terrible injury, like a lost puppy to be stroked, a lonely woman to be husbanded. But then he’d start thinking of the wires behind her eyes, and he’d be screwing a machine, an inanimate object, a public toilet. His relations with women were a mess.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Cobb Anderson was not too surprised to see a girl in Sta-Hi’s bed when he woke up.

“Aren’t you the stewardess?” he asked, slowly raising himself into sitting position. He’d slept in his clothes three nights running now. First on Mooney’s floor, then on the bopper space-ship, and now here in the hotel. The grease on his skin had built up so thick that it was hard to blink his eyes. “Do they have a shower here?”

“I’m sorry,” the hotel’s disembodied voice answered. “We do not. Water is a precious resource on the Moon. But you may enjoy a chemical sponge-bath, Mr. Anderson. Step right this way.”

A light blinked over one of the three doors. Stiffly, ponderously, Cobb shuffled through it.

“I’ll have to charge you for triple occupancy, Mr. DeMentis,” the hotel told Sta-Hi in a polite, neutral voice.

But at the same time he could overhear another of its point-voices sniggeringly asking Misty, “Dja come?”

“Breakfast,” Sta-Hi said, drowning the other voice out. “Central nervous stimulants. Cold beer.”

“Very good, sir.”

The old man appeared again, moving like an upended steamer trunk on wheels. He was naked. Seeing Misty he paused, embarrassed.

“I’m having my clothes cleaned.”

“Don’t worry,” Sta-Hi put in. “She’s just a robot-remote.”

Cobb ignored that, peeled a sheet off the bed and wrapped it around his waist. He was a hairy man, and most of the hair was white. His stomach looked bigger with the clothes off.

Just then breakfast slid out of the wall and onto the table between the beds. “To your health,” Cobb said, taking one of the beers. It had a kick to it, and left him momentarily dizzy. He took a plate of the scrambled… eggs?... and sat down on his bed.

“He doesn’t know what a robot-remote is,” Sta-Hi said to Misty.

Mouth full, Cobb glared at him until he had swallowed. “Of course I do, Sta-Hi. Can’t you get it through your drug-addled noggin that I was at one time a famous man? That I, Cobb Anderson, am responsible for the robots having evolved into boppers?”

Something on the girl’s face changed. And then Cobb remembered their cover story.

“The ears have walls,” Sta-Hi remarked. “You shit-head.”

Cobb glared again, and continued eating in silence. So what if some of the boppers found out who he was, anyway? They couldn’t all be against him getting immortality. Maybe the hotel didn’t even care. He had slept well in the low lunar gravity. He felt ready for anything.

Having learned that Cobb Anderson was here in the room with her, Misty… that is to say the bopper brain in the nose of the spaceship… took certain steps. But meanwhile started an argument with Sta-Hi.

“Why did you say just a robot-remote? As if I were less than human. Would you say that about a woman with an artificial leg? Or a glass eye? I just happen to be all artificial.”

“Stuzzy, Misty. I can wave with it.” said Sta-Hi. “But as long as BEX has the final word, and I think he does, you’re really just a puppet being run by… ”

“What do you call yourself?” Misty interrupted angrily. “Sta-Hi? What a stupid name! It sounds like a brand-name for panty-hose!”

“Personal insults,” Sta-Hi said, shaking his head. “What next?”

“It is now 0830 hours,” the hotel interrupted. “May I remind you of your stated intent to get the 0900 bus to the robotics museum?”

“Will we need pressure suits?” Cobb asked.

“They will be provided.”

“Let’s go then,” Misty said.

Sta-Hi exchanged a glance with Cobb. “Look Misty… this is likely to be a sort of sentimental journey for the old man. I wonder if you could just… fade. Maybe we’ll be back here by lunchtime.”

“Fade?” Misty cried, angrily flouncing across the room. “Too bad there’s not a toggle switch on the top of my head! Then you wouldn’t even have to ask me to leave. You creep!” She slammed the door very hard.

“Ouch,” the hotel said softly.

“Why did you get rid of her?” Cobb asked. “She’s cute. And I don’t think she’d try to stand in my way.”

“You bet she wouldn’t,” Sta-Hi answered. “Do you realize what the boppers are really planning to do to us?”

“They’re going to give me some kind of immortality drug,” Cobb said happily. “And maybe some new organs as well. And as for you, well…”

Cobb didn’t