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

like to tell the younger man that he was only here because the boppers had wanted him out of the way. But before he could tell him about Sta-Hi2 using Mooney’s influence to get a night watchman job at the warehouse, Sta-Hi had started talking.

“Immortality. What they want to do, old man, is to cut out our brains and grind them up and squeeze all the information out. They’ll store our personalities on tapes in some kind of library. And if we’re lucky, they might send copies of the tapes down to Earth to help run those two robot-remotes. But that’s not…”

“BUS TOUR PARTICIPANTS MUST PROCEED TO THE LOBBY IMMEDIATELY!” the hotel-room blared, interrupting Sta-Hi.

Cobb was galvanized into activity by this. He hurried out to the elevators, dragging Sta-Hi with him. It was like he didn’t want to hear the truth. Or didn’t care. And Sta-Hi? He came along. Now that the hotel knew that he knew, he wouldn’t be safe in it. He’d have to try to make his break in the museum.

The tour-bus was about half-full. Most of the others were ageing rich folks, singles and couples. Everyone was wearing a bubble-top pressure suit. They were supple, lovely things… made of a limp clear plastic that sparkled with a sort of inner light. In the shade, a person in a bubble-topper looked normal, except for the mild halo that seemed to surround his head. But the suits turned reflective in sunlight.

The bus was a wire-wheeled flat-car surmounted by two rows of grotesquely functional seats. Each seat consisted of three black balls of hard rubber mounted on a bent Y of stiff plastic. To Sta-Hi, his seat looked like Mickey Mouse’s head… with everything but the nose and ears invisible. He half-expected a squeak of protest when he lowered his body down onto it.

As they pulled clear of the dome a sudden crackle of static split his helmet.

“We’ve got an AOK on that, Houston. We are proceeding to deploy the egression facility.”

Breathing, a fizzling whine, another voice.

“I am leaving the vehicle.”

Pause.

“Got a little problem with the steps here.”

Long pause.

“We read you, Neal.” Faint, encouraging.

Big crackle.

“—at’s one small step for man, giant step for humanity.”

Synthetic cheering washed out the voices. Sta-Hi turned to Cobb, trying to catch a glimpse of his face. But now there was no way to see in through the other’s bubble-topper. Their suits had turned mirror-like as soon as they’d left the shade of the dome.

The bopper bus continued with its taped “Sounds of Lunar Discovery” as they approached Disky. The key moon-landings were all dramatized, as were the attempts at human settlement, the dome blow-outs, and the first semi-autonomous robots. When Disky was about 500 meters off , the transcendentally bland voice on the tape reached its finale.

“Nineteen Ninety-Five! Ralph Numbers and twelve other self-reproducing robots are set free in the Sea of Tranquility! Learn the rest of the story in the robotics museum!” There was a click and a longish pause.

Sta-Hi stared at the buildings of Disky, filling the small horizon. Here and there, boppers moved about, just small glittering lights at this distance.

Suddenly the bus’s real voice sounded in their earphones. “Good morning, fleshers. I am circumscribing Disky through fifty-eight degrees to reach our entry ray. Please to be restful and asking questions. My label Captain Cody in this context. Do brace for shear.”

Hardly slowing down, the vehicle swerved sharply to the right. The Y-seats swayed far over. Too far. Sta-Hi grabbed Cobb’s arm. If he fell off, nothing would stop him from rolling under those big, flexing wheels. You had the feeling that “Captain Cody” wouldn’t even slow down. For a minute the seats wobbled back and forth. Now the bus was driving along the outskirts of Disky, circling the city counterclockwise.

“How many boppers live here?” came some oldster’s voice over the earphones. No answer.

The voice tried again. “How many boppers live in Disky, Captain Cody?”

“I am researching this information,” came the reply. The bus’s voice was high and musical. Definitely alien-sounding. Everyone waited in silence for the population figure.

A large building slid by on their left. The sides were open, and inside you could see stacked sheets of some material. A bopper standing at the edge stared at them, its head slowly tracking their forward motion.

“What precision is required?” the bus asked then.

“I don’t know,” the old questioner crackled uncertainly. “Zuh… _zero _precision? Does that make sense?”

“Thank you,” the bus chortled. “With zero precision, is no boppers living in Disky. Or ten to sixty-third power.”

Boppers were notorious for their nit-picking literal-mindedness when talking to humans. It was just another of their many ways of being hostile. They had never quite forgiven people for the three Asimov laws that the original designers had… unsuccessfully, thanks to Cobb… tried to build into the boppers. They viewed every human as a thwarted Simon Legree.

For a while after that, no one asked Captain Cody any more questions. Disky was big… perhaps as big as Manhattan. The bus kept a scrupulous five hundred meters from the nearest buildings at all times, but even from that distance one could make out the wild diversity of the city.

It was a little as if the entire history of Western civilization had occurred in one town over the course of thirty years. Squeezed against each other were structures of every conceivable type: primitive, classical, baroque, gothic, renaissance, industrial, art nouveau, functionalist, late funk, zapper, crepuscular, flat-flat, hyperdee… all in perfect repair. Darting among the buildings were myriads of the brightly colored boppers, creatures clad in flickering light.

“How come the buildings are so different?” Sta-Hi blurted. “Captain Cody?”

“What category of cause your requirements?” the bus sing-songed.

“State the categories, Captain Cody,” Sta-Hi shot back, determined not to fall into the same trap as the last questioner.

“WHY QUESTION,” the bus answered in a gloating tone, “Answer Categories: Material Cause, Situational Cause, Teleological Cause. Material Cause Subcategories: Spacetime, Mass-energy. Situational Cause Subcategories: Information, Noise. Teleological Cause Subcategories... ”

Sta-Hi stopped listening. Not being able to see anyone’s face was making him uptight. The bubble-toppers had gone as silvery as Christmas-tree balls. The round heads reflected Disky and each others’ reflections in endless regresses. How long had they been on the bus?

“Informational Situational Cause Subsubcategories:” the bus continued, with insultingly-precise intonation, “Analog, Digital. Noisy… ”

Sta-Hi sighed and leaned back in his seat.

CHAPTER TWELVE

The museum was underground, under Disky. It was laid out in a pattern of concentric circles intersected by rays. Something like Dante’s Inferno. Cobb felt a tightening in his chest as he walked down the sloping stone ramp. His cheap, second-hand heart felt like it might blow out any minute.

The more he thought about it, the likelier it seemed that what Sta-Hi said was true. There was no immortality drug. The boppers were going to tape his brain and put him in a robot body. But with the body he had now, that might not be so bad.

The idea of having his brain-patterns extracted and transferred didn’t terrify Cobb as it did Sta-Hi. For Cobb understood the principles of robot consciousness. The transition would be weird and wrenching. But if all went well…

“It’s on the right down there,” Sta-Hi said, pressing his bubble-topper against Cobb’s. He held a little engraved stone map in his hand. They were looking for the Anderson room.

As they walked down the hall the exhibits sprang to life. Mostly hollows… holograms with voice-overs broadcast directly to the suits’ radios. A thin little man wearing a dark suit over a wool vest appeared in front of them. Kurt Gödel it said under his feet. He had dark-rimmed glasses and silvery hair. Behind him was a blackboard with a statement of his famous Incompleteness Theorem.

“The human mind is incapable of formulating (or mechanizing) all its mathematical intuitions,” Gödel’s image stated. He had a way of ending his phrases on a rising note which chattered into an amused hum.

“On the other hand, on the basis of what has been proved so far, it remains possible that there may exist (and even be empirically discoverable) a theorem-proving machine which in fact is equivalent to mathematical intuition… ”

“What’s he talking about?” Sta-Hi demanded.

Cobb had stopped to watch the hollow of the great master. He still remembered the years he had spent brooding over the passage which was being recited. Humans can’t build a robot as smart as themselves. But, logically speaking, it is possible for such robots to exist.

How? Cobb had asked himself throughout the 1970’s, How can we bring into existence the robots which we can’t design? In 1980 he had the bare bones of an answer. One of his colleagues had written the paper up for Speculations in Science and Technology. “Towards Robot Consciousness,” he’d called it. The idea had all been there. Let the robots evolve. But fleshing the idea out to an actual…

“Let’s go,” Sta-Hi urged, tugging Cobb through Gödel’s talking hollow.

Beyond, two frightened lizards scampered down the hallway. A leathery-winged creature came zooming up the hall towards them, and darted its scissoring beak at the lizards. One of the little beasts escaped with a quick back-flip, but the other was carried off over Cobb and Sta-Hi’s heads, dripping pale blood.

“Survival of the Fittest,” an announcer’s mellow voice intoned. “One of the two great forces driving the engine of evolution.”

In speeded-up motion, the little lizard laid a clutch of eggs, the eggs hatched, and new lizards grew and whisked around. The predator returned, the survivors laid eggs… over and over the cycle repeated. Each time the lizards were more agile, and with stronger rear legs. In a few minutes’ time they were hopping about like loathsome little kangaroos, fork-tongued and yellow-eyed.

It was Cobb who had to urge them past this exhibit. Sta-Hi wanted to stick around and see what the lizards would come up with next.

Stepping out of the prehistoric scene, they found themselves on a carnival midway. Rifles cracked and pinball machines chimed, people laughed and shrieked, and under it all was the visceral throb of heavy machinery. The floor seemed to be covered with sawdust now; and grinning, insubstantial bumpkins ambled past. A boy and girl leaned against a cotton-candy stand, feeding each other bits of popcorn with shiny fingers. He had a prominent Adam’s apple and a bumpy nose. A sine-wave profile. She wore a high, blonde pony-tail fastened by a mini-blinker. The only jarring note was a hard rain of tiny purplish lights… which seemed to pass right through everything in the scene. At first Cobb took it for static.

To their right was a huge marquee with lurid paintings of distorted human forms. The inevitable barker… checked suit, bowler, cigar-butt… leaned down at them, holding out his thin cane for attention.

“See the Freaks, Feel the Geeks!” His loud, hoarse voice was like a crowd screaming. “Pinheads! The Dog-Boy! Pencil-Necks! The Human Lima Bean! Half-Man-Half-...” Slowly the carnival noises damped down, and were replaced by the rich, round tones of the voice-over.

“Mutation. ” The voice was resonant, lip-smackingly conclusive. “The second key to the evolutionary process.”

The zippy little dots of purple light grew brighter. They passed right through everyone on the midway… especially those two lovers, french-kissing now, hips touching.

“The human reproductive cells are subjected to a continual barrage of ionizing radiation,” the voice said earnestly. “We call these the cosmic rays.”

The carnival noises faded back in now. And each of the fast little lights made a sound like a slide-whistle when it