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

off without so much as a kiss good-bye. “All them things you and me did was wrong, Randy Karl,” she’d said. “I’m through bein’ the goddamn Whore of Babylon. It was only because of your mother that you was important to me.”

Honey had used him and ditched him, and then the same thing had happened again—only this time with a moldie named Parvati. Randy lived with Parvati while he was working for an imipolex fab in Bangalore, India. In the end it came out that Parvati really and truly only wanted him for the imipolex he could give her. There’d been a bad last scene involving poisoning and knife-play; Randy ended up in possession of one of Parvati’s buttocks, which had become none other than Willa Jean.

Randy didn’t tell anyone that particular story because it was too ludicrous, like so much of his sorry-ass life. From the inside, of course, his life didn’t feel funny one bit. Just because most people’s lives worked out so goody-goody bone-normal, did that make him a Bozo clown that anyone could take a shot at?

He sighed, staring down at his bright-line alla mesh and tweaking the wing shape of another glider. No way to deny that it was his fault Babs thought he was a fool. First of all, he’d come in loaded on camote on Tuesday morning. He had a painful memory of trying to hump one of those aliens, just like a dog getting on someone’s leg. His eyes all rolling back to show their whites. Ow. Since then he’d been too ashamed to talk about the aliens, or even to ask Babs where they’d gone.

And then there’d been the second thing. Tuesday night, before he had any kind of chance to reestablish his credibility, Babs had left for a date—a date!—and in the night he had his godawful recurring nightmare about the snail that followed him everywhere, the snail that would always catch up no matter how fast or how far he ran.

Sitting alone on the bluff, Randy writhed in agony, remembering the raw terror of waking up in the night with everything _not _okay, with the nightmare snail big and real and truly after him, dragging its realware shell through the sad real world, the snail talking like his poor dead mother, its voice loud and clear so that Yoke and Cobb could hear it, could hear all about how the snail wanted to sit on his face so nasty. “Ah’m real hot to crawl on you, Randy Karl.”

He was no motherfucker, he didn’t deserve this kilp, but try and explain it to Babs after she heard all about it from that little loonie twist Yoke; Yoke laughing her ass off about it every time she brought it up, twenty times so far if it was one.

And this morning Yoke had told that slick Theodore about the snail. Since they were keeping the allas secret, Yoke had to talk all around everything to avoid spilling the beans. She’d made it sound like he had hand-built the monster while he was lifted or sleepwalking or something.

So who was Babs gonna go for, Bozo the hillbilly or Theodore the smooth-talking California scene-maker, always with the right opinions about the right things—shit, the dook even worked at an art gallery, which had to be Babs’s perfect wet dream. Theodore had slept over with Babs last night. The guy was already gettin’ on her. Randy felt a sick rush of self-loathing. All the twisted, rotten things he’d done over the years—how could any regular woman love him?

Randy set the next glider on fire and watched as it warped and burned, spiraling down into the pounding surf. “That’s me,” he muttered, and damned if he didn’t half feel like jumping off  the cliff  himself. Get it the hell over with. The way he was, nobody could ever love him. He was better off dead. Randy inched closer to the cliffs edge, watching as some dirt crumbled under his weight. Better off dead? All because of that noisy, plump-cheeked little Babs Mooney? “Come on, Randy boy. Tat tvam asi.”

He thought of a better thing to do, reckless enough to slake his death-wish without being sheer suicide. He found the alla-catalog image of his motorcycle, located an image of a full-size glider plane, and mentally attached the titanium-braced imipolex wings of the glider to the bike. He studied the image, adjusted the bends of the wing, and said “Actualize.” The alla projected a bright-line wire mesh near the edge of the bluff , then filled it in with Randy’s newly designed fly-bike.

The ocean wind beat at the twenty-foot wings, threatening to push the motorcycle-glider over on one side. Randy bulked up some dirt mound supports for the wings and added a rocket-pod to the rear of the bike. And then he took another look at the ocean. The restless waves were gray and cold, utterly heedless of human comfort. It would xoxx to fall in. Fuck death! He didn’t have to die; he could change! It wasn’t too late yet. There had to be a way. Randy decided to launch the fly-bike in an _unmanned _test-run. Whether or not it worked, it would be easy enough to alla up another, and while he was doing all this he could think about how to make himself more lovable.

So as to properly weight the trial vehicle, Randy alla-made a mannequin of—why not polished madrone wood? That was one of the nicest materials he had seen so far, a fine-grained reddish wood nearly as dense and heavy as flesh. The lustrous madrone figure looked very floatin’ sitting on the motorcycle-rocket-glider. Yaaar. Give it green glass eyes and a shit-eating grin. Randy fired up the rocket to launch the combine off the cliff. One of the wings twisted; the bike spun into the cliff and tumbled out of control. Meanwhile the rocket was blasting and—_splash—_the bike punched into the water at easily forty miles per. The crouched wooden rider floated facedown, the waves beating the figure against the rocks.

“That’s the old me,” laughed Randy, relieved not to be down there. “This boy’s startin’ up a new leaf.” He still had a chance with Babs. He’d stay away from camote, stop fucking moldies, and quit doing deals with sleazebags like Aarbie Kidd. Yaaar. Better straight than dead.

The wrecked motorcycle-glider looked bad down in the ocean, so Randy sent his alla control-mesh down there to surround it. It was stuzzy how you could just wish the mesh out to wherever you wanted it to be.

Once Randy had the mesh around the smashed motorcycle, he had to tweak the mesh, as the smashed-up machine wasn’t shaped the same anymore. The alla hookup was intense enough that Randy had a direct sensory feeling for the contents of the mesh; there were some rocks in there, a couple of little fish, lot of mussels—would have been a shame to wipe out all those things. He tightened the mesh in on the busted fly-bike and turned the machinery into water. But he left his wooden man to keep bumbling about in the rocks and surf. The bad Randy. “One more taahm,” muttered Randy, and made a new motorcycle with wings. This time, though, he gave it some wing-flexing controls hooked into the handlebars, plus a better rider, one more likely to steer the test vehicle in a helpful way. He actualized an imipolex figure and equipped it with camera-eyes, an uvvy, a rudimentary niobium wire nervous system, and a control patch like he’d given Willa Jean. Like a ventriloquist throwing his voice, Randy put his awareness out into the imipolex rider, looking through its eyes and twitching its limbs and fingers. The more of this he did, the less he felt like dying.

_Vooden-vooden, _screeched the fly-bike’s electric engine, and _kkkroooooow _went the rocket. Out into the air the jury-rigged machine flew. Fully into the virtual personality of his stand-in, Randy felt himself to be riding it. He twitched the wings, adjusted the rocket, gained some altitude, but then—damn!—a gust of wind crimped down a wing and he was flying straight back at the cliff. Frantically he manipulated the wings and—yes!—he was turning, he was going to make it, but—double damn— there was one jutting rock that was just going to catch the tip of his right wing—quick, alla-blast it out of the way!

Randy got the uvvy on the plastic rider to send his alla a direct signal that—_boom—_turned a protruding knee of rock into thin air but—uh-oh!—turning so much rock into air made a shock wave that threw the fly-bike further off balance. The bike rocketed downward. So as to make the cleanup simpler this time, Randy snapped an alla mesh out there and turned the machine and its plastic rider into air just before they crashed into the rocky shore. He was seeing out through the eyes of the rider right up to the instant when it dissolved, which was a very strange feeling. Somehow the experience made him think of that poor moldie Monique whom he’d kidnapped and sent off to her death last fall. “I’m sorry,” said Randy out loud.

He’d been a fool too long. It was time to go back and talk to Babs. He’d abandoned any thought of riding a fly-bike. They’d served their purpose now, they’d kept him from killing himself.

He was thirsty again, but when he uvvied into his alla to make another soft drink, a strange thing happened. Instead of producing a control mesh, the alla began talking to him.

“Greetings,” said the alla. “Shall I actualize a new Randy Karl Tucker or shall I execute a fresh registration?” As it spoke he felt a series of tingles in his body, as if the alla were checking him out.

“Hey,” said Randy, confused. “We already done this before. I _am _Randy Karl Tucker.”

“Original user identity is ninety-eight percent confirmed,” said the alla, as if not even listening to him. “The Randy Karl Tucker actualization option is withdrawn. For full confirmation and reactivation, we must now execute a fresh registration. Please give a name and thought association for each image.” And then it showed Randy the same series of images it had used before to learn his mental soft ware. The first three flicked past: a symmetric circular pattern of colored lights, a crooked forked line, and a uniform patch of rough texture.

Just like the first time, Randy said they were like a mandala he’d seen the first time he got high on camote in Bangalore with Parvati, like a dried up creek-bed out at the London Earl Estates trailer park south of Louisville, and like the skin of a dead moldie he’d seen in a jar at a Heritagist church fair.

After the dizzyingly rapid and thorough quizzing came a series of tingles throughout Randy’s body, and then the alla said, “You are registered as my sole user for life. Feel free to select something from my catalog.”

And at this point Randy realized what had happened. The complicated hookup through the imipolex dummy had temporarily tricked the alla into the belief that it was the real Randy who’d been alla-converted into air. The alla thought it had killed him.

Once he was dead the alla could either—what had it said?—“actualize a new Randy Karl Tucker” or “execute a fresh registration.” Had the first option, so quickly withdrawn, meant that the alla could make a duplicate of him, a second Randy identical in mind and body? That would be floatin’.

“Go ahead and make that copy of me,” Randy told the alla, not really thinking through the consequences. His pulse was pounding with excitement. “Make a Randy Karl Tucker Two.”

Again there came a series of tingles in Randy’s body. “Ninety-nine point nine eight seven confirmation that you are Randy Karl Tucker.