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

back, he couldn’t recall this new body of his having drunk or eaten much of anything during the last week. Of course he’d had to chew down some of the fish he and Sta-Hi2 had caught. Annie always insisted on frying it up for them. And when old Mooney had come, Cobb had sipped some sherry and pretended to be drunk. But other than that…

Cobb opened a second bottle of sherry and pulled deeply at it. The first bottle had done nothing but make him belch a few times, incredibly foul-smelling belches, methane and hydrogen-sulfide, death and corruption going on somewhere deep inside him. His mind was clear as a bell, and he was tired of it.

Suddenly exasperated, Cobb tilted up the second bottle of sherry, and, leaving an airspace above his upper lip, chugged the whole fucking thing down in one long, drink-crazed gurgle.

As he swallowed the last of it he felt a sudden and acute distress. But it wasn’t the buzz, the flush, the confusion he had expected. It was, rather, an incredible urgency, a need to…

Without even consciously controlling what he did, Cobb knelt down on the sand and clawed at the vertical scar on his chest. He was too full. Finally he pushed the right spot and the little door in his chest popped open. He tried not to breathe as the rotten fish and lukewarm sherry plopped down onto the sand in front of him. Yyeeeeeeaaaaauuughhhh.

He stood up, still moving automatically, and went inside to rinse the food cavity out with water. And it wasn’t till he was wiping it out with paper towels that he thought to notice anything strange about what he was doing.

He stopped then, a wad of paper towels in his hand, and stared down. The little door was metal on the inside and plastic flickercladding on the out. After he pushed it shut, the skin dove-tailed so well that he couldn’t find the top edge. He found the pressure switch again… just under his left nipple… and popped the little door back open. There were scratches on the metal… writing? It looked backwards, but he couldn’t bend close enough to be sure.

Door flapping, Cobb went into the bathroom and examined himself in the mirror. Except for the hole in his chest he looked the same as ever. He felt the same as ever. But now he was a robot.

He pushed the little door all the way open, so that the metal inside was reflected in the mirror. There was a letter there, scratched in backwards.

Dear Dr. Anderson!

Welcome to your new hardware! Use it in good repair as a token of gratitude from the entire bopper race! User’s Guide:

1) Your body’s skeleton, muscles, processors, etc. are synthetic and self-repairing. Be sure, however, to recharge the power-cells twice a year. Plug is located in left heel.

2) Your brain-functions are partially contained in a remote supercooled processor. Avoid electromagnetic shielding or noise-sources, as this may degrade the body-brain link. Travel should be undertaken only after consultation.

3) Every effort has been made to transfer your software without distortion. In addition we have built in a library of useful subroutines. Access under password BEBOPALULA.

Respectfully yours,

The Big Boppers

Cobb sat down on the toilet and locked the bathroom door. Then he got up and read the letter again. It was still sinking in. Intellectually he had always known it was possible. A robot, or a person, has two parts: hardware and soft ware. The hardware is the actual physical material involved, and the software is the pattern in which the material is arranged. Your brain is hardware, but the information in the brain is soft ware. The mind… memories, habits, opinions, skills… is all soft ware. The boppers had extracted Cobb’s software and put it in control of this robot body. Everything was working perfectly, according to plan. For some reason this made Cobb angry.

“Immortality, my ass,” he said, kicking the bathroom door. His foot went through it.

“Goddamn stupid robot leg.”

He unlocked the door and walked down the hall into the kitchen. Christ, he needed a drink. The thing that bothered Cobb the most was that even though he felt like he was all here, his brain was really inside a computer somewhere else. Where?

Suddenly he knew. The Mr. Frostee truck, of course. A super-cooled bopper brain was in that truck, with Cobb’s software all coded up. It could simulate Cobb Anderson to perfection, and it monitored and controlled the robot’s actions at the speed of light.

Cobb thought back to that interim time, before the simulation that was now him had hooked into a new body. There had been no distinctions, no nagging facts, only raw possibility… Thinking back to the experience opened up his consciousness in a strange way. As if he could let himself go, and ooze out into the rooms and houses around him. For an instant he saw Annie’s face staring out of a mirror, tweezers and tube of cream…

He was standing in front of the kitchen sink. He’d left the water running. He leaned forward and splashed some of it on his face. Something bumped the sink, oh yes, the door in his chest, and he pushed it closed. What had been that code word?

Cobb went back to the bathroom, opened the flap, and read the letter a third time. This time he got the little joke. The big boppers had put him in this body, and the code word for the library of subroutines was, of course…

“Be-Bop-A-Lu-La, she’s mah baybee,” Cobb sang, his voice echoing off the tiles, “Be-Bop-A-Lu-La, Ah don’t mean maybee…“He stopped then, cocking his head to listen to an inner voice.

“Library accessed,” it said.

“List present subroutines,” Cobb commanded.

“MISTER FROSTEE, TIME-LINE, ATLAS, CALCULATOR, SENSE ACUITY, SELF-DESTRUCT, REFERENCE LIBRARY, FACTCHUNKING, SEX, HYPER ACTIVITY, DRUNKENNESS... ”

“Hold it,” Cobb cried. “Hold it right there. What does DRUNKENNESS involve?”

“Do you wish to call the subroutine?”

“First tell me what it does.” Cobb opened the bathroom door and glanced out nervously. He thought he had heard something. It wouldn’t do for him to be found talking to himself. If people suspected he was a robot they might lynch…

“... now activated,” the voice in his head was saying in its calm, know-it-all tone. “Your senses and thought processes will be systematically distorted in a step-wise fashion. Close your right nostril and breathe in once through your left nostril for each step desired. Inhaling repeatedly through the right nostril will reverse these steps. There is, of course, an automatic override for your… ”

“OK.” Cobb said. “Now stop talking. Log off. End it.”

“The command you are searching for is OUT, Dr. Anderson.”

“OUT, then.”

The feeling of another presence in his mind winked out. He walked out onto the back porch and stared at the ocean for awhile. The bad smell from the rotten fish drifted in. Cobb found a piece of cardboard and took it out to scoop the mess up. Re-charge power-cells twice a year.

He dumped the stinking fish down by the water’s edge and walked back to his cottage. Something was bothering him. How likely was it that this new body was a token of gratitude with no strings attached?

Obviously the body had been sent to Earth with certain built-in programs… break out of the warehouse, tell Cobb Anderson to go to the Moon, stick your head in the first Mr. Frostee truck you see. The big question was: were there any more programs waiting to be carried out? Worse: were the boppers in a position to control him on a real-time basis? Would he notice the difference? Who, in short, was in charge now, Cobb… or a big bopper called Mr. Frostee?

His mind felt clear as a bell, clear as a goddamn bell. Suddenly he remembered the other robot. Cobb went in through the porch and down the short hall to his bedroom. The bopper-built body that had looked like Sta-Hi was still lying there. Its features had gone slack and sagging. Cobb leaned over the body, listening. Not a sound. This one was turned off.

Why? “The real Sta-Hi is coming back,” the truck-driver had said. So they wanted to get this one out of circulation before it was exposed as a robot. It had been standing in for Sta-Hi, working with Mooney at the spaceport. The plan had been for the robot to smuggle a whole lot more robot-remotes through customs and out of the warehouses. It had mentioned this to Cobb one day while they were fishing. Why so many robots?

Tokens of gratitude, each and every one? No way. What did the boppers want?

He heard the screen-door slap then. It was Annie. She’d done something to her hair and face. Seeing him, she shone like a sunflower.

“It’s almost six, Cobb. I thought maybe we should walk over to the Gray Area now and have some supper there first?” He could feel her fragile happiness as clearly as if it were his own. He walked over and kissed her.

“You look beautiful.” She had on a loose Hawaiian-print dress.

“But you, Cobb, you should change your clothes!”

“Right.”

She followed him into his bedroom and helped him find the white-duck pants and the black sport-shirt she’d gotten ready for tonight.

“What about him?” Annie asked, whispering and pointing at the inert figure on Cobb’s bed.

“Let him sleep. Maybe he’ll pull through.” The truck would come get him while they were out. Good riddance.

He could see through her eyes as he dressed. His new body wasn’t quite as fat as the old one, and the clothes fit, for once, without stretching.

“I was afraid you’d be drunk,” Annie said hesitantly.

“I could use a quick one,” Cobb said. His new sensitivity to other people’s thoughts and feelings was almost too much to take. “Wait a second.”

Presumably the DRUNKENNESS subroutine was still activated. Cobb went into the kitchen, pressed his finger to his right nostril, and inhaled deeply. A warm feeling of relaxation hit him in the pit of the stomach and the backs of the knees, spreading out from there. It felt like a double shot of bourbon.

“That’s better,” Cobb murmured. He opened and closed the kitchen cupboard to sound as if he’d had a bottle out. Another quick snort, and then Annie came in. Cobb felt good.

“Let’s go, baby. We’ll paint the town red.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

“They’re collecting human brain-tapes,” Sta-Hi said as his father parked the car. “And sometimes they take apart the person’s body, too, to seed their organ tanks. They’ve got a couple hundred brains on tap now. And at least three of those people have been replaced by robot doubles. There’s Cobb, and one of the Little Kidders, and a stewardess. And there’s still that robot who looks like me. Your surrogate son.”

Mooney turned off the ignition and stared out across the shopping center’s empty parking lot. An unpleasant thought struck him.

“How do I know you’re real now, Stanny? How do I know you’re not another machine like the one that had me fooled all week?”

The answering laugh was soft and bitter. “You don’t. I don’t. Maybe the diggers switched me over while I was sleeping.” Sta-Hi savored the worry on his father’s face. My son the cyborg. Then he relented.

“You don’t have to worry, Dad. The diggers wouldn’t really do that. It’s just the big boppers that are into it. The diggers only work there, making the tunnels. They’re on our side, really. They’ve started a full-scale revolution on the Moon.