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

“What do you want from me?” Silently asking this, Cobb leaned back in his chair, stretching out his legs. Mooney looked impatient. Sta-Hi was staring at the bugs on the ceiling.

“Convince the others,” came Mr. Frostee’s reply. In the background, Cobb could make out the interior of a truck-cab. Hands on the steering wheel. The concrete walls of a parking garage, then the garish lights of Daytona Beach streaming past.

“Convince them all to get robot bodies like you. Then we can merge, we can all merge to become a new and greater being. We’ll set up a number of reprocessing centers… ”

Mooney was standing over Cobb, shaking him. It was hard to see, with the glare of headlights coming at him. Slowly, Cobb brought his attention back to the cottage.

“What’s the matter, Mooney?” asked Cobb.

“You’re signaling for help, aren’t you?”

“How would you like a nice everlasting body like mine?” Cobb countered. “I could arrange it.”

“So that’s it,” Sta-Hi said dreamily. “The big boppers want to bring us all into the fold.”

“It’s not so unreasonable,” Cobb protested. “It’s a natural next evolutionary step. Imagine people that carry terabyte computing systems in their head, people that communicate directly brain-to-brain, people who live for centuries and change bodies like suits of clothes!”

“Imagine people that aren’t people,” Sta-Hi replied. “Cobb, the big boppers like TEX and MEX have been trying to run the same con on the Moon. And most of the little boppers up there aren’t buying it… most would rather fight then let themselves be patched into the big systems. Now why do you think that is?”

“Obviously some people… or boppers… are going to be paranoid about losing their precious individuality,” Cobb answered. “But that’s just a matter of cultural conditioning! Look, Sta-Hi, I’ve been all the way in… all the way. After I got taped on the Moon I was just a pattern in a memory-bank somewhere for a few days. And you know, it wasn’t even that… ”

“Let’s go,” Mooney ordered, roughly pulling Cobb to his feet. “You’re going to be deprogrammed and dismantled, Anderson. We can’t let this kind of…”

Mr. Frostee was still there in Cobb’s head. “I’ve taken the liberty of activating your SELF-DESTRUCT subroutine,” the voice said quietly. “Just say the word ‘DESTROY’ out loud and you’ll explode. Your body will explode. You’re really in me. I’ll give you a new body, the one here in the truck… ”

“MR. FROSTEE OUT,” Cobb said. If he did it, he wanted it to be his own decision.

Mooney had his pistol at the base of Cobb’s skull. He was getting panicky.

Any second, Mooney, Cobb thought to himself. But still he hesitated. He told himself it was just because he didn’t want to hurt Sta-Hi… but he was also scared, scared to die again. Could he really cross the noisy void between bodies again? But he’d already done it once, hadn’t he?

“Go outside, Sta-Hi,” Mooney said then, and sealed his fate. “Go check if that old bitch is waiting out there to ambush us. Or the other robot.”

Sta-Hi eased out the back door and melted into the night.

“I’ve finally got you,” Mooney said, with a nudge of his pistol. “I’m going to find out what makes you tick.”

“DESTROY,” Cobb said, and lost his second body.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

“I want to talk to you about diarrhea,” a voice said earnestly. “Gastric distress can ruin that long-hoped-for vacation. So be sure… ”

Cobb’s first conscious act was to turn the radio off. He had just pulled out of a fuel-station on the gritty outskirts of Daytona Beach. But, on the other hand, he had just died in the explosion of his cottage in Cocoa Beach.

“Hello, Cobb. You see? You can count on me.” Mr. Frostee’s voice filled his head again. Cobb looked down at his sinewy forearms, handling the ice-cream truck’s big steering-wheel with an experienced touch.

“Sta-Hi2?” Cobb asked. “You put me in Sta-Hi2?”

“It was Sta-Hi2 But I just gave the body a new look. I copied the fellow who was running the pumps back there.”

Cobb thought back to the explosion. DESTROY, disorientation, and now this. His fingers were blackened with years of grease. He leaned out the window to take a peek at himself in the rearview mirror.

He had a skinny head and large, liquid eyes. Thinning black hair, greasy and combed straight back. His nose was much more prominent than his chin. Ratface. Approaching headlights pulled his attention back to the road.

“What about disguising the truck?” Cobb asked. “I killed Mooney, but he must have left records. And Sta-Hi got away. The heat’s gonna be looking for a Mr. Frostee truck.”

“There’ll be time for that later. Right now I’ve got a score to settle. Those hoodlums… those Little Kidders… one of them wrecked my best remote. He’s called Berdoo.”

Without consciously thinking about it, Cobb had driven the truck onto the thruway west, towards Orlando. Was he still in control of his actions?

“Where are we going?”

“Disney World. Berdoo doesn’t remember it, but he once told me… told Phil… that he has a friend who runs a motel there. I think that’s where he’ll go to hide out. I want you to shoot him, Cobb, and then take out his brain for me. We’ll leave the organs… that’s all over for now… but I’ve got to get that brain on tape. You should have seen how easily he killed my Phil.”

It was hard to read the emotion in Mr. Frostee’s even voice. Was revenge the motive? Or was it just a collector’s lust for ownership?

In any case, trying to ambush the Little Kidders in their own hideout sounded like a terrible idea. And going brain-collecting was something Cobb hoped to put off as long as possible. He wondered if he should just turn around. Or pull off the highway and leave the truck. Glancing in his rearview mirror he could see dawn pinkening the horizon. The road was empty.

“You’ve still got your free will,” Mr. Frostee said. “But don’t forget that we’re in this together. If I die then so do you. You’re really just a pattern in my circuits.”

“But you can’t override me?” Testing, Cobb took his foot off the accelerator. No one pushed his foot back.

“I can’t control your mind,” Mr. Frostee said, not quite answering the question. “But don’t stop the truck. What if a cop comes by?”

Cobb speeded back up. “Why would you give one of your subsystems free will?”

“The human mind is all of a piece, Cobb. If we try to start picking and choosing, all that’s left is a boring bundle of reflexes. When a big bopper builds in some human’s personality, he’s got to learn to live with the subsystem’s free will. I could cut you off entirely, in an emergency, but short of… ”

“Why bother taping humans at all?”

“No program we can write and control acts like human soft ware. Humans can’t write bopper programs… they had to let them evolve. And a bopper can’t write a human program. It works both ways. We need you guys. What we’re working towards is a human-bopper fusion, a single great mind stretching from person to person all over the world. It’s right, Cobb, and it’s inevitable. Simpler beings merge to produce higher beings, and they must merge and merge again. In this way we draw ever closer to the One.”

“The One?” Cobb said, laughing. “You don’t mean the One on the Moon, do you? Don’t you know that’s just a random noise source? Haven’t you figured that out?”

“Randomness is an elusive concept, Cobb.”

“Look,” Cobb said, “In order to make the boppers evolve fast enough I had to speed up the rate of mutation. So in the substrate program I included a command that they plug into the One, once a month, as you know. But the One is just a simple cosmic ray counter. It goes through your programs changing yesses and noes, here and there, just on the basis of the Geiger counter click-pattern of cosmic-ray bursts for the last day or so. The One is just a glorified circuit-scrambler.”

Still Mr. Frostee was silent. Finally the answer came. “You choose to make light of the One, Cobb. But the pulse of the One is the pulse of the Cosmos. You yourself call its noisy input the cosmic rays. What is more natural than that the Cosmos should lovingly direct the growth of the boppers with its bursts of radiation? There is no noise in the All… there is only information. Nothing is truly random. It is sad that you choose not to understand what you yourself have created.”

A ditch full of brackish water and marsh-grass lay to the right of the thruway. Cobb saw an alligator, lying half out of the water and watching the early morning traffic. The night had passed, it was quarter to seven. In a sort of phantom-stomach reflex, Cobb had a brief longing for breakfast. But the hunger faded, and Cobb let the empty miles roll by, lost in thought.

What was he now? In one sense he was what he had always been. A certain pattern, a type of soft ware. The fiveness of a right hand is the same as the fiveness of a left. The Cobbness that had been a man was the same as the Cobbness now coded upon Mr. Frostee’s cold chips.

Cobb Anderson’s brain had been dissected, but the software that made up his mind had been preserved. The idea of “self” is, after all, just another idea, a symbol in the software. Cobb felt like him_self_ as much as ever. And, as much as ever, Cobb wanted his self to continue to exist on hardware.

Perhaps the boppers had stored a tape of him on the Moon, and perhaps up there his software had also been given hardware. But, here and now, Cobb’s continued existence depended on keeping Mr. Frostee cold and energized. They were in this together. Him and a machine who wanted to know God.

“I’ll tell you,” Cobb said, breaking the silence. “I think it would be really stupid to go charging after the Little Kidders before getting the truck repainted. Even if the cops aren’t after us yet, there’s no point having Berdoo be able to see you coming from a block away. Let’s get off the thruway and fix up the truck. There’s a giant plastic ice-cream cone on the cab’s roof, for God’s sake.”

“You’re driving,” Mr. Frostee said mildly. “I will defer to your superior knowledge of human criminality.”

Cobb got out at the next exit and took a small road north. This was rolling countryside, with plenty of streams. Palms and magnolias gave way to blackjack pines and scrubby live oak. Brambles and honeysuckle filled in the spaces between the struggling little trees. And in some places the uncontrollable kudzu vine had taken root and choked out all other vegetation.

It was only eight-thirty, but already the asphalt road was shimmering in the heat. The frequent dips were filled with reflecting water-mirages. Cobb rolled down the window and let the air beat against his face. The truck’s big hydrogen-fueled engine roared smoothly and the sticky road sang beneath the tires.

The wild scrub gave way to farmland, big cleared pastures with cattle in them. The cows waded about knee-deep in weeds, munching the flowers. White cattle egrets stalked and flapped along next to them, spearing the