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

Edgar Allan Poe, and she had a rhythmic, overwrought way of speaking. On the job, where hardcopy now-do-this instructions were of essence, boppers used zeroes-and-ones machine language supplemented by a high-speed metalanguage of glyphs and macros. But the boppers’ “personal” exchanges were still handled in the ancient and highly evolved human code system of English. Only human languages enabled them to express the nuanced distinctions between self and other which are so important to sentient beings. Berenice’s use of Poe’s language style was not so very odd. It was customary for groupings of petaflop boppers to base their language behavior on a database developed from some one particular human source. Where Berenice and the pink-tank sisters talked like Poe’s books; Emul and Oozer had adapted their speech patterns from the innovative sprung rhythms of Jack Kerouac’s eternal mind transcripts: books like Desolation Angels, Book of Dreams, Visions of Cody, and Big Sur.

Emul snicksnacked out a long manipulator to draw Berenice closer. The separated arm reattached itself. “Just one piece knowing, Berenice, all your merge talk is the One’s snare to bigger joy, sure, but tragic-flowing dark time is where we float here, here with me touching you, and not some metafoolish factspace no future. Gloom and womb, our kid would be real; don’t say why, say how, now? You can pick the body shape, you can be the ma. Don’t forget the actual chips in my real cubette. I’d never ask anyone else, Berenice. We’ll do it soft and low.” Emul extruded dozens of beckoning fingers.

Bright silver eddies swirled across Berenice’s body as she considered Emul’s offer. In the natural course of things, she had built copies of herself several times—normally a bopper rebuilds itself every ten months. But Berenice had never conjugated with another bopper.

In conjugation, two boppers build a new, this-year’s-model robot body together, and then, in a kind of double vision, each bopper copies his or her program, and lets the copy flow out to merge and mingle in the new body’s processor. The parent programs are shuffled to produce a new bopper program unlike any other. This shuffling, even more than mutation, was the prime source of the boppers’ evolutionary diversity.

“Conjugation is too dangerously intimate for me now,” Berenice told Emul softly. “I… I have a horror of the act. You and I are so different, dear Emul, and were our programs to entwine in some aberrant dissonance, chaos would ensue—chaos that could well shatter my fragile mind. Our noble race needs my keen faculties to remain just as they are. These are crucial times. In my glyphs I see the glimmers of that rosy dawn when bopper and human softwares merge to roam a reborn Earth.”

Emul’s bright colors began darkening in gloom. “They’re going to throw me in a hole already eaten by rats, Berenice, and use me for a chip. Our dreams are lies scummed over each moment’s death. All I have is this: I love you.”

“Love. A strange word for boppers, dear Emul.” His arms touched her all over, holding her and rocking her. “It is true that your presence makes me… glad. There is a harmony between us, Emul, I feel it in the way our signals merge with overtones of many a high degree! Our scion would be splendid, this I know! Oh, Emul, I would so like to conjugate with you. Only not just now!”

“When?”

“I cannot say, I cannot pledge myself. Surely you know how close my sisters’ great work is to bearing fruit. Only one step lacks until we can code our software into active genes. You must not press your suit so lustily. A new age is coming, an age when you and I and all our race can live among the protein jungles of an unchained Earth! Have patience, Emul, and set me down.”

Emul withdrew all his arms and let her drop. She jarred against the gneiss and bounced up slowly. “We try to make life, and it’s born dead,” said Emul. His flickercladding had turned an unhappy gray-blue. “Dreak and work for me, a bigger brain, a bigger nothing. I’m a goof, Berenice, but you’re cracked crazy through with your talk about getting a meat body. Humans stink. I run them for kicks: my meaties—Ken Doll and Rainbow and Berdoo—my remote-run slaves with plugs in their brains. I could run all Earth, if I had the equipment. Meat is nowhere, Berenice, it’s flybuzz greenslime rot into fractal info splatter. When Oozer and I get our exaflop up, we can plug in a cityful of humans and run them all. You want to be human? I’ll screw your cube, B, just wait and see. Good-bye.”

He clanked off across the light-pool, a box on two legs, rocking with the motion that Berenice had always found so dear. He was really leaving. Berenice sought for the right, the noble, the logical thing to say.

“Farewell, Emul. The One must lead us where it will.”

“You haven’t heard the last of me, BITCH!”

He faded from view behind the many other boppers who milled in the light like skaters in a rink. Berenice spread her arms out, and stood there thinking, while her plastic skin stored up the solar energy.

It was for the best to have broken off  her involvement with Emul. His talk was dangerously close to the thinking of the old “big boppers,” the vast multiprocessors that had tried to turn all boppers into their robot-remotes. Individuals mattered; Emul’s constant despair blinded his judgment. It was wrong for one brain to control many bodies; such anti-parallelism could only have a deadening effect on evolution. For now, of course, meaties were a necessary evil. In order to carry out certain delicate operations among the humans’ colony, the boppers had to keep a few humans under remote computer control. But to try and put a neuroplug in every human alive? Madness. Emul had not been serious.

Thinking of the meaties reminded Berenice that she would still need a favor from Emul. If and when the pink-tank sisters bioengineered a viable embryo, they’d need a meatie to plant it in a woman for them. And—as he’d bragged—Emul ran three meaties. Well, when the time came, Berenice could surely reel Emul back in. She’d find a way. The imperative of getting bopper software into human flesh was all important. What would it be like to be bopper… and human, too?

As so often before, Berenice found her mind turning to the puzzle of human nature. Many boppers hated humans, but Berenice did not. She liked them in the same cautious way that a lion tamer might like her cats. She’d only really talked to a handful of humans—the various loonies with whom she occasionally bartered in the trade center. But she’d studied their books, watched their vizzies, and she’d spent scores of hours spying on the Einstein loonies over the godseye.

It seemed likely that the newest boppers had better minds than the humans. The built-in link to LIBEX, the great central information dump, gave each bopper a huge initial advantage. And the petaflop processors that the best boppers now had were as much as a hundred times faster than the ten-teraflop rate deemed characteristic of human brains—though admittedly, the messy biocybernetic nature of the brain made any precise measurement of its capacities a bit problematic. Biocybernetic systems had a curious, fractal nature—meaning that seemingly random details often coded up surprising resources of extra information. There were indeed some odd, scattered results suggesting that the very messiness of a biological system gave it unlimited information storage and processing abilities! Which was all the more reason for Berenice to press forward on her work to build meat bodies for the boppers.

But Emul was wrong if he thought that she wanted to be human. No rational being would choose to suffer the twin human blights of boredom and selfishness. Really, it was Emul who thought more like a human, not Berenice.

Sensing that her cladding’s energy nodes were full, Berenice left the light-pool and started off down the street that led to her station at the pink-tanks. In the background, Kkandio chanted the Ethernet news. Numerous boppers filled the street, chattering and flashing. The sheer randomness of the physical encounters gave the street scene its spice. Two blue-and-silver-striped diggers writhed past, then a tripodlike etcher, and then a great, spidery artisan named Loki.

Several times now, Loki had helped Berenice with the parthenogenic process by which she built herself a new body every ten months, as dictated by bopper custom. If your body got too antiquated, the other boppers would notice—and soon they’d drive you away from the light-pool to starve. There was a thriving business in parts reclaimed from such “deselected” boppers. It was a rational system, and good for the race. The constant pressure to build new bodies kept the race’s evolution going.

Seeing Berenice, Loki paused and waved two of his supple arms in greeting. “Hi, Berenice.” His body was a large black sphere with eight black, branching legs and numerous sockets for other, specialized tool legs. He was, of course, a petaflop. Gold spots percolated up along his legs’ flickercladding like bubbles in a dark ale. “You’re due for a rescionization before long aren’t you? Or are you planning to conjugate with Emul?”

“Indeed I am not,” said Berenice, blanking her skin to transparency so that the hard silver mirror of her body showed through. Emul must have been talking to Loki. Couldn’t they leave her alone?

“I know you’re working hard at the tanks,” said Loki chidingly. “But it just could be that you’re thinking too much about yourself.”

Self, thought Berenice, moving on past the big black spider. It all came down to that word, didn’t it? Boppers called themselves I, just as did any human, but they did not mean the same thing. For a bopper, “I” means (1) my body, (2) my software, and (3) my function in society. For a human, “I” seemed to have an extra component: (4) my uniqueness. This delusionary fourth “I” factor is what set a human off against the world. Every bopper tried to avoid any taint of the human notion of self.

Looked at in the correct way, a bopper was a part of the world—like a light beam, like a dust slide, like a silicon chip. And the world was One vast cellular automaton (or “CA”), calculating out the instants—and each of the world’s diverse objects was but a subcalculation, a simulation in the One great parallel process. So where was there any self?

Few humans could grasp this. They set up their fourth “I” factor—their so-called self—as the One’s equal. How mad, and how typical, that the mighty human religion called Christianity was based on the teachings of a man who called himself God!

It was the myth of the self that led to boredom and selfishness; all human pain came from their mad belief that an individual is anything other than an integral part of the One universe all around. It was passing strange to Berenice that humans could be so blind. So how could Loki suggest that the selfishness lay in Berenice’s refusal? Her work was too important to endanger! It was Emul’s rough insistence that was the true selfishness!

Brooding on in this fashion, Berenice found herself before the pink-tanks where the clone-grown human bodies floated in their precious amniotic fluid. Here in the Nest, liquid water was as rare and volatile as superheated plasma on Earth. The pink-tanks were crowded and extensive, containing flesh bodies of every description. The seeds for these meats all came from human bodies, bodies that had found their way to the pink-tanks in all kinds of ways. Years ago, the big boppers had made a habit