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

different qualities in the low lunar gravity, one-sixth that of Mother Earth’s. The water jets traveled along much flatter trajectories, and the drops on the walls swelled to the size of plums before crawling down to the floor. Numerous suction-operated chrome drain grids kept the floor clear. Whitey and Darla stayed in there for fifteen minutes, cleaning themselves inside and out. The fans dried them, and they vended themselves clothes from a machine. Pajama pants for him and a loose top for her, just like Rock Hudson and Doris Day.

They went back out in the gym and relaxed on one of the mats.

“That was really a K-bit thing for you to do, Darla, whoring for merge on Bill Ding, with the enemies I’ve got. You gotta remember, all kinds of factions are watching the grid all the time. Some bopper wanted to get that mickeymouse little control unit on you, so you’d be a zombie.”

“Rank. Super rank. What do zombies do? What’s the difference from a meatie?”

“OK. It’s a big operation to turn a person into a meatie. The ratsurgeon cuts the person’s head open, takes out part of the right brain half, and puts in a neuroplug that connects to rest of the brain. The rat is a little robot-remote that hooks into the plug. They have to take part of the brain out to make room for the rat. The rat gives orders and makes up for the missing right brain tissue.”

“Which used to do what?”

“Space perception, face recognition, some memory, some left body control. Even after it’s all plugged in, the rat has better control over the left body half than over the right. But the rat can control the right body, indirectly, by giving headvoice orders to the left brain, or by making cross-cuing signals with the left half of the body. That’s why meaties move kind of weird. I should have noticed that about Ken right away. It’s just that I haven’t seen very many meaties.”

“But why was Ken’s rat trying to put a plug on my spine to make me a zombie? What does a zombie box do?”

“Well, it’s a crude version of a rat, only not plugged into so many nerves. The idea of a zombie box is that it would give quick control over your legs and arms. The boppers wanted you to go somewhere, Darla.”

“Like where?”

“I don’t know. Maybe to the Nest to get a neuroplug and a rat installed. Very few people are likely to volunteer for that operation, you wave.”

“Very few indeed.”

“But if they can get a zombie box on you, it paralyzes your speech centers and takes over your leg muscles, and marches you right in to the ratsurgeon.”

“Wherever he may be.” Darla giggled, euphoric with relief at their escape. “Can you imagine how that would feel, Whitey, doing the zombie stomp down echoing empty halls to the hidden bopper ratsurgeon?”

“Be good to watch on the vizzy,” said Whitey, also feeling oddly elated. “I wonder why they wanted to make you a meatie, if that’s what it was? Was it you special, or is it just whoever phones Bill Ding? Maybe the boppers want you to kill someone, like Buddy Yeskin.”

“Buddy’s dead? Della Taze’s funboy? Why didn’t you tell me that when you were talking about Della before, Whitey? Is this all tied in with merge?”

“Could be. I did sell some merge to the boppers, back last month when we were so beat. Maybe I shouldn’t have done that. Yeah, Buddy’s dead. Some guy killed him, and then Della Taze disappeared. It was probably a meatie that killed him. I haven’t seen it, but Bei Ng has it on tape. It might even have been our friend Ken Doll. Ken killed Buddy, and he must have done something weird to Della, too.”

“What about our cubby?” asked Darla. Her upswing was fading, and her voice shook. “Is it safe to go back? Don’t you think we should clean it out and move?”

“No use moving,” said Whitey after some thought. “The boppers have so many cameras planted, they’ll always know where to get us. I can probably hunt down Ken, but there’s mongo other meaties. Only _really _safe place for us now is sucko Earth. But mudders are dirty dooks, Darla. We’re loonies. I’m going to talk to Bei Ng, honey, and we’ll find a way to strike back. The boppers’ll pay for this.” He paused, alerted by a sound in his head. “Hold it. Mooney’s at the trade center now. Hush, Darla, this is heavy. He’s… he’s talking to a bopper called Cobb. Cobb has something for Mooney but—” Whitey broke off and shook his head in disgust.

“What happened?”

“The bopper scanned Mooney and found my mikespike. He took it out and crushed it. Xoxxox. Why don’t you come up to the ISDN building with me, Darla. I want to tell Bei about all this. I think we better stick together for now.”

“Check,” said Darla. “And let’s stop by the cubby and pick up Ken’s merge.”

“You’d still take that? From Ken?”

“Clear. It’s got to be supergood stuff.”

CHAPTER SIX

COBB III

December 26, 2030

He died in 2020…

... and woke up in 2030. Again? That was his first feeling. Again? When you’re alive, you think you can’t stand the idea of death. You don’t want it to stop, the space and the time, the mass and the energy. You don’t want it to stop… but suppose that it does. It’s different then, it’s nothing, it’s everything, you could call it heaven. Once you’re used to the Void, it’s really not so great to have to start up in spacetime again. How would you like to get out of college, and then have to go back through grade school again? And again?

Cobb Anderson, creator of the boppers, was killed in 2020. The boppers did it. They killed Cobb and dissected him—as a favor. They had to take his faltering body apart to get out the software; the leftover meat went into the pink-tanks. Ideally the boppers would have recorded and analyzed all the electrochemical patterns in all of Cobb’s various muscles and glands, but they only had time to do his brain. But they did the brain well; they teased out all its sparks and tastes and tangles, all its stimulus/response patterns—the whole biocybernetic software of Cobb’s mind. With this wetware code in hand, the boppers designed a program to simulate Cobb’s personality. They stored the digital master of the program on an S-cube, and they beamed a copy of it down to Earth, where it was booted into a big bopper named Mr. Frostee. Mr. Frostee had control of several humanoid robot-remotes, and he let Cobb “live” in them for a bit. The experiences Cobb had in these bodies were beamed back up to the Moon and added to the memory store of his master S-cube as they occurred.

Unfortunately it was only a matter of weeks till Mr. Frostee and his Cobb simulation met a bad end, so for ten years Cobb was definitely out of the picture, just a frozen S-cube sitting on a shelf in the Nest’s personality storage vaults. HUMAN SOFTWARE-CONSTRUCT 223-90-2156: COBB ANDERSON. An unread book, a Platonic form, terabytes of zeroes and ones. During all that time, Cobb was in “heaven,” as he would later term it.

And then, on the second day of Christmas, 2030, Berenice got Loki to help her bring Cobb back. She needed Cobb to help with certain upcoming diplomatic negotiations—negotiations having to do with the unusual pregnancy of Della Taze.

So that Cobb wouldn’t feel too disoriented, Berenice and Loki booted SOFTWARE-CONSTRUCT 223-90-2156 back up into a humanoid diplomat body, a body which Berenice had constructed for her own next scionization. In order to make the transition more natural, Berenice smoothed off the body’s prominent breasts and buttocks, changed its flickercladding to pink, and turned its crotchpouch inside out to resemble a penis. So humble a tube serves as the conduit of much bioinformation, Loki, and each male flesher holds his in high esteem.

The body had a petaflop processor, which meant that Cobb would think—or, more precisely, generate fractal cellular automata patterns in Hilbert space—hundreds of times faster than he had been accustomed to doing in his meat days. Once Berenice had the body all set, Loki copied the Cobb S-cube information onto a universal compiler which, in turn, fed an appropriately tailored version of the Cobb program into the shiny pink-clad petaflop body. The body pulsed and shuddered like a trap with something in it. A soulcatcher. Cobb was back.

Again, was all he could think. Again? He lay there, monitoring inputs. He was lying on a stone table in a room like a big mausoleum. Racks of shelving stretched up on three sides; shelves lined with crystalline cubes. Light glared into the room from a mirror high above. He tried to take a breath. Nothing doing. He raised his hand—it was unnaturally smooth and pink—and ran it over his face. No holes; his face was a sealed plastic mask. He was in another robot body. Moving with an amazing rapidity, his mind flipped through the memories of his last experiences in a robot body run by Mr. Frostee. As he let his hand fall back to his side, he sensed the oddness of the weight/mass ratio. He wasn’t on Earth.

“Greetings, Cobb Anderson, we welcome you into our Nest, deeply hidden beneath the surface of Earth’s aged Moon. The year is 2030. Does this rebirth find you well?” It wasn’t a spoken voice, it was a radio voice in his processor. The voice came from a gleaming gold woman with copper and silver features. She was beautiful, in an inhuman way, and her voice was rich and thrilling. Standing next to her was a shining ebony octopus creature, holding a box with wires that ran into Cobb’s neck.

“I’m Loki,” said the octopus, his voice calm and serious. “And that’s Berenice. I’m proud to have helped get you running again, Dr.

Anderson. We should have done it years ago, but it’s been hectic. A lot’s happened.”

Loki and Berenice, two bright new boppers all set for a big info swap session. Cobb rebelled against being drawn into conversation, and into this reality. He had all his old memories back, yes, but there was more. His new body here was like a Ouija board or a spirit table, and now, while the connection was fresh, he could make it rap and skitter out the truth of where he’d just been. He made as if to say something, and his voice came out as a radio signal too. “Wait… I have to tell it. I’ve been in heaven.”

Staticky robot laughter, and then Berenice’s intricately modulated signal. “I long to hear your account of the heaven that you have seen, Dr. Anderson.”

“It’s… ” Right then, Cobb could still see it clearly, the endless meshing of fractal simplicities, high and bright like clouds seen from an airplane, with the SUN above all—but it was all being garbled by the palimpsest overlay of his new body’s life. Talking quickly, Cobb made a stab at getting it down in words. “I’m still there. That’s a higher I of course; the cosmos is layered forever up and down, with I’s on every level—the I’s are lenslike little flaws in the windows of the world—I’m in these chips and I’m in heaven. The heavenly I is all the I’s at once, the infinite I. We’re hung up on each other, I and I, finite I and infinite I—have you robots learned