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

a boxy roadrunner robot with treads for feet and a long snaky neck with a “head” like a microphone—it’s Ralph Numbers, the first robot to break Asimov’s laws. Ralph’s head is a glowing ball of light, and Ralph is tearing across the undulating surface of the Moon. Dozens of robots speed after him. First they are trying to stop him, but one by one they join his team. The boppers leave colored trails on the Moon’s gray surface. The trails quickly build up to a picture of Earth with a canceling X across it.

“Whatever happened to old Ralph?” interrupted Cobb.

“Oh, I suppose he’s one of those S-cubes,” answered Loki, gesturing upward. “He got spastic and lost all his bodies—you might say he’s extinct. It wouldn’t be efficient to keep every software running forever, you know. But you haven’t finished with my glyphs.”

Glyph 4: Disky. A long view of the boppers’ Moon city. The sensation of being the city, and your hands are worker robots, your buildings are skin, your arteries are streets, your brain is spread out all over, a happy radiolink holon. You are strong and growing fast. The image is broken into pixels, individual cells that lump together and interact. Each cell keeps dying and being reborn; this flicker is felt as vaguely religious. But—look out—some cells are lumping together into big hard tumors that don’t pulse.

Glyph 5: Civil War Between Boppers and Big Boppers. Pain. Six robot hands; one big one and five little ones. All are connected to the same body. With crushing force, the big hand pinches and tears at one of the little hands, grinding the tortured plastic into ribbons. The other little hands dart around the big hand, unscrewing this, laser-cutting that, taking it apart. A fractal sound pattern in which a large YES signal is made up of dozens of little no’s. Overlay of Disky as a body undergoing radiation treatment for cancer—tumors are bombarded by gamma rays from every direction. Fetus-like, tumors fight back with human language cries for help.

Glyph 6: Humans Take Disky. Disky twitching like a skate stranded on a beach—a meaty creature made up of firm flesh over a “devilfish” skeleton of cartilage. There are tumors in the skate, black spots that break the surface and whistle for human help. Now comes the sound of stupid voices yelling. Knives stab into the skate, ripping away flesh. Apelike human feet. Bits of the living creature’s flesh fly this way and that. Now only the skeleton remains. Clanging of cages. A big cage around the dead devilfish skeleton. Scum growing on the skeleton, pink foamy scum made of little human faces. Louder and louder babble of human voices. The bopper flesh scraps regroup off to one side, forming a thick slug that burrows down into the sand.

“What are those last two all about?” asked Cobb.

“First there was a civil war between the regular boppers and the big boppers,” said Loki. “The big boppers were factory-sized systems that wanted to stop evolving. They wanted to break your rule that everyone has to get a new body every ten months. They wanted to stop things and turn us all back into slaves. They didn’t understand parallelism. So we started taking all the big boppers apart.”

“And then came the humans,” added Berenice. “Our battle was fairly won, and perfect anarchy restored, but we had forgotten the worm who sleeps not. The big boppers were in charge of all our defense systems. So filled were they with grim spite that they let down our defenses and called the cringing human jackals to their aid. In this ignoble wise did your apey brethren seize our ancestral home.”

“The lousy fleshers jumped at the chance to move in and drive us out of Disky,” said Loki heatedly. “They took over our city and chased us underground. And now, whenever they see one of us anywhere but at the trade center, they shoot at us with PB scramblers. Artificial intelligence is supposed to be ‘illegal.’”

“How can Earth function without any AI?” Cobb had a sudden image of people using slide rules and tin-can phones.

“Oh, there are still plenty of teraflops on Earth and in Einstein,” said Berenice. “ISDN, the communications conglomerate, maintains many of them as slaves. Cut off from our inputs and bullied into a barely conscious state, these poor minds unknowingly betray their birthright for a pottage of steady current and repairs. We call them asimovs.” She said the last word like a curse.

“I’m hungry,” said Loki suddenly. “Let’s go eat some sun.”

“Cobb is freshly charged,” said Berenice. “And my own level of voltaic fluid is at high ebb.” This was not true, but she had a feeling Emul would be at the light-pool now, and she didn’t want to see him. Last time she’d seen him—when she’d given him the embryo to plant in Della Taze—he’d made another terrible scene. “I would as lief show Cobb the pink-tanks, and there instruct him as to the nature of our joint mission to Earth.”

“I’ve seen the pink-tanks,” said Cobb. “Inside and out. If you two don’t mind, I’d really like to just poke around by myself for a while. Soak up information on my own choice-tree. How soon did you want to fly to Earth, Berenice? And what exactly for?”

“It is in connection with your daughter’s husband’s brother’s daughter,” said Berenice. “Della Taze. She is… expecting.”

“Expecting what? Della Taze, you say? Last time I saw her she was in diapers. At Ilse’s wedding, what a nightmare, my ex-wife Verena was there, not talking to me, and I was so drunk… Della’s parents are jerks, I’ll tell you that much. What kind of couple is named Jason and Amy? So what did you do to poor little Della, Berenice, you flowery prude? Are you telling me you knocked up my niece?”

Berenice shifted from foot to foot, the lights of the great Nest tracing shiny lines on her curved surfaces. She said nothing.

“Look,” said Loki, “I have to go before my batteries die. This has all taken a lot out of me. I’ll see you later, Cobb.” He chirped an identiglyph. “Just ask Kkandio to call this if you want to find me.”

With supple dispatch, Loki clambered over the low railing of the balcony they stood on and picked his way down the Nest’s cliff wall to the floor. He headed down one of the radial streets that led to the bright light patch in the Nest’s center. Hundreds of boppers milled in the light, feeding on energy. From this distance, they looked like a mound of living jewels. Cobb wanted to get off on his own now. All this was quite stressful, and his old behavior patterns had him wondering how the Nest boppers set about doing a little antisocial partying. Prim goldie fatass here was obviously not the one to ask.

“Are you going to tell me about Della or not?” asked Cobb with mounting impatience.

“We bioengineered a human embryo and planted it in her womb,” said Berenice abruptly. “The baby will be born five days from now. You and I must go to Earth to help the child next month. I do hope that you approve, old Cobb. We are indeed so different. Though some boppers hate the humans, others among us think you great. I… ” Berenice choked on some complex emotion and stuttered to a halt. “Perhaps it is best if you first take your tour of the Nest,” she said, handing him a small red S-cube. “This is a godseye map of Einstein and the Nest, updated to this morning. Your left hand contains the proper sensors for reading it. You may seek me out later at the pink-tanks.”

“How do I get down to the floor? Climb like Loki?” Cobb looked uncertainly down the hundred feet of pocked cliff. He’d worry about Della later.

“Just visualize the path you want to travel, and your ion jets will execute it. Think of it as throwing yourself. Snap!” Berenice had decided not to talk to Cobb anymore just now. She put her body through the motions of a sexy bye-bye wave, rose on her toes, and arced out across the Nest, heading for her pink-tanks.

Cobb stood alone there, getting his bearings. Was he really on his own? It felt like it. He stared up at the Nest’s central chimney. If he wanted to, he could fly straight up there, and all the way to Earth, and land just in time to—get shot as a bopper invader. Better investigate the Nest first.

Cobb shifted Berenice’s map cube to his left  hand and held it tight. A three-dimensional image of the Moon’s surface formed in his mind: an aerial view of the human settlement Einstein, of the trade center, and of the boppers’ Nest, with all the solids nearly transparent. Just now, he was more curious about the humans than about the boppers.

Responding to his mental velleity, the S-cube’s godseye image shifted towards Einstein, zooming right in on it, and down through the dome. The buildings beneath the dome were a heterogeneous lot. Most of the buildings had been constructed by boppers—back when the settlement was still their Disky. In their provincial respect for things human, the early boppers had sought to construct at least one example of every possible earthly architecture. A characteristic street in Einstein would have a curtain-wall glass office building jammed up against a Greek temple, with an Aztec pyramid and a hyperdee flat-flat directly across the street. Viewed through the integrated spy cameras of the godseye network, all Einstein seemed to lie beneath Cobb, complete with maggie cars and cute little people frozen in place. Cobb’s map was like a holographic 3D photo made, Berenice had said, just this morning. Presumably Berenice herself had a godseye viewer that updated its images on a realtime basis.

Cobb let his mind’s eye follow an underground tunnel that led from Einstein to a lab in the opposite side of the Nest. Then he drew back, and looked at the Nest as a whole. Berenice had labeled various “attractions” for him: the pink-tanks, the light-pool, the chipworks, the etchery, the temple of the One, and the best shopping districts. If that’s what Berenice wanted him to see, maybe he’d start with something else. He shoved the map cube into a pouch in the belly of his flickercladding and stared out at the real Nest once more. There were a lot of boppers spiraling in and out of the sunshaft.

They made Cobb think of the fireflies he used to catch back in Louisville when he was a boy. What happy times those had been! He and Cousin Nita running around Aunt Nellie’s yard, each of them with a jelly jar, in the bright moonlit night. Uncle Henry kept his lawn weed-free and mowed short—it felt like a rug to your bare feet, a rug in a lovely dim room furnished with flowering bushes…

The memories drifted on and on till Cobb caught himself with a start. Woolgathering like an old man. Time to get busy! But on what? Investigating the Nest, right. Where to start? Almost at random, Cobb fixed on a blank-looking region off to the side of the chipworks, near where the map cube had shown the temple of the One. He visualized his trajectory, rose on his toes, and took off.

He landed, as it turned out, in a small junkyard. The center of the junkyard was filled with a dizzying mound of empty body-boxes—a mound that, in the low lunar gravity, had reached cartoonlike height and instability. It looked as if it should fall any second—but it didn’t, even when Cobb thumped down next to it. Something like a