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

junkyard dog was on Cobb in a flash—glued to his side like a heavy sucker-fish.

The soft , parasitical creature seemed to be made entirely of imipolex. It was yellow with splotches of green. Cobb could feel a kind of burning where its thick end had attached to his hip. He used both hands to lever it off of him, flipped it onto the ground, and gave it a sharp kick. It curled into a ball that rolled past the cowingly great body-box heap, and came to rest against a bin filled with electromagnetic relays.

“Whass happenin?”

Cobb turned to face a bopper that looked like a cross between a praying mantis and tangle of coat hangers. It had scores of thin thin legs, each leg with a specialized tool at its tip. Its photoreceptors and transmission antennae were clustered into a bulblike protrusion that slightly resembled a face.

“I’m just looking around,” said Cobb. “Where do you get all these parts?”

“Pawns, kills, junkers, and repos. You buyin or sellin?”

“I’m new here. I’m Cobb Anderson, the man who built the first moon-robots.”

“Sho. Thass a real nice body, thass a brand new model. Ah’m Fleegle.” Fleegle stepped closer and ran his wiry appendages over Cobb admiringly. “Genuine diplomat body, petaflop and ready to flah. Ah’ll give you ten K an a new teraflop of yo choice.”

“Forget it, Fleegle. What could I buy with your ten thousand chips that would be better than this?”

Fleegle regarded him levelly. The sluglike “junkyard dog” came humping back across the lot and slid up onto Fleegle’s wiry frame. It smoothed itself over his central pod; it was his flickercladding.

“Effen you don know,” said Fleegle, “best not mess with it.” He turned and went back to work; disassembling a blanked-out digger robot. Why was the robot blank? Had its owner moved on to a better body? Or had the owner been forced willy-nilly into nonexistence?

Fleegle and the junkyard gave Cobb the creeps. He picked his way out past the boxes of parts and into the street. Looming in the near distance was the chipworks, a huge structure with bright smelters showing through its window holes. This street was lined with small operations devoted to the salvage and repair of body parts. The boppers were a bit like the kind of crazed superconsumer who no sooner gets a new car than he starts scheming on what to trade it in for. Each bopper had, as Cobb recalled, a basic directive to build itself a new body every ten months.

But some of the boppers on this ugly little factory street looked more than ten months old. Right here in front of Cobb, for instance, was a primitive metal shoebox on treads that looked a bit like the old Ralph Numbers.

“Why don’t you have a new body?” Cobb asked it.

The machine emitted a frightened glyph of Cobb smashing it in and selling its parts. “I… I’m sorry, lord,” it stammered. “I’ll run down soon enough. They won’t let me near the light-pool anymore.”

“But why don’t you do something to earn the chips to buy a new body?” pressed Cobb. Two or three other aimless old robots came clanking over to watch the conversation.

“Obsolete,” sighed the box on treads, wagging its corroded head. “You know that. Please don’t kill me, lord. You’re rich, you don’t need my chips.”

“Sure, go on and crack the deselected old clunker open,” urged one of the other boppers, slightly newer in appearance. “I’ll help you, bwana.”

This was a beat-up digger talking, with its drill-bit face worn smooth. He bashed at the first bopper to no avail. A third bopper darted in and tried to tear off one of the second bopper’s shovel arms.

Cobb stepped around the sordid melee, and took a street that led off to the right and into a tunnel. The shrine of the One was in there someplace. The One was a randomization device—actually a cosmic-ray counter— that Cobb had programmed the original boppers to plug into every so often, just to keep them from falling into stasis. Actually, the thorough meme-shuffling produced when boppers conjugated to jointly program a new scion was a better source of program diversity, just as on earth the main source of evolutionary change is the gene-shuffling of sexual reproduction, rather than occasional lucky strike of a favorable gene mutation. Nevertheless, the boppers took their “plugging into the One” seriously, and Cobb recalled from his conversations with Mr. Frostee that the boppers had built up some more or less religious beliefs about their One. Of course, now that he’d been in heaven, he had to admit that there was a sense in which they were right. As Mr. Frostee had said, “Why do you think they’re called cosmic rays?”

Cobb stopped at the mouth of the tunnel leading into the cliff , and peered up. It was an oppressive sight: the two-mile-high wall of stone that beetled out overhead like a tilting gravestone. Heaven and death. Stress. Cobb remembered that he still wanted to get drunk, if such a thing were possible in this clean Berenice-built body. There were certainly no built-in fuzzer programs, he’d already made sure of that. What did today’s boppers do for kicks? It had seemed like Fleegle had been on the point of telling him about something sinful…

“Ssst,” came a voice, cueing right in on his thoughts. “You lookin to dreak?” Faint glyph of pleasure.

Hard as he looked, Cobb couldn’t make out the source of the voice.

“Maybe,” he said tentatively. “If you mean feeling good. If it doesn’t cost me an arm and a leg.”

“Two thousand chips… or an arm’s OK, too,” said the voice. “Up to the shoulder.” Now Cobb saw something shifting against the cliff; a big, lozenge-shaped patch of flickercladding that matched the gray rock surface in endless detail. If he looked hard he could make out the thing’s borders. It was the size of a ragged bedsheet. “Come on in,” it urged. “Party time. Dreak out, peta. You can afford a new arm, clear.”

“Uh… ”

“Walk through me. I’ll snip, and you’ll trip. Plenty of room inside. Nobody but petas in there, pinkboy, it’s high-tone.”

“What is dreak?”

“You kidding?” The pleasure glyph again, a bit stronger. It tasted like orgasm, dope rush, drunken bliss, supernal wisdom, and the joy of creation. “This dreak’ll make you feel like an exaflop, pinkboy, and get you right in tune with the One. No one goes to the temple anymore.”

“A whole arm is too much. I just got this body.”

“Come here till I look at you.”

Cobb glanced up, sketching out a flight path in case the lozenge snatched at him. An orange starfish cradling what looked like a bazooka watched him from a few balconies up. Should he leave? He walked a few steps closer, and the wall lozenge bulged out to feel him.

“Tell you what,” it said after a moment’s examination. “You’re state-of-the-art, and it’s your first dreak tube, so we’ll give you a price. Just your left hand.” The pleasure glyph, once again, even stronger. “Walk through and really see the One.”

This was too intriguing to pass up. And it was, after all, Cobb’s duty as a computer scientist to look into a development as novel as this. Hell, Berenice could get him another damn hand. He stepped forward, and slithered through the thick folds of the camouflaged door. It snipped off his left hand on the way in, but it didn’t hurt, and his flickercladding sealed right over the stump.

Cobb looked around, and decided he’d made a big mistake. Who did he think he was, Sta-Hi? This was no mellow Prohibition Era saloon, this was more like a hardcore basehouse—a shoddy, unfinished room with a heavily armed guard in every corner. The guards were orange starfish-shaped boppers like the one he’d seen on the balcony outside. Each of them had a tray full of small metal cylinders, and each had a lethal particle-beam tube ready to hand, in case anyone got out of line. There were half a dozen customers, all with the mirror finish of optically processing petaflops. Cobb seemed to be the only one who’d sold part of his body to get in. He felt as stupid as if he’d offered a bartender fellatio instead of a dollar for a beer. All the other customers were giving the starfish little boxes of chips for their cylinders. They looked tidy and businesslike, giving the lie to Cobb’s initial impression of the place.

But what was dreak? One of the starfish fixed its blue eyespot on Cobb and held up a cylinder from its tray. The cylinder was metal, three or four inches long, and with a kind of nipple at one end. A compressed gas of some sort—something along the lines of nitrous oxide? Yes. The starfish tapped at a cylinder rigged to a bleeder valve, and a little cloud of patterns formed—patterns so intricate as to be on the verge of random snow. The cloud dissipated. Was there supposed to be some way to breathe the stuff ?

“Not just yet,” said Cobb. “I want to mingle a bit. I really just come here for the business contacts, you know.”

He hunkered down by the wall between two petaflops, interrupting their conversation, not that he could follow what they were saying. They were like stoned out beatnik buddies, a Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady team, both of them with thick, partly transparent flickercladdings veined and patterned in fractal patterns of color. Each of the cladding’s colorspots was made up of an open network of smaller spots, which were in turn made of yet smaller threads and blotches—all the way down to the limits of visibility. One of the petaflop’s patterns and body outlines were angular and hard-edged. He was colored mostly red-yellow-blue. The other petaflop was green-brown-black, and his surface was so fractally bumpy that he looked like an infinitely warty squid, constantly sprouting tentacles which sprouted tentacles which sprouted. Each of these fractal boppers had a dreak cylinder plugged into a valve in the upper part of his body.

“Hi,” said Cobb. “How’s the dreak?”

With surprising speed, the angular one grew a glittering RYB arm that reached out and fastened on Cobb’s left forearm, right above Cobb’s missing hand. The smooth one seized Cobb’s right elbow with a tentacle that branched and branched. They marched him over to the dreak tray, and the orange starfish plugged one of the cold gas cylinders into a heretofore unnoticed valve in the side of Cobb’s head.

Time stopped. Cobb’s mind cut and interchanged thoughts and motions into a spacetime collage. The next half hour was a unified tapestry of space and time.

A camera eye would have showed Cobb following the RYB and GBB petas back to the wall and sitting between them for half an hour.

For Cobb, it was like stepping outside of time into a world of synchronicity. Cobb saw all of his thoughts at once, and all of the thoughts of the others near him. He was no longer the limited personoid that he’d been since Berenice had woken him up.

Up till now, he’d felt like:    But right now, he felt like:

A billion-bit CD recording          A quintillion atom orchestra

A finite robot                                 A living mind

Shit                                                   God

He exchanged a few glyphs with the guys next to