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

hand through his thinning hair. “I loved Della Taze, Stahn, I still do. You know that. She’s all right now, but what the boppers did to her was wrong. I want to punish them. And I am a bioengineer. I am a very brilliant man.”

“You always say,” put in Bei. There seemed to be a friendly sibling rivalry between him and Yukawa. “You very brilliant except sometimes you not very smart.”

“I’ve designed a chipmold,” said Yukawa. “Fern just infected you with it. It’s a bit like thrush, quite opportunistic, and you’ve got it. I don’t care if we lose track of you or not, once you take my chipmold into the Nest.”

“Max,” interrupted Mrs. Beller, sidestepping the spray from Stahn’s mouth. “Do you really think you should—”

“Tell him, tell him,” said Bei Ng. “Once we replace his right parietal lobe with a neuroplug, he got nothing else to lose. Stahn going to play ball with us, no problem. Is all decide.”

Yukawa steepled his fingers and wagged his long head happily. “Chipmold in that water, Stahn, and you drank it.”

Ricardo cackled joyfully, and even Whitey cracked a smile.

“What’s chipmold?” said Stahn presently.

“In general, biotic life can flourish whenever there is an energy gradient,” said Yukawa. “Think of the tubeworms who live around deep-sea volcanic vents. Or lichen growing on a sunlit Antarctic rock. There’s an energy gradient across all the boppers’ silicon chips, and I’ve designed an organism that can live there. Chipmold.”

“I don’t get it,” said Stahn. “The chipmold will crud up their circuits?”

“Better than that. The chipmold likes a steady thousand-cycle per second frequency. That’s what it ‘eats,’ if you will: kilohertz electromagnetic energy. For a mold, it’s quite intelligent. It’s able to selectively suppress or potentiate the chips’ firing to enhance the amplitude of the desired frequency. It will eat their heads.” Yukawa threw his arms around his head, shuddered, and then slumped.

“Spastic robots, my friend,” said Ricardo.

“Be sure and spit a lot,” said Bei Ng, beaming across his desk. “Spread chipmold all around Nest. Cock leg here and there like dog.”

“Oxo wow,” said Stahn, more impressed than he cared to admit. Something else occurred to him. “Am I going to have fits?”

“Who cares, dip,” said reliable Whitey. “Where’s the map?”

“Don’t worry,” said Yukawa. “In your high-entropy system the stuff’s just like sore throat. And a low-grade bladder infection. It’s quite versatile; I’m not sure what it’ll do to the boppers’ flickercladding.”

“Come on, Stahn,” drawled Mrs. Beller. “Be a dear and tell us where you hid the map.”

This was his only chance. “It’s in my office desk. But I fixed it so only I can get it. It’s boobytrapped with a smart bomb.”

“Clear,” said Whitey disgustedly. “You have to say that, right? They teach you that line at cop school, right?”

“I don’t care what you think, punk, it’s true. It’s in my office desk with a smart bomb that only I can turn off. The bomb knows what I look like.”

“AO. Cardo and I’ll take you there. Right, Bei?”

Bei thought for a full two minutes, as if pondering a chess problem. “Yes,” he said finally. “Go up to roof, get maggie, fly to Mr. Mooney’s building, if he make trouble you can stun. You take Mrs. Beller, too. Very careful, very slow.”

“I’ve got a stunpatch all set,” said Mrs. Beller, reaching into her purse. She drew out a foil disk, stripped plastic off one side of it, and glued it to the back of Stahn’s neck. “Let him go, boys.”

Whitey and Ricardo let go each other’s hands and let Stahn stand up.

“Walk towards me, Stahn,” said Mrs. Beller. “Come here and give me a big kiss.” She pouted her big lips at him and showed the tip of her purple tongue. “Come to mamma.”

Stahn took a cautious step, and then Mrs. Beller pressed the button of the control she was holding. The stunpatch fired electricity into Stahn’s spine. It hurt more than anything he’d ever imagined possible. He fell twitching to the floor and lay there staring glassy-eyed at Mrs. Beller’s legs. It took a few minutes till he could get back up. One thought dominated his mind: he must not do anything that would make Mrs. Beller press the button again.

Mrs. Beller, Whitey, and Ricardo ushered Stahn out into the hall.

“This is the sixth floor of the ISDN ziggurat,” said Mrs. Beller, playing the part of a clear-voiced tour guide. She walked next to Stahn, with Ricardo in front and Whitey behind. Her hips swayed enticingly. “Not everyone knows that ISDN stands for Integrated Systems Digital Network. We’re a petabuck company born of the merger of AT&T and Mitsubishi. ISDN manufactures about 60 percent of the vizzies in use, and we operate something like 80 percent of the transmission channels. This, our Einstein ziggurat, houses labs, offices, and a number of independent organizations— this far from Earth’s scrutiny it’s a case of In my father’s house are many mansions. Most people don’t understand that ISDN has no leaders and no fixed policies. ISDN operates at unfathomable degrees of parallelism and nonlinearity. How else to pay off the world’s chaos?

“Supposedly, ISDN has been backing Bei Ng’s Church of Organic Mysticism on the off chance that Bei might come up with a workable form of telepathy, but really we’ve just wanted to keep a feeler on the merge trade, which looks to be a coming thing. And of course Bei’s many connections are very valuable.”

The long hall was lined with room after room of weird equipment. ISDN was so big. It seemed unlikely that anyone could really know what was going on in all the labs. The general idea seemed to be to try and keep up with the boppers, by whatever means necessary. In one of the rooms on Bei Ng’s hall, cyberbiologists were fiddling with probes and petri dishes. In another room, cellular automata technicians were watching 3D patterns darting about in a great mound of imipolex. In still another room, Stahn could see information mechanics disassembling a beam-charred woman-shaped petaflop. Was that the one—Berenice—who’d been killed with Manchile the other day? Stahn wondered briefly how old Cobb was doing; he’d gotten away, lucky guy.

Suddenly it occurred to Stahn that somewhere in this huge building there was an operating room with brain surgeons waiting for him. He shuddered and turned his attention back to Mrs. Beller.

“ISDN carefully looks over every major new development with one question in mind,” she was saying. “How can this be used to increase our power and our holdings? Usually we use incremental techniques, but sometimes a catastrophic intervention is required. The Manchildren pose a real threat to our main customers, the human race. We asked all our employees for suggestions, and Bei Ng called up his merge-brother, Max Gibson-Yukawa. Our intervention will be unfortunate for the boppers. Here’s the elevator.”

The ride over to Stahn’s building was uneventful. Only when they were walking down the hall to his office did his captors show any signs of nervousness. Though they didn’t come out and say so, it was clear that they were wondering just how smart Stahn’s bomb was.

Inside Stahn’s office, Mrs. Beller took a post by the door. She held out her right hand, with the thumb lightly resting on the button of the stunpatch control. Whitey and Ricardo got back in the far corners of the room, covering Stahn and the desk with their needlers. Stahn stood behind his plastic-topped desk, facing Mrs. Beller and the open office door. Behind him and to the left was Ricardo, behind him and to the right was Whitey.

“All right, Stahn,” purred Mrs. Beller. “Be a good boy and get out your map. Tell the bomb that everything’s OK.” She caressed the control button with her fat thumb tip, and pain seeped down Stahn’s spine. She deepened her voice, shifting from soft cop to hard cop mode. “Don’t try to outthink me Mooney, you’re a burnt-out stumblebum with no second chance.”

“Sane,” said Stahn. “I’m ready to spread. Shave my brain and mail me to Happy Acres with my GI wendy, how bad can it be.” He smiled in an ingratiating, cringing way and pulled open the top left drawer of his brown metal desk. “Map’s right in here.”

Stahn’s perceived timeflow was running very very slow. The next second of time went as follows:

Stahn took his hand off the wide-open drawer and looked down at his smart kinetic energy bomb, nestled right next to Cobb’s red map cube. The bomb was a rubbery deep-blue sphere with a reddish eye set into it. It was designed not to explode, but rather to bounce around and hit things. It was polonium-centered and quite massive. Its outer rind was a thick tissue of megaflop imipolex that had been microwired to act as a computer and as a magnetic field drive, feeding off the energy of the radioactive polonium core. The bomb had the intelligence, roughly, of a dog. Recognizing Stahn, the bomb activated its powerful maggie-drive and floated up a fraction of a millimeter, up off the brown metal of Stahn’s desk drawer bottom, up just enough so that Stahn could tell that his good smart bomb was ready to help.

Over the years, Stahn had taught the bomb to read his eye signals. He blinked twice, meaning “HIT THEM,” and then stared at Mrs. Beller’s right wrist, meaning “THERE FIRST.”

Silently the bomb began to spin, adjusting its English. Stahn formed his face into a weary, disgusted expression. “How beat. The scuzz-ass bomb is broken anyway.” He stared hard at Mrs. Beller’s wrist and… widened his eyes.

The bomb flew up, caromed off the ceiling, and struck Mrs. Beller a paralyzing blow on the right wrist. The stunpatch control dropped from her numb hand. The bomb came up off the floor, sighted on Mydol, and did a two-cushion rebound off the wall and ceiling. It caught Mydol solidly in the side of the head. Mydol’s eyes glazed as his head snapped to one side.

The bomb came up off the floor and wall, fixed its eye on Ricardo, and set up a gyroscopic spin calculated to accelerate it off the ceiling and into Ricardo’s forehead. The KE bomb was travelling at about 40 ft/sec, or 30 mph—any faster and it wouldn’t have been able to direct its bounces to optimum target.

The bomb was thinking as fast as it could, but its max flop was less than Ricardo’s.

Ricardo became consciously aware of the bomb’s violent Superball motion only after it had already hit Whitey, but by then his arm muscles were tracking the bomb. A fast eye/hand feedback loop locked the needler on target. Ricardo zapped Stahn’s smart bomb just before it hit the ceiling.

The smart bomb broke into four or five throbbing chunks that thudded to the floor and lay there twitching. The slow, full second ended.

Before anything else could happen, Stahn peeled the stunpatch off his neck and wadded it up, ruining its circuits.

“I’ve still got the drop on you, Mooney,” said Ricardo from his corner. “Nice move, though. Good thing there was three of us. You AO, Fern?”

“He’s broken my wrist,” said Mrs. Beller.

Stahn tossed the wadded stunpatch out his room’s open window. “Well, that SM was getting a little old, Fern. Why don’t you all promise me some money and I’ll go quietly? I really will. I’ll go to Happy Acres and I’ll infect the boppers with chipmold, but I want a square ISDN contract in writing and on the record. I want three things.” Stahn held up three fingers