Complete Stories

by Rudy Rucker

  Chunky was a soft-looking squat disk, very like a sea anemone. A piezoplastic space anemone. His—”No, I’m a her,” said Chunky’s contralto voice, interrupting Cobb’s interior monologue—her flesh was tinged a pale green from the included algae, with highlights of purple and beige. Her body-plan was radial, with a central crown of perhaps a hundred pointy tentacles. Seven eyestalks rose out of the crown’s core, and one of them was allocated to Cobb. As he watched, the other six eyes stretched out to join him. For a silly minute the seven eyes bobbed and bumped, staring into each other.

  “Being in me is like being in that heaven you were talking about, huh?” said Chunky. “Because really I’m seven different personalities—eight counting you now, Cobb—but they’re all merged into one big fat body. Fat is good. Do you like your eye?”

  “This eye’s the only thing that’s all mine right now?”

  “The eye is ours,” said Chunky, her six other eyes merrily staring into Cobb’s. “There is no mine. Why aren’t you picking up on the philosophical metaphor? Do you think an idea’s only interesting unless you made it up yourself? I can see your thoughts Cobb, clear as day. Now listen. My body—it’s a symbol of your God, your SUN, your cosmic One Mind jellyfish. Each individual sentient being is an eyestalk that the universe grows to look at itself with. Me, I’m a grex made of seven moldies who think as one, and usually each of my moldies has its own eyestalk to wave around. Bonk!” One of Chunky’s eyes caromed off Cobb’s, but it didn’t hurt, it felt nice, it felt like a kiss. Cobb and the fat anemone’s six other eyes bounced each other some more, until each had touched all the others, like champagne flutes raised in a toast.

  “Here’s to the success of the new limpware Cobb Anderson!” said Chunky.

  Gazing past bumptious Chunky’s six eyes, Cobb noticed that there was another cave just next door. And sticking out of that cave’s door were seven more eyestalks, and one of them was looking at him with the same peculiar fixity with which he was looking at it.

  “Is that Dot right there?” Cobb asked Chunky. “I think you said Dot was running her own simulation of Cobb Anderson? Is that another me over there, inside that one eye that’s leaning closer?”

  As Cobb craned across the space between the two caves, one of the eyes in the other group craned symmetrically nearer, approaching smoothly and steadily as a reflection in a mirror. Yes, he was sure that it was he.

  “You want to talk to him,” whispered Chunky warmly. “Don’t you, Cobbie? Dot and I will patch you in.”

  “Hello, Cobb,” Cobb said to the other eyestalk, and at the same instant he heard it saying hello to him. Their thoughts of speaking were being converted into signals that Dot and Chunky exchanged by radio waves and reconverted into signals that their emulations could interpret as sound.

  “What did you think about when you woke up?” asked the other Cobb, just as Cobb started to ask it himself.

  Expecting to be readily understood, Cobb answered concisely. “First I had white-light panic, then I remembered the spleen nurse, then JFK’s eternal flame, and then I got some memories of, of—”

  “The SUN,” said the other Cobb. “I know. I saw the exact same things. The light, the nurse, the flame, the memories of heaven. That’s so strange.”

  “It’s not strange,” put in Dot. “It’s logical.” Her voice came across as nasal and penetrating. “I could start this Cobbware up a hundred times, and each time the personality emulation would always remember the exact same scenes, every detail the same—because the early part of the boot process is a fully deterministic algorithm, no different in principle from tracking the orbit of a point on a strange attractor. If you start in the same place, you always get the same pattern.”

  “But don’t worry,” said Chunky. “Once a Cobb personality session is up and running, it begins interacting with the ever-various real world and zigzags off into some wild and wacky new future. High Lyapunov-exponent dependence on perturbations, don’t you know. It’s just the early parts of the wake-up sequence that are completely predictable. In fact Dot and I have been simulating a shitload of Cobb wake-ups this week, pardon my French.”

  “Just to torture me?” cried Cobb.

  “No, cruster, just to get your port done. And believe me, there was a lot to do. When they cut up your brain in 2020, those crude boppers turned you from analog into digital. But thanks to our fungus and algae—we call it chipmold—we moldies are totally down with analog, so we’ve been retrofitting you. You’ll feel real wiggly. We’re ninety-nine percent there. Now relax. Talk to the other Cobb and let me and Dot listen.”

  “Do you think Pop was fucking that spleen nurse?” the other Cobb asked Cobb. “There was something about the way she looked at him.”

  “Yeah,” said Cobb. “I do think so. Pop was quite the philanderer.”

  Dot and Chunky were transmitting more than just Cobb’s spoken words, they were sending a wide band-width transmission of sensations and emotions. If Cobb let himself relax, he could begin to merge into the other Cobb, and whether he was inside Chunky or inside Dot became a little less clear.

  “Now do you see what it’s like to be a grex?” said Chunky.

  “Shhhh!” said Dot.

  “You know,” the other Cobb was saying, “If there’s two of us and Willy only brings one body, then one of us is going to get left out. Like a real simple game of musical chairs. Where the loser gets killed.”

  “Would one of us dying really matter?” said Cobb. “The I-am-me feeling is the only part of us that isn’t the same, but that part is just a little piece of the SUN, so even that’s the same.”

  “But,” said the other Cobb, “I wouldn’t like it to be me. Don’t you feel that way?

  “Yeah,” said Cobb, not liking to admit it. “I do. Even though I know from personal experience that being dead is better than being alive. The survival instinct is really wired in.”

  “Then let’s try and beat the game,” said the other Cobb. “If we can totally merge into one consciousness, then there’s nobody extra to leave out.”

  So Cobb relaxed further, completely drawing back from identifying with the Chunky Cobb or the Dot Cobb. Now the images from their two eyes fused into stereo perception and he began to get some damn good depth perception. The jumbled stones on the ground leapt into clarity. Moving in complete accord, the two Cobb eyes swiveled this way and that, looking around.

  The walls of this great underground cavern rose above them like an upside-down funnel, perhaps two miles across and one mile high. A thick vertical shaft of light ran down from the small hole at the top. Cobb remembered that he’d been here before. This place was beneath the surface of the Moon; it was called the Nest. The bopper robots had lived here.

  More and more memories were emerging, flocking out like startled birds from a cliff of nests. Cobb could remember being alive four times before. He started, first, as a human who lived from 1950 to 2020, at which time the bopper robots had disassembled his brain and coded it up as an S-cube of software. For his second life, the boppers gave him a robot body with a short-lived supercooled brain that followed him around inside an ice cream truck. This had only lasted for a few months of 2020, and had not worked out very well. Cobb’s S-cube code had lain dormant until 2030 when, third, he’d gotten a sleek petaflop Moon bopper body. These new bopper bodies had no longer required a low temperature to operate. As part of an ill-fated scheme to start tinkering with the wetware of human DNA, Cobb had flown from the Nest all the way down to Earth. He’d been gunned down on a highway by state troopers. An even longer gap had followed until fourth, in 2053, Cobb had been allowed a very brief run as an emulation inside an asimov slave computer buried under Salt Lake City. He had almost no memories from that last run; nobody had told him much of anything, and all he’d had time to do was to say a few kind words to his great-grandson, an unwholesome Kentucky boy called Randy Karl Tucker. Today was the fifth time, and the date was, Cobb somehow knew, July 25, 2054.

  A
s he came back to the present, it occurred him that there was no “other Cobb” anymore. They’d fully merged; the Dot Cobb and Chunky Cobb emulations were parts of a unified whole, inseparable as two overlaid color separations in an old-fashioned printed image.

  “Right on!” said Cobb, congratulating himself. “I’m safe!”

  “We couldn’t be more pleased,” said Chunky. “This is exactly the final confirmation we’ve been hoping for.”

  “I’ll tell them it’s time to bring Cobb’s body,” said Dot, and her voice seemed to move off into the distance, where she began a lengthy, animated discussion with someone who sounded like a callow teenage girl.

  “What kind of body do I get?” asked Cobb.

  “An imipolex moldie body of course,” said Chunky. “Like Dot and me.”

  “I’m going to look like a weird monster?”

  “Yeah, the kind of weird monster that’s called a human being. Your grandson Willy’s artist friend Corey Rhizome made you a moldie body that looks just like you did when you were sixty. Except that Corey made you look fit and healthy instead of old and fat and drunk.”

  Cobb let the dig go by. He had indeed been a drunk during the declining last decades of his human life. Remarkable that he kept getting these fresh starts. It occurred to him to ask for more. “Why not go ahead and give me a body that looks young? Like in my thirties or my twenties?”

  “Willy wants you to look older than him because you’re his grandfather. But hey, you’ll be a moldie. If you don’t like the way you look, you can change it.”

  “And here come Jenny and Gaston with the new body!” rasped Dot. “You remember Jenny, don’t you, Cobb?”

  “I—I don’t think so.”

  Two moldies were bounding through the strewn rocks toward them. The one in front was shaped like a five-foot-tall carrot with a green fringe of tentacles on top. And the one in back was like a round red beet with a long, twitching tap-root. Between them swayed the slack dead weight of a lifeless human form. Cobb watched them with his two eyestalks, being careful to keep his stereo vision fused.

  Jenny was the big carrot, and her radioed voice sounded like that of a gossipy teenage girl. “Well, hi there, Cobb Anderson. You don’t remember me?”

  “The voice sounds familiar. Were you the one running me in that asimov computer a few months ago?”

  “Ta da! Jenny here, Jenny there, Jenny Jenny everywhere. Even inside a Heritagist asimov machine. That wasn’t the true marvelous Moon moldie me, of course, it was just my software agent. Can you believe she’s been trying to break free of my control, the little bitch? Anyway, the main point is that my agent was able to cryp all of that Cobbware and send it up here to the Moon so that we moldies can download it onto a moldie body that’s all your own. Isn’t that floatin’ of us? Let’s drop it right here, Gaston.”

  “Yo,” said Gaston. “I’m down with that.”

  Jenny and Gaston slung the limp plastic body down onto the ground. It was indeed the form of a nude sixty-year-old man, white bearded and white haired, a man with a big head and high cheekbones, his skin somewhat papery in appearance, much curly body hair, many freckles, a barrel chest, a flat stomach, and a respectable penis.

  “Are you ready, Cobb?” asked Dot.

  “I sure am.”

  “All right then,” said Chunky. “Push both of your eyes down there, touch them to the body, and I’ll send you in.”

  Cobb moved his two eyes forward and down, the eyes watching each other to make sure they kept an even pace. No point in taking a chance with some last-minute greedy race. The new body lay on its back on the dusty stone floor, waiting. Beneath the pale skin were blue lines of veins that were tubes of mold, not blood. As he drew closer and closer, Cobb filled with a desire to gush out, a feeling like wanting to ejaculate, and then aaah he touched down with both eyes, flowed out into his new body, and—twitch, twitch—sat up.

  Much better. Cobb stood and stretched. There were no feelings of joints cracking; his body was all of a smooth, flexing dough like the foot of a snail or the mantle of a squid. To test his strength, he crouched and sprang. In the low lunar gravity he flew up a hundred feet, looking down at orange Jenny and crimson Gaston and the mouths of the two caves where lurked fat Chunky and Dot.

  As he started to fall, Cobb looked out across the Nest. There were some factory buildings to his left, and roads and buildings between here and the center, where the great light-stream came down. The sight of the bright central light-pool filled Cobb with a visceral hunger; it was like seeing food.

  When he hit the ground, Cobb’s body cushioned the fall in a most inhuman manner: he collapsed like an accordion, his chin descending to the level of his knees.

  “Yee-haw,” cheered Chunky, her radio voice clear in Cobb’s head.

  “This feels so good,” said Cobb, rebounding to his humanoid shape. “Thank you!” He reached out and hugged Jenny; the big carrot was lithe and powerful in his arms. She wriggled free, and then Cobb bent down to embrace round Gaston.

  “Welcome back,” said the beet.

  ============

  Note on “Cobb Wakes Up”

  Written in January 1996.

  Other magazine, March 2006.

  “Cobb Wakes Up” is set in the world of my Ware novels: Software, Wetware, Freeware, and Realware. I originally intended to use this piece as the opening chapter of Realware, but then decided to open that book in a different way. I only happened to unearth this fragment recently, in the process of posting my writing notes for my most recent nine novels at www.rudyrucker.com/writing. As I mentioned before, now that I’m retired, I’m industriously assembling a lifebox simulacrum of my mind online.

  This tale is a self-contained vignette, a little thought experiment concerning what might happen if you could store someone’s mind as software, and if you then gave that mind two separate bodies.

  Rereading the story makes me miss the Ware worlds, and my father Embry Cobb Rucker, who was the model for Cobb Anderson. My father was a very human, sociable man: a businessman and then an Episcopal priest. I used to feel myself to be very different from him, but as the years go by, I realize we were always the same.

  The Square Root of Pythagoras

  (Written with Paul Di Filippo)

  The Crooked Beetle spit a number-form into its cupped claws, the number a black oozing mass almost ten stadia in length if uncoiled, now intricately folded into and through itself. The creature’s oddly articulated arm joints creaked as it urged the prize upon the human standing cowed before it.

  “Take it now,” said the apeiron Beetle in a richly modulated drone. “You’re almost ready for it. The fifth and the last of our gifts.” The prize’s weight was immense, and the human staggered, lost his balance, seemed to fall sideways out of the dream universe —

  Morning sunlight fell across Pythagoras’s face and he woke. For a few moments his mind was blessedly empty, free of the crooked, the infinite, the irrational, the unlimited—free of the apeiron. Pythagoras sat up, pulling a musty sheepskin around his shoulders like a mantle. Looking out of the mouth of his cave he could see down the rocky slopes to the orchards and fields that nestled in the curve of the river Nessus.

  The river. Sight of the gleaming watery thread brought back the weight of his knowledge. Pythagoras’s little store of five worldly numbers included the river’s number, which, like the others, was inconceivably long. The knowledge of the River Number had come to him from the Braided Worm, the first of the apeiron beings who’d appeared to him, half a year ago.

  Now there were five of these grotesque, unclean, raggedly formed creatures haunting his nightly dreams. A terrible psychic burden, yes, but there was gain in the encounters with the Tangled Tree, the Braided Worm, the Bristle Cat, the Swarm of Eyes, and the Crooked Beetle, for each of them had made Pythagoras a gift of a magical power-number. The Crooked Beetle had been disturbingly portentous in granting of its boon. The new number surpassed all the others; it was of a crushin
g size. Clearly it meant something important.

  Pythagoras sometimes wished that he could still believe his old teachings that the world was a simple pattern of small, integral numbers; it would be nice once again to have a soul as innocently harmonious as two strings tuned to the ratios of five and three. The apeiron dream creatures and their terrible gifts had begun to undermine everything that Pythagoras had once believed.

  Thank Apollo the Sun was back with its respite from the dreams. It was a fresh day, a good day, with students to teach and, perhaps, come late afternoon, a noblewoman to dally with.

  There was a large stone ledge outside the cave, Pythagoras’s public space. Stooping to the hearth there, Pythagoras assembled a rough cone of twigs and prepared to invoke the Fire Number he’d obtained from the Bristle Cat. This number was not the skeletal “four” of the tetrahedron, which some took to be the form of Fire; no, thanks to the demons of the apeiron, Pythagoras had experienced the gnosis of one of the true and esoteric numbers for physical Fire in this fallen world of Woman and Man. The magically puissant numbers for physical things were so huge that of all men who had ever lived, only Pythagoras had the mind to encompass them.

  Pythagoras formed the Fire Number in his soul and projected it outward.

  The sheaf of twigs, really no cone at all, became covered over with coarse red/yellow triangles and pyramids, mere simulacra of flames, for Pythagoras’s Fire Number, in the end, was but a workable approximation. Now the divine nature of the world intervened, cooperating so that the lithe, curvy forms of actual fire sprang up from the twigs. The Fire Number kindled the true Fire inherent in the organic wood, activated the particles of elemental Fire placed in the wood by the beneficent rays of the great One shining Sun.