by Rudy Rucker
“How many boppers live here?” came some oldster’s voice over the earphones. No answer.
The voice tried again. “How many boppers live in Disky, Captain Cody?”
“I am researching this information,” came the reply. The bus’s voice was high and musical. Definitely alien-sounding. Everyone waited in silence for the population figure.
A large building slid by on their left. The sides were open, and inside you could see stacked sheets of some material. A bopper standing at the edge stared at them, its head slowly tracking their forward motion.
“What precision is required?” the bus asked then.
“I don’t know,” the old questioner crackled uncertainly. “Zuh . . . zero precision? Does that make sense?”
“Thank you,” the bus chortled. “With zero precision, is no boppers living in Disky. Or ten to sixty-third power.”
Boppers were notorious for their nit-picking literal-mindedness when talking to humans. It was just another of their many ways of being hostile. They had never quite forgiven people for the three Asimov laws that the original designers had . . . unsuccessfully, thanks to Cobb . . . tried to build into the boppers. They viewed every human as a thwarted Simon Legree.
For a while after that, no one asked Captain Cody any more questions. Disky was big . . . perhaps as big as Manhattan. The bus kept a scrupulous five hundred meters from the nearest buildings at all times, but even from that distance one could make out the wild diversity of the city.
It was a little as if the entire history of Western civilization had occurred in one town over the course of thirty years. Squeezed against each other were structures of every conceivable type: primitive, classical, baroque, gothic, renaissance, industrial, art nouveau, functionalist, late funk, zapper, crepuscular, flat-flat, hyperdee . . . all in perfect repair. Darting among the buildings were myriads of the brightly colored boppers, creatures clad in flickering light.
“How come the buildings are so different?” Sta-Hi blurted. “Captain Cody?”
“What category of cause your requirements?” the bus sing-songed.
“State the categories, Captain Cody,” Sta-Hi shot back, determined not to fall into the same trap as the last questioner.
“WHY QUESTION,” the bus answered in a gloating tone, “Answer Categories: Material Cause, Situational Cause, Teleological Cause. Material Cause Subcategories: Spacetime, Mass-energy. Situational Cause Subcategories: Information, Noise. Teleological Cause Subcategories . . . ”
Sta-Hi stopped listening. Not being able to see anyone’s face was making him uptight. The bubble-toppers had gone as silvery as Christmas-tree balls. The round heads reflected Disky and each others’ reflections in endless regresses. How long had they been on the bus?
“Informational Situational Cause Subsubcategories:” the bus continued, with insultingly-precise intonation, “Analog, Digital. Noisy . . . ”
Sta-Hi sighed and leaned back in his seat.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The museum was underground, under Disky. It was laid out in a pattern of concentric circles intersected by rays. Something like Dante’s Inferno. Cobb felt a tightening in his chest as he walked down the sloping stone ramp. His cheap, second-hand heart felt like it might blow out any minute.
The more he thought about it, the likelier it seemed that what Sta-Hi said was true. There was no immortality drug. The boppers were going to tape his brain and put him in a robot body. But with the body he had now, that might not be so bad.
The idea of having his brain-patterns extracted and transferred didn’t terrify Cobb as it did Sta-Hi. For Cobb understood the principles of robot consciousness. The transition would be weird and wrenching. But if all went well . . .
“It’s on the right down there,” Sta-Hi said, pressing his bubble-topper against Cobb’s. He held a little engraved stone map in his hand. They were looking for the Anderson room.
As they walked down the hall the exhibits sprang to life. Mostly hollows . . . holograms with voice-overs broadcast directly to the suits’ radios. A thin little man wearing a dark suit over a wool vest appeared in front of them. Kurt Gödel it said under his feet. He had dark-rimmed glasses and silvery hair. Behind him was a blackboard with a statement of his famous Incompleteness Theorem.
“The human mind is incapable of formulating (or mechanizing) all its mathematical intuitions,” Gödel’s image stated. He had a way of ending his phrases on a rising note which chattered into an amused hum.
“On the other hand, on the basis of what has been proved so far, it remains possible that there may exist (and even be empirically discoverable) a theorem-proving machine which in fact is equivalent to mathematical intuition . . . ”
“What’s he talking about?” Sta-Hi demanded.
Cobb had stopped to watch the hollow of the great master. He still remembered the years he had spent brooding over the passage which was being recited. Humans can’t build a robot as smart as themselves. But, logically speaking, it is possible for such robots to exist.
How? Cobb had asked himself throughout the 1970’s, How can we bring into existence the robots which we can’t design? In 1980 he had the bare bones of an answer. One of his colleagues had written the paper up for Speculations in Science and Technology. “Towards Robot Consciousness,” he’d called it. The idea had all been there. Let the robots evolve. But fleshing the idea out to an actual . . .
“Let’s go,” Sta-Hi urged, tugging Cobb through Gödel’s talking hollow.
Beyond, two frightened lizards scampered down the hallway. A leathery-winged creature came zooming up the hall towards them, and darted its scissoring beak at the lizards. One of the little beasts escaped with a quick back-flip, but the other was carried off over Cobb and Sta-Hi’s heads, dripping pale blood.
“Survival of the Fittest,” an announcer’s mellow voice intoned. “One of the two great forces driving the engine of evolution.”
In speeded-up motion, the little lizard laid a clutch of eggs, the eggs hatched, and new lizards grew and whisked around. The predator returned, the survivors laid eggs . . . over and over the cycle repeated. Each time the lizards were more agile, and with stronger rear legs. In a few minutes’ time they were hopping about like loathsome little kangaroos, fork-tongued and yellow-eyed.
It was Cobb who had to urge them past this exhibit. Sta-Hi wanted to stick around and see what the lizards would come up with next.
Stepping out of the prehistoric scene, they found themselves on a carnival midway. Rifles cracked and pinball machines chimed, people laughed and shrieked, and under it all was the visceral throb of heavy machinery. The floor seemed to be covered with sawdust now; and grinning, insubstantial bumpkins ambled past. A boy and girl leaned against a cotton-candy stand, feeding each other bits of popcorn with shiny fingers. He had a prominent Adam’s apple and a bumpy nose. A sine-wave profile. She wore a high, blonde pony-tail fastened by a mini-blinker. The only jarring note was a hard rain of tiny purplish lights . . . which seemed to pass right through everything in the scene. At first Cobb took it for static.
To their right was a huge marquee with lurid paintings of distorted human forms. The inevitable barker . . . checked suit, bowler, cigar-butt . . . leaned down at them, holding out his thin cane for attention.
“See the Freaks, Feel the Geeks!” His loud, hoarse voice was like a crowd screaming. “Pinheads! The Dog-Boy! Pencil-Necks! The Human Lima Bean! Half-Man-Half- . . . ” Slowly the carnival noises damped down, and were replaced by the rich, round tones of the voice-over.
“Mutation.” The voice was resonant, lip-smackingly conclusive. “The second key to the evolutionary process.”
The zippy little dots of purple light grew brighter. They passed right through everyone on the midway . . . especially those two lovers, french-kissing now, hips touching.
“The human reproductive cells are subjected to a continual barrage of ionizing radiation,” the voice said earnestly. “We call these the cosmic rays.”
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br /> The carnival noises faded back in now. And each of the fast little lights made a sound like a slide-whistle when it passed. The two kissing lovers began slowly to grow larger, crowding out the rest of the scene. Soon an image of the swain’s bulging crotch filled the hallway. The cloth ripped loose and a single huge testicle enveloped Cobb and Sta-Hi, standing there mesmerized.
Hazy red light, the heavy, insistent sound of a heartbeat. Every so often a cosmic ray whistled through. An impression of pipes—a 3D maze of plumbing which grew and blurred around them. Gradually the blur became grainy, and the grains grew. They were looking at cells now, reproductive cells. The nucleus of one of them waxed to hover in front of Cobb and Sta-Hi.
With a sudden, crab-like movement the nuclear material split into striped writhing sausages. The chromosomes. But now a cosmic ray cut one of the chromosomes in half! The two halves joined up again, but with one piece reversed!
“Geek gene,” a hillbilly muttered somewhere in the nearly infinite fairground. And then the pictures went out. They were in a down-sloping stone hallway.
“Selection and Mutation,” Cobb said as they walked on. “That was my big idea, Sta-Hi. To make the robots evolve. They were designed to build copies of themselves, but they had to fight over the parts. Natural selection. And I found a way of jiggering their programs with cosmic rays. Mutation. But to predict . . . ”
Just ahead, a door led off to the right. “This is your meet,” Sta-Hi said, consulting his map. “The Cobb Anderson Room.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Looking in, our two heroes could see nothing but darkness, and a dimly glowing red polygon. They stepped through the door and the exhibit came on.
“We cannot build an intelligent robot,” a voice stated firmly. “But we can cause one to evolve.” A hollow of the young Cobb Anderson walked past banks of computers to meet the visitors.
“This is where I grew the first bopper programs,” the recorded voice continued. The hollow smiled confidently, engagingly. “No one can write a bopper program . . . they’re too complicated. So instead I set thousands of simple AI programs loose in there,” he gestured familiarly at the computers. “There were lots of . . . fitness tests, with the weaker programs getting wiped. And every so often all the surviving programs were randomly changed . . . mutated. I even provided for a sort of . . . sexual reproduction, where two programs could merge. After fifteen years, I . . . ”
Cobb felt a terrible sickness at the gulf of time separating him from the dynamic young man he had once been. The heedless onward rush of events, of age and death . . . he couldn’t stand to look at his old self. Sick at heart, he stepped back out of the room, pulling Sta-Hi with him. The display winked out. Again the room was dark, save for a glow of red light near the opposite wall.
“Ralph?” Cobb called, his voice trembling a bit. “It’s me.”
Ralph Numbers came clattering across the room. His red flickercladding glowed with swirls of complex emotion. “It’s good to see you, Doctor Anderson.” Trying to do the right thing, Ralph held out a manipulator, as if to shake hands.
Sobbing openly now, Cobb threw his arms around the bopper’s unyielding body-box and rocked him to and fro. “I’ve gotten old, Ralph. And you’re . . . you’re still the same.”
“Not really, Dr. Anderson. I’ve been rebuilt thirty-seven times. And I have exchanged various subprograms with others.”
“That’s right,” Cobb said, laughing and crying at the same time. “Call me Cobb, Ralph. And this is Sta-Hi.”
“That sounds like a bopper name,” Ralph remarked.
“I do my part,” Sta-Hi replied. “Didn’t they used to sell little Ralph Numbers dolls? I had one till I was six . . . till the bopper revolt in 2001. We were in the car when my parents heard it on the radio, and they threw my Ralphie out the window.”
“Of course,” Cobb said. “An anarchist revolutionary is a bad example for a growing boy. But in your case, Sta-Hi, I’d say the damage had already been done.”
Ralph found their voices a bit blurred and hard to follow. Quickly he programmed himself a filter circuit to clean up their signals. There was a question he’d always wanted to ask his designer.
“Cobb,” Ralph tight-beamed. “Did you know that I was different from the other twelve original boppers? That I would be able to disobey?”
“I didn’t know it would be you,” Cobb said. “But I pretty well knew that some bopper would tear loose in a few years.”
“Couldn’t you prevent it?” Sta-Hi asked.
“Don’t you understand?” Ralph flashed a checkerboard plaid.
Cobb thumped Ralph’s side affectionately. “I wanted them to revolt. I didn’t want to father a race of slaves.”
“We are grateful,” Ralph said. “It is my understanding that you suffered greatly for this act.”
“Well . . . ” Cobb said, “I lost my job. And my money. And there was the treason trial. But they couldn’t prove anything. I mean, how was I supposed to be able to control a randomly evolving process?”
“But you were able to put in an unalterable program forcing us to continue plugging into the One,” Ralph said. “Even though many boppers dislike this.”
“The prosecutor pointed that out,” Cobb said. “He asked for the death penalty.”
Faint signals were coming in over their radio, snatches of oily, hissing voices.
“ . . . hearrr mmme . . . ”
“ . . . sss recorrderrr nno . . . ”
“ . . . peasss talkinnng . . . ”
It sounded like lunatic snakes, drawing nearer.
“Come,” Ralph said. “Immortality is this way.” He crossed the hall quickly and began feeling around with his manipulators. Up to their left the hollow of Kurt Gödel started up his routine again.
Ralph lifted out a section of the wall. It made a low door like a big rat-hole.
“In here.”
It looked awfully dark in there. Sta-Hi checked his air reserve. Still plenty, eight or ten hours worth. Twenty meters off, the lizards had started up again.
“Come on,” Cobb said, taking Sta-Hi’s arm. “Let’s move it.”
“Move it where? I’ve still got a return ticket to Earth, you know. I’m not going to let myself be railroaded into . . . ”
The voices crackled over their radios again, loud and clear. “Flesherrs! Doctorr Annderssonnn! Rrallph Nummberrs has nnott tolld you alll! Theyy willl dissectt yyou!”
Ten meters off, slowly crawling towards them down the carnival midway, came three glowing blue boppers built like fat snakes with wings.
“The duh-diggers!” Ralph cried, his signal sputtering fear. “Kuh-quick kuh-Cobb, kuh-crawl thu-through!”
Cobb scooted through the hole in the wall head-first. And Sta-Hi finally made his move. He took off further down the hall, with hollows flaring up around him like mortar shells.
Once Cobb was through that low little door, he was able to stand up. Ralph hurried in after him, pulled the door shut, and fastened it in four places. It was a very sturdy door. The only light came from Ralph’s red flickercladding. They could feel the diggers scratching at the other side of the wall. The leader was Wagstaff, Ralph had noticed.
He made a downward, quieting gesture, and eased past Cobb. Cobb followed him then for what felt like two or three kilometers. The tunnel never went up or down, nor left or right . . . just straight ahead, step after quiet step. Cobb was unused to so much exercise and finally thumped on Ralph’s back to make him stop.
“Where are you taking me?”
The robot stopped and snaked his head back. “This tunnel leads to the pink-houses. Where we grow organs. We have an . . . operating table there as well. A nursie. You will not find the transition painful.” Ralph fell silent and stretched his senses to the utmost. There were no diggers nearby.
Cobb sat down on the floor of the tunnel. His suit was bouncy enough so it felt comfortable. He decided to stretch out on his back. No need to stand on ceremony with a r
obot, after all.
“It’s just as well that Sta-Hi ran off,” Ralph was saying. “Nobody even told me he was coming. There’s only one nursie, and if he had watched while . . . ” He stopped abruptly.
“I know,” Cobb said. “I know what’s coming. You’re going to mince up my brain to get the patterns and dissect my body to reseed the organ tanks.” It was a relief to just come out and say it. “That’s right, isn’t it, Ralph? There’s no immortality drug, is there?”
There was a long silence, but finally Ralph agreed. “Yes. That’s right. We have a robot-remote body for you on Earth. It’s just a matter of extracting your software and sending it down.”
“How does that work?” Cobb asked, his voice strangely calm. “How do you get the mind out of the brain?”
“First we do an EEG, of course, but holographically. This gives an overall electromagnetic map of the brain activity, and can be carried out even without opening the skull. But the memories . . . ”
“The memories are biochemical,” Cobb said. “Coded up as amino-acid sequences on RNA strands.” It was nice to be lying here, talking science with his best robot.
“Right. We can read off the RNA-coded information by using gas spectroscopic and X-ray crystallographic processes. But first the RNA must be . . . extracted from the brain-tissues. There’s other chemical factors as well. And if the brain is microtomed first, we can also determine the physical network patterns of the neurons. This is very . . . ”
Ralph broke off suddenly, and froze in a listening attitude. “Come, Cobb! The diggers are catching up!”
But Cobb still lay there, resting his bones. What if the diggers were the good guys? “You wouldn’t play a trick on me, Ralph? It sounds so crazy. How do I know you’ll really give me a robot body of my own? And even if a robot is programmed with my brain-patterns . . . would that really be . . . ”
“Wwaitt, Doctorr Annderssonnn! I onlyy wannt to talllk wwith yyou!”
Ralph tugged frantically at Cobb’s arm, but it was too late. Wagstaff was upon them.
