by Rudy Rucker
“Th—” Krypto the Killer Robot turned and walked off. And GAX began to talk.
“Don’t be hasty, Mr. . . . DeMentis. Or do you prefer your real name?” The voice in his earphones was urbane and intimate, the mad mastermind taunting the trapped superhero.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Sta-Hi didn’t answer right away. The dark mechanical-man remote stopped some ten meters off and turned to stare at him. He could hear his breathing more distinctly than usual. Muzak seemed to be playing faintly in the deep background somewhere. All over the factory, dark remotes had come out of hiding and were straightening up . . . dismantling the dead boppers and remotes, lining up the work-tools, soldering loose wires back in place.
“You’re not leaving here alive,” GAX’s voice said smoothly. “Not in your present form.”
“Fuck that,” Sta-Hi exclaimed. “I push this button and you’re gone. I’m the one in charge here.”
A high-pitched synthetic chuckle. “Yes . . . but my remotes are programmable for up to four days of independent activity. On their own they lack a certain intelligence . . . spirituality if you will. But they obey. I suggest that you reassess your situation.”
Sta-Hi realized then that there was a loose ring of perhaps fifty remotes around him. All were seemingly at work, but all were acutely aware of his presence. He was hopelessly outnumbered.
“You see,” GAX gloated. “We enjoy a situation of mutual assured destruction. Game-theoretically interesting, but by no means unprecedented. Your move.” The ring of robots around Sta-Hi tightened a bit . . . a step here, a turn there . . . something was crawling towards the wires!
“Freeze!” Sta-Hi screamed, gripping the trigger-cell. “Anything else in here moves and I’m blowing the whole goddamn . . . ”
Abruptly the factory fell silent. There were no more sidling movements, no more vibrations except for a deep, steady grinding somewhere underfoot. Sta-Hi finished screaming. There was a little blue light blinking on his wrist. Air warning. He checked the reading. Two hours left. He was going to have to stop breathing so hard.
“You should have gone with Ralph Numbers and Dr. Anderson,” GAX said quietly. “To join the ranks of the immortal. As it is, you may become damaged too badly for effective taping.”
“Why, GAX? Why do you cut people up and tape their brains?” Surges of mortal fear kept gripping Sta-Hi’s guts. Why weren’t there any pills inside the suit? He sucked greedily at the drinking nipple by his right cheek.
“We value information, Sta-Hi. Nothing is so densely packed with logically deep information as a human brain. This is the primary reason. MEX compares our activities to those American industrialists called . . . culture vultures. Who ransacked the museums of the Old World for works of art. And there are higher, more spiritual reasons. The merging of all . . . ”
“Why can’t you just use EEG’s?” Sta-Hi asked. The grinding vibration underfoot was getting stronger. A trap? He moved back a few meters. “Why do you have to chew up our brains?”
“So much of your information storage is chemical or mechanical rather than electrical,” GAX explained. “A careful electron-microscopic mapping of the memory RNA strands is necessary. And by cutting the brain into thin slices we can learn which neurons connect to which. But this has gone on long enough, Sta-Hi. Drop the trigger-cell and we will tape you. Join us. You can be our third Earth-based robot-bodied agent. You’ll see that . . . ”
“You’re not getting me,” Sta-Hi interrupted. He was standing now and his voice had risen. “Soul-snatchers! Puppet-masters! I’d rather die clean, you goddamn . . . ”
KKKKAA-BRRUUUUUUUUMMM
Without quite meaning to, Sta-Hi had pushed the button on the trigger-cell. The flash of light was blinding. Pieces of things flew past on hard, flat trajectories. There was no air to carry a shockwave, but the ground underfoot jerked and knocked him off his feet. Clumsy again, but numerous, the pre-programmed remotes moved in for the kill.
The whole time he had been talking with GAX there had been that steady grinding vibration coming through the floor. Now, as Sta-Hi stood up again, the vibration broke into a chunky mutter and something burst through the floor behind him. A blue and silver nose-cone studded with black drill-bits . . . a digger!
It twittered something oily. A wrench flew by. The remotes were closing in. Without a second thought, Sta-Hi followed the digger back down the tunnel it had made, crawling on his stomach like a shiny white worm.
It’s a bad feeling not to be able to see your feet when you’re expecting steel claws to sink into them. Sta-Hi crawled very fast. Before long, the thin tube they were in punched through the wall of a big tunnel, and Sta-Hi followed the digger out.
He got to his feet and brushed himself off. No punctures in his suit. An hour’s worth of air left. He was going to have to stop getting excited and breathing so hard.
The digger was examining Sta-Hi curiously . . . circling him, and reaching out to touch him with a thin and flexible probe.
A small rock came rolling out of the shaft they had come down. The killer-robots were coming. “Uuuuunnh!” Sta-Hi said, pointing.
“To be rresstfulll,” the digger said. He humped himself up like the numeral “2” and applied his digging head to the tunnel wall near the hole they’d crawled out of. Sta-Hi stepped back. Moments later a few tons of rock came loose, burying the digger and the hole he’d made.
A second later the digger slid effortlessly out of the heap of rubble, leaving no exit behind him. “To commme withh mme,” he said, wriggling past Sta-Hi. “I willl showw you thinngs of innteresst.”
Sta-Hi followed along. Once again he was breathing hard. “Do you have any air?” he asked.
“Whatt iss airr?”
Sta-Hi controlled his voice with difficulty. “It’s a . . . gas. With oxygen. Humans breathe it.”
Sta-Hi’s radio warbled strangely in his ear. Laughter? “Of courrsse. Aairr. There iss plennty in the pinnk-houses. Do yyou needd aairr in the presennt tensse?”
“In half an hour.” The tunnel was unlit, and Sta-Hi had to guide himself by following the blue-white glow of the digger’s body. Not too far ahead was a spot of pinkish light in the side of the tunnel.
“To be resstfull. In hallf a kilometerr iss a pinkk-housse with nno nurrsies. But llook innto thiss one firrsstt.” The digger stopped by a pink-lit window.
Sta-Hi peered in. Ralph Numbers was in there with a portable refrigeration unit plugged into his side. Warm in there. Ralph was standing over a thing like a floppy bathtub, and in it . . .
“Doctorr Annderssonn iss inn the nurssie,” the digger said softly.
The nursie was a big moist pod shaped something like a soldier’s cap, but two meters long. A big cunt-cap, with six articulated metal arms on each side. The arms were busy . . . horribly busy.
They had already flayed Cobb’s torso. His chest was split down the sternum. Two arms held the ribcage open, while two others extracted the heart, and then the lungs. At the same time, Ralph Numbers was easing Cobb’s brain out of the top of the opened-up skull. He disconnected the EEG wires from the brain, and then dropped the brain into something that looked like a bread-slicer connected to an X-ray machine.
The nursie flicked the switch on the brain-analyzer and waddled away from the window, towards the far end of the room.
“Nnow to pllannt,” the digger whispered.
At the other end of the pink-lit room was a large tank of murky fluid. The nursie moved down the tank, sowing. Lungs here, kidneys there . . . squares of skin, eyeballs, testicles . . . each part of Cobb’s body found its place in the organ tank. Except for the heart. After examining the second-hand heart critically, the nursie threw it down a disposal chute.
“What about the brain?” Sta-Hi whispered. He struggled to understand. Cobb feared death above all else. And the old man had known what he was in for here. But he’d chosen it anyhow. Why?
“The brainn patterns will be annalyzzed. Doctorr Annderssonn’
s ssoftwarre will alll be preserrrved, but . . . ”
“But what?”
“Ssome of uss feel thiss is nnott rright. Especially in those much morre frequennt cases where nno nnew harrdware iss issuedd to the donorr. The bigg bopperrss wannt to do thiss to alll the flesherrs and all the little bopperrs, too. They wannt to mellt us all togetherr. We arre fightinng backk, annd you havve hellped uss verry much by killinng GAX.”
Inside the room the nursie had finished. On its short legs it waddled back to Ralph Numbers, who was standing there with misery written all over his flickercladding. The nursie came up next to Ralph, as if to say something. But then, with a motion too fast to follow, it sprang up and plastered itself to Ralph’s body-box.
The red robot’s manipulators struggled briefly and then were still. “Yyou ssee!” the digger hissed. “Nnow the nurrsie iss stealinng Rallph’s sofftware too! No onne iss safe. The warr musst conntinue till all the biggg bopperrs havve . . . ”
A thickness was growing in Sta-Hi’s throat. Nausea? He turned away from the window, took a step and stumbled to his knees. The blue light on his wrist glared in his eyes. He was suffocating!
“Air,” Sta-Hi gasped. The digger lifted him onto its back and wriggled furiously down the tunnel to a safe pink-house, an air-filled room with nothing but some unattended organ-tanks.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Strangely enough, Cobb never had the feeling of really losing consciousness. He and Ralph hurried through the tunnels to the pink-house together. In the pink-house, Ralph helped Cobb into the nursie, the nursie gave him a shot, and then everything . . . came loose.
There were suddenly so many possibilities for motion that Cobb was scared to move. He felt as if his legs might walk off in one direction and leave his head and arms behind.
But that wasn’t quite accurate. For he couldn’t really say where his arms or legs or head were. Maybe they had already walked off from each other and were now walking back. Or maybe they were doing both. With an effort he located what seemed to be one of his hands. But was it a right hand or a left hand? It was like asking if a coin in your pocket is heads or tails.
This sort of problem, however, was only a small part of Cobb’s confusion, only the tip of the iceberg, the edge of the wedge, the snout of the camel, the first crocus of spring, the last rose of summer, the ant and the grasshopper, the little engine that could, the third sailor in the whorehouse, the Cthulhu Mythos, the neural net, two scoops of green ice-cream, a broken pane of glass, Borges’s essay on time, the year 1982, the state of Florida, Turing’s imitation game, a stuffed platypus, the smell of Annie Cushing’s body, an age-spot shaped like Australia, the cool moistness of an evening in March, the Bell inequality, the taste of candied violets, a chest-pain like a steel cylinder, Aquinas’s definition of God, the smell of black ink, two lovers seen out a window, the clack of typing, the white moons on fingernails, the world as construct, rotten fish bait on a wooden dock, the fear of the self that fears, aloneness, maybe, yes and no . . .
“Cobb?”
If he answered then he must not have. That is, if he hadn’t answered, he would have. To say: Help me, Ralph! To say: Whoooooooooooooooah!! To say: Here come de judge!!! To say: Selection principles must occur at every level of the processor hierarchy. To say: Please don’t. To say: Verena. To say: Possibility is Reality! To say: DzzzZZzZZZzZZZZZzzzZzZZZZzzzZZzZzZZZZZzzzzZzZZzZZZzzzZZZzZZZZzzt. To say the noise and information all at once, Lord, just this once . . .
“Cobb?”
The confusion was thicker now, distinctions gone. He had always thought that thought processes depended on picking points on a series of yes-or-no scales . . . but now the scales were gone, or bent into circles, and he was still thinking. Amazing what a fellow can do without. Without past or future, black or white, right or left, fat or thin, pokes or strokes . . . they’re all the same . . . me or you, space or time, finite or infinite, being or nothingness . . . make it real . . . Christmas or Easter, acorns or oak trees, Annie or Verena, flags or toilet-paper, looking at clouds or hearing the sea, ham-spread or tuna, asses or tits, fathers or sons . . .
“Cobb?”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
It happened while he was buying an ice-cream, a double-size Mr. Frostee with sprinkles. The driver counted the change into Cobb’s hand and suddenly he was . . . there again. But where had he been?
Cobb started, and stared at the truck-driver, an evil-looking bald man with half his teeth missing. Something like a wink or a smile seemed to flicker across the ruined face. Then the sickly sweet chiming started up again and the boxy white truck drove off, its powerful refrigeration unit humming away.
His feet carried him back to his beach cottage. Annie was on the porch in back, lounging on Cobb’s hammock with her shirt off. She was rubbing baby oil into the soft rolls of her belly-flesh.
“Give me a lick, honey?”
Cobb looked at her, uncomprehending. Since when was she living with him? But . . . yet . . . he could remember her moving in with him last Friday night. Today was Friday again. She’d been here a week. He could remember the week, but it was like remembering a book or a movie . . .
“Come on, Cobb, before it melts!”
Annie leaned out from the hammock, her brown breasts sliding around. He handed her the ice-cream cone. Ice-cream cone?
“I don’t like ice-cream,” Cobb said. “You can have it all.”
Annie sucked at the cold tip, her full lips rounded. Coyly, she glanced over to see if Cobb was thinking what she was. He wasn’t.
“Whydja buy it then?” she asked with a slight edge to her voice. “When you heard that music you went running out of here like you’d been waiting your whole life to hear it. First time I’ve seen you excited all week.” There was a hint of accusation in the last sentence, of disappointment.
“All week,” Cobb echoed and sat down. It was funny how supple his body felt. He didn’t have to keep his back stiff. He held his hands up, flexing them curiously. He felt so strong.
Of course he had to be strong, to break out of his crate and through the warehouse wall, with only Sta-Hi to help him . . . What?
The memories were all there, the sights and sounds, but something was missing from them. Something he suddenly had again.
“I am,” Cobb muttered. “I am me.” He . . . this body . . . hadn’t thought that for . . . how long?
“That’s good, hon.” Annie was lying back in the hammock, her hands folded over her navel. “You’ve been acting kind of weird ever since Mooney took us to the Gray Area last Friday. I am. I am me. That’s all there is really, isn’t there. . . . ” She kicked out with her bare foot, setting the hammock to swaying.
The operation must have worked. It was all fitting together now. The frantic dash to the pink-house with Ralph. The nursie, the shot, and then that strange floating time of total disorientation.
Under these memories, faint but visible, were the robot’s memories: Breaking out of the warehouse, contacting the old Anderson on the beach, and then moving in with Annie. That had been last week, last Friday.
Since then that cop, Mooney, had been out twice more to talk to him. But he hadn’t realized the real Cobb was gone. The robot had been able to fake it by just acting too drunk to answer specific questions. Even though Mooney had begun to suspect that Cobb had a robot double somewhere, he was naive enough to think he’d know the double on sight.
“There’s Sta-Hi,” Annie called. “Will you let him in, Cobb?”
“Sure.” He stood up easily. Sta-Hi always dropped by this time of day. Nights he guarded a warehouse at the spaceport. They liked to fish together. They did?
Cobb walked into the kitchen and peered through the screen door, holding the handle uncertainly. That sure looked like Sta-Hi out there in the harsh sun, skinny and shirtless, his lips stretched in a half-smile.
“Hi,” Cobb said, as he had said every day for a week. “How are you?”
“Stuzzy,” Sta-Hi said, smiling and tos
sing his hair back. “Waving.” He reached for the door handle.
But Cobb continued to hold the door closed. “Hi,” he said, on a wild impulse. “How are you?”
“Stuzzy,” Sta-Hi said, smiling and tossing his hair back. “Waving.” He reached for the door handle.
“Hi,” Cobb said, trying to keep the tremble out of his voice. “How are you?”
“Stuzzy,” Sta-Hi said, smiling and tossing his hair back. “Waving.” He reached for the door handle.
Music was playing, wheedling closer. Resonant as a film of mucus across a public-speaker’s throat . . . harrumph . . . sweet as a toothache, it’s Mister Frostee time!
Sta-Hi jerked and turned around. He was hurrying towards the white truck that was slowly cruising up.
“More ice-cream?” Annie asked as Cobb opened the door to follow.
The door slapped shut. Annie kicked again, swaying gently. Today she wouldn’t cover up her breasts when Sta-Hi came in. Her nipples were a definite plus. She poured out a bit more baby oil. One of them was going to take her to the Golden Prom tonight and that was that.
Cobb followed the Sta-Hi thing . . . Sta-Hi2 . . . out to the Mr. Frostee truck. The sun was very bright. The same bald man with the half-caved-in face was driving. What a guy to have selling ice-cream. He looked like a thrill-killer.
The driver stopped when he saw Sta-Hi2, and gave him a familiar smile. At least it might have been a smile. Sta-Hi2 walked up to him expectantly.
“A double-dip Mr. Frostee with sprinkles on it.”
“Yeth thir!” the driver said, his loose lips fluttering. He got out and unlatched the heavy door in the truck’s side. He wore colorful sneakers with letters around the edges. Kid’s shoes, but big.
“Thtick your head in,” the driver advised. “An you’ll get it!”
Cobb tried to see over Sta-Hi2’s shoulder. There was much too much equipment in that truck. And it was so cold in there. Frost crystals formed in the air that blew out. In the middle was what looked like a giant vacuum chamber, even colder, shrouded and insulated. A double-dip Mr. Frostee with sprinkles was sitting there in a sort of bracket set one meter back. Had it been that way for Cobb? He couldn’t remember.
