by Rudy Rucker
Jackson looked doubtful. “A truck tried to eat your brain?” He raised his voice, “Hey, Don! You and Steve open it up! See what’s in back!”
“Be careful!” Wendy squeaked, but by then the door was open. When the mist dispersed you could see Don and Steve reaching in and poking around with billy-clubs. There was a sound of breaking glass.
“Whooo-ee!” Don called. “Got nuff goodies in here to open us a Radio Shack! Steve and me saw it first!” He swirled his club around, and there was more tinkling from inside the truck.
The others walked over to look in. The truck was lying half keeled-over. There was a lot of frost inside, like in a freezer chest. The liquid-helium vessel that had surrounded Mr. Frostee was broken and there in the center was a big, intricate lump of chips and wires.
“Who was drivin?” Action Jackson wanted to know.
“It could drive itself,” Sta-Hi said. “I rammed it and made a hole. It must have heated up too much.”
“You a hero, boy,” Jackson said admiringly. “You may amount to something yet.”
“If I’m a hero, can I leave now?”
A hard glance, and then a nod. “All right. You come in tomorrow make a deposition and I might could get you a reward.”
Sta-Hi helped himself to a bottle from the liquor-store window and went back to the car with Wendy. He let her drive. She pulled down a ramp onto the beach, and they parked on the hard sand. He got the bottle open: white wine.
“Here,” Sta-Hi said, passing her the wine. “And why did you say he was your father?”
“Why did you say I was your wife?”
“Why not?”
The moon scudded in and out of clouds, and the waves came in long smooth tubes.
Wetware
For
Philip K. Dick
1928-1982
“One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4,
Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7, Chapter 8,
Chapter 9, Chapter 10, Chapter 11, Chapter 12,
Chapter 13, Chapter 14, Chapter 15
CHAPTER ONE
PEOPLE THAT MELT
December 26, 2030
It was the day after Christmas, and Stahn was plugged in. With no work in sight, it seemed like the best way to pass the time . . . other than drugs, and Stahn was off drugs for good, or so he said. The twist-box took his sensory input, jazzed it, and passed it on to his cortex. A pure software high, with no somatic aftereffects. Staring out the window was almost interesting. The maggies left jagged trails, and the people looked like actors. Probably at least one of them was a meatie. Those boppers just wouldn’t let up. Time kept passing, slow and fast.
At some point the vizzy was buzzing. Stahn cut off the twist-box and thumbed on the screen. The caller’s head appeared, a skinny yellow head with a down-turned mouth. There was something strangely soft about his features.
“Hello,” said the image. “I’m Max Yukawa. Are you Mr. Mooney?”
Without the twist, Stahn’s office looked unbearably bleak. He hoped Yukawa had big problems.
“Stahn Mooney of Mooney Search. What can I do for you, Mr. Yukawa?”
“It concerns a missing person. Can you come to my office?”
“Clear.”
Yukawa twitched, and the vizzyprint spat out a sheet with printed directions. His address and the code to his door-plate. Stahn thumbed off, and after a while he hit the street.
Bad air out there, always bad air—yarty was the word for it this year. 2030. Yart = yawn + fart. Like in a library, right? Sebum everywhere. Sebum = oily secretion which human skin exudes. Yarts and sebum, and a hard vacuum outside the doooooooommmme. Dome air—after the invasion, the humans had put like a big airtight dome over Disky and changed the town’s name to Einstein. The old Saigon into Ho Chi Minh City routine. The boppers had been driven under the Moon’s surface, but they had bombs hidden all over Einstein, and they set off one a week maybe, which was not all that often, but often enough to matter for sure for sure. And of course there were the meaties—people run by remote bopper control. What you did was to hope it didn’t get worse.
So OK, Stahn is standing out in the street waiting for a slot on the people-mover. A moving sidewalk with chairs, right. He felt like dying, he really really felt like dying. Bad memories, bad chemistry, no woman, bad life.
“Why do we bother?”
The comment was right on the beam. It took a second to realize that someone was talking to him. A rangy, strungout dog of a guy, shirtless in jeans with blond hair worn ridgeback style. His hair was greased up into a longitudinal peak, and there were extra hairgrafts that ran the hairstrip right on down his spine to his ass. Seeing him made Stahn feel old. I used to be different, but now I’m the same. The ridgeback had a handful of pamphlets, and he was staring at Stahn like one of them was something in a zoo.
“No thanks,” Stahn said, looking away. “I just want to catch a slot.”
“Inside your lamejoke private eye fantasy? Be here now, bro. Merge into the One.” The kid was handsome in an unformed way, but his skin seemed unnaturally slack. Stahn had the impression he was stoned.
Stahn frowned and shook his head again. The ridgeback gave him a flimsy plas pamphlet, tapped his own head, and then tapped Stahn’s head as if to mime the flow of knowledge. Poor dumb freak. Just then an empty slot came by. Safely off the sidewalk, Stahn looked the leaflet over. OR-MY IS THE WAY, it read. ALL IS ONE!
The text said that sharing love with one’s fellows could lead to a fuller union with the cosmos at large. At the deepest level, the pamphlet informed Stahn, all people are aspects of the same archetype. Those who wished to learn more about Organic Mysticism were urged to visit the Church offices on the sixth floor of the ISDN ziggurat. All this wisdom came courtesy of Bei Ng, whose picture and biography appeared on the pamphlet’s back cover. A skinny yellow guy with wrinkles and a pointed head. He looked like a big reefer. Even after eighteen clean months, lots of things still made Stahn think of drugs.
The Einstein cityscape drifted past. Big, the place was big—like Manhattan, say, or half of D.C. Not to mention all the chambers and tunnels underground. Anthill. Smart robots had built the city, and then the humans had kicked them out. The boppers. They were easy to kill, once you knew how. Carbon-dioxide laser, EM energy, scramble their circuits. They’d gone way underground. Stahn had mixed feelings about boppers. He liked them because they were even less like regular people than he was. At one point he’d even hung out with them a little. But then they’d killed his father . . . back in 2020. Poor old dad. All the trouble Stahn had given him, and now it felt like he was turning into him, year by year. Mooney Search. Wave on it, sister, wiggle. Can I get some head?
Yukawa’s address was a metal door, set flush into the pumice-stone sidewalk. Deep Encounters said the sign over the door-plate. Psychological counselling? The folks in this neighborhood didn’t look too worried about personality integration. Bunch of thieves and junkies is what they looked like. Old Mother Earth had really shipped the dregs to Einstein. Like the South, right, Settled by slaves and convicts—since 1690. 2022 was when the humans had retaken the Moon. Stahn looked at the sheet that Yukawa had sent. 90-3-888-4772. Punch in the code, Stahn. Numbers. Prickly little numbers. Number, Space, Logic, Infinity . . . for the boppers it was all Information. Good or bad?
OK, so the door opens, and Stahn ladders on down and takes a look. A vestibule, empty and gray. To the right was a door with a light over it. In front of Stahn was another door, and a window like at a walk-in bank. Yukawa’s face was behind the thick glass. Stahn showed him the vizzyprint sheet, and he opened up the second door.
Stahn found himself (found himself?) in a long laboratory, with a desk and chairs at one end. The air was thick with strange smells: benzenes, esters, the rich weavings of long-chain molecules, and under it all the stench of a badly-kept menagerie. His host was seated on a sort of high stool by that thick glass window.
It took Stahn a second to absorb the fact that about half the guy’s body was . . . where?
Yukawa’s soft thin head and arms rose up out of a plastic tub mounted on four long legs. The rest of him was a yellow-pink puddle in the tub. Stahn gagged and took a step back.
“Don’t be alarmed, Mr. Mooney. I was a little upset, so I took some merge. It’s just now wearing off.”
Merge . . . he’d heard of it. Very synthetic, very illegal. I don’t do drugs, man, I’m high on life. People took merge to sort of melt their bodies for a while. Stuzzadelic and very tempting. If Stahn hadn’t been so desperate for work he might have left right then. Instead he came on nonchalant.
“What kind of lab is this, Mr. Yukawa?”
“I’m a molecular biologist.” Yukawa put his hands on the tub’s sides and pushed up. Slowly his belly solidified, his hips and his legs. He stepped over to the desk and began pulling his clothes back on. Over the vizzy, Stahn had taken him for Japanese, but he was too tall and pale for that. “Of course the Gimmie would view this as an illegal drug laboratory. Which is why I don’t dare call them in. The problem is that something has happened to my assistant, a young lady named Della Taze. You advertise yourself as a Searcher, so . . . ”
“I’ll take the case, don’t worry. I already checked you on my data-base, by the way. A blank. That’s kind of unusual, Mr. Yukawa.” He was fully dressed now, gray pants and a white coat, quite the scientist. Stahn could hardly believe he’d just seen him puddled in that tub. How good did it feel?
“I used to be a man named Gibson. I invented gene-invasion.”
“You were that mad scientist who . . . uh . . . turned himself Japanese?”
“Not so mad.” A smile flickered across Yukawa’s sagging face. “I had cancer. I found a way to replace some of my genes with those of a ninety-eight-year-old Japanese man. The cancer went into remission, and as my cells replaced themselves, I took on more and more of the Japanese man’s somatotype. A body geared for long life. There was talk of a Nobel Prize, but . . . ”
“The California dog-people. The Anti-Chimera Act of 2027. I remember. You were exiled here. Well, so was I. And now I’m a straight rent-a-pig and you’re a dope wizard. Your girl’s gone, and you’re scared to call the Gimmie.” Most Einstein law enforcement was done on a freelance basis. No loonie ever called in the official law—the Gimmie—on purpose. At this point the Gimmie was a highly organized gang of extortionists and meatie-hunters. They were a moderately necessary evil.
“Clear. Let me show you around.” Long and undulant, Yukawa drifted back into the lab. The low lunar gravity seemed to agree with him.
The closer tables were filled with breadboarded electronic circuits and mazes of liquid-filled tubes. Computerized relays shunted the colored fluids this way and that. A distillation process seemed to be underway. The overall effect was of a miniature oil refinery. In contrast, the tables towards the rear of the lab were filled with befouled animal cages. It had been a while since Stahn had seen animals. Live meat.
“Watch,” said Yukawa, shoving two cages together. One cage held a large brown toad, the other a lively white rat. Yukawa drew a silver flask out of his coat pocket and dribbled a few drops onto each of the subject animals. “This is merge,” he explained, opening the doors that separated the cages.
The toad, a carnivore, flung itself at the rat. For a moment the two beasts struggled. But then the merge had taken effect, and the animals’ tissues flowed together: brown and white, warts and hair. A flesh-puddle formed, loosely covering the creatures’ loosened skeletons. Four eyes looked up: two green, two pink. Faint shudders seemed to animate the fused flesh. Pleasure? It was said that merge users took a sexual delight in puddling.
“How do they separate?”
“It’s automatic. When the merge wears off, the cell walls stiffen and the body collagens tighten back up. What the drug does is to temporarily uncoil all the proteins’ tertiary bunchings. One dose lasts ten minutes to an hour—and then back to normal. Now look at these two cages.”
The next two cages held something like a rat and something like a toad. But the rat’s hair was falling out, and its feet were splayed and leathery. The toad, for its part, was growing a long pink tail, and its wide mouth showed signs of teeth.
“Chimeras,” said Yukawa with some satisfaction. “Chimeras like me. The trick is to keep them merged for several days. Gene exchange takes place. The immune systems get tired.”
“I bet. So the Japanese man you merged with turned into you?”
Yukawa made a wry face. “That’s right. We beat cancer together, and he got a little younger. Calls himself Bei Ng these days. He runs his own fake religion here in Einstein, though it’s really an ISDN front. Bei’s always trying to outdo me and rip me off. But never mind about him. I want you to look at this one back here. It’s my pet project: a universal life form.”
At the very rear of the lab was a large pen. Huddled in the pen was a sodden, shambling thing—an amalgam of feathers and claws. Chitin, man, and hide, and the head had (A) long feelers, (B) a snout, (C) a squid-bunch of slack mandibles, dot dot dot, and (Z) gills. Gills on the moon.
“You’re nuts, Yukawa. You’re out of your kilpy gourd.”
At the sound of Stahn’s voice, the monstrosity hauled itself over to rattle the pen’s bars with tiny pink hands.
“Yes, Arthur,” said Yukawa. “Good.” He fished a food pellet out of his lab jacket and fed it to his creation. Just then a bell chimed.
“Back to business,” said Yukawa, giving Stahn a U-shaped smile. “I don’t know why I’m showing you all this anyway. Loneliness, I suppose. Della’s been my only companion for the last two years.”
Stahn tagged along as Yukawa made his way back to the thick window looking onto the vestibule. A light was flashing over the other door out there.
“Time’s up,” said Yukawa, speaking into a microphone. “The session’s over, Mrs. Beller.” Stahn got the full picture.
“You retail the merge right here? You’re running a love-puddle?”
“That is the vulgar terminology, yes. I have to fund my ongoing research in whatever fashion I can. I sell merge both wholesale and retail. There’s nothing really wrong with merge, you know. It’s terribly addictive, but if someone wants to quit, why, I’m perfectly willing to sell them the proper blocker.”
Outside the window, the lit door opened. Two people stepped out—a wide-mouthed brunette and her funboy. He wore a black-and-white bowling shirt with Ricardo stitched over the breast pocket. She was hot stuff. Their faces looked soft and tired, and they were holding hands.
Yukawa powered a drawer out through the wall. “Same time tomorrow, Mrs. Beller?”
“Feels so rave, Max.” The woman dropped some money into the drawer. She was hot stuff. What type of sex do you like, Mrs. Beller, WHAT TYPE??? She was used-looking, and she had a slow lazy voice and the big soft lips to match. She raked a stare across Stahn’s face and led Ricardo up the ladder to the street. As they left, Stahn noticed that their two joined hands were actually fused into a single skin-covered mass. Hot.
Yukawa caught Stahn’s expression, caught some of it. “They’ll pull apart later, when the stuff fully wears off. In some circles it’s quite fashionable to walk around part merged.”
“How come they don’t look like each other—if they’re merging every day?”
“Dosage control. Unless you set up an all-day drip, merging has no lasting effects. And the drip has to be just right, or you end up as an entropic solution of amino acids. No one can do the gene exchange right but me.”
“Other people have done it. Vic Morrow did it, dad.” Vic Morrow had been a truck-farmer in the San Joaquin Valley. In 2027, he’d hit on the idea of treating his migrant workers to a series of weekend-long mergedrip parties. Once the workers had all flowed together, Morrow would throw a couple of dogs into the love-puddle with them. He was nuts. Over the weeks, the workers had transmuted into beasts, ever more tractable
, ever less demanding. The big scandal came when Morrow had a heart attack and his workers ate most of his corpse and rolled in the rest of it. A month later, the Anti-Chimera Act had passed Congress by acclaim.
Yukawa frowned and fumbled in his desk. “I told Morrow how to do it. It was a big mistake. I owed him money. I don’t trust anyone with my secrets anymore. Especially . . . ” He stopped himself and pushed a folder across the desk. “Here’s the full printout on Della—I already accessed it for you. Last Friday—that was the 20th—I was with Della all day as usual, and at four she left in her maggie. Monday and Tuesday she didn’t come in. I called her apartment, nobody home. Yesterday was Christmas and I didn’t bother calling. I figured maybe she’d taken an extra-long holiday weekend, gone on a party or a trek in the crater. She doesn’t tell me her plans. But now she’s still not here and her vizzy still doesn’t answer. I’m worried. Either something’s happened to her, or . . . or she’s run away.”
Stahn picked up the folder and leafed through it. Focus. DELLA TAZE. Born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky. Twenty-eight years old. Ph.D. in molecular genetics, U. Va., 2025. Same year he’d fled to Einstein. Her photo: a nice little blonde with a straight mouth and a button nose. Fox. Unmarried.
“She was your girlfriend?” Stahn glanced up at Yukawa. His long, thin head looked cruel and freakish. The “universal life form” at the back of the lab was crying out for more food, making a sound midway between a squeal and a hiss. Arthur. It was hard to see why Della Taze hadn’t split like . . . two years ago.
“ . . . wouldn’t let me come to her apartment,” Yukawa was saying. “And she wouldn’t ever merge with me either. We argued about it Friday. I know she was using, towards the end she asked me for it all the time. Maybe that was the only reason she stayed with me as long as she did. But now . . . now she’s gone, and I have to get her back. Track her down, Mooney. Bring my Della back!”
