The Ware Tetralogy

by Rudy Rucker

  “Come, dear,” said Mom. “Open your presents. We only had time to get two, but they’re right here in front of the vizzy in case anyone’s sharing in with us.”

  It felt silly but nice sitting down in front of the vizzy—there were some excited children on the screen just then, and it was almost like having noisy little Ruby and Sude at her side. And Bowser was right there, nuzzling her. Della’s first present was an imipolex sweatshirt called a heartshirt.

  “All the girls at the bank are wearing them this year,” explained Dad. “It’s a simplified version of bopper flickercladding. Try it on!”

  Della slipped the loose warm plastic over her top. The heartshirt was an even dark blue, with a few staticky red spots drifting about.

  “It can feel your heartbeat,” said Mom. “Look.” Sure enough, there was a big red spot on the plastic sweatshirt, right over Della’s heart, a spot that spread out into an expanding ring that moved on over Della’s shoulders and down her sleeves. Her heart beat again, and a new spot started—each beat of her heart made a red splash in the blue of the heartshirt.

  “Neat,” said Della. “Thanks. They don’t have these up in Einstein. Everyone there hates boppers too much. But it’s stuzzy. I like it.”

  “And when your heart beats faster, Della,” said Mom, “all the fellows will be able to see.”

  Suddenly Della remembered Buddy, and why she’d come home, and the red rings on her sweatshirt started bouncing like mad.

  “Why, Della!” said Mom, coyly. “Do you have a boyfriend?”

  “I’m not ready to talk about it,” said Della, calming herself. Especially not to a loudmouth racist drunk like you, Mom.

  “Let’s have some champagne,” suggested Dad.

  “Good idea,” said Mom. “Take the edge off. And then Della can open her other present.”

  Della watched the vizzy for a minute, calming down. Good old vizzy. She touched the screen here and there, and the picture skipped from home to home. Louisville people, not so different from the Tazes. Della even recognized some of them. She had some champagne and felt OK again. Lots of the people in the vizzy were drinking . . . why should she be so hard on her parents?

  “Let’s see my other present. I’m sorry I didn’t bring you all anything.”

  “You brought yourself.”

  Della’s second present was a little seed-packet labelled WEEK TREES.

  “Have you heard of these?” asked Mom. “They’re bioengineered. You know the miniature bonsai trees that the Japanese used to grow? These are the same, except their whole life cycle only takes a week. I’ve been showing them off in the store. They’re amazing. We’d planned to try and mail these to you.” She poured herself a fresh glass of champagne, which killed the bottle. “Get Della a little pottery cup with some potting soil, Jason. And why don’t you twist up a few jays?”

  “Mom . . . ”

  “Don’t be so uptight, Della.” Mom’s painted eyes flashed. “You’ll get your turkey dinner, just wait and see. It’s Christmas! Anyway, you’re the one who’s addicted to that hard-drug merge, little Miss Strict.”

  “AO, wave, it’s heavy junk, Mom, but I took blocker and I’m oxo. Wu-wei, Mom, your rectum’s showing.” A wave of nausea swept over her again and she gagged. “It must be the gravity that’s making me feel so sick.”

  “Let’s wait on the weed till Colin and Ilse get here,” suggested Dad. “You know how they love to smoke. You get that turkey in the microwave, Amy, and I’ll help Della plant one of her week trees.”

  Mom finished her champagne and got to her feet. She forgot her anger and smiled. “I got a boneless turkey this year, Della. They grow them in tanks.”

  “Do they have legs and wings?”

  “Everything except bones. Like soft-shell crabs. Sometimes I feel that way myself. I’ll make lots of sausage stuffing for you, sweetie.”

  “Thanks, Mom. Let me know if you need any help.”

  Dad got a little pot full of wet soil, and he and Della planted a week tree seed. They’d half expected the tree to shoot up and hit them in the face, but for the moment, nothing happened. Bowser sniffed curiously at the dirt.

  “Let’s figure it out,” said Della, who liked playing with numbers. “Say a real tree lives seventy years. Then one day is like ten years for a week tree. So it should go through a year in two and four-tenths hours. Divide by twelve and get a month in two-tenths of an hour. Two-tenths of an hour is twelve minutes. Assuming that the seed starts out in a dormant midwinter mode, then we should see the first April leaves in four times twelve minutes, which will be . . . ”

  “Noon,” said Dad. “Look at the soil in the pot, it’s beginning to stir.” Sure enough, the soil at the center of the pot was bulging up, and there, slowly slowly, came the creeping tip of the week tree. “I think they’re like apple trees. We ought to have some little apples by tonight, Della.”

  “Wiggly!” She gave Dad a kiss. Mom had some pans sizzling out in the kitchen, and the vizzy was full of happy Christmas people. “Thank you. It is nice to be back.”

  “Can you tell me more about what happened up in Einstein, Della?”

  “I had a boyfriend named Buddy Yeskin. We took merge together and—”

  “What does that actually mean, ‘taking merge together’?” asked Dad. “I can’t keep up with all these new—”

  “It’s this weird drug that makes your body get all soft. Like a boneless turkey, I guess. And you feel really—”

  Dad frowned. “I can’t believe you’d do a thing like that, Della. We didn’t raise you that way.” He sighed and took a sip of the whiskey he’d brought out from the kitchen. “You took merge with this Buddy Yeskin, and then what happened?”

  “While we were . . . together, someone broke into my apartment and killed Buddy. Smashed him all into pieces while he was soft.” The fast red circles began rippling across Della’s heartshirt again. “I kind of fainted, and when I woke up, a crazy man called on the vizzy and said he was going to kill me, or frame me for the murder, if I didn’t leave for Earth. He’d even arranged a ticket and a fake passport for me. It was such a nightmare web, closing in on me. I was scared. I ran home.”

  The week tree was a barky little shoot now, with three stubby little branches.

  “You’re safe here,” said Dad, patting her hand. Just then Della noticed that his voice was already slurring a little. Dad noticed her noticing. He gave a rueful smile. “For as long as you can stand us. Tomorrow I’ll take you to see Don Stuart . . . you remember him. He’s a good lawyer. Just in case.” Bowser started barking.

  “Merry Christmas!” shouted Mom in the kitchen. “You didn’t have to bring all that! Jason! Della!”

  It was Jason’s older brother Colin, with his wife Ilse and son Willy. Colin worked as an English professor at the University of Louisville. He was skinny and sarcastic. Ilse was from a famous family: Ilse’s father was Cobb Anderson, who’d built the first moon-robots years ago.

  Great-uncle Cobb had been convicted of treason for building the robots wrong. Then he’d started drinking, had left his wife Verena, and had ended up as a pheezer bum in Florida. Somehow he’d died—it was a little uncertain—apparently the robots had killed him. He was the skeleton in the family closet.

  Aunt Ilse was more like her German mother than she was like old Cobb. Vigorous and artsy-craftsy, she’d hung on to her wandering husband Colin through thick and thin, not that Della could see why. Uncle Colin had always struck her as obsolete, trying to make people look at his stupid paper books, when he barely even knew how to work the vizzy. And when he smoked marijuana with Dad, he got mad if you didn’t laugh at his jokes and act impressed by his insights.

  Their son Willy was a smart but sort of nutty guy in his twenties. A hacker, always fiddling with programs and hardware. Della had liked him a lot when they were younger, but it seemed like he’d stopped maturing long before she had. He still lived at home.

  “Dad, don’t tell them about why I’ve
come back. Say I’m here to buy laboratory equipment for Dr. Yukawa. And tell Mom to keep quiet, too. If she gets drunk and starts talking about me, I’m going to—”

  “Relax, geeklet.”

  Before long they were seated around the dining table. Dad had put the week tree in the center so they could watch it grow. Aunt Ilse offered a Lutheran grace, and Dad got to work carving the boneless turkey. He cut it in thick, stuffing-centered slices.

  “Well, Della,” said Colin after the first rush of eating was over, “how are things up on the Moon? Real far out? And what are old Cobb’s funky machines into?” He specialized in the literature of the mid-twentieth century, and he liked to use the corny old slang on her. In return, Della always used the newest words she knew.

  “Realtime, it’s pretty squeaky, Unk. There’s giga bopper scurry underground, and they’re daily trying to blank us. They have a mongo sublune city called the Nest.”

  “Come on, Della,” said Dad. “Talk English.”

  “Don’t you feel guilty about the boppers?” asked Aunt Ilse, who was always ready to defend the creatures that her father had midwifed. “I mean, they built most of Einstein. Disky, they used to call it, no? And they’re just as conscious as us. Isn’t it really like the blacks in the old South? The blacks did all the work, but the whites acted like they weren’t even people.”

  “Those robots aren’t conscious,” insisted Mom. She’d had a lot of red wine in the kitchen, and now they were all back on the champagne. “They’re just a bunch of goddamn machines.”

  “You’re a machine, too, Aunt Amy,” put in Willy. “You’re just made of meat instead of wires and silicon.” Willy had a slow, savoring way of speaking that could drive you crazy. Although he’d never finished college, he made a good living as a freelance software writer. Earth still used a lot of computers, but all the bigger ones were equipped with deeply coded behavior locks intended to keep them from trying to follow in the steps of the boppers, the rebel robots who’d colonized the Moon. Earth’s slave computers were known as asimovs in honor of the Asimov laws of robotics which they obeyed.

  “Don’t call your aunt ‘meat,’ ” reprimanded Uncle Colin, who liked to flirt with Mom. “The turkey is meat. Your aunt is a person. You wouldn’t want me to put gravy on your aunt and eat her, would you? In front of everyone?” Colin chuckled and bugged his eyes at Mom. “Should I smack him, Amy?”

  “At least he’s thinking about what I’m made of. At my age, that’s practically a compliment. Would you call me a machine, Jason honey?”

  “No way.” Dad poured out some more champagne. “Machines are predictable.”

  “I think Mom’s predictable,” Della couldn’t resist saying snippishly. Her stomach felt really bad again. “Both of you are predictable.”

  “You’re all mistaken,” put in Willy. “Relative to us, people and boppers are both unpredictable. It’s a consequence of Chaitin’s version of Gödel’s theorem. Grandpa Cobb explained it years ago in a paper called ‘Towards Robot Consciousness.’ We can only make predictions about the behavior of systems which are much simpler than ourselves.”

  “So there, Della,” said Mom.

  “But why can’t we learn to coexist peacefully with the boppers, Della?” pressed Aunt Ilse.

  “Well, things are fairly peaceful now,” said Della. “The boppers harass us because they wish we’d give Einstein back to them, but they don’t actually pop the dome and kill everyone. They could do it, but they know that Earth would turn around and fire a Q-bomb down into their Nest. For that matter, we could Q-bomb them right now, but we’re in no rush to, because we need the things their factories and pink-tanks make.” Everyone except Mom was looking at Della with interest, and she felt knowledgeable and poised. But just then her stomach twitched oddly. Her breasts and stomach felt like they were growing all the time.

  “Well, I don’t feel guilty about the boppers,” put in Mom. The alcohol was really hitting her, and she hadn’t followed the conversation at all. “I think we ought to kill all the machines . . . and kill the niggers too. Starting with President Jones.”

  There was a pained silence. The little week tree rustled; its first blossoms were opening. Della decided to let Mom have it. “My boyfriend was a ‘nigger,’ Mom.”

  “What boyfriend? I hope you didn’t let him—”

  “Yes, Della,” said Dad, raising his voice heavily. “It’s great to have you back. More food anyone? Or should we pause for some holiday marijuana? How about it, Colin?”

  “Shore,” said Colin, switching to his hick accent. He gave Della a reassuring wink. “Mah smart little niece. She’s got more degrees than a thermometer! Weren’t you doing something with genetics up there in Einstein?”

  “I hope not,” put in Mom, trying to recover. “This child still has to find a husband.”

  “Chill it, Mom,” snapped Della.

  “That’s . . . uh . . . right, Colin,” said Dad, still trying to smooth things over. “Della was working with this Dr. Yukawa fellow. She’s down here to buy some equipment for him.” He drew a reefer out of his pocket and fired it up.

  “How long will you be staying here?” asked Aunt Ilse.

  “I’m not sure. It might be quite a while till everything’s set.”

  “Oh,” said Ilse, passing the reefer to her husband without taking a hit. She could be really nosy when she got going. “How lovely. Is Dr. Yukawa planning to—”

  Della kicked Willy under the table. He got the message, and interrupted to throw the interrogation off track. “What kind of stuffing is this, Aunt Amy? It’s really delicious.”

  “Meat-stuffing, honey. I was fresh out of wires and silicon. Pass me that thing, Colin.”

  “I have an interesting new job, Della,” said Willy, talking rapidly around his food. He had smooth, olive skin like his mother, and finely arched eyebrows that moved up and down as he chewed and talked. “It’s for the Belle of Louisville—you know, the big riverboat that tourists ride on? OK, what they’ve got there is three robot bartenders—with imipolex skins, you know, all designed to look like old-time black servants.”

  “Why can’t they just hire some real blacks?” demanded Mom, exhaling a cloud of smoke. “God knows there’s enough of them unemployed. Except for President Jones. Not that I want to offend Della.” She reached out and touched the blossoms of the week tree, moving the pollen around. Della, who had decided not to eat any more of her mother’s meal, slipped Bowser the rest of her boneless turkey.

  “This all has to do with what we were talking about before, Aunt Amy,” continued Willy. “They did have real blacks tending bar on the Belle, but they kept acting too much like regular people—maybe sneaking a drink now and then, or flirting with the women, or getting in arguments with drunk rednecks. And if there did happen to be a bartender who did his job perfectly, then some people would feel bad to see such a talented person with such a bleaky job. Guilty liberals, you wave? They tried white bartenders, too, but it was the same deal—either they start fights with the rednecks, or they make the liberals feel sad. I mean, who’s going to take a bartending job, anyway? But as long as it’s robots, then there’s none of this messy human stuff.”

  “That’s interesting, Willy,” said Uncle Colin. “I didn’t know the Belle was your new gig. Nobody tells me anything. I was on the Belle just last week with a dude who came to give a rap about Mark Twain, and those black bartenders didn’t seem like robots at all. As a matter of fact, they kept making mistakes and dropping things. They were laughing all the time. I didn’t feel a bit sorry for them!”

  “That’s my new program!” exulted Willy. “There’s a big supercooled processor down below the deck, and it runs the three bartender robots. My job was to get it fine-tuned so that the bartenders would be polite, but clearly unfit for any better job.”

  “Hell, you could have just hired some of our tellers,” put in Dad. “I don’t know why people still mess with robots after 2001.” 2001 was the year that the boppers
—Cobb Anderson’s self-replicating moon-robots—had revolted. They’d started their own city up on the Moon, and it hadn’t been till 2022 that the humans had won it back.

  “How come they have such a big computer on the Belle anyway?” Colin wanted to know. “I thought big computers weren’t allowed outside of the factories anymore. Is it a teraflop?”

  Willy raised his high, round eyebrows. “Almost. A hundred gigaflop. This is a special deal the city put together. They got the processor from ISDN, the vizzy people. It’s been up and running for six months, but they needed me to get it working really right.”

  “Isn’t that against the Artificial Intelligence Law?” asked Dad.

  “No, it isn’t,” Willy insisted calmly. “Burt Masters, who operates the Belle, is friends with the mayor, and he got a special exemption to the AI law. And of course Belle—that’s what the computer calls itself—is an asimov. You know: Protect Humans—Obey Humans—Protect Yourself are coded into Belle’s circuits in 1-2-3 order.” He gave Della a smile. “Those are the commands that Ralph Numbers taught the boppers to erase. Have you actually seen any boppers, Della? I wonder what the newest ones look like. Grandpa Cobb fixed it so they’d never stop evolving.”

  “I’ve seen some boppers over at the trade center. These days a lot of them have a kind of mirror-backing under their skins. But I didn’t pay much attention to them. Living in Einstein you do sort of get to hate them. They have bombs hidden all over, and now and then they set one off just to remind us. And they have hidden cameras everywhere, and there’s rumors that the robots can put a thing like a plastic rat inside a person’s head and control them. Actually—” Suddenly it hit her. “Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if—” She cut herself off and took a long drink of champagne.

  “I still don’t see why we can’t drop a Q-bomb down into their Nest,” said Mom. The marijuana had brought her somewhat back into focus.

  “We could,” said Della, trying to get through to her mother. “But they know that, and if the Nest goes, Einstein goes, too. It’s a stalemate, like we used to have with the Russians. Mutual Assured Destruction. That’s one reason the boppers don’t try and take Einstein back over. We’re like hostages. And remember that Earth likes buying all the stuff they make. This heartshirt is boppermade, Mom.”