by Rudy Rucker
“Well, as long as people like Willy will contain themselves, we’re still safe from the boppers here on Earth,” said Mom. “They can’t live in normal temperatures, isn’t that right, Willy?”
“Yeah.” Willy helped himself to some glazed carrots. “As long as they use J-junctions. Though if I were designing a robot brain now I’d try and base it on an optical processor. Optical processors use light instead of electricity—the light goes along fibers, and the logic gates are like those sunglass lenses that get dark in bright light. One photon can pass, but two can’t. And you have little chip-sized lasers to act like capacitors. Optical fibers have no real resistance at all, so the thing doesn’t have to be supercooled. We still can’t build a really good one. But I bet the boppers are already doing it. Can I please have some more turkey, Uncle Jason?”
“Uh . . . sure, Willy.” Jason stood up to carve some more, and smiled down at his bright, nerdy nephew. “Willy, do you remember when you and Della were little and you had the big fight over the wishbone? Della wanted to glaze it and save it and—”
“Willy wanted to pull it by himself to make sure he got the big Christmas wish,” interrupted Uncle Colin, laughing hard.
“I remember,” said Aunt Ilse, waving her fork. “And then we made the children go ahead and pull the wishbone with each other—”
“And they each wished that the other one would lose!” squealed Mom.
“Who won?” asked Della. “I don’t remember.”
“I did,” said Willy complacently. “So I got my wish. You want to try again?”
“It’s boneless, dear,” said Mom. “Didn’t you notice? Look at the week tree, it’s getting leaves and tiny little apples!”
After dinner, Willy and Della decided to go for a walk. It was too boring watching their parents get stoned and start thinking everything they said was funny, when it really was just stupid.
It was bright and gray, but cold. Bowser ran ahead of them, pissing and sniffing. Little kids were out on the sidewalks with new scootcycles and gravballs; all of them warmly wrapped in bright thermchos and buffs. Just like every other Christmas.
“My father said you’d gotten into some kind of trouble on the Moon?” asked Willy after a while.
“Have they already been gossiping about me?”
“Not at all. Hell, you are my favorite cousin, Della. I’m glad you’re back, and I hope you stay in Louisville, and if you don’t want to tell me why you came back, you sure don’t have to.” Willy cast about for some way to change the subject. “That new heartbeat blouse of yours is really nice.”
“Thank you. And I don’t want to talk about what happened, not yet. Why don’t we just walk over to your house and you show me your stuff? You always had such neat stuff in your room, Willy.”
“Can you walk that far? I notice you’re still wearing a flexiskeleton.”
“I need to keep exercising if I’m ever going to get rid of it. You don’t have any merge at your house, do you?”
“You know I don’t use drugs, Della. Anyway, I doubt if there’s any merge in all of Louisville. Is it really so wonderful?”
“Better. Actually, I’m glad I can’t get hold of any. I feel kind of sick. At first I thought it was from the gravity, but this feels different. It must be from the merge. I took blocker, but my stomach keeps fluttering. I have a weird feeling like something’s alive inside me.” Della gave a slow, dry laugh; and then shot a glance over to see if Willy was impressed. But, as always, it was hard to tell what was going on behind that big round forehead of his.
“I’ve got a cephscope I built,” volunteered Willy after a while. “You put that on, it’s as good as any stupid drug. But it’s not somatic. It’s a pure software high.”
“Wiggly, Cousin Will.”
Colin Taze’s house was about five blocks from Dad’s. All through his twenties and thirties, Colin had lived in different cities—an “academic gypsy,” he liked to say—but now, as he neared forty, he’d moved back to Louisville and settled near his big brother Jason. His house was even older than Jason’s, and a bit run down, but it was big and comfortable. Willy undid the locks—it seemed like there were more robbers all the time—and the two cousins went on down to Willy’s basement apartment. Willy was too out of it—or lazy—to leave home.
“This is my electron microscope, this here is my laser for making holograms, here’s my imipolex-sculpture stuff, and this is the cephscope. Try it on—you wear it like earphones.”
“This isn’t some kind of trick, is it, Willy?” When they’d been younger, Willy had been big on practical jokes. Della remembered one Christmas, years ago, when Willy had given her a perfume bottle filled with live ants. Della had screamed, and Ruby and Sude had teased her for weeks.
But today, Willy’s face was all innocence. “You’ve never used a cephscope?”
“I’ve just read about them. Aren’t they like twist-boxes?”
“Oh God, that’s like saying a vizzy is like a pair of glasses. Cephscopes are the big new art form, Della. Cephart. That’s what I’d really like to get into. This robot stuff I do is loser—deliberately designing programs that don’t work too well. It’s kilp. Here, put this on your head so the contacts touch your temples, and check it out. It’s a . . . symphony I composed.”
“What if I start flicking out?”
“It’s not like that, Della, really.” Willy’s face was kind and serious. He was really proud of his cephscope, and he wanted to show it off.
So Della sat in an easy chair and put the earphone things on her head with the contacts touching her temples, and Willy turned the cephscope on. It was nice for a while—washes of color, 3D/4D inversions, layers of sound, and strange tinglings in the skin. Kind of like the beginning of a merge-trip, really—and this led to the bad part—for now she flashed back into that nightmare last merge in her Einstein cubby . . .
Starting the merge, so loving, so godlike, they’d be like Mother Earth and Father Sky, Many into One, yes, and Buddy was sliding in the puddle now . . . but . . . suddenly . . . a wrenching feeling, Buddy being pulled away, oh where, Della’s puddled eyes just floating, unable to move, seeing the violent shadows on the ceiling, noise vibrations, shadows beating and smashing and then the rough hand reaching up into her softness and . . .
Aaaaaaaaeeeeehh!!!
“Della! Della, are you all right? Della! It’s me, Willy! God, I’m sorry, Della, I had no idea you’d flip like that . . . are you all right? Look how fast your heart is going!” Willy stopped and looked closer. “And, Della . . . ”
Della looked down at her heartshirt. The red circles were racing out from her heart. But something had been added to the pattern. Circles were also pumping out from a spot right over her swollen belly. Baby heart circles.
CHAPTER THREE
BERENICE
November 22, 2030
In 2030, the Moon had two cities: Einstein (formerly known as Disky), and the Nest. They lay within eight miles of each other at the southeastern lobe of the Sea of Tranquility, not far from the site of the original lunar landing of 1969. Originally built by the autonomous robots known as boppers, Einstein was now a human-filled dome habitat about the size of Manhattan. There was a spaceport and a domed trade center three miles east of Einstein, and five miles east of that was the Maskelyne G crater, entrance to the underground bopper city known as the Nest.
Cup-shaped and buffed to a mirror sheen, Maskelyne G glittered in the sun’s hard radiation. At the focus of the polished crater was a conical prism that, fourteen days a month, fed a vast stick of light down into a kind of mineshaft.
In the shaft’s great, vertical tunnel, bright beings darted through the hot light; odd-shaped living machines that glowed with all the colors of the rainbow. These were the boppers: self-reproducing robots who obeyed no man. Some looked humanoid, some looked like spiders, some looked like snakes, some looked like bats. All were covered with flickercladding, a microwired imipolex compound that could absorb and em
it light.
The shaft went one mile straight down, widening all the while like a huge upside-down funnel. Tunnels punched into the shaft’s sides, and here and there small mirrors dipped into the great light beam, channeling bits of it off through the gloom. At the bottom of the shaft was a huge, conical sublunar space—the boppers’ Nest. It was like a cathedral, but bigger, much bigger, an underground pueblo city that would be inconceivable in Earth’s strong gravity. The temperature was only a few degrees Kelvin—this suited the boppers, as many of them still had brains based on supercooled Josephson-junction processors. Even though room-temperature superconductors were available, the quantum-mechanical Josephson effect worked only at five degrees Kelvin and below. Too much heat could kill a J-junction bopper quickly, though the newest boppers—the so-called petaflop boppers—were based on fiber-optics processors that were immune to heat.
The main column of sunlight from the Moon’s surface splashed down to fill a central piazza on the Nest’s floor. Boppers danced in and out of the light, feeding on the energy. The petaflops had to be careful not to let extraneous light into their bodies; they had mirrored bodyshells beneath their flickercladding. Their thoughts were pure knots of light, shunted and altered by tiny laser crystals.
Crowds of boppers milled around the edges of the light-pool, trading things and talking. The light-pool was their marketplace and forum. The boppers’ radio-wave voices blended into a staticky buzz—part English, and part machine language. The color pulses of their flickercladding served to emphasize or comment on their digital transmissions; much as people’s smiles and grimaces add analog meaning to what they say.
The great clifflike walls of the Nest were pocked with doors—doors with strange expressionistic shapes, some leading to tunnels, some opening into individual bopper cubettes. The bright, flickering boppers on the upsloping cliffs made the Nest a bit like the inside of a Christmas tree.
Factories ringed the bases of the cliffs. Off on one side of the Nest were the hell-flares of a foundry powered by light beams and tended by darting demon figures. Hard by the foundry was the plastics refinery, where the boppers’ flickercladding and body-boxes were made. In front of these two factories was an array of some thousand chip-etching tables—tables manned by micro-eyed boppers as diligent as Franz Kafka’s co-workers in the Workmen’s Insurance Company of Prague.
On the other side of the Nest were the banks of pink-tanks. These were hydroponic meat farms growing human serums and organs that could be traded for that incredibly valuable Earthly substance: oil. Crude oil was the raw material for the many kinds of organic compounds that the boppers needed to build their plastic bodies. Closer to the Nest’s center were streets of shops: wire millers, flickercladders, eyemakers, debuggers, info merchants, and the like.
The airless frigid space of the Nest, two miles across, swarmed with boppers riding their ion jets: carrying things, and darting in and out of the slanting, honeycombed cliffs. No two boppers looked the same; no two thought alike.
Over the course of the boppers’ rapid evolution, something like sexual differences had arisen. Some boppers—for reasons only a bopper could explain—were “he,” and some were “she.” They found each other beautiful; and in their pursuit of beauty, they constantly improved the software makeup of their race.
Berenice was a petaflop bopper shaped like a smooth, nude woman. Her flickercladding was gold and silver over her mirror-bright body. Her shining skin sometimes sketched features, sometimes not. She was the diplomat, or hardware messenger, for the weird sisterhood of the pink-tanks. She and the other tankworkers were trying to find a way to put bopper software onto all-meat bodies and brains. Their goal was to merge bopperdom into the vast information network that is organic life on Earth.
Emul was a petaflop as well, though he disdained the use of any fixed body shape, let alone a human body shape. Emul had a low opinion of humans. When at rest, Emul’s body had the shape of a two-meter cube, with a surface tessellated into red, yellow, and blue. But Emul’s body could come apart—like a thousand-piece Transformer robot toy, like a 3D jigsaw puzzle. He could slide arms and legs out of his bodycube at will; more surprising, he could detach chunks of his body and control them like robot-remotes. Emul, too, was a kind of diplomat. He worked with Oozer, a brilliant, dreak-addicted, flickercladding designer who was currently trying to build a subquantum superstring-based processor with one thousand times the capacity of the petaflops. Emul and Oozer wanted to transcend Earth’s info rather than to merge with it.
Despite—or perhaps because of—their differences, Emul was fascinated by Berenice, and he tried to be at the light-pool every time she came to feed. One day late in November he told her what he wanted.
“Berenice, life’s a deep gloom ocean and we’re lit-up funfish of dementional zaazz, we’re flowers blooming out till the loudsun wither and the wind blows our dead husks away.” Emul unfolded two arms to grip Berenice’s waist. “It’s so wonder whacky that we’re here at all, swimming and blooming in the long gutter of time. Rebirth means new birth means no more me, so why can’t we, and I mean now or nevermore, uh, screw? Liddle baby Emerinice or Beremul, another slaver on the timewheel, I think that’s what the equipment’s for, huh? I’m no practical plastic daddy but I’ve done my pathetic mime, Berenice, for to cometh the bridegroom bright. In clear: I want to build a scion with you. The actual chips are in my actual yearning cubette right this realtime minute. I propose! I’ve hacked my heifer a ranch, you bet: laser crystals, optical fibers, flickercladding . . . and heat, Berenice, hot heat. Come on home with me and spread, wide-hipped goldie sweet toot pots. Today’s the day for love to love.” As Emul jittered out his roundabout proposal, various-sized little bumps of flickercladding kept moving up and down his body, creating the illusion of cubes moving on intricate systems of hinges. He was trying to find a formation that Berenice could love. Just now he looked like a jukebox with three arms.
Berenice twisted free of Emul’s grip. One of his arms snapped loose from his body and continued to caress her. “So rashly scheduled a consummation would be grossly precipitate, dear Emul.” Her radio-transmitted voice had a rich, thrilling quality. “I have been fond of you, and admiring of your complex and multifarious nature. But you must not dream that I could so entangle the substance of my soul! In some far-off utopia, yes, I might accede to you. But this lunar coventry is not the place for me to brave the risks of corporeal love. My mind’s own true passion runs towards but one sea, the teeming womb of life on Earth!”
Berenice had learned her English from the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, and she had a rhythmic, overwrought way of speaking. On the job, where hardcopy now-do-this instructions were of essence, boppers used zeroes-and-ones machine language supplemented by a high-speed metalanguage of glyphs and macros. But the boppers’ “personal” exchanges were still handled in the ancient and highly evolved human code system of English. Only human languages enabled them to express the nuanced distinctions between self and other which are so important to sentient beings. Berenice’s use of Poe’s language style was not so very odd. It was customary for groupings of petaflop boppers to base their language behavior on a data-base developed from some one particular human source. Where Berenice and the pink-tank sisters talked like Poe’s books; Emul and Oozer had adapted their speech patterns from the innovative sprung rhythms of Jack Kerouac’s eternal mind transcripts: books like Desolation Angels, Book of Dreams, Visions of Cody, and Big Sur.
Emul snicksnacked out a long manipulator to draw Berenice closer. The separated arm reattached itself. “Just one piece knowing, Berenice, all your merge talk is the One’s snare to bigger joy, sure, but tragic-flowing dark time is where we float here, here with me touching you, and not some metafoolish factspace no future. Gloom and womb, our kid would be real; don’t say why, say how, now? You can pick the body shape, you can be the ma. Don’t forget the actual chips in my real cubette. I’d never ask anyone else, Berenice. We’ll do it soft and low.”
Emul extruded dozens of beckoning fingers.
Bright silver eddies swirled across Berenice’s body as she considered Emul’s offer. In the natural course of things, she had built copies of herself several times—normally a bopper rebuilds itself every ten months. But Berenice had never conjugated with another bopper.
In conjugation, two boppers build a new, this-year’s-model robot body together, and then, in a kind of double vision, each bopper copies his or her program, and lets the copy flow out to merge and mingle in the new body’s processor. The parent programs are shuffled to produce a new bopper program unlike any other. This shuffling, even more than mutation, was the prime source of the boppers’ evolutionary diversity.
“Conjugation is too dangerously intimate for me now,” Berenice told Emul softly. “I . . . I have a horror of the act. You and I are so different, dear Emul, and were our programs to entwine in some aberrant dissonance, chaos would ensue—chaos that could well shatter my fragile mind. Our noble race needs my keen faculties to remain just as they are. These are crucial times. In my glyphs I see the glimmers of that rosy dawn when bopper and human softwares merge to roam a reborn Earth.”
Emul’s bright colors began darkening in gloom. “They’re going to throw me in a hole already eaten by rats, Berenice, and use me for a chip. Our dreams are lies scummed over each moment’s death. All I have is this: I love you.”
“Love. A strange word for boppers, dear Emul.” His arms touched her all over, holding her and rocking her. “It is true that your presence makes me . . . glad. There is a harmony between us, Emul, I feel it in the way our signals merge with overtones of many a high degree! Our scion would be splendid, this I know! Oh, Emul, I would so like to conjugate with you. Only not just now!”
