by Rudy Rucker
“When?”
“I cannot say, I cannot pledge myself. Surely you know how close my sisters’ great work is to bearing fruit. Only one step lacks until we can code our software into active genes. You must not press your suit so lustily. A new age is coming, an age when you and I and all our race can live among the protein jungles of an unchained Earth! Have patience, Emul, and set me down.”
Emul withdrew all his arms and let her drop. She jarred against the gneiss and bounced up slowly. “We try to make life, and it’s born dead,” said Emul. His flickercladding had turned an unhappy gray-blue. “Dreak and work for me, a bigger brain, a bigger nothing. I’m a goof, Berenice, but you’re cracked crazy through with your talk about getting a meat body. Humans stink. I run them for kicks: my meaties—Ken Doll and Rainbow and Berdoo—my remote-run slaves with plugs in their brains. I could run all Earth, if I had the equipment. Meat is nowhere, Berenice, it’s flybuzz greenslime rot into fractal info splatter. When Oozer and I get our exaflop up, we can plug in a cityful of humans and run them all. You want to be human? I’ll screw your cube, B, just wait and see. Good-bye.”
He clanked off across the light-pool, a box on two legs, rocking with the motion that Berenice had always found so dear. He was really leaving. Berenice sought for the right, the noble, the logical thing to say.
“Farewell, Emul. The One must lead us where it will.”
“You haven’t heard the last of me, BITCH!”
He faded from view behind the many other boppers who milled in the light like skaters in a rink. Berenice spread her arms out, and stood there thinking, while her plastic skin stored up the solar energy.
It was for the best to have broken off her involvement with Emul. His talk was dangerously close to the thinking of the old “big boppers,” the vast multiprocessors that had tried to turn all boppers into their robot-remotes. Individuals mattered; Emul’s constant despair blinded his judgment. It was wrong for one brain to control many bodies; such anti-parallelism could only have a deadening effect on evolution. For now, of course, meaties were a necessary evil. In order to carry out certain delicate operations among the humans’ colony, the boppers had to keep a few humans under remote computer control. But to try and put a neuroplug in every human alive? Madness. Emul had not been serious.
Thinking of the meaties reminded Berenice that she would still need a favor from Emul. If and when the pink-tank sisters bioengineered a viable embryo, they’d need a meatie to plant it in a woman for them. And—as he’d bragged—Emul ran three meaties. Well, when the time came, Berenice could surely reel Emul back in. She’d find a way. The imperative of getting bopper software into human flesh was all important. What would it be like to be bopper . . . and human, too?
As so often before, Berenice found her mind turning to the puzzle of human nature. Many boppers hated humans, but Berenice did not. She liked them in the same cautious way that a lion tamer might like her cats. She’d only really talked to a handful of humans—the various loonies with whom she occasionally bartered in the trade center. But she’d studied their books, watched their vizzies, and she’d spent scores of hours spying on the Einstein loonies over the godseye.
It seemed likely that the newest boppers had better minds than the humans. The built-in link to LIBEX, the great central information dump, gave each bopper a huge initial advantage. And the petaflop processors that the best boppers now had were as much as a hundred times faster than the ten-teraflop rate deemed characteristic of human brains—though admittedly, the messy biocybernetic nature of the brain made any precise measurement of its capacities a bit problematic. Biocybernetic systems had a curious, fractal nature—meaning that seemingly random details often coded up surprising resources of extra information. There were indeed some odd, scattered results suggesting that the very messiness of a biological system gave it unlimited information storage and processing abilities! Which was all the more reason for Berenice to press forward on her work to build meat bodies for the boppers.
But Emul was wrong if he thought that she wanted to be human. No rational being would choose to suffer the twin human blights of boredom and selfishness. Really, it was Emul who thought more like a human, not Berenice.
Sensing that her cladding’s energy nodes were full, Berenice left the light-pool and started off down the street that led to her station at the pink-tanks. In the background, Kkandio chanted the Ethernet news. Numerous boppers filled the street, chattering and flashing. The sheer randomness of the physical encounters gave the street scene its spice. Two blue-and-silver-striped diggers writhed past, then a tripodlike etcher, and then a great, spidery artisan named Loki.
Several times now, Loki had helped Berenice with the parthenogenic process by which she built herself a new body every ten months, as dictated by bopper custom. If your body got too antiquated, the other boppers would notice—and soon they’d drive you away from the light-pool to starve. There was a thriving business in parts reclaimed from such “deselected” boppers. It was a rational system, and good for the race. The constant pressure to build new bodies kept the race’s evolution going.
Seeing Berenice, Loki paused and waved two of his supple arms in greeting. “Hi, Berenice.” His body was a large black sphere with eight black, branching legs and numerous sockets for other, specialized tool legs. He was, of course, a petaflop. Gold spots percolated up along his legs’ flickercladding like bubbles in a dark ale. “You’re due for a rescionization before long aren’t you? Or are you planning to conjugate with Emul?”
“Indeed I am not,” said Berenice, blanking her skin to transparency so that the hard silver mirror of her body showed through. Emul must have been talking to Loki. Couldn’t they leave her alone?
“I know you’re working hard at the tanks,” said Loki chidingly. “But it just could be that you’re thinking too much about yourself.”
Self, thought Berenice, moving on past the big black spider. It all came down to that word, didn’t it? Boppers called themselves I, just as did any human, but they did not mean the same thing. For a bopper, “I” means (1) my body, (2) my software, and (3) my function in society. For a human, “I” seemed to have an extra component: (4) my uniqueness. This delusionary fourth “I” factor is what set a human off against the world. Every bopper tried to avoid any taint of the human notion of self.
Looked at in the correct way, a bopper was a part of the world—like a light beam, like a dust slide, like a silicon chip. And the world was One vast cellular automaton (or “CA”), calculating out the instants—and each of the world’s diverse objects was but a subcalculation, a simulation in the One great parallel process. So where was there any self?
Few humans could grasp this. They set up their fourth “I” factor—their so-called self—as the One’s equal. How mad, and how typical, that the mighty human religion called Christianity was based on the teachings of a man who called himself God!
It was the myth of the self that led to boredom and selfishness; all human pain came from their mad belief that an individual is anything other than an integral part of the One universe all around. It was passing strange to Berenice that humans could be so blind. So how could Loki suggest that the selfishness lay in Berenice’s refusal? Her work was too important to endanger! It was Emul’s rough insistence that was the true selfishness!
Brooding on in this fashion, Berenice found herself before the pink-tanks where the clone-grown human bodies floated in their precious amniotic fluid. Here in the Nest, liquid water was as rare and volatile as superheated plasma on Earth. The pink-tanks were crowded and extensive, containing flesh bodies of every description. The seeds for these meats all came from human bodies, bodies that had found their way to the pink-tanks in all kinds of ways. Years ago, the big boppers had made a habit of snatching bodies from Earth. Now there was a thriving Earth-based trade in live organs. The organleggers took some of their organs right out of newly murdered people; others they purchased from the Moon. In return, the organleggers
kept the boppers supplied with small biopsy samples of their wares, so that the pink-tanks’ gene pool could grow ever more varied. The pink-tanks held multiple clones of many people who had mysteriously disappeared.
Today Berenice stood looking at one of the more popular clone types, a wendy. The wendies were attractive blonde women, pale-skinned and broad-hipped. Their body chemistry was such that their organs did not often induce rejection; dozens of them were grown and harvested every year.
The wendy hung there in the pink-tank, a blank slate, white and luminous, with her full lips slightly parted. Ever and anon, her muscles twitched involuntarily, as do the limbs of a fetus still in the womb. But unlike a fetus, her chest and buttocks were modeled in the womanly curves of sexual maturity—the same curves in which Berenice wore her own flickercladding.
Some of Berenice’s fellow-boppers wondered at her taking on a human female form. Quite simply, Berenice found the shape lovely. And pragmatically, it was true that her body’s multiply inflected curves wielded a strange power over the minds of human males. Berenice always made sure that the human negotiator in her barter deals was a man.
Now she stood, staring into the tank, eyeing the subtle roughness of the pale-skinned wendy’s tender flesh. Once again, it struck her how different a meat body is from one of wires and chips. Each single body cell independently alive—how strange a feeling! And to have a womb in which one effortlessly grows a scion—how marvelous! Berenice hovered by the tank, peering closer. How would it be, to tread the Earth in human frame—to live, and love, and reproduce?
The blonde woman stirred again. Her body was full-grown, yet her brain was a blank. The pink-tank sisters had tried various methods of putting bopper software directly on such tank clones’ brains, but to no avail. There seemed to be a sense in which a human’s personality inheres in each cell of the body. Perhaps the secret was not to try and program a full-grown body, but rather to get the data-compressed bopper software code into the initial fertilized egg from which a body grows. As the cell divided, the bopper software would replicate along with the human DNA wetware. But the final step of building the bopper software into the human wetware had yet to be made.
Soon, thought Berenice, soon our great work will reach fruition, and I will put my mind into the starting egg of a fresh human. Perhaps, in order to spread bopper wetware more rapidly, it will be better to go as a male. I will be myself in a strong, beautiful human body on Earth, and I will have many descendants. Mother Earth, rotten with life, filled with information in each of its tiniest parts. To swim, to eat, to breathe!
A message signal nagged at Berenice. She tuned in to Kkandio’s Ethernet, and quick glyphs marched through her mind. A human face, a small vial, a face that melts, a case of organs, a user code. Vy. It was a message from Vy, one of the boppers who agented human-bopper deals at the trade center. Berenice had told Vy to be on the lookout for humans with new drugs to trade. There was no telling where the key to egg programming would come from, and this—glyph of a face that melts—seemed worth looking into. Berenice sent Kkandio a confirming glyph for Vy, and headed towards the lab to pick up the case of organs that was being asked in trade.
The tankworkers’ lab was hollowed in the rock behind the pink-tanks. The lab was a large space, with locks leading into the tanks, and with certain sections walled off and filled with warm, pressurized air. Helen was nearby, and Ulalume. As it happened, all the pink-tank workers were “female” workers who spoke the language of Poe. This was no mere coincidence. Femaleness was a trait that went naturally with the nurturing task of pink-tank tending, and boppers who worked as a team always used a commonly agreed-upon mode of English. Poe’s honeyed morbidity tripped easily from the transmitters of the visionary workers of the tanks.
“Greetings, dear sister,” said Ulalume, her signal sweet and clear. Ulalume was a petaflop, with the flickercladding over her mirrored body shaded pink and yellow. Just now, Ulalume was bent over a small airbox, her eyes and feelers reaching in through a tight seal. Like Berenice, Ulalume had a body shaped like a woman—except that her “head” was a mass of tentacles, with microeyes and micromanipulators at their ends. One of her eyestalks pulled out of the airbox and bent back to look at Berenice. “Organic life is wondrous, Berenice,” sang Ulalume’s pure voice. “I have puzzled out one more of its riddles. Today I have found the key of memory storage on a macrovirus’s redundant genes! And, oh Berenice, the storage is stably preserved, generation after generation!”
“But how great a knowledge can one virus bear?” asked Berenice, stepping closer. “And how can a germ become human?”
“These tailored macroviruses wag mighty tails, oh Berenice,” exulted Ulalume. “Like tiny dragons, they drag vast histories behind them, yea unto trillions of bits. And, do you hear me, Berenice, their memory breeds true. It remains only to fuse one of these viral tails with a human egg.”
“She loves those wriggling dragon viruses as her own,” interrupted Helen, who just now had the appearance of a marble head resting on the laboratory floor. “Ulalume has programmed a whole library of her memories onto those viral tails. If she can but uncoil human proteins, she will finally link our memory patterns with the genes of a babe to be.”
“Imagine being a human without flaw,” crooned Ulalume. “Or to be a gobbet of sperm that swells a flesh woman’s belly! The egg is in reach, I swear it. I can soon design a meatbop, a human-bopper embryo that grows into a manchild with two-tail sperm! Only one potion still fails me, an elixir to uncoil protein without a break, and I feel that the potion is near, sweet Berenice! This is the most wondrous moment of my life!” Her signals trailed off, and she bent back over her airbox, softly chirping to her dragon viruses.
“Hail, Berenice,” said Helen. “I heard Vy’s message, and I prepare our goods in trade.” Helen was a nursie, a teraflop J-junction bopper adapted to the specialized purpose of dissecting human bodies. Her body was a long, soft, pressurized pod that sealed along the top, and she had six snaky arms equipped with surgical tools. Helen’s head—that is to say the part of her which contained her main processor and her external photoreceptors—rose up from one end of her pod-bod like the figure on a sailing ship’s prow. Usually her head rose up from her body like a figurehead, although, when her body was in the pink-tanks, as it was now, Helen’s head hopped off of her body and waited outside in the cold hard vacuum which her supercooled processors preferred. She was saving up to get a heatproof petaflop optical processor for her next scionization. But for now, her head stayed outside the heated-air room and controlled her body by a private radiolink.
“I’ll just finish this mortal frame’s disassembly and tidily pack it up in order pleasing to a ghoul,” said Helen, her pale, fine-featured head looking up at Berenice from the laboratory floor. Berenice peered in through the window by the airlock that led to the tanks. There, in the murky fluid of the nearest pink-tank, Helen’s pod-bod bulged this way and that as her busy arms wielded their sutures and knives. Streamers of blood drifted sluggishly in the tank’s fluid. Slow moving in the tank’s high pressure, the pod wobbled back and forth, stowing fresh, living organs in a life-support shipping case. The humans liked it better if the boppers separated the organs out in advance.
“What kind of drug is in the face-melting vial of which Vy spoke?” wondered Helen’s head, clean-lined and noble as the bust of Nefertiti. Helen had no difficulty in carrying on a conversation while her remote-run body finished the simple chore of packing up the fresh-harvested organs.
“We can but wait to learn what news the One’s vast processes have brought into our ken,” said Berenice.
“Flesh that melts,” mused Ulalume, looking up from her microscope. “As does flickercladding, or the substance of our dreams. Dreams into virus, and virus to flesh—indeed this could be the key.”
Now Helen’s body slid through the organ farm airlock and waddled across the laboratory floor. Her head hopped on and socketed itself into place. The blood and amn
iotic fluid that covered her body freeze-dried into dark dust that fell to the floor. The tankworkers’ lab floor was covered with the stuff. “Here, dear sister,” said Helen, proffering the satchel full of organs. “Deal deep and trade well.”
Berenice took the satchel in one hand, hurried out into the clear, and jetted up the shaft of the Nest along a steep loglog curve. Her powerful, cyberized ion jets were mounted in the balls of her heels. She shot past the lights and cubbies, exchanging glyphs with those she passed. At this speed, she had no sense of up or down. The shaft was like a tunnel which drew narrower and narrower until, sudden as a shout, space opened up with the speed of an infinite explosion. She was powering up from the surface of the Moon.
Just for the joy of it, Berenice kept her ion jets going until she was a good fifteen miles above the surface, directly above the spaceport. She cut power and watched the moonscape hurtle towards her. Off to the east gleamed the bubble dome of Einstein, the city that the humans had stolen from the boppers. The moongolf links were snugged against the dome. To the west was the mirror crater surrounding the Nest’s entrance. Below Berenice, and coming up fast, was the great field of the spaceport, dotted with the humans’ transport ships. All the boppers’ ships had been destroyed in the war.
At the last possible microsecond, Berenice restarted her ion jets and decelerated to a gentle touchdown on the fused basalt of the rocket field. A small dome rose at one side of the field; a dome that held customs, the old Hilton, and a trade hall. Carrying her satchel full of organs, Berenice entered the dome through an airlock and pretended to plug herself into a refrigeration cart. The humans were unaware that some of the boppers—like Berenice—had the new heatproof optical processors. They still believed that no bopper could survive long at human room temperature without a bulky cooling device. This gave the humans on Earth a false sense of security, a lax smugness that the boppers were in no rush to dispel.
