The Ware Tetralogy

by Rudy Rucker

  This was too intriguing to pass up. And it was, after all, Cobb’s duty as a computer scientist to look into a development as novel as this. Hell, Berenice could get him another damn hand. He stepped forward, and slithered through the thick folds of the camouflaged door. It snipped off his left hand on the way in, but it didn’t hurt, and his flickercladding sealed right over the stump.

  Cobb looked around, and decided he’d made a big mistake. Who did he think he was, Sta-Hi? This was no mellow Prohibition Era saloon, this was more like a hardcore basehouse—a shoddy, unfinished room with a heavily armed guard in every corner. The guards were orange starfish-shaped boppers like the one he’d seen on the balcony outside. Each of them had a tray full of small metal cylinders, and each had a lethal particle-beam tube ready to hand, in case anyone got out of line. There were half a dozen customers, all with the mirror finish of optically processing petaflops. Cobb seemed to be the only one who’d sold part of his body to get in. He felt as stupid as if he’d offered a bartender fellatio instead of a dollar for a beer. All the other customers were giving the starfish little boxes of chips for their cylinders. They looked tidy and businesslike, giving the lie to Cobb’s initial impression of the place.

  But what was dreak? One of the starfish fixed its blue eyespot on Cobb and held up a cylinder from its tray. The cylinder was metal, three or four inches long, and with a kind of nipple at one end. A compressed gas of some sort—something along the lines of nitrous oxide? Yes. The starfish tapped at a cylinder rigged to a bleeder valve, and a little cloud of patterns formed—patterns so intricate as to be on the verge of random snow. The cloud dissipated. Was there supposed to be some way to breathe the stuff?

  “Not just yet,” said Cobb. “I want to mingle a bit. I really just come here for the business contacts, you know.”

  He hunkered down by the wall between two petaflops, interrupting their conversation, not that he could follow what they were saying. They were like stoned out beatnik buddies, a Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady team, both of them with thick, partly transparent flickercladdings veined and patterned in fractal patterns of color. Each of the cladding’s colorspots was made up of an open network of smaller spots, which were in turn made of yet smaller threads and blotches—all the way down to the limits of visibility. One of the petaflop’s patterns and body outlines were angular and hard-edged. He was colored mostly red-yellow-blue. The other petaflop was green-brown-black, and his surface was so fractally bumpy that he looked like an infinitely warty squid, constantly sprouting tentacles which sprouted tentacles which sprouted. Each of these fractal boppers had a dreak cylinder plugged into a valve in the upper part of his body.

  “Hi,” said Cobb. “How’s the dreak?”

  With surprising speed, the angular one grew a glittering RYB arm that reached out and fastened on Cobb’s left forearm, right above Cobb’s missing hand. The smooth one seized Cobb’s right elbow with a tentacle that branched and branched. They marched him over to the dreak tray, and the orange starfish plugged one of the cold gas cylinders into a heretofore unnoticed valve in the side of Cobb’s head.

  Time stopped. Cobb’s mind cut and interchanged thoughts and motions into a spacetime collage. The next half hour was a unified tapestry of space and time.

  A camera eye would have showed Cobb following the RYB and GBB petas back to the wall and sitting between them for half an hour.

  For Cobb, it was like stepping outside of time into a world of synchronicity. Cobb saw all of his thoughts at once, and all of the thoughts of the others near him. He was no longer the limited personoid that he’d been since Berenice had woken him up.

  Up till now, he’d felt like:

  But right now, he felt like:

  A billion-bit CD recording

  A finite robot

  Shit

  A quintillion atom orchestra

  A living mind

  God

  He exchanged a few glyphs with the guys next to him. They called themselves exaflop hackers, and they were named Emul and Oozer. When they didn’t use glyphs, they spoke in a weird, riffy, neologistic English.

  Cobb was able to follow the “conversation” as soon as the dreak gas swirled into his bodyshell. Indeed, the conversation had been going on all along, and the room which Cobb had taken for crazed and menacing was in fact filled with good talk, pleasant ideas, and a high veneer of civilization. This was more teahouse than basehouse. The starfish were funny, not menacing. The synchronicity-inducing dreak shuffled coincidentally appropriate new information in with Cobb’s old memories.

  One element of the half-hour brain collage seemed to be a conversation with Stanley Hilary Mooney. It started when Oozer introduced Cobb to his “girlfriend” Kkandio, a pleasant-voiced bopper who helped run the boppers’ communications. Kkandio wasn’t actually in the room with them; but any bopper could reach her over the built-in Ethernet. On an impulse Cobb asked Kkandio if she could put him in touch with Sta-Hi; one of the people he’d seen in his godseye view of Einstein had looked a bit like Cobb’s old friend.

  Kkandio repeated the name, and then there was a phone ringing, a click, and Sta-Hi’s face.

  “Hello, this is Cobb Anderson, Sta-Hi. I’m down in the boppers’ Nest. I just got a new body.”

  “Cobb?” Sta-Hi’s phonemes occupied maddeningly long intervals of time. “They recorporated you again? I always wondered if they would. I already killed you once, so I guess we can be friends again. What’s the story?”

  “A bopper named Berenice brought me back. She planted a bopper-built embryo in my niece Della Taze, and Della’s back in Louisville. I’m supposed to fly down there and talk to her or something. Berenice—I just flashed, that’s the name of a girl in an Edgar Allan Poe story. She talks like that, too. She’s weird.”

  “You can’t go to Earth,” dragged Sta-Hi. “You’ll melt.”

  “Not in this new body. It’s an optically processing petaflop, immune to high temperatures.”

  “Oxo! War of the Worlds, part II.”

  “You ought to be here right now, Sta-Hi,” said Cobb. “I’m high on some new stuff called dreak with two boppers called Emul and Oozer. It’s a synchronicity drug. It’s almost like being dead, but better. You know, people were wrong to ever think that a meat body is a prerequisite for having a soul. And if boppers are at the point of being like people, I think we should find a way of forging a human/bopper peace. You have to help me.”

  “Prerequisites,” said Sta-Hi. “What’s the difference between prerequisites, perquisites, and perks, eh, Cobb? I mean that’s where the realpeople are at. Maybe you’re right, I can’t decide just like that. Berenice. And you say that’s an Ed Poe name? Wavy. I’ll come out to the trade center right now. I’ll meet you there, and we’ll decide what to do. And dig it, Cobb, I’m not Sta-Hi anymore, I’m Stahn.”

  “You should make up your mind,” said Cobb. “See you.”

  The image was no bigger than that. Around it was the hypermix of Cobb’s thoughts with the glyphs and spontaneous prose of the two exaflop hackers. Emul and Oozer. And around that was realtime, realtime in which the dreak wore off. Cobb began trying to nail down some facts.

  “You know who I am?” he asked the angular one. “I’m Cobb Anderson, bop, I’m the guy who invented you all.”

  “Oh sure, Dr. Anderson, I know the know you tell told now. We dreaked together, bop, no state secrets here. You’ve been safe in heaven dead ten years, and think you invented me and Oozer. Rip van Winkle wakes and fixes H. Berenice brought you back, Cobb, I know her well. My ladylove, unspeakably sad and contentious. My splitbrain stuttering meatie Ken Doll put the Berenice tanksisters’ bean in your great niece’s sweet spot. Ken’s on the prowl for a brand new gal. So’s I can dad a combo with B. too.”

  “Ah—yeah,” put in Oozer. “The mighty meatbean of, ah, jivey robobopster madness. We’ll wail on it, you understand, wail OUR song up YOUR wall and down in the Garden of Eden, luscious Eve and her countlessly uncounted childr
en . . . phew! Naw, but sure we know you, Cobb. Even before we all blasted that dreak.”

  “What . . . what is dreak?” said Cobb, reaching up and detaching the little metal cylinder from his head. It was empty now, with a punctured hole in one end where the gas had rushed out into his body. Apparently the petaflop body was a hermetically sealed shell that contained some kind of gas; and the dreak gas had mingled in there and given him a half hour of telepathic synchroswim vision.

  “Dreary to explain and word all that gnashy science into flowery bower chat,” said Emul. “Catch the glyph.”

  Cobb saw a stylized image of a transparent petaflop body. Inside the body, spots of light race along optical fibers and percolate through matrices of laser crystals and gates. There is a cooling gas bath of helium inside the sealed bodyshell. Closeup of the helium atoms, each like a little baseball diamond with players darting around. Each atom different. Image of a dreak cylinder now, also filled with helium atoms, but each atom’s ball game the same, the same swing, the same run, the same slide, at the same instant. A cylinder of atoms in Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen quantum synchronization. The cylinder touches the petaflop body, and the quantum-clone atoms rush in; all at once the light patterns in the whole body are synchronized too, locked into a kaleidoscopic Hilbert space ballet.

  “The exact moment, you understand,” said Oozer. “With dreak the exact moment grows out to include questionings and reasonings about certain things in the immediate framework, though just now, all the things we said, all the things I speculated about are so—or the way I did it at any rate—but that’s not the point, either, the main thing relative to Emul is to merge his info with Berenice, though the ultimate design of an exaflop is, to be sure, the true and lasting goal though yet again, be it said, another hit of dreak would, uh . . . ”

  Emul extruded some things like wheels and rolled across the room to get three more of the steel gas syrettes.

  “No thanks,” said Cobb, getting to his feet. “Really. I want to go meet my friend.”

  “Sta-Hi Mooney,” said Emul, handing Oozer a dreak tube and settling himself against the wall. “Your boon companion of yore is a stupid hilarious clown detective. He knows scornful hipster Whitey Mydol, whose lushy Darla I have my godseye on. Ken Doll came on wrong just now. I’ll call in clown cop Mooney, Cobb, you tell him I know what he needs to fill his desolate life with wild light. A blonde named Wendy was his wife, she girlfridayed for you and Frostee, right, Cobb?”

  Cobb remembered. Blonde, wide-hipped young Wendy—she’d worked for him when he’d been running the Personetics scam out of Marineland with Mr. Frostee. She’d been with Sta-Hi that last night on Earth. “Sta-Hi married Wendy?”

  “Wed and dead. There’s a whole bunch of sad and curious clones Berenice sells, and one meat product is the wendies. You tell Mooney that. I’ll be calling him for some mad mysterious mission.”

  Oozer had already plugged in his dreak cylinder, and now Emul followed suit. They kept talking, but in a sideways kind of way that Cobb could no longer understand. He turned and found his way back out through the soft door creature he’d come in through.

  “Coming down already, pinkboy?” asked the wall lozenge. “You can have another bang for the rest of your arm.”

  Cobb didn’t bother answering. He stepped out into the open, and powered up the Nest’s long shaft. It would be good to talk to a human being. He’d decided to give Sta-Hi the map cube, just in case everything got out of hand.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  MANCHILE

  December 31, 2030

  Della’s pregnancy reached full term in nine days. Like a week tree, the embryo within her had been doped and gene-tailored to grow at an accelerated rate. Her parents and her midwife, Hanna Hatch, all urged Della to abort. But Della couldn’t shake the feeling that maybe the baby was Buddy’s. Maybe its fast growth was just a weird unknown side effect of taking so much merge. Admittedly, Della did have some fragmentary memories of Buddy’s killer reaching up into her puddled womb. But, even so, the baby might be Buddy’s. And, what the hell, even if she was wrong, she could spare nine days to find out what was growing in her. Anyway, abortions were illegal this year. Also this whole thing was a good way for Della to show her Mom she wasn’t a kid anymore. Reasons like that; people can always find reasons for what they do.

  The labor pains started the afternoon of New Year’s Eve. Mom was so freaked by all this that she was sober for once. She got right on the vizzy and called Hanna Hatch. Hanna hurried to Della’s bedside. Della came out of one of her pains to find Hanna looking at her.

  “Remember to breathe, Della. In and out, try and keep all your attention on the air.” Hanna was a handsome woman with dark hair and delicate features. Her powerful body seemed a size larger than her head. Her hands were gentle and skilled. She felt Della all over and gave a reassuring smile. “You’re doing fine. Here comes the next one. Remember: pant in, blow out. I’ll do it with you.”

  The pains kept coming, faster and faster, lava chunks of pain threaded along the silvery string of Hanna’s voice. During each pain, Della would blank out, and each time she saw the same thing: a yellow skull with red robot eyes flying towards her through a space of sparkling lights, a skull that kept coming closer, but somehow never reached her.

  “That’s good, Della,” Hanna was saying. “That’s real good. You can push on the next contraction. Bear down and push.”

  This was the biggest pain of all. It was unbearable, but Della couldn’t stop, not now, the baby was moving down and out of her, the skull was all around her.

  “One more time, Della. Just one more.”

  She gasped in air and pushed again . . . OOOOOOOOOOOOOO. Bliss.

  There was a noise down between her legs, a jerky, gaspy noise—the baby! The baby was crying! Della tried to lift her head, but she was too weak.

  “The baby looks beautiful, Della. One more tiny push to get the placenta out.”

  Della drew on her last reserves of strength and finished her birthing. Hanna was silent for a minute—tying off the umbilical cord—and then she laid the little baby on Della’s breast. It felt just right.

  “Is it . . . ”

  “It’s fine, Della. It’s a lovely little manchild.”

  Della and the baby rested for a half hour, and then he began crying for food. She tried nursing him, but of course her milk wasn’t in yet, so Mom fed him a bottle of formula. And another bottle. And another. The baby grew as they watched—his stomach would swell up with formula, and then go back down as his little fingers stretched and flexed like the branches on a week tree.

  His hair was blond, and his skin was pink and blotchy, with no trace of Buddy’s deep mocha shading. It was hard to form a clear impression of his features, as he was constantly drinking formula or yelling for more. Della helped feed him for a while, but then she drifted off to dreamless sleep. She woke to the sound of arguing from downstairs. It was still dark. Dad was yelling at Mom.

  “Why don’t you let that baby sleep and come to bed? Who do you think you are, Florence Nightingale? You’ve been drinking, Amy, I can tell. You’re just using this as an excuse for an all-night drinking session. And what the HELL do you think you’re doing feeding OATMEAL to a newborn baby?”

  There was the clatter of a dish being snatched, followed by loud, powerful crying.

  “SHUT UP, Jason,” screamed Mom. “I’ve had ONE drink. The baby is not NORMAL. Look how BIG it’s gotten. Whenever I stop feeding it, it cries and WON’T STOP CRYING. I want poor Della to get some SLEEP. YOU take over if you’re so smart. And STOP YELLING or you’ll WAKE DELLA!!!”

  The baby’s crying grew louder. Uncannily, the crying sounded almost like words. It sounded like, “GAMMA FOOD MANCHILE! GAMMA FOOD MANCHILE!”

  “GIVE THE BABY SOME OATMEAL!” yelled Mom.

  “ALL RIGHT,” answered Dad. “BUT BE QUIET!”

  Della wanted to go downstairs, but she felt like her whole insides would fall out if she stood up. Wh
y did her parents have to turn so weird just now when she needed them? She groaned and went back to sleep.

  When she woke up again, someone was tugging on her hair. She opened her eyes. It was broad daylight. Her vagina felt torn. Someone was tugging on her hair. She turned her head and looked into the face of a toddler, a pink-faced blond kid standing unsteadily by her bed.

  “Manchile Mamma,” said the tot in a sweet lisping voice. “Mamma sleep. Gamma Gappa food Manchile.”

  Della jerked and sat bolt upright. Her parents were standing off to one side of the room. The child scrambled up on her bed and fumbled at her breasts. She pushed it away.

  “Mamma food Manchile?”

  “GET RID OF IT,” Della found herself screaming. “OH TAKE IT AWAY!”

  Her mother marched over and picked up the baby. “He’s cute, Della. He calls himself Manchile. I’m sure he’s normal, except for growing so fast. It must be that drug you were taking, that merge? Was your Negro boyfriend a very light one?”

  “Gamma food Manchile?” said Manchile, plucking at Mom’s face.

  “He calls us Gappa and Gamma,” said Dad. “We’ve been feeding him all night. I had to go out to the 7-Eleven for more milk and oatmeal. I tell you one thing, Della, this boy could grow into one hell of an athlete.”

  “Hoddog Manchile?”

  “He likes hotdogs, too,” said Mom. “He’s ready to eat just about anything.”

  “HODDOG!”

  Now Bowser came trotting into the room. He strained his head up to sniff at the new family member’s feet. Manchile gave the dog a predatory, openmouthed look that chilled Della’s blood.

  “Have you called the Gimmie?”

  “I don’t see that it’s any of their business,” said Dad. “Manchile’s just a fast bloomer. And remember, Della, you may still be in trouble with the law for that business up on the Moon. You know the old saying: when the police come is when your troubles begin.”

  “HODDOG FOOD MANCHILE BWEAD MILK!” roared the baby, thumping on Mom’s shoulders.