The Ware Tetralogy

by Rudy Rucker

  “Let go him, Mydol,” sang Bei Ng. “He want to talk.”

  Whitey let up the pressure and gave Stahn a violent shove. Stahn flew across the room and landed on a leather couch. His five captors seated themselves as well. For a minute Stahn stayed doubled over, clutching his throat. Play for time, Stahn. You can offer them the map you got from Cobb.

  He peeked up and checked out his surroundings. The room was a luxurious office, with a red bimstone floor and impossibly expensive oak-paneled walls. Bei Ng sat behind a large mahogany desk, with Yukawa in an easy chair to one side. Whitey and Ricardo were squeezed onto the couch shoulder to shoulder with Stahn, Whitey on the right and Ricardo on the left. Mrs. Beller sat in another easy chair, her lovely legs loosely crossed.

  “Hey,” croaked Stahn finally. “Let’s power down. I’m just a middle-aged detective. I’ll tell you everything I know. I’ll tell you my life story, for God’s sake, just keep the ridgeback off my neck.” Ricardo snickered at this, a high hophead giggle. He and Whitey were holding hands across Stahn’s belly, forming a kind of seatbelt. Stahn couldn’t move his arms. “I mean, really, I’ll do whatever you guys say. I don’t know where Darla is, I swear. A bopper named Emul hired me to find out if Darla is pregnant, and if she’d be willing to carry an extra baby. I was all set to offer her $20K. But then she threw merge on me and told me she’s getting an abortion. Emul had a bug in my pocket, so I suppose it’s possible that—”

  “You scuzzy lickchip leech,” snapped Whitey, giving Stahn a stinging slap with his free hand. “She never made it to the Tun.”

  “What Emul offer you?” asked Bei Ng.

  “Money,” said Stahn. “And—and a clone of my dead wife Wendy. I killed her by accident six years ago. The boppers have clones of her in their pink-tanks. Emul said that if I’d do a few jobs for him, he’d get me a wendy.”

  “Very touching,” said Bei Ng, half smiling and then falling into a minute’s reverie. Finally he reached some conclusion and looked over at Mydol.

  “You no worry, Whitey, if Emul want Darla fuck, then either Darla safe or now Darla meatie. We find some way to get her out. Hotshot ISDN surgeons can always fix. I say we go ahead make Mooney volunteer meatie and carry new wetware as per plan. His wendy story make good cover.” Bei smiled broadly and leaned back in his chair. “Is no rush now, is all decide.”

  Suddenly Stahn understood a piece of his merge vision. “What do you mean, ‘We make Mooney volunteer meatie’?”

  “Just for a while,” said Yukawa, arranging the bottom half of his long thin head into a smile. “When things settle down, ISDN can tank-grow a clone of your missing brain tissue and hook it up, just like Bei says. If you like. But the meaties don’t have it bad, you know. I think they live in pleasant tract homes in a bopper-built ecosphere. Ken told Whitey all about it before he died.” Yukawa winked at Whitey.

  “Ken Doll?” said Stahn, more and more confused.

  “Affirmo,” said Whitey. “I chased him down after he zombie-boxed Darla. I killed him slow, and he told me a lot. You’ve been merged a couple of hours, Mooney. Darla disappeared somewhere down in the Markt; there must be some kind of secret door.” Whitey’s face was inches from Stahn’s. “Do you know where the door is?”

  “Uh . . . maybe you’ll have to kill me slow to find out, punk.”

  Whitey took this in stride. “And what did old Cobb tell you after he pulled my mikespike out of your skull?”

  “Yes,” said Bei. “We very interest. Why Cobb want see you before he fly to Earth? Cobb on humans’ side, yes?”

  “Cobb . . . Cobb’s for information exchange. Always has been. He likes the idea of his boppers building people and blending in. But he’s no fool, man, he knows how ruthless the boppers can be. He . . . ” Stahn looked around the room. He was trapped bad. Might as well play his only card. “He gave me an S-cube map of the Nest, along with all the access glyphs. Just in case we need to strike back.”

  “I speak for ISDN,” said Mrs. Beller. “And we do want to strike back. With those gibberlin genes, the Manchildren are going to kill Earth’s ecology. There could be a billion of them in a year, a trillion in two. This time the boppers have gone too far. We are going to strike back, Mr. Mooney, and you’re part of the plan.”

  “The operation won’t hurt,” said Yukawa. “Mrs. Beller knows some expert neurosurgeons working right here in the ISDN building. They’ll take part of your right brain out—less than a third, really—put a neuroplug in, and then you go to the trade center and offer your services to your friend Emul. The scalpel boys’ll go easy on you—you’ll still be able to move the left side of your body, though you will have some disorientation.”

  Stahn tried to stand up, but Ricardo and Whitey still had their two hands clamped together across his arms and stomach. They were strong guys. They had him pushed right down into the cushions. Ricardo snickered and spoke. He had a slight lisp. “You know about slack, Sta-Hi? Like to take it easy, man? Slack means no more yelling from the right half of your head. You going to be very happy, my friend.” He lefthanded a stick of gum out of his shirt pocket. “You want a piece, Stahn? You want to get high?”

  “No,” said Stahn, “I don’t.” This was really happening. “I quit using two years ago. If it wasn’t for drugs I wouldn’t have lost my job and killed Wendy. I was working as a cop for a while there, you know, down there in Daytona after I broke Frostee.” He sighed shakily. “Man oh man, those boppers never quit. I wonder if they’ll still give me a wendy when I’m a meatie.”

  “You’ll be a charming couple,” purred Mrs. Beller. “With half an adult brain between the two of you.”

  “Just like an ex-cop and his old lady,” said Ricardo, happily chomping his gum. “What you say they call those pleasant tract homes, Dr. Yukawa? Say Happy Acres?” Ricardo shook his head in mock wonder as Yukawa guffawed. “You won’t have a care in the world, Mooney man, boffing that fine fresh tank-grown chick. With her brain all blank, she’ll believe anything you want to tell her. You’ll live like a king. When she get smart maybe they make her a meatie, too—I hear they cut out a piece of the left half of a woman’s brain, man—”

  “Shut up, Cardo,” snarled Mydol, digging his elbow so hard into Stahn’s stomach that Stahn gasped. “Don’t talk to me about woman meaties.” He made his voice calm again and addressed Stahn. “So Cobb gave you a map, did he? Now we’re getting somewhere. Is the map in your office?”

  “Kill me slow, punk. Smother me with Darla’s fat whore ass and—”

  The thud of Whitey’s fist against his neck knocked Stahn unconscious. When he came back to, Mrs. Beller was leaning over him with a bulb of water. “Drink this, Stan, it’s just water. You shouldn’t tease Whitey, he’s very upset. He’s worried about Darla.”

  Stahn’s throat felt broken. He could barely get the water down. Some of it went the wrong way, and he coughed for a long time, thinking hard. The question was: what could he get for the map? A chance to escape, at best. Still, just in case, he had to ask.

  “If I give you the map, you’ll let me go, won’t you? You can use someone else for the meatie agent.”

  “No, Mooney,” whispered Whitey. “We’re gonna use you. Bei promised me.”

  “It is for good of the human race,” said old Bei. “Truly, Stahn. You will be hero; you will atone for many sin.”

  “But what good will I be as an agent?” protested Stahn, his voice cracking. “You can’t put a mikespike on me. The boppers can sense them and pick them right out like Cobb did. It’s pointless. I’ll just disappear into the Nest.”

  “Here, Stahn,” said lovely Fern Beller, still standing over him. “Drink some more water. Your voice sounds awful.” Stahn drank deep. Fern’s hands were soft and sweet, oh Mrs. Beller, what type of sex.

  “Whitey and I have something in common,” said Yukawa then, running a hand through his thinning hair. “I loved Della Taze, Stahn, I still do. You know that. She’s all right now, but what the boppers did to her was
wrong. I want to punish them. And I am a bioengineer. I am a very brilliant man.”

  “You always say,” put in Bei. There seemed to be a friendly sibling rivalry between him and Yukawa. “You very brilliant except sometimes you not very smart.”

  “I’ve designed a chipmold,” said Yukawa. “Fern just infected you with it. It’s a bit like thrush, quite opportunistic, and you’ve got it. I don’t care if we lose track of you or not, once you take my chipmold into the Nest.”

  “Max,” interrupted Mrs. Beller, sidestepping the spray from Stahn’s mouth. “Do you really think you should—”

  “Tell him, tell him,” said Bei Ng. “Once we replace his right parietal lobe with a neuroplug, he got nothing else to lose. Stahn going to play ball with us, no problem. Is all decide.”

  Yukawa steepled his fingers and wagged his long head happily. “Chipmold in that water, Stahn, and you drank it.”

  Ricardo cackled joyfully, and even Whitey cracked a smile.

  “What’s chipmold?” said Stahn presently.

  “In general, biotic life can flourish whenever there is an energy gradient,” said Yukawa. “Think of the tubeworms who live around deep-sea volcanic vents. Or lichen growing on a sunlit Antarctic rock. There’s an energy gradient across all the boppers’ silicon chips, and I’ve designed an organism that can live there. Chipmold.”

  “I don’t get it,” said Stahn. “The chipmold will crud up their circuits?”

  “Better than that. The chipmold likes a steady thousand-cycle per second frequency. That’s what it ‘eats,’ if you will: kilohertz electromagnetic energy. For a mold, it’s quite intelligent. It’s able to selectively suppress or potentiate the chips’ firing to enhance the amplitude of the desired frequency. It will eat their heads.” Yukawa threw his arms around his head, shuddered, and then slumped.

  “Spastic robots, my friend,” said Ricardo.

  “Be sure and spit a lot,” said Bei Ng, beaming across his desk. “Spread chipmold all around Nest. Cock leg here and there like dog.”

  “Oxo wow,” said Stahn, more impressed than he cared to admit. Something else occurred to him. “Am I going to have fits?”

  “Who cares, dip,” said reliable Whitey. “Where’s the map?”

  “Don’t worry,” said Yukawa. “In your high-entropy system the stuff’s just like sore throat. And a low-grade bladder infection. It’s quite versatile; I’m not sure what it’ll do to the boppers’ flickercladding.”

  “Come on, Stahn,” drawled Mrs. Beller. “Be a dear and tell us where you hid the map.”

  This was his only chance. “It’s in my office desk. But I fixed it so only I can get it. It’s boobytrapped with a smart bomb.”

  “Clear,” said Whitey disgustedly. “You have to say that, right? They teach you that line at cop school, right?”

  “I don’t care what you think, punk, it’s true. It’s in my office desk with a smart bomb that only I can turn off. The bomb knows what I look like.”

  “AO. Cardo and I’ll take you there. Right, Bei?”

  Bei thought for a full two minutes, as if pondering a chess problem. “Yes,” he said finally. “Go up to roof, get maggie, fly to Mr. Mooney’s building, if he make trouble you can stun. You take Mrs. Beller, too. Very careful, very slow.”

  “I’ve got a stunpatch all set,” said Mrs. Beller, reaching into her purse. She drew out a foil disk, stripped plastic off one side of it, and glued it to the back of Stahn’s neck. “Let him go, boys.”

  Whitey and Ricardo let go each other’s hands and let Stahn stand up.

  “Walk towards me, Stahn,” said Mrs. Beller. “Come here and give me a big kiss.” She pouted her big lips at him and showed the tip of her purple tongue. “Come to mamma.”

  Stahn took a cautious step, and then Mrs. Beller pressed the button of the control she was holding. The stunpatch fired electricity into Stahn’s spine. It hurt more than anything he’d ever imagined possible. He fell twitching to the floor and lay there staring glassy-eyed at Mrs. Beller’s legs. It took a few minutes till he could get back up. One thought dominated his mind: he must not do anything that would make Mrs. Beller press the button again.

  Mrs. Beller, Whitey, and Ricardo ushered Stahn out into the hall.

  “This is the sixth floor of the ISDN ziggurat,” said Mrs. Beller, playing the part of a clear-voiced tour guide. She walked next to Stahn, with Ricardo in front and Whitey behind. Her hips swayed enticingly. “Not everyone knows that ISDN stands for Integrated Systems Digital Network. We’re a petabuck company born of the merger of AT&T and Mitsubishi. ISDN manufactures about 60 percent of the vizzies in use, and we operate something like 80 percent of the transmission channels. This, our Einstein ziggurat, houses labs, offices, and a number of independent organizations—this far from Earth’s scrutiny it’s a case of In my father’s house are many mansions. Most people don’t understand that ISDN has no leaders and no fixed policies. ISDN operates at unfathomable degrees of parallelism and nonlinearity. How else to pay off the world’s chaos?

  “Supposedly, ISDN has been backing Bei Ng’s Church of Organic Mysticism on the off chance that Bei might come up with a workable form of telepathy, but really we’ve just wanted to keep a feeler on the merge trade, which looks to be a coming thing. And of course Bei’s many connections are very valuable.”

  The long hall was lined with room after room of weird equipment. ISDN was so big. It seemed unlikely that anyone could really know what was going on in all the labs. The general idea seemed to be to try and keep up with the boppers, by whatever means necessary. In one of the rooms on Bei Ng’s hall, cyberbiologists were fiddling with probes and petri dishes. In another room, cellular automata technicians were watching 3D patterns darting about in a great mound of imipolex. In still another room, Stahn could see information mechanics disassembling a beam-charred woman-shaped petaflop. Was that the one—Berenice—who’d been killed with Manchile the other day? Stahn wondered briefly how old Cobb was doing; he’d gotten away, lucky guy.

  Suddenly it occurred to Stahn that somewhere in this huge building there was an operating room with brain surgeons waiting for him. He shuddered and turned his attention back to Mrs. Beller.

  “ISDN carefully looks over every major new development with one question in mind,” she was saying. “How can this be used to increase our power and our holdings? Usually we use incremental techniques, but sometimes a catastrophic intervention is required. The Manchildren pose a real threat to our main customers, the human race. We asked all our employees for suggestions, and Bei Ng called up his merge-brother, Max Gibson-Yukawa. Our intervention will be unfortunate for the boppers. Here’s the elevator.”

  The ride over to Stahn’s building was uneventful. Only when they were walking down the hall to his office did his captors show any signs of nervousness. Though they didn’t come out and say so, it was clear that they were wondering just how smart Stahn’s bomb was.

  Inside Stahn’s office, Mrs. Beller took a post by the door. She held out her right hand, with the thumb lightly resting on the button of the stunpatch control. Whitey and Ricardo got back in the far corners of the room, covering Stahn and the desk with their needlers. Stahn stood behind his plastic-topped desk, facing Mrs. Beller and the open office door. Behind him and to the left was Ricardo, behind him and to the right was Whitey.

  “All right, Stahn,” purred Mrs. Beller. “Be a good boy and get out your map. Tell the bomb that everything’s OK.” She caressed the control button with her fat thumb tip, and pain seeped down Stahn’s spine. She deepened her voice, shifting from soft cop to hard cop mode. “Don’t try to outthink me Mooney, you’re a burnt-out stumblebum with no second chance.”

  “Sane,” said Stahn. “I’m ready to spread. Shave my brain and mail me to Happy Acres with my GI wendy, how bad can it be.” He smiled in an ingratiating, cringing way and pulled open the top left drawer of his brown metal desk. “Map’s right in here.”

  Stahn’s perceived timeflow was ru
nning very very slow. The next second of time went as follows:

  Stahn took his hand off the wide-open drawer and looked down at his smart kinetic energy bomb, nestled right next to Cobb’s red map cube. The bomb was a rubbery deep-blue sphere with a reddish eye set into it. It was designed not to explode, but rather to bounce around and hit things. It was polonium-centered and quite massive. Its outer rind was a thick tissue of megaflop imipolex that had been microwired to act as a computer and as a magnetic field drive, feeding off the energy of the radioactive polonium core. The bomb had the intelligence, roughly, of a dog. Recognizing Stahn, the bomb activated its powerful maggiedrive and floated up a fraction of a millimeter, up off the brown metal of Stahn’s desk drawer bottom, up just enough so that Stahn could tell that his good smart bomb was ready to help.

  Over the years, Stahn had taught the bomb to read his eye signals. He blinked twice, meaning “HIT THEM,” and then stared at Mrs. Beller’s right wrist, meaning “THERE FIRST.”

  Silently the bomb began to spin, adjusting its English. Stahn formed his face into a weary, disgusted expression. “How beat. The scuzzass bomb is broken anyway.” He stared hard at Mrs. Beller’s wrist and . . . widened his eyes.

  The bomb flew up, caromed off the ceiling, and struck Mrs. Beller a paralyzing blow on the right wrist. The stunpatch control dropped from her numb hand. The bomb came up off the floor, sighted on Mydol, and did a two-cushion rebound off the wall and ceiling. It caught Mydol solidly in the side of the head. Mydol’s eyes glazed as his head snapped to one side. The bomb came up off the floor and wall, fixed its eye on Ricardo, and set up a gyroscopic spin calculated to accelerate it off the ceiling and into Ricardo’s forehead. The KE bomb was travelling at about 40 ft/sec, or 30 mph—any faster and it wouldn’t have been able to direct its bounces to optimum target.

  The bomb was thinking as fast as it could, but its max flop was less than Ricardo’s.

  Ricardo became consciously aware of the bomb’s violent Superball motion only after it had already hit Whitey, but by then his arm muscles were tracking the bomb. A fast eye/hand feedback loop locked the needler on target. Ricardo zapped Stahn’s smart bomb just before it hit the ceiling.