by Rudy Rucker
Bubba did his best to look noncommittal, and the young man continued.
“Last of all, should you and your companion be up for a numero trois, we have a Mindscape Axis Inverter—a truly enlightening experience for the wealthy connoisseur of healthy highs.” The tuxedoed young man gave a prim smile and turned his attention to the next customer.
Bubba found a soft chair and plopped down. The well-lit dining room spread out from the other side of the dim lounge. There were people at all the tables, some of them tucking into big steak and seafood dinners. Bubba’s stomach rumbled again. Disconsolately he glanced around the lounge. A dark-skinned woman was watching him from a couch nearby.
She was looking through a kind of lorgnette that she had held up to her face. A twist-box. He smiled and waved at her. Her full and finely chiseled lips smiled back from beneath the twist-box. He got up and walked over.
“Hi, I’m Bubba Anderson.” He tried his most winning tone. The woman tilted her head back to look at him, still using the twist-box. “I’m alone,” said Bubba, still smiling. “Would you like to have dinner with me? I’d like to talk to you for a while.”
She set down the twist-box and looked him in the eye. Her eyes were large, with unreadable pupils set into smooth white whites. Finally she favored him with another smile. “Kimmie,” she said, holding up her hand, palm down.
Bubba bent over and brushed his lips across Kimmie’s fingers. “Charmed, I’m sure. May I look through your twist-box?”
“Certainly.”
He sat down next to her on the couch and took the proffered twist-box. A slim titaniplast cable connected it to a staple in the floor. He held it up to his eyes and looked at Kimmie.
Her face took on the appearance of a visage in an animated cartoon. A congeries of fluxdots drifted out of her hair and down over her eyes, silvering them, adding meat to the cheeks and still more heft to the lips. He looked down her throbby neck and at the breast mounds swelling out of her strapless pink silk dress. He could hear his heart going kathump kathump. Kimmie’s dress disappeared, and Bubba’s glance skied down the slope of her smooth belly to the wiry black mysteries of her crotch. He stared and Knew. She was fertile. His penis stiffened.
“Now, really, Bubba,” said Kimmie, plucking the twist-box from his grasp. “You barely know what couth IS, do you, dear? You a country cousin?”
She talked like Geegee. “I’m new in town,” he said, uncertainly. “It’s very cold out tonight, did you notice? Cold and windy.”
“Well, I suppose it’ll get colder before it gets hot. And you’re asking me to dinner?”
“Yes.”
“I accept. But we’ll split the check, and there’s no strings. I fancy I could buy and sell you, Bubba child.”
“Thank you, Kimmie. Have you looked at the new Willy Taze cephscope show? It’s supposed to be about Manchile.”
She countered with a question. “What do you think of Manchile, Bubba? Do you think they were right to kill him?”
“I didn’t see him. But what he says makes sense, doesn’t it? Why shouldn’t humans and boppers begin to merge?”
Kimmie smiled drily. “How do we know the robots won’t screw our genes up so bad that the race dies off? Maybe that’s what they want. I’m all for the Thang’s enlightened egalitarianism, but I do have my doubts about a man who knocks up ten women in a week. Manchile’s nine-day boys.”
She gave Bubba an odd look. Did she know him for a meatbop? Was she some kind of Gimmie agent? His stomach rumbled again. To cover up his confusion he picked up one of the cephscope headsets and put it on. It was a simple band with metal pads that rested on his temples. As soon as Bubba slipped it on, the tape started.
Bubba felt a series of odd tingles all over his body, as if the cephscope were checking out his neurowiring. There were some random sounds and washes of color, and then suddenly the room around him tore into bits. He was staring at a man’s handsome face, and the man was talking in a thick Southern accent.
“In all the different kinds of folks I’ve met, I’ve seen one thing the same—everybody wants the best for their children. Boppers is the same!”
The image cut to the faces of a cheering crowd. Bubba had the kinetic feelings of being in a jostling crowd, staring up at Manchile on a stage. Two shiny boppers hovered overhead—one of them was Uncle Cobb! The crowd got softer and everything grew pink, glowing pink with branching purple vein patterns. Fish darted by. Far in the distance, breakers crashed. Bubba felt himself floating, floating on a wooden raft. The raft scrunched onto the sand of a pitilessly bright beach. A chattering band of apes came running down from the jungle that edged the beach. They poked and probed at Bubba, showing their large teeth. He held up his arms and roared at them. But now he was looking out at a crowd of people, looking out at them from Manchile’s point of view. One of the men in the crowd lifted a particlebeam tube and aimed it. The burning blast blew him into blackness. Spermy white wiggles darted in the black. The squiggles split in two, and the new pieces split and split again, but unevenly, mapping out some kind of design like a circuit diagram or a choice-tree. Behind the branching tree he could see the apes again; the tree was a cage that held him captive. A monotonous male voice recited numbers in his ear, and his hands moved obsessively back and forth, as if he were knitting. Meanwhile his eyes darted up and down the branchings of the cage’s bars—there was a way out if only he could see . . . Bubba had the odd feeling that the design coded up a message just for him, but it was going by too fast, and now the image grew faint and grainy as a vizzyscreen. On the screen there was a woman newscaster talking with a slight lisp.
“Welcome to the evening news for Saturday, February 8, 2031. Tonight’s top story: Half an hour age, fugitives Cobb Anderson and Cisco Lewis were killed in a bloody shootout with Kentucky state troopers on I76. Three officers were wounded, one severely.”
Bubba shook his head and blinked his eyes. The vizzy image stayed put. Pictures of Mamma and Uncle Cobb appeared behind the sleek, fast-talking anchorwoman.
“Cobb Anderson’s petaflop bopper body will be sent to the Einstein ISDN ziggurat for disassembly, while Cisco Lewis’s autopsy is slated for the Humana Hospital, where biodecontamination facilities are available. A local car dealer reports having seen Ms. Lewis’s child, the last of the nine-day meatbop boys known to be at large. He is believed to be a dark-haired adolescent male, five-foot-six, using the name Buford Cisco Anderson. He should be presumed armed and dangerous. ISDN is offering one hundred and fifty thousand dollars for the boy’s body, and Gimmie officers have been instructed to shoot on sight. I switch you now to Brad Kurtow, at the scene of the massacre on I76, forty miles north of Louisville.”
Bubba clawed the cephscope headset off. The tape had ended, and he’d been sitting here staring at a vizzyscreen across the room. They’d killed Cobb and Cisco. He lurched to his feet, and jerked when someone touched him.
“Where you goin, country? That cephtape flick you out?”
He looked down at the black woman . . . Kimmie. “I—I have to go.”
“Maybe I can help.”
“I don’t trust any of you.” He rushed out of the lounge and down the hall, forgetting his overcoat. Only outside did he remember that he’d left his car keys in the coat pocket. Just as well, if Cuss Buckenham had called the Gimmie. In the distance a siren sounded, getting closer. Bubba took off running at top speed. Headlights coming, and the sound of helicopters overhead. He cut into an alley and kept going.
For the next hour, Bubba ran in and out of alleys, hiding from every passing car and ducking the searchlights that probed down out of the beating sky. Finally, just as he could run no further, he found himself in a junkyard down by the Ohio River. He flopped onto the seat inside a dead car’s shell and gasped for air. His strong body’s pulse quickly returned to normal, but now that he’d stopped running, the cold was sharp and painful. He was hungrier than he’d ever been in his life. Peering out through the car’s windowhole, Bubba
saw a fire glowing in a distant part of the junkyard. Straining his senses to the utmost, he picked his way in that direction.
There was a lone man by the fire, which was made out of old tires. Bubba watched him from the shadows, wondering what to do. The lumpy firetender had a mound of vizzies running, with each screen set to a different channel. He was swathed in layers of rags. Bubba could see that he was quite fat. Bubba hunkered there, staring at the fat man, feeling the saliva fill his mouth. He felt around on the ground beside him, and his hand closed over a heavy metal rod. Time to eat.
An hour later, Bubba was just about to start in on the fat man’s second leg. After braining the guy, Bubba had laid him out so that his two legs lay across the acridly burning tires. Once the flesh was cooked through, it had been easy enough to twist the legs off and drag the torso out of sight. Now, after nibbling a whole leg right down to the bone, both thigh and drumstick, Bubba was very full. But who knew when he’d eat again. He stepped up to the fire and looked down at the black-charred second leg. The first one had been on the raw side; this one ought to be better. Beyond the dead cars, Louisville was like an excited anthill, with choppers and squad cars searching for Bubba.
Bubba picked up the leg and began scraping off the blackened crust. He knew that humans viewed cannibalism as wrong, but that was just too bad, wasn’t it, if the humans thought they could kill his father, his mother, and his Uncle Cobb, kill them like diseased rats. Bubba’s Know told him that boppers often cannibalized each other for parts. It made sense. What could be a better source of body-building chemicals than a body? But, yes, he Knew it was wrong, murder was always wrong, and the watchman had made such a sad noise as he died.
Here and now, all this worrying was quite abstract. Here and now it was eat or die. With the testosterone and the gibberlin raging through his tissues, Bubba had the hunger of a werewolf. He broke the leg in two at the knee joint and bit into the crisp calf. He hunkered there by the fire, eating and enjoying the warmth.
The idyllic times at Churchill Downs already seemed like a very long time ago. Even La Mirage Health Club seemed like a long time ago. Bubba’s mind was right up in the present, wondering where he’d hide next. It wouldn’t do to be found with the half-eaten body of a junkyard watchman. It would give people a bad impression of the boppers; it would harm the Thang.
The mound of vizzies by the fire was full of news about him and the others. The same news over and over; the excited human ants rub-rubbing their info feelers. Luther and Geegee had been arrested. Willy Taze was going on trial tomorrow on a treason charge. Kimmie Karroll, wealthy socialite, reported having met Bubba at La Mirage. There was a strict emergency curfew in effect; and all ISDN and Gimmie officers had been instructed to shoot on sight.
A helicopter racketted right overhead, searchlight blazing. It came in so fast and low that Bubba barely had time to throw himself under the watchman’s beat-up pickup nearby. The helicopter hovered, examining the fire. The thigh was still there on the ground, and most of the calf. Bubba wished he’d thought of taking off the shoe; the shoe made it too obvious.
BBBBDBDBDBDBBTKTKTK.
Automatic weapons fire. They were shooting down at the junkyard, in circles spreading out from the fire. When the bullets began pinging into the bed of the pickup, Bubba grew frantic. He scrunched up under the truck’s engine block for protection. The helicopter kept shooting the pickup. Maybe they’d spotted him before coming in.
The tire fire was at the edge of a slope leading down to the frozen Ohio River. The pickup was facing that way. Down there would be better than up here. Bubba got on his back and grabbed the pickup’s front axles with his hands. With the fresh food in him, he felt very strong. He dug his heels into the ground and pushed with all his might. Slowly the truck’s mass gave, and then, all at once, Bubba and the truck were bouncing down the steep bank. The hovering gunship followed right along, pouring its full firepower down onto the truck. A bullet wormed past the truck’s driveshaft and struck Bubba heavily in his crotch . . . oh . . . and then . . . CRASH . . . Bubba and the truck smashed into the ice of the river . . . and fell through.
The water was cold dark death, but it was safety, too. Bubba’s body filled with adrenochrome and the pain in his groin went numb. He could last several minutes down here. He pushed free of the truck and swam downstream, staying just below the surface of the ice.
CHAPTER TWELVE
EMUL
February 22, 2031
Emul was very depressed. Everything was going wrong, up here and down on Earth. Berenice was dead and no one had gotten around to making her a new body. Emul wanted to find a way to put Berenice’s software directly onto a wendy, as she’d always wanted, but he couldn’t make it click.
None of the other boppers, not even Berenice’s weird sisters, felt like helping him bring Berenice back, even as a petaflop, because, just now, Berenice’s software was in disgrace. Her blitzkrieg program for a human/bopper fusion had wretchedly crashed. With the disappearance two weeks ago of Bubba, Manchile’s sole surviving son, the boppers were left with nothing but bad publicity.
Berenice had hatched her plan on her own, though Emul had gotten her to explain it before he’d assented to have his meatie Ken Doll plant Berenice’s handmade seed in Della Taze. The plan had gone like this: (1) Assemble a wholly artificial human-compatible embryo, the future scion Manchile. (2) Wetware-code the embryo’s DNA to produce gibberlin plasmids so as to speed up the scion’s growth and sexual activity. (3) Software-code the embryo’s RNA with the Know—which consisted of a terabit of Berenice’s info about Earth, Moon, and her plans for the scion. As well as carrying a kind of bopper consciousness, the Know was intended to serve as a hormone-triggered mindtool-kit to compensate for the short-lived scion’s lack of experiential programming. (4) Plant the bopper-built embryo in a woman’s womb. (5) Force the woman to travel to Earth. (6) The scion Manchile was programmed to reproduce, start a religion, and to get himself assassinated, thereby initiating class warfare on Earth. (7) Wait through the ensuing chaos for Manchile’s descendants to ripple out over Earth. Side by side with the victorious human underclass, the meatbops would welcome the true boppers to their lovely planet!
Things had started to go wrong the instant Manchile had gone public. Although some radical humans did have a certain sympathy for Manchile’s Thang, very few of them felt strongly enough to act on their sympathies, and most of these were now in jail. The Gimmie had justified their brutal repression by presenting Manchile and the nine-day boys as an invasive social cancer. The final, debilitating propaganda battle had been lost when the fleshers heard about Bubba eating the bum—a typically baroque Berenice touch. If the humans had been able to find Bubba’s body they would have torn it into shreds.
Even now, two weeks after the fact, with the crisis apparently over, ISDN was still keeping the antibopper propaganda drums beating. The bum, or watchman, or whatever he’d been, had become a human race-hero; his picture was everywhere and there were dramas about him; his name was Jimmy Doan. “Avenge Jimmy Doan,” the humans liked to say now, “How many robots is one Jimmy Doan worth?” Maybe a worn-out gigaflop with no cladding, was Emul’s opinion, but no one was asking him or any other bopper for input.
Emul had some suspicions about ISDN’s real motives for keeping up the frenzy. In many ways, ISDN was like one of the old, multibodied big boppers. Emul had reason to believe that ISDN was beating the drums for business purposes. Most obviously, the continuing hysteria increased ISDN viewership. More subtly, the increased security measures at the trade center had greatly curtailed human/bopper trade, which had the effect of inflating prices and increasing the profit per item to be made by ISDN’s middlemen.
Some hotheaded fleshers were talking about evacuating Einstein and cleaning out the Nest once and for all. But Emul was sure that ISDN had no intention of leaving the Moon; there was still so much money to be made. Surely the boppers were too sexy to exterminate. The apey jackdaw fleshers had an e
ndless appetite for the tricks that boppers could do.
Instead of any all-out attack, the humans had been launching a number of commando raids on the Nest this week. Just yesterday, Emul had been forced to dynamite the Little Kidder Toys entrance to his tunnel after losing his favorite two meaties in a flesher terror raid there. A gang of ridgebacks, led by Darla’s husband, Whitey Mydol, had burst into the store and had shot it out with Rainbow and Berdoo. Rainbow and Berdoo had been meaties for years, and Emul had been proud to own them. They’d cost him plenty. It had hurt to see them go down; to watch from inside their heads. They’d done their best, but the plaguey communications links were all staticky and unreliable these days; it seemed like everyone’s equipment was wearing out at once. It had hurt to lose to Berdoo, and to make things worse, the combatative Mydol had escaped alive, even though Emul had blown up the tunnel just as Mydol entered. Mydol had lucked out and had stood in just the right place. All the luck was running the wrong way, and everything was going screwy.
Another screwy thing that Emul wondered about off and on was this character Stahn Mooney, a slushed clown detective whom he’d hired to help with the kidnapping of Darla last month. The evening of the kidnapping, Mooney, for reasons unknown, got a partial right hemispherectomy, had a rat-compatible neuroplug installed, and phoned Emul up from the trade center, offering himself as a voluntary meatie. Mooney’s body was strong, and his left brain glib, so business sense had dictated that Emul accept the offer. Apparently Mooney had taken Emul’s promise of a free wendy too much to heart, and he arrived at the Nest with some crazed notion that a community of meaties lived together in a place called Happy Acres, when in fact there were at most five or six meatie-owners in all the Nest, most of them involved with the dreak and amine trades. Emul had hired him all right, but something about Mooney stank—most of all the fact that there were no godseye records of what he’d done after Darla merged him down in the Mews. As soon as Emul had installed Mooney’s rat, he wasted no time in selling the guy to Helen, Berenice’s waddling pink-tank sister, who had ample use for a flesh tankworker. Emul had gotten a nice price out of Helen, enough for four tubes of dreak; and Mooney seemed happy enough playing with the blank wendy Helen gave him; but the whole thing still bothered Emul. It stank.
