by Rudy Rucker
Emul shifted into realtime and looked around his laboratory. It was a low rock-walled room twenty by forty feet. Half the room was filled with Oozer’s flickercladding vats. Formerly a flickercladding designer, Oozer was now busy trying to develop a totally limp computer with petaflop capabilities. Most flickercladding was already capable of petaflop thought processes—on a limpware basis—and Oozer felt he should be able to make the stuff function at these high levels independently of any J-junction or optical CPU hardware at all. Oozer was known for such autonomous limpware designs as the kiloflop heartshirt and the megaflop smart KE bomb.
Emul’s jumbled end of the room had a hardened glass panel and airlock set into one of the walls. The panel showed Darla’s room; she spent most of her time lying on her bed and watching the vizzy. Like all the humans, she was in an ugly mood these days. Earlier today, when Emul had entered her quarters, she’d threatened to do bellyflops off her bed until she aborted. He’d had to talk to her for a long time. He’d ended up promising to let her out early if she would promise to fly to Earth. He was supposed to be working out the details right now, though he didn’t feel like it. He didn’t feel like doing much of anything these days; he seemed to have a serious hardware problem.
His hardware problem was the greatest of Emul’s worries—above and beyond Darla, Stahn Mooney, Whitey Mydol, Berenice, and ISDN’s jingoistic war drumming. There was a buzz in Emul’s system. At first he’d thought it was from too much dreak, and he’d given the stuff up almost entirely. But the buzz just got worse. Then he’d thought it might be in his flickercladding, so he’d acid-stripped his imipolex all off and gotten himself recoated with a state-of-the-art Happy Cloak built by Oozer. The buzz was no better. It was a CPU problem of some sort, a breakdown in perfectly reversible behavior. The primary symptom was that more and more often Emul’s thoughts would be muddled by rhythmic bursts of kilohertz noise. It was possible to think around the thousand spikes a second, but it was debilitating. Apparently Emul needed a whole new body.
Just now Emul was in his rest position—that of an RYB cube with a few sketchy manipulators and sensor stalks. He was resting on the floor in front of his thinking desk, which served as a communications terminal and as a supplemental memory device—much like a businessman’s file cabinets and floppy disks.
Four treasured S-cubes sat out on Emul’s desk: brown, red, green, and gold. These hard and durable holostorage devices coded up the complete softwares of four boppers. There were Oozer’s and Emul’s S-cubes, of course, updated as far as yesterday. And there was a recent cube of Kkandio, Oozer’s sometime mate, a suave boppette who worked the Ethernet. She and Oozer had two scions between them. Most important of all, there was dear Berenice’s S-cube. Emul had used a copy of it to blend with his own software when he’d programmed the girl embryo he’d put in Darla’s womb. He wanted to build a new petaflop for Berenice, but right now it felt like he, Emul, needed a new body worse than anyone.
Emul sent signals in and out of his desk, flipping though his various internal and external memories: his flickercladding mode, his hereditary RAM, his realtime randomization, the joint bopper godseye, his inner godseye, his flowchart history, and all the detailed and cumbersome speculations that he’d dumped into his desk’s limpware storage devices.
Emul was trying to decide if there were any hope of getting an exaflop system up in the next couple of weeks. Two months ago, when he and Oozer had been able to afford a lot of dreak, the exaflop had seemed very near. Indeed, Emul had half-expected his next body to be an operational, though experimental, exaflop based on a novel quantum clone string-theoretic memory system. But now, soberly looking over his records, Emul realized that any exaflop was still years away. Looking at his credit holdings, he saw that he didn’t really have enough money for a new petaflop, either, and that, as a matter of fact, a repo teraflop was going to be about the best he could swing.
His worry session was interrupted by Oozer, who came stumping awkwardly down to his end of the lab, gesturing back towards his vats.
“Oh, ah, Emul, some off brands of imipolex in there; the stuff is letting itself go.”
“I got the fear of eerie death standing ankle-deep around me, Oozer,” said Emul unhappily. “The buzz is so much worser stacks in my thinker.”
“I can’t—at any rate I keep saying ‘at any rate’—I don’t mean to say that, but I do now know your kilohertz buzz. It hurts. We’re sick, Emul. The cladding’s sick, too.”
“Plague,” said Emul, jumping to a conclusion. “Flesher plague on both our houses.”
He turned to his desk and made some calls. Starzz, who ran the dreakhouse. Helen, to whom he’d sold that meatie three weeks back. Wigglesworth, the digger who was supposed to fix Emul’s tunnel. Oozer’s girlfriend Kkandio, voice of the Ethernet.
Sure enough, none of them was feeling too well. They each had a hardware buzz. They were relieved and then frightened to hear that others had the same problem. Emul told them to spread the word.
He and Oozer looked at each other, thinking. The desk’s signal buzzed and sputtered at a steady kilohertz cycle.
“Discover to recover,” said Oozer, running a thick gout of his flickercladding over to the desk. Little tools formed out of his warts, and in minutes he had the desk’s CPU chips uncovered. “Dr. Benway letting the clutch out as fast as possible, you know, ‘Whose lab tests?!?’” Oozer peered and probed, muttering his bepop English all the while. “Which would break the driveshaft, see, ‘cause the universal joint can’t but—Emul! Look at this!”
Emul put a microeye down by the desk’s chips. The chips were oddly spotted and discolored by small—he looked closer—colonies of organisms like . . . mold cultures in a petri dish. All their chips were getting infected with a biological mold, a fuzzy gray-yellow sludge that fed on—he stuck an ammeter wire into one of the mold spots—one thousand cycles per second. The fleshers had done it . . .
“Well, I’ll tell you this, I don’t feel very intelligent . . . anymore, at times, for a long time . . . the cladding’s full of nodes, Emul, come see.” Oozer wheeled around in a jerky circle.
Watching him, Emul realized that his old friend was shaking all over. Oozer’s limbs were moving jerkily, as if they longed to stutter to a halt. But the bopper drove himself forward and pulled a big sheet of plastic out of the nearest vat. The thick plastic flopped to the floor and formed itself into a mound. It looked unlike any flickercladding Emul had ever seen. Normal flickercladding was dumb: left on its own, it did little more than run a low-complexity cellular-automaton pattern. If you disturbed flickercladding—by touching it, by shining light on it, or by feeding it signals through its microprobes—then its pattern would react. But ordinarily, all by itself, flickercladding was not much to look at. This new stuff was different; it was transparent, showing three-dimensional patterns of an amazing complexity. The stuff’s pattern-flow seemed to be coordinated by a number of bright, pulsing nodes—mold spots!
All of a sudden Oozer’s trembling got much more violent. The bopper drew all his arms and sensors in, forming himself into a tight pod. The Oozer pod huddled on the floor, looking almost like the new mound of flickercladding, all bright and spotty. Emul signaled Oozer, but got only a buzz in response.
Emul’s own buzzing felt worse and worse, and now it was like his willpower was cut out, and the more he tried to find it, the worse it got, to try and find his self. He looked down at his box and noticed bright mold spots in his own flickercladding . . . bright mold sucking out his battery-juice too f-f-f-fast . . . h-h-h-h-e s-s-s-sank d-d-d-down.
And lay there like a shiny chrysalis.
The lab was still, with nothing moving but Darla, anxiously peering out through the glass of her sealed room.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
HAPPY ACRES
February 24, 2031
Stahn blinked and tried to stand up. But his left leg was numb and floppy, as was his left arm, as was the entire left side of his body. He lande
d heavily on something soft. A woman smell over the fetid stench, he was lying on . . . Wendy? Wendy!!! Wendy???
She was a comatose human vegetable fitfully twitching her flawless bod. Her breath was babyishly irregular. She barely knew how to breathe right, poor clone . . . but . . .
Stahn tried again to stand up and only managed to wallow the more inefficaciously on the wendy-thing’s not unappetizing person. His penis stiffened, and he did what he had to do. Wendy liked it; come to think of it, they’d been doing this a lot. They were naked and covered with filth.
After they both climaxed, Stahn rolled onto the right side of his body, and began looking around for the bench he’d been sitting on. There it was, over there . . . he began worming his way across the offal-strewn floor of the tiny stone stall he and the wendy had apparently been living in.
Something had just stopped; like a noise Stahn had gotten used to, but what? He hooked his chin over the edge of the bench and dragged himself back into sitting position. He kept forgetting to use the left half of his body. Why had he crawled when he could have walked? His space orientation was shot: even the five-foot crawl from Wendy to the bench seemed complicated. Stahn stared down at Wendy. Looking at her helped focus his ideas. He was a meatie, that was it, and Wendy was a blank-brained clone, he was a meatie living in . . .
“Happy Acres,” said Stahn out loud, slurring his words, but enjoying the sound of his voice nonetheless. He started laughing, and then he couldn’t stop laughing for a long time. It was like he had a month’s worth of laughter waiting to get out, desperate laughter that sounded like moans.
Eventually the moaning turned into thick hollow coughing and he had to stop. There was something wrong with the roof of his mouth: a big hole up there, and a pain like a splinter. Stahn felt the hole with his tongue, felt and listened, and looked around.
The air in here was incredibly unbelievably vile. They were in a room with a locked jail cell door. You could look out onto big pink-lit tanks filled with crowded murky fluid, livers and lungs and brains and, yes, wendies floating in them, the pink-tanks, that’s where Stahn worked most days, worked till he couldn’t move, with Wendy crawling along after, both of them eating as much raw organ as they liked of course, and at the end of the day, however long it was, they were shut up in their Happy Acres cubby for intercourse, excretion, and dreamless sleep. What was it Ricardo had said? Stahn remembered, and spoke out loud again.
“You won’t have a care in the world, Mooney man, you’ll live like a king!”
The sobbing laughter started again, loose and sloppy, with air snuckering in and out of the hole in his soft palate, the big splinter slipping and wiggling, uuuuuuhuhuhuhuhhhh . . . there . . . it was coming . . . uuuuughhh . . .
Stahn retched hard and harder and then . . . the little dead plastic rat slid out of his mouth and clattered to the floor. All right! No more rat, no more of Helen’s goddamn nagging voice in his head day and night, like a mother you can’t get away from, do this Stahn, do that, oh I like when you move your bowels. No more of Helen in Stahn all the time, using him in the stink. He ground the rat under his foot.
Something had happened to Helen; something had shut her down. So wonderful, at last, to sit here thinking his own thoughts and looking around . . . though there was still some problem . . . hmmmm, oh yes . . . his right brain damage . . . and the way he kept forgetting about the left half of his body. Could he move his left leg, if he really tried? His left thumb?
Stahn stared hard at his thumb. He used to know how to move it, but just now, without Helen’s voice running his left side, he . . . couldn’t . . . get the notion of purposeful action . . . so he grabbed the thumb with his good right hand and wiggled it, yah, he even leaned over and sniffed it, licked it, bit it and . . . there . . . it was moving . . . spastically moving as new nerve routings opened up . . . tingling . . . he did the rest of his hand then . . . step by step . . . the arm . . . the arm flapping at his side like the chicken imitation he used to do on Z-gas in Daytona . . . lean over so it beats on your leg, Stahn . . . shuffle splutter, splutter mutter . . .
Eventually he struggled to his feet and stood there, pigeon-toed and awkward, but, yes, stood. And found his way over to Wendy and felt the roof of her mouth, looking for a rat, but she was untouched, still too dumb for the boppers to use, good deal.
“We’re gonna make it, Wendy; we’re gonna make it back, babe.”
He worked on Wendy’s body for a while, rubbing and flexing her arms and legs like a physical therapist, or like a mother with her baby, rubbed and flexed her, talking all the while, thrilled to talk for the first time in . . . yes . . . it had been a month.
Stahn’s memory of the month’s slavery was oddly faint. Possibly the horror of it had been such that his brain refused to remember. Or perhaps it was that, with Helen calling all all all the shots always always always, his brain had known that it needn’t bother to make notes. Or maybe the surgical brain trauma had screwed up his memory for good.
ISDN had done this to him . . . why? To bring the chipmold to the Nest, yes. The chipmold must have worked, that was it, the chipmold had fried the brains of all the boppers. They were crispy critters now, that’s what Chief Jackson had always called the gone loveboat dopers who couldn’t remember their names, crispy critters. Stahn had been pretty sick with that chipmold himself for a week there . . . he remembered the ache in his throat and in his kidneys . . . but he’d gotten well, the ancient streetwise human wetware had come up with an antidote.
Stahn tugged Wendy up onto the bench. She sat unsteadily at his right side, blowing spit bubbles. After a while she slid back off the bench.
Stahn worked on his left side some more, trying to keep remembering it, and then he picked his way across the cell to examine the door. He couldn’t really see through his left eye, or do anything about what he felt with his left hand, but after a while he had the door pretty well doped out. It was held locked by a hook-and-eye latch. The lock was hard to work . . . Stahn kept moving his hands in the wrong direction like in a mirror . . . but finally he got their cell open.
“Come on, Wendy. We’re going home.” He pulled Wendy to her feet and put a tight arm around her waist. They shuffled out of their cell into the pink-lit room where the organ-filled pink-tanks were. It looked very familiar in a way, albeit as confusing as a maze. Wandering this way and that, his heart pounding anxiously, Stahn finally bumped into the glass wall next to the airlock.
Helen and Ulalume were out there, sitting in the middle of the floor and not doing anything, not dead or alive but just kind of . . . sitting there with their flickercladding gone strange. Tranced out, like. Yukawa had said that the chipmold would start some kind of electric vibrations in the boppers’ brains and give them fits. Cataleptic as opposed to epileptic, or so it would seem. Helen and Ulalume were buddha-ed out, man, just sitting out there—Stahn chuckled softly—just sitting out there in perfect full-lotus aum mane padme hum meditation, wave, robot sees God in a mold, all right. And their flickercladding was doing weird stuff, blotched and splotchy all along Helen’s xoxy big nurse pod-bod and on that “fine-featured Nefertiti head” she was so proud of, always reciting Poe’s “To Helen” in Stahn’s brain, ghastly old vampire bat that she was, always bugging Stahn always, and now she had big moldy bright spots in her flickercladding. Squidhead Ulalume and toothed-vagina Helen just sitting out there in the middle of the floor, side by side, waiting for ye Judgment Day trumps, or so so so it would seem. No prob. Do what?
Stahn struggled for an idea. He wanted to leave, but there was no air out there. How had Emul transported him here, through the Nest’s cold hard vacuum? At first he couldn’t remember at all, but then it came to him. After Emul had met Stahn at the trade center, he’d wrapped Stahn in a special Happy Cloak, a big piece of flickercladding that was programmed to behave like a bubbletopper spacesuit. Emul had used the Happy Cloak to bring Stahn from the trade center to the ratmaker, where Stahn had gotten a rat compatible with his
new neuroplug. That was all very vague. And then Emul had sold Stahn to Helen, bringing him here to the pink-tanks, still in the Happy Cloak. Stahn could see the Happy Cloak hanging from a hook right across the room from the airlock, as a matter of fact, hanging there twisting and glowing in blotchy thought. He just had to run out through the vacuum and get the cloak, that was it.
It? Get the cloak, Stahn, yes. He set Wendy down on the floor, leaning her against the wall, and went into the airlock. It took him the longest time to get the door closed behind him, and then he got mixed up and went back out of the airlock into the pink-tank room with Wendy. He was so flustered that he forgot the left half of his body for an instant there, and fell to the floor, landing facedown in the warm puddle between Wendy’s widespread legs, Happy Acres. He stood back up and peered out through the glass wall again, trying to gather his wits.
He spotted the Happy Cloak on the wall again, and remembered, and went back into the airlock. When it opened he would run out, grab the Happy Cloak, and run back in here to put it on. He poised himself to run, put his right hand on one of the door handles—he hoped it was the correct handle this time—and slapped his clumsy left hand against the vent button. The air whooshed out . . . Stahn kept his mouth and throat open, letting his lungs collapse instead of popping . . . and he was running across the room . . . or trying to run . . . like a palsy victim in the Special Olympics four-yard dash, man, don’t forget your left leg . . . got his hand on the Happy Cloak . . . it simpered and came loose from its hook . . . oh the cold the pain in his ears his achy lungs and sweat crystallizing on his stiffening skin . . . but where was the airlock? Stahn swung his head this way and that, not seeing what he was looking for . . . a door shape over there, but that didn’t look right . . . he tried to turn . . . stumble . . . oh no! Too confused to do anything but lie there and thrash, ow, Stahn began to die, but then, at the last moment, the Happy Cloak flowed out over his whole body, making itself into a warm air-filled spacesuit.
