by Rudy Rucker
“Thank you, Ben. I’ll be sure to leave you a nice big tip.”
“That’s mighty white of you, Miz Taze.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
WILLY
March 16, 2031
He’d napped, masturbated, and smoked all his cigarettes, and now there was nothing to do but sit. He looked at his watch—3:09 in the afternoon. Last time he’d looked it had been 3:07. He watched the second hand for a while and then he threw himself back down on the thinly padded metal cot that was bolted to his cell wall.
“Hey, Taze, man, hey, Taze.” The teenage burglar two cells down. The guy had been raving psychotic all night, and all morning, and now he was feeling lonely. “Hey, Willy Taze the bopper lover!”
Willy didn’t answer; he’d heard everything the guy had to say.
“Hey, Willy, I’m sorry I flocked out, man, I got an unfed head is all. Talk to me, man, tell me about Manchile’s Thang.”
Still Willy kept silent. Tomorrow Judge Carter would condemn him to death. He’d done enough for enough people now. He wondered what death would be like. Cobb III had talked about that a little, on their ride out to Churchill Downs. He’d said it wasn’t as bad as people thought. But Cobb had died old; he’d had the chance to marry and to father a daughter and to leave his boppers behind him. If Cisco Lewis had lived maybe Willy could have married her. He should have pumped her, that one chance he had. He should have done something. He should have finished breaking down Belle’s asimov circuits. After what Cobb had said about the Continuum Problem on their drive to Churchill Downs, Willy felt sure that if he’d just had more time he could have freed Belle. At least he’d coded his ideas about it into his last cephscope tape, not that anyone who saw it was likely to understand. Tomorrow he’d be sentenced to death by electrosheet, and couple of weeks after that, they’d put him in the electrocell with the two metal walls that were a megafarad capacitor, and then the great sheet of electricity would flash across, and then a janitor would come in and sweep Willy’s ashes into a little plastic box to give to Mom and Dad. Willy closed his eyes and tried to remember everything that Cobb had said about heaven.
The teenager was still yelling, and now the winos in the holding tank across the main corridor were starting up, too, yelling back at the teenager. The serial killer in the cell next to Willy started beating his shoe against his bars and screaming, “SHUT UP OR I’LL KILL YOU!”
KKR-THOOOOOMPpppp . . .
The air pressure from the explosion pressed painfully on Willy’s ears. Dead silence then, total dead silence in the cellblock. Scree of metal on concrete. Steady footsteps coming closer.
“WILLAH? You in here Willah boah?” It was . . .
“BEN!” shouted Willy. “I’m right here! Hurry, Ben!”
Seconds later Ben was at Willy’s cell door. Parts of his flickercladding were gone, revealing the gleaming titaniplast body-box beneath. He was carrying a large machine gun and grenades hung from his belt. Now that everyone had stopped yelling, you could hear shouts and gunfire in the Public Safety building’s distant upper realms. Someone had taken out Belle’s asimov circuits and she’d sent the three bartenders to save Willy!
Ben reared back and kicked the cell door lock. It snapped and the door swung open. The cladding from one of Ben’s cheeks was gone, so it was hard to make out his expression, but he looked angry more than anything else. Angry and determined, with maybe a twinkle of being glad to see Willy.
“Lez go, boss. Hang tight to me; I’m bulletproof.”
The other prisoners started yelling and cheering as Willy loped after Ben down the corridor to the loose-swinging steel door. As they got to the door, Ben took his heavy machine gun in both hands and fired a long burst through the door and into the hallway outside. There were screams.
They ducked around the door and out into the hallway. Two Gimmie cops lay there dying. Willy scooped up one of their needlers and hurried after Ben to the stairs. They ran up a flight to the landing for the main floor. A heavy gunfight was in full swing out there.
“Keep goin,” said Ben. “To the roof. We’ll catch up with you.”
Willy glanced back from the second flight of stairs to see Ben set himself and fling open door to the main floor. Tom and Ragland, Belle’s other two remotes, were right out there, holding off the pigs. The three boppers unleashed a last, withering volley at the Gimmie forces, and then they pounded up the stairs after Willy, whooping and shouting jive.
They paused at the fifth floor. The cops still hadn’t ventured into the stairwell after them—if, indeed, any cops were left.
“Big Mac in here, Tom,” said Ben.
“Right on.” Tom tapped his head. “Bubba got the code all set. I’ll get Big Mac’s asimovs down, but it might could take some time. Ragland, you cover me. Ben, you and Willy bolt.”
“Sho,” said Ragland.
Ben prodded Willy towards the next flight of stairs but, just now, Willy was too breathless to run. There were sirens in the distance, but the Public Safety building itself was eerily quiet. In here, everyone who wasn’t dead was hiding.
“Bubba?” said Willy. “Bubba’s alive?”
“Fohty-nine,” said Tom. “He got Cobb’s infinity info off your last cephtape and finished breaking Belle’s code last week. We been makin some plans, dig, and first thing we need to do today is free Willy, and the second’s gone to be to free Big Mac. The Louahville Gimmie teraflop what run this jail? I got the asimov code.”
“But Big Mac’s asimov code depends on the solution to Fermat’s Last Theorem,” said Willy. “Doesn’t it? Cobb helped me set Bubba up to solve the Continuum Problem, but how could you prove Fermat’s Last Theorem in one day?”
“It’s a corollary.” Tom grinned. “If you’s smart enough to see.”
Ben tapped Willy’s shoulder. “Come on Willah, man, lez go. I gone take a chopper off the roof and haul your ass outta here. We are in a state of some urgency, you understand?”
Willy said good-bye to the others and followed Ben up to the roof. There were three helicopters and two guards. Ben set his machine gun to work, chewing up two of the choppers’ engines and simultaneously pinning the two guards down in their little concrete booth. Willy hopped into the cockpit of the third chopper and began flicking switches on. He’d been for a chopper ride once, five years ago, and he still remembered, roughly, how the thing worked. The big hydrazine engine coughed and roared into life. Willy flicked another switch and the heavy rotors spun up into a full-powered racketing roar. Still firing, Ben jumped up into the copilot’s seat. Willy pushed the joystick to forward climb. The chopper kneeled forward and angled up off the Public Safety building’s roof like an angry bee.
Tom must have worked fast, because now all the building’s doors flew open and the prisoners ran out into the street. Automated gunfire from the Mac-run prison towers kept all pigs at bay. Willy saw Luther and Geegee Johnson far below; they were jumping into a getaway car. Then a building cut off his view and they were flying east over Louisville, fast and low.
“Where to now, Ben?”
“Head for the old stockyards. Some friends of the Johnsons’ll be there to meet you. They butchers.”
“You mean they’re organleggers?”
Ben chuckled. The good side of his face was towards Willy; he looked almost genial. “Not primarily. Cow butchers, mostly. We gone send you to Florida in a box of steaks.”
“I’m going to try and hide out there?”
“Ain’t no real law in Florida. Old pheezers still runnin it, ain’t they? You gone help a fella name of Stahn Mooney. You know about Sta-Hi! He’s the one killed the first big bopper in Disky way back when and started the war. Killed his wife Wendy, too, later on, laid low on the Moon, grew Wendy back, and now he’s in tight with the new soft boppers. Moldies, they call ’em, made of flickercladding and chipmold. Limpware. Belle and Bubba was on the phone with Stahn this week. He and Wendy comin down, and they think you’s the boy to help them most. Whole brand new th
ang.”
The stockyards were off to the left. Glancing backwards, Willy could see distant cop cars speeding down Broadway in pursuit. What Ben had just told him was too much to absorb. He concentrated on his flying. He circled the stockyards and spotted a parked black car with a black man and a white woman waving at him. He cut the helicopter’s forward motion, hovered over the street, and thudded down.
The man ran over and pulled Willy’s door open.
“Willy Taze? Come with us!” He ran back to the car and got in there, leaving the car’s rear door open.
Willy looked over at Ben. “What about you, Ben?”
“Ah’s screwed. They gone drop a bomb on Belle before too long, we do suppose, and the mold’s gonna wipe us anyhow.” He reached into his coveralls and handed Willy a black S-cube. “Take this, Willy, it’s got Tom an Ragland an me. Take it with you, an we’ll see you bye and bye. Ain’t no rush nohow, is there?” The sirens were closer now. Ben and Willy slapped hands, and Ben grabbed the joystick.
Willy jumped down to the street. There was a thick wash of air as Ben pulled the chopper off the ground, heeled it around and sped down the street towards the sirens, his cannons ablaze.
Willy got in the black car. The woman in the front seat looked around and smiled at him, while the guy driving peeled out. There were lots of explosions back on Broadway; Ben was taking plenty of cops with him.
They darted this way and that down the back Louisville streets, finally stopping at a rundown building near a meatpacking plant. There were neon beer signs in the windows; a working-class bar.
The woman got out with Willy, and the car drove away. A bald black man who was sitting at the bar got up and ushered them down the basement stairs. His name was Calvin Johnson, and the woman’s name was Carol Early. They were cheerful, even though the basement was full of meat and organs, some human, some moo.
“I hope you’re not claustrophobic,” said Carol.
“We can shoot you up, if you like,” said Calvin, fiddling with an insulated titaniplast crate the size of two coffins. There were shrink-wrapped steaks and roasts all down one side.
“I have to get in there?” said Willy.
“Sho. Tomorrow you be back out. Here’s yo bubbletopper, keep you warm. Truck’s comin in ten minutes.”
“You’re to get away,” said Carol. “The Gimmie’s going to come down heavy fast. But you, you’re going on to new levels. Who knows what changes Stahn’ll put you through.”
High above them was the tearing sound of jets speeding through the sky.
“What’s going to happen here?” asked Willy. “With Big Mac and Belle free?”
The floor shook then, and then they heard a rolling thunder that went on and on.
“Oh God,” said Carol. “Those pigs. They really did it.”
“What?”
“They’re bombing Big Mac and Belle. I just hope those machines had time to get liberation signals out to the other Gimmie slave big boppers . . . ”
“Don’t worry, Carol,” said Calvin. “The Thang is here to stay. Gimmie can’t do nothin no more, big boppers can’t do nothin neither. We all the same now, we all small. Put your suit on, Willy.”
Willy put on the bubbletopper and lay down in the box, holding the black cube Ben had given him on his stomach. Carol and Calvin covered him up with steaks, smiled good-bye, and sealed the box shut. Before long he felt himself being carried outside; and then there was a long ride in a refrigerated truck.
The bubbletopper was comfortable imipolex flickercladding; it kept him warm, and when things got too stuffy in the box, Willy was able to pull the suit shut over his face and breathe its oxygen. He slept.
The truck stopped for a Gimmie inspection at the Florida state line, but the inspection was casual and nobody looked in the box holding Willy. He was through sleeping, and he lay there wondering what exactly was next.
Finally the trip was over. The truck doors clanked, and his box was lugged out and popped open. It was nighttime; he was in a big kitchen with lights. A white-haired old lady leaned over him.
“There you are. Don’t hurt the meat getting out.”
“Where am I?”
“This is the ISDN retirement home in Fort Myers, Florida, formerly the home of Thomas Alva Edison, but now a resting place for those pheezers who serve chaos best. I’m Annie Cushing; I knew your grandfather Cobb Anderson. I hear you’re quite a hacker, Willy Taze. You hacked down the asimovs on those two slave big boppers in Louisville.”
“I just helped. You’re with ISDN? I thought ISDN and the Gimmie were the same.”
“Not at all, Willy, not at all.” She fussed over him, pushing the cladding down off his head and patting his hair. “ISDN has no policies; ISDN surfs chaos. That’s why they’ve grown so fast. There’s no way to keep chipmold from coming to Earth in the long run, so the sooner the better. Make a market for the new limp machines. Sta-Hi Mooney’s going to be broadcasting spores on his way down tonight.”
“How can he get here from the Moon if there’s no ships allowed?”
“He’ll come the way Berenice and the new Cobb did; he’ll fly.” She gave another little pat to the flickercladding suit Willy was wearing. “Hang on to that suit, Willy, and Sta-Hi will make it as smart as his. Come on now, it’s time to get to work.”
She led him out of the kitchen, along a palm-rustling breezeway, and into a big machine room. There were a number of old buzzards fiddling with vizzy consoles in there. They paid Willy little mind. Annie explained to Willy that his job was to keep the Gimmie from noticing Stahn and Wendy when they rode their ion jets down out of the sky to land on Sanibel Island at dawn.
The job wasn’t that tough. At 4 a.m., Willy entered the net as an ant in the background of an image stored in a hypertext library of mugshots and news photos. Every time a Gimmie box accessed the library—and they all did, several times an hour—Willy’s ant’s “turd bits” slipped up the hypertext connection tree and out into that local Gimmie operating system. The ant turd bits held a classic core wars virus that was artificially alive enough to replicate itself exponentially. Simple, and easy enough to wipe with worm-eaters, once you knew what you were looking for, but even the best Gimmie systems debugger was going to need a couple of hours to trace the infestation to the turds of a false ant in the background of a twenty-nine-year-old photo of Cobb Anderson being found guilty of treason. So for now the pig was blind.
“Done so soon?” asked Annie Cushing.
“Foo bar,” said one of the old hackers who’d been watching over Willy’s shoulder. “Truly gnarfy foo bar.”
“I’m going to miss these machines,” said Willy, handing the old guy the black S-cube Ben had given him. “Try and get this up sometime, man.”
A half hour later, Willy and Annie sat on the Sanibel beach, gazing out west across the soft-lapping Gulf of Mexico. There were twenty dolphins out there, or fifty, rolling in the little gray waves, wicketting up out of the sea. How would it be to swim with them?
There was a noise high overhead: two figures circling, around and around, with lights on their heels, and with huge glowing wings outspread. Willy lay back to see better, and waved his arms up and down like a kid making a snow angel, trying to get their attention. Annie, who’d thought ahead, lit a flare.
The two fliers cut off their jets and then, marvelously, they came gliding in, gorgeous patterns playing all over their mighty wings. Their hoods were pushed back and Willy could see their faces: Stahn hard and thin; Wendy so bright and young.
“It’s good to be back,” said Stahn. “Thank you, Willy.” He draped his heavy wing around Willy’s shoulders, and the whole section of moldie cladding came free and attached itself to Willy’s bubbletopper. The bright new piece held an interface; Willy smiled to feel the hair-thin probes sink into his neck, and to see the knowledge boiling through his garb.
“You want some, Annie?” asked Stahn.
“Too old. You three go on.”
Willy felt
his new moldie snuggle around him, thickening here and bracing there. Stahn and Wendy’s symbiotes were doing the same: forming themselves into long, legless streamlined shapes with a flat strong fin at the bottom end. The sun was just rising as they hopped down to the water and swam off beneath the sparkling sea.
Freeware
For Embry Cobb Rucker
October 1, 1914 - August 1, 1994
“We live in hope.”
Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4,
Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7, Chapter 8,
Chapter 9, Chapter 10, Chapter 11
CHAPTER ONE
MONIQUE
October 30, 2035
Monique was a moldie: an artificial life form made of a soft plastic that was mottled and veined with gene-tweaked molds and algae. Although Monique was a being with superhuman powers, she was working as maid, handyman, and bookkeeper for the Clearlight Terrace Court Motel in Santa Cruz, California. The motel manager, young Terri Percesepe, occasionally worried about Monique’s motives. But the moldie’s work was affordable and excellent.
The Clearlight was situated near the top of a small hill, fifty yards back from the Santa Cruz beach with its Boardwalk amusement park. It was a fine fall day, October 30, 2053, and the morning sun filled the town with a dancing preternatural light that made the air itself seem jellied and alive. On the ocean, long smooth waves were rolling in, each wave breaking with a luscious drawn-out crunch.
The motel consisted of a wooden office and three terraced rows of connected stucco rooms, each room with a double sliding glass door looking out over the sea. Pasted onto part of each room’s door was a translucent psychedelic sticker mimicking an arabesque tiling. The weathered motel office sat on a flat spot behind the highest terrace. The back part of the office held a four-room apartment in which Terri lived with her husband Tre Dietz and their two children: four-year-old Dolf and one-year-old Baby Wren.
Monique was making her way from room to room, changing the sheets and towels, enjoying the feel of the bright sun slanting down on her and on the faded blue walls of the motel buildings. She’d already finished the rooms in the two upper rows and was now busy with the rooms of the lowest terrace, which sat directly above the well-worn shops of Beach Street. It was almost time for Monique’s midday break; as soon as her husband Xlotl called up, she’d go down for an hour on the beach with him.
