The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com

by Various

  “Thank you,” said Presburg. “You may go. Next witness? Carlo Morse?”

  “I see what you’re getting at,” said Morse. “The moon’s goddamn gone.” Presburg sampled a live, vigorously kicking shrimp. “Not exactly gone,” he said, his mouth full. “Real different. The Chinese ribbonhackers have been dreamfabbing on it. You tell me what that means for our business.”

  “No more tides?” said Morse.

  “Oh, we’d get decent tides from the sun’s gravity anyway,” said Presburg dismissively. “Think harder.” He bit the body off another shrimp. “Meanwhile, you should try some of these. With that hot sauce, they’re fantastic.”

  “Pretty soon food will be totally free,” said Ganzer, intently studying his figurine of Tigra. "We'll be dreaming garbage into food."

  “The new market,” said Presburg with a quick nod. “Reality is the ultimate medium to productize.”

  “If dreams become real…,” put in Ganzer, still fiddling with the figurine. “Well, I'd like to be an amorphous blob. I wanna fly, too. Remember flying dreams, Carlo? Nobody buys those these days.”

  “I always really wanted to fly,” mused Morse. “In my flying dreams, I’ll be hovering over people, and talking down to them, and they just answer back in a normal, everyday fashion. There’s no panic, no corny sense of wonder about it—”

  “Hey!” exclaimed Ganzer. He’d managed to twist the little Tigra figure’s head loose. He pulled it off the little body. Attached to the head was a gleaming ribbon, like a tiny sword.

  “That’s a ribbonware plug-in!” exclaimed Presburg.

  With a smooth, nimble motion, Ganzer stabbed the ribbon into the side of his own head.

  His gut bulged out; his neck shrank; his head merged into his body. His stained sportswear burst and dropped to the floor in scraps. Ganzer slumped across the table—jiggly, shiny, ciliated, magnificent. A huge paramecium with his slipper-mouth agape.

  Presburg jumped to his feet and screamed—a rich scream, filled with vibrato and with a ragged crackle in the upper registers.

  “I can fly,” blubbered Ganzer. He floated off the tabletop and drifted toward the room’s low ceiling.

  As if guided by fate, Maya came racing across the deli, carrying a big carving knife from the counter men. With a quick gesture, she slit Ganzer open like a hog.

  Flying ribbonware shards tumbled out like viruses from an infected cell. Nimble as dragonflies, some of the ribbons plunged themselves into the heads of the people in the deli. And the rest of them surged out the deli door and into the early evening streets.

  Yokl the doorman politely ushered them outside, where the populace was gently floating over their abandoned cars.

  “Can we fly up there and get a decent dessert on the moon?” said Presburg, his voice sounding odd. He was turning into Jimmy Ganzer. “I mean, this all stands to reason, right? We’ll find Tigra up there, too.”

  Morse patted his old friend on the back and gazed into the lambent sky. Something was rising over the dark horizon. A cosmic jewel, with its facets etched in light, slowly turning and unfolding.

  “Dream on," said Morse. "Dream on.”

  Books by Rudy Rucker

  NOVELS

  Hylozoic

  Postsingular

  Mathematicians in Love

  Frek and the Elixir

  Saucer Wisdom

  As Above, So Below: A Novel of Peter Bruegel

  Spaceland

  Realware

  Freeware

  The Hacker and the Ants

  The Hollow Earth

  Wetware

  The Sex Sphere

  Software

  White Light

  Spacetime Donuts

  The Secret of Life

  Master of Space and Time

  SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS

  Mad Professor

  Gnarl!

  The Fifty-Seventh Franz Kafka

  NON-FICTION

  The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul: What Gnarly Computation Taught Me About

  Ultimate Reality, the Meaning Of Life, and How To Be Happy

  Seek!

  All the Visions

  Mind Tools

  The Fourth Dimension

  Infinity and the Mind

  Books by Bruce Sterling

  NOVELS

  Involution Ocean

  The Artificial Kid

  Schismatrix

  Islands in the Net

  The Difference Engine (with William Gibson)

  Heavy Weather

  Holy Fire

  Distraction

  Zeitgeist

  The Zenith Angle

  Kiosk

  The Caryatids

  SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS

  Crystal Express

  Globalhead

  A Good Old-fashioned Future

  Visionary in Residence

  NON-FICTION

  The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier

  Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the next fifty years

  Shaping Things

  ANTHOLOGY

  Mirrorshades: A Cyberpunk Anthology (ed.)

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.

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  Contents

  Begin Reading

  Books by Rudy Rucker

  “Waverly’s dead?” said Becka, verging toward a shriek. “How can Waverly be dead? Without him to cover our ass, we’re finished! They’ll rub us out and say we never existed!”

  “You hear that rumbling outside?” said Gordo. “A steamroller. That’s how they got him.” Gordo’s breath misted the frigid air, for Dr. Waverly had ignored paying the power bills to heat their safe house.

  “What kind of bodyguard are you anyway? Hopeless ape! We’re doomed.” With one burgundy fingernail, Becka slit a spy hole through the aluminum foil duct-taped to the window.

  “What is that monster doing out there?”

  Gordo rubbed his chapped hands. “I was watching Dr. Waverly like a hawk. Who knew a steamroller could pounce?” Laughing darkly, Gordo dropped into a leather executive armchair. From this throne, Dr. Fred Waverly had once ruled a federal research empire. The chair’s glossy arms were cracked and its casters were flat as broken feet.

  “This means we’re on a hit list,” said Becka.

  “Lighten up,” said Gordo, his voice echoing in the unheated room. “This means we’re on our own. We’ll close down Project Loco. Sell off the secrets. And get the hell out while we can.”

  “Was it Yellco who got Waverly?”

  “Not likely,” said Gordo, blinking at her. “But I’m glad we’ve got a barricade. In case that roller makes a charge.” He gestured at the walls, stacked with debris.

  The contents of Project Loco’s offices had been manhandled by forklift robots and crammed into their hideout: a derelict McMansion in dismal Middleburg, Virginia.

  During the seven weeks of their increasingly uneasy confinement, Gordo and Becka had passed the time by piling the federal debris against the walls. Graceless steel desks, empty watercoolers, dead coffeemakers, and oddly angled surge protectors—plus their specialized locative-science equipment: GPS units, atomic sextants, flux oscillators, nanolasers, and neutrino sieves.

  The house was a jumble of crazed debris—except for one shining treasure, the culmination of years of off-the-books black-budget research, a bubbling, green-lit aquarium-tank, with glassy little cells subdividing it like an uneasy high-rise—a tenement for leeches.
<
br />   Eight or nine species of leeches. Careful Loco research had proved that leeches in particular excelled as plug-and-play biotech implants. Leeches were simple and rugged, they ran off human blood, and their boneless flesh could hold a fine payload of wetware programming. Plus, once you got used to the concept of interfacing with leeches, it didn’t hurt all that much to stick them on.

  Happier than clams and flexing in slimy topological ease, the bioprogrammed invertebrates were the ultimate product of the Loco Project. They carried the experimental Loco translocation apps. The parasites’ aquarium boasted its own battery-operated power supply to keep the creatures at a comfortable, blood-warm heat.

  Gordo pressed his chilly hands against the warm green glass. Outside the safe house walls, the steamroller clattered on like a coffee grinder, casually, remorselessly. Every once in a while, a ragged stranger would wobble by on a bike, but nobody seemed much bothered by the goings-on at a derelict house.

  Meanwhile the steamroller was methodically flattening everything near the safe house’s garage. With digital efficiency, it crushed the abandoned doghouse. Then the thorn-tangled rose bushes. Then some cheap concrete garden statuary.

  So much for the anonymous safety of the Loco Project’s final redoubt. The front yard was a maze of roller-marks in snow.

  Uneasily, Becka rubbed the back of her neck. “What actually happened? Did Waverly morph into a giant leech? Like Patel did at the lab? Waverly was claiming he’d fixed that in his latest wetware build?”

  “He slumped to the ground,” said Gordo thoughtfully. “That’s all I know for sure.”

  “Was he writhing at all? Did he display spastic invertebrate activity?”

  “The way it came down—” Excited now, Gordo crouched in the middle of the room, his heavy body nimble as he moved his hands, mapping things out. “He went soft. The steamroller attacked. And Waverly was like a gingerbread man under a rolling pin. A thirty-foot smear of smashed mathematical physicist. No blood, no bones. I used my hands to pry him off the lawn. I rolled him up like a tortilla and carried him into the garage.”

  “Not much like Patel,” mused Becka.

  “I can’t say,” replied Gordo. “Remember, I only joined your team after the Patel incident.”

  “I wish you’d stop bitching about ‘the Patel incident.’”

  “Look,” said Gordo, “you can’t just morph a federal scientist into a giant invertebrate that catches fire. That’s not an acceptable protocol.”

  “Security guys like you can never keep your traps shut,” said Becka, angrily pacing back and forth through the debris. “Forget about Patel, he’s stuffed in a nuclear waste barrel. Let’s talk about Waverly. Even if a steamroller crushed him, it’s not scientifically established that he’s dead.”

  “Where do you get that idea? Of course he’s dead. I saw his brains come out of his eye sockets.”

  “I need facts,” insisted Becka. “Not your interpretations.”

  “Oooh,” said Gordo. “The dragon lady. Okay, as soon as we stepped outside the safe house, Waverly started babbling. He said, ‘I’m going everywhere.’ He was slobbering. Then he lost his muscle tone. His hands pulled up into his sleeves, and he went all boneless. And then—wham! That steamroller comes out of nowhere and runs him over.”

  “Just like that?” said Becka skeptically.

  “That’s how I saw it. That’s the machine that killed him, still tooling around out there. It’s like a remote-controlled drone.” Gordo peeped out the window. “Look, it keeps backing in and out of our garage. That’s where I dragged Waverly. It’s still running over him. Again and again.”

  Bathed in the warm green light of the leech aquarium, Becka stared at Gordo. She looked cute and serious with her short dark hair. Pitiable shadows of rage and despair played across her face. As long as Dr. Waverly had been in charge, Becka, ever the faithful post-doc, had been full of hope. But now, with Waverly flattened, her illusions were crushed like so many asphalt pebbles.

  “Where do steamrollers come from?” she mused. “Oh. The city construction yard.”

  “I guess,” said Gordo, still peering out the window. “But I can tell you it didn’t drive here. Someone got hold of our loco and teleported it in. Take a close look, it’s cruising right by our house again.”

  Becka hastened to the window.

  “Its motor isn’t on at all,” Gordo pointed out. “Its drone control isn’t active. You can tell from the lights on top. They’re all off. The things running on pure loco. Someone’s teleporting it all around!”

  “Translocating, not teleporting,’” snapped Becka. “Can’t you get that one thing straight? Loco applies affine transformations to the subdimensional pregeometry that underlies the spacetime foam. Loco edits our reality from the outside. Loco is nothing like ‘teleportation.’”

  “Sure it is,” said Gordo, baiting her. “It’s like on Star Trek.”

  “Christ, you’re a moron.”

  “Maybe so, baby. But this moron has what you want.” Gordo attempted a leer.

  “As if,” said Becka, looking away.

  “Anyway,” said Gordo, beginning to enjoy himself. “The steamroller spread out fat Waverly like pizza dough.”

  Becka scowled. “I told you that Waverly should never leave our safe house.”

  Gordo picked absently at the masking tape on an office cartoon taped to the side of an upended desk. An archaic folk-xerox of some guy unscrewing his belly button and having his ass drop off.

  Becka rooted in the debris that braced the safe house walls. She found a federally-approved orange-and-silver pilot survival blanket. It was sixty years old and rattled like burnt parchment, but she wrapped it around her sloping shoulders.

  “Don’t get that look on your face again,” said Gordo, adjusting the buttons of his overcoat. “None of this is my fault. Waverly insisted on taking a walk today. You know he was stir-crazy. He said an outing might reduce his bloat. We snuck out while you were sleeping.”

  Becka wrung her blue-knuckled hands. “Goddamn it! We’ve been stuck here for weeks in this crappy, nameless, unheated, dead-end, foreclosed house, playing Dad and Junior and Sis. We shattered every limit of space and time and stuck our software into leeches, and after all our fine work, what do we get?”

  “We get a steamroller popped out of thin air,” said Gordo practically.

  “With the Pentagon waiting for us to turn our beautiful invention into a killing machine.”

  Gordo grunted.

  “Or for some sleazy web-biz morons to productize us commercially. I’m talking about Yellco. They hired a bunch of our disgruntled staffers. Yellco and their stupid cloud.”

  “The cloud’s ubiquitous,” said Gordo cozily. “The cloud is everywhere, all the time. That’s what’s good about the Yellco cloud.”

  “The cloud spies on everybody,” said Becka. “How come the cloud is bigger than the government? This is all so unfair!”

  Silently, Gordo blew on his hands, then rubbed his right shoulder. He opened a desk, revealing half a crate of army-surplus beef stew.

  “How can you possibly eat at a time like this?”

  “When’s a man supposed to eat?” retorted Gordo, searching through a tangle of cable-dripping debris. He produced one stained, misshapen plastic container and pulled a tab at its base. The stew began to hum and rattle.

  “That can is seriously past its expiration date,” remarked Becka.

  “Desperate times.” Gordo nodded.

  “Did you set Waverly up?” asked Becka, slitting her eyes.

  Taken aback by the wild accusation, Gordo was silent for a long moment. “Why are you always like this?” he said, his voice nearly a whine. “Everything’s always so complicated with you.”

  “I’ll make it simple.” Becka stood up and poked him in the chest with her finger. “Our boss is a pancake. Who’s next?”

  “You!” said Gordo, abruptly clamping her in an embrace.

  Becka wriggled one hand fre
e. She slapped Gordo so hard that the sound echoed from the clutter on the walls.

  “Go ahead, hit me,” muttered Gordo, releasing her and gingerly feeling his inflamed cheek. “Because I’m a mole, all right? You might as well know—I’m a mole from Yellco. I’ve been wanting to tell you that for a long time.”

  Becka gaped in amazement, still catching up. “You work for Yellco? All this time?”

  “Yeah. When I spread the word about that Patel incident, your staffers scattered in all directions. You ended up exiled and alone, and I came along to pick up the intellectual property. That’s the pay-off, and that’s why I’m still here, all cozy with you.”

  “Oh, it’s all so dark-side,” said Becka despairingly. “So sleazy. So sold-out.”

  “You academics never have any street-smarts,” said Gordo, still rubbing his cheek. He looked at his reflection in the glass of the gleaming aquarium. “Me, I’m a street-hardened security op. That’s what Waverly asked for—after you guys vitrified Patel’s ashes into a glassy barrel of nuclear waste. Waverly figured a guy like me would know how to hush things up. That shows how much you losers knew about real-life federal security.”

  “What were you doing before?” asked Becka, intrigued. “Where do people like you come from?”

  “Oh, I was the top security man at Dulles airport. Humiliating passengers. It was great work, but I screwed up and strip-searched a congressman’s son. You guys were my disgrace posting. Project Loco is my personal Siberia.”

  “But you should have loved your new job!” Becka protested. “We got such superb results in unconventional physics! Sure, Patel turned into a leech and underwent spontaneous combustion—but that only happened one time! All the rest of those wiggling things locked in the penthouse, those were just animal subjects. Dogs, mostly. Leeches love dogs.”

  Silently, Gordo thought this over. “What was Patel like?” he said at last. “I mean, before he got all flexible and tubular.”