by Rudy Rucker
Yoke: "Oh, that was so wild. All afternoon Tuesday, Randy was moping and dragging around all hung over while Babs and I made wavy stuff. He was wishing he had an alla and wondering where the aliens went, and we were like, 'Serves you right for getting so trashed.' But then after we alla-made a bunch of soup and bread and cheese for supper, Babs finally gave Randy his alla and it registered itself to him. That's a trip in itself, it's like the alla is memorizing your body and your mind -- your wetware and your software -- the whole package. I was for holding out on Randy, but Babs keeps wanting to be nice to him. Or get his attention or something. And then as soon as she had Randy's attention, Babs did a head-trip on him by going out on a date with this new guy Theodore. I have a feeling she's using Theodore to make Randy jealous. Anyway, Randy and I were alone together Tuesday evening. I showed him how the alla works, and the very first customized thing he did was to make a safe DIM control patch for his plastic chicken, Willa Jean. Willa Jean is sort of the same thing as a Silly Putter, except Randy has a control feed into her, and she's not as smart. Randy was using an illegal leech-DIM before, and he got Cobb to approve the new one as safe around real moldies; in fact Cobb helped him design it. Hey, there goes Willa Jean now." Yoke trained her vision on Willa Jean wandering across the floor, ostensibly pecking for stray crumbs of imipolex. "I'm surprised that plastic chicken's here, because Randy's gone out on his new motorcycle. I wonder if he's using her to eavesdrop on me. If so, you're a geek, Randy." Yoke swung her alla through the air to launch a buzzing, bouncing spark-machine that frightened Willa Jean off into the far corners of the warehouse. "But I still haven't told you the best part. After Randy fixed Willa Jean, he was tired, so he made himself a good bed and lay down on that and started creating all sorts of little samples of every kind of material he could think of, each sample in the shape of a Lego block, and he was snapping them together and then --this is the rich part-Randy fell asleep while he was wearing his uvvy, and he ended up hooking into his alla and making something that he'd been dreaming, God you should have heard him scream. The screaming started at like three in the morning and Babs wasn't back yet, so it was just me and Cobb to deal. Randy's realware dream thing was a giant snail with his mother's face. It was chasing him. A giant imipolex snail actually crawling around the warehouse at three in the morning, knocking things over, and I mean a snail this big." Yoke stretched both arms up high, shaking with mirth. "I really shouldn't be laughing because it's very sad, his mother died at the end of November and Randy had totally been neglecting to stay in touch and he missed the funeral and apparently he has these recurrent guilt nightmares about a giant snail, it has to do with being too late. It was crawling after him all around the warehouse and wailing 'What taahm is it?' in this bewildered, Kentucky-accented voice. 'You goin' be late for school if you don't hurry up, Randy Karl. When is Tuesday?' Except it said 'whiyun' instead of 'when.' " Yoke was struggling to keep her voice level, but now and then letting out shrieks of laughter. "It had a silver-frosted black shell, like a middle-aged lady's hair. And there was some incest thing in there too. It wanted to sit on his face. I heard it say 'Ah'm real hot to crawl on you, Randy Karl.' Randy was just completely freaking out. And finally he was cornered and the snail really did crawl onto him, right across his body and up onto his face, I think it must have weighed four hundred pounds. It moved a lot faster than you'd expect. Randy would have suffocated if Cobb hadn't been able to drag it outside; Cobb can be really strong. We burned the imipolex, but the shell's still there. I'll show it to you in a minute." Joke: "I can see where you'd think that's funny, Yoke. Not everyone would. But that's why we love you. It sounds like Randy could run amok, a gunjy dook like that. You're going to push him too far. Not everybody appreciates your sense of humor. Though Corey's loving it. I'm telling him some of the stuff while it's coming in." Joke's view showed a greenish-skinned man with square vertical goatee and the sides of his head shaved, grinning and leaning forward as if hungering for information. "No, Corey, you can't uvvy in. This is totally diffusion-encrypted. Emul customized some cryp code just for this call. Yes, Corey, you heard me right, a giant snail with his mother's face wanted to crawl on him. Back off-ski! Okay, Yoke, while you were telling about Randy just now, Berenice did an anonymous search of the moldie chat-lines and found out a few things. The aliens' sacrificial clone trick went over; the moldies really think they killed them all. But they're suspicious about Squanto and Sue flying to the Moon. The dummy is halfway here and nobody wants to bother chasing it down, but they're doubting it's real. They've posted the Sue Miller information all over the place, along with one of the Cappy Jane images of you. But it isn't you. Look." Joke flashed the Sue Miller ID sheet with the photo image of a short-haired hollow-cheeked girl with black hair. In addition, there was a holographic still image of Yoke and Cobb floating in the Vava'u bay, with the giant cube of imipolex just behind them. But Yoke's face was replaced by Sue Miller's, and Cobb looked like a plastic American Indian.
"The moldies didn't notice you searching, did they, Berenice?" Joke paused, looking into her head, which was partly inhabited by the wetware-coded personalities of two old-time boppers called Berenice and Emul. Quickly receiving her answer, Joke continued talking. "No, you're safe for now, Yoke, but you better believe the shit's going to hit the fan one way or another. You didn't say where Randy went on his motorcycle. And what about Babs?" Yoke: "Well, yesterday was pretty calm, and we were nice to Randy and made things together, so don't worry too much about him going amok. He made the motorcycle this morning. A really tough machine, all big and black and loud, though of course it's electric. Like I say, he's out riding it now, but I don't know where. Babs was so impressed with Randy's motorcycle that she made herself a car, look, you can see it out in front of the warehouse." Yoke peered out the warehouse's big square door at an incredibly decorated dune-buggy outside. It was covered all over with drawings of girls, done in a casual sketchbook kind of style, and its fenders were curled up in funny squiggles. It looked like a live cartoon, bright in the afternoon sun. Standing by the buggy was Babs herself, talking to a burr-cut man with little round glasses. "That's Babs's new friend Theodore. He slept here last night. Believe it or not, Randy's jealous of him. As if he had a right. I think that's why he took off on his big bad motorsickle this morning. And then Babs made herself the car just to show she's still on top. She thought about it for a couple of hours and when she was ready she alla-made it real fast when nobody was looking. She transmuted some heavy garbage instead of just air, so that there wasn't this like big thunderclap. Theodore and our neighbors don't know about the allas yet, thank God. If the word gets out, it's going to be a zoo. I'll go ahead and step all the way outside so you can see down the street. Hi, Babs, I'm talking to my sister Joke on the Moon. See Cobb lying in the street next to the car sunning himself, Joke? It's the third sunny day in a row. Say hi to Joke, Cobb, you lazy old slug." Cobb stuck a head and arm out of his puddled form and waved. "And see the giant, charred snail shell across the street by the water, Joke? Isn't that too much?" Joke: "Keep looking, I want to sketch the shell for Corey. He wants to make a Silly Putter pet Tucker Snail. And then look down the street so I can see the Anubis, Yoke. I'm getting really nice image quality. And also I want to talk about how soon you're coming home. I don't want to lose you. You should leave before the heavy kilp starts happening."
Yoke stared at the shell and the Anubis for a minute, then wandered back into the warehouse. It was two in the afternoon. "Phil's the big issue to me, Joke, and of course Ma too. I'm sorry, but I don't want a clone with a Happy Cloak for my mother. According to the aliens, Phil and Darla and the others are off in the powerball hyperspace bubble, maybe not so far away. In the fourth dimension. I told Phil I'd wait for him here. If I hang here just a little more, maybe he'll come back. Oh, and look, I didn't show you yet what Randy, Babs, and I made yesterday." Yoke gazed at a chest-high aquarium filled with delicately shaded plastic jellyfish. "These are imipolex, like Babs's worms.
It's very easy to program an artificial jellyfish, at least it was with Randy helping. See how we put a different mandala onto the surface of each one? The kind of realistic ones are Babs's and the more abstract ones are by me. I think Babs is right that moving art is better than art that just sits there. Next I want to make some simulated polyps that build a coral reef. I wish I knew more limpware engineering. Randy's good at it, believe it or not. Of course, playing with real life would be more exciting, but the aliens say it's going to be impossible for us to use the alla to really program biological life until we completely figure out all of the wetware engineering for ourselves, and who knows when that'll be. They don't want to tell us too much, because they don't want it to be easy for us or the moldies to actualize a billion instances of ourselves and instantly over-populate the planet. They think we're that dumb."
Joke: "Too true. I wish you'd come back home, Yoke. Those allas--they could be dangerous. What if someone were to turn one against you? It sounds like things could so easily get out of control. Does Randy Karl Tucker realize that the aliens are in bodacious moldie bodies just down the block?"
Yoke made a little marble head with her alla, an image of how she felt. An open-mouthed face: excited, anxious, aware. "We didn't tell him yet, no. But I think we might go see them tonight."
CHAPTER FIVE
RANDY, PHIL, BABS, PHIL
Randy, February 26
Randy steered his motorcycle south out of San Francisco, taking Route 1 down along the coast past Pacifica. Though it had been sunny over at Babs's warehouse, it was foggy and cold on the coast. He pulled over and alla-made himself gloves and a set of biking leathers. Awesome what the little coppery tube could do. It had been great making things with Babs and Yoke yesterday. That Babs was really something. And now, just when he was starting to go for her, she was slipping away from him, which was majorly depressing. Maybe it was time for him to change.
Randy tucked the alla tube inside his right glove just in case he needed it all of sudden. He'd never ridden a motorcycle before, and he had a notion that if he were about to collide with something, he might be able to use the alla to turn the obstacle into thin air. Just project a bright-line cube on out there and zap whatever it was: a rock, a tree, or even another vehicle. Though if he couldn't have Babs, then why bother? Randy caught himself and pushed that feeling away. Riding the bike proved quite easy. Randy had picked a top-of-the-line model out of the alla catalog, and it was very stable.
It had a big quantum-dot electric motor and imipolex DIM wheels. South of Half Moon Bay, Randy decided to stop and make himself a snack. Not seeing any official beach, he simply drove his bike across a field of dead brussels sprouts to the edge of a hundred-foot bluff at the edge of the sea. The smart wheels had no problem picking their way across the furrows.
Randy parked his bike upright on its stand, then used his alla to make himself an energy bar and a can of Bharat Jolly-Zest soda, an anise-flavored Indian soft drink he'd become fond of in Bangalore. He was pleased to find it in the truly exhaustive alla catalog. After eating, he kept sitting on the bluff, amusing himself by designing a series of little realware glider airplanes and flinging them out into the eddying winds. He couldn't stop thinking about Babs Mooney. Babs's sudden relationship with Theodore was bothering Randy a lot more than he would have expected. Up until a few days ago he'd been thinking of Babs as basically an easy mark whom he could sponge off of, as well as being a pretty good person to kill time with. It's not like she was knock-down gorgeous or anything. But now all of a sudden things were getting complicated, the way women were said to like them to be.
Randy's experience thus far with women was very limited, one might even say stunted. The sum total was this: in high school he'd had a hot and heavy affair with a bisexual older woman named Honey Weaver who -- it later developed -- had really just been using him as a way to get at his mother, with whom Honey also had an affair. It was Honey who'd gotten Randy interested in cheeseball sex. She'd had two memorable moldie sex toys: the dildo Angelika and the versatile rubber sheet Sammie-Jo.
The day after Randy graduated from high school -- lordy lord, that was nearly four years ago --Honey had converted to Heritagism and cut him off without so much as a kiss good-bye. "All them things you and me did was wrong, Randy Karl," she'd said. "I'm through bein' the goddamn Whore of Babylon. It was only because of your mother that you was important to me."
Honey had used him and ditched him, and then the same thing had happened again --only this time with a moldie named Parvati. Randy lived with Parvati while he was working for an imipolex fab in Bangalore, India. In the end it came out that Parvati really and truly only wanted him for the imipolex he could give her. There'd been a bad last scene involving poisoning and knife-play; Randy ended up in possession of one of Parvati's buttocks, which had become none other than Willa Jean.
Randy didn't tell anyone that particular story because it was too ludicrous, like so much of his sorry-ass life. From the inside, of course, his life didn't feel funny one bit. Just because most people's lives worked out so goody-goody bone-normal, did that make him a Bozo clown that anyone could take a shot at? He sighed, staring down at his bright-line alla mesh and tweaking the wing shape of another glider. No way to deny that it was his fault Babs thought he was a fool. First of all, he'd come in loaded on camote on Tuesday morning. He had a painful memory of trying to hump one of those aliens, just like a dog getting on someone's leg. His eyes all rolling back to show their whites. Ow. Since then he'd been too ashamed to talk about the aliens, or even to ask Babs where they'd gone.
And then there'd been the second thing. Tuesday night, before he had any kind of chance to reestablish his credibility, Babs had left for a date--a date!--and in the night he had his godawful recurring nightmare about the snail that followed him everywhere, the snail that would always catch up no matter how fast or how far he ran.
Sitting alone on the bluff, Randy writhed in agony, remembering the raw terror of waking up in the night with everything not okay, with the nightmare snail big and real and truly after him, dragging its realware shell through the sad real world, the snail talking like his poor dead mother, its voice loud and clear so that Yoke and Cobb could hear it, could hear all about how the snail wanted to sit on his face so nasty. "Ah'm real hot to crawl on you, Randy Karl." He was no motherfucker, he didn't deserve this kilp, but try and explain it to Babs after she heard all about it from that little loonie twist Yoke; Yoke laughing her ass off about it every time she brought it up, twenty times so far if it was one.
And this morning Yoke had told that slick Theodore about the snail. Since they were keeping the allas secret, Yoke had to talk all around everything to avoid spilling the beans. She'd made it sound like he had hand-built the monster while he was lifted or sleepwalking or something.
So who was Babs gonna go for, Bozo the hillbilly or Theodore the smooth-talking California scene-maker, always with the right opinions about the right things --shit, the dook even worked at an art gallery, which had to be Babs's perfect wet dream. Theodore had slept over with Babs last night. The guy was already gettin' on her. Randy felt a sick rush of self-loathing. All the twisted, rotten things he'd done over the years --how could any regular woman love him? Randy set the next glider on fire and watched as it warped and burned, spiraling down into the pounding surf. "That's me," he muttered, and damned if he didn't half feel like jumping off the cliff himself. Get it the hell over with. The way he was, nobody could ever love him. He was better off dead. Randy inched closer to the cliffs edge, watching as some dirt crumbled under his weight. Better off dead? All because of that noisy, plump-cheeked little Babs Mooney? "Come on, Randy boy. Tat tvam asi."
He thought of a better thing to do, reckless enough to slake his death-wish without being sheer suicide. He found the alla-catalog image of his motorcycle, located an image of a full-size glider plane, and mentally attached the titanium-braced imipolex wings of the glider to the bike. He studied the image, adju
sted the bends of the wing, and said "Actualize." The alla projected a bright-line wire mesh near the edge of the bluff, then filled it in with Randy's newly designed fly-bike.
The ocean wind beat at the twenty-foot wings, threatening to push the motorcycle-glider over on one side. Randy bulked up some dirt mound supports for the wings and added a rocket-pod to the rear of the bike. And then he took another look at the ocean. The restless waves were gray and cold, utterly heedless of human comfort. It would xoxx to full in. Fuck death! He didn't have to die; he could change! It wasn't too late yet. There had to be a way. Randy decided to launch the fly-bike in an unmanned test-run. Whether or not it worked, it would be easy enough to alla up another, and while he was doing all this he could think about how to make himself more lovable.
So as to properly weight the trial vehicle, Randy alla-made a mannequin of--why not polished madrone wood? That was one of the nicest materials he had seen so far, a fine-grained reddish wood nearly as dense and heavy as flesh. The lustrous madrone figure looked very floatin' sitting on the
motorcycle-rocket-glider. Yaaar. Give it green glass eyes and a shit-eating grin. Randy fired up the rocket to launch the combine off the cliff. One of the wings twisted; the bike spun into the cliff and tumbled out of control. Meanwhile the rocket was blasting and--splash--the bike punched into the water at easily forty miles per. The crouched wooden rider floated facedown, the waves beating the figure against the rocks.
