by Rudy Rucker
“Come on, Spazz! Please! Let’s shut ’em down!”
“Okay, okay, all you have to do is go to this web address I’m gonna tell you, enter my name and a password, and then type something into a form you’ll find there. I’ve got a script on the server that sends what you type to all the Mophones.”
“Tell me.”
Spazz walked me through the steps. His secret controller web page had a graphic of the vintage soft-porn queen Bettie Page holding a whip; the tip of the whip led to a field where I could type in Spazz’s real name, which I’d never actually heard before, and then this weird, hard-to-hack password p∧h#re@ky?DEF6. A little Motalk upgrade window appeared.
“Type helo mophone : * and press ENTER,” said Spazz. “One 1 in helo.”
I did it. Meanwhile sirens were coming towards my house, a fire engine and a rescue vehicle. The rain picked up as the fire engine pulled up and the firemen jumped off. Suddenly a big metal disk materialized in my front yard, rolling around on its edge like a twenty-foot hubcap, gouging a muddy trench in the ground and changing its shape as it rolled. That would be Deet’s borrowed saucer. It dinged the truck, smashed my garage and disappeared into Dronia. Another wobbly wave of Wackles flickered through my front yard, on their way to Klupdom. The firemen stood there in shock, with no clue what to do next, the rain streaming off their helmets and their yellow slickers.
“Type halt-a,” said Spazz.
I did it. The window at the tip of Bettie’s whip printed an echo line:
done
“It says done,” I told Spazz.
“Gnar gnar,” said Spazz, meaning something like “Good.”
A question occurred to me. “If the Mophones are off, why can I still hear you?”
“We’re like superusers,” said Spazz. “You and me and Jena. Our three Mophones don’t accept downloads. They were the first three we built, before Tulip put the download feature in.”
“Well turn off your Mophone and don’t use it again! I’ll tell Jena and we’ll be done. Oh, thank God, Spazz, thank God. We’re safe.”
Just then something cataclysmic must have happened up in Klup dom, for a dozen dead Wackles flew across my office and crashed through the house’s front wall like it was tissue paper. I yelped with surprise.
“You’re really losing it, Joe,” said Spazz on the Mophone “I better be the one to call Jena.”
“Don’t!” I shrieked. But he’d already hung up.
There was a heavy creaking from overhead, as of thick, rusty nails being slowly pulled from old beams. I pocketed my Mophone and ran out into the front yard just before the ceiling of my office collapsed.
There was a sharp twinge in my shoulder. From the corner of my eye I could see my burgundy linen shirt bulging upwards. Some thing was growing out of the spot where the Wackle had bit me! I didn’t like to think what it might be. But right now I had the fire chief to deal with, a handsome guy with a dark mustache.
“What’s going on?” he asked. “Is this a toxic spill?”
“It’s—it’s computer graphics,” I told him, wiping the rain out of my eyes. “A three-dimensional projection unit gone out of control. There’s nothing we can do to stop it. Just keep people back from the house.” A Wackle ball thudded into me, very nearly ma ing me lose my balance.
“Is there anyone else in the house?” asked the chief.
“No,” I said. The Wackle strands were smashing it to bits. Pieces of wood and plaster were flying; the walls were wobbling.
“Where’s your utility boxes?” asked the chief. “We need to cut your power and gas.”
“In back,” I told him. and he splashed off.
I pulled out my Mophone and dialed Jena’s number, leaning over the Mophone so the rain wouldn’t get on it. Busy. Talking to Spazz. When Jena got going, she could talk for half an hour. And Spazz would let her—just to drive me nuts. He didn’t really buy into how serious this was.
I’d have to find Jena in person before it was too late. Maybe she’d gone hack to our old house? Not likely, given how worried she was about Sante. Where else did Jena like to go? The Los Perros Coffee Roasting. She loved to sit there drinking nonfat decaf lattes and talking on her cell phone.
I decided to drive there. Even though I could walk to the Roasting in five or ten minutes, I didn’t want to do it in this rain. My shirt was already soaked. The scene here had gotten so chaotic that none of the firemen moved to stop me from getting into my car.
But before I could pull out of the driveway, a limo blocked me in. Clement Treed and the MeYou transition team. Oh, Christ. I honked, but the driver didn’t move. I jumped out and ran back. Clement got out of the rear and unkinked his lanky body, looking around.
“Bad news?” he said, ducking his head against the rain.
“I turned off the Mophones,” I told him. “They were a trick. The Kluppers gave them to us so we’d pop space. They want to get rid of us so it’ll be easy for them to shoot the Dronners. I have to go find Jena. I couldn’t turn off her Mophone.”
Clement scowled down at me. “Turned the Mophones off? The day after product launch? That’s a showstopper, Joe. Hurry up and turn them hack on.”
“Didn’t you hear me, Clement,? We’re talking about the destruction of the cosmos! The Mophones violate the Law of Conservation of Energy. They’ll make a hole in space. The decay of the vacuum.”
“What’s your source on this?” he said sharply.
“Them,” I said, pointing to the swarm of red balls. “The Wackles.”
“I was wondering about those things,” said Clement. “Bad business. They’re wrecking our office. You won’t restore Mophone service?”
“Maybe—maybe we do a bait-and-switch,” I said frantically. “We slam our users over to PacBell.”
“There’s no we anymore,” said Clement grimly. “You’ve lost it, Joe. I’m taking control. And you’re fired.”
There was a blinding flash of light: a hyperbazooka beam passing through our space. Some of the red balls disappeared, and a few more dead Wackles went flying by, rapidly phasing through a series of nightmarish shapes you weren’t really sure you could see. Losing my job didn’t seem too important just now.
“Gotta go,” I shouted. I jumped into my Explorer, put it into four-wheel drive, and circled through the yard to get to the road. I headed for the coffee shop as fast as I could go, using redial on my Mophone to call Jena over and over. Busy, busy, busy. I should have killed Spazz when I had the chance.
The lump on my shoulder gave a sharp twitch. What the hell? I reached under my linen shirt and peeled off the band-aid. I felt a round bump with two sharp, wiggly little projections on it. It moved when I touched it, and, oh gross, was it making a sound?
But now there was a siren behind me, a cop car with its flasher on. Either I was speeding or Clement had sicced him on me. Whatever. I wasn’t stopping. Looking in the mirror at the cop, I realized that a bunch of the red Wackle balls were following me, swarming all around the outside of my Explorer. Protecting me from the Kluppers. I felt a deep wave of affection for the Wackles. Truly our smeel was one. I’d worry about my shoulder later.
I got a parking space right in front of the Coffee Roasting. I peered in past the rain, looking over the customers, my mind running at unbelievable speed.
In the window were a couple in identical blue and yellow biking jerseys, blue and yellow shoes, black spandex shorts, like they were on a team. Behind them was a blonde woman handing an accordion file organizer filled with separate small folders to a nerd who held his lips pooched out in moronic concentration. Beside them was a man with a long straight nose, fine teeth, curly hair, and a strong chin, holding forth to a trio of older CEO-type guys, his girlfriend silently gazing at him like a flower enjoying the sun. Just now he’d said something to make the older guys laugh, and the girlfriend had ducked her head and was looking openmouthed over at them, milking the moment. The CEOs were dignified silver-haired guys in turtlenecks and jeans. I n
oticed all of this in the split second I was scanning the room for Jena. I was amped like you wouldn’t believe.
And then I saw her, sitting at a table in a corner near the rear. She was just setting down her phone; thank God she was off the line. We were almost home free!
The cop had double parked next to me. He was a fit, craggy guy my age. Intense-looking, short dark hair, mustache, acne-scarred skin. The kind of guy I might have played beach volleyball with on a different kind of day. “Sir,” he called, peering past the Wackle globs between us. “Sir!” In California, whenever someone called you “Sir” it meant they were going to hassle you. Back in Matthewsboro it had been a term of respect.
Though the window I saw Jena picking up her Mophone again, pushing the buttons to make another call. Wanting to say one more thing to Spazz.
“Don’t!” I shouted, jumping out of my car. “Don’t use the Mophone!”
“Sir!”
The flock of Wackle balls smashed the Coffee Roasting’s plate glass window, sending the customers scattering. In the aftermath of the tinkling glass came a moment of silence, broken only by the quiet pooting of jazz from the coffee shop’s sound system. And then I heard a tiny little voice from my shoulder: a high voice, a Wackle voice.
“It’s gonna pop, Joe!” it cried.
I believed what it said. I flung myself into the shop, ran to the corner of the room, and dove across Jena’s table, knocking her Mophone from her hands. Jena gave an angry exclamation, jumped to her feet and stepped back. She thought I’d gone nuts.
Pop!
It was a small sound, clear and distinct. The Mophone had been replaced by a sinister black sphere. The sphere was matte black, so utterly nonreflecting that it looked like a flat disk, or even like a flaw on my cornea. It was a hole in space, slowly and implacably increasing its size. Soundlessly the sphere dug through the tabletop and ate away the side of Jena’s coffee mug. At the ball’s touch, matter disappeared like a burst bubble’s rainbows, objects evaporated like the pictures in a burning reel of film.
The ball gave off a vibe of pure Nothingness, a vibe that I recognized as Death. I knew Death a bit from seeing my mother’s brother Vick die of a stroke at Thanksgiving dinner one year. This was after my parents had divorced, when drunk Uncle Vick had taken to spending the holidays with us. One minute old Vick had been bragging and bullying, inflating himself with our attention; the next minute he’d been dead on the floor with his tongue sticking out and his little eyes gone milky blank. I’d seen Death convert Vick into Nothing. And now Death was here again.
The ball’s rate of expansion was picking up. The whole table was gone and the ball was nearly as tall as me. It was starting to dig into the floor. Jena was hemmed into the corner of the room. There was an instant when she still could have darted out, but she’d hesitated and missed it. There wasn’t any possible way for her to get out past the ball now. She could smell the Death in it, too.
“Help me, Joe!” she cried.
There was no question in my mind that I had to save my Jena. Nobody else was going to do it. The mustached cop who’d been so interested in me was standing outside on the sidewalk, busy calling for backup on his cell phone. It was all up to me. But I found it hard to step forward and reach for the ball of Nothing. Logically, I knew I was augmented, hyperthick, and probably impervious to the dissolution of Spaceland—but the deathly sphere terrified me.
Jena screamed again. I stopped thinking and leapt into the ball. My outstretched arms went in first, and then my head. It was fine for my body, but as I left the fabric of Spaceland, my watch and my clothes disappeared.
Yes, despite my fears, it was fine for me inside the ball, just plain old hyperspace. I could see Klupdom and Dronia to either side. I was breathing the air of the All.
“Grab the edges,” piped the voice from my shoulder.
Right. I groped around at the edge of the ball, turning my hands vinn and vout. There was a kind of hyperthickness I could catch hold of. It felt like slippery latex. The stuff of Spaceland. I clamped onto either side of the ball, turning my hands around and around, knotting them into the fabric of space. The ball tried to grow further; I was barely able to hold it back. Without releasing the grip of my hands, I kicked out and found the ball’s edges with my feet. I jiggled my feet in a four-dimensional way and got swatches of our space wrapped around them. And that was enough.
I was holding the ball in four different spots. My arms were stretched out to the left and right, and my legs were doing the splits from front to back. The ball of Nothing had stopped growing. Joe Superhero.
“A pyramid of forces,” said the voice on my shoulder. “Perfect, Joe.”
I glanced over and finally allowed myself to see the little Wackle head growing out of my flesh. The head was the size of a thumb, four-dimensional, with its shape changing as it moved. It had soft little devil horns. At its neck, its crimson hide blended into my pale skin. Gnarly gnarly gnarly. I looked away from it.
I used my third eye to see into Spaceland. There was pandemonium in the Coffee Roasting. Jena was sobbing and shouting my name. She couldn’t see me here inside the hall; she thought I’d sacrificed myself for her. Good! Like being at my own funeral. But—not so good—she was still trapped in the corner by the curve of the ball.
I turned my head back and forth, looking vinn towards Dronia and vout towards Klupdom. There was lot to see. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of Wackle strands were teaching out towards me from the Dronian cliffs. Many of the strands passed through Space land into the Klupper part of the All. Vout there I saw four silver saucers with gray-suited grolly guards. Momo’s husband Voule was among them: dark, powerful, loud. At his commands, the purplish-skinned grolly guards were attempting to wipe out the Wackles with hyperbazookas, but the Wackles were frustrating them bv the sheer force of their numbers. For the moment it was a stand-off.
I wondered why the Empress’s crimson-clad troops hadn’t come. I must be that the attack upon Spaceland had been carried out without her knowledge. If our only enemies were Momo’s family and the grolly guards, the Wackles could surely hold them off until—until what? How long was I supposed to float here holding my world together?
“Yoo-hoo,” said the Wackle head on my shoulder, trying to get me to talk to it.
I still didn’t want to; I didn’t want the head to be real. Meanwhile the steady straining of the Nothing-ball was starting to wear on me. I noticed that if I flexed my knees and elbows, I could make the ball a little smaller. But my muscles could only hold so long, and each time I’d let up, my limbs would snap back to their maximum extension, with the sphere of Nothing patiently pulling at my joints. At some point I was going to come apart
“Help,” I said softly.
“Me?” said the Wackle head on my shoulder.
“I guess so,” I sighed, finally acknowledging it. “Can you call the others?”
The little head let out a piercing whistle, and one of the Wackle strands drifted into the ball. It flowed and thickened until a fat, devilish Wackle section was squeezed in there with me, the rest of him sticking vinn and vout on either side.
We were mashed together like lovers in a sleeping bag. “Our smeel is one, Joe,” said the Wackle, his face pressed against mine.
“Arc you the one who bit me?” I asked. The Wackle shrugged, as if to indicate this was a pointless question. I was beginning to understand that individuality meant nothing for the Wackles. They were all part of one great SuperWackle, including the extra head on my shoulder, and speaking of the head, how in hell was I going to get rid of it?
“A handy head for wander wonder,” said the Wackle, as if he were reading my mind. And perhaps he was. Certainly I was understanding the Wackles a lot better than I’d been able to a few hours ago.
The Wackle petted my extra head with a tendril from the tip of a folded-up arm. “Atop High Dronia you soonest fetch a patch,” he said. His motions were jiggling the ball of Nothing, pulling that much harder on my j
oints. I couldn’t stand it much longer.
“Stop jouncing,” I snapped. Now that we were practically brothers, there was no need to stand on ceremony. “Fat slob. Why don’t you hold the ball for a while? Or can we sew it up?”
“Fetch a peachy patch, flatty,” said the Wackle. “Drabk the Sharak of Okbra can do. If. You bark to doggy Drabk beyond beyond the Dronia.” He made a vinnward gesture and the ball jounced again. Hard.
“Grab the ball and let me out of here, idiot.”
“Negatory,” said the Wackle. “Boneless stretch taffy pull me whoops it would.”
“Then do this,” I hissed. “Bring the rope we used to tie up Momo’s saucer. And be careful when you slide out. Do it smooth, pig.”
The big Wackle eased himself out of the hole and swooped off through the clear air of Dronia. Thanks to my garage having been crushed, my saucer had drifted quite some distance off, but it didn’t take the Wackle long to return with the rope. He grew half a dozen arms and nimbly pulled out a series of mounds from the edges of the Nothing-ball, knotting the rope around each one of them. Soon the pressure was off my arms and legs and I could let go; I eased myself into the space of Dronia.
The Wackle tied off a few more spots on the ball—by now he’d made at least twenty links. The sections of rope stretched back and forth between the knots, making a kind of three-dimensional star, five or six feet across. Around the ball was Spaceland, that is, the Los Perros Coffee Roasting with its broken front window and its customers on the sidewalk. The rough-skinned cop was in the shop, uncertainly looking at the tip of his nightstick where the ball of Nothing had melted it away. He wasn’t going to do much till reinforcements arrived. Jena had stopped crying for me and was trying to figure out how to get out without touching the ball.
Here in Dronner space, there were Wackles on every side. Thanks to the parasitic head on my shoulder, I could easily tune in on their conversations. They were talking about the Kluppers, the hole, and about me. About how I had to fly my saucer up to High Dronia to fetch a patch from Drabk—whoever or whatever he was. The main image of Drabk I could pick up from the Wackles was of some object like a thick, dark worm—a caterpillar?