Freeware

by Rudy Rucker

  "Ten thousand dollars," said Ike enviously. "That's righteous bucks. Why don't I get any money?"

  "The restaurant is worth a lot more than ten thousand dollars, you fool."

  "Oh yeah, I guess it is."

  "And you get it all to yourself," spat Terri. "Just because you're a boy with a stupid, gross ball sack."

  "Whoah!"

  That summer Terri had a summer job running the cash register in Dom's Grotto out on the Santa Cruz Wharf. Dom was virulently antimoldie, and he made a point of advertising that no moldies were employed in any capacity by his restaurant.

  ALL

  HUMAN-PREPARED FOOD read the signs outside. HERITAGISTS WELCOME. NO MOLDIES

  WORK

  HERE. Due to the stench of moldies, not many restaurants employed them anyway, except perhaps to wash dishes or keep the books, but Dom liked to promote the Heritagist cause, even at the risk of getting in trouble for violating the equal rights clause of the Moldie Citizenship Act.

  Terri was a calm and efficient cashier, sitting there afternoons and evenings on a high stool. She wore pink lipstick, and she wore her hair long and straight.

  She chewed gum. Her face was thin, her skin was dark, she was sexy. Terri slept late in the mornings, and at night she went to as many beach parties as her parents would let her get away with.

  Ike was working as a deckhand on a Percesepe day-cruise fishing boat run by Dom's brother Carmen. Ike's boat would leave early and come back to the wharf around 4 P.M. He'd help cleaning the fish the tourists had caught, collect his tips, hose himself off with fresh water, and go over to Dom's Grotto to get his main meal of the day. Terri would order it up as takeout and let Ike have it for free; this was approved by Dom, with the stipulation that Ike's meals not be extravagant.

  One foggy day in August, Ike came in wet and wiry, his brown eyes big and his short hair bristling. He wore boots, baggy shorts, and a damp, stained T-shirt. "Yaar, Terri!"

  "Yaar, kiddo. How were the tips?"

  "So-so." He shoved his hand in his pocket and held out a small wad of ones and fives. "The customers caught their limit of rockfish, but they were cheap bastards. They were Baptist Heritagists from Texas; Dad's group invited them here and gave them a reduced rate. They kept hoping someone would hook a rogue moldie so we'd have to flame it. Instead of tipping me, one couple gave me, look at this—" Ike dug in his other pocket and produced a gospel DIM that displayed a little hollow film loop about moldies being the Beast predicted by the Book of Revelations.

  "Moldies are Satan," chirped the little DIM as it played its images.

  "How bogus," said Terri. "How valley. And I notice they don't hate moldies too much to use a DIM for their gospel tract. Like they don't realize that DIMs are small pieces of moldie?"

  "They don't know shit," said Ike. "When I mentioned that we're Catholic, they said that the Virgin Mary is a false idol. Whatevray. I'm starving, Terri. Can I get a lobster? Just this once?"

  "You know Dad says to give you cheap food," said Terri. "Unsold fish for upstart barbarians."

  "Yeah," said Ike, "with lemonade for dessert. Come on, Terri. Let me have a lobster today. If Dad complains, I'll take the blame."

  "He won't let you take the blame," said Terri. "You're the son. Dad saves all the blame for me. But what the hey, big sis can handle it. What do you want with your lobster?"

  "I want steamed clams, garlic bread, onion rings, french fries, coleslaw, corn on the cob, and a double vanilla milk shake."

  "Hungry much?" Terri filled out a takeout check and handed it in through a little window to the kitchen. Ike flopped down on one of the captain's chairs by the register.

  "Don't sprawl, Ike. You'll scare off the paying customers. We don't want them to think this is a place for grunge buckets."

  "Shut up," said Ike, rubbing his face and lolling even farther back.

  "I saw little Cammy Maarten at the party last night," said Terri to needle her brother. "Isn't she in your grade? She asked about you. She said I should bring you to the next party. She thinks you're cute."

  "Cammy Maarten is a feeb," said Ike. He had not yet realized that girls were something he needed. "And I'd feel stupid coming to a surfer beach party when I don't even have a board."

  "We should get a board, Ike," said Terri. "I've been thinking about that. We could get a DIM board and share it. We'll each get our own wet suit, of course.

  I have a lot of money saved up from this job, and you have a big hoard of birthday and Christmas money, don't you? It's totally lame for us to be living in Cruz and not know how to surf."

  "Dad won't like it," said Ike. "He hates surfers."

  "Not every single thing has to come out Dad's way, does it?" asked Terri.

  "I would love to surf," allowed Ike. "But don't you think maybe we're too old to learn?"

  "Seventeen and fifteen isn't old, Ike, believe me. Old is the people who eat in this restaurant all day. Hey, here's your order. Stick around outside and wait for me. I'll tell Teresa I have cramps from my period and she'll let me off early and we can go to the surf shop."

  "You're gross," said Ike and went out on the wharf to feast. Terri came out when he was almost through eating and ate the rest of his french fries and onion rings, plus the hard-to-get meat in the body of his lobster. Hungry seagulls skirled overhead and sea lions barked down among the pilings.

  They fed the lobster shells to the sea lions and walked down to the land end of the wharf to wait for a moldie bus. Before long the big loping thing came pattering by, coming down the grass-and-sand street. Terri waved, and the bus stopped. The bus was a fused grex made of twelve moldies. Her name was Muxxi.

  "Howdy thar, Terri and Ike," said Muxxi in the corny Wild West accent she affected, perhaps to please tourists or perhaps to mock. "Whar ye goin'

  today?"

  "We want to go to Dada Kine Surf Shop, Muxxi," said Terri.

  "Waal, now, I reckon that means we'll be a-settin' you young-uns off at the corner of Forty-First Street and Opal Cliff Drive," said Muxxi, displaying the fare as numbers in her skin. "Pay up!"

  Ike and Terri handed their fares to Muxxi, who rippled her imipolex to move the other riders toward the rear of the bus. Muxxi bulged out two fresh front-row seats for Ike and Terri. The kids lowered their butts down into the seats and the seats grabbed them tight. In bad weather the seats formed protective cowls, but today Terri and Ike were fully exposed to the pleasant sun and offshore breeze.

  The bus's giant sluglike body rippled along through the main beach area.

  There on the right was the Boardwalk with its classic mechanical roller coaster and on the left was the hill with the family motel, the Terrace Court. Terri's motel—someday. Terri had gone to her mother to complain about the will, and Alice had promised Terri that she would pass the motel directly on to her, which made Terri feel a lot better. Alice had even asked Terri what she thought about maybe adding Clearlight to their motel's name.

  The bus waded across the shallow San Lorenzo River and humped up a slope to a grassy road that capped the cliffs. Muxxi let off two passengers at the yacht harbor, where the cliffs dropped away. She got another few passengers as she raced along the edges of Twin Lakes and Live Oaks beaches. As each group of passengers got on, Ike and Terri's seats moved further towards the rear.

  The cliffs rose up again and the bus surged onto them, the thick corrugations on her underside swaying at a rapid steady pace. Now they were at Pleasure Point with its schools of surfers.

  "Here's whar ye git off, Terri and Ike," twanged Muxxi. Their seats turned to the side and became chutes that slid them slowly down to the ground. Muxxi pattered off, and the kids stood watching the surfers for a while.

  "Do you really think we can learn to do it, Terri?" asked Ike.

  "Sure. It's easier with a DIM board. They have ripples on their bottom like Muxxi; they can swim. It makes it a lot less work to catch waves."

  "What if they swim off without you and go rogue?"


  "They don't," said Terri. "They're not smart and independent like moldies.

  They're DIMs. A DIM board is smart enough to swim and to let you steer it, and that's all it wants to do. Dom thinks women should be like DIMs."

  "Stop going off about Dom," said Ike. "I'm ready to buy a board."

  They walked a block up Forty-First Street to the Dada Kine Surf Shop. Inside the store it was dark and cool. New and used DIM boards lined two walls and hung from the ceiling. Racks of wet suits filled out the rest of the store. A

  Hawaiian kahuna was sitting behind the counter. Slouched next to him was a red-and-yellow moldie, a liveboard. A liveboard was vastly more skilled and functional than a DIM board, but, of course, full moldies were very expensive.

  Instead of just buying them, you had to put them on a salary.

  "Yaar, Terri," said the big Hawaiian. "Your bud Kurtis Goole was in here earlier today. I think he went up to Four Mile Beach."

  "I'm not looking for him, Kimo," said Terri. "I'm here to shop. This is my brother Ike. We want to get wet suits and a DIM board."

  "Two boards," said Ike all of a sudden. "I don't want to have to share with you, Terri."

  "Tell me how much money you want to spend," said Kimo. "And we'll see what we can do."

  "And I'll give you little bangtails a cost-free and unforgettably wise lesson," volunteered the moldie. "A gorgeous incentive for them, right, Kimo? Business being so slow that I haven't been paid in it seems like seven weeks, you understand."

  "Mahalo very much, Everooze," said Kimo. "It'll be bitchin' if you give them a lesson. How much bucks you got, kids?"

  An hour later Ike and Terri had each gotten a used wet suit and a rebuilt DIM

  board—at a very reasonable price. Ike's board was red with black checkers, Terri's was patterned with blue-and-green flames. Everooze bounced down to the beach with them, jabbering away, and they swam out to a small uncrowded break.

  "I'll hang this fabulation on three ripe words like an uvvy preacher," said Everooze. "Visualize, realize, and actualize. How do you talk to your DIM

  board?

  It's a telepathic union, thanks to a little piece of uvvy in the nape of the wet suit neck, cuddled right up near your bright young Percesepe brain. To make your board swim, you visualize the motion you want, and then you realize that thought—push it out of your head so's the DIM can channel it. And then, step three, the DIM makes it actual, all by itself. Splutter mutter, peanut butter!

  Visualize, realize, and actualize—these are the keys to correct surf motion in the water and—hmmm—indeed in all other walks or flights of life. The magic of the -alize ending. Yes. The DIM in the DIM board is a clueless little tad of flicker-cladding, a lonely finger's worth of a moldie, but if you can visualize and realize, it can actualize. It works fairly well, at least on these puny waves. Puny waves but nicely tubular, I should add. Let's surf 'em."

  The realizing step was a little hard to get, but after a while Terri and Ike had it down. The trick was to think that you were already moving the way you wanted—to make it real at least for yourself—and the DIM would pick up on that.

  Ike said it felt like his whole body was talking to the DIM, and Terri said it was more like focusing your attention ahead of where you already were.

  Everooze said that either way was perfectly floatin', although it was best of all to degravitate to the fact that they were, in fact, helping the DIM boards to surf.

  Once they swam out through the breakers, Everooze started showing them how to catch a wave. "It's a cosmic rhythm, you viz?" said Everooze, repeatedly catching waves, then ducking underwater to swim back to Terri and Ike like a big oblong sea skate turned skateboard. "It's not enough to see a wave coming; you want to smell it and hear it and feel it in the air and in the water.

  Undoubtedly there's a little current between your toes right now, for instance, which is the suck of the draw of the next wave crest to come. Get fully lifted on synesthesia because the ocean is indeed realizing its ability to actualize the way you are going to move. Not only are you helping the DIM board; you're helping the ocean as well. Think of yourself as the ocean's DIM."

  Terri and Ike started catching waves then and riding them, at first on all fours and then, miraculously, standing on two feet. "Ah yes," exulted Everooze.

  "The human race rises from the primordial sea, a boy and a girl step forth from the zillion whats of past time to be here—whoops!—keep your center between your knees, Terri, think of your whole mass as a magic invisible weight dangling down there—that's it, my lassie—yee-haw!—and another one, Ike—boom—over the falls for sure, a Niagara wet whirl under there in Neptune's washing machine, no harm in that, no loss in failure, the surf god is actualizing tubes, kids, so get back out there—whoo-ee!"

  When they got back home from that long, magical afternoon, Terri and Ike were committed surfers.

  Dom never approved, but in the end it didn't matter. Terri and Ike finished out high school and kept on surfing and working various small-time jobs, and then Dom died.

  It happened over Thanksgiving weekend, 2048. There was a big family dinner at their Uncle Carmine's. Alice got quite wasted and somehow ended up in a big argument with Dom. Apparently she wasn't happy with their sex life. Dom stormed out into the night and disappeared.

  Back home around midnight, after Terri and Ike had finally gotten their mother to pass out in her bed, there was an uvvy call from a Wackerhut gimmie. Terri answered.

  "Is this the Percesepe residence?"

  "Yes, who's calling?" "I'm an investigator for Wackerhut Security. There's a problem here with a Dom Percesepe. Are you his next of kin?"

  "I'm his daughter."

  "You better get over here: 2020 Bay Street, right near the Saturn Cafe."

  "Is he okay?"

  "You'd better come over."

  As Ike and Terri stepped out of the house, several small dragonfly telerobots buzzed around them. They were newsies, remotely controlled mobile camera eyes.

  Something serious had happened to Dom. Before they could get on their hydrogen cycles, a car pulled up and a man got out. He wore a customized uniform and a gun; he was another gimmie. A newsie dragonfly hung whirring in place above his head.

  "I'm from Boozin Security," he said. "I'll give you a ride."

  "Wasn't it a Wackerhut gimmie who called me before?" said Terri.

  "The uvvy newsies are calling all the local gimmies. There's enough blood for everyone."

  "What's happened to my father?" shouted Ike.

  "You better come see."

  The limo took them to a small yellow Santa Cruz cottage surrounded by knots of gimmies and newsies. Scores of dragonflies buzzed in the air. There were spotlights and the gimmie cars were flashing red and blue. A woman stepped forward to interview Terri and Ike, but a burly Wackerhut gimmie hustled them inside the cottage.

  The place smelled more strongly of moldies than anyplace Terri had ever been.

  There was a slit-open moldie body with a full harvest of camote nodules on the floor. On the bed was a naked dead person. Dom.

  There was blood all over his face; his nose was torn wide open. His genitals were bloody as well. He had a blowtorch clenched in his dead hand. His body was welted with circular marks, as if from squid tentacle suckers. The fast little dragonfly cameras darted this way and that, agitated as blowflies around fresh carrion.

  It soon came out that Heritagist Dom was a longtime cheeseball. What exactly had gone wrong in the cottage on that last night remained unclear. Had Dom been threatening the flammable moldie with the blowtorch? Or trying to defend himself? It was hard to be sure. The cottage belonged to a woman named Myrdle Deedersen, who said she hadn't realized what was going on. She'd been renting the cottage to a biker from Florida who wasn't around very often. He always paid her in cash and she didn't know his name. She thought he'd left town.

  Nobody really believed her, but it was such a distasteful case that nobody in the Percesepe fami
ly was willing to pay for a full gimmie investigation.

  Suffice it to say that Dom had gotten himself killed either by a moldie or by some local sporehead ring involved in kidnapping moldies and butchering them to sell off their imipolex and their camote on the black market. Dom should have known better than to be a cheeseball. Case closed.

  Sure enough, Dom's will left the restaurant to Ike. The twenty-year-old Ike struggled half a year with Dom's Grotto, suffering much advice from his mother and his uncles, but the restaurant business wasn't for him. When Kimo put Dada Kine up for sale in 2049, Ike sold Dom's Grotto to his Uncle Carmine and bought the surf shop and all its assets, including the aging Everooze.

  The first thing Ike did was to use some of his excess profit from the deal to get Everooze a complete retrofit and take him surfing in Hawaii, along with Kimo and Kimo's new moldie liveboard ZyxyZ. They surfed the giant waves of the Pipeline, waves so big that before liveboards the only way a person could catch one of them was to be towed in by Jet Ski. It was a deeply memorable trip.

  Now, four years later, Ike was a pro surfer and a seasoned businessman. Alice was still alive, and Terri and Tre were scraping by on Tre's gigs and on the money from managing Alice's motel. Rather than feeling guilt about his fat inheritance, Ike blamed Terri's poverty on Tre. Ike didn't like Tre.

  Ike was waiting on the cliff beside Everooze when sharky Ouish and Xanana came bouncing up to the Steamers Lane overlook, with Terri and Xlotl rickshawing along behind. Everooze was distorted into the shape of an airy igloo, his new method of actualizing the maximum amount of solar radiation.

  "Yaar, Terri," said Ike. "What's happening?"

  "Monique took off with one of our guests," said Terri as Xlotl set her down on the ground. "We think he's gotten control over her somehow."

  "You saw her leave?" asked Ike.

  "Tre did. He tried to stop her, but then he had a bike accident and broke his collarbone."

  "That stupid stoner hairfarmer."

  "He's not a hairfarmer, Ike; he's a scientist and an artist. He's a chaotician."

  "Yeah, but you're not denying he's a stoner, are you? These poor valleys come out to live at the beach and they think it's nothing but party time."