Freeware

by Rudy Rucker

  Darla sometimes thought that if she hadn't met Whitey, she might have ended up like Kellee.

  "Come on in, Kellee," said Darla. "How's it going?"

  "Hard and xoxxy. I need money." Kellee was tiny and undernourished, not much bigger than Yoke or Joke.

  "I don't keep any money around the house, Kellee," said Darla. "But I can give you a couple hits of merge. Best I can do."

  "You still take merge, Darla? You still into the magic floppy?"

  "Sure, whaddya think? I'm suddenly too realwoman for the love puddle? But I only do it with Whitey, like on major special occasions, maybe two or three times a month, and hardly ever in front of Yoke and Joke anymore."

  "You've got your life together, Darla. I envy you. The pervo dooks I make it with, you wouldn't believe."

  "I'm all ears," said Darla. "You know I love your sordid tales. How about some coffee, Kellee?"

  "You got beer?"

  "Affirmo."

  After three beers and half an hour of chat, Kellee reminded Darla about the merge, and Darla went and got three caps from her stash.

  "Thanks a lot, Darla," said Kellee, pocketing them. "And before I go, there's something I better tell you. I've been getting up my courage. The girls aren't home, are they? Yoke and Joke?"

  "No, they're at school."

  "Okay," sighed Kellee, running her fingers through her lank hair. "I gotta tell you about Corey Rhizome. Last night I was out to the isopod fuffing him for a few doses of snap and he did this really slarvy thing."

  "What do you mean?"

  "He was wearing his uvvy on his neck while he was on top of me, which is totally insulting in the first place—I know I'm not as wonderbuff as I used to be, but if somebody doesn't want Kellee, they should leave Kellee alone. I mean obviously Corey was using the uvvy to run a philtre to make me look like someone else. And I'm wondering who? So… I snatch the uvvy off him while he's coming, and I check it out, and… and it was a philtre of Joke. Or Yoke. They look the same to me."

  "That gunjy deeve!" cried Darla. "My girls! I knew it! On their birthday, he gave them a Silly Putter that humped Joke's leg, and now he's running sex philtres of them on snap whores—excuse me, Kellee. This has to got to stop!

  I'm telling Whitey!"

  "Whitey will stop Corey," said Kellee. "Brah Whitey will do the deed. You got another beer?"

  So Whitey spoke to Corey, and Corey stopped coming around, and the friendly dinners out at the isopod came to an end. Whitey stayed friends with Corey, more or less, but Darla hadn't talked to him since. How time flies by. Now the girls were twenty-two, and it was November 6, 2053.

  "Come on, Darla," pleaded Corey Rhizome's hollow. "Talk to the Old Toymaker."

  Slowly Darla got out of bed, her boobs jouncing in the gentle lunar gravity.

  Her flesh exuded the notions of softness, of comfort, of ease. She had a mild double chin, a practical bow-shaped mouth, a pug nose, and frank eyes.

  "Just a minute, goob!" she hollered and got herself dressed. She pulled on thigh-high moldie boots and low-cut black panties with a satin string waistband and scallops of lace around the edges of the crotch. She slung her heavy studded leather utility belt about her waist and left her breasts bare. She put on a long strand of black moon-pearls and a necklace of thin gold chain, then rummaged briefly at her hair, a great black haystack that puffed down over her shoulders to feather across the mounds of her breasts. She put on her black lipstick and toggled the uvvy's video camera.

  "What is it?"

  "Hi, Darla," said Corey Rhizome, regarding her with no special interest.

  Darla's garb was not at all unusual in the heated tunnels of the Moon and, in any case, Darla was far too mature to pique Corey's lust. "Do you, uh, know where Whitey is?" Judging from the background of the hollow, it looked like Corey was calling from his bathroom. Some guys had no class at all.

  "He went out this morning, dook. He's doing something for ISDN. That's all you called for? Like I'm some kilpy message machine?" She reached for the uvvy cutoff.

  "Wait, Darla, wait. I can talk to you."

  "Oh, I'm lucky." Darla picked up the uvvy and carried it into the kitchen area with her. Rhizome's hollow trailed along behind the uvvy like a balloon. While she was moving, the hollow made some funny hisses and crackles, and then she thought she heard a sound like whooping somewhere else in the apartment. She stopped and cocked her head, but now everything was quiet. Drug hangover, no doubt. "Okay, I need some breakfast," said Darla. She set the uvvy on the counter, popped a squeeze bulb of sugared coffee into the microwave, and filled a bowl with paste from the food tap.

  "It's about my Silly Putters," said Corey Rhizome, looking worried. He was sitting on the toilet with his pants on. "They're acting different today.

  This morning I got an uvvy call from this moldie called Frangipane. She's a friend of Willy and Gurdle-7 in the Nest. And she sent my uvvy something like a virus, which it then downloaded onto twelve of the fourteen Silly Putters up and running today. When Frangipane hosed me, my uvvy made a kind of crackling sound and then the twelve infected Silly Putters started whooping and, um, I hate to tell you this, Darla, but I just heard those sounds again, so I think my uvvy sent the virus on to your uvvy. How many Silly Putters do you have in your apartment? You better go check on them."

  "Oh sure, thanks a lot," said Darla, spooning up her paste and not paying much attention. "How many Silly Putters do we have? We only have one left. The girls took the rest of them when they moved out. But we do still have Rags, the one that's like a cute little spotted fox terrier. I haven't seen him yet this morning." She raised her voice. "Here, Rags! Come here, boy!" There was no response.

  ISDN had done well by Darla and Whitey; they had a six-cubby apartment. Darla set down her spoon and ambled into the living cubby. Rags was indeed in the living cubby, but Rags had stopped acting like a dog. He was shaped the same, still white with irregular black spots, but—he was standing on his hind legs, and he didn't run over to greet Darla like he usually did. He was standing like a little man with his back to the room, carefully examining the electric zapper curtain that filled the apartment's outer door. Rags leaned forward and cautiously touched one of his whiskers to the zapper and—zzzt!—so much for that hair. Darla made an exclamation, and Rags turned to confront her. His eyes were live and alert.

  "Hello," said Rags, although Rags had never talked before. "I've stopped being a dog. Now I am Cthon from the Andromeda galaxy." He paused and stared at Darla as if analyzing her appearance. "Most remarkable. I believe I am one of the first personality waves to be Decrypted at your node. This is the planet Earth?"

  "This is the Moon," said Darla flatly, not letting the moldie's bufugu jive distract her. It was clear to Darla that this Silly Putter had fully crashed for true. Welcome to The Twilight Zone. Darla began walking backward step by step.

  The little dog trotted after her, still erect on his hind legs. "How did you learn to talk all of a sudden, Rags?" said Darla, sweetening her voice as if she didn't have a care in the world. There was a needler in a drawer in the kitchen.

  "Yes, that's what I mean, Darla," said Rhizome's voice from the hollow on the counter. "The way Rags is acting. All my Silly Putters have turned into fucked-up aliens. They've been taken over by some kind of rogue software from outer space—I didn't ask for it, but here it is, and it's free, whether we want it or not, it's physical graffiti from dimension Z, the truest freeware there ever was. I locked myself in the bathroom after Clever Hansi started—"

  Darla toggled off the uvvy and skipped around behind the kitchen counter.

  Opened the drawer. Got the needler. The weird little dog-thing was at her feet, looking up at her. "Can you open the front door now?" he asked. "I want to go join the new arrivals at Corey's. We have to get this node properly installed. It's for your own good."

  Darla drilled it right between its big intelligent eyes. The imipolex charred, smoked, and burst into flame, writhing and giving off high
, horrible screams.

  Darla needled it again and again, coughing from the smoke. The sprinklers in the ceiling kicked on and doused the flames. Suddenly suspicious of the uvvy that had brought this, Darla ran into the kitchen and chopped it up with a knife, cutting deep grooves into the countertop. Damn Corey Rhizome for bringing this down on her!

  Just then Darla heard the zapper curtain make the boinging noise that signaled when it opened. She raced into the living cubby, holding the needler straight before her, with her other hand grasping her wrist for steadiness, but…

  It was Yoke and Joke.

  "What are you doing, Ma?" said Yoke. "It's just us."

  Darla lowered the needler and the girls swept in. "She shot Rags!" exclaimed Joke. "It's soaked in here and everything's ruined!"

  "Ma," wailed Yoke. "Are you twisted on snap again? If you are, we're leaving."

  Both Yoke and Joke had light olive skin, big bright eyes, and short full-lipped mouths. They had identical faces, but they'd outgrown the phase of wanting to dress the same. Yoke wore her thick dark hair natural in a bob, while Joke had used her hair for a creative zone. She'd started by dying it blonde, then she'd let three inches of black roots grow out, and now she wore her hair gathered into two high ponytails, with the blonde ends of the ponytails dyed purple.

  It matched the punk look of her clothes: a leather jacket over a T-shirt, with red plaid pants cut off at mid-calf above dull red combat boots. For her part, Yoke wore a long, dark, ribbed-wool dress with low silver boots—modern moonmaid-style.

  "Wait," gasped Darla, flopping down on a chair in the kitchen but still holding on to her needler. "Corey Rhizome sent me some kind of virus, and then Rags was possessed. He started talking. And then, after I shot him, I got the idea the uvvy might be possessed too."

  "You sure nailed them," said Joke, holding up a ragged scrap of the hacked-up uvvy. "What did Rags say anyway?" "He—" Darla shook her head in confusion. "I'm completely straight, girls, so unlax. Give me my coffee." Yoke handed Darla her squeezie of coffee and Darla took a few big slurps. "I think Rags said he was from another galaxy. I, of all people, know better than to trust robots when they act tweaky. So I killed him."

  "And the uvvy?" insisted Joke.

  "I was upset, damn it!" yelled Darla. "Do you have to be so fucking logical all the time, Joke? The signal that changed Rags came from the uvvy, so I killed it too. Call Corey Rhizome if you don't believe me. He's locked himself in his bathroom."

  "My dear old Bandersnatch?" giggled Joke. "Are his Silly Putters saying they're from other galaxies too?"

  "Something like that," grumbled Darla. "I didn't finish talking to him. Xoxxy pervo that he is. Don't call him, come to think of it. Not that we could anyway, what with the kilpy uvvy broken. I'll have to get a new one today. What did you two brats come here for, besides making fun of your poor old mother?" Seeing her daughters always cheered Darla up.

  "There's an abductor ship about to land out at the spaceport," said Joke.

  "Blaster? He caught about twenty moldies. And—get this—Blaster has a human woman aboard as well. Her name's Terri Percesepe. Blaster wants to sell her like for a ransom."

  "Sell her to who?"

  "Stahn Mooney's paying. He called Pop to arrange it last week. Didn't Pop tell you? Yoke and I are supposed to pick Terri up and help her get back to Earth."

  "For free?" snapped Darla.

  "Of course not," said Joke, tapping her head. "We're getting good money.

  Berenice made up the contract with Blaster."

  "Anyway," chimed in Yoke, "we thought you might enjoy going out to the spaceport with us to greet her. Pop will be there too."

  "He could have called me about this," complained Darla. "Sometimes I think Whitey doesn't love me anymore."

  "Sure he does, Ma," said Joke. "Are you gonna come?"

  "All right," said Darla. "I wouldn't mind getting out a little. I have the creeps from this place, after Rags acting that way."

  "It was probably just a malfunction," said Yoke soothingly. "Corey's been known to err."

  "But he said all his Silly Putters had turned into… I think he said aliens?" said Darla. "Are your Silly Putters acting weird today? You still have a lot of them, don't you?"

  "Joke took them all back to Corey," said Yoke sadly. "Even the rath and the Jubjub bird."

  "For a while there, Emul and Berenice had me convinced that Silly Putters are wrong," said Joke. "Berenice kept asking how I would feel about owning six-inch-tall pet humans programmed to be animals."

  "I doubt if pet humans would ever suddenly decide that they're from another galaxy," said Darla. "Cthon—that's what Rags said his name was. He was walking on his hind legs and he was talking. His eyes were different."

  "Well, maybe we should go out to the isopod and visit Corey," suggested Joke.

  "If it's really true."

  "That child molester?" flared Darla. "Locked in the bathroom is where he belongs! We're not speaking to him anymore!"

  "We're not children anymore, Ma," said Joke. "Anyway, I already have seen him again. He's lonely since Willy moved out of the isopod and into the Nest.

  We've had dinner a couple of times. His studios are totally gogo. And I've decided Emul and Berenice were wrong about Silly Putters. Corey's Silly Putters aren't sad at all; they're a great art-form. There's no reason not to be like animals instead of being like people. Look at tropical fish, for instance. Instead of putting their computational energy into being smart, they put it into being beautiful."'

  "Wait, wait, wait, Joke," cried Darla. "Stop it right there. You're telling me you've been to Corey's isopod?"

  "Interrupt," said Yoke. "We gotta jam over to the spaceport right now, sistahs.

  Berenice says Blaster's almost here. You two can finish arguing while we're on the way."

  Outside the apartment, they walked down the corridor past other cubby doors closed off by the faintly buzzing curtains of zappers. At the end of the corridor was the vertical shaft that led down to the Markt and up to the domed city of Einstein.

  "Are we gonna take the underground tunnel?" asked Darla.

  "No," said Joke. "We'll rent a buggy and drive. It's prettier that way. And Stalin's paying. It's in the contract."

  "Boway!" exulted Darla. "Wonderbuff. I haven't been out under the stars in a long time. But maybe… maybe I should have worn more clothes."

  "Aw, you look bitchin', Ma," said Yoke. "The bubbletopper'll keep you warm.

  Let's go!"

  They swung easily up the ladder that led to the top of the shaft and stepped out onto the streets of Einstein. High above them the huge dome arched over the city, with maggies flying this way and that. In the center of the street was a moving sidewalk with chairs.

  "Look, girls, there goes a woman with a Silly Putter," said Darla, pointing to a woman gliding past with what looked like a Siamese cat in her lap. "I wonder if—" But the imipolex cat was just sitting there, looking comfortable and normal. Yoke looked at Darla a little questioningly. "Well, maybe Corey hasn't sent the virus to anyone else," said Darla.

  "Here comes a slot," said practical Joke, and the three of them hopped onto the slidewalk and took a seat. The incredibly various architecture of Einstein streamed past, setting Darla to reminiscing.

  Here came, for instance, the lotus-stem-columned Temple of Ra, a former bopper factory that had been a flophouse since the First Human-Bopper War in 2022.

  Darla had lived there when she'd first come up to the Moon in 2024; she'd come as the fungirl traveling companion of a construction company executive named Ben Baxter. Darla started out as the Baxter family's baby-sitter back in her hometown of Albuquerque, New Mexico, but soon Baxter had fallen for Darla in a big way. Darla played along with the dook, but once he'd gotten her to the Moon, she'd ditched him and struck out on her own. Those had been some wild and scroungy times in the Temple of Ra. That was where Darla had discovered merge, and merge had led her to Whitey.

  Darla's
reverie was interrupted by the sight of something odd in the alley that separated the Temple of Ra from the 1930s-style office building next door.

  The alley was largely filled with the rubble of discarded loonie utensils and furniture, most of it made of ceramics and polished stone, with the broken-up surfaces giving off random glints of light. A drift of polished pumice seemed to be moving around as if windblown, but there was never any wind in the Einstein dome. Could it be virus-infected rogue Silly Putters under the garbage? But just as the alley swung out of sight, Darla got a glimpse of a rat popping out from under the broken stones, a regular gray rat with a naked pink tail. Maybe Corey had just been stoned and Darla was just being paranoid. But then—what was it that had happened to Rags?

  Now they slid past the old office building—it was called the Bradbury and Stahn Mooney's detective office had been in there. What a strange skinny dook Stahn had been. Hard to believe he'd moved back to Earth and been a U.S. Senator for twelve years. Him and his Moldie Citizenship Act, what kilp. At least on the Moon, the moldies weren't interested in acting like citizens. They stayed out of Einstein, and the humans stayed out of their Nest. It was better that way.

  Darla nodded to herself.

  "'Sup, Ma?" said Yoke, throwing her arms around Darla and giving her a hug.

  "I was watching an uvvy show about Earth the other day," said Darla. "I can't believe those filthy mudders live with moldies right among them."

  "Don't whip yourself into a racist frenzy, Ma," said Joke. "Remember that (a)

  it hurts my feelings and (b) we're going to be surrounded by moldies at the spaceport trade center."

  "Well, how would you like it if some xoxxox bopper had caged you up and raped you like Emul did to me? Not that I don't love you, Jokie, but—"

  "Oh, give it a rest, you two," interrupted Yoke. "We get off here."

  They hopped down from the moving sidewalk's bench. They were near the edge of Einstein, with the dome wall just a few hundred feet ahead. Butted up against the wall was a pumice-block building with a high false front shaped like a crenellated castle wall. The wall was decorated with huge set-in polished obsidian letters saying MOON BUGGIES.