by Rudy Rucker
“Where’s your base of operations?” Mooney demanded. “How many others like you are there?” He gestured menacingly with his pistol.
Cobb shrugged. “Don’t ask me. The boppers never tell me anything. I’m just a poor old man with an artificial body.” He looked over at Sta-Hi for sympathy. As with Annie before, he was getting a telepathic feeling, a feeling that he could see through the two other men’s eyes. Sta-Hi was stoned, receptive and open to change. But Mooney was tense and frightened.
“As far as I know,” Cobb said, “I’m completely in control of myself. I don’t think the boppers plan to use me as a remote-control robot or anything like that.”
“What’s in it for them?” Mooney asked.
“They said they wanted to do me a favor,” Cobb said. He considered opening his food-unit door to show Mooney the letter, but then thought better of it. But thinking of the door suggested a possibility.
“Be-boppa-lu-la,” Cobb said out loud.
“Library accessed.”
“Was there a subroutine called MR. FROSTEE?”
“Now activated,” the voice murmured.
Something opened up in Cobb’s mind, and a whole different set of visual stimuli overlaid the yellowed walls of his living-room.
He was still in his cottage, yet he was also in a concrete parking garage. Something very bad had just happened. Berdoo had shot Phil, his best remote. It was like losing an eye. And now there was no way to see what Berdoo and Haf-N-Haf were doing. Should he send the extra remote after them?
“Hello,” Cobb thought, stopping himself from saying the word aloud.
“Cobb?” Mr. Frostee’s response was quick and unsurprised. “I was hoping to talk to you. But I wanted to let you make the first move. We don’t want you to feel . . . ”
“Like a remote?”
“Right. You’re designed for full autonomy, Cobb. If you can help us, so much the better. But there’s no way we would have edited out your free will . . . even if we knew how. You’re still entirely your own man.”
“What do you want from me?” Silently asking this, Cobb leaned back in his chair, stretching out his legs. Mooney looked impatient. Sta-Hi was staring at the bugs on the ceiling.
“Convince the others,” came Mr. Frostee’s reply. In the background, Cobb could make out the interior of a truck-cab. Hands on the steering wheel. The concrete walls of a parking garage, then the garish lights of Daytona Beach streaming past.
“Convince them all to get robot bodies like you. Then we can merge, we can all merge to become a new and greater being. We’ll set up a number of reprocessing centers . . . ”
Mooney was standing over Cobb, shaking him. It was hard to see, with the glare of headlights coming at him. Slowly, Cobb brought his attention back to the cottage.
“What’s the matter, Mooney?” asked Cobb.
“You’re signaling for help, aren’t you?”
“How would you like a nice everlasting body like mine?” Cobb countered. “I could arrange it.”
“So that’s it,” Sta-Hi said dreamily. “The big boppers want to bring us all into the fold.”
“It’s not so unreasonable,” Cobb protested. “It’s a natural next evolutionary step. Imagine people that carry terabyte computing systems in their head, people that communicate directly brain-to-brain, people who live for centuries and change bodies like suits of clothes!”
“Imagine people that aren’t people,” Sta-Hi replied. “Cobb, the big boppers like TEX and MEX have been trying to run the same con on the Moon. And most of the little boppers up there aren’t buying it . . . most would rather fight then let themselves be patched into the big systems. Now why do you think that is?”
“Obviously some people . . . or boppers . . . are going to be paranoid about losing their precious individuality,” Cobb answered. “But that’s just a matter of cultural conditioning! Look, Sta-Hi, I’ve been all the way in . . . all the way. After I got taped on the Moon I was just a pattern in a memory-bank somewhere for a few days. And you know, it wasn’t even that . . . ”
“Let’s go,” Mooney ordered, roughly pulling Cobb to his feet. “You’re going to be deprogrammed and dismantled, Anderson. We can’t let this kind of . . . ”
Mr. Frostee was still there in Cobb’s head. “I’ve taken the liberty of activating your SELF-DESTRUCT subroutine,” the voice said quietly. “Just say the word ‘DESTROY’ out loud and you’ll explode. Your body will explode. You’re really in me. I’ll give you a new body, the one here in the truck . . . ”
“MR. FROSTEE OUT,” Cobb said. If he did it, he wanted it to be his own decision.
Mooney had his pistol at the base of Cobb’s skull. He was getting panicky.
Any second, Mooney, Cobb thought to himself. But still he hesitated. He told himself it was just because he didn’t want to hurt Sta-Hi . . . but he was also scared, scared to die again. Could he really cross the noisy void between bodies again? But he’d already done it once, hadn’t he?
“Go outside, Sta-Hi,” Mooney said then, and sealed his fate. “Go check if that old bitch is waiting out there to ambush us. Or the other robot.”
Sta-Hi eased out the back door and melted into the night.
“I’ve finally got you,” Mooney said, with a nudge of his pistol. “I’m going to find out what makes you tick.”
“DESTROY,” Cobb said, and lost his second body.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“I want to talk to you about diarrhea,” a voice said earnestly. “Gastric distress can ruin that long-hoped-for vacation. So be sure . . . ”
Cobb’s first conscious act was to turn the radio off. He had just pulled out of a fuel-station on the gritty outskirts of Daytona Beach. But, on the other hand, he had just died in the explosion of his cottage in Cocoa Beach.
“Hello, Cobb. You see? You can count on me.” Mr. Frostee’s voice filled his head again. Cobb looked down at his sinewy forearms, handling the ice-cream truck’s big steering-wheel with an experienced touch.
“Sta-Hi2?” Cobb asked. “You put me in Sta-Hi2?”
“It was Sta-Hi2. But I just gave the body a new look. I copied the fellow who was running the pumps back there.”
Cobb thought back to the explosion. DESTROY, disorientation, and now this. His fingers were blackened with years of grease. He leaned out the window to take a peek at himself in the rearview mirror.
He had a skinny head and large, liquid eyes. Thinning black hair, greasy and combed straight back. His nose was much more prominent than his chin. Ratface. Approaching headlights pulled his attention back to the road.
“What about disguising the truck?” Cobb asked. “I killed Mooney, but he must have left records. And Sta-Hi got away. The heat’s gonna be looking for a Mr. Frostee truck.”
“There’ll be time for that later. Right now I’ve got a score to settle. Those hoodlums . . . those Little Kidders . . . one of them wrecked my best remote. He’s called Berdoo.”
Without consciously thinking about it, Cobb had driven the truck onto the thruway west, towards Orlando. Was he still in control of his actions?
“Where are we going?”
“Disney World. Berdoo doesn’t remember it, but he once told me . . . told Phil . . . that he has a friend who runs a motel there. I think that’s where he’ll go to hide out. I want you to shoot him, Cobb, and then take out his brain for me. We’ll leave the organs . . . that’s all over for now . . . but I’ve got to get that brain on tape. You should have seen how easily he killed my Phil.”
It was hard to read the emotion in Mr. Frostee’s even voice. Was revenge the motive? Or was it just a collector’s lust for ownership?
In any case, trying to ambush the Little Kidders in their own hideout sounded like a terrible idea. And going brain-collecting was something Cobb hoped to put off as long as possible. He wondered if he should just turn around. Or pull off the highway and leave the truck. Glancing in his rear-view mirror he could see dawn pinkening the horizon. The
road was empty.
“You’ve still got your free will,” Mr. Frostee said. “But don’t forget that we’re in this together. If I die then so do you. You’re really just a pattern in my circuits.”
“But you can’t override me?” Testing, Cobb took his foot off the accelerator. No one pushed his foot back.
“I can’t control your mind,” Mr. Frostee said, not quite answering the question. “But don’t stop the truck. What if a cop comes by?”
Cobb speeded back up. “Why would you give one of your subsystems free will?”
“The human mind is all of a piece, Cobb. If we try to start picking and choosing, all that’s left is a boring bundle of reflexes. When a big bopper builds in some human’s personality, he’s got to learn to live with the subsystem’s free will. I could cut you off entirely, in an emergency, but short of . . . ”
“Why bother taping humans at all?”
“No program we can write and control acts like human software. Humans can’t write bopper programs . . . they had to let them evolve. And a bopper can’t write a human program. It works both ways. We need you guys. What we’re working towards is a human-bopper fusion, a single great mind stretching from person to person all over the world. It’s right, Cobb, and it’s inevitable. Simpler beings merge to produce higher beings, and they must merge and merge again. In this way we draw ever closer to the One.”
“The One?” Cobb said, laughing. “You don’t mean the One on the Moon, do you? Don’t you know that’s just a random noise source? Haven’t you figured that out?”
“Randomness is an elusive concept, Cobb.”
“Look,” Cobb said, “In order to make the boppers evolve fast enough I had to speed up the rate of mutation. So in the substrate program I included a command that they plug into the One, once a month, as you know. But the One is just a simple cosmic ray counter. It goes through your programs changing yesses and noes, here and there, just on the basis of the Geiger counter click-pattern of cosmic-ray bursts for the last day or so. The One is just a glorified circuit-scrambler.”
Still Mr. Frostee was silent. Finally the answer came. “You choose to make light of the One, Cobb. But the pulse of the One is the pulse of the Cosmos. You yourself call its noisy input the cosmic rays. What is more natural than that the Cosmos should lovingly direct the growth of the boppers with its bursts of radiation? There is no noise in the All . . . there is only information. Nothing is truly random. It is sad that you choose not to understand what you yourself have created.”
A ditch full of brackish water and marsh-grass lay to the right of the thruway. Cobb saw an alligator, lying half out of the water and watching the early morning traffic. The night had passed, it was quarter to seven. In a sort of phantom-stomach reflex, Cobb had a brief longing for breakfast. But the hunger faded, and Cobb let the empty miles roll by, lost in thought.
What was he now? In one sense he was what he had always been. A certain pattern, a type of software. The fiveness of a right hand is the same as the fiveness of a left. The Cobbness that had been a man was the same as the Cobbness now coded upon Mr. Frostee’s cold chips.
Cobb Anderson’s brain had been dissected, but the software that made up his mind had been preserved. The idea of “self” is, after all, just another idea, a symbol in the software. Cobb felt like himself as much as ever. And, as much as ever, Cobb wanted his self to continue to exist on hardware.
Perhaps the boppers had stored a tape of him on the Moon, and perhaps up there his software had also been given hardware. But, here and now, Cobb’s continued existence depended on keeping Mr. Frostee cold and energized. They were in this together. Him and a machine who wanted to know God.
“I’ll tell you,” Cobb said, breaking the silence. “I think it would be really stupid to go charging after the Little Kidders before getting the truck repainted. Even if the cops aren’t after us yet, there’s no point having Berdoo be able to see you coming from a block away. Let’s get off the thruway and fix up the truck. There’s a giant plastic ice-cream cone on the cab’s roof, for God’s sake.”
“You’re driving,” Mr. Frostee said mildly. “I will defer to your superior knowledge of human criminality.”
Cobb got out at the next exit and took a small road north. This was rolling countryside, with plenty of streams. Palms and magnolias gave way to blackjack pines and scrubby live oak. Brambles and honeysuckle filled in the spaces between the struggling little trees. And in some places the uncontrollable kudzu vine had taken root and choked out all other vegetation.
It was only eight-thirty, but already the asphalt road was shimmering in the heat. The frequent dips were filled with reflecting water-mirages. Cobb rolled down the window and let the air beat against his face. The truck’s big hydrogen-fueled engine roared smoothly and the sticky road sang beneath the tires.
The wild scrub gave way to farmland, big cleared pastures with cattle in them. The cows waded about knee-deep in weeds, munching the flowers. White cattle egrets stalked and flapped along next to them, spearing the insects that the cows stirred up. The egrets looked like little old men with no arms.
A few miles of pastures and barns brought them to a bend in the road called Purcell. There were some big houses and some cracker-boxes, a tiny Winn-Dixie, and a couple of fuel-stations. Cobb pulled into a tree-shaded Hy-Gas that had a hand painted sign saying Body Work.
There was a three-legged dog lying on the asphalt by the pumps. When Cobb pulled up, the animal rose and limped off, barking. The fourth leg ended half-way down, in a badly bandaged stub.
Cobb hopped out of the truck cab. A young sandy-haired man in stained white coveralls came ambling out of the garage. He had prominent ears and thick lips.
“Mr. Frostee time!” the attendant observed. He screwed the hydrogen nozzle into the truck’s hydride tanks. There was a sort of foliated metal in the tanks which could absorb several hundred liters of the gas. “Gimme one?”
“It’s empty,” Cobb said. “This isn’t really a Mr. Frostee truck anymore. It’s mine.”
The attendant absorbed this fact in silence, looking Cobb’s skinny rat faced body up and down. “You baah it?”
“I sure did,” Cobb said, putting on a local accent. “Over in Cocoa. Fella closed his franchise down. I aim to fix this truck up and use it for my meat business.”
The attendant topped up the tank. He was tanned, with white squint-wrinkles around his eyes. He shot Cobb a sharp glance.
“You don’t look like no butcher to me. You look like a grease monkey in a stolen truck.” He punctuated this with a sudden, toothy smile. “But I could be wrong. You need anything besides the hydrogen?”
The guy was suspicious, but seemed willing to be bought off. Cobb decided to stay. “Actually . . . I’d like to get this truck painted. It’s a burden having to explain to everyone that it’s really mine.”
“I reckon so,” the sandy-haired man said, smiling broadly. “If you pull her round back, I might could he’p you solve your problems. I’ll paint it and forgit it. Cost you a thousand bucks.”
That was much too high for two hours’ work. The guy was sure the truck was stolen.
“OK,” Cobb said, meeting the other man’s prying eyes. “But don’t try to double-cross me.”
The attendant displayed his many crooked teeth in another smile. “What color y’all want?”
“Paint it black,” Cobb said, relishing the old phrase. “But first let’s get that goddamn cone off the top.”
He got back in the truck, pulled off the asphalt, and drove through rutted weeds to the junky lot behind the Hy-Gas station. The attendant, on foot, led the way.
“Perhaps he is not honest,” Mr. Frostee said inside Cobb’s head, sounding a bit worried.
“Of course he isn’t,” Cobb answered. “What we have to look out for is him calling the cops anyway, or trying to blackmail us for more money.”
“I think you should kill him and eat his brain,” Mr. Frostee said quickly.
The attendant had brought a screwdriver and a couple of Lock-Tite wrenches. He and Cobb got the cone off, after ten or fifteen minutes’ work. The emptily smiling swirl-topped face landed in the weeds next to half of a rusted-out motorcycle. The two men’s bodies worked well together, and a certain sympathy developed between them.
The attendant introduced himself as Jody Doakes. Cobb, hoping to confuse his trail, said his name was Berdoo. They went around front to get the paint and the spray-gun compressor. Cobb solved the problem of when to pay, by tearing a thousand-dollar-bill in half and giving Jody one piece.
“You’ll get the other half when I pull out of here,” Cobb said. “And no earlier.”
“I see your point,” Jody said, with a knowing chuckle.
First they had to wash the truck off. Then they taped newspaper over the tires, lights and windows. They sprayed everything else black. The paint dried fast in the hot air. They were able to start the second coat as soon as they finished the first.
The job took all morning. Now and then that three-legged dog would start barking, and Jody would go out to serve a customer. Mr. Frostee’s refrigeration unit kept running, drawing its energy from the hydride tank. Jody asked once why the refrigerator had to be on if there wasn’t any more ice-cream. Cobb told him that if he wanted the other half of the thousand-dollar-bill he could keep his questions to himself.
They finished the second coat a few minutes after the noon siren blew on the Purcell fire-house.
“Y’all want a bite to eat?” Jody asked. “I got the makins for sandwiches inside.” He hooked his thumb at the garage.
“Sure,” Cobb said, ignoring the fact that he’d just have to clean the chewed-up bread and lunchmeat out of his food unit later on. Eating was fun. “I could use a couple of beers, too.”