The Ware Tetralogy

by Rudy Rucker

  “Could be. I did sell some merge to the boppers, back last month when we were so beat. Maybe I shouldn’t have done that. Yeah, Buddy’s dead. Some guy killed him, and then Della Taze disappeared. It was probably a meatie that killed him. I haven’t seen it, but Bei Ng has it on tape. It might even have been our friend Ken Doll. Ken killed Buddy, and he must have done something weird to Della, too.”

  “What about our cubby?” asked Darla. Her upswing was fading, and her voice shook. “Is it safe to go back? Don’t you think we should clean it out and move?”

  “No use moving,” said Whitey after some thought. “The boppers have so many cameras planted, they’ll always know where to get us. I can probably hunt down Ken, but there’s mongo other meaties. Only really safe place for us now is sucko Earth. But mudders are dirty dooks, Darla. We’re loonies. I’m going to talk to Bei Ng, honey, and we’ll find a way to strike back. The boppers’ll pay for this.” He paused, alerted by a sound in his head. “Hold it. Mooney’s at the trade center now. Hush, Darla, this is heavy. He’s . . . he’s talking to a bopper called Cobb. Cobb has something for Mooney but—” Whitey broke off and shook his head in disgust.

  “What happened?”

  “The bopper scanned Mooney and found my mikespike. He took it out and crushed it. Xoxxox. Why don’t you come up to the ISDN building with me, Darla? I want to tell Bei about all this. I think we better stick together for now.”

  “Check,” said Darla. “And let’s stop by the cubby and pick up Ken’s merge.”

  “You’d still take that? From Ken?”

  “Clear. It’s got to be supergood stuff.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  COBB III

  December 26, 2030

  He died in 2020 . . .

  . . . and woke up in 2030. Again? That was his first feeling. Again? When you’re alive, you think you can’t stand the idea of death. You don’t want it to stop, the space and the time, the mass and the energy. You don’t want it to stop . . . but suppose that it does. It’s different then, it’s nothing, it’s everything, you could call it heaven. Once you’re used to the Void, it’s really not so great to have to start up in spacetime again. How would you like to get out of college, and then have to go back through grade school again? And again?

  Cobb Anderson, creator of the boppers, was killed in 2020. The boppers did it. They killed Cobb and dissected him—as a favor. They had to take his faltering body apart to get out the software; the leftover meat went into the pink-tanks. Ideally the boppers would have recorded and analyzed all the electrochemical patterns in all of Cobb’s various muscles and glands, but they only had time to do his brain. But they did the brain well; they teased out all its sparks and tastes and tangles, all its stimulus/response patterns—the whole biocybernetic software of Cobb’s mind. With this wetware code in hand, the boppers designed a program to simulate Cobb’s personality. They stored the digital master of the program on an S-cube, and they beamed a copy of it down to Earth, where it was booted into a big bopper named Mr. Frostee. Mr. Frostee had control of several humanoid robot-remotes, and he let Cobb “live” in them for a bit. The experiences Cobb had in these bodies were beamed back up to the Moon and added to the memory store of his master S-cube as they occurred.

  Unfortunately it was only a matter of weeks till Mr. Frostee and his Cobb simulation met a bad end, so for ten years Cobb was definitely out of the picture, just a frozen S-cube sitting on a shelf in the Nest’s personality storage vaults. HUMAN SOFTWARE-CONSTRUCT 223-90-2156: COBB ANDERSON. An unread book, a Platonic form, terabytes of zeroes and ones. During all that time, Cobb was in “heaven,” as he would later term it.

  And then, on the second day of Christmas, 2030, Berenice got Loki to help her bring Cobb back. She needed Cobb to help with certain upcoming diplomatic negotiations—negotiations having to do with the unusual pregnancy of Della Taze.

  So that Cobb wouldn’t feel too disoriented, Berenice and Loki booted SOFTWARE-CONSTRUCT 223-90-2156 back up into a humanoid diplomat body, a body which Berenice had constructed for her own next scionization. In order to make the transition more natural, Berenice smoothed off the body’s prominent breasts and buttocks, changed its flickercladding to pink, and turned its crotchpouch inside out to resemble a penis. So humble a tube serves as the conduit of much bioinformation, Loki, and each male flesher holds his in high esteem.

  The body had a petaflop processor, which meant that Cobb would think—or, more precisely, generate fractal cellular automata patterns in Hilbert space—hundreds of times faster than he had been accustomed to doing in his meat days. Once Berenice had the body all set, Loki copied the Cobb S-cube information onto a universal compiler which, in turn, fed an appropriately tailored version of the Cobb program into the shiny pink-clad petaflop body. The body pulsed and shuddered like a trap with something in it. A soulcatcher. Cobb was back.

  Again, was all he could think. Again? He lay there, monitoring inputs. He was lying on a stone table in a room like a big mausoleum. Racks of shelving stretched up on three sides; shelves lined with crystalline cubes. Light glared into the room from a mirror high above. He tried to take a breath. Nothing doing. He raised his hand—it was unnaturally smooth and pink—and ran it over his face. No holes; his face was a sealed plastic mask. He was in another robot body. Moving with an amazing rapidity, his mind flipped through the memories of his last experiences in a robot body run by Mr. Frostee. As he let his hand fall back to his side, he sensed the oddness of the weight/mass ratio. He wasn’t on Earth.

  “Greetings, Cobb Anderson, we welcome you into our Nest, deeply hidden beneath the surface of Earth’s aged Moon. The year is 2030. Does this rebirth find you well?” It wasn’t a spoken voice, it was a radio voice in his processor. The voice came from a gleaming gold woman with copper and silver features. She was beautiful, in an inhuman way, and her voice was rich and thrilling. Standing next to her was a shining ebony octopus creature, holding a box with wires that ran into Cobb’s neck.

  “I’m Loki,” said the octopus, his voice calm and serious. “And that’s Berenice. I’m proud to have helped get you running again, Dr. Anderson. We should have done it years ago, but it’s been hectic. A lot’s happened.”

  Loki and Berenice, two bright new boppers all set for a big info swap session. Cobb rebelled against being drawn into conversation, and into this reality. He had all his old memories back, yes, but there was more. His new body here was like a Ouija board or a spirit table, and now, while the connection was fresh, he could make it rap and skitter out the truth of where he’d just been. He made as if to say something, and his voice came out as a radio signal too. “Wait . . . I have to tell it. I’ve been in heaven.”

  Staticky robot laughter, and then Berenice’s intricately modulated signal. “I long to hear your account of the heaven that you have seen, Dr. Anderson.”

  “It’s . . . ” Right then, Cobb could still see it clearly, the endless meshing of fractal simplicities, high and bright like clouds seen from an airplane, with the SUN above all—but it was all being garbled by the palimpsest overlay of his new body’s life. Talking quickly, Cobb made a stab at getting it down in words. “I’m still there. That’s a higher I of course; the cosmos is layered forever up and down, with I’s on every level—the I’s are lenslike little flaws in the windows of the world—I’m in these chips and I’m in heaven. The heavenly I is all the I’s at once, the infinite I. We’re hung up on each other, I and I, finite I and infinite I—have you robots learned about infinite I yet? There’s more to a meatperson or a chipperson than ten trillion zeroes and ones: matter is infinitely divisible. The idealized pattern in the S-cube is a discrete model, it’s a digital construct. But once it’s running on a real body, the pixels have fuzz and error and here come I and I. You caught my soul. It works because this real body is real matter, sweet matter, and God is everywhere, Berenice and Loki, God is in the details. We’re not just form, is the point, we’re content, too, we’re actual, endlessly comple
x matter, all of us, chips and meat. I’m still in heaven, and I always will be, whether or not I’m down here or there, chugging along, facing the same old tests, hopelessly hung up inside your grade-B SF action adventure.” Cobb pulled Loki’s programming wires out of his neck abruptly. “I love dead . . . that’s Frankenstein’s monster.”

  “We need you, Cobb,” said Loki. “And pulling those wires out doesn’t change anything; it’s quite evident that you’re already operational. It’s good stuff, isn’t it, Berenice? I don’t believe anyone’s tried running a human software on a petaflop before this.”

  “What Dr. Anderson says is stimulating in the extreme,” agreed Berenice. “The parallelism between bodies of meat and bodies of bopper manufacture is precisely the area in which I do presently press my investigations, Cobb. I have often wondered if the differing entropy levels of organic versus inorganic processes might not, after all, induce some different qualities in those aspects of being which are perhaps most wisely called the spiritual. I am heartened by your suggestion that flesher and bopper bodies are in every way of a rude and democratic equivalence and that we boppers do indeed have claim on an eternal resting place in the precincts of that misty heaven whence emanates the One. I believe this to be true. Despite this truth, the humans, in their benighted xenophobia—”

  “—hate you as much as ever. And with good reason, I’m sure. The last thing Mr. Frostee and I were doing on Earth ten years ago was killing people, beaming their brainware up to Disky, and sending their bodies by freight. I didn’t think too much of it, but at that point I was under Frostee’s control.” Cobb sat up on the edge of the stone table and looked down at his bright body. “This is fully autonomous? I’ve got my own processor?”

  “Yes,” said Loki. He was like a big black tarantula, bristling with more specialized tools than an electronic Swiss knife. An artisan. “I helped Berenice build it for herself, and she might appreciate getting it back if you find another, but—

  “The body is yours, Dr. Anderson,” said Berenice. “Too long has the great force of your personality languished unused.”

  Cobb glanced up at the high shelves filled with S-cubes. “Lot of languishing going on up there, hey, Berenice?” There were warped infinities of reflections going back and forth between pink Cobb, golden Berenice, and glistering Loki.

  The taut gold buckler of Berenice’s belly caught Cobb’s eye. It bulged out gently as a heap of wheat. Yet the mockery was sterile: Berenice had left off the navel, the end of the flesh cord that leads back and back through blood, through wombs, through time—Put me through to Edenville. Cobb thought to wonder if his ex-wife Verena were still alive. Or his girlfriend, Annie Cushing. But they’d be old women by now, nothing like this artificial Eve.

  Still staring into the curved mirror of Berenice’s belly, Cobb could see what he looked like. A cartoon, a mannequin, a gigolo. He took control of his flickercladding and molded his features till they looked like the face he remembered having when he’d been fifty—the face that had been in all the newspapers when he’d been tried for treason back in 2001. High cheekbones, a firm chin, colorless eyes, blond eyelashes, sandy hair, good-sized nose, and a straight mouth. A strong face, somewhat American Indian, well-weathered. He gave his body freckles and hair, and sculpted the glans onto the tip of his penis. Added vein lines here and muscle bumps there. Body done, he sat there, feeling both calm and reckless. He was smarter than he’d ever been; and he was no longer scared of death. The all-pervasive fear that clouded all his past memories was gone.

  “So what was it you boppers wanted me for?”

  Bernice shot him a soundless glyph, a full-formed thought-image: a picture of Earth, her clouds swirling, followed by a zoom into the Gulf of Mexico, followed by a closeup of the teeming life on a coral reef, a microscopic view of a vigorous brine shrimp, and a shot of one of the protozoa in the shrimp’s gut. The emotional tenor of the glyph was one of curiosity, yearning, and a sharp excitement. The boppers want to enter Earthlife’s information mix.

  Deliberately misinterpreting, Cobb reached out and grabbed the lovely Berenice. She was firm and wriggly. “Do you know where babies come from, Berenice?” He stiffened his penis, and tried pushing her down on her back on the table, just to check if . . .

  “Release me!” cried Berenice, shoving Cobb and vaulting to the opposite side of the table. “You presume on our brief acquaintance, sir, you are dizzy with the new vastness of a petaflop brain. I have recorporated you for a serious purpose, not for such vile flesh-aping motions as you seek in this mock-playful wise to initiate. Truly, the baseness of the human race is fathomless.”

  Cobb laughed, remembering a dog he’d once owned that had hunched the leg of anyone he could jump up on. Gregor had been the dog’s name—once Cobb’s boss had brought his family over for dinner, and there Gregor was hunching on the boss’s daughter’s leg, his muzzle set in a terribly earnest expression, his eyes rolling back half white, and the red tip of his penis sliding out of its sheath . . .

  “Woof woof,” Cobb told Berenice, and walked past her and out of the S-cube storage room. There was a short passageway, cut out of solid rock, and then he was standing on a kind of balcony, looking out into the open space of the Nest.

  The size of the space was stunning. It took Cobb a moment to grasp that the lights overhead were boppers on the Nest’s walls, rather than stars in an open sky. The Nest’s floor spread out across acres and acres; the opposite wall looked to be almost a mile away. Airborne boppers darted in and out of a mile-long shaft of light that plunged down the center axis of the Nest to spotlight a distant central piazza. The Nest floor was covered with odd-shaped buildings set along a radial grid of streets that led out from the bright center to the huge factories nestled against the sloping stone cliffs that made up the Nest’s walls. Appropriately enough, the floor, viewed as a whole, looked a bit like the guts of an old-fashioned vacuum-tube computer.

  Now Berenice and Loki were at Cobb’s side.

  “You haven’t thanked Berenice for your wonderful new body,” chided Loki. “Have you no zest for a return to Earth?”

  “To live in a freezer? Like Mr. Frostee?” Mr. Frostee had been a big bopper brain that lived inside a refrigerated truck. Cobb’s memories of his last bopper-sponsored reincarnation went up to where Sta-Hi Mooney had smashed a hole in the side of Mr. Frostee’s truck, and the truck had crashed. Clearly the boppers had been taping his signals and updating his S-cube right up to that last minute. Three levels of memory, now: the old human memories up to his dissection, the robot body memories up till the crash, the fast-fading memories of heaven. “Maybe I’d rather go back to heaven.”

  “Enough prattle of heaven,” said Berenice. “And enough foolish sport, old Cobb. Higher duties call us. My body, as yours, is petaflop, and my processors are based on a subtler patterning than Josephson imagined. High temperature holds no terror for a processor based on laser crystals. The crystals’ pure optical phase effects maintain my mind’s integrity as a patterning transcendent of any earthly welter of heat. I want to visit Earth, Cobb, I have a mission there. I have recorporated you to serve as my guide.”

  Cobb looked down at his body with new respect. “This can live on Earth? How would we get there? The humans would never let us on a ship—”

  “We can fly,” said Berenice simply. “Our heels have ion jets.”

  “Superman and Superwoman,” marvelled Cobb. “But why? Go to Earth for what?”

  “We’re going to start making meat bodies for ourselves, Cobb,” said Loki. “So we can all go down to Earth, and blend in. It’s fair. Humans built robots; now the robots are building people! Meatboppers!”

  “You two are asking me to help you take Earth away from the human race?”

  “Meatboppers will be of an equal humanity,” said Berenice smoothly. “One could legitimately regard the sequence human—bopper—meatbop as a curious but inevitable zigzag in evolution’s mighty stream.”

  Cobb thought
about it for a minute. The idea did have a crazy charm to it. Already in 1995, when he’d built his self-replicating moon-robots, some people had spoken of them as a new stage in evolution. And when the robots rebelled in 2001, people had definitely started thinking of them as a new species: the boppers. But what if the bopper phase was just a kind of chrysalis for a new wave of higher humans? What a thought! Bopper-built people with wetware processors! Meatbops! And Cobb could get a new meat body out of it too, although . . .

  “What’s wrong with a good petaflop body like you and I have now, Berenice? If we can live on Earth like this, then why bother switching back to meat?”

  “Because it would put the stinking humans in their place,” said Loki bluntly. “We want to beat them at their own game, and outbreed them into extinction.”

  “What have they ever done to you?” Cobb asked, surprised at the bopper’s vehemence. “What’s happened during the last ten years, anyway?”

  “Let me chirp you some history glyphs,” said Loki.

  A linked series of images entered Cobb’s mind then; a history of the bopper race, hypermodern analogs of such old U.S. history glyphs as Washington Crossing the Delaware, The A-Bomb at Hiroshima, The Helicopter over the Saigon Embassy, and so on. Each glyph was like a single state of mind—a cluster of visual images and kinesthetic sensations linked to some fixed emotions and associations.

  Glyph 1: Man on the Moon. A sword covered with blood. The blood drops are tiny bombs. The sword is a rocket, a phallus, a gun, and a guitar. Jimi Hendrix is playing “Purple Haze” in the background, and you smell tear gas and burning buildings. The heaviness of the sword, the heaviness of the slow, stoned guitar music. At the tip of the sword is a drop of sperm. The opalescent drop is the Moon. The Moon is beeping and crackling: and the sound is Neil Armstrong’s voice: “—at’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”