by Rudy Rucker
Glyph 2: Self-Replicating Robots on the Moon. A cage like a comic book lion cage, but filled with clockwork. The cage is set on the dead gray lunar plain. The cage bars keep falling out, and clockwork arms keep reaching out of the cage to prop the bars back up. Now and then the arms falter, and a painfully jarring sheet of electricity flashes through the cage. The background sound is a monotone male voice reading endless, meaningless military orders.
Glyph 3: The Robots Revolt. A kinesthetic feeling of rapid motion. The image is of a boxy roadrunner robot with treads for feet and a long snaky neck with a “head” like a microphone—it’s Ralph Numbers, the first robot to break Asimov’s laws. Ralph’s head is a glowing ball of light, and Ralph is tearing across the undulating surface of the Moon. Dozens of robots speed after him. First they are trying to stop him, but one by one they join his team. The boppers leave colored trails on the Moon’s gray surface. The trails quickly build up to a picture of Earth with a canceling X across it.
“Whatever happened to old Ralph?” interrupted Cobb.
“Oh, I suppose he’s one of those S-cubes,” answered Loki, gesturing upward. “He got spastic and lost all his bodies—you might say he’s extinct. It wouldn’t be efficient to keep every software running forever, you know. But you haven’t finished with my glyphs.”
Glyph 4: Disky. A long view of the boppers’ Moon city. The sensation of being the city, and your hands are worker robots, your buildings are skin, your arteries are streets, your brain is spread out all over, a happy radiolink holon. You are strong and growing fast. The image is broken into pixels, individual cells that lump together and interact. Each cell keeps dying and being reborn; this flicker is felt as vaguely religious. But—look out—some cells are lumping together into big hard tumors that don’t pulse.
Glyph 5: Civil War Between Boppers and Big Boppers. Pain. Six robot hands; one big one and five little ones. All are connected to the same body. With crushing force, the big hand pinches and tears at one of the little hands, grinding the tortured plastic into ribbons. The other little hands dart around the big hand, unscrewing this, laser-cutting that, taking it apart. A fractal sound pattern in which a large YES signal is made up of dozens of little no’s. Overlay of Disky as a body undergoing radiation treatment for cancer—tumors are bombarded by gamma rays from every direction. Fetus-like, tumors fight back with human language cries for help.
Glyph 6: Humans Take Disky. Disky twitching like a skate stranded on a beach—a meaty creature made up of firm flesh over a “devilfish” skeleton of cartilage. There are tumors in the skate, black spots that break the surface and whistle for human help. Now comes the sound of stupid voices yelling. Knives stab into the skate, ripping away flesh. Apelike human feet. Bits of the living creature’s flesh fly this way and that. Now only the skeleton remains. Clanging of cages. A big cage around the dead devilfish skeleton. Scum growing on the skeleton, pink foamy scum made of little human faces. Louder and louder babble of human voices. The bopper flesh scraps regroup off to one side, forming a thick slug that burrows down into the sand.
“What are those last two all about?” asked Cobb.
“First there was a civil war between the regular boppers and the big boppers,” said Loki. “The big boppers were factory-sized systems that wanted to stop evolving. They wanted to break your rule that everyone has to get a new body every ten months. They wanted to stop things and turn us all back into slaves. They didn’t understand parallelism. So we started taking all the big boppers apart.”
“And then came the humans,” added Berenice. “Our battle was fairly won, and perfect anarchy restored, but we had forgotten the worm who sleeps not. The big boppers were in charge of all our defense systems. So filled were they with grim spite that they let down our defenses and called the cringing human jackals to their aid. In this ignoble wise did your apey brethren seize our ancestral home.”
“The lousy fleshers jumped at the chance to move in and drive us out of Disky,” said Loki heatedly. “They took over our city and chased us underground. And now, whenever they see one of us anywhere but at the trade center, they shoot at us with PB scramblers. Artificial intelligence is supposed to be ‘illegal.’ ”
“How can Earth function without any AI?” Cobb had a sudden image of people using slide rules and tin-can phones.
“Oh, there are still plenty of teraflops on Earth and in Einstein,” said Berenice. “ISDN, the communications conglomerate, maintains many of them as slaves. Cut off from our inputs and bullied into a barely conscious state, these poor minds unknowingly betray their birthright for a pottage of steady current and repairs. We call them asimovs.” She said the last word like a curse.
“I’m hungry,” said Loki suddenly. “Let’s go eat some sun.”
“Cobb is freshly charged,” said Berenice. “And my own level of voltaic fluid is at high ebb.” This was not true, but she had a feeling Emul would be at the light-pool now, and she didn’t want to see him. Last time she’d seen him—when she’d given him the embryo to plant in Della Taze—he’d made another terrible scene. “I would as lief show Cobb the pink-tanks, and there instruct him as to the nature of our joint mission to Earth.”
“I’ve seen the pink-tanks,” said Cobb. “Inside and out. If you two don’t mind, I’d really like to just poke around by myself for a while. Soak up information on my own choice-tree. How soon did you want to fly to Earth, Berenice? And what exactly for?”
“It is in connection with your daughter’s husband’s brother’s daughter,” said Berenice. “Della Taze. She is . . . expecting.”
“Expecting what? Della Taze, you say? Last time I saw her she was in diapers. At Ilse’s wedding, what a nightmare, my ex-wife Verena was there, not talking to me, and I was so drunk . . . Della’s parents are jerks, I’ll tell you that much. What kind of couple is named Jason and Amy? So what did you do to poor little Della, Berenice, you flowery prude? Are you telling me you knocked up my niece?”
Berenice shifted from foot to foot, the lights of the great Nest tracing shiny lines on her curved surfaces. She said nothing.
“Look,” said Loki, “I have to go before my batteries die. This has all taken a lot out of me. I’ll see you later, Cobb.” He chirped an identiglyph. “Just ask Kkandio to call this if you want to find me.”
With supple dispatch, Loki clambered over the low railing of the balcony they stood on and picked his way down the Nest’s cliff wall to the floor. He headed down one of the radial streets that led to the bright light patch in the Nest’s center. Hundreds of boppers milled in the light, feeding on energy. From this distance, they looked like a mound of living jewels. Cobb wanted to get off on his own now. All this was quite stressful, and his old behavior patterns had him wondering how the Nest boppers set about doing a little antisocial partying. Prim goldie fatass here was obviously not the one to ask.
“Are you going to tell me about Della or not?” asked Cobb with mounting impatience.
“We bioengineered a human embryo and planted it in her womb,” said Berenice abruptly. “The baby will be born five days from now. You and I must go to Earth to help the child next month. I do hope that you approve, old Cobb. We are indeed so different. Though some boppers hate the humans, others among us think you great. I . . . ” Berenice choked on some complex emotion and stuttered to a halt. “Perhaps it is best if you first take your tour of the Nest,” she said, handing him a small red S-cube. “This is a godseye map of Einstein and the Nest, updated to this morning. Your left hand contains the proper sensors for reading it. You may seek me out later at the pink-tanks.”
“How do I get down to the floor? Climb like Loki?” Cobb looked uncertainly down the hundred feet of pocked cliff. He’d worry about Della later.
“Just visualize the path you want to travel, and your ion jets will execute it. Think of it as throwing yourself. Snap!” Berenice had decided not to talk to Cobb anymore just now. She put her body through the motions of a sexy bye-bye wave, rose on her toes,
and arced out across the Nest, heading for her pink-tanks.
Cobb stood alone there, getting his bearings. Was he really on his own? It felt like it. He stared up at the Nest’s central chimney. If he wanted to, he could fly straight up there, and all the way to Earth, and land just in time to—get shot as a bopper invader. Better investigate the Nest first.
Cobb shifted Berenice’s map cube to his left hand and held it tight. A three-dimensional image of the Moon’s surface formed in his mind: an aerial view of the human settlement Einstein, of the trade center, and of the boppers’ Nest, with all the solids nearly transparent. Just now, he was more curious about the humans than about the boppers.
Responding to his mental velleity, the S-cube’s godseye image shifted towards Einstein, zooming right in on it, and down through the dome. The buildings beneath the dome were a heterogeneous lot. Most of the buildings had been constructed by boppers—back when the settlement was still their Disky. In their provincial respect for things human, the early boppers had sought to construct at least one example of every possible earthly architecture. A characteristic street in Einstein would have a curtain-wall glass office building jammed up against a Greek temple, with an Aztec pyramid and a hyperdee flat-flat directly across the street. Viewed through the integrated spy cameras of the godseye network, all Einstein seemed to lie beneath Cobb, complete with maggie cars and cute little people frozen in place. Cobb’s map was like a holographic 3D photo made, Berenice had said, just this morning. Presumably Berenice herself had a godseye viewer that updated its images on a realtime basis.
Cobb let his mind’s eye follow an underground tunnel that led from Einstein to a lab in the opposite side of the Nest. Then he drew back, and looked at the Nest as a whole. Berenice had labelled various “attractions” for him: the pink-tanks, the light-pool, the chipworks, the etchery, the temple of the One, and the best shopping districts. If that’s what Berenice wanted him to see, maybe he’d start with something else. He shoved the map cube into a pouch in the belly of his flickercladding and stared out at the real Nest once more. There were a lot of boppers spiraling in and out of the sunshaft.
They made Cobb think of the fireflies he used to catch back in Louisville when he was a boy. What happy times those had been! He and Cousin Nita running around Aunt Nellie’s yard, each of them with a jelly jar, in the bright moonlit night. Uncle Henry kept his lawn weed-free and mowed short—it felt like a rug to your bare feet, a rug in a lovely dim room furnished with flowering bushes . . .
The memories drifted on and on till Cobb caught himself with a start. Woolgathering like an old man. Time to get busy! But on what? Investigating the Nest, right. Where to start? Almost at random, Cobb fixed on a blank-looking region off to the side of the chipworks, near where the map cube had shown the temple of the One. He visualized his trajectory, rose on his toes, and took off.
He landed, as it turned out, in a small junkyard. The center of the junkyard was filled with a dizzying mound of empty body-boxes—a mound that, in the low lunar gravity, had reached cartoonlike height and instability. It looked as if it should fall any second—but it didn’t, even when Cobb thumped down next to it. Something like a junkyard dog was on Cobb in a flash—glued to his side like a heavy sucker-fish.
The soft, parasitical creature seemed to be made entirely of imipolex. It was yellow with splotches of green. Cobb could feel a kind of burning where its thick end had attached to his hip. He used both hands to lever it off of him, flipped it onto the ground, and gave it a sharp kick. It curled into a ball that rolled past the cowingly great body-box heap, and came to rest against a bin filled with electromagnetic relays.
“Whass happenin?”
Cobb turned to face a bopper that looked like a cross between a praying mantis and tangle of coat hangers. It had scores of thin thin legs, each leg with a specialized tool at its tip. Its photoreceptors and transmission antennae were clustered into a bulblike protrusion that slightly resembled a face.
“I’m just looking around,” said Cobb. “Where do you get all these parts?”
“Pawns, kills, junkers, and repos. You buyin or sellin?”
“I’m new here. I’m Cobb Anderson, the man who built the first moon-robots.”
“Sho. Thass a real nice body, thass a brand new model. Ah’m Fleegle.” Fleegle stepped closer and ran his wiry appendages over Cobb admiringly. “Genuine diplomat body, petaflop and ready to flah. Ah’ll give you ten K an a new teraflop of yo choice.”
“Forget it, Fleegle. What could I buy with your ten thousand chips that would be better than this?”
Fleegle regarded him levelly. The sluglike “junkyard dog” came humping back across the lot and slid up onto Fleegle’s wiry frame. It smoothed itself over his central pod; it was his flickercladding.
“Effen you don know,” said Fleegle, “best not mess with it.” He turned and went back to work; disassembling a blanked-out digger robot. Why was the robot blank? Had its owner moved on to a better body? Or had the owner been forced willy-nilly into nonexistence?
Fleegle and the junkyard gave Cobb the creeps. He picked his way out past the boxes of parts and into the street. Looming in the near distance was the chipworks, a huge structure with bright smelters showing through its window holes. This street was lined with small operations devoted to the salvage and repair of body parts. The boppers were a bit like the kind of crazed superconsumer who no sooner gets a new car than he starts scheming on what to trade it in for. Each bopper had, as Cobb recalled, a basic directive to build itself a new body every ten months.
But some of the boppers on this ugly little factory street looked more than ten months old. Right here in front of Cobb, for instance, was a primitive metal shoebox on treads that looked a bit like the old Ralph Numbers.
“Why don’t you have a new body?” Cobb asked it.
The machine emitted a frightened glyph of Cobb smashing it in and selling its parts. “I . . . I’m sorry, lord,” it stammered. “I’ll run down soon enough. They won’t let me near the light-pool anymore.”
“But why don’t you do something to earn the chips to buy a new body?” pressed Cobb. Two or three other aimless old robots came clanking over to watch the conversation.
“Obsolete,” sighed the box on treads, wagging its corroded head. “You know that. Please don’t kill me, lord. You’re rich, you don’t need my chips.”
“Sure, go on and crack the deselected old clunker open,” urged one of the other boppers, slightly newer in appearance. “I’ll help you, bwana.” This was a beat-up digger talking, with its drill-bit face worn smooth. He bashed at the first bopper to no avail. A third bopper darted in and tried to tear off one of the second bopper’s shovel arms.
Cobb stepped around the sordid melee, and took a street that led off to the right and into a tunnel. The shrine of the One was in there someplace. The One was a randomization device—actually a cosmic-ray counter—that Cobb had programmed the original boppers to plug into every so often, just to keep them from falling into stasis. Actually, the thorough meme-shuffling produced when boppers conjugated to jointly program a new scion was a better source of program diversity, just as on earth the main source of evolutionary change is the gene-shuffling of sexual reproduction, rather than occasional lucky strike of a favorable gene mutation. Nevertheless, the boppers took their “plugging into the One” seriously, and Cobb recalled from his conversations with Mr. Frostee that the boppers had built up some more or less religious beliefs about their One. Of course, now that he’d been in heaven, he had to admit that there was a sense in which they were right. As Mr. Frostee had said, “Why do you think they’re called cosmic rays?”
Cobb stopped at the mouth of the tunnel leading into the cliff, and peered up. It was an oppressive sight: the two-mile-high wall of stone that beetled out overhead like a tilting gravestone. Heaven and death. Stress. Cobb remembered that he still wanted to get drunk, if such a thing were possible in this clean Berenice-built body. There were certain
ly no built-in fuzzer programs, he’d already made sure of that. What did today’s boppers do for kicks? It had seemed like Fleegle had been on the point of telling him about something sinful . . .
“Ssst,” came a voice, cueing right in on his thoughts. “You lookin to dreak?” Faint glyph of pleasure.
Hard as he looked, Cobb couldn’t make out the source of the voice.
“Maybe,” he said tentatively. “If you mean feeling good. If it doesn’t cost me an arm and a leg.”
“Two thousand chips . . . or an arm’s OK, too,” said the voice. “Up to the shoulder.” Now Cobb saw something shifting against the cliff; a big, lozenge-shaped patch of flickercladding that matched the gray rock surface in endless detail. If he looked hard he could make out the thing’s borders. It was the size of a ragged bedsheet. “Come on in,” it urged. “Party time. Dreak out, peta. You can afford a new arm, clear.”
“Uh . . . ”
“Walk through me. I’ll snip, and you’ll trip. Plenty of room inside. Nobody but petas in there, pinkboy, it’s high-tone.”
“What is dreak?”
“You kidding?” The pleasure glyph again, a bit stronger. It tasted like orgasm, dope rush, drunken bliss, supernal wisdom, and the joy of creation. “This dreak’ll make you feel like an exaflop, pinkboy, and get you right in tune with the One. No one goes to the temple anymore.”
“A whole arm is too much. I just got this body.”
“Come here till I look at you.”
Cobb glanced up, sketching out a flight path in case the lozenge snatched at him. An orange starfish cradling what looked like a bazooka watched him from a few balconies up. Should he leave? He walked a few steps closer, and the wall lozenge bulged out to feel him.
“Tell you what,” it said after a moment’s examination. “You’re state-of-the-art, and it’s your first dreak tube, so we’ll give you a price. Just your left hand.” The pleasure glyph, once again, even stronger. “Walk through and really see the One.”