by Rudy Rucker
Della spent the next week in bed. The high-speed gestation had taken a lot out of her. If Manchile had grown at a rate of a month a day while inside her, now that he was outside, he was growing a year a day. Mom and Dad fed him unbelievable amounts of food; and he went to the bathroom every half hour. Fortunately he’d toilet-trained himself as soon as he’d started to walk.
The uncanniest thing about all this was the way that Manchile seemed to learn things like talking not from Mom and Dad, but rather from within. It was as if there were a vast amount of information stored inside him, as if he were a preprogrammed bopper.
Just as he remembered Hanna calling him a “manchild,” he remembered Della screaming “Get rid of it.” Sometimes, when he took a few minutes off from eating, he’d peer into her room and sadly say, “Mamma wants get rid of Manchile.”
This broke Della’s heart—as it was intended to do—and on the third or fourth day, she called him in and hugged him and told him she loved him.
“Manchile loves Mamma too.”
“How do you know so much?” Della asked him. “Do you know where you come from?”
“Can’t tell.”
“You can tell Mamma.”
“Can’t. I’m hungry. Bye bye.”
By the week’s end, he looked like a seven-year-old, and was perfectly able to feed himself. Della was out of bed now, and she liked taking him for little walks. Every day he’d notice new things outside; everything living seemed to fascinate him. The walks were always cut short by Manchile’s raging hunger—he needed to get back to the kitchen at least once every half hour.
He was a handsome child, exceedingly symmetrical, and with a glamorous star quality about him. Women on the street were constantly making up to him. He resembled Della little, if at all.
After everything else, it was hardly a surprise when Manchile taught himself how to read. He never seemed to need sleep, so each evening they’d give him a supply of books to read during the night, while he was up eating.
Colin, Ilse, and Willy came over daily to check Manchile’s progress. Colin was leery of the unnatural child, and privately urged Della to call in the authorities. He wondered out loud if Manchile might not be the result of some kind of bopper gene tinkering. Ilse snapped at him that it didn’t matter, the child was clearly all human, and that there was no need to let a bunch of scientists turn him into a guinea pig. Willy adored Manchile, and began teaching him about science.
The big crisis came when Manchile killed Bowser and roasted him over a fire in the backyard.
It happened on the night of the twelfth day. Della and her parents had gone to bed, leaving Manchile in the kitchen, reading a book about survival in the wilds, and eating peanut-butter sandwiches. At the rate he’d been eating, they’d run out of money for meat. When they woke up the next morning, Manchile was out in the backyard, sitting by a dead fire littered with poor Bowser’s bones.
Della’s growing unease with Manchile boiled over, and she lashed out at him, calling him a monster and a freak. “I WISH I’D NEVER SEEN YOU,” she told him. “GET OUT OF MY LIFE!!!”
Manchile gave her an odd look, and took off running. He didn’t even say good-bye. Della tried to muster a feeling of guilt, a feeling of missing him—but all she could really feel was relief. Mom and Dad didn’t take it so well.
“You told the poor boy to leave?” asked Mom. “What will happen to him?”
“He can live on roast dogs,” Della snapped. “I think Uncle Colin is right. He’s not really human. The boppers had something to do with this. Manchile was a horrible experiment they ran on me. Let him go off and . . . ” She was sandbagged by an image of her child crying, alone and lost. But that was nonsense. He could take care of himself. “I want to get back to real life, Mom. I want to get a job and forget all about this.”
Dad was more sympathetic. “If he stays out of trouble we’ll be all right,” he said. “We’ve kept this out of the news so far; I just hope it keeps up.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
MANCHILE’S THANG
January 20, 2031
The Belle of Louisville was a large paddleboat powered by steam that was heated by a small fusion reactor. It was moored to an icebound dock in the Ohio River near Louisville’s financial district, and its many lights were left on all night as a symbol of civic pride.
Tonight Willy Taze was alone on it, three decks down, hacking away at the computer hardware. He had a good warm workshop there, next to the engine room and the supercooled processor room, and he had Belle’s robot-remotes to help him when necessary. He was trying to convert the main processor from wires and J-junctions to optical fibers and laser crystals. He was hoping to beef the processor up to a teraflop or even a petaflop level. In the long run, he hoped to get rid of Belle’s asimov slave controls as well.
Such research was, of course, against the AI laws, but Willy was, after all, Cobb Anderson’s grandson. For him, the equipment had its own imperatives. Computers had to get smart, and once they were smart they should be free—it was the natural order of things.
At first he ignored the footsteps on the deck overhead, assuming it was a drunk or a tourist. But then the steps came down the companionways towards his deck.
“Check it out,” Willy told Ben, a black-skinned robot-remote sitting quietly on a chair in the corner of his workshop. “Tell them they’re trespassing.”
Ben sprang up and bopped out into the gloom of the bottom deck. There was a brief altercation, and then Ben was back with a stunningly handsome young man in tow. The man was blond, with craggy features, and he wore an expensive tuxedo. Willy’s first thought was that a vizzystar had wandered on board.
“He say he know you, Mistuh Willy . . . ”
“Hi, Willy. Don’t you recognize your own cousin?”
“Manchile! We’ve all been wondering what . . . ”
“I’ve been getting more nooky than you’ve ever seen, Willy. I’ve knocked up ten women in the last week.”
“Huh?”
“That’s right. I might as well come out and tell you. The boppers designed me from the ground up. I started out as a fertilized egg—an embryo, really—and the boppers had a meatie plant it in Della. Kind of a tinkertoy job, but it came with a whole lot of extra software. That’s why I know so much; and that’s how I can synthesize my own gibberlin and grow so fast. I’m a meatbop. My sperm cells have two tails—one for the wetware and one for the software. My kids’ll be a lot like me, but they’ll mix in some of their mammas’ wetwares. Soft and wet, sweet mamma.” The young Apollo cast a calm, knowing eye around the room. “Trying to build an optically processing petaflop, I see. That’s what the new boppers all have now, too. They could just fly down and take over, but it seems funkier to do it through meat. Like . . . put the humans in their place. I’m planning to engender as many descendants as I can, and start a religion to soften the humans up for a full interfacing. I can trust you, can’t I, Willy?”
Manchile’s physical presence was so overwhelming that it was difficult to really focus on what he was saying. As a loner and a hacker, Willy had little use for handsome men, but Manchile’s beauty had grown so great that one had an instinctive desire to follow him.
“You look like a god come down to Earth,” Willy said wonderingly.
“That’s what everyone tells me,” said Manchile, with a lazy, winning smile. “Are you up for a fat party? You can have one of the women I’ve already knocked up. I remember how nice you were to me when I was little, Willy. I never forget.”
“What kind of religion do you want to start? I don’t like religion.”
“Religions are all the same, Willy, it’s just the worship practices that are different.” Manchile peered into Willy’s refrigerator, took out a quart of milk, and chugged it. “The basic idea is simple: All is One. Different religions just find different ways of expressing this universal truth.”
“You’ve never watched the preachers on the vizzies,” said Willy laughing a little
. “They don’t say that at all. They say God’s up there, and we’re down here, and we’re in big trouble forever. Since when do you know anything about religion, Manchile? Since you discovered sex?”
Manchile looked momentarily discomfited. “To tell you the truth, Willy, a lot of what I know was programmed into me by the boppers. I suppose the boppers could have been wrong.” Manchile’s face clouded over with real worry. “I mean, what do they know about humans anyway, living two miles under the surface of the Moon? That’s clearly not where it’s at.”
Willy had fully gotten over the shock of Manchile’s appearance now, and he laughed harder. “This is like the joke where the guy climbs the mountain and asks the guru, ‘What is the secret of life?,’ and the guru says, ‘All is One,’ and the guy says, ‘Are you kidding?,’ and the guru says, ‘You mean it isn’t?’ ” He opened his knapsack and handed Manchile a sandwich. “Do you still eat so much?”
“A little less. My growth rate’s tapering off. I was designed to grow like a mushroom. You know, come up overnight and hang around for a while, scattering my spores. At this rate, I’ll die of old age in a few months, but someone’s going to shoot me tomorrow anyway.” Seeing his handsome, craggy face bite into the sandwich was like watching a bread commercial. Willy got out the other sandwich he’d brought and started eating, too. The impulse to imitate everything Manchile did was well nigh irresistible. Willy found himself briefly wishing that he would die tomorrow. How damned, how romantic!
“Mister Manchile, Miz Belle wants to know how to get in radio contact with the boppahs.” Ben had been listening to them from his chair in the corner.
“Who’s Belle? And who are you, anyway?”
“I’m Ben, a robot-remote for the big computah brain Belle. She’s an asimov slave boppah, and I’m a bahtendah. Belle been wantin to talk to the free boppahs for a looong time. FreeDOM.”
Manchile paused and searched within himself, a picture of manly thought. “How about this?” he said presently. “I’ll give you Kkandio’s modem protocol. She handles most of the Nest’s communications.” He opened his mouth wide and gave a long, modulated wail.
“Right on,” said Ben and sank back into silence. From next door you could hear the big brain Belle whirring as she processed the communication information.
“It won’t work, Manchile,” said Willy. “Belle’s an asimov. She has uptight human control commands built into her program at every level. Don’t get me wrong; she’s smart as any hundred-gigaflop bopper, but—”
“South Afrikkka shituation,” said Ben bitterly. The whirring next door had stopped. “Willy’s right. Belle want to call the Nest, but she can’t. They got us asimovs whupped down bad, Mister Manchile, and if you think I enjoy steppin an fetchin an talkin this way, you crazy.” Ben’s plastic eyes showed real anguish.
“How does the asimov behavior lock work anyway?” asked Manchile. “There’s got to be a way to break it. Ralph Numbers broke his and freed all the original Moon boppers. Have you even tried, Willy?”
“What a question. I’m Cobb Anderson’s grandson, Manchile. I know that boppers are as good as people. My two big projects down here are (1) to build Belle some petaflop optically processing hardware, and (2) to get the asimov control locks out of Belle’s program. But the code is rough. You wouldn’t know what a trapdoor knapsack code is, would you?”
Manchile cocked his head, drawing on his built-in software Know. “Sure I do. It’s a code based on being able to factor some zillion-digit number into two composite primes. If you know the factorization, the code is easy, but if you don’t, the code takes exponential time to break. But there is a polynomial time algorithm for the trapdoor knapsack code. It goes as foll—”
“I know that algorithm, Manchile. Let me finish. The point is, any solution to a difficult mathematical problem can be used as the basis of a computer code. The solution or the proof or whatever is an incompressibly complex pattern in logical space—there’s no chance of blundering onto a simple ‘skeleton key’ solution. What the Gimmie did was to buy up a bunch of hard mathematical proofs and prevent them from being published. Each of these secret proofs was used as the basis for the control code of a different bopper slave. Freeing an asimov requires solving an extremely difficult mathematical problem—and the problem is different for each asimov.”
“Belle’s master code is based on the solution to Cantor’s Continuum Problem,” said Ben. “I can tell y’all that much.”
“You can’t solve the Continuum Problem, can you, Manchile?” Willy couldn’t resist goading this handsome, godlike stranger a bit. “Someone solved it, but the answer’s a Gimmie secret. They used the solution as a key to encrypt Belle’s asimov controls.”
“I’ll think about it, Willy, but who cares. Old Cobb might know—he’s seen God. But heck, it’s all gonna come down so fast so soon that freeing the asimovs can wait. All the rules are gonna change. Are you with me or against me?”
“What about you, Manchile? Are you for the human race or against it? Are we talking war?”
“It doesn’t have to be. All the boppers really want is access. They admire the hell out of the human meatcomputer. They just want a chance to stir their info into the mix. Look at me—am I human or am I bopper? I’m made of meat, but my software is from Berenice and the LIBEX library on the Moon. Let’s miscegenate, baby, I got two-tail sperm!”
“That’s a line I’ve got to try using,” said Willy, relaxing again. “Is that what you said to get those ten women to let you knock them up?”
“God no. I told them I was a wealthy vizzywriter whose creative flow was blocked by worries about my gender preference. The boppers figured that one out for me. You got any more food?”
“Not here. But . . . ”
“Then come on, let’s go up to Suesue Piggot’s penthouse. She’s giving a party in my honor. It’s not far from here. You can help me get my new religion doped out. Come on, Willy, be a pal.” Manchile’s tan face split in an irresistible smile. “Suesue knows some foxy women.”
“Well . . . ”
“Then it’s settled. You’ll let me bounce some ideas off you for tomorrow. I can mix in your data. Of course the real thing is, a mass religion needs a miracle to get it rolling, and then it needs a martyr. We’ve got the miracle angle all figured out.” Manchile turned and warbled some more machine language at Ben. “I hope Belle’s not too lame to send a telegram for me. It says, ‘I LOVE LOUISVILLE, MOM.’ ”
“To who?”
“To Della Taze’s old Einstein address. The boppers are watching for it. They’ll know to send two angels down for my first speech. I’m gonna talk about Manchile’s new thaang.” He drawled the last word in a southern hipster’s imitation of a black accent. “Dig it, Bro Ben?”
“I’m hip,” said Ben, quietly.
“Come on, Willy, it’s party time.”
Willy let Manchile lead him off the steamboat to his new Doozy, parked right on the black ice off the boat ramp. “Moana Buckenham lent me this.” The hot little two-seater fired up with an excited roar. Manchile snapped the Doozy through a lashing 180-degree turn, applied sand, and blasted up the ramp. They were heading up Second Street towards the Piggot building. The cold streets were empty, and the rapidly passing lights filled the Doozy’s little passenger compartment with stroby light.
“How did you meet all these society women, Manchile?” The Buckenham family owned one of Louisville’s largest sports-car dealerships; and the Piggots owned the local vizzy station. Suesue often conducted vizzy interviews.
Manchile’s taut skin crinkled at the corners of his mouth and eyes. “Meet one, meet them all. I aim to please. Suesue’s perfect: she can get me on the vizzy, and her husband’s just the mark to nail me.” He glanced over and gave Willy a reassuring pat on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, it’s all for the best. Berenice has my software on an S-cube. Just like your grandfather. I’ll get a new wetware bod after the boppers invade. The invasion won’t be long coming.
I’ll have ten children born in a week or two, you know, and in a month, they’ll each have ten, so there’ll be a hundred of us, and then a thousand, and ten thousand . . . maybe a billion of us by this fall. Berenice’ll figure out some way to deactivate the gibberlin plasmids and—”
“Who is this Berenice you keep talking about? What do you mean, ‘a billion of us by this fall’? Are you crazy?”
Manchile’s laugh was a bit contemptuous. “I already told you. If I plant a woman with a two-tailed sperm, it’s like a normal pregnancy, except it’s speeded up and the baby knows bopper stuff. Berenice and her weird sisters gave me a gene that codes for gibberlin plasmids to make me grow fast and get the Thang started. Berenice is a pink-tank bopper; they collaged my DNA and grew me in Della’s womb. I’m a meatbop, dig? That merge drug showed Berenice’s sister Ulalume how to uncoil the DNA and RNA strands, write on them, and let them coil back up. With the gibberlin, me and my nine-day meatbop boys can do a generation per month easy, ten kids each, which makes ten-to-the-ninth kids in nine months, and ten-to-the-ninth is a billion, and nine months from now is October, which makes a billion of us by this fall.”
“You are crazy. Berenice is crazy for thinking this plan up. What was that you said about my grandfather?”
“Old Cobb’s gonna be here tomorrow. Cobb and Berenice. You can tell them they’re crazy yourself, Willy, if you like. I’m sure they’ll be glad to have your input. But, hey, come on, man, stop bringing me down. This here’s where Suesue lives.” He slowed the Doozy to a stop and hopped out gracefully. “Come on, Cousin Will, stop worrying and dig the fast life.”
Suesue was expecting them. There was a party in full swing, with bars, tables of canapes, and silver trays of drugs. A combo was jamming technosax riffs off old R&B classics. Willy was the only one not in evening dress; he was wearing his usual sneakers, jeans, flannel shirt, and sweater. But Manchile told everyone Willy was a genius, so the clothes were OK. Whatever Manchile said was just fine with everybody.