On the Planet of Bottled Brains

by Harry Harrison

  "We'll see what the computer says," Bill rasped, a little grimly.

  It was shortly after that that the computer came into the room. Or appeared to come into the room since the whole damn thing was nothing but an electronic simulation anyway. It made quite an entrance, descending from an invisible spot in the ceiling in the form of a flashing blue light, and then winking out of existence for a moment, appearing again in the form of a severe looking man in a blue-stripe business suit, the shoulders thick with dandruff, and sporting a small mustache and pince-nez.

  "You two creepos have been disobeying orders," the computer implied. "Have your dim traces of brains forgotten already that I told you how important this work is? You must do it properly, exactly, quickly and succinctly — or there will be the most dire of consequences."

  "Is that a fact?" Bill said truculently.

  "Yes, it shagging well is."

  "How do you propose to punish us, seeing as how we haven't any bodies, huh?" Bill sneered.

  "I have my little ways," the computer hinted laconically. "Do you want me to give a quick and repulsive demonstration?"

  "Oh, please, no," Scalsior begged. "Everyone knows that computers are very big, powerful, sadistic and highly dangerous. Which eez why we banned them from our planet. Other computers of course, you being a fair and impartial, not to say kind, are an exception to the general rule. I take your word for eet. I'll obey like mad, let me tell you!"

  "Then you, with all groveling and knee-bending, may be gone," the computer ordered in a lordly tone. Then it turned ominously to Bill. "But as for you..."

  "Yeah," Bill said surlily, "what about me?"

  "Do you want a demonstration of my wrath?"

  "Not particularly. But I suppose there is no stopping you. Let's see what you can do."

  Immediately the figure seated at the desk vanished. The opalescent hue of the domelike wall changed to red shot through with streaks of black. An unpleasant exudant oozed from the walls. Regurgitant sounds came from speakers that suddenly extruded themselves from the walls. From hidden entranceways little black imps complete with forked tails and bearing tiny pitchforks flew in and circled Bill's head like a flock of mites, not managing to bite him, of course, since his corporeal extension was missing, but managing to act plenty annoying and to block his field of vision. At the same time one of the walls opened to reveal a fiery furnace, complete with wrought iron horses standing in the middle of it bearing huge blazing logs. The gusts of heat the furnace let out would have frightened the bejeezus out of a creature with a lot less imagination than Bill. At the same time the wall on the other side opened to reveal an Arctic wilderness with a double gale blowing across sending great flurries of razor-sharp ice crystals flying around the room. Both of these creations were going full blast at the same time, and Bill, no matter where he moved, seemed to be caught between them. He perceived a tiny passageway in one wall and ran to it. It led him to a pit full of excrement. And then the walls started shaking.

  Bill was teetering on the single plank that ran across the side of the excremental ordure shaking with fear and knowing that he was going to fall into it. At this moment, when all appeared to be lost, a voice came to him from somewhere close by:

  "Don't let the bastards get you down!"

  "Who's that?" Bill asked tremulously.

  "It's me. The Squoll. I just wanted to see how you were doing."

  "As you can see," Bill screamed, "not too goddamned well!"

  "I fail to perceive the difficulty."

  "You do do you, you moronic two-tailed animal! Just take a good look. I've got a fire on one side and a snowstorm on the other side and a pit of shit blocking the only exit."

  "Really? That's quite interesting," the Squoll said admiringly. "I can't see any of those things, of course, because they're computer simulations and therefore don't work on simpler creatures such as myself."

  "You can't see them?"

  "I'm afraid not. Take your word for it, though."

  "If you can't see them, that means they're not there!" Bill cried out excitedly. And at that very instant the hallucinations or visions or whatever the hell they were — computer simulations maybe — ceased. Or rather, they may very well have continued, because Bill could see various shadows dancing and interweaving, but they had no meaning for him because he had refused to understand them out of miffed pride at being outdone by a simple-minded Squoll.

  With the hallucinations or whatever ended, Bill could see that the interior of the computer was also a simulated space, and that he need no longer be bound by the walls. He walked through several of them. Behind him came an angry voice: "And just what do you think you're up to?"

  "Goodbye, computer," Bill said. "I'm going to take a little vacation from all this."

  No matter what the computer said, there didn't seem to be anything he could do. It called after Bill, "You'll be sorry," but Bill ignored that and, with the Squoll close behind, went back to the fields where he had tended the valves and first met the Squoll and found salvation.

  Chapter 4

  But Bill found that he was not to be rid of the computer as easily as that. He was, after all, in a sense, when you thought about it, and he didn't like to, a part of the computer himself. A partly semi-autonomous part, but still a part. The computer knew where he was all the time. It took delight in waiting until Bill had just fallen into simulated sleep, then it would appear suddenly, often in the form of a banshee, and scream him awake again. The computer made sure it rained wherever Bill was. Although, as an incorporeal being, Bill was, in effect, waterproof, it was still a drag to have to look at those leaden skies, those depressing cypresses, the cowed and malignant cattails that rustled their feathers in the deep and noisome swamp which the computer made sure Bill lived in. Bill was getting pretty tired of the swamp. He thought he was catching a cold, too, from having his feet in water so much. This, although he didn't know it, proved the thesis of various scientists on Earth that colds are mainly in the head. Not only did he have a cold, but he was coming down with bronchitis. He was afraid pneumonia might come next. He wondered if a dream creature such as himself could die of a dream malady such as the ones the computer was trying to visit on him. It seemed entirely possible.

  To make matters worse, after a while his friend the Squoll asked him to leave.

  "I still like you a whole lot," the Squoll said. "But I've got my family to think about. Our burrow has been flooded for two weeks now. The young 'uns are crying all the time. It's true that they're both cutting ears at the same time, but that doesn't account for all of it. Bill, you know, to coin a phrase, it's just too damn depressing around you. Why don't you take a trip, go somewhere. Preferably far away from here. Maybe you'll come up with some way to lift the curse."

  "It isn't a curse," Bill said. "It's just the computer acting peevish."

  "And that by you isn't a curse? Goodbye, Bill, and don't hurry back."

  So Bill went away. Or rather he tried to until he discovered that the computer had cut his power sources. No longer could he travel in the air, light and fast, using the battery pack that had been supplied to him. Now he had to trudge along on the ground. Even though he couldn't be said to have muscles, something ached. Even though he didn't properly have feet, they hurt him. Especially the one with the alligator foot. Because even in his computer reconstruction, Bill still had that damnable talon-clawed pedal extremity.

  He continued to walk, and he slept and dreamed while he walked. He dreamed he was a ballet dancer and someone had tied red shoes to his feet that forced him to dance on and on, while the ballet master, an aged poofter, looked on and smiled sadistically.

  And this dismal state of affairs went on and on endlessly and pretty boring it was too. Desperate now, he continued searching through the computer's memory for a place where he'd be left alone. Surely there must be a refuge there somewhere! But where? He tried going into some of the rarely-used data bases from past times on the planet Tsuris. He went and hid
in data bases that gave figures for annual rainfall for a thousand years back. He looked for refuge among ancient records of past muggings and murders. He hung out with biographies of past great Tsurisians. He even tried out the catalog of lost causes, the index of impossible inventions, the summary of near impossibilities. Every time, just when he thought he had a good place, the computer came along, often singing in a high-pitched, unpleasant voice. "Hello, Bill, time to rise and shine!" And Bill would be on the move again. Oh, it was a hellish life.

  This state of affairs might have gone on indefinitely. After all, Bill was more or less immortal in his present state. He could be expected to last at least as long as the computer did. The only way out might be if the military fleet attacked Tsuris. They had sent out their volunteer and he hadn't returned. And that got Bill worried. He grew long, imaginary fingernails and began to chew them. If they heard nothing they might get it into their teeny-tiny moronic minds to launch an attack.

  "You can defend this planet against a bombing attack from space, good old buddy computer, can't you?"

  The computer, which was getting plenty of practice in computer-simulated sadism, only chuckled horribly.

  Life reached its low point one dismal day that was very much like a really rotten day in February back where Bill came from. There was just enough light in the lowering skies to render the landscape unbelievably gloomy. Moss and fungi had taken root on Bill's skin. Small crabs with sharp claws were able to eke out a bare living in his hair. Vermin of various sorts, both domestic and imported, squabbled merrily with each other in his armpits. His crotch had become a region so dreadful that he no longer even bothered to look there. It wasn't that Bill was abstaining from washing. On the contrary, he had taken to scrubbing himself obsessively. It was that he could never get dry. His uniform, for example, had come to resemble a military sponge. His insignia looked as if they'd been in an underground pit ten feet under a pond. That was not far from the case.

  Even his diet had suffered. Although in the early days, when he was still on speaking terms with the computer, he had been served simulated meals of great variety and visual appeal, and had turned his nose up at them because they weren't really nourishing, being virtual food rather than real food, now the computer took great pleasure in serving him up with such twisted concoctions as green frog ice cream, drek stew with toasted yak's curds, and similar unpleasantries. And the hell of it was, even though he didn't require food, being fed directly on computer energy, he had never gotten over his habit of eating three or four meals a day when they were available. Yet when he avoided the computer's loathsome meals he suffered intense hunger pangs which were no less painful for being psychosomatic.

  This, then, was his state when something occurred to him that broke up the monotony of his existence and offered a ray of hope. This incident took place on a day that began just as disgustingly as all the others. Bill awoke, tired and unrefreshed, in a cave whose walls dripped moisture almost as vehemently as the rain fell thundering and splashing in the cave mouth. He staggered outside, shaking with cold and cringing with damp, ready to take up yet again the dismal burden of his existence.

  Then he noticed that there was a curious light on the horizon. At first he thought of a forest fire. But nothing, not even a simulation, could make this sodden stuff burn. What was it? Bill squinted. The light was a long way off, and to reach it he had to pass through difficult country. Was it worth it? What difference did it make to him, a light on the horizon? It was probably just the bowb-minded computer playing another trick on him.

  He groaned and tried to think what he was going to do with himself today. He couldn't think of anything, as usual. He looked at the light again. It was the same, neither stronger nor weaker nor of a different color. What was it doing there? He heaved himself to his feet, cursed feebly once or twice, and set out through glutinous mud that clutched at him with the properties of slow-setting glue. Onward he squelched, limbs aching with virtual exhaustion, teeth chattering with simulated cold. He found that to reach the light he would have to cross a range of mountains. That was doubly annoying, because he was sure that range hadn't been there when he'd first noticed the light. It had to be the computer's work, putting those mountains there. In fact the computer was probably behind the light, too, setting him up for even deeper disappointment in its sadistic mechanical way. Yes, he was doomed, yes he was! Why go on? He might just as well lie down in the mud and see if he could virtually drown. But that would mean giving in to a sadistic collection of transistors and wires. Was this the way it was going to end? Not with a bang but with a short-circuited sizzle.

  "Never!" he groaned aloud, then started coughing and sneezing. "Give in to a crappy machine! Not me, not macho Bill! I have survived, ha-ha, far worse. I'm a real winner, I am. No surrender! Onward!"

  Cheered on by this masculine bullshit he forced himself to his feet and staggered on, no surrender! Even though his lungs were puffing like a bellows gone berserk, even though the mountains ahead of him presented themselves, on closer inspection, as steep ice pinnacles with screaming winds howling among them, and him without a crampon. Good guys win! The phallus forever!

  Despite all this it was no go. Exhausted he slumped back, tired, finished. Without crampons he could not go on, despite the best will in the world...

  But then he remembered his clawed foot! Yes, of course, his lovely alligator's claws! A natural crampon, born from a lab-mutated foot bud! He wasn't licked yet!

  Bill tore off the clumsy wrappings that kept his foot from the metaphoric cold, the coldest kind of cold there is. One foot wrapped, the other unwrapped, he stood for a moment, then, throwing caution to the winds, and commending his soul to the great Tribunal in the sky where troopers collect their final medals and ultimate demerits, he tore off the coverings from the other foot, too. Although it was a normal foot, it had been so long since Bill had cut his toenails that he found now that even with that foot he could get good purchase on the icy metaphor. He scrambled up, panting, grinning, his taloned claw striking deeply into the adamantine ice, while the other foot scrambled for a foothold in the slightly softer sub-adamantine ice. His hands clawed at the sheer face, finding here and there little wiry vines that had withstood the cold and were deeply rooted enough to give him additional leverage. He pulled himself up the cliffside, onward, onward, while insane lights exploded in the sky and he could hear an orchestra in his head playing the 1812 Overture. And then, suddenly, he was on the crest of the summit. He took one more step. He was over the top. He looked eagerly down the downslope of the icy summit, and beheld a sight he had not anticipated even in his wildest imaginings.

  There, sitting in a little natural hollow in the slope, was Brownnose. In front of him there was a fire, and Brownnose was feeding small phosphorus logs into it. These, mounting high in the air, and giving off phosphorescent sparks and also emitting a violet glow, were the source of the light Bill had seen in the sky.

  "Brownnose! What are you doing here?" Bill asked.

  "Bill! Gosh, how great to see you!" Brownnose looked much the same as at their last meeting. Perhaps his freckles were more pronounced due to the cold; possibly his hair, sticking out from under a fur-lined parka hood, was a little less orange than formerly. It was not impossible that there was another line or two in his face. But despite these changes wrought by time, the evil cosmetician, it was the same old Brownnose, Bill's former friend, a man desperately eager to prove himself and win back the love and respect of his friends, the other troopers, for some idiotic reason known only to himself, or, failing that, at least to have them stop laughing at him.

  Bill squatted down by the fire. The phosphorus sparked and flashed, but Bill was too numb to even feel the pain when the occasional spark landed on his skin. This was the first time he'd been warm and dry (because Brownnose had providentially erected a small two-person tent just before Bill's arrival and even had a small pot of stew brewing on the edge of it). Bill had a lot of questions to ask, and the st
ew was one of them. As he understood it, nothing real could exist here in this place. Even Bill was not real. His body, the really real part of him, was off slumbering in what Bill hoped was a safe place. The computer was the master of reality. It dictated not only what food Bill ate, but what that food would look like, taste like, and so the computer controlled how Bill would react to his food since the computer could shape it to get any response he wanted. If this were true, and there seemed no reason to doubt it, since Bill had seen his own body stacked on a cot in the waiting room while he hovered about in uncertainty for a moment, until the computer sucked him up and took him in. So in that case, how had Brownnose gotten here, and how come he was able to produce his own metaphor for food?

  "Brownnose," Bill said to his stupidly grinning friend, "it's not really you, is it?"

  "Of course it's me," Brownnose said, his grin turning just a shade anxious.

  "No, it can't be," Bill said. "You must be one of the hallucinations or constructs that the computer produces. You couldn't be making this food, either, without the knowledge of the computer. So you're just another fake production of the computer, sent here to make me have false hope again so it can dash it." Bill snuffled with self-pity and wiped a pendant drop from his nose with the back of his hand.