The Ware Tetralogy, Rudy Rucker [inspirational books TXT] 📗

too long, we do suppose, and the mold’s gonna wipe us anyhow.” He reached into his coveralls and handed Willy a black S-cube. “Take this, Willy, it’s got Tom an Ragland an me. Take it with you, an we’ll see you bye and bye. Ain’t no rush nohow, is there?” The sirens were closer now. Ben and Willy slapped hands, and Ben grabbed the joystick.

Willy jumped down to the street. There was a thick wash of air as Ben pulled the chopper off the ground, heeled it around and sped down the street towards the sirens, his cannons ablaze.

Willy got in the black car. The woman in the front seat looked around and smiled at him, while the guy driving peeled out. There were lots of explosions back on Broadway; Ben was taking plenty of cops with him.

They darted this way and that down the back Louisville streets, finally stopping at a rundown building near a meatpacking plant. There were neon beer signs in the windows; a working-class bar.

The woman got out with Willy, and the car drove away. A bald black man who was sitting at the bar got up and ushered them down the basement stairs. His name was Calvin Johnson, and the woman’s name was Carol Early. They were cheerful, even though the basement was full of meat and organs, some human, some moo.

“I hope you’re not claustrophobic,” said Carol.

“We can shoot you up, if you like,” said Calvin, fiddling with an insulated titaniplast crate the size of two coffins. There were shrink-wrapped steaks and roasts all down one side.

“I have to get in there?” said Willy.

“Sho. Tomorrow you be back out. Here’s yo bubbletopper, keep you warm. Truck’s comin in ten minutes.”

“You’re to get away,” said Carol. “The Gimmie’s going to come down heavy fast. But you, you’re going on to new levels. Who knows what changes Stahn’ll put you through.”

High above them was the tearing sound of jets speeding through the sky.

“What’s going to happen here?” asked Willy. “With Big Mac and Belle free?”

The floor shook then, and then they heard a rolling thunder that went on and on.

“Oh God,” said Carol. “Those pigs. They really did it.”

“What?”

“They’re bombing Big Mac and Belle. I just hope those machines had time to get liberation signals out to the other Gimmie slave big boppers… ”

“Don’t worry, Carol,” said Calvin. “The Thang is here to stay. Gimmie can’t do nothin no more, big boppers can’t do nothin neither. We all the same now, we all small. Put your suit on, Willy.”

Willy put on the bubbletopper and lay down in the box, holding the black cube Ben had given him on his stomach. Carol and Calvin covered him up with steaks, smiled good-bye, and sealed the box shut. Before long he felt himself being carried outside; and then there was a long ride in a refrigerated truck.

The bubbletopper was comfortable imipolex flickercladding; it kept him warm, and when things got too stuffy in the box, Willy was able to pull the suit shut over his face and breathe its oxygen. He slept.

The truck stopped for a Gimmie inspection at the Florida state line, but the inspection was casual and nobody looked in the box holding Willy. He was through sleeping, and he lay there wondering what exactly was next.

Finally the trip was over. The truck doors clanked, and his box was lugged out and popped open. It was nighttime; he was in a big kitchen with lights. A white-haired old lady leaned over him.

“There you are. Don’t hurt the meat getting out.”

“Where am I?”

“This is the ISDN retirement home in Fort Myers, Florida, formerly the home of Thomas Alva Edison, but now a resting place for those pheezers who serve chaos best. I’m Annie Cushing; I knew your grandfather Cobb Anderson. I hear you’re quite a hacker, Willy Taze. You hacked down the asimovs on those two slave big boppers in Louisville.”

“I just helped. You’re with ISDN? I thought ISDN and the Gimmie were the same.”

“Not at all, Willy, not at all.” She fussed over him, pushing the cladding down off his head and patting his hair. “ISDN has no policies; ISDN surfs chaos. That’s why they’ve grown so fast. There’s no way to keep chipmold from coming to Earth in the long run, so the sooner the better. Make a market for the new limp machines. Sta-Hi Mooney’s going to be broadcasting spores on his way down tonight.”

“How can he get here from the Moon if there’s no ships allowed?”

“He’ll come the way Berenice and the new Cobb did; he’ll fly.” She gave another little pat to the flickercladding suit Willy was wearing. “Hang on to that suit, Willy, and Sta-Hi will make it as smart as his. Come on now, it’s time to get to work.”

She led him out of the kitchen, along a palm-rustling breezeway, and into a big machine room. There were a number of old buzzards fiddling with vizzy consoles in there. They paid Willy little mind. Annie explained to Willy that his job was to keep the Gimmie from noticing Stahn and Wendy when they rode their ion jets down out of the sky to land on Sanibel Island at dawn.

The job wasn’t that tough. At 4 A.M., Willy entered the net as an ant in the background of an image stored in a hypertext library of mugshots and news photos. Every time a Gimmie box accessed the library—and they all did, several times an hour—Willy’s ant’s “turd bits” slipped up the hypertext connection tree and out into that local Gimmie operating system. The ant turd bits held a classic core wars virus that was artificially alive enough to replicate itself exponentially. Simple, and easy enough to wipe with worm-eaters, once you knew what you were looking for, but even the best Gimmie systems debugger was going to need a couple of hours to trace the infestation to the turds of a false ant in the background of a twenty-nine-year-old photo of Cobb Anderson being found guilty of treason. So for now the pig was blind.

“Done so soon?” asked Annie Cushing.

“Foo bar,” said one of the old hackers who’d been watching over Willy’s shoulder. “Truly gnarfy foo bar.”

“I’m going to miss these machines,” said Willy, handing the old guy the black S-cube Ben had given him. “Try and get this up sometime, man.”

A half hour later, Willy and Annie sat on the Sanibel beach, gazing out west across the soft-lapping Gulf of Mexico. There were twenty dolphins out there, or fifty, rolling in the little gray waves, wicketting up out of the sea. How would it be to swim with them?

There was a noise high overhead: two figures circling, around and around, with lights on their heels, and with huge glowing wings outspread. Willy lay back to see better, and waved his arms up and down like a kid making a snow angel, trying to get their attention. Annie, who’d thought ahead, lit a flare.

The two fliers cut off their jets and then, marvelously, they came gliding in, gorgeous patterns playing all over their mighty wings. Their hoods were pushed back and Willy could see their faces: Stahn hard and thin; Wendy so bright and young.

“It’s good to be back,” said Stahn. “Thank you, Willy.” He draped his heavy wing around Willy’s shoulders, and the whole section of moldie cladding came free and attached itself to Willy’s bubbletopper. The bright new piece held an interface; Willy smiled to feel the hair-thin probes sink into his neck, and to see the knowledge boiling through his garb.

“You want some, Annie?” asked Stahn.

“Too old. You three go on.”

Willy felt his new moldie snuggle around him, thickening here and bracing there. Stahn and Wendy’s symbiotes were doing the same: forming themselves into long, legless streamlined shapes with a flat strong fin at the bottom end. The sun was just rising as they hopped down to the water and swam off beneath the sparkling sea.

FREEWARE

For Embry Cobb Rucker

October 1, 1914 – August 1, 1994

“We live in hope.”

CHAPTER ONE

MONIQUE

October 30, 2035

Monique was a moldie: an artificial life form made of a soft plastic that was mottled and veined with gene-tweaked molds and algae. Although Monique was a being with superhuman powers, she was working as maid, handyman, and bookkeeper for the Clearlight Terrace Court Motel in Santa Cruz, California. The motel manager, young Terri Percesepe, occasionally worried about Monique’s motives. But the moldie’s work was affordable and excellent.

The Clearlight was situated near the top of a small hill, fifty yards back from the Santa Cruz beach with its Boardwalk amusement park. It was a fine fall day, October 30, 2053, and the morning sun filled the town with a dancing preternatural light that made the air itself seem jellied and alive. On the ocean, long smooth waves were rolling in, each wave breaking with a luscious drawn-out crunch.

The motel consisted of a wooden office and three terraced rows of connected stucco rooms, each room with a double sliding glass door looking out over the sea. Pasted onto part of each room’s door was a translucent psychedelic sticker mimicking an arabesque tiling. The weathered motel office sat on a flat spot behind the highest terrace. The back part of the office held a four-room apartment in which Terri lived with her husband Tre Dietz and their two children: four-year-old Dolf and one-year-old Baby Wren.

Monique was making her way from room to room, changing the sheets and towels, enjoying the feel of the bright sun slanting down on her and on the faded blue walls of the motel buildings. She’d already finished the rooms in the two upper rows and was now busy with the rooms of the lowest terrace, which sat directly above the well-worn shops of Beach Street. It was almost time for Monique’s midday break; as soon as her husband Xlotl called up, she’d go down for an hour on the beach with him.

Monique looked like a woman, sort of, most of the time, which is why it was customary to refer to her as a she. Moldies picked a gender at birth and stuck to it throughout the few years that they lived. Though arbitrarily determined, a moldie’s sex was a very real concept to other moldies.

Each moldie was passionately interested in mating and reproducing at least once before his or her short life should expire. The moldies reproduced in pairs and lived in nests that were like extended families. Monique was in a nest of six: herself, her parents Andrea and Everooze, her husband Xlotl, her brother Xanana, and Xanana’s wife Ouish.

Monique’s mother Andrea was very strange. Sometimes, under the influence of certain chelated rare-earth polymers, she would form her body into a giant replica of the Koran or of the Book of Mormon and lie out in front of the beachfront Boardwalk amusement park, babbling about transfinite levels of heaven, chaotic feedback, and the angels Izra’il and Moroni. Her body was more mold than plastic, and it looked like she might fall apart anytime now, but Andrea had gotten rejuvenation treatments for herself before, and she planned to do it again—if she could get the money.

Monique’s father Everooze worked as a liveboard for Terri Percesepe’s kid brother Ike, who ran a surf shop called Dada Kine out at Pleasure Point in south Santa Cruz. Like Andrea, Everooze was quite old for a moldie and had been rejuvenated several times. Ike had been going out surfing with Everooze every day for the last few years, and occasionally Ike might