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

“We can talk about that on the Moon if he has interest,” said Frangipane. “My lover Ormolu has some knowledge of the lost wetware arts.” Ormolu waved from the background. He looked like a blobby gilt cupid from an antique clock.

“Put a cork in it,” said Stahn. “I don’t want to get vivisected the way Cobb Anderson did.”

“What about me?” interrupted Blaster. “Why doesn’t the Nest ever do a pre-landing backup for me or my recruits? Aren’t I as important as Wendy?”

“You are too big, Blaster,” said Frangipane. “And no, you are not really so important, I regret to say. In any case, I don’t have the resources to make any other backups. Your new recruits should just be happy that we have jobs for them.”

“Xoxx you, then,” said Blaster. “I don’t need your help anyway. I’ve made this landing without a problem plenty of times.”

“That’s right. And you should not have a problem today.”

“Yeah, and just to make sure and keep it that way, I’m not taking any more calls. I don’t feel good at all about getting uvvied by your Heritagist friend Jenny while I’m in landing countdown mode. I’m going to take this up with the Nest Council later.” Huffy Blaster went off -line.

A few hours later, just before Blaster was scheduled to land, Wendy and Stahn got a call. They expected it to be Blaster, but it was Frangipane, her petals blushing and a-flutter.

“Bonjour,” said the moldie. “There’s no good way to explain about this, Wendy, but it seems we in the Nest are finally ready to attempt a full Gurdle decryption with a moldie as host. We have tested it on some Silly Putters this morning, and now we’re going to try it on you. It seems safer with you out in space, and with wise old Senator Mooney inside you. Be of good courage!”

Before they could protest, a sudden sharp crackle of petabyte information hiss came over the uvvy—a virus!

Stahn told Wendy to turn it off, but Wendy was already gone. The noise lasted for what seemed like a very long time, the sound so densely fractal and impossible to ignore that Stahn started hearing nutso voices in it. And there was nothing to do but grit his teeth until finally the connection broke. And then Wendy started making a noise; long, slow, rising whoops, each about one second long.

“Whooop whooop whooop whooop—”

“What’s the matter, Wendy?”

“Whooop whooop whooop whooop whooop whooop—”

Frangipane’s info had set Wendy to shivering. She was so tightly linked to Stahn that he could see down into her and feel it like it was happening to himself. Piezoplastic vibrations deep inside Wendy were crisscrossing and spewing cascades of phonons down into the live net of her quasicrystalline structure. And the structure was spontaneously deforming like someone was turning a dial on the Tessellation Equation, causing the structure of Wendy’s plastic to slide-whistle its way up the scale through 4D, 5D, 6D, 7D… on and on, with each level happening twice as fast as the one before, so that—it felt like to Stahn, at least—Wendy was going through infinitely many dimensional arrangements in each second. And then starting right up again. Whooop whooop whooop whooop. Wendy’s imipolex was like a scanner going over and over the channels, alef null channels zeno-paradoxed into every second and suddenly—Stahn flashed an eidetic mental image of this—a cosmic ray in the form of a sharp-edged infinite-dimensional Hilbert prism slammed into Wendy and lodged itself in her plastic flesh, working its way through and through her like a migrating fragment of shrapnel. The shudderingly rising dimensionality of Wendy’s quasicrystalline structure caught the wave of information and amplified it. The info surfed Wendy’s whoop and blossomed suddenly inside her like a great still explosion in deep space.

“Ffzzzt! crackle gonnnnng—hello, I am Quuz from Sun.”

At first Stahn was in denial. “Aw, Wendy, why you gotta lay such a weird trip on me, us floating here in outer space halfway to the Moon, I mean what the—”

“What manner of creature are you—Stahn Mooney?”

The sincerity of the question struck a chill into Stahn’s heart. “Stop it, Wendy! Wendy?”

“Wendy is dead, Stahn Mooney. I am Quuz from Sun.”

“Help! Uvvy someone for help! Frangipane? Are you there? We’ve got to warn Blaster!”

“How do I uvvy Blaster?” asked the mighty Quuz voice, and before Stahn thought the better of it, he showed Quuz where Wendy had kept her dial-up protocols, and Quuz dialed Blaster and the connection formed, even though Blaster didn’t want it to, and Quuz fed Blaster the same skirling crackle that Frangipane had fed to Wendy just a minute or two before.

CHAPTER EIGHT

DARLA

2031 – November 6, 2053

Darla woke up cranky. The uvvy was calling for her, but she didn’t pick up. The message software kicked in, and a live hologram of the unwelcome bulk of Corey Rhizome appeared in her and Whitey’s sleeping cubby, half a mile beneath the surface of the Moon.

The sides of Corey’s head were shaved clean, but his goatee’s formerly strict vertical rectangle had gone a bit wispy and strange. He’d gained weight and his skin looked grayish-green. His voice had its usual sneering, mocking tone, even though he was trying to be friendly.

“Hi, Darla,” said Corey’s hollow. “This is the Old Toymaker. I know you’re there, moonqueen. I’m going to stand here and keep talking until you pick up. I have a problem I need to talk about. And I miss you and Whitey and the twins.”

“I bet you do,” thought Darla.

Darla’s “identical” twin girls Yoke and Joke had been born in 2031, right after the Second Human-Bopper War. Although Yoke and Joke looked exactly the same, they had different fathers. Yoke was the traditional result of Darla’s fucking her partner Whitey Mydol, but Joke was a wetware engineered clone of Yoke that a bopper named Emul had implanted in the pregnant Darla’s womb after abducting and imprisoning her.

Joke was just as cute and bouncy as Yoke during her first year, but once she began to talk it was evident that she was different. When strangers would ask her who her parents were, she’d say, “Whitey, Darla, Emul, and Berenice.”

“Who are Emul and Berenice, honey?”

“Boooppers,” the little voice would say, drawing out the first syllable. “They’re dead right now. But I talk to them in my head all the time.”

“Can it, Joke,” Darla might say then if the stranger looked to be a rare lunar asshole of the Heritagist persuasion. “Don’t listen to her, Ms. Murgatroyd. Joke’s full of jive. Aren’t you, Jokie?” Poke.

The first day that Joke and Yoke went to school, Yoke was in tears when they came home. “Joke already knows how to read,” she wailed. “Why do I have to be so dumb?”

“It’s not really me who reads,” Joke told her. “Emul and Berenice look out through my eyes and they think the words to me.”

“What’s it like having them in your head?” asked Yoke, drying her eyes.

“It feels crowded,” said Joke. “They talk funny. Berenice is all flowery and old-fashioned, and Emul jumbles up his words.”

“Are you going to keep coming to school even though you know everything?”

“Of course, Yoke. It’s fun to see the other kids. And we belong together, you and me. If I went around alone without you all day, I’d get lost.”

“That’s true. You’re always getting turned around and mixed up, Joke, even if you already can add and read.”

“Emul and Berenice say I have a right-brain deficit,” said Joke, enunciating the words carefully. ” ‘Cause that’s where they live.” Joke tapped her cute delicate hand against the right side of her head. She and Yoke had glistening chestnut brunette hair.

“Poor Jokie. I’ll keep you from getting lost and you’ll help me with hard stuff at school,” said Yoke.

As they grew older, Yoke and Joke were inseparable companions, well loved by Whitey and Darla’s circle of friends. On their eighth birthday, Corey Rhizome brought a special toy over as a present for them.

“Wave this, girls,” said Corey, setting a small plastic dinosaur down on the floor. The dino reared back and gave a small roar that was interrupted by a hiccup so vigorous that the little creature fell over on his side, which sent Yoke and Joke into gales of laughter.

“What is that thing?” asked Darla as the plastic dinosaur grinned sheepishly and got back on its feet.

“It’s a production-quality Silly Putter,” said Corey proudly. “Willy showed me how to program them way back when, and I’ve been refining their software and limpware ever since. Check it out. I think I’ve advanced my Art to the magical level. I expect a stunning tsunami of commercial success for Rhizome Enterprises. I can like mass-produce plastic animals that I invented. Yes, I’m about to surf the tsunami, Darla—everyone’s going to want to buy a Silly Putter.”

“Your Silly Putter is funny,” chuckled Yoke, squatting down to watch as the little dinosaur began dancing a jig.

“Can we really keep this one?” asked Joke.

“Yes yes, it’s a present for you girls!” said Corey, patting them on their heads. “Because you two are so cute.”

“Hold on,” said Darla. “What if it’s dangerous? It might hurt children. You know how devious moldies are.”

“Moldies are good,” put in little Joke loyally. She always stuck up for the boppers and their descendants.

“Don’t get your bowels in an uproar, Darla,” sneered Corey. “Silly Putters aren’t smart enough to be dangerous.”

“Oh right! And meanwhile the DIM in my microwave or in a maggie is about the size of my thumb. DIMs are tiny. This dinosaur is like a thousand times bigger, in terms of mass.”

“You’re smart, huh, Darla?” went Corey. “So dig it, that’s the exact problem that Willy solved for me like six years ago, before he started spending all his time sitting in the marijuana grove staring up at the stars. The Silly Putters damp themselves. Admittedly they mass enough imipolex to go moldie. But they don’t because we have them in a feedback loop. Instead of getting smarter, they make themselves more beautiful. And they know how to become beautiful because I told them how, and I’m an Artist. They don’t reproduce, by the way—if you want more of them, you have to get them from me: Corey Rhizome, a.k.a. the Old Toymaker, a.k.a. the Silly Putter King, a.k.a. the president of Rhizome Enterprises.”

“Corey’s got orders for three thousand Silly Putters,” put in Whitey. “We think they’re gonna be a fad. Willy’s not interested in investing anymore, so I gave Corey some money myself. And he’ll give me initial public offering stock in return. We’re owners, now, Darl, we’re realman and realwoman.”

“You gave him money?” demanded Darla. “Who exactly is ordering all these Silly Putters?”

“All the orders for the Silly Putters are on the Moon,” intoned Corey. “I think right now Earth figures they have enough trouble with the Moldie Citizenship Act without importing more weird limpware. Especially with those asshole Heritagists. You know what they should really call that religion? The Born-Again Dogshit Moron Motherfucking Asshole Scumbag Church of Fuck Your Kids and Blame Satan.” Corey’s antic smile broke into wheezing chuckles. “But I digress. Silly Putters are perfect toys and pets for up here, where the moldies don’t live with us. Silly Putters appeal to our loonie sense of the strange, and they’re an ideal substitute for the animal pets we’re not allowed to have because of our