Rudy Rucker - The Ware Tetralogy

Willy picked his way through a field of inert sun collectors and came upon a small shopping center. The most obvious looting target there would have been the Red Ball liquor/drugstore, but someone had walled up its doors and windows with thick sheets of titaniplast. From the whoops and yee-haws within, it sounded like there were some crazed lowlifes sealed up inside there getting wasted. Nobody was trying to get in. Going in there would have been like jumping into a cage of hungry hyenas.

The dark Winn-Dixie supermarket, on the other hand, was wide open, with a hand-lettered sign saying TAKE WHAT YOU NEED. GOD BLESS YOU. THE LITTLE KIDDERS.

There were an inordinate number of extremely old people filling up their Winn-Dixie shopping carts as high as they would go—Florida pheezers trundling off into the night with their booty. Willy went into the Winn-Dixie and found himself a bottle of Gatorade and a premade deli sandwich: a doughy bun with yellow mustard and vat cheese. The sandwich was mashed and wadded; it was the very last item in the deli case. All the good stuff was long gone.

As Willy left the store, he noticed a tiny old woman struggling to push a grocery cart mountainously piled with fruits, vegetables, and cleaning supplies. One of the cart’s front wheels had gotten stuck in a pothole in the parking lot.

“Can I help you with that, ma’am?” asked Willy in his politest tone.

“You’re not going to try and steal from me, are you?” demanded the silver-haired old woman, staring up at Willy through the thick smudged lenses of her glasses. “I could use help, but not if you’re a robber.”

“How far from here do you live?”

“Forever. Over a mile.”

“Look, one reason I want to help you is that I need a place to sleep.”

“I’m not letting any strange men in my house.”

“Do you have a garage?”

“As a matter of fact, I do. But my dog Arf lives in there.”

“I’ll share with him. I need a place to sleep for a few days. You’ll never get all this stuff home if I don’t help you.”

“If you’re going to help me, then I can get more food. Wait right here and don’t let anyone touch my cart.”

“I don’t think it’s very safe to stay around here,” protested Willy. A fight between two old couples had broken out nearby. One of the men was threatening the other with his aluminum cane.

“Don’t worry about those drunk pheezers,” said the old woman. “A strong young man like you. I’ll be right back out.”

Willy opened his Gatorade and started in on his sandwich. The old woman darted back into Winn-Dixie and emerged fifteen minutes later with another laden cart, this one mostly filled with pots, pans, shampoos, dog biscuits, and ice cream. Pushing at one cart and then the other, Willy headed down the road with her.

“I hope you have a big freezer.”

“It’s broken, of course. Thanks to the chipmold. Nothing works since last night. No electricity, no telephone, no appliances, no cars, no machines. It’s amazing. This is the most exciting time I’ve had in years. When we get home, we can eat a lot of ice cream. I might even give some to my neighbors. What’s your name?”

“Willy.”

“I’m Louise. What’s that junk on your legs?”

“Flickercladding with chipmold. It— he —is from the Moon. He’s intelligent. I call him Ulam.”

“How disgusting.”

Old Louise had a big wrecked couch in her garage that Willy could sleep on. Of course, the couch was already being used by Arf the dog, but Arf didn’t mind sharing. He was an orange-and-white collie-beagle mixture with friendly eyes and a long, noble nose. His ever-shedding hair was everywhere, and it made Willy sneeze. The garage had a separate room with a well-equipped little computer hardware workshop that had once been used by Louise’s dead husband. Of course, now, after Spore Day, nothing in there was working.

Louise didn’t bother Willy much; a lot of the time she seemed to forget he was there. So that people wouldn’t keep asking Willy about Ulam, he picked a pair of discarded pheezer pants out of a dumpster, baggy-ass brick-red polyester pants that looked like they came from a three-hundred-pound man. They fit over Ulam. And a lot of the time Willy would go out without Ulam.

He couldn’t resist roaming the streets to find out what was going on. With all the vizzy gone for days merging into weeks, people were less and less likely to recognize or even care about the escaped race-traitor Willy Taze.

People were foraging off their preserved foods and off the land. A few antique chipless engines were dug out of museum storage and harnessed to pumping clean well water; people walked to the wells with jugs to get their daily supply. As for sanitation—well, you could use a shovel. Or not. The neighborhoods took on the low-level funky smell of crowded campgrounds. Yet everyone was happy. With all the news media gone, they had their brains back. And the disaster atmosphere had gotten people to cooperate and help their neighbors. It was, in many ways, a fun and mellow time.

Willy wandered around being friendly to people. One popular topic of conversation was a local gang called the Little Kidders. They were the ones who’d secured the Red Ball store for themselves on Spore Day, and if you wanted booze or drugs you could buy it from them. When a couple of Gimmie pigs had tried to reclaim the Red Ball, the Little Kidders blew them away, which all the pheezers agreed was totally stuzzy.

Some anachronistic individuals found some old noncomputerized printing equipment and started making paper newspapers again. It gave you a kind of Ye Olde Quainte Village feeling to read one. But they had good information—travelers’ reports about conditions in the rest of the country, along with lots of local notices about things or services that people wanted to swap.

The main local market for trading things was the emptied-out Winn-Dixie. The space had become a free public market, and anyone who wanted to could take things there and barter them with others. The Little Kidders in the Red Ball next door made sure that the Gimmie didn’t try to come in to tax or regulate things. Half-jokingly, people began referring to the gutted Winn-Dixie as the Little Kidders Superstore.

Every night Ulam would go out and forage for stray slugs of imipolex from the Selena . After Ulam had herded or cajoled a slug back into the garage’s workshop, he had a way of paralyzing it. Arf invariably accompanied Ulam on his nightly hunts, enthusiastically wagging his high-held fluffy white tail. Ulam would give Arf a handful of Louise’s dog biscuits whenever they found another slug. Soon the hoarded slugs filled half the workshop waist-high—making a soft, vile-smelling heap that Arf loved to lie on top of, sometimes sleeping, sometimes licking his balls.

At least now Willy had the couch to himself. But he was puzzled.

“What’re all those slugs good for, Ulam?”

“They’re live imipolex. What could be more precious?”

“But they’re just a big wad of dirty, smelly, hairy plastic. A dog’s bed! They’re like what you’d sweep up after a six-city-block street fair. Why aren’t the slugs smart like you, Ulam?”

“They lack the software. I could copy myself onto each of them, but I prefer not to, because then my new selves would compete with me for scarce resources. Certainly I may clone myself a child copy or two later on, but it would be my preference to do this in a more romantic manner—to sexually reproduce with another moldie. In any case, this slug flesh is here for a different kind of replication. This is commodity imipolex, shipped from the Nest to Florida to make the humans love and value the moldies! You, Willy Taze, are the man to help us. You and I shall fashion small pieces of the slugs into customized imipolex products to be sold through the Little Kidders Superstore!”