Rudy Rucker - The Ware Tetralogy

“You’re losing me, Ulam.”

“We’ll use the slug’s imipolex to make clever little soft devices that behave like optical processors and silicon computer chips. Miniature slugs—they’ll look like the slimy humped gray dots you find under wet cardboard here in Florida. Each one-gram globule will be programmable for one particular purpose. Mayhap to run a washing machine. Or a power-switching station. Or a vizzy. A gram of chipmold-infected imipolex holds great sapience.”

“I get it,” said Willy. “The little pieces of imipolex will be like customized chips were before the chipmold ate them. Let’s call the sluglets DIMs . For D esigner IM ipolex.”

“DIMs!” exclaimed Ulam approvingly. “You have a gift for the genial turn of phrase, Willy. One must perforce be dim to spend one’s life inside an engine or a toaster, repetitiously computing at some wheezing flesher’s behest.”

“It sure would help if I could use this equipment,” said Willy, forlornly looking at the computer devices resting on the shelves of the workshop. Most of them had fuzzy crests of mold growing out of their air vents. “Even if we had electricity, they wouldn’t work anymore. How can I program a DIM without any engineering tools?”

“Use me,” said Ulam “As long as you can tell me what each DIM is supposed to do, I can program it by temporarily merging it with my flesh and thinking the pattern into it. I lack only a knowledge of how the bemolded human chips were designed—the microcode, the architecture, the black-box in/out of the pin I/O. You’re the superhacker, Willy. Instruct me, and let us tinker together.”

During the next few feverish Florida months, Willy was to experience a unique burst of creativity. With the assistance of his trusty ‘Cloak Ulam, Willy Taze founded the new computer science of limpware engineering, crafted the first DIMs, and topped it all off by inventing the uvvy in September.

But in mid-May, Willy and Ulam were still just getting started. This was when the Selena’s crew and passengers were released, seven or eight weeks after the start of their quarantine. Willy couldn’t afford to press forward amid the few reporters who made it there, but he managed to follow Fern Seller to her temporary squat in one of the abandoned motels of Cocoa.

When he knocked on her door, Fern opened it right away. She was a dark-haired woman with a wide soft mouth and a lazy-sounding voice. Willy introduced himself.

“Hi. I’m Willy Taze. Stahn Mooney said you’d help me get up to the Moon.”

“Come on in, Willy. The Selena won’t be ready to fly again for months. I definitely need entertaining. There’s no water here. How would you like to wash me off with your tongue?”

The luscious Fern was serious, sort of, though it was pretty obvious that there was one special area she wanted Willy to lick the most of all. They undressed, took off their Happy Cloaks, and got into bed together, but then—Willy couldn’t go through with it, with any of it.

Over the years, Willy had spent uncounted hours having cybersex via porno viddies, blue cephscope tapes, chat rooms, teledildonics, and the like. Yet when it came to getting a real flesh-and-blood girlfriend and consummating the love act with her, some problem had always intervened. Willy had written it off to bad luck and geekishness, but now in Fern’s funky bed he fully realized the awful truth.

“I can’t, Fern. I just can’t stand the idea of really doing it in person.”

“Not even a straight missionary fuck, for God’s sake?”

“I . . . I can’t get that intimate. I mean all the hair and skin and germs and bodily fluids—” Shakily, Willy got out of bed and started putting his clothes back on.

“Are you gay?”

“No! Gay sex would be even worse. All the porno I ever use is het.”

“You use het porno, but you won’t fuck a woman? All you ever do is watch?”

“Uh, sometimes I go interactive with women across the Net. I have like some special peripherals hooked to my cephscope at home. You always hope they’re women, anyway.”

“So why not get back in bed and you and me touch each other? Hands are peripheral. And I am a woman.”

“I can’t do it, Fern. You’re very attractive, and I would totally go for you across a remote link. But I see now that I can’t do it in person.”

On the floor Ulam was pressed up against Fern’s Happy Cloak. “We want to tryst,” said Ulam, speaking out of a flexible membrane on his skin. “Her name is Flouncey.”

“Sure,” said Willy. “You’re lucky, Ulam. Is it okay with you, Fern?”

“Oh, you’re too good to do me, but your ‘Cloak wants to hump mine?” snapped Fern. “Thanks a lot. If we had dogs, we could watch them fucking too. Would you get off on that ? You’re a gunjy bithead, Willy.”

“Don’t be angry, Fern,” said Ulam. “Willy is a genius, the first and noblest of the limpware engineers. He and I are machinating a scheme to sell DIMs through the Little Kidders Superstore. Did not ISDN send you and the Selena down to distribute imipolex? Willy is the man to bring this plan to fruition. And I am the moldie to make Flouncey happy. She and I are already exceedingly fond of each other. Her high intellectuality is a joy after my dealings with the beastlike slugs of the Selena’s dispersed cargo.”

“You’ve been collecting the slugs?” said Fern, her face brightening. She was sitting up in the bed with the sheet pulled around her. “At least that’s some good news. I thought maybe the whole cargo was lost. How much of it have you recovered, Ulam?”

“Twenty slugs. At roughly fifty kilograms each, that makes one ton out of the ten you brought down. Much of the imipolex was destroyed in flames by the ignorant fleshers. And I fear many of the slugs have disappeared into the sea.”

“And what are these DIMs you want to make, Willy?” asked Fern.

“DIMs are tiny designer imipolex slugs to replace the world’s computers and chips,” answered Willy. They’ll weigh about a gram each. Ulam’s collected enough imipolex to make a million of them. I already have the basic design process worked out. I use an architecture like a parallel pipeline based on fractal Feigenbaum cascades. It’s a perfect fit for what chipmold-infected imipolex is good at; I can’t believe I thought of it. And Ulam can program them just by touching them, once I tell him what to do. I made up a special new computer language for telling him. I call this first version of the language Limplan-A.”

“You’ve already done all that for us, Willy? Are you sure you don’t want to fuck me?”

“Um, if we could do it while we’re in different rooms. But the damn Net’s broken. Of course . . . we could link up using Ulam and Flouncey.”

Now Flouncey spoke up. She had a melodic husky voice like Fern’s. “Ulam and I would have to get to know each other better first. Maybe later we can hook you two up. Like much later. Can we go outside now, Fern?”

“For sure. I don’t want to give Willy a remote hand job. Yuckola. I think we should just be good friends, Willy. There’s plenty of men for me—and plenty of porno for you.”

“Fine.”

Flouncey and Ulam went outside and lay down next to the algae-green swimming pool. The mold-mottled wads of lunar plastic began touching each other—a little at first and then much more.

“How romantic,” said Fern acidly and pulled on her clothes. “Let’s talk about the DIM business, Willy. What’s going to be the first product?”

“With the electricity still out, there’s no point in making DIMs for kitchen appliances.”

“Maybe I can get you permission to fix the power plants,” mused Fern. “ISDN has a lot of contacts. But meanwhile—what about cars?”