Rudy Rucker - The Ware Tetralogy

“That would work. I could make DIMs to replace the controller cards in car engines.”

After a week, Willy and Ulam had produced twenty special DIMs for running car engines. They patched one onto Louise’s old buggy, and Willy, Fern, Ulam, and Flouncey drove to the Little Kidders Superstore.

The sight of a functioning car was a sensation; in half an hour they’d sold all twenty DIMs. Of course the Little Kidders got wind of this, and two of them came out of the Red Ball to talk. They introduced themselves as Aarbie Kidd and Haf-N-Haf.

Haf-N-Haf was an unsettling sight—a fat, sloppy, fortyish man with piebald stubble all over his head and chin. He was missing all the teeth in the right half of his mouth, and that side of his face was slack and caved in. He spoke in a slobbering, nearly incomprehensible lisp.

But Aarbie was young and powerfully built, with a shaved head that had laser-precise tattoos of flames, blue on one side and red on the other. The flames swept back from his eyes. His teeth were white and even; his skin was an attractive pale brown. Haf-N-Haf deferred to him, and Fern seemed interested. “Kin y’all git my motorcycle to workin’ agin?” asked Aarbie.

“We can do it,” said Ulam from the backseat of Louise’s car.

Aarbie peered in at Ulam and Flouncey. “What the hell is this shit? Talkin’ slugs?” He wrinkled his nose at the characteristic odor. “ Fooo-eee !”

“We’re moldies,” said Ulam. “There will be many more of us here soon.”

“Remember that it’s thanks to them we can fix your motorcycle,” said Fern didactically. Aside from monetary gain, one of the big reasons for selling DIMs was to get people to accept the moldies.

“I bet Fewn can fix evewyfing wif her puffy,” lisped Haf-N-Haf, and Aarbie went into high peals of unpleasant hyena laughter, overly prolonged. Willy felt like punching him, but Fern kept control of the situation.

“I’ve heard a lot about how important the Little Kidders are around here,” said the calm Fern. “So we certainly value your friendship. Why don’t you let Ulam take a look at your bike, Aarbie, so he can get the specs for the chip? Once it’s working, I wouldn’t mind at all if you took me for a nice long ride.”

“Oh yeah?” grinned Aarbie, pleasantly surprised. “Oh yeah? Who all’s Ulam?”

“Behold,” said Ulam, flowing out of the car window. “Where is your mechanical steed, oh flesher?”

Aarbie wheeled his bike out from inside the Red Ball, and Ulam pulled the infected processor card out of the engine. The next day Ulam and Willy delivered a droplet-sized DIM to control the motorcycle engine, and Fern spent the night with Aarbie.

The day after that, Fern gave Aarbie DIMs for all the other Little Kidders’ bikes, and Aarbie, who, of course, turned out to be the gang leader, agreed that the Little Kidders would sign on as the transportation and security division of the new operation. Just to fuck with the Gimmie’s head, ISDN incorporated Fern and Willy’s new company out of South Africa and named it Mbanje DeGroot, with Willy the president and Fern the CEO. At old Louise’s suggestion, Willy and Ulam moved their operations out of Louise’s garage and rented a rarely used pheezer dance hall near a bar and grill called the Gray Area. Fern and Flouncey started working there too.

As the word about the Mbanje DeGroot DIMs spread, the demand for them grew superexponentially. The Little Kidders cruised the streets, handling DIM orders and deliveries and buying up any rogue slugs of imipolex that people had trapped.

In order to ramp up production, Mbanje DeGroot needed electricity for metal machines to slice and dice the imipolex, plus more moldies to program the DIMs.

As promised, Fern used her ISDN connections to get a contract for Willy and Ulam to replace the crucial computerized components of the local electric power generation and distribution centers, which solved the electricity problem for them and for everyone else in their part of Florida.

Ulam and Flouncey joyously mated four times in a row, cloning differently shuffled combinations of themselves onto four of the captured slugs of imipolex. The children were called Winken, Blinken, Tod, and Nod. Maturing in a matter of days, they started worked in the Mbanje DeGroot DIM factory with their parents.

It was still up to Willy to provide a Limplan-A description (well, actually it was Limplan- B by now) for each new kind of DIM that was needed; and this kept him as busy as he could stand to be. Busier, even.

At this point people started realizing who Willy was, and there was some threat of him getting busted. In fact, four Gimmie officials showed up from Washington, driving a rare gasoline-powered armored HumVee, a vehicle so ancient that it had no susceptible chips for the chipmold to have ruined. An ugly mob of pheezers gathered around the HumVee outside the Gray Area, rocking it back and forth, almost on the point of turning it over.

Aarbie and a few sniggering Little Kidders parted the crowd and led the officials into the Mbanje DeGroot shop. The head official nervously read a Gimmie ultimatum stating that unless Mbanje DeGroot’s entire DIM production were routed to Washington, D.C., for Gimmie defense and security purposes, Willy Taze would have to go back to jail.

“Can I thoot them now, Aawbie?” asked Haf-N-Haf, fondling his O.J. ugly stick, a thousand-flechettes-per-minute quantum-dot-powered rail gun the size and shape of a quart milk carton. The pheezers outside screeched for the Gimmie pigs’ blood.

“Oh, ah expect these here civil servants’ll accept a counteroffer,” said Aarbie. “Ain’t that right?”

The officials returned to Washington with the recommendation that due to his public-spirited national reconstruction efforts, Willy deserved an unconditional pardon. The pardon came through, and Willy was a free man, a race-traitor no longer.

A fresh shipment of imipolex came down on a second rocket from the Moon, and Ulam and Flouncey bred four more children: Flopsy, Squid, Shambala, and Cinnabar. Winken, Blinken, Tod, and Nod paired up and begat eight further moldies: Stanky, Panky, Grogan, Flibbertigibbet, Dik, Dawna, Nerf, and Moana. All eighteen of the moldies busied themselves programming DIMs with “the laying on of hands,” as they called it, but still the Mbanje DeGroot production pace was far too slow for the worldwide demand.

“I wish I could just teach everyone how to write their own Limplan-C programs,” said Willy, out swimming in the ocean with Fern on a rare day of rest. They were wearing Ulam and Flouncey and diving along some reefs. “I’m working way too hard. And it’s starting to repeat. I hate to repeat.”

“Well, why don’t you make DIMs to fix all the telephones and vizzies so the Net works again,” said Fern, transmitting her thoughts through Flouncey to Ulam to Willy. “Then you could start selling a Limpware Developer’s Kit. Call it the LDK.”

“Wavy, Fern, but dig it, there are a zillion kinds of chip designs that were used in all the different Net machinery. I don’t want to have to hack every single kind of telephone and vizzy chip into yet another goddamn little DIM pimple. The whole point is to sell people the tools for writing their own new pimples. If we had a phone system to deliver the developer kits, I’d say go ahead and give all the existing DIM source code away as freeware just to get people started.”

“What if you invented a whole new kind of superphone?” suggested Fern.

Willy was quiet for a minute. “Yes!” he said finally. “One massive, conclusive hack. Figure out an optimal architecture and make the new phones out of solid imipolex. People will use them the way you and I are talking to each other through our ‘Cloaks. We won’t need to repair the central phone system at all. That’s dead technology. The phones will talk to each other directly, figure out their own node-to-node routings, the works.”