Rudy Rucker - The Ware Tetralogy

“How big would a superphone have to be?”

“You’d need maybe a hundred grams each for the kind of device I’m thinking about. But, hey, I don’t want to call it a superphone, naw—I want to call it an uvvy . Uuuuh-veee. It’s cozy-sounding.”

“A lot of folks are going to balk at sticking wires into their spines.”

“Oh, we can do it without wires,” said Willy. “Just use the existing cephscope technology. Room-temperature polymer superconductors making tight vortices of electromagnetic energy to tweak your nerves. The only reason Happy Cloaks still use wires is that they’ve been too lazy to hack the upgrade. Not to mention the fact that loonie moldies don’t exactly give a shit about humans’ comfort—no offense intended, Ulam and Flouncey.”

So Willy invented the uvvy and turned production over to ISDN on the Moon. And now ISDN ships started delivering uvvies and shipments of imipolex to any local entrepreneur willing to pay for the cargo with millions of dollars. The ships brought down lots of moldie immigrants as well. And the ships returned to the Moon filled with thousands of barrels of crude oil that the lunar ISDN plants could use to make more imipolex.

Once an ISDN ship had landed in your area, you could buy an uvvy to download freeware capable of turning a little piece of chipmold-infected imipolex into a DIM capable of carrying out whatever simple cybernetic task you needed done. Up to a point, you could pinch imipolex for the DIMs right off of your uvvy, though eventually your uvvy would lose functionality, and you’d need to reinvigorate it with some more ISDN imipolex.

Of course, once you had your DIM program and your imipolex slug, it still took a moldie to actually put the program onto the imipolex—yet another step, in other words. So you’d pay a local moldie to install your program onto as many DIMs as you wanted to pay him or her for processing. Moldies were eager for work because they needed money to buy enough imipolex to reproduce themselves.

Another commercial angle to the new economy was that if the program for the particular kind of DIM you needed wasn’t available as freeware, you needed to pay a programmer to write it for you—or possibly write it yourself. The essential tool for creating DIM programs was the Willy Taze Limpware Developer’s Kit, which came complete with Willy’s final (he swore) release of Limplan-D, downloadable direct from Mbanje DeGroot for a stiff license fee.

The whole cycle created an instant new economy that benefited everyone concerned. The only unhappy ones were the Heritagists, those individuals who hated the sight and smell of the alien moldies. But most people ignored the Heritagists; the comforts of limpware technology far outweighed misgivings about the moldies.

By the end of September, Fern and Willy had a lot more free time. Everything was on automatic. The two friends were comfortably installed in separate luxury suites in a high-tone motel. Willy did a lot of diving, and Fern focused her energy on refitting the Selena’s . By mid-October it was nearly done. It was agreed that Willy would fly up to the Moon with her on November 2, 2031. He could clearly see that if he stayed on Earth, things would start to repeat.

A week before takeoff, Willy encountered Fern lying out by the pool with Aarbie Kidd. It seemed Fern had decided she couldn’t go another day without scoring some of her favorite drug: merge.

“We ain’t never had no merge down to the local Red Ball,” Aarbie was saying. “It’s kind of a seldom thing, I reckon. I hear tell they got it in South Miami Beach. The trisexes are into it.”

“I want you to take merge with me, Aarbie,” said Fern.

“I’ll try anything, Fern. Hell, we could git on my bike and be down there in a love puddle, all lifted and floppy tonight.”

So Aarbie and Fern jammed on down to South Miami Beach to score merge. Not wanting to be left home alone, Willy decided to take a trip up to Louisville. He got Ulam’s strongest granddaughter Moana to fly him, giving her three nanograms of quantum dots and five kilograms of imipolex for her pay.

Over the summer, Willy’s parents, Isle and Colin, had separated. He went to see his mother first. She still lived in the big old family house on Eastern Avenue. Willy and Moana landed in the familiar backyard—it felt like a dream, silently dropping down out of the sky into the spot where he’d spent a happy childhood at play. Moana said she’d just as soon look around town on her own, so Willy agreed to meet her in the yard the next afternoon. Moana formed herself into a dog shape and went trotting off .

Willy stooped down and looked at the familiar ground. Over there, embedded in the soil, was one of his little green plastic toy soldiers. How happy he’d been, back then, playing quietly in the sun. His eyes moistened and he gave a deep sigh. His childhood was gone, but somehow he’d grown into something less than a man.

Inside the house, Willy found Ilse to be vigorous and artsy-craftsy as ever, but with a tragic new bitterness about Colin’s unfaithfulness. She made Willy a tasty low-fat supper and drank a little more white wine than usual. “It’s so nice to have someone with me in the house,” she kept saying. “I rattle around so.”

All night Willy kept waking to hear the uneasily sleeping Isle calling out angry words at her absent unfaithful husband. “Goddamn you. How could you? I hate you. Sshhit . Goddamn you, Colin.”

It was depressing. The next afternoon Willy wore Moana like a pair of seven-league boots, and they trucked on downtown to meet his dad. Colin was an English professor at the University of Louisville; he’d moved out of Ilse’s house to live in an apartment with a student named Xuyen Tuyen. Seeing Colin’s evasive face, Willy uneasily realized he’d already absorbed too much of Ilse’s bitterness to be friendly with his old man. It was easier to talk with Xuyen, the girlfriend.

She was a cheerful round-faced Vietnamese woman with a Kentucky accent. “Just call me Sue,” she said to Willy as he stumbled over her name. “You should come to the big Halloween party at the La Mirage Health Club with us tonight. I’m dragging your dad. And your Cousin Delia’s comin’ too.”

“Well, I’ve certainly got the perfect costume,” said Willy.

“What?”

Willy patted his heavy leg covering. “This Happy Cloak I brought with me. Her name is Moana. I can wear her over my whole body.”

“And look like what?”

“Whatever I want to. I know! I’ll go as a great big naked woman.” He hit on this idea especially to jangle Colin, who’d always nursed a cringing, stealthy fear that his unmarried son was gay.

At the party, Willy’s Amazon appearance attracted the amorous attention of one Sue Tucker, an attractive bisexual female plumber from Shively. The party got way wild, and on this one unique occasion, safely wrapped in moldie as he was, Willy did fully copulate with a real live woman, i.e., Sue Tucker. At the final moment of ultimate intimacy, a deep-seated reproductive impulse caused Willy to tell Moana to uncover the tip of his penis—allowing his ejaculated seed to enter a woman’s womb for the first and last time. So it was thus—though it was years later till he learned it—that Willy Taze became the father of Randy Karl Tucker.

And then Willy went back to Florida, and the Selena was ready, and Fern took Willy up to the Moon. Aarbie stayed on the Earth, as did Ulam, Flouncey, and their descendants. Earth’s info-rich environment was like a promised land for the moldies, and none of them wanted to go back to the harsh Moon.

When Willy landed at the Moon spaceport, there were hundreds of humans and moldies there cheering him. If the mudders still had some doubts about Willy’s activities, the loonies viewed Willy as a savior and a hero. Thanks to Willy, there was a huge demand for Moon-built limpware products, and the Moon’s moldies could emigrate to Earth and find good work. The fact that Willy was the grandson of the great Cobb Anderson was important to the loonies as well.