Rudy Rucker - The Ware Tetralogy

Corey took an uvvy out of his pocket and put it on Willy’s neck. Dozens of lively rubbery creatures appeared, overlaid on the crowded terrace party. Some of the figures, like Vector Man, were familiar if somewhat warped, while others were wholly unknown. Tedeleh Torah came jauntily hopping toward them on his two scroll legs and unfurled himself like a flasher, brazenly displaying sacred Hebrew writing that twisted and curled like snakes. Squawky Bird flapped awkwardly forward and began pecking up the writhing letters as if they were worms, Squawky drooling and slobbering while s/he did this. Vector Man’s linked spheres came free and all bounced straight at Willy’s face and, awww, they weren’t spheres at all, they were prickly-ass 3D Mandelbrot sets. Willy flinched, but kept watching. This was majorly stuzzadelic art. Across the terrace, Barbie got down on her plastic knees and gave the Western Exterminator Man a deep-throat Barbie blow job, with the Exterminator Man all droppin’ his hammer and goin’ “ Whoah !” The chromed Help Daemon walked up to Willy and presented him with a bill made out for a hundred trillion dollars. The Pig Chef ran a knife down his own stomach and began offering people fresh platters of steamy chitlins. Giggles the Bear grabbed the Pig Chef’s knife and butchered the Dough-Boy into cookies that Reddy Kilowatt zapped into golden crisps with his lightning-bolt fingers. It just kept going on and on and getting crazier. Finally Willy reached back and pulled off the uvvy.

“That’s wild, Corey. It must have been a lot of work.”

“Not for me. The images are all appropriated. And I used some commercial toonware to set their behaviors. I’ve been doing this kind of thing for years.”

“Corey’s jammed the Net so many times,” said Whitey. “Doctoring vizzycasts, replacing commercials with his own weird Rhizome riffs. You know how there’s no corporate vizzy news on the Moon anymore because the announcers kept turning into like giant ants? That’s thanks to Corey.”

“Affirmo, I slew that dragon,” said Corey. “But now I’m into a more personal kind of art. I’m drawn to the idea of making actual physical objects. Not just logos. Historical and allegorical figures as well. And figures exemplifying universal concepts. Hummel figurines for the twenty-first century. The Traveling Salesman meets the Farmer’s Daughter.”

“But can she do this ?” interrupted Darla, hefting her breasts and somehow getting her nipples to spray out many thin jets of milk.

“Aw, Darla,” said Whitey, stepping forward so that the milk sprayed onto his bare chest. “You’re slushed, babe.”

“Vintage loonie grunge,” said Corey. To Willy, it all seemed quite mad and joyous.

Willy went to visit Corey’s quarters the next day: a five-room spread carved into stone fifty feet below the lunar surface. You got there by sliding down a pole in the center of a chute that led to a warren of hallways with doors to lots of people’s apartments.

The first room of Corey’s place—actually, the loonies called rooms cubbies —reminded Willy a bit of his old room back in his parents’ basement. There was floatin’ wavy junk everywhere: shelves and shelves of little plastic and rubber toys, windrows of hundred-year-old comic books and magazines, staticky old hollowcasters with arcane image loops, seventeen antique Lava lamps, a wall covered with weird drawings Corey had laminated onto plastic dinner plates, and even some ancient TVs showing videos. Another wall was covered with plastic water guns, forever more futuristic than any actual needler or O.J. ugly stick.

Beyond the front cubby and the kitchen lay Corey’s sleeping cubby and his two studios, one traditional and one modern. The traditional studio was for painting and sculpture, with hand-painted canvases hanging on the walls and leaning in the corners. A lot of them were painted on black velvet and held glowing images of such historically iconic events as the vivisection of Cobb Anderson, the nuking of Akron, and the classic newsie image of Stahn and Darla emerging from the mouth of the Nest of the exterminated boppers—both of them in mirrored Happy Cloaks, Stahn lanky and jaunty, Darla weary and hugely pregnant.

Most of the sculptures were on the order of assemblages; there was, for instance, a series of oversized snow domes holding scenes like Santa with his intestines spilling out, a Happy New Year’s fetus wielding a curette, and a paradoxically sweet image of monarch butterflies circling a nude Alice in Wonderland. Though there was something odd about the butterflies’ dreamy humanoid faces . . .

A lot of the art spilled over into the modern studio, which also held the usual kind of electronic equipment, all recently upgraded to DIMs—a cephscope deck, a holoscanner, uvvies, and stacks of S-cubes. Corey’s kitchen was gray with ash and disorder. His sleeping cubby had an extra-high ceiling to accommodate his marvelous fifteen-foot-tall gene-tailored marijuana plants.

Willy was enchanted, and over the weeks to come he spent more and more time hanging out with Corey. He admired Corey’s classic beatnik cool. And, best of all, Corey shared Willy’s unwillingness to grow up.

Willy started helping Corey with his Silly Putters project, often working so late that he would end up sleeping over on a mattress in the front cubby. It came out that, thanks to the expenses of buying old magazines and DIM upgrades, Corey was having trouble paying the rent. Willy suggested that he move in as a roommate and share the bills. Corey said that sounded fine, as long as they didn’t get on each other’s nerves. Just to clear the air of any misunderstanding about his motives, Willy explained his sex problem. He was straight, but unable to contemplate physical sex with a real live woman. He was, in short, a jack-off .

“The stain of Onan,” said Corey. “Didn’t something terrible happen to that guy in the Bible? Hold on—” He nimbly accessed his uvvy, and the little device declaimed a Bible verse:

“ And what Onan did was displeasing in the sight of the Lord, and He slew him also. Genesis 38:10.”

Corey looked disappointed. “That’s not very visual. Too bad. Well, at least you’re not lusting after twelve-year-old girls, Willy.”

“Is that what you’re into?” asked Willy uncertainly.

“I do think about young girls from time to time. But I don’t act out. As an artist, I’m able to transmute the dross of my perversion into the gold of deathless cultural artifacts. As a practical matter, I only date twenty-year-olds and over. When I do date. I like it better when women find out about me and just come over and hang out.”

Willy helped Corey make some preliminary Silly Putters. Being true Art, the project was somewhat pointlessly difficult. The problem with trying to create these half-living objects was that you were working in the zone between the slavishly obedient DIM and the utterly ungovernable moldie. There was a constant danger of the thing’s behavior entering the strange attractor of consciousness. Times like that, Willy had to stun the freshly self-aware being and manually damp down its non-linearity parameters, feeling uneasy about performing what was, in some respects, an act of lobotomy if not murder.

One model that Willy got to work very nicely was a femlin , modeled on a groovy little Leroy Neiman sprite figure that Corey showed him in the joke pages of an old magazine called Playboy . The femlin wore nothing but high heels, black stockings, and opera gloves. She loved to cavort with Willy’s penis. Willy was soon obsessively attached to her.

One dire day the femlin’s mind chaotically tunneled into the basin of self-awareness, and she grokked how nowhere her life with Willy was. She managed to sneak out of Corey’s apartment while the door’s electric zapper was off, and ran down the warren’s public hallway. A frightened neighbor lady stomped on the femlin, mistaking her for a rat. Willy happened upon this scene and totally lost it; he started screaming at the neighbor so hard that some passersby had to grab him and hold him down and dose him with a sedative, right there on the floor next to the smeared remains of his precious femlin.