Rudy Rucker - The Ware Tetralogy

Around then it came out that the neighbors were tired of Willy and Corey’s nasty habits from A to Z, and there got to be such a bad vibe around the warren that it started to make sense to move. Willy and Corey were continuing to find each other fully compatible, so they decided to find a new place together. In fact, they decided to design and build their own luxury isopod estate in a crater outside of Einstein—build a spacious little biosphere with its own soil floor and crater-spanning dome. Really an “isopod” was supposed to be a crawly critter like a pill-bug or a woodlouse—but the loonies had highjacked the word.

The isopod would cost billions, but Willy had hundreds of millions, and hundreds of millions more were coming in faster than he could spend them. Corey got deeply involved in designing the estate—the mansion, the studios, the vegetable gardens, and the giant marijuana grove. The construction took several years.

By the time they moved in, Willy had fully nailed the problem of designing Silly Putters—it was basically just a matter of having them homeostatically damp their own nonlinearities whenever certain activation thresholds were exceeded. With this feedback in place, the little creatures would putter along at the low twilight border of awareness forever. So now Willy had a femlin again. He called her Elvira.

Corey got interested in mass-producing the Silly Putters instead of letting them be one-of-a-kind art objects, but Willy stayed out of this endeavor. Instead he turned his energies to improving the isopod, adding every manner of special feature to it: a God’s-eye real-time map of Earth, a private swimming pool, a menagerie, a Turkish bath, a loop-the-loop bicycle course, and on and on. The years drifted by.

For a time, Whitey and Darla and their twin girls Joke and Yoke were regular visitors, but then Corey gave some Silly Putters to Joke and Yoke for a birthday, and the Putters did something that led to a furious breakdown of the friendship, at least on Darla’s part. Willy never found out the details. Women continued to visit Corey, though never for very long. More years passed, and little Joke started turning up at the isopod to hang out with Corey by herself.

The DIMs and the Limpware Developer’s Kit continued to be huge successes, but Willy didn’t interest himself in them anymore. It was like something in him had snapped during that last frantic development push in Cocoa. He had no special desire to do anything. He became something of a hermit, meditating and savoring his solitude. He could pass days at a time sitting in the little forest of giant marijuana plants, staring up past the plants through the dome at the stars.

Finally one day in the summer of 2052—so many years gone!— something new got Willy’s attention.

It started with a grinding sound beneath the soil, over in the corner of the grove where the dome met the ground. A moon-quake? A rupture in the plastic beneath the soil floor? But then the ground heaved upward as if from a giant mole, and a shiny blob of purple imipolex pushed up into the isopod air. The blob formed a face and spoke.

“Willy Taze! You still haven’t visited the Nest! We need you now. With your help, the first Gurdle decryption may happen soon.”

“You’re . . . you’re Gurdle?”

The moldie wormed himself farther out of the hole, though carefully leaving his tail in the hole to prevent the isopod’s air from rushing out. His purple skin glinted with silvery highlights. “I’m Gurdle-7! Gurdle’s great-great-great-great-grandson. It’s been twenty-one years, Willy! And now it’s time to leave your enchanted garden. Come on and slip inside of me. I’ll be a bubbletopper to carry you to the Nest. And inside the Nest, we have prepared a pink-house for you every bit as pleasant as this isopod.”

“Do we have to crawl back through that hole?” said Willy dubiously. “I’ll bump myself on the rocks.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll make my skin hard around you. And I’ll patch the hole behind me. Come, Willy. Arise! The Gurdle decryption is of cosmic importance. And only you can help us accomplish the final steps.”

Stahn stepped out of his fine Victorian mansion on Masonic Avenue above Haight Street in San Francisco. It was early evening on Halloween, 2053. Walking by were lively groups of people on their way to the Castro Street Halloween party, a traditional event now back in operation after a brief hiatus during the anxious years surrounding the coming of the Second Millennium. AIDS was gone, drugs were legal, and San Francisco was more fun than ever.

Stahn felt very strung out. He’d gotten lifted on camote after his final conversation with Tre Dietz late last night. In the afternoon, Tre had uvvied up to announce that some kind of software agent named Jenny had shown him a secret tape of Sri Ramanujan explaining a new piece of mathematics called the Tessellation Equation. Jenny had talked to Stahn too. She looked like a lanky teenage farm girl. It seemed she lived inside a Heritagist computer, but that she had very close connections to the loonie moldies. Then, in the evening, Tre had called again—very distraught—to talk about ransoming his wife Terri from the moldies. Stahn made some calls to the Moon to try and help out with that, and told Tre, and had then started getting loaded as he normally did in the evening.

But then a few hours later Tre uvvied again, fantastically excited about some new vision about how to use the Tessellation Equation to make Perplexing Poultry imipolex based on tilings of every finite dimension. Disquietingly, this software agent Jenny thing was there on the link with Tre, listening in. She wouldn’t say why she was so interested in this information. But Tre didn’t care, his obsession was to get Stahn to understand about Perplexing Poultry in Hilbert space, and about how Ramanujan’s Tessellation Equation could now be used to make imipolex-5, imipolex-6, imipolex-N!

To help himself understand the strange ideas he was hearing, Stahn drunkenly chewed up a couple of nuggets of camote while Tre was talking. It wasn’t the first time he’d tried the drug, but this time it turned out to be a big mistake, an unbearably strange lift, a psychotically strange panic trip to deep and personal revelations about his multitudinous personality flaws. Stahn went to bed and tried to sleep, but instead spent ten hellish hours in Hilbert space with Tre’s multi-dimensional Poultry pecking and clucking in the mysterious thickets of his chaotically disturbed consciousness. It was a relief to see dawn come, and to get up and try and start a new day.

In the afternoon, Stahn finally managed to get some sleep, but then, around dusk, his wife Wendy woke him.

“Get up, sleepyhead. We’re going to the Halloween parade, remember? What the heck did you do to yourself last night, anyway? I came downstairs and tried to talk to you, but you were completely gaga.” She had wide hips, pert lips, a soft chin, and blonde hair. Her voice was soothingly normal.

“I have to get up?”

“You have to get up. Here.” She handed him a big mug of tea with milk and sugar. “We’re walking to the Castro and meeting Saint and Babs. Our children? A family outing? Helloooo!”

“Okay, Wendy, don’t overdo it. I’m here. Thanks for the tea. I got lifted on camote after talking to Tre Dietz last night. I thought it might make me smart like him. What a burn. I’ll tell you about it later.”

So Stahn took a shower and put on black clothes and painted his hands and face black. He dusted himself with silver sparkles and went to stand on his front steps while waiting for Wendy to finish getting dressed. His head hurt very deeply; he could feel the pain deep inside his brain from the healed wounds where he’d gotten a tank-grown pre-programmed flesh-­and-blood right hemisphere to replace the Happy Cloak that had replaced the robot rat that had replaced his original right brain—his skull was a xoxxin’ roach-motel and thanks to Tre he’d been to Hilbert space and was no doubt subject to snap back there anytime—