Rudy Rucker - The Ware Tetralogy

There was a chair and table, a bed, a big sofa, and an easy chair. To the left was a freestanding food pantry with a microwave, and to the right was a toilet, an exercise treadmill, and a deep clear pool of constantly recirculating water. The air smelled okay—maybe a little like a man’s dirty laundry and maybe a little bit like moldies. The masses of hanging plants seemed to help. There were no papers, no keyboards, no books, no vizzy, and no hollowcaster—apparently Willy’s uvvy served for all that.

“I’d like to wash before I get dressed,” said Terri, walking over to the pool. “It’s been a week.”

“Go ahead. Here’s soap and a washcloth and the towel’s over there. Do you mind if I keep talking to you?”

“I want to talk. I have a lot of questions. But don’t stare at me that way.” Terri slid into the water and ran the cloth over her face. It felt wonderful. “I gather that you and your moldie friends sent out some kind of virus,” she said presently.

“A Tessellation Equation program,” said Willy, sitting down at the edge of the pool with his back to Terri. “We call it the Stairway To Heaven. It turns a moldie into a kind of antenna that can pick up alien personality waves—though you can equally well think of the signals as alien personality particles . Hilbert space prisms with gigaplex nontrivial axes. Anyhow, when the alien gets unpacked, that’s a Gurdle decryption. We sent the Stairway To Heaven to Wendy, and she did a Gurdle decryption of a personality wave from the Sun. Quuz. Then all of a sudden Wendy-Quuz sent the Stairway To Heaven and the Quuz code to Blaster. We should have realized that could happen. What a fiasco.” Willy sighed heavily. “The spaceport dome is totally destroyed? You were inside Blaster when his Gurdle decryption happened, Terri. What was it like?”

“There was a horrible kind of screeching hissing noise from the information coming in, and then there was a big whoop—I guess that was the Stairway To Heaven?”

“Right. The Stairway To Heaven is a limpware program that uses the Tessellation Equation to force the quasicrystalline structure of a moldie’s imipolex up and up through a series of higher and higher dimensionalities. Once you start the Stairway To Heaven running on a moldie, it happens over and over until sooner or later an alien personality wave gets Gurdle decrypted. It’s like whooop whooop whooop whooop —and then eventually *Ffizzt* the moldie acquires a new personality. You only heard the one whoop because Wendy-Quuz sent the Quuz personality wave right along with the Stairway To Heaven program. So Blaster’s body decrypted Quuz on the Stairway’s very first run-through.”

“I see,” said Terri. “Sort of. And then Blaster-Quuz sent the same message down to the spaceport over and over to make sure all the moldies down there got it—and then the spaceport moldies fused together and split open the spaceport dome and a lot of people got killed.” She rubbed herself hard with the washrag, trying to erase the memory of the blood-foamed corpses.

“What was Quuz like?” asked Willy.

“He seemed—stupid? You’d think something from a star would be more advanced than us. I think Quuz was only the soul of a sunspot—not of the whole Sun. He thought about patterns of fire and light. He was greedy. ‘Sun wants eat Earth.’ That’s how he talked. Like a baby who wants to grab things and put them in his mouth. Not so much evil as—” Just then Terri noticed three pairs of eyes staring at her over the back of the sofa. “What’s that! What do you have in here with us, Willy?”

“Oh, I have three Silly Putters—sort of like pet moldies. They’re a little smarter than animals. Come on out, guys. Terri won’t hurt you. Line up so she can take a look at you. Front and center ! Now, Terri, I hope you’re not off ended by the way Elvira looks. I’m—I guess some people would say I’m—”

“Just hand me the towel, okay?”

Willy gave Terri the towel. She quickly dried herself and pulled on the T-shirt and the shorts, eyeing the Silly Putters all the while. From smallest to largest, they resembled a tiny voluptuous woman clad only in boots and gloves, a winged green dragon with a long scaly tail, and an apple-cheeked gnome with a full white beard cropped short and tidy.

“These are Elvira, Fafnir, and Doc,” said Willy. “They’re not able to talk, but they can obey lots of commands. Show Terri how you water the plants, Fafnir. Fafnir, water plants !”

Fafnir waddled forward and sucked a deep draught from the water of the pool—the constant refiltering had already removed the soap and dirt from Terri’s bath. Flapping his leathery wings in an awkward, comical blur, Fafnir rose up like a hummingbird and began spewing small dabs of water into each of the hanging plants.

“Do you have any injuries, Terri?” continued Willy. “Your knee looks kind of banged up. Doc’s got a complete set of healer tools, and he knows how to use them, right, Doc?” Willy pointed to Terri’s knee, which was indeed dark with a spreading bruise, and commanded, “ Doc, heal !” The gnome stepped forward, grinning and nodding, and before Terri could slap him away, he’d laid his hands on her knee and done something tingly that made the pain go away.

“I guess I don’t have to ask what Elvira is for,” said Terri. Hearing her name, Elvira started up a spirited little dance, flinging her arms from side to side in a showy, abandoned way that Terri found intensely annoying.

“Elvira cheers me up,” said Willy evasively. “She’s what they call a femlin. Are you hungry? Elvira or Doc can get you something.”

“What kind of food do you have? Do you have vegetables or fruit? I’ve had nothing but moldie juice for over a week. But I’d rather help myself. I certainly wouldn’t want to eat anything that’s been touched by Elvira.”

“If that’s the way you feel,” said Willy stiffly.

“It’s the way any woman would feel. You’ve been living alone too long, Willy. For God’s sake, tell that thing to stop dancing. I don’t have to put up with this.”

“Oh, whatever. Elvira, hide !” The femlin went back behind the couch. Willy sat down in the easy chair and gestured toward the food pantry. “So eat something. You’re hungry and cranky. I got fresh fruits and veggies delivered from the greenhouse today.”

Terri found herself a banana and a bunch of strawberries. She ate them with wheat germ and runny tofu. Delicious. While she ate, Willy stared off into space, listening down into his uvvy.

“Can I uvvy my husband now?” asked Terri after she’d finished. “He must be worried sick.”

“Um, yeah,” said Willy, coming back from wherever he’d been. “I’ve got an extra uvvy that you can use. I invented the uvvy, you know. I’m not just some crazy weirdo, Terri.”

“I know that, Willy. I guess maybe I was a little short-tempered just now.”

“Well, I’m glad to have you here,” said Willy and handed Terri a green uvvy.

Donning the uvvy felt like opening her eyes and discovering a roomful of surprise-party guests. The presences of Willy, Gurdle-7, Frangipane, Jenny, and Ormolu were close by, and beyond them lay a vast churning crowd of other moldie minds. It seemed like everyone in the nest was uvvy-connected to everyone else. Hundreds of voices were talking at once, but via some multiplex uvvy magic, Terri could follow the threads of the conversations.

The two main questions being discussed were (a) how to prevent Wendy-Quuz from triggering another catastrophe and (b) what to do with the new Gurdle decryption technology. Most of the moldies were for sending a smart bomb to annihilate Wendy-Quuz and for never using Gurdle decryption again, but Willy and Gurdle-7 were arguing that the technology was too important to ignore.