Rudy Rucker - The Ware Tetralogy

“From what I hear,” Sta-Hi said as neutrally as possible, “the Little Kidders go around eating brains, not taping them.”

“You’ve heard of them?” Misty seemed surprised. “Well, it looks like they’re eating the brain. But one of them is a robot with a little laboratory inside his chest. He has all the equipment to get the memories out. The patterns. They get a lot of people’s brains that way. The big boppers are making a sort of library out of them. But most people don’t get their own robot-remote body like me. I’m just really . . . lucky.” She smiled again.

“I’m surprised you’re telling me all this,” Sta-Hi said finally. BEX . . . Misty . . . must really not know who he was. Whoever had fixed up their fake ID’s must not have had time to tell the others.

But maybe . . . and this would be much worse . . . maybe they did know perfectly well who he was. But he was already doomed, a walking dead man, just waiting for them to extract his brain-tape and send it down to Earth to run that Sta-Hi 2they had all set. You can tell anything to a man about to die.

“But BEX didn’t want me to,” Misty was saying. “ You can’t hear him of course, but he’s been telling me to shut up the whole time. But he can’t make me. I still have my free will . . . it’s part of the brain-tape. I can do what I like.” She smiled into Sta-Hi’s eyes. There was a moment’s silence and then she started talking again.

“You wanted to know who I am. I gave you one answer. A robot-remote. A servo-unit operated by a program stored in a bopper spaceship. But . . . I’m still Misty-girl, too. The soul is the software, you know. The software is what counts, the habits and the memories. The brain and the body are just meat, seeds for the organ-tanks.” She smiled uncertainly, took a pull at his beer, set it down. “Do you want to fuck?”

The sex was nice, but confusing. The whole situation kept going di-polar on Sta-Hi. One instant Misty would seem like a lovely warm girl who’d survived a terrible injury, like a lost puppy to be stroked, a lonely woman to be husbanded. But then he’d start thinking of the wires behind her eyes, and he’d be screwing a machine, an inanimate object, a public toilet. His relations with women were a mess.

Cobb Anderson was not too surprised to see a girl in Sta-Hi’s bed when he woke up.

“Aren’t you the stewardess?” he asked, slowly raising himself into sitting position. He’d slept in his clothes three nights running now. First on Mooney’s floor, then on the bopper space-ship, and now here in the hotel. The grease on his skin had built up so thick that it was hard to blink his eyes. “Do they have a shower here?”

“I’m sorry,” the hotel’s disembodied voice answered. “We do not. Water is a precious resource on the Moon. But you may enjoy a chemical sponge-bath, Mr. Anderson. Step right this way.”

A light blinked over one of the three doors. Stiffly, ponderously, Cobb shuffled through it.

“I’ll have to charge you for triple occupancy, Mr. DeMentis,” the hotel told Sta-Hi in a polite, neutral voice.

But at the same time he could overhear another of its point-voices sniggeringly asking Misty, “Dja come?”

“Breakfast,” Sta-Hi said, drowning the other voice out. “Central nervous stimulants. Cold beer.”

“Very good, sir.”

The old man appeared again, moving like an upended steamer trunk on wheels. He was naked. Seeing Misty he paused, embarrassed.

“I’m having my clothes cleaned.”

“Don’t worry,” Sta-Hi put in. “She’s just a robot-remote.”

Cobb ignored that, peeled a sheet off the bed and wrapped it around his waist. He was a hairy man, and most of the hair was white. His stomach looked bigger with the clothes off .

Just then breakfast slid out of the wall and onto the table between the beds. “To your health,” Cobb said, taking one of the beers. It had a kick to it, and left him momentarily dizzy. He took a plate of the scrambled . . . eggs? . . . and sat down on his bed.

“He doesn’t know what a robot-remote is,” Sta-Hi said to Misty.

Mouth full, Cobb glared at him until he had swallowed. “Of course I do, Sta-Hi. Can’t you get it through your drug-addled noggin that I was at one time a famous man? That I, Cobb Anderson, am responsible for the robots having evolved into boppers?”

Something on the girl’s face changed. And then Cobb remembered their cover story.

“The ears have walls,” Sta-Hi remarked. “You shit-head.”

Cobb glared again, and continued eating in silence. So what if some of the boppers found out who he was, anyway? They couldn’t all be against him getting immortality. Maybe the hotel didn’t even care. He had slept well in the low lunar gravity. He felt ready for anything.

Having learned that Cobb Anderson was here in the room with her, Misty . . . that is to say the bopper brain in the nose of the spaceship . . . took certain steps. But meanwhile started an argument with Sta-Hi.

“Why did you say just a robot-remote? As if I were less than human. Would you say that about a woman with an artificial leg? Or a glass eye? I just happen to be all artificial.”

“Stuzzy, Misty. I can wave with it.” said Sta-Hi. “But as long as BEX has the final word, and I think he does, you’re really just a puppet being run by . . . “

“ What do you call yourself?” Misty interrupted angrily. “ Sta-Hi ? What a stupid name! It sounds like a brand-name for panty-hose!”

“Personal insults,” Sta-Hi said, shaking his head. “What next?”

“It is now 0830 hours,” the hotel interrupted. “May I remind you of your stated intent to get the 0900 bus to the robotics museum?”

“Will we need pressure suits?” Cobb asked.

“They will be provided.”

“Let’s go then,” Misty said.

Sta-Hi exchanged a glance with Cobb. “Look Misty . . . this is likely to be a sort of sentimental journey for the old man. I wonder if you could just . . . fade. Maybe we’ll be back here by lunchtime.”

“ Fade ?” Misty cried, angrily flouncing across the room. “Too bad there’s not a toggle switch on the top of my head! Then you wouldn’t even have to ask me to leave. You creep!” She slammed the door very hard.

“Ouch,” the hotel said softly.

“Why did you get rid of her?” Cobb asked. “She’s cute. And I don’t think she’d try to stand in my way.”

“You bet she wouldn’t,” Sta-Hi answered. “Do you realize what the boppers are really planning to do to us?”

“They’re going to give me some kind of immortality drug,” Cobb said happily. “And maybe some new organs as well. And as for you, well . . .”

Cobb didn’t like to tell the younger man that he was only here because the boppers had wanted him out of the way. But before he could tell him about Sta-Hi 2using Mooney’s influence to get a night watchman job at the warehouse, Sta-Hi had started talking.

“Immortality. What they want to do, old man, is to cut out our brains and grind them up and squeeze all the information out. They’ll store our personalities on tapes in some kind of library. And if we’re lucky, they might send copies of the tapes down to Earth to help run those two robot-­remotes. But that’s not . . .”

“BUS TOUR PARTICIPANTS MUST PROCEED TO THE LOBBY IMMEDIATELY!” the hotel-room blared, interrupting Sta-Hi.

Cobb was galvanized into activity by this. He hurried out to the elevators, dragging Sta-Hi with him. It was like he didn’t want to hear the truth. Or didn’t care. And Sta-Hi? He came along. Now that the hotel knew that he knew, he wouldn’t be safe in it. He’d have to try to make his break in the museum.