Rudy Rucker - The Ware Tetralogy

Joke’s message started coming in: “Your clothes are floatin’, Yoke. I have so many clothes ideas I want you to make. Like polka dots with the dots being cutouts. Look.” The signal showed Joke’s hands quickly sketching a girl with an outfit. Beyond Joke’s hands was a lunar workshop crowded with equipment for making Silly Putters: shelves and shelves of chemicals, a hulking injection molder, and a workbench with imipolex-machining tools such as a piezomorpher and a volume-filling airbrush. Joke was living with her somewhat gnarly artist boyfriend, Corey Rhizome, who was visible at the other end of the workshop. A few of Corey’s Silly Putters were hopping around; they were plastic pets a little like Willa Jean, but smarter and more autonomous. Yoke recognized two of the Silly Putters: the small green pig of a “rath” and the football-shaped, orange-beaked “Jubjub bird,” the two forever engaged in mutual battle. Joke set down her pen and continued talking. “I hope you bring that alla back here really soon! Oh, and your sculptures are terrific. I never knew you could be such the artist, Yoke. That wire thing with the sliding blocks is sooo weightless. I guess you could make a really big one? I mean, like as big as a carnival ride, with each of the sliding thingies hollowed out so that a person could ride inside? I’m wondering if there’s any limit to the power of the alla. I mean, could you hollow out a huge biosphere under the Moon’s surface and fill it up with dirt and rivers and lakes and an atmosphere and maybe even a little fusion sun? There’s no end to what people might ask you for. So you’re right that it’s really important to figure out how to copy the allas so that it’s not just you and Babs being golden geese when everyone finds out. I’m glad that the people and moldies from Tonga haven’t tracked you back to San Francisco. I guess the King is keeping quiet and the Cappy Janes really fell for the decoy. The tofu Sue Miller! We knew a girl just like that, remember Simmie Lipsit? I wonder if one of the Cappy Janes has chased down the tofu Sue by now. You know, I’m going to ask Emil and Berenice to check on the moldies’ chat lines right now. While I do that, tell me what’s up with Cobb’s great-grandson. Did you ever give him his alla?”

Yoke: “Oh, that was so wild. All afternoon Tuesday, Randy was moping and dragging around all hung over while Babs and I made wavy stuff . He was wishing he had an alla and wondering where the aliens went, and we were like, ‘Serves you right for getting so trashed.’ But then after we alla­-made a bunch of soup and bread and cheese for supper, Babs finally gave Randy his alla and it registered itself to him. That’s a trip in itself, it’s like the alla is memorizing your body and your mind—your wetware and your software—the whole package. I was for holding out on Randy, but Babs keeps wanting to be nice to him. Or get his attention or something. And then as soon as she had Randy’s attention, Babs did a head-trip on him by going out on a date with this new guy Theodore. I have a feeling she’s using Theodore to make Randy jealous. Anyway, Randy and I were alone together Tuesday evening. I showed him how the alla works, and the very first customized thing he did was to make a safe DIM control patch for his plastic chicken, Willa Jean. Willa Jean is sort of the same thing as a Silly Putter, except Randy has a control feed into her, and she’s not as smart. Randy was using an illegal superleech before, and he got Cobb to approve the new one as safe around real moldies; in fact Cobb helped him design it. Hey, there goes Willa Jean now.” Yoke trained her vision on Willa Jean wandering across the floor, ostensibly pecking for stray crumbs of imipolex. “I’m surprised that plastic chicken’s here, because Randy’s gone out on his new motorcycle. I wonder if he’s using her to eavesdrop on me. If so, you’re a geek, Randy.” Yoke swung her alla through the air to launch a buzzing, bouncing spark-machine that frightened Willa Jean off into the far corners of the warehouse. “But I still haven’t told you the best part. After Randy fixed Willa Jean, he was tired, so he made himself a good bed and lay down on that and started creating all sorts of little samples of every kind of material he could think of, each sample in the shape of a Lego block, and he was snapping them together and then—this is the rich part—Randy fell asleep while he was wearing his uvvy, and he ended up hooking into his alla and making something that he’d been dreaming, God you should have heard him scream. The screaming started at like three in the morning and Babs wasn’t back yet, so it was just me and Cobb to deal. Randy’s realware dream thing was a giant snail with his mother’s face. It was chasing him. A giant imipolex snail actually crawling around the warehouse at three in the morning, knocking things over, and I mean a snail this big.” Yoke stretched both arms up high, shaking with mirth. “I really shouldn’t be laughing because it’s very sad, his mother died at the end of November and Randy had totally been neglecting to stay in touch and he missed the funeral and apparently he has these recurrent guilt nightmares about a giant snail, it has to do with being too late. It was crawling after him all around the warehouse and wailing ‘What taahm is it?’ in this bewildered, Kentucky-accented voice. ‘You goin’ be late for school if you don’t hurry up, Randy Karl. When is Tuesday?’ Except it said ‘whiyun’ instead of ‘when.’ “ Yoke was struggling to keep her voice level, but now and then letting out shrieks of laughter. “It had a silver-frosted black shell, like a middle-aged lady’s hair. And there was some incest thing in there too. It wanted to sit on his face. I heard it say ‘Ah’m real hot to crawl on you, Randy Karl.’ Randy was just completely freaking out. And finally he was cornered and the snail really did crawl onto him, right across his body and up onto his face, I think it must have weighed four hundred pounds. It moved a lot faster than you’d expect. Randy would have suffocated if Cobb hadn’t been able to drag it outside; Cobb can be really strong. We burned the imipolex, but the shell’s still there. I’ll show it to you in a minute.”

Joke: “I can see where you’d think that’s funny, Yoke. Not everyone would. But that’s why we love you. It sounds like Randy could run amok, a gunjy dook like that. You’re going to push him too far. Not everybody appreciates your sense of humor. Though Corey’s loving it. I’m telling him some of the stuff while it’s coming in.” Joke’s view showed a greenish-skinned man with square vertical goatee and the sides of his head shaved, grinning and leaning forward as if hungering for information. “No, Corey, you can’t uvvy in. This is totally diffusion-encrypted. Emul customized some cryp code just for this call. Yes, Corey, you heard me right, a giant snail with his mother’s face wanted to crawl on him. Back off-ski! Okay, Yoke, while you were telling about Randy just now, Berenice did an anonymous search of the moldie chat-lines and found out a few things. The aliens’ sacrificial clone trick went over; the moldies really think they killed them all. But they’re suspicious about Squanto and Sue flying to the Moon. The dummy is halfway here and nobody wants to bother chasing it down, but they’re doubting it’s real. They’ve posted the Sue Miller information all over the place, along with one of the Cappy Jane images of you. But it isn’t you. Look.”

Joke flashed the Sue Miller ID sheet with the photo image of a short­haired hollow-cheeked girl with black hair. In addition, there was a holo­graphic still image of Yoke and Cobb floating in the Vava’u bay, with the giant cube of imipolex just behind them. But Yoke’s face was replaced by Sue Miller’s, and Cobb looked like a plastic American Indian. “The moldies didn’t notice you searching, did they, Berenice?” Joke asked. She paused, looking into her head, which was partly inhabited by the wetware-coded personalities of two old-time boppers called Berenice and Emul. Quickly receiving her answer, Joke continued talking. “No, you’re safe for now, Yoke, but you better believe the shit’s going to hit the fan one way or another. You didn’t say where Randy went on his motorcycle. And what about Babs?”