Rudy Rucker - The Ware Tetralogy

Sta-Hi broke off, sobbing. A minute went by till he found his voice again. “I saw them take you apart, Cobb. They took out your heart and your balls and everything else. It’s like . . . “

The face across from him looked sympathetic, interested. The perfect cult minister.

“Fuck!” Sta-Hi spat, suddenly lashing out and hitting the robot’s face with the back of his hand. “I might as well be talking to a tape-recorder.”

The blow hurt his hand, and made him angrier. He got to his feet, standing over the Cobb-faced robot.

“I ought to fucking take you apart!”

The robot began to talk then, slowly, and in Cobb’s old voice. “Listen to me, Sta-Hi. Sit down and listen. You know perfectly well that you can’t hurt me by hammering on this robot-remote. I’m sorry your father died. But death isn’t real. You have to understand that. Death is meaningless. I wasted the last ten years being scared of death, and now . . . “

“Now that you think you’re immortal you don’t worry about death,” Sta-Hi said bitterly. “That’s really enlightened of you. But whether you know it or not, Cobb Anderson is dead . I saw him die, and if you think you’re him, you’re just fooling yourself.” He sat down, suddenly very tired.

“If I’m not Cobb Anderson, then who would I be?” The flickercladding face smiled at him gently. “I know I’m Cobb. I have the same memories, the same habits, the same feelings that I always did.”

“But what about your . . . your soul ,” Sta-Hi said, not liking to use the word. “Each person has a soul, a consciousness, whatever you call it. There’s some special thing that makes a person be alive, and there’s no way that can go into a computer program. No way.”

“ It doesn’t have to go into the program, Sta-Hi. It is everywhere. It is just existence itself. All consciousness is One. The One is God. God is pure existence unmodified.”

Cobb’s voice was intense, evangelical. “A person is just hardware plus software plus existence. Me existing in flesh is the same as me existing on chips. But that’s not all. Potential existence is as good as actual existence. That’s why death is impossible. Your software exists permanently and indestructibly as a certain possibility , a certain mathematical set of relations. Your father is now an abstract, non-physical possibility. But nevertheless he exists! He . . .”

“What is this,” Sta-Hi interrupted. “A cram-course in Personetics? Is this the crap that you feed those girls to keep them whoring for you? Forget it!”

Sta-Hi stopped talking, suddenly realizing something. That black truck outside . . . that must be the Mr. Frostee truck with a paint-job. And inside the truck would be a super-cooled big bopper brain with Cobb coded up inside it. He couldn’t hurt this robot-remote, but if he got out to the truck . . . It was just a question of whether he really wanted to. Did he hate the boppers or not?

“I sense your hostility,” Cobb said. “I respect that. But I’d like you to come in with me anyhow. I need an outside man, a Personetics promoter. I could be Jesus and you be John the Baptist. Or you be Jesus and I’ll be God.”

While he was talking, the robot’s face changed again, to a copy of Sta-Hi’s. “I always use this trick on the recruits,” he chuckled. “Like Charlie Manson. I am a mirror . But that was before your time. Here, have a joint.”

The robot lit a reefer and handed it over. The Cobb face came back. “I’m a little psychic now, too,” he said. “I’ve gotten pretty loose. And what I said is really true. Nothing is ever really destroyed. There is no . . .”

“Oh, tape it,” Sta-Hi said taking the reefer and leaning back in his easy chair. “I might come in with you. Especially if you can get me another Happy Cloak.”

“What’s that?” Cobb asked.

“Well, I never told you yet . . . about what I did on the Moon.”

“You ran away in the museum. The next time I saw you, it was that night when you and your father . . . “

“Yeah, yeah,” Sta-Hi said, cutting him off. “Don’t remind me about that. Let me tell my story. I found this sort of cape called a Happy Cloak. It was made of flickercladding and when I put it on I could talk bopper, except with a pidgen accent. I went to where a bunch of boppers were storming a big factory called GAX. We got in, but GAX almost won anyway. Then at the last minute I blew him up.”

The robot started in shock. “You blew up a big bopper?”

“Yeah. Some diggers and a repair spider had set the charge. All I had to do was push the button. The remotes would have gotten me then, but at the last minute a digger tunneled up through the floor and saved me. He took me to watch the nursie take you apart. Ralph and the nursie taped you, and then the nursie grabbed Ralph Numbers and taped him, too. The diggers said . . . “

Cobb’s face was working, as if he were arguing with a voice in his head. Now he interrupted. “Mr. Frostee wants to kill you, Sta-Hi. He says that if it weren’t for you blowing up GAX, the big boppers would have won.”

Cobb was twitching all over, as if he could hardly control himself. His voice grew thin and odd. “I’m not a puppet. Sta-Hi is my friend. I have free will.”

The words seemed to cost him a great effort. His eyes kept straying to a hunting-knife lying on his desk.

“No!” Cobb said, shaking his head jerkily. It wasn’t clear who he was talking to. “I’m not your hand. I’m your conscience! I’m a . . .”

Suddenly his voice stopped. The features of his face clenched in a final spasm and then slid back into the serene curves of Mel Nast. The thick lips parted to complete Cobb’s sentence.

“ . . . hallucination. But this robot-remote is, in the last analysis, mine. I have temporarily had to evict Dr. Anderson.” The hand snaked over to pick up the knife.

Sta-Hi jumped to his feet and vaulted out of the tank in one motion. He hit the floor running, with the robot close behind.

The door out to the hall was open, and Sta-Hi managed to slam it behind him, gaining a few seconds. He got the second door closed too, closed tight, and he had his cab started by the time the robot came charging out.

Sta-Hi ignored it, and aimed his cab at the black panel truck parked across the lot. He revved the engine up to a chattering scream and peeled out.

The robot jumped onto his hood and punched his fist through the windshield. Sta-Hi squinted against the flying glass and kept the car aimed at the truck. He had it up to fifty kph by the time it hit.

The air-bag in the steering column burst out, punching Sta-Hi in the face and chest, keeping him in his seat. An instant later the bag was limp and the car was stopped. Sta-Hi’s lip had split. There was blood in his mouth. The car lights were out, and it was hard to see what had happened.

Footsteps came running across the parking lot.

“What happened? Sta-Hi? Mel?” It was Wendy. Sta-Hi got out of his cab. The girl ran past him, to reach out to the figure crushed between the cab and the dented side of the black van.

“Back up, Sta-Hi! Quick!”

But now the black van was moving instead. Its engine, already on, roared louder, and it backed out, grinding the pinned robot-remote against the cab’s hood. It looked like steam was leaking from a hole in the truck’s side.

The driverless van flicked its lights on, and Sta-Hi could make out the face of the broken robot slumped across his cab’s hood. The blank eyes may have seen him or not, but then the lips moved. It was saying . . .

“Look out!” Sta-Hi screamed, snatching Wendy back and flinging their bodies to shelter on the ground behind the cab.