Rudy Rucker - The Ware Tetralogy

“Noon,” said Dad. “Look at the soil in the pot, it’s beginning to stir.” Sure enough, the soil at the center of the pot was bulging up, and there, slowly slowly, came the creeping tip of the week tree. “I think they’re like apple trees. We ought to have some little apples by tonight, Della.”

“Wiggly!” She gave Dad a kiss. Mom had some pans sizzling out in the kitchen, and the vizzy was full of happy Christmas people. “Thank you. It is nice to be back.”

“Can you tell me more about what happened up in Einstein, Della?”

“I had a boyfriend named Buddy Yeskin. We took merge together and—”

“What does that actually mean , ‘taking merge together’?” asked Dad. “I can’t keep up with all these new—”

“It’s this weird drug that makes your body get all soft. Like a boneless turkey, I guess. And you feel really—”

Dad frowned. “I can’t believe you’d do a thing like that, Della. We didn’t raise you that way.” He sighed and took a sip of the whiskey he’d brought out from the kitchen. “You took merge with this Buddy Yeskin, and then what happened?”

“While we were . . . together, someone broke into my apartment and killed Buddy. Smashed him all into pieces while he was soft .” The fast red circles began rippling across Della’s heartshirt again. “I kind of fainted, and when I woke up, a crazy man called on the vizzy and said he was going to kill me, or frame me for the murder, if I didn’t leave for Earth. He’d even arranged a ticket and a fake passport for me. It was such a nightmare web, closing in on me. I was scared. I ran home.”

The week tree was a barky little shoot now, with three stubby little branches.

“You’re safe here,” said Dad, patting her hand. Just then Della noticed that his voice was already slurring a little. Dad noticed her noticing. He gave a rueful smile. “For as long as you can stand us. Tomorrow I’ll take you to see Don Stuart . . . you remember him. He’s a good lawyer. Just in case.” Bowser started barking.

“Merry Christmas!” shouted Mom in the kitchen. “You didn’t have to bring all that! Jason! Della!”

It was Jason’s older brother Colin, with his wife Ilse and son Willy. Colin worked as an English professor at the University of Louisville. He was skinny and sarcastic. Ilse was from a famous family: Ilse’s father was Cobb Anderson, who’d built the first moon-robots years ago.

Great-uncle Cobb had been convicted of treason for building the robots wrong. Then he’d started drinking, had left his wife Verena, and had ended up as a pheezer bum in Florida. Somehow he’d died—it was a little uncertain—apparently the robots had killed him. He was the skeleton in the family closet.

Aunt Ilse was more like her German mother than she was like old Cobb. Vigorous and artsy-craftsy, she’d hung on to her wandering husband Colin through thick and thin, not that Della could see why. Uncle Colin had always struck her as obsolete, trying to make people look at his stupid paper books, when he barely even knew how to work the vizzy. And when he smoked marijuana with Dad, he got mad if you didn’t laugh at his jokes and act impressed by his insights.

Their son Willy was a smart but sort of nutty guy in his twenties. A hacker, always fiddling with programs and hardware. Della had liked him a lot when they were younger, but it seemed like he’d stopped maturing long before she had. He still lived at home.

“Dad, don’t tell them about why I’ve come back. Say I’m here to buy laboratory equipment for Dr. Yukawa. And tell Mom to keep quiet, too. If she gets drunk and starts talking about me, I’m going to—”

“Relax, geeklet.”

Before long they were seated around the dining table. Dad had put the week tree in the center so they could watch it grow. Aunt Ilse offered a Lutheran grace, and Dad got to work carving the boneless turkey. He cut it in thick, stuffing-centered slices.

“Well, Della,” said Colin after the first rush of eating was over, “how are things up on the Moon? Real far out? And what are old Cobb’s funky machines into?” He specialized in the literature of the mid-twentieth century, and he liked to use the corny old slang on her. In return, Della always used the newest words she knew.

“Realtime, it’s pretty squeaky, Unk. There’s giga bopper scurry underground, and they’re daily trying to blank us. They have a mongo sublune city called the Nest.”

“Come on, Della,” said Dad. “Talk English.”

“Don’t you feel guilty about the boppers?” asked Aunt Ilse, who was always ready to defend the creatures that her father had midwifed. “I mean, they built most of Einstein. Disky, they used to call it, no? And they’re just as conscious as us. Isn’t it really like the blacks in the old South? The blacks did all the work, but the whites acted like they weren’t even people.”

“Those robots aren’t conscious,” insisted Mom. She’d had a lot of red wine in the kitchen, and now they were all back on the champagne. “They’re just a bunch of goddamn machines .”

“You’re a machine, too, Aunt Amy,” put in Willy. “You’re just made of meat instead of wires and silicon.” Willy had a slow, savoring way of speaking that could drive you crazy. Although he’d never finished college, he made a good living as a freelance software writer. Earth still used a lot of computers, but all the bigger ones were equipped with deeply coded behavior locks intended to keep them from trying to follow in the steps of the boppers, the rebel robots who’d colonized the Moon. Earth’s slave computers were known as asimovs in honor of the Asimov laws of robotics which they obeyed.

“Don’t call your aunt ‘meat,’” reprimanded Uncle Colin, who liked to flirt with Mom. “The turkey is meat. Your aunt is a person. You wouldn’t want me to put gravy on your aunt and eat her, would you? In front of everyone?” Colin chuckled and bugged his eyes at Mom. “Should I smack him, Amy?”

“At least he’s thinking about what I’m made of. At my age, that’s practically a compliment. Would you call me a machine , Jason honey?”

“No way.” Dad poured out some more champagne. “Machines are predictable.”

“I think Mom’s predictable,” Della couldn’t resist saying snippishly. Her stomach felt really bad again. “Both of you are predictable.”

“You’re all mistaken,” put in Willy. “Relative to us, people and boppers are both unpredictable. It’s a consequence of Chaitin’s version of Gödel’s theorem. Grandpa Cobb explained it years ago in a paper called ‘Towards Robot Consciousness.’ We can only make predictions about the behavior of systems which are much simpler than ourselves.”

“So there, Della,” said Mom.

“But why can’t we learn to coexist peacefully with the boppers, Della?” pressed Aunt Ilse.

“Well, things are fairly peaceful now,” said Della. “The boppers harass us because they wish we’d give Einstein back to them, but they don’t actually pop the dome and kill everyone. They could do it, but they know that Earth would turn around and fire a Q-bomb down into their Nest. For that matter, we could Q-bomb them right now, but we’re in no rush to, because we need the things their factories and pink-tanks make.” Everyone except Mom was looking at Della with interest, and she felt knowledgeable and poised. But just then her stomach twitched oddly. Her breasts and stomach felt like they were growing all the time.

“Well, I don’t feel guilty about the boppers,” put in Mom. The alcohol was really hitting her, and she hadn’t followed the conversation at all. “I think we ought to kill all the machines . . . and kill the niggers too. Starting with President Jones.”