Rudy Rucker - The Ware Tetralogy

There was a pained silence. The little week tree rustled; its first blossoms were opening. Della decided to let Mom have it. “My boyfriend was a ‘nigger,’ Mom.”

“What boyfriend? I hope you didn’t let him—”

“Yes, Della,” said Dad, raising his voice heavily. “It’s great to have you back. More food anyone? Or should we pause for some holiday marijuana? How about it, Colin?”

“Shore,” said Colin, switching to his hick accent. He gave Della a reassuring wink. “Mah smart little niece. She’s got more degrees than a thermometer! Weren’t you doing something with genetics up there in Einstein?”

“I hope not,” put in Mom, trying to recover. “This child still has to find a husband.”

“Chill it, Mom,” snapped Della.

“That’s . . . uh . . . right, Colin,” said Dad, still trying to smooth things over. “Della was working with this Dr. Yukawa fellow. She’s down here to buy some equipment for him.” He drew a reefer out of his pocket and fired it up.

“How long will you be staying here?” asked Aunt Ilse.

“I’m not sure. It might be quite a while till everything’s set.”

“Oh,” said Ilse, passing the reefer to her husband without taking a hit. She could be really nosy when she got going. “How lovely. Is Dr. Yukawa planning to—”

Della kicked Willy under the table. He got the message, and interrupted to throw the interrogation off track. “What kind of stuffing is this, Aunt Amy? It’s really delicious.”

“ Meat -stuffing, honey. I was fresh out of wires and silicon. Pass me that thing, Colin.”

“I have an interesting new job, Della,” said Willy, talking rapidly around his food. He had smooth, olive skin like his mother, and finely arched eyebrows that moved up and down as he chewed and talked. “It’s for the Belle of Louisville —you know, the big riverboat that tourists ride on? OK, what they’ve got there is three robot bartenders—with imipolex skins, you know, all designed to look like old-time black servants.”

“Why can’t they just hire some real blacks?” demanded Mom, exhaling a cloud of smoke. “God knows there’s enough of them unemployed. Except for President Jones. Not that I want to offend Della.” She reached out and touched the blossoms of the week tree, moving the pollen around. Della, who had decided not to eat any more of her mother’s meal, slipped Bowser the rest of her boneless turkey.

“This all has to do with what we were talking about before, Aunt Amy,” continued Willy. “They did have real blacks tending bar on the Belle , but they kept acting too much like regular people—maybe sneaking a drink now and then, or flirting with the women, or getting in arguments with drunk rednecks. And if there did happen to be a bartender who did his job perfectly, then some people would feel bad to see such a talented person with such a bleaky job. Guilty liberals, you wave? They tried white bartenders, too, but it was the same deal—either they start fights with the rednecks, or they make the liberals feel sad. I mean, who’s going to take a bartending job, anyway? But as long as it’s robots, then there’s none of this messy human stuff .”

“That’s interesting, Willy,” said Uncle Colin. “I didn’t know the Belle was your new gig. Nobody tells me anything. I was on the Belle just last week with a dude who came to give a rap about Mark Twain, and those black bartenders didn’t seem like robots at all. As a matter of fact, they kept making mistakes and dropping things. They were laughing all the time. I didn’t feel a bit sorry for them!”

“That’s my new program!” exulted Willy. “There’s a big supercooled processor down below the deck, and it runs the three bartender robots. My job was to get it fine-tuned so that the bartenders would be polite , but clearly unfit for any better job.”

“Hell, you could have just hired some of our tellers,” put in Dad. “I don’t know why people still mess with robots after 2001.” 2001 was the year that the boppers—Cobb Anderson’s self-replicating moon-robots—had revolted. They’d started their own city up on the Moon, and it hadn’t been till 2022 that the humans had won it back.

“How come they have such a big computer on the Belle anyway?” Colin wanted to know. “I thought big computers weren’t allowed outside of the factories anymore. Is it a teraflop?”

Willy raised his high, round eyebrows. “Almost. A hundred gigaflop. This is a special deal the city put together. They got the processor from ISDN, the vizzy people. It’s been up and running for six months, but they needed me to get it working really right.”

“Isn’t that against the Artificial Intelligence Law?” asked Dad.

“No it isn’t,” Willy insisted calmly. “Burt Masters, who operates the Belle , is friends with the mayor, and he got a special exemption to the AI law. And of course Belle—that’s what the computer calls itself—is an asimov. You know: Protect Humans—Obey Humans — Protect Yourself are coded into Belle’s circuits in 1-2-3 order.” He gave Della a smile. “Those are the commands that Ralph Numbers taught the boppers to erase. Have you actually seen any boppers, Della? I wonder what the newest ones look like. Grandpa Cobb fixed it so they’d never stop evolving.”

“I’ve seen some boppers over at the trade center. These days a lot of them have a kind of mirror-backing under their skins. But I didn’t pay much attention to them. Living in Einstein you do sort of get to hate them. They have bombs hidden all over, and now and then they set one off just to remind us. And they have hidden cameras everywhere, and there’s rumors that the robots can put a thing like a plastic rat inside a person’s head and control them. Actually—” Suddenly it hit her. “Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if—” She cut herself off and took a long drink of champagne.

“I still don’t see why we can’t drop a Q-bomb down into their Nest,” said Mom. The marijuana had brought her somewhat back into focus.

“We could ,” said Della, trying to get through to her mother. “But they know that, and if the Nest goes, Einstein goes, too. It’s a stalemate, like we used to have with the Russians. Mutual Assured Destruction. That’s one reason the boppers don’t try and take Einstein back over. We’re like hostages. And remember that Earth likes buying all the stuff they make. This heartshirt is boppermade, Mom.”

“Well, as long as people like Willy will contain themselves, we’re still safe from the boppers here on Earth,” said Mom. “They can’t live in normal temperatures, isn’t that right, Willy?”

“Yeah.” Willy helped himself to some glazed carrots. “As long as they use J-junctions. Though if I were designing a robot brain now I’d try and base it on an optical processor. Optical processors use light instead of electricity—the light goes along fibers, and the logic gates are like those sunglass lenses that get dark in bright light. One photon can pass, but two can’t. And you have little chip-sized lasers to act like capacitors. Optical fibers have no real resistance at all, so the thing doesn’t have to be supercooled. We still can’t build a really good one. But I bet the boppers are already doing it. Can I please have some more turkey, Uncle Jason?”

“Uh . . . sure, Willy.” Jason stood up to carve some more, and smiled down at his bright, nerdy nephew. “Willy, do you remember when you and Della were little and you had the big fight over the wishbone? Della wanted to glaze it and save it and—”

“Willy wanted to pull it by himself to make sure he got the big Christmas wish,” interrupted Uncle Colin, laughing hard.