Rudy Rucker - The Ware Tetralogy

Again , was all he could think. Again? He lay there, monitoring inputs. He was lying on a stone table in a room like a big mausoleum. Racks of shelving stretched up on three sides; shelves lined with crystalline cubes. Light glared into the room from a mirror high above. He tried to take a breath. Nothing doing. He raised his hand—it was unnaturally smooth and pink—and ran it over his face. No holes; his face was a sealed plastic mask. He was in another robot body. Moving with an amazing rapidity, his mind flipped through the memories of his last experiences in a robot body run by Mr. Frostee. As he let his hand fall back to his side, he sensed the oddness of the weight/mass ratio. He wasn’t on Earth.

“Greetings, Cobb Anderson, we welcome you into our Nest, deeply hidden beneath the surface of Earth’s aged Moon. The year is 2030. Does this rebirth find you well?” It wasn’t a spoken voice, it was a radio voice in his processor. The voice came from a gleaming gold woman with copper and silver features. She was beautiful, in an inhuman way, and her voice was rich and thrilling. Standing next to her was a shining ebony octopus creature, holding a box with wires that ran into Cobb’s neck.

“I’m Loki,” said the octopus, his voice calm and serious. “And that’s Berenice. I’m proud to have helped get you running again, Dr.

Anderson. We should have done it years ago, but it’s been hectic. A lot’s happened.”

Loki and Berenice, two bright new boppers all set for a big info swap session. Cobb rebelled against being drawn into conversation, and into this reality. He had all his old memories back, yes, but there was more. His new body here was like a Ouija board or a spirit table, and now, while the connection was fresh, he could make it rap and skitter out the truth of where he’d just been. He made as if to say something, and his voice came out as a radio signal too. “Wait . . . I have to tell it. I’ve been in heaven.”

Staticky robot laughter, and then Berenice’s intricately modulated signal. “I long to hear your account of the heaven that you have seen, Dr. Anderson.”

“It’s . . . ” Right then, Cobb could still see it clearly, the endless meshing of fractal simplicities, high and bright like clouds seen from an airplane, with the SUN above all—but it was all being garbled by the palimpsest overlay of his new body’s life. Talking quickly, Cobb made a stab at getting it down in words. “ I’m still there . That’s a higher I of course; the cosmos is layered forever up and down, with I’s on every level—the I’s are lenslike little flaws in the windows of the world—I’m in these chips and I’m in heaven. The heavenly I is all the I’s at once, the infinite I. We’re hung up on each other, I and I, finite I and infinite I—have you robots learned about infinite I yet? There’s more to a meatperson or a chipperson than ten trillion zeroes and ones: matter is infinitely divisible. The idealized pattern in the S-cube is a discrete model , it’s a digital construct . But once it’s running on a real body, the pixels have fuzz and error and here come I and I. You caught my soul. It works because this real body is real matter , sweet matter, and God is everywhere, Berenice and Loki, God is in the details. We’re not just form, is the point, we’re content , too, we’re actual, endlessly complex matter , all of us, chips and meat. I’m still in heaven, and I always will be, whether or not I’m down here or there, chugging along, facing the same old tests, hopelessly hung up inside your grade-B SF action adventure.” Cobb pulled Loki’s programming wires out of his neck abruptly. “ I love dead . . . that’s Frankenstein’s monster.”

“We need you, Cobb,” said Loki. “And pulling those wires out doesn’t change anything; it’s quite evident that you’re already operational. It’s good stuff, isn’t it, Berenice? I don’t believe anyone’s tried running a human software on a petaflop before this.”

“What Dr. Anderson says is stimulating in the extreme,” agreed Berenice. “The parallelism between bodies of meat and bodies of bopper manufacture is precisely the area in which I do presently press my investigations, Cobb. I have often wondered if the differing entropy levels of organic versus inorganic processes might not, after all, induce some different qualities in those aspects of being which are perhaps most wisely called the spiritual . I am heartened by your suggestion that flesher and bopper bodies are in every way of a rude and democratic equivalence and that we boppers do indeed have claim on an eternal resting place in the precincts of that misty heaven whence emanates the One. I believe this to be true. Despite this truth, the humans, in their benighted xenophobia—”

“—hate you as much as ever. And with good reason, I’m sure. The last thing Mr. Frostee and I were doing on Earth ten years ago was killing people, beaming their brainware up to Disky, and sending their bodies by freight. I didn’t think too much of it, but at that point I was under Frostee’s control.” Cobb sat up on the edge of the stone table and looked down at his bright body. “This is fully autonomous? I’ve got my own processor?”

“Yes,” said Loki. He was like a big black tarantula, bristling with more specialized tools than an electronic Swiss knife. An artisan. “I helped Berenice build it for herself, and she might appreciate getting it back if you find another, but—

“The body is yours, Dr. Anderson,” said Berenice. “Too long has the great force of your personality languished unused.”

Cobb glanced up at the high shelves filled with S-cubes. “Lot of languishing going on up there, hey, Berenice?” There were warped infinities of reflections going back and forth between pink Cobb, golden Berenice, and glistering Loki.

The taut gold buckler of Berenice’s belly caught Cobb’s eye. It bulged out gently as a heap of wheat. Yet the mockery was sterile: Berenice had left off the navel, the end of the flesh cord that leads back and back through blood, through wombs, through time— Put me through to Edenville . Cobb thought to wonder if his ex-wife Verena were still alive. Or his girlfriend, Annie Cushing. But they’d be old women by now, nothing like this artificial Eve.

Still staring into the curved mirror of Berenice’s belly, Cobb could see what he looked like. A cartoon, a mannequin, a gigolo. He took control of his flickercladding and molded his features till they looked like the face he remembered having when he’d been fifty—the face that had been in all the newspapers when he’d been tried for treason back in 2001. High cheekbones, a firm chin, colorless eyes, blond eyelashes, sandy hair, good-sized nose, and a straight mouth. A strong face, somewhat American Indian, well-weathered. He gave his body freckles and hair, and sculpted the glans onto the tip of his penis. Added vein lines here and muscle bumps there. Body done, he sat there, feeling both calm and reckless. He was smarter than he’d ever been; and he was no longer scared of death. The all-pervasive fear that clouded all his past memories was gone.

“So what was it you boppers wanted me for?”

Bernice shot him a soundless glyph, a full-formed thought-image: a picture of Earth, her clouds swirling, followed by a zoom into the Gulf of Mexico, followed by a closeup of the teeming life on a coral reef, a microscopic view of a vigorous brine shrimp, and a shot of one of the protozoa in the shrimp’s gut. The emotional tenor of the glyph was one of curiosity, yearning, and a sharp excitement. The boppers want to enter Earthlife’s information mix .

Deliberately misinterpreting, Cobb reached out and grabbed the lovely Berenice. She was firm and wriggly. “Do you know where babies come from, Berenice?” He stiffened his penis, and tried pushing her down on her back on the table, just to check if . . .