Rudy Rucker: The Ware Tetralogy

Wagstaff’s flickercladding flared silvery-white with emotion. “You sshould sshow thhe olld mann mmorre respecct! TEX and MEX just want to eat his brainn! And if we donn’t stopp themm, the bigg bopperrs will eatt up all the rresst of uss too!”

“Is that all you called me out here for?” Ralph asked. “To air your fears of the big boppers?” It was time to be going. He had come all the way to Maskelyne Crater for nothing. It had been a stupid idea, plugging into the One at the same time as Wagstaff. Just like a digger to think that would change anything.

Wagstaff slithered across the dry lunar soil, bringing himself closer to Ralph. He clamped one of his grapplers onto Ralph’s tread.

“Yyou donn’t rrealizze how manny brrainns they’ve takenn allrreaddy.” The signals were carried by a weak direct current . . . a bopper’s way of whispering. “Thhey arre kkillinng peoplle jusst to gett theirr brainn­ patterrns. They cutt themm upp, annd thhey arre garrbage orr sseeds perrhapps. Do yyou knnow howw thhey sseed our orrgann farrms?”

Ralph had never really thought about the organ farms, the huge underground tanks where big TEX, and the little boppers who worked for him, grew their profitable crops of kidneys, livers, hearts and so on. Obviously some human tissues would be needed as seeds or as templates, but . . .

The sibilant, oily whisper continued. “The bigg bopperrs use hiredd killerrs. The kkillerss act at the orrderrs of Missterr Frostee’s rrobott-­remmote. Thiss is whatt poorr Doctorr Anndersson willl comme to if I do nnot stopp yyou, Rallph.”

Ralph Numbers considered himself far superior to this lowly, suspicious digging machine. Abruptly, almost brutally, he broke free from the other’s grasp. Hired killers indeed. One of the flaws in the anarchic bopper society was the ease with which such crazed rumors could spread. He backed away from the console of the One.

“I hadd hoped the Onne coulld mmake you rrememberr what you sstannd forr,” Wagstaff tight-beamed.

Ralph snapped open his parasol and trundled out from under the parabolic arch of spring steel which sheltered the One’s console from sun and from chance meteorites. Open at both ends, the shelter resembled a modernistic church. Which, in some sense, it was.

“I am still an anarchist,” Ralph said stiffly. “I still remember.” He’d kept his basic program intact ever since leading the 2001 revolt. Did Wagstaff really think that the big X-series boppers could pose a threat to the perfect anarchy of the bopper society?

Wagstaff slithered out after Ralph. He didn’t need a parasol. His flickercladding could shed the solar energy as fast as it came down. He caught up with Ralph, eyeing the old robot with a mixture of pity and respect. Their paths diverged here. Wagstaff would head for one of the digger tunnels which honeycombed the area, while Ralph would climb back up the crater’s sloping two-hundred-meter wall.

“I’mm warrninng yyou,” Wagstaff said, making a last effort. “I’mm goinng to do everrythinng I can to sstopp you fromm turrnning that poorr olld mman innto a piece of ssofttware in the bigg bopperrs’ memorry bannks. Thatt’s nnot immortality. We’re plannninng to ttearr thosse bigg machinnes aparrt.” He broke off, fuzzy bands of light rippling down his body. “Now you knnoww. If you’re nnot with uss you’rre againnst us. I willl nnot stopp at viollence.”

This was worse than Ralph had expected. He stopped moving and fell silent in calculation.

“You have your own will,” Ralph said finally. “And it is right that we struggle against each other. Struggle, and struggle alone has driven the boppers forward. You choose to fight the big boppers. I do not. Perhaps I will even let them tape me and absorb me, like Doctor Anderson. And I tell you this: Anderson is coming. Mr. Frostee’s new remote has already contacted him.”

Wagstaff lurched towards Ralph, but then stopped. He couldn’t bring himself to attack so great a bopper at close range. He suppressed his flickering, bleeped a cursory SAVED signal and wriggled off across the gray moon-dust. He left a broad, sinuous trail. Ralph Numbers stood motionless for a minute, just monitoring his inputs.

Turning up the gain, he could pick up signals from boppers all over the Moon. Underfoot, the diggers searched and smelted ceaselessly. Twelve kilometers off, the myriad boppers of Disky led their busy lives. And high, high overhead came the faint signal of BEX, the big bopper who was the spaceship linking Earth and Moon. BEX would be landing in fifteen hours.

Ralph let all the inputs merge together, and savored the collectively purposeful activity of the bopper race. Each of the machines lived only ten months—ten months of struggling to build a scion, a copy of itself. If you had a scion there was a sense in which you survived your ten-month disassembly. Ralph had managed it thirty-six times.

Standing there, listening to everyone at once, he could feel how their individual lives added up to a single huge being . . . a rudimentary sort of creature, feeling about like a vine groping for light, for higher things.

He always felt this way after a meta-programming session. The One had a way of wiping out your short-term memories and giving you the space to think big thoughts. Time to think. Once again, Ralph wondered if he should take up MEX on his offer to absorb Ralph. He could live in perfect security then . . . provided, of course, that those crazy diggers didn’t pull off their revolution.

Ralph set his treads to rolling at top speed, 10 kph. He had things to do before BEX landed. Especially now that Wagstaff had set his pathetic microchip of a brain on trying to prevent TEX from extracting Anderson’s software.

What was Wagstaff so upset about anyway? Everything would be preserved . . . Cobb Anderson’s personality, his memories, his style of thought. What else was there? Wouldn’t Anderson himself agree, even if he knew? Preserving your software . . . that was all that really counted!

Bits of pumice crunched beneath Ralph’s treads. The wall of the crater lay a hundred meters ahead. He scanned the sloping cliff, looking for an optimal climbing path.

If he hadn’t just finished plugging into the One, Ralph would have been able to retrace the route he’d taken to get down into the Maskelyne Crater in the first place. But undergoing meta-programming always wiped out a lot of your stored subsystems. The intent was that you would replace old solutions with new and better ones.

Ralph stopped, still scanning the steep crater wall. He should have left trail markers. Over there, two hundred meters off, it looked like a rift had opened up a negotiable ramp in the wall.

Ralph turned and a warning sensor fired. Heat. He’d let half his body-box stick out from the parasol’s shade. Ralph readjusted the little umbrella with a precise gesture.

The top surface of the parasol was a grid of solar energy cells, which kept a pleasant trickle of current flowing into Ralph’s system. But the main purpose of the parasol was shade. Ralph’s microminiaturized processing units were unable to function at any temperature higher than 10° Kelvin, the temperature of liquid oxygen.

Twirling his parasol impatiently, Ralph trundled towards the rift he’d spotted. A slight spray of dust flew out from under his treads, only to fall instantly to the airless lunar surface. As the wall went past, Ralph occupied himself by displaying four-dimensional hypersurfaces to himself . . . glowing points connected in nets which warped and shifted as he varied the parameters. He often did this, to no apparent purpose, but it sometimes happened that a particularly interesting hypersurface could serve to model a significant relationship. He was half-hoping to get a catastrophe-theoretic prediction of when and how Wagstaff would try to block Anderson’s disassembly.