Rudy Rucker - The Ware Tetralogy

“What is dreak?”

“You kidding?” The pleasure glyph again, a bit stronger. It tasted like orgasm, dope rush, drunken bliss, supernal wisdom, and the joy of creation. “This dreak’ll make you feel like an exaflop, pinkboy, and get you right in tune with the One. No one goes to the temple anymore.”

“A whole arm is too much. I just got this body.”

“Come here till I look at you.”

Cobb glanced up, sketching out a flight path in case the lozenge snatched at him. An orange starfish cradling what looked like a bazooka watched him from a few balconies up. Should he leave? He walked a few steps closer, and the wall lozenge bulged out to feel him.

“Tell you what,” it said after a moment’s examination. “You’re state-of-­the-art, and it’s your first dreak tube, so we’ll give you a price. Just your left hand.” The pleasure glyph, once again, even stronger. “Walk through and really see the One.”

This was too intriguing to pass up. And it was, after all, Cobb’s duty as a computer scientist to look into a development as novel as this. Hell, Berenice could get him another damn hand. He stepped forward, and slithered through the thick folds of the camouflaged door. It snipped off his left hand on the way in, but it didn’t hurt, and his flickercladding sealed right over the stump.

Cobb looked around, and decided he’d made a big mistake. Who did he think he was, Sta-Hi? This was no mellow Prohibition Era saloon, this was more like a hardcore basehouse —a shoddy, unfinished room with a heavily armed guard in every corner. The guards were orange starfish-shaped boppers like the one he’d seen on the balcony outside. Each of them had a tray full of small metal cylinders, and each had a lethal particle-beam tube ready to hand, in case anyone got out of line. There were half a dozen customers, all with the mirror finish of optically processing petaflops. Cobb seemed to be the only one who’d sold part of his body to get in. He felt as stupid as if he’d offered a bartender fellatio instead of a dollar for a beer. All the other customers were giving the starfish little boxes of chips for their cylinders. They looked tidy and businesslike, giving the lie to Cobb’s initial impression of the place.

But what was dreak? One of the starfish fixed its blue eyespot on Cobb and held up a cylinder from its tray. The cylinder was metal, three or four inches long, and with a kind of nipple at one end. A compressed gas of some sort—something along the lines of nitrous oxide? Yes. The starfish tapped at a cylinder rigged to a bleeder valve, and a little cloud of patterns formed—patterns so intricate as to be on the verge of random snow. The cloud dissipated. Was there supposed to be some way to breathe the stuff ?

“Not just yet,” said Cobb. “I want to mingle a bit. I really just come here for the business contacts, you know.”

He hunkered down by the wall between two petaflops, interrupting their conversation, not that he could follow what they were saying. They were like stoned out beatnik buddies, a Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady team, both of them with thick, partly transparent flickercladdings veined and patterned in fractal patterns of color. Each of the cladding’s colorspots was made up of an open network of smaller spots, which were in turn made of yet smaller threads and blotches—all the way down to the limits of visibility. One of the petaflop’s patterns and body outlines were angular and hard-edged. He was colored mostly red-yellow-blue. The other petaflop was green-brown-black, and his surface was so fractally bumpy that he looked like an infinitely warty squid, constantly sprouting tentacles which sprouted tentacles which sprouted. Each of these fractal boppers had a dreak cylinder plugged into a valve in the upper part of his body.

“Hi,” said Cobb. “How’s the dreak?”

With surprising speed, the angular one grew a glittering RYB arm that reached out and fastened on Cobb’s left forearm, right above Cobb’s missing hand. The smooth one seized Cobb’s right elbow with a tentacle that branched and branched. They marched him over to the dreak tray, and the orange starfish plugged one of the cold gas cylinders into a heretofore unnoticed valve in the side of Cobb’s head.

Time stopped. Cobb’s mind cut and interchanged thoughts and motions into a spacetime collage. The next half hour was a unified tapestry of space and time.

A camera eye would have showed Cobb following the RYB and GBB petas back to the wall and sitting between them for half an hour.

For Cobb, it was like stepping outside of time into a world of synchronicity. Cobb saw all of his thoughts at once, and all of the thoughts of the others near him. He was no longer the limited personoid that he’d been since Berenice had woken him up.

Up till now, he’d felt like: But right now, he felt like:

A billion-bit CD recording A quintillion atom orchestra

A finite robot A living mind

Shit God

He exchanged a few glyphs with the guys next to him. They called themselves exaflop hackers, and they were named Emul and Oozer. When they didn’t use glyphs, they spoke in a weird, riffy, neologistic English.

Cobb was able to follow the “conversation” as soon as the dreak gas swirled into his bodyshell. Indeed, the conversation had been going on all along, and the room which Cobb had taken for crazed and menacing was in fact filled with good talk, pleasant ideas, and a high veneer of civilization. This was more teahouse than basehouse. The starfish were funny, not menacing. The synchronicity-inducing dreak shuffled coincidentally appropriate new information in with Cobb’s old memories.

One element of the half-hour brain collage seemed to be a conversation with Stanley Hilary Mooney. It started when Oozer introduced Cobb to his “girlfriend” Kkandio, a pleasant-voiced bopper who helped run the boppers’ communications. Kkandio wasn’t actually in the room with them; but any bopper could reach her over the built-in Ethernet. On an impulse Cobb asked Kkandio if she could put him in touch with Sta-Hi; one of the people he’d seen in his godseye view of Einstein had looked a bit like Cobb’s old friend.

Kkandio repeated the name, and then there was a phone ringing, a click, and Sta-Hi’s face.

“Hello, this is Cobb Anderson, Sta-Hi. I’m down in the boppers’ Nest. I just got a new body.”

“Cobb?” Sta-Hi’s phonemes occupied maddeningly long intervals of time. “They recorporated you again? I always wondered if they would. I already killed you once, so I guess we can be friends again. What’s the story?”

“A bopper named Berenice brought me back. She planted a bopper-built embryo in my niece Della Taze, and Della’s back in Louisville. I’m supposed to fly down there and talk to her or something. Berenice —I just flashed, that’s the name of a girl in an Edgar Allan Poe story. She talks like that, too. She’s weird.”

“You can’t go to Earth,” dragged Sta-Hi. “You’ll melt.”

“Not in this new body. It’s an optically processing petaflop, immune to high temperatures.”

“Oxo! War of the Worlds, part II.”

“You ought to be here right now, Sta-Hi,” said Cobb. “I’m high on some new stuff called dreak with two boppers called Emul and Oozer. It’s a synchronicity drug. It’s almost like being dead, but better. You know, people were wrong to ever think that a meat body is a prerequisite for having a soul. And if boppers are at the point of being like people, I think we should find a way of forging a human/bopper peace. You have to help me.”

“Prerequisites,” said Sta-Hi. “What’s the difference between prerequisites, perquisites, and perks, eh, Cobb? I mean that’s where the realpeople are at. Maybe you’re right, I can’t decide just like that. Berenice. And you say that’s an Ed Poe name? Wavy. I’ll come out to the trade center right now. I’ll meet you there, and we’ll decide what to do. And dig it, Cobb, I’m not Sta-Hi anymore, I’m Stahn .”