Rudy Rucker - The Ware Tetralogy

“This is the sixth floor of the ISDN ziggurat,” said Mrs. Beller, playing the part of a clear-voiced tour guide. She walked next to Stahn, with Ricardo in front and Whitey behind. Her hips swayed enticingly. “Not everyone knows that ISDN stands for Integrated Systems Digital Network. We’re a petabuck company born of the merger of AT&T and Mitsubishi. ISDN manufactures about 60 percent of the vizzies in use, and we operate something like 80 percent of the transmission channels. This, our Einstein ziggurat, houses labs, offices, and a number of independent organizations— this far from Earth’s scrutiny it’s a case of In my father’s house are many mansions . Most people don’t understand that ISDN has no leaders and no fixed policies. ISDN operates at unfathomable degrees of parallelism and nonlinearity. How else to pay off the world’s chaos?

“Supposedly, ISDN has been backing Bei Ng’s Church of Organic Mysticism on the off chance that Bei might come up with a workable form of telepathy, but really we’ve just wanted to keep a feeler on the merge trade, which looks to be a coming thing. And of course Bei’s many connections are very valuable.”

The long hall was lined with room after room of weird equipment. ISDN was so big. It seemed unlikely that anyone could really know what was going on in all the labs. The general idea seemed to be to try and keep up with the boppers, by whatever means necessary. In one of the rooms on Bei Ng’s hall, cyberbiologists were fiddling with probes and petri dishes. In another room, cellular automata technicians were watching 3D patterns darting about in a great mound of imipolex. In still another room, Stahn could see information mechanics disassembling a beam-charred woman-shaped petaflop. Was that the one—Berenice—who’d been killed with Manchile the other day? Stahn wondered briefly how old Cobb was doing; he’d gotten away, lucky guy.

Suddenly it occurred to Stahn that somewhere in this huge building there was an operating room with brain surgeons waiting for him. He shuddered and turned his attention back to Mrs. Beller.

“ISDN carefully looks over every major new development with one question in mind,” she was saying. “How can this be used to increase our power and our holdings? Usually we use incremental techniques, but sometimes a catastrophic intervention is required. The Manchildren pose a real threat to our main customers, the human race. We asked all our employees for suggestions, and Bei Ng called up his merge-brother, Max Gibson-Yukawa. Our intervention will be unfortunate for the boppers. Here’s the elevator.”

The ride over to Stahn’s building was uneventful. Only when they were walking down the hall to his office did his captors show any signs of nervousness. Though they didn’t come out and say so, it was clear that they were wondering just how smart Stahn’s bomb was .

Inside Stahn’s office, Mrs. Beller took a post by the door. She held out her right hand, with the thumb lightly resting on the button of the stunpatch control. Whitey and Ricardo got back in the far corners of the room, covering Stahn and the desk with their needlers. Stahn stood behind his plastic-topped desk, facing Mrs. Beller and the open office door. Behind him and to the left was Ricardo, behind him and to the right was Whitey.

“All right, Stahn,” purred Mrs. Beller. “Be a good boy and get out your map. Tell the bomb that everything’s OK.” She caressed the control button with her fat thumb tip, and pain seeped down Stahn’s spine. She deepened her voice, shifting from soft cop to hard cop mode. “Don’t try to outthink me Mooney, you’re a burnt-out stumblebum with no second chance.”

“Sane,” said Stahn. “I’m ready to spread. Shave my brain and mail me to Happy Acres with my GI wendy, how bad can it be.” He smiled in an ingratiating, cringing way and pulled open the top left drawer of his brown metal desk. “Map’s right in here.”

Stahn’s perceived timeflow was running very very slow. The next second of time went as follows:

Stahn took his hand off the wide-open drawer and looked down at his smart kinetic energy bomb, nestled right next to Cobb’s red map cube. The bomb was a rubbery deep-blue sphere with a reddish eye set into it. It was designed not to explode , but rather to bounce around and hit things. It was polonium-centered and quite massive. Its outer rind was a thick tissue of megaflop imipolex that had been microwired to act as a computer and as a magnetic field drive, feeding off the energy of the radioactive polonium core. The bomb had the intelligence, roughly, of a dog. Recognizing Stahn, the bomb activated its powerful maggie-drive and floated up a fraction of a millimeter, up off the brown metal of Stahn’s desk drawer bottom, up just enough so that Stahn could tell that his good smart bomb was ready to help.

Over the years, Stahn had taught the bomb to read his eye signals. He blinked twice, meaning “HIT THEM,” and then stared at Mrs. Beller’s right wrist, meaning “THERE FIRST.”

Silently the bomb began to spin, adjusting its English. Stahn formed his face into a weary, disgusted expression. “How beat. The scuzz-ass bomb is broken anyway.” He stared hard at Mrs. Beller’s wrist and . . . widened his eyes.

The bomb flew up, caromed off the ceiling, and struck Mrs. Beller a paralyzing blow on the right wrist. The stunpatch control dropped from her numb hand. The bomb came up off the floor, sighted on Mydol, and did a two-cushion rebound off the wall and ceiling. It caught Mydol solidly in the side of the head. Mydol’s eyes glazed as his head snapped to one side.

The bomb came up off the floor and wall, fixed its eye on Ricardo, and set up a gyroscopic spin calculated to accelerate it off the ceiling and into Ricardo’s forehead. The KE bomb was travelling at about 40 ft/sec, or 30 mph—any faster and it wouldn’t have been able to direct its bounces to optimum target.

The bomb was thinking as fast as it could, but its max flop was less than Ricardo’s.

Ricardo became consciously aware of the bomb’s violent Superball motion only after it had already hit Whitey, but by then his arm muscles were tracking the bomb. A fast eye/hand feedback loop locked the needler on target. Ricardo zapped Stahn’s smart bomb just before it hit the ceiling.

The smart bomb broke into four or five throbbing chunks that thudded to the floor and lay there twitching. The slow, full second ended.

Before anything else could happen, Stahn peeled the stunpatch off his neck and wadded it up, ruining its circuits.

“I’ve still got the drop on you, Mooney,” said Ricardo from his corner. “Nice move, though. Good thing there was three of us. You AO, Fern?”

“He’s broken my wrist,” said Mrs. Beller.

Stahn tossed the wadded stunpatch out his room’s open window. “Well, that SM was getting a little old, Fern . Why don’t you all promise me some money and I’ll go quietly? I really will. I’ll go to Happy Acres and I’ll infect the boppers with chipmold, but I want a square ISDN contract in writing and on the record. I want three things.” Stahn held up three fingers of his left hand, preparing to tick off his points.

Behind him on the floor, Whitey Mydol began to groan and wake up. Stahn talked faster. “First, in return for cooperating from here on out, I want to be given the status of an ISDN employee. I want a job. Second, in return for giving up my right brain, I want ISDN to clone me a new one should I so desire. If I kick being a meatie, I want my brain back. And number three, I get half a gigabuck payable to my account.”

“Listen to this load of crutches,” grumbled Whitey, who’d managed to lurch back to his feet. He was standing there with his arms crossed over his chest, trying to keep his balance.