Rudy Rucker - The Ware Tetralogy

Things had started to go wrong the instant Manchile had gone public.

Although some radical humans did have a certain sympathy for Manchile’s Thang, very few of them felt strongly enough to act on their sympathies, and most of these were now in jail. The Gimmie had justified their brutal repression by presenting Manchile and the nine-day boys as an invasive social cancer. The final, debilitating propaganda battle had been lost when the fleshers heard about Bubba eating the bum—a typically baroque Berenice touch. If the humans had been able to find Bubba’s body they would have torn it into shreds.

Even now, two weeks after the fact, with the crisis apparently over, ISDN was still keeping the antibopper propaganda drums beating. The bum, or watchman, or whatever he’d been, had become a human race-hero; his picture was everywhere and there were dramas about him; his name was Jimmy Doan. “Avenge Jimmy Doan,” the humans liked to say now, “How many robots is one Jimmy Doan worth?” Maybe a worn-out gigaflop with no cladding , was Emul’s opinion, but no one was asking him or any other bopper for input.

Emul had some suspicions about ISDN’s real motives for keeping up the frenzy. In many ways, ISDN was like one of the old, multibodied big boppers. Emul had reason to believe that ISDN was beating the drums for business purposes. Most obviously, the continuing hysteria increased ISDN viewership. More subtly, the increased security measures at the trade center had greatly curtailed human/bopper trade, which had the effect of inflating prices and increasing the profit per item to be made by ISDN’s middlemen.

Some hotheaded fleshers were talking about evacuating Einstein and cleaning out the Nest once and for all. But Emul was sure that ISDN had no intention of leaving the Moon; there was still so much money to be made. Surely the boppers were too sexy to exterminate. The apey jackdaw fleshers had an endless appetite for the tricks that boppers could do.

Instead of any all-out attack, the humans had been launching a number of commando raids on the Nest this week. Just yesterday, Emul had been forced to dynamite the Little Kidder Toys entrance to his tunnel after losing his favorite two meaties in a flesher terror raid there. A gang of ridgebacks, led by Darla’s husband, Whitey Mydol, had burst into the store and had shot it out with Rainbow and Berdoo. Rainbow and Berdoo had been meaties for years, and Emul had been proud to own them. They’d cost him plenty. It had hurt to see them go down; to watch from inside their heads. They’d done their best, but the plaguey communications links were all staticky and unreliable these days; it seemed like everyone’s equipment was wearing out at once. It had hurt to lose to Berdoo, and to make things worse, the combatative Mydol had escaped alive, even though Emul had blown up the tunnel just as Mydol entered. Mydol had lucked out and had stood in just the right place. All the luck was running the wrong way, and everything was going screwy.

Another screwy thing that Emul wondered about off and on was this character Stahn Mooney, a slushed clown detective whom he’d hired to help with the kidnapping of Darla last month. The evening of the kidnapping, Mooney, for reasons unknown, got a partial right hemispherectomy, had a rat-compatible neuroplug installed, and phoned Emul up from the trade center, offering himself as a voluntary meatie . Mooney’s body was strong, and his left brain glib, so business sense had dictated that Emul accept the offer. Apparently Mooney had taken Emul’s promise of a free wendy too much to heart, and he arrived at the Nest with some crazed notion that a community of meaties lived together in a place called Happy Acres, when in fact there were at most five or six meatie-owners in all the Nest, most of them involved with the dreak and amine trades. Emul had hired him all right, but something about Mooney stank—most of all the fact that there were no godseye records of what he’d done after Darla merged him down in the Mews. As soon as Emul had installed Mooney’s rat, he wasted no time in selling the guy to Helen, Berenice’s waddling pink-tank sister, who had ample use for a flesh tankworker. Emul had gotten a nice price out of Helen, enough for four tubes of dreak; and Mooney seemed happy enough playing with the blank wendy Helen gave him; but the whole thing still bothered Emul. It stank.

Emul shifted into realtime and looked around his laboratory. It was a low rock-walled room twenty by forty feet. Half the room was filled with Oozer’s flickercladding vats. Formerly a flickercladding designer, Oozer was now busy trying to develop a totally limp computer with petaflop capabilities. Most flickercladding was already capable of petaflop thought processes—on a limpware basis—and Oozer felt he should be able to make the stuff function at these high levels independently of any J-junction or optical CPU hardware at all. Oozer was known for such autonomous limpware designs as the kiloflop heartshirt and the megaflop smart KE bomb.

Emul’s jumbled end of the room had a hardened glass panel and airlock set into one of the walls. The panel showed Darla’s room; she spent most of her time lying on her bed and watching the vizzy. Like all the humans, she was in an ugly mood these days. Earlier today, when Emul had entered her quarters, she’d threatened to do bellyflops off her bed until she aborted. He’d had to talk to her for a long time. He’d ended up promising to let her out early if she would promise to fly to Earth. He was supposed to be working out the details right now, though he didn’t feel like it. He didn’t feel like doing much of anything these days; he seemed to have a serious hardware problem.

His hardware problem was the greatest of Emul’s worries—above and beyond Darla, Stahn Mooney, Whitey Mydol, Berenice, and ISDN’s jingoistic war drumming. There was a buzz in Emul’s system. At first he’d thought it was from too much dreak, and he’d given the stuff up almost entirely. But the buzz just got worse. Then he’d thought it might be in his flickercladding, so he’d acid-stripped his imipolex all off and gotten himself recoated with a state-of-the-art Happy Cloak built by Oozer. The buzz was no better. It was a CPU problem of some sort, a breakdown in perfectly reversible behavior. The primary symptom was that more and more often Emul’s thoughts would be muddled by rhythmic bursts of kilohertz noise. It was possible to think around the thousand spikes a second, but it was debilitating. Apparently Emul needed a whole new body.

Just now Emul was in his rest position—that of an RYB cube with a few sketchy manipulators and sensor stalks. He was resting on the floor in front of his thinking desk, which served as a communications terminal and as a supplemental memory device—much like a businessman’s file cabinets and floppy disks.

Four treasured S-cubes sat out on Emul’s desk: brown, red, green, and gold. These hard and durable holostorage devices coded up the complete softwares of four boppers. There were Oozer’s and Emul’s S-cubes, of course, updated as far as yesterday. And there was a recent cube of Kkandio, Oozer’s sometime mate, a suave boppette who worked the Ethernet. She and Oozer had two scions between them. Most important of all, there was dear Berenice’s S-cube. Emul had used a copy of it to blend with his own software when he’d programmed the girl embryo he’d put in Darla’s womb. He wanted to build a new petaflop for Berenice, but right now it felt like he, Emul, needed a new body worse than anyone.

Emul sent signals in and out of his desk, flipping though his various internal and external memories: his flickercladding mode, his hereditary RAM, his realtime randomization, the joint bopper godseye, his inner godseye, his flowchart history, and all the detailed and cumbersome speculations that he’d dumped into his desk’s limpware storage devices.