The Ware Tetralogy by Rudy Rucker (most important books of all time .txt) đ
- Author: Rudy Rucker
- Performer: -
Book online «The Ware Tetralogy by Rudy Rucker (most important books of all time .txt) đ». Author Rudy Rucker
âWhat do you want from me?â Silently asking this, Cobb leaned back in his chair, stretching out his legs. Mooney looked impatient. Sta-Hi was staring at the bugs on the ceiling.
âConvince the others,â came Mr. Frosteeâs reply. In the background, Cobb could make out the interior of a truck-cab. Hands on the steering wheel. The concrete walls of a parking garage, then the garish lights of Daytona Beach streaming past.
âConvince them all to get robot bodies like you. Then we can merge, we can all merge to become a new and greater being. Weâll set up a number of reprocessing centers⊠â
Mooney was standing over Cobb, shaking him. It was hard to see, with the glare of headlights coming at him. Slowly, Cobb brought his attention back to the cottage.
âWhatâs the matter, Mooney?â asked Cobb.
âYouâre signaling for help, arenât you?â
âHow would you like a nice everlasting body like mine?â Cobb countered. âI could arrange it.â
âSo thatâs it,â Sta-Hi said dreamily. âThe big boppers want to bring us all into the fold.â
âItâs not so unreasonable,â Cobb protested. âItâs a natural next evolutionary step. Imagine people that carry terabyte computing systems in their head, people that communicate directly brain-to-brain, people who live for centuries and change bodies like suits of clothes!â
âImagine people that arenât people,â Sta-Hi replied. âCobb, the big boppers like TEX and MEX have been trying to run the same con on the Moon. And most of the little boppers up there arenât buying it⊠most would rather fight then let themselves be patched into the big systems. Now why do you think that is?â
âObviously some people⊠or boppers⊠are going to be paranoid about losing their precious individuality,â Cobb answered. âBut thatâs just a matter of cultural conditioning! Look, Sta-Hi, Iâve been all the way in⊠all the way. After I got taped on the Moon I was just a pattern in a memory-bank somewhere for a few days. And you know, it wasnât even that⊠â
âLetâs go,â Mooney ordered, roughly pulling Cobb to his feet. âYouâre going to be deprogrammed and dismantled, Anderson. We canât let this kind ofâŠâ
Mr. Frostee was still there in Cobbâs head. âIâve taken the liberty of activating your SELF-DESTRUCT subroutine,â the voice said quietly. âJust say the word âDESTROYâ out loud and youâll explode. Your body will explode. Youâre really in me. Iâll give you a new body, the one here in the truck⊠â
âMR. FROSTEE OUT,â Cobb said. If he did it, he wanted it to be his own decision.
Mooney had his pistol at the base of Cobbâs skull. He was getting panicky.
Any second, Mooney, Cobb thought to himself. But still he hesitated. He told himself it was just because he didnât want to hurt Sta-Hi⊠but he was also scared, scared to die again. Could he really cross the noisy void between bodies again? But heâd already done it once, hadnât he?
âGo outside, Sta-Hi,â Mooney said then, and sealed his fate. âGo check if that old bitch is waiting out there to ambush us. Or the other robot.â
Sta-Hi eased out the back door and melted into the night.
âIâve finally got you,â Mooney said, with a nudge of his pistol. âIâm going to find out what makes you tick.â
âDESTROY,â Cobb said, and lost his second body.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
âI want to talk to you about diarrhea,â a voice said earnestly. âGastric distress can ruin that long-hoped-for vacation. So be sure⊠â
Cobbâs first conscious act was to turn the radio off. He had just pulled out of a fuel-station on the gritty outskirts of Daytona Beach. But, on the other hand, he had just died in the explosion of his cottage in Cocoa Beach.
âHello, Cobb. You see? You can count on me.â Mr. Frosteeâs voice filled his head again. Cobb looked down at his sinewy forearms, handling the ice-cream truckâs big steering-wheel with an experienced touch.
âSta-Hi2?â Cobb asked. âYou put me in Sta-Hi2?â
âIt was Sta-Hi2 But I just gave the body a new look. I copied the fellow who was running the pumps back there.â
Cobb thought back to the explosion. DESTROY, disorientation, and now this. His fingers were blackened with years of grease. He leaned out the window to take a peek at himself in the rearview mirror.
He had a skinny head and large, liquid eyes. Thinning black hair, greasy and combed straight back. His nose was much more prominent than his chin. Ratface. Approaching headlights pulled his attention back to the road.
âWhat about disguising the truck?â Cobb asked. âI killed Mooney, but he must have left records. And Sta-Hi got away. The heatâs gonna be looking for a Mr. Frostee truck.â
âThereâll be time for that later. Right now Iâve got a score to settle. Those hoodlums⊠those Little Kidders⊠one of them wrecked my best remote. Heâs called Berdoo.â
Without consciously thinking about it, Cobb had driven the truck onto the thruway west, towards Orlando. Was he still in control of his actions?
âWhere are we going?â
âDisney World. Berdoo doesnât remember it, but he once told me⊠told Phil⊠that he has a friend who runs a motel there. I think thatâs where heâll go to hide out. I want you to shoot him, Cobb, and then take out his brain for me. Weâll leave the organs⊠thatâs all over for now⊠but Iâve got to get that brain on tape. You should have seen how easily he killed my Phil.â
It was hard to read the emotion in Mr. Frosteeâs even voice. Was revenge the motive? Or was it just a collectorâs lust for ownership?
In any case, trying to ambush the Little Kidders in their own hideout sounded like a terrible idea. And going brain-collecting was something Cobb hoped to put off as long as possible. He wondered if he should just turn around. Or pull off the highway and leave the truck. Glancing in his rearview mirror he could see dawn pinkening the horizon. The road was empty.
âYouâve still got your free will,â Mr. Frostee said. âBut donât forget that weâre in this together. If I die then so do you. Youâre really just a pattern in my circuits.â
âBut you canât override me?â Testing, Cobb took his foot off the accelerator. No one pushed his foot back.
âI canât control your mind,â Mr. Frostee said, not quite answering the question. âBut donât stop the truck. What if a cop comes by?â
Cobb speeded back up. âWhy would you give one of your subsystems free will?â
âThe human mind is all of a piece, Cobb. If we try to start picking and choosing, all thatâs left is a boring bundle of reflexes. When a big bopper builds in some humanâs personality, heâs got to learn to live with the subsystemâs free will. I could cut you off entirely, in an emergency, but short of⊠â
âWhy bother taping humans at all?â
âNo program we can write and control acts like human soft ware. Humans canât write bopper programs⊠they had to let them evolve. And a bopper canât write a human program. It works both ways. We need you guys. What weâre working towards is a human-bopper fusion, a single great mind stretching from person to person all over the world. Itâs right, Cobb, and itâs inevitable. Simpler beings merge to produce higher beings, and they must merge and merge again. In this way we draw ever closer to the One.â
âThe One?â Cobb said, laughing. âYou donât mean the One on the Moon, do you? Donât you know thatâs just a random noise source? Havenât you figured that out?â
âRandomness is an elusive concept, Cobb.â
âLook,â Cobb said, âIn order to make the boppers evolve fast enough I had to speed up the rate of mutation. So in the substrate program I included a command that they plug into the One, once a month, as you know. But the One is just a simple cosmic ray counter. It goes through your programs changing yesses and noes, here and there, just on the basis of the Geiger counter click-pattern of cosmic-ray bursts for the last day or so. The One is just a glorified circuit-scrambler.â
Still Mr. Frostee was silent. Finally the answer came. âYou choose to make light of the One, Cobb. But the pulse of the One is the pulse of the Cosmos. You yourself call its noisy input the cosmic rays. What is more natural than that the Cosmos should lovingly direct the growth of the boppers with its bursts of radiation? There is no noise in the All⊠there is only information. Nothing is truly random. It is sad that you choose not to understand what you yourself have created.â
A ditch full of brackish water and marsh-grass lay to the right of the thruway. Cobb saw an alligator, lying half out of the water and watching the early morning traffic. The night had passed, it was quarter to seven. In a sort of phantom-stomach reflex, Cobb had a brief longing for breakfast. But the hunger faded, and Cobb let the empty miles roll by, lost in thought.
What was he now? In one sense he was what he had always been. A certain pattern, a type of soft ware. The fiveness of a right hand is the same as the fiveness of a left. The Cobbness that had been a man was the same as the Cobbness now coded upon Mr. Frosteeâs cold chips.
Cobb Andersonâs brain had been dissected, but the software that made up his mind had been preserved. The idea of âselfâ is, after all, just another idea, a symbol in the software. Cobb felt like him_self_ as much as ever. And, as much as ever, Cobb wanted his self to continue to exist on hardware.
Perhaps the boppers had stored a tape of him on the Moon, and perhaps up there his software had also been given hardware. But, here and now, Cobbâs continued existence depended on keeping Mr. Frostee cold and energized. They were in this together. Him and a machine who wanted to know God.
âIâll tell you,â Cobb said, breaking the silence. âI think it would be really stupid to go charging after the Little Kidders before getting the truck repainted. Even if the cops arenât after us yet, thereâs no point having Berdoo be able to see you coming from a block away. Letâs get off the thruway and fix up the truck. Thereâs a giant plastic ice-cream cone on the cabâs roof, for Godâs sake.â
âYouâre driving,â Mr. Frostee said mildly. âI will defer to your superior knowledge of human criminality.â
Cobb got out at the next exit and took a small road north. This was rolling countryside, with plenty of streams. Palms and magnolias gave way to blackjack pines and scrubby live oak. Brambles and honeysuckle filled in the spaces between the struggling little trees. And in some places the uncontrollable kudzu vine had taken root and choked out all other vegetation.
It was only eight-thirty, but already the asphalt road was shimmering in the heat. The frequent dips were filled with reflecting water-mirages. Cobb rolled down the window and let the air beat against his face. The truckâs big hydrogen-fueled engine roared smoothly and the sticky road sang beneath the tires.
The wild scrub gave way to farmland, big cleared pastures with cattle in them. The cows waded about knee-deep in weeds, munching the flowers. White cattle egrets stalked and flapped along next to them, spearing the
Comments (0)