The Ware Tetralogy by Rudy Rucker (most important books of all time .txt) 📖

differently shuffled combinations of themselves onto four of the captured slugs of imipolex. The children were called Winken, Blinken, Tod, and Nod. Maturing in a matter of days, they started worked in the Mbanje DeGroot DIM factory with their parents.

It was still up to Willy to provide a Limplan-A description (well, actually it was Limplan-_B_ by now) for each new kind of DIM that was needed; and this kept him as busy as he could stand to be. Busier, even.

At this point people started realizing who Willy was, and there was some threat of him getting busted. In fact, four Gimmie officials showed up from Washington, driving a rare gasoline-powered armored HumVee, a vehicle so ancient that it had no susceptible chips for the chipmold to have ruined. An ugly mob of pheezers gathered around the HumVee outside the Gray Area, rocking it back and forth, almost on the point of turning it over.

Aarbie and a few sniggering Little Kidders parted the crowd and led the officials into the Mbanje DeGroot shop. The head official nervously read a Gimmie ultimatum stating that unless Mbanje DeGroot’s entire DIM production were routed to Washington, D.C., for Gimmie defense and security purposes, Willy Taze would have to go back to jail.

“Can I thoot them now, Aawbie?” asked Haf-N-Haf, fondling his O.J. ugly stick, a thousand-flechettes-per-minute quantum-dot-powered rail gun the size and shape of a quart milk carton. The pheezers outside screeched for the Gimmie pigs’ blood.

“Oh, ah expect these here civil servants’ll accept a counteroffer,” said Aarbie. “Ain’t that right?”

The officials returned to Washington with the recommendation that due to his public-spirited national reconstruction efforts, Willy deserved an unconditional pardon. The pardon came through, and Willy was a free man, a race-traitor no longer.

A fresh shipment of imipolex came down on a second rocket from the Moon, and Ulam and Flouncey bred four more children: Flopsy, Squid, Shambala, and Cinnabar. Winken, Blinken, Tod, and Nod paired up and begat eight further moldies: Stanky, Panky, Grogan, Flibbertigibbet, Dik, Dawna, Nerf, and Moana. All eighteen of the moldies busied themselves programming DIMs with “the laying on of hands,” as they called it, but still the Mbanje DeGroot production pace was far too slow for the worldwide demand.

“I wish I could just teach everyone how to write their own Limplan-C programs,” said Willy, out swimming in the ocean with Fern on a rare day of rest. They were wearing Ulam and Flouncey and diving along some reefs. “I’m working way too hard. And it’s starting to repeat. I hate to repeat.”

“Well, why don’t you make DIMs to fix all the telephones and vizzies so the Net works again,” said Fern, transmitting her thoughts through Flouncey to Ulam to Willy. “Then you could start selling a Limpware Developer’s Kit. Call it the LDK.”

“Wavy, Fern, but dig it, there are a zillion kinds of chip designs that were used in all the different Net machinery. I don’t want to have to hack every single kind of telephone and vizzy chip into yet another goddamn little DIM pimple. The whole point is to sell people the tools for writing their own new pimples. If we had a phone system to deliver the developer kits, I’d say go ahead and give all the existing DIM source code away as freeware just to get people started.”

“What if you invented a whole new kind of superphone?” suggested Fern.

Willy was quiet for a minute. “Yes!” he said finally. “One massive, conclusive hack. Figure out an optimal architecture and make the new phones out of solid imipolex. People will use them the way you and I are talking to each other through our ‘Cloaks. We won’t need to repair the central phone system at all. That’s dead technology. The phones will talk to each other directly, figure out their own node-to-node routings, the works.”

“How big would a superphone have to be?”

“You’d need maybe a hundred grams each for the kind of device I’m thinking about. But, hey, I don’t want to call it a superphone, naw—I want to call it an uvvy. Uuuuh-veee. It’s cozy-sounding.”

“A lot of folks are going to balk at sticking wires into their spines.”

“Oh, we can do it without wires,” said Willy. “Just use the existing cephscope technology. Room-temperature polymer superconductors making tight vortices of electromagnetic energy to tweak your nerves. The only reason Happy Cloaks still use wires is that they’ve been too lazy to hack the upgrade. Not to mention the fact that loonie moldies don’t exactly give a shit about humans’ comfort—no offense intended, Ulam and Flouncey.”

So Willy invented the uvvy and turned production over to ISDN on the Moon. And now ISDN ships started delivering uvvies and shipments of imipolex to any local entrepreneur willing to pay for the cargo with millions of dollars. The ships brought down lots of moldie immigrants as well. And the ships returned to the Moon filled with thousands of barrels of crude oil that the lunar ISDN plants could use to make more imipolex.

Once an ISDN ship had landed in your area, you could buy an uvvy to download freeware capable of turning a little piece of chipmold-infected imipolex into a DIM capable of carrying out whatever simple cybernetic task you needed done. Up to a point, you could pinch imipolex for the DIMs right off of your uvvy, though eventually your uvvy would lose functionality, and you’d need to reinvigorate it with some more ISDN imipolex.

Of course, once you had your DIM program and your imipolex slug, it still took a moldie to actually put the program onto the imipolex—yet another step, in other words. So you’d pay a local moldie to install your program onto as many DIMs as you wanted to pay him or her for processing. Moldies were eager for work because they needed money to buy enough imipolex to reproduce themselves.

Another commercial angle to the new economy was that if the program for the particular kind of DIM you needed wasn’t available as freeware, you needed to pay a programmer to write it for you—or possibly write it yourself. The essential tool for creating DIM programs was the Willy Taze Limpware Developer’s Kit, which came complete with Willy’s final (he swore) release of Limplan-D, downloadable direct from Mbanje DeGroot for a stiff license fee.

The whole cycle created an instant new economy that benefited everyone concerned. The only unhappy ones were the Heritagists, those individuals who hated the sight and smell of the alien moldies. But most people ignored the Heritagists; the comforts of limpware technology far outweighed misgivings about the moldies.

By the end of September, Fern and Willy had a lot more free time. Everything was on automatic. The two friends were comfortably installed in separate luxury suites in a high-tone motel. Willy did a lot of diving, and Fern focused her energy on refitting the Selena’s. By mid-October it was nearly done. It was agreed that Willy would fly up to the Moon with her on November 2, 2031. He could clearly see that if he stayed on Earth, things would start to repeat.

A week before takeoff, Willy encountered Fern lying out by the pool with Aarbie Kidd. It seemed Fern had decided she couldn’t go another day without scoring some of her favorite drug: merge.

“We ain’t never had no merge down to the local Red Ball,” Aarbie was saying. “It’s kind of a seldom thing, I reckon. I hear tell they got it in South Miami Beach. The trisexes are into it.”

“I want you to take merge with me, Aarbie,” said Fern.

“I’ll try anything, Fern. Hell, we could git on my bike and be down there in a love puddle, all lifted and floppy tonight.”

So Aarbie and Fern jammed on down to South Miami Beach to score merge. Not wanting to be left home alone, Willy decided to take a trip up to Louisville. He got Ulam’s strongest granddaughter Moana to fly him, giving her three nanograms of quantum dots and five kilograms of imipolex for her pay.

Over the summer, Willy’s parents, Isle and Colin, had separated. He went to see his mother first. She still lived in the big old family house on Eastern Avenue. Willy and Moana landed in the familiar backyard—it felt like a dream, silently dropping down out of the sky into the spot where he’d spent a happy childhood at play. Moana said she’d just as soon look around town on her own, so Willy agreed to meet her in the yard the next afternoon. Moana formed herself into a dog shape and went trotting off.

Willy stooped down and looked at the familiar ground. Over there, embedded in the soil, was one of his little green plastic toy soldiers. How happy he’d been, back then, playing quietly in the sun. His eyes moistened and he gave a deep sigh. His childhood was gone, but somehow he’d grown into something less than a man.

Inside the house, Willy found Ilse to be vigorous and artsy-craftsy as ever, but with a tragic new bitterness about Colin’s unfaithfulness. She made Willy a tasty low-fat supper and drank a little more white wine than usual. “It’s so nice to have someone with me in the house,” she kept saying. “I rattle around so.”

All night Willy kept waking to hear the uneasily sleeping Isle calling out angry words at her absent unfaithful husband. “Goddamn you. How could you? I hate you. Sshhit. Goddamn you, Colin.”

It was depressing. The next afternoon Willy wore Moana like a pair of seven-league boots, and they trucked on downtown to meet his dad. Colin was an English professor at the University of Louisville; he’d moved out of Ilse’s house to live in an apartment with a student named Xuyen Tuyen. Seeing Colin’s evasive face, Willy uneasily realized he’d already absorbed too much of Ilse’s bitterness to be friendly with his old man. It was easier to talk with Xuyen, the girlfriend.

She was a cheerful round-faced Vietnamese woman with a Kentucky accent. “Just call me Sue,” she said to Willy as he stumbled over her name. “You should come to the big Halloween party at the La Mirage Health Club with us tonight. I’m dragging your dad. And your Cousin Delia’s comin’ too.”

“Well, I’ve certainly got the perfect costume,” said Willy.

“What?”

Willy patted his heavy leg covering. “This Happy Cloak I brought with me. Her name is Moana. I can wear her over my whole body.”

“And look like what?”

“Whatever I want to. I know! I’ll go as a great big naked woman.” He hit on this idea especially to jangle Colin, who’d always nursed a cringing, stealthy fear that his unmarried son was gay.

At the party, Willy’s Amazon appearance attracted the amorous attention of one Sue Tucker, an attractive bisexual female plumber from Shively. The party got way wild, and on this one unique occasion, safely wrapped in moldie as he was, Willy did fully copulate with a real live woman, i.e., Sue Tucker. At the final moment of ultimate intimacy, a deep-seated reproductive impulse caused Willy to tell Moana to uncover the tip of his penis—allowing his ejaculated seed to enter a woman’s womb for the first and last time. So it was thus—though it was years later till he learned it—that Willy Taze became the father of Randy Karl Tucker.

And then Willy went back to Florida, and the Selena was ready, and Fern took Willy up to the Moon. Aarbie stayed on the Earth, as did Ulam, Flouncey, and their descendants. Earth’s info-rich environment was like a promised land for the moldies, and none of them wanted to go back to the harsh Moon.

When Willy landed