The Ware Tetralogy by Rudy Rucker (ebook reader 8 inch .txt) 📕

was taking art courses, living with a girlfriend, and working for a few hours every morning selling tickets for the Percesepe family’s day-excursion fishing boats. People still liked to fish, even in 2049, though these days there was always a slight chance of snagging a submarine rogue moldie and having to face the rogue’s inhumanly savage retaliation. Each fishing boat was equipped with a high-pressure flamethrower for just this eventuality.

The day when Tre’s life changed, the uvvy woke him. Tre was on his thin sleeping pad, and the uvvy chirped, “Tre Tre Tre Tre… ” Tre grabbed the uvvy, which was about the size of an old-fashioned telephone handset, and told it to project. You could use an uvvy one of two ways: you could ask it to project a holographic image of your caller or you could set it onto your neck and let it make a direct electromagnetic field connection with your brain.

In projection mode, part of the uvvy’s surface vibrated to cast a lifelike holographic image into the air, and another part of it acted as a speaker.

“Hello. Tre Dietz?” The image showed the head of a conventionally attractive blonde California woman in her twenties.

“Yaar,” said Tre. “It’s me.”

Rain was spitting against the windowpanes and a brisk breeze was picking at the house’s thin walls. From a certain angle Tre could see a patch of ocean through his window. The ocean looked cold, silvery gray, rife with waves. This afternoon he was going out surfing with Terri at a beginner’s nook just below Four Mile Beach; Terri was going to give him a lesson. Answering the uvvy, Tre had been hoping it was Terri. But it wasn’t.

“Wonderbuff,” said the hollow of the conventional blonde. “I’m Cynthia Major. I’m in human resources at Apex Images in San Francisco. Tre, the Mentor wants me to tell you that we’re very happily discombobulated by your Perplexing Poultry philtre.”

A philtre was a type of software that you put onto an uvvy, so that the uvvy images would come out all different. Philtre like filter, but also _philtre _like magic potion, as a good philtre could make things look way strange if you put the philtre onto an uvvy that you were wearing on your neck. Philtres were a wavy new art hack.

Tre had made the Perplexing Poultry philtre in February with a little help from Benny, Aanna, and, of course, UCSC’s Wad. Formally, Perplexing Poultry was about the idea that space can be thought of as a quasicrystal, that is, as a nonrepeating tessellation of two kinds of polyhedral cell. This fact was a mathematical result from the last century that had become important for modeling the structure of imipolex. Tre had learned about quasicrystals in his course on Limpware Structures. To make the philtre visually engaging, Tre had deformed the two basic polyhedra into a pair of shapes which resembled a skinny chicken and a fat dodo bird.

Experientially, the Perplexing Poultry philtre was a totally bizarre lift. If you fired up Perplexing Poultry in an uvvy on your neck, all the things around you would seem to deform into the shapes of three-dimensional Perplexing Poultry, i.e., into things like linkages of odd-shaped birds with weird multisymmetrical ways of pecking into each other. You yourself would become a wave of perplexity in the Poultry sea.

Tre had written his philtre as a goof, really, as something to wrap himself up in when he was lifted. It was very weightless to check out the beach or a coffee shop with your weeded-up head way into Perplexing Poultry.

Philtres were cutting-edge in terms of image manipulation. Rather than being a static video or text, a philtre was a system of interpretation. The technology had evolved from a recreational device called a twist-box that had been popular in the early thirties. Twist-boxes had been marketed as a drug-free method of consciousness alteration, as “a pure soft ware high.” Like uvvy philtres, twist-boxes worked by distorting your visual input. But the twist-box used a simple Stakhanovite three-variable chaotic feedback loop, rather than a ideologically designed process, as was characteristic of the new philtres. And in these Dionysian mid-twenty-first-century times, people tended to use philtres as an enhancement to drugs rather than as a replacement for them.

The realtime human neurological mindmeld involved in programming a philtre was too complicated for Tre to have done on his own, of course, any more than a dog would have been able to paint its self-portrait. But Tre had access to UCSC’s Wad, a cosmic mind-amplification device that was a grex, that is, a symbiotic fusion of several different moldies.

With Wad, many things were possible, particularly if your problem happened to be one that Wad found interesting. Since the flickercladding plastic of moldies’ bodies was quasicrystalline imipolex, Wad had thought the quasicrystal-related Perplexing Poultry philtre to be totally floatin’ and had done a solar job for Tre.

So here was Tre getting an uvvy call about his Poultry from a businesswoman in the city.

“I’m glad you like it,” said Tre. “How come you’re calling me?”

Cynthia Major laughed, as though this were a refreshingly naive thing to say. “We want you to sign a contract with us, Tre. Do you know anything about Apex Images?”

“Not really. You do ads?”

“We’re the thirteenth-biggest image agency worldwide. Ads, music viddies, hollows, uvvy philtres—we do it all.”

“You want to use the Perplexing Poultry to sell stuff like wendy meat?”

Cynthia Major laughed infectiously. “Good guess! Apex would like to sell wendy meat with Perplexing Poultry. We do have their account. Or sell uvvy sets. Or politicians. Who knows? The lift is, we at Apex Images want to have rights to lots of floaty philtres that we can license and put out there in all kinds of ways.”

“You want to own the rights to Perplexing Poultry?”

“Well, that whole issue is more complicated than you realize, Tre, which is why the Mentor thought of having us call you. Have you ever heard of a company called Emperor Staghorn Beetle Larvae, Ltd.?”

“Yeah, I have,” said Tre. “They make imipolex. They’re based in Bangalore, India. What about them?”

“They want to sue you. They own all the patents to Roger Penrose’s work on quasicrystals, and they claim that your philtre is, in fact, derived from drawings which Penrose created for a 1990s two-dimensional quasicrystal puzzle that was also known as Perplexing Poultry. I assume this isn’t news to you?”

“The lawsuit is news. But, yeah, of course I know about Penrose’s work. We had a lecture on it in Limpware Structures. Emperor Staghorn Beetle Larvae, Ltd., is suing me? That’s ridiculous. What for? I don’t own anything.”

“Well, Emperor Staghorn doesn’t really want to sue; they’d much rather settle for a piece of your action. So before taking any irreversible steps, they got in touch with Apex through the Mentor. He’s quite well connected on the subcontinent, you know. If you sign on with Apex, we can smooth this over, Tre, and we can handle all the bothersome legal aspects of your work in the future. And we’ll pay you a nice advance on future royalties.”

As the woman talked to him, Tre was moving around his room putting on warm clothes. The sun was peeking out now and then, turning the ocean green when it shone. Tre’s life right now suited him fine. He was not happy to see a possible change.

“I’m not clear what I’d be signing up for.”

“You sign with us, and we arrange contracts and for people to use your work. We take a commission and maybe from time to time we might encourage you to design something to spec.”

“This sounds awfully complicated. I’m still a student. I don’t want to work. I want to hack. I want to stay high and get tan. I’m learning to surf.”

Cynthia gave a rich conspiratorial laugh. “Mr. Kasabian is going to love you, Tre. He’s our director. Can you come up to the city for a meeting next week?”

“Well… I don’t have any classes on Tuesday.”

The blonde head consulted someone not visible in the uvvy’s sphere of view. “How about Wednesday?” the head responded. “Eleven A.M.?”

“Zoom on this,” said Tre. “What kind of an advance are we talking about?”

The woman gazed off to one side, and Tre suddenly got the suspicion that Cynthia Major was a simmie, a software simulation of a real person.

The face turned back to him and named a dollar amount much larger than Tre had imagined anyone wanting to give him in the foreseeable future.

“Myoor!” exclaimed Tre, imitating a surprised cow, as it was currently considered funny to do, at least among Tre’s circle of friends. “I’ll be there. Mur myoor!”

So the next Wednesday, Tre caught the light rail up to San Francisco. Benny Phlogiston rode along with him to provide moral support, also to visit a new live sex show he’d heard about in North Beach.

“It’s layers of uvvy,” Benny explained enthusiastically on the train. “I, heard about it on the Web. The club’s called Real Compared To What. There’s actual nude men and women there in the middle of the room, and they’re all wearing uvvies on their necks, and there’s these uvvy dildos as well. You go in there and put on your own uvvy, and you can actually be a dildo. A dildo that talks to a naked girl.”

“That’s great, Benny,” said Tre. “I’m so happy for you. You feeble bufugu pervo. Do you think we should get high right now?”

“Never get high before an important meeting, Tre,” advised Benny. “Being high makes the meeting seem to take too long and makes it seem too important. Go in there and score some gigs, brah, and then we’ll smoke up. Maybe Apex will give you a big advance and you can buy us drinks at Adler’s Museum or Vesuvio. Let’s meet in Washington Square at three-thirty.”

“That sounds good, brah Ben. Have fun being a dildo.”

“You still don’t understand, Tre. It’s that the illusions have illusions inside them. The performers run you the illusion that you are in Real Compared To What being a dildo. But the dildo is smart, and the dildo is dreaming that it’s a user. I want to tweak into moiré patterns of uvvy/ realtime bestial lust.”

“Floaty. Give out some copies of Perplexing Poultry if you can. Maybe Real Compared To What will give you something free in return. A backstage assignation with a live woman.”

“Fully.”

Tre found Apex Images in a retrofitted Victorian on a back street above Haight Street. Heavily made-up Cynthia Major was sitting there in the flesh behind a desk. She was a real person after all.

“Tre!” she exclaimed pleasantly. “You’re here! I’ll buzz Mr. Kasabian.”

The reception area filled two carpeted rooms. A dark wooden staircase led upstairs. The windows were bay windows that bulged out, leaving nooks occupied by displays of past Apex Image successes. The displays were hollows being run by uvvies. One showed the notorious EAT ME wendy meat ad with Wendy Mooney posed nude on a giant hamburger bun, with most of a big ass cheek bared to the viewer. Her Happy Cloak cape was ruffled like a bolero bed jacket around her shoulders. She was very attractive for being nearly fifty. The ad had the transreal sheen of a classic painting by the great Kustom Kulture artist Robert Williams—Apex Images had, in fact, purchased a license for the Robert Williams style from his estate. Another display showed a teeming cloud of Von Dutch winged eyeballs, a striking image used by