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

was floatin’ wavy junk everywhere: shelves and shelves of little plastic and rubber toys, windrows of hundred-year-old comic books and magazines, staticky old hollowcasters with arcane image loops, seventeen antique Lava lamps, a wall covered with weird drawings Corey had laminated onto plastic dinner plates, and even some ancient TVs showing videos. Another wall was covered with plastic water guns, forever more futuristic than any actual needler or O.J. ugly stick.

Beyond the front cubby and the kitchen lay Corey’s sleeping cubby and his two studios, one traditional and one modern. The traditional studio was for painting and sculpture, with hand-painted canvases hanging on the walls and leaning in the corners. A lot of them were painted on black velvet and held glowing images of such historically iconic events as the vivisection of Cobb Anderson, the nuking of Akron, and the classic newsie image of Stahn and Darla emerging from the mouth of the Nest of the exterminated boppers—both of them in mirrored Happy Cloaks, Stahn lanky and jaunty, Darla weary and hugely pregnant.

Most of the sculptures were on the order of assemblages; there was, for instance, a series of oversized snow domes holding scenes like Santa with his intestines spilling out, a Happy New Year’s fetus wielding a curette, and a paradoxically sweet image of monarch butterflies circling a nude Alice in Wonderland. Though there was something odd about the butterflies’ dreamy humanoid faces…

A lot of the art spilled over into the modern studio, which also held the usual kind of electronic equipment, all recently upgraded to DIMs—a cephscope deck, a holoscanner, uvvies, and stacks of S-cubes. Corey’s kitchen was gray with ash and disorder. His sleeping cubby had an extra-high ceiling to accommodate his marvelous fifteen-foot-tall gene-tailored marijuana plants.

Willy was enchanted, and over the weeks to come he spent more and more time hanging out with Corey. He admired Corey’s classic beatnik cool. And, best of all, Corey shared Willy’s unwillingness to grow up.

Willy started helping Corey with his Silly Putters project, often working so late that he would end up sleeping over on a mattress in the front cubby. It came out that, thanks to the expenses of buying old magazines and DIM upgrades, Corey was having trouble paying the rent. Willy suggested that he move in as a roommate and share the bills. Corey said that sounded fine, as long as they didn’t get on each other’s nerves. Just to clear the air of any misunderstanding about his motives, Willy explained his sex problem. He was straight, but unable to contemplate physical sex with a real live woman. He was, in short, a jack-off.

“The stain of Onan,” said Corey. “Didn’t something terrible happen to that guy in the Bible? Hold on—” He nimbly accessed his uvvy, and the little device declaimed a Bible verse:

“And what Onan did was displeasing in the sight of the Lord, and He slew him also. Genesis 38:10.”

Corey looked disappointed. “That’s not very visual. Too bad. Well, at least you’re not lusting after twelve-year-old girls, Willy.”

“Is that what you’re into?” asked Willy uncertainly.

“I do think about young girls from time to time. But I don’t act out. As an artist, I’m able to transmute the dross of my perversion into the gold of deathless cultural artifacts. As a practical matter, I only date twenty-year-olds and over. When I do date. I like it better when women find out about me and just come over and hang out.”

Willy helped Corey make some preliminary Silly Putters. Being true Art, the project was somewhat pointlessly difficult. The problem with trying to create these half-living objects was that you were working in the zone between the slavishly obedient DIM and the utterly ungovernable moldie. There was a constant danger of the thing’s behavior entering the strange attractor of consciousness. Times like that, Willy had to stun the freshly self-aware being and manually damp down its non-linearity parameters, feeling uneasy about performing what was, in some respects, an act of lobotomy if not murder.

One model that Willy got to work very nicely was a femlin, modeled on a groovy little Leroy Neiman sprite figure that Corey showed him in the joke pages of an old magazine called Playboy. The femlin wore nothing but high heels, black stockings, and opera gloves. She loved to cavort with Willy’s penis. Willy was soon obsessively attached to her.

One dire day the femlin’s mind chaotically tunneled into the basin of self-awareness, and she grokked how nowhere her life with Willy was. She managed to sneak out of Corey’s apartment while the door’s electric zapper was off, and ran down the warren’s public hallway. A frightened neighbor lady stomped on the femlin, mistaking her for a rat. Willy happened upon this scene and totally lost it; he started screaming at the neighbor so hard that some passersby had to grab him and hold him down and dose him with a sedative, right there on the floor next to the smeared remains of his precious femlin.

Around then it came out that the neighbors were tired of Willy and Corey’s nasty habits from A to Z, and there got to be such a bad vibe around the warren that it started to make sense to move. Willy and Corey were continuing to find each other fully compatible, so they decided to find a new place together. In fact, they decided to design and build their own luxury isopod estate in a crater outside of Einstein—build a spacious little biosphere with its own soil floor and crater-spanning dome. Really an “isopod” was supposed to be a crawly critter like a pill-bug or a woodlouse—but the loonies had highjacked the word.

The isopod would cost billions, but Willy had hundreds of millions, and hundreds of millions more were coming in faster than he could spend them. Corey got deeply involved in designing the estate—the mansion, the studios, the vegetable gardens, and the giant marijuana grove. The construction took several years.

By the time they moved in, Willy had fully nailed the problem of designing Silly Putters—it was basically just a matter of having them homeostatically damp their own nonlinearities whenever certain activation thresholds were exceeded. With this feedback in place, the little creatures would putter along at the low twilight border of awareness forever. So now Willy had a femlin again. He called her Elvira.

Corey got interested in mass-producing the Silly Putters instead of letting them be one-of-a-kind art objects, but Willy stayed out of this endeavor. Instead he turned his energies to improving the isopod, adding every manner of special feature to it: a God’s-eye real-time map of Earth, a private swimming pool, a menagerie, a Turkish bath, a loop-the-loop bicycle course, and on and on. The years drifted by.

For a time, Whitey and Darla and their twin girls Joke and Yoke were regular visitors, but then Corey gave some Silly Putters to Joke and Yoke for a birthday, and the Putters did something that led to a furious breakdown of the friendship, at least on Darla’s part. Willy never found out the details. Women continued to visit Corey, though never for very long. More years passed, and little Joke started turning up at the isopod to hang out with Corey by herself.

The DIMs and the Limpware Developer’s Kit continued to be huge successes, but Willy didn’t interest himself in them anymore. It was like something in him had snapped during that last frantic development push in Cocoa. He had no special desire to do anything. He became something of a hermit, meditating and savoring his solitude. He could pass days at a time sitting in the little forest of giant marijuana plants, staring up past the plants through the dome at the stars.

Finally one day in the summer of 2052—so many years gone!— something new got Willy’s attention.

It started with a grinding sound beneath the soil, over in the corner of the grove where the dome met the ground. A moon-quake? A rupture in the plastic beneath the soil floor? But then the ground heaved upward as if from a giant mole, and a shiny blob of purple imipolex pushed up into the isopod air. The blob formed a face and spoke.

“Willy Taze! You still haven’t visited the Nest! We need you now. With your help, the first Gurdle decryption may happen soon.”

“You’re… you’re Gurdle?”

The moldie wormed himself farther out of the hole, though carefully leaving his tail in the hole to prevent the isopod’s air from rushing out. His purple skin glinted with silvery highlights. “I’m Gurdle-7! Gurdle’s great-great-great-great-grandson. It’s been twenty-one years, Willy! And now it’s time to leave your enchanted garden. Come on and slip inside of me. I’ll be a bubbletopper to carry you to the Nest. And inside the Nest, we have prepared a pink-house for you every bit as pleasant as this isopod.”

“Do we have to crawl back through that hole?” said Willy dubiously. “I’ll bump myself on the rocks.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll make my skin hard around you. And I’ll patch the hole behind me. Come, Willy. Arise! The Gurdle decryption is of cosmic importance. And only you can help us accomplish the final steps.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

STAHN

October 31, 2053

Stahn stepped out of his fine Victorian mansion on Masonic Avenue above Haight Street in San Francisco. It was early evening on Halloween, 2053. Walking by were lively groups of people on their way to the Castro Street Halloween party, a traditional event now back in operation after a brief hiatus during the anxious years surrounding the coming of the Second Millennium. AIDS was gone, drugs were legal, and San Francisco was more fun than ever.

Stahn felt very strung out. He’d gotten lifted on camote after his final conversation with Tre Dietz late last night. In the afternoon, Tre had uvvied up to announce that some kind of software agent named Jenny had shown him a secret tape of Sri Ramanujan explaining a new piece of mathematics called the Tessellation Equation. Jenny had talked to Stahn too. She looked like a lanky teenage farm girl. It seemed she lived inside a Heritagist computer, but that she had very close connections to the loonie moldies. Then, in the evening, Tre had called again—very distraught—to talk about ransoming his wife Terri from the moldies. Stahn made some calls to the Moon to try and help out with that, and told Tre, and had then started getting loaded as he normally did in the evening.

But then a few hours later Tre uvvied again, fantastically excited about some new vision about how to use the Tessellation Equation to make Perplexing Poultry imipolex based on tilings of every finite dimension. Disquietingly, this software agent Jenny thing was there on the link with Tre, listening in. She wouldn’t say why she was so interested in this information. But Tre didn’t care, his obsession was to get Stahn to understand about Perplexing Poultry in Hilbert space, and about how Ramanujan’s Tessellation Equation could now be used to make imipolex-5, imipolex-6, imipolex-N!

To help himself understand the strange ideas he was hearing, Stahn drunkenly chewed up a couple of nuggets of camote while Tre was talking. It wasn’t the first time he’d tried the drug, but this time it turned out to be a big mistake, an unbearably strange lift, a psychotically strange panic trip to deep and personal revelations about his multitudinous personality flaws. Stahn went to bed and tried to sleep, but instead spent ten hellish hours in Hilbert space with Tre’s multi-dimensional Poultry pecking and clucking in the mysterious thickets of his chaotically disturbed consciousness. It was a relief to see dawn come, and to get up and try and start a new day.

In the afternoon, Stahn finally managed to get some sleep, but