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  THE WARE TETRALOGY

  Rudy Rucker

  Copyright © 2010 by Rudy Rucker

  Cover art by Chris Harvey/Fotolia.com

  Cover design by Stephen H. Segal

  Ebook design by Neil Clarke

  ISBN: 978-1-60701-211-5 (ebook)

  ISBN: 978-1-60701-211-5 (trade paperback)

  PRIME BOOKS

  www.prime-books.com

  All characters in this book are fictitious.

  No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, mechanical, electronic, or otherwise, without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder.

  For more information, contact Prime Books.

  Table of Contents

  Introduction by William Gibson

  Software

  Wetware

  Freeware

  Realware

  Afterword by Rudy Rucker

  About the Author

  Sui Generis: A Testimony

  by William Gibson

  Genuinely sui generis novelists operate at an inherent disadvantage, and all the more so in any so-called genre.

  Genre is that dubious bargain whereby the reader is offered (for our present purposes) a novel, a form whose very name promises a new experience, but offers, in genre, the implicit and crucial promise of the repetition of previous pleasures.

  Rudy Rucker has never trafficked in that repetition, and while he unabashedly loves the genre in which he tends to be marketed, he transcends it, or perhaps engulfs it, in his singularity. You’ll see this said about all too many science fiction writers, given novelty’s supposed (and largely spurious, in my view) importance to the genre, but of Rudy it’s quite literally true. He is one splendidly odd duck, balanced between pure mathematics on the one hand and spontaneous bop prosody on the other, while uncounted further hands (or paws, in some cases) flicker in from their individual Hilbert spaces, bearing cups, wands, alien sex toys, artifacts out of Roadrunner cartoons, terrible jokes, gleefully fell dooms, and lubricating dabs of mentholated ichor.

  Scarily bright, and a card-carrying Holy Fool who’s managed to fall off every cliff but the only really wrong ones, he used to frighten me.

  In part, no doubt, because he’s the only higher mathematician I’ve ever known, while I am myself virtually an innumerate. I knew from the very start of our acquaintance (from before, actually, as I read him before I met him) that he habitually, effortlessly, visited realms I was literally incapable of envisioning, let alone visiting. He also frightened me because, though generally convivial, he seemed to me to teeter atop an angelic pinhead of purest Random, causing me the constant apprehension that he might at any second do or say literally anything at all. As I was secretly attempting to negotiate my own life and literary career with the emergency brake on, this made me complexly uneasy. He seemed starry-eyed with the sheer joy of forgetting the brakes entirely.

  I found him unsettling in another way as well, though that was not so much about him as about something we had in common. Being at least a decade older than the rest of our cyberpunk cohort, we were both veterans of (ahem) “the Sixties.” Which was to say that we had once been somewhere very strange and new indeed, but that that tide had somehow receded, leaving us in some new but actually markedly unstrange iteration of a world we had once expected to change utterly. Whenever I ran into Rudy, over the first decade or so of my career, I worried that we were both actually too old for this. But then I’d note the shiver of angelic pinhead-wobble, and in some paradoxical way be comforted thereby. (“And at the time,” Rudy wrote to me recently, “I thought we were jaded roués!”)

  Before I read or met Rudy, I’d lived for several seasons in Washington, D.C., with a roommate who at some point went up to New York to see a great retrospective show of the Surrealists, kindly and hugely formatively bringing me the show’s catalog as a gift. I had heard of Surrealism, but had never really put together what it was. That catalog became a sort of Rosetta Stone for me, a way of decoding and assembling a great many very diverse things that I had encountered in art and literature, things I had known were similar, in some way, but without really understanding how.

  The capital-s Surrealism, Surrealism™, was splendid stuff, but I now recognized a similar but lower-case impulse in virtually everything that had ever attracted me in the popular arts. I saw it in Mad Magazine (and particularly in its imitators), in Forrest J. Ackerman’s gloriously cheesy Famous Monsters of Filmland, in Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone, in Zap Comix. And I saw it, of course, in the prose science fiction I had grown up with: a folk surrealism, a street surrealism, entirely free of Breton’s faux-papal excommunications and other tedious hi-jinx. It was, I saw, to certain forms of popular art, and most particularly to the flavors of science fiction that had worked best for me, the equivalent of the ethanol molecules in an alcoholic beverage. So I filed that one away, and went about my business, such as it was.

  Later, encountering first the fiction and then its author, I took it instantly for granted that in Rudy Rucker I found an exemplar of that very thing, a natural-born American street surrealist, bordering at times on a practitioner of Art Brute.

  Rudy’s fiction has a much higher percentage of surrealism molecules than most fiction, science or otherwise. It has, as moonshiners say when they swirl whiskey in a glass, in order to closely observe how it settles back down the sides of the glass, “good legs.” Rudy’s fiction is probably a bit too strong, in that regard, for some readers, but even the hard stuff, let me assure you, is an enjoyably acquired taste.

  And I’m no longer afraid of Rudy. We’re both (even) older, and vibrate now at more authentically geezeroid frequencies. And I no longer feel that the world outside the window isn’t as freaky as the ones we glimpsed back in the Sixties. It is. With bells on.

  Now go and read Rudy Rucker, in the 21st century. Dude’s sui generis. And has good legs.

  —17 December 2008, Vancouver

  Software

  For Al Humboldt, Embry Rucker, and Dennis Poague.

  Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4,

  Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7, Chapter 8,

  Chapter 9, Chapter 10, Chapter 11, Chapter 12,

  Chapter 13, Chapter 14, Chapter 15, Chapter 16,

  Chapter 17, Chapter 18, Chapter 19, Chapter 20,

  Chapter 21, Chapter 22, Chapter 23, Chapter 24,

  Chapter 25, Chapter 26, Chapter 27, Chapter 28

  CHAPTER ONE

  Cobb Anderson would have held out longer, but you don’t see dolphins every day. There were twenty of them, fifty, rolling in the little gray waves, wicketting up out of the water. It was good to see them. Cobb took it for a sign and went out for his evening sherry an hour early.

  The screen door slapped shut behind him and he stood uncertainly for a moment, dazed by the late afternoon sun. Annie Cushing watched him from her window in the cottage next door. Beatles music drifted out past her.

  “You forgot your hat,” she advised. He was still a good-looking man, barrel-chested and bearded like Santa Claus. She wouldn’t have minded getting it on with him, if he weren’t so . . .

  “Look at the dolphins, Annie. I don’t need a hat. Look how happy they are. I don’t need a hat and I don’t need a wife.” He started toward the asphalt road, walking stiffly across the crushed white shells.

  Annie went back to brushing her hair. She wore it white and long, and she kept it thick with hormone spray. She was sixty and not too brittle to hug. She wondered idly if Cobb would take her to the Golden Prom next Friday.

  The long last chord of “Day in the Life” hung in the air. Annie couldn’t have said which song she had just heard—after fifty years her responses to the music were all but extinguished—but she walke
d across the room to turn the stack of records over. If only something would happen, she thought for the thousandth time. I get so tired of being me.

  At the Superette, Cobb selected a chilled quart of cheap sherry and a damp paper bag of boiled peanuts. And he wanted something to look at.

  The Superette magazine selection was nothing compared to what you could get over in Cocoa. Cobb settled finally for a love-ad newspaper called Kiss and Tell. It was always good and weird . . . most of the advertisers were seventy-year-old hippies like himself. He folded the first-page picture under so that only the headline showed. PLEASE PHEEZE ME.

  Funny how long you can laugh at the same jokes, Cobb thought, waiting to pay. Sex seemed odder all the time. He noticed the man in front of him, wearing a light-blue hat blocked from plastic mesh.

  If Cobb concentrated on the hat he saw an irregular blue cylinder. But if he let himself look through the holes in the mesh he could see the meek curve of the bald head underneath. Skinny neck and a light-bulb head, clawing in his change. A friend.

  “Hey, Farker.”

  Farker finished rounding up his nickels, then turned his body around. He spotted the bottle.

  “Happy Hour came early today.” A note of remonstrance. Farker worried about Cobb.

  “It’s Friday. Pheeze me tight.” Cobb handed Farker the paper.

  “Seven eighty-five,” the cashier said to Cobb. Her white hair was curled and hennaed. She had a deep tan. Her flesh had a pleasingly used and oily look to it.

  Cobb was surprised. He’d already counted money into his hand. “I make it six fifty.” Numbers began sliding around in his head.

  “I meant my box number,” the cashier said with a toss of her head. “In the Kiss and Tell.” She smiled coyly and took Cobb’s money. She was proud of her ad this month. She’d gone to a studio for the picture.

  Farker handed the paper back to Cobb outside. “I can’t look at this, Cobb. I’m still a happily married man, God help me.”

  “You want a peanut?”

  “Thanks.” Farker extracted a soggy shell from the little bag. There was no way his spotted and trembling old hands could have peeled the nut, so he popped it whole into his mouth. After a minute he spit the hull out.

  They walked towards the beach, eating pasty peanuts. They wore no shirts, only shorts and sandals. The afternoon sun beat pleasantly on their backs. A silent Mr. Frostee truck cruised past.

  Cobb cracked the screw-top on his dark-brown bottle and took a tentative first sip. He wished he could remember the box number the cashier had just told him. Numbers wouldn’t stay still for him anymore. It was hard to believe he’d ever been a cybernetician. His memory ranged back to his first robots and how they’d learned to bop . . .

  “Food drop’s late again,” Farker was saying. “And I hear there’s a new murder cult up in Daytona. They’re called the Little Kidders.” He wondered if Cobb could hear him. Cobb was just standing there with empty colorless eyes, a yellow stain of sherry on the dense white hair around his lips.

  “Food drop,” Cobb said, suddenly coming back. He had a way of re-entering a conversation by confidently booming out the last phrase which had registered. “I’ve still got a good supply.”

  “But be sure to eat some of the new food when it comes,” Farker cautioned. “For the vaccines. I’ll tell Annie to remind you.”

  “Why is everybody so interested in staying alive? I left my wife and came down here to drink and die in peace. She can’t wait for me to kick off. So why . . . ” Cobb’s voice caught. The fact of the matter was that he was terrified of death. He took a quick, medicinal slug of sherry.

  “If you were peaceful, you wouldn’t drink so much,” Farker said mildly. “Drinking is the sign of an unresolved conflict.”

  “No kidding,” Cobb said heavily. In the golden warmth of the sun, the sherry had taken quick effect. “Here’s an unresolved conflict for you.” He ran a fingernail down the vertical white scar on his furry chest. “I don’t have the money for another second-hand heart. In a year or two this cheapie’s going to poop out on me.”

  Farker grimaced. “So? Use your two years.”

  Cobb ran his finger back up the scar, as if zipping it up. “I’ve seen what it’s like, Farker. I’ve had a taste of it. It’s the worst thing there is.” He shuddered at the dark memory . . . teeth, ragged clouds . . . and fell silent.

  Farker glanced at his watch. Time to get going or Cynthia would . . .

  “You know what Jimi Hendrix said?” Cobb asked. Recalling the quote brought the old resonance back into his voice. “When it’s my time to die, I’m going to be the one doing it. So as long as I’m alive, you let me live my way.”

  Farker shook his head. “Face it, Cobb, if you drank less you’d get a lot more out of life.” He raised his hand to cut off his friend’s reply. “But I’ve got to get home. Bye bye.”

  “Bye.”

  Cobb walked to the end of the asphalt and over a low dune to the edge of the beach. No one was there today, and he sat down under his favorite palm tree.

  The breeze had picked up a little. Warmed by the sand, it lapped at Cobb’s face, buried under white whiskers. The dolphins were gone.

  He sipped sparingly at his sherry and let the memories play. There were only two thoughts to be avoided: death and his abandoned wife Verena. The sherry kept them away.

  The sun was going down behind him when he saw the stranger. Barrel-chest, erect posture, strong arms and legs covered with curly hair, a round white beard. Like Santa Claus, or like Ernest Hemingway the year he shot himself.

  “Hello, Cobb,” the man said. He wore sungoggles and looked amused. His shorts and sportshirt glittered.

  “Care for a drink?” Cobb gestured at the half-empty bottle. He wondered who, if anyone, he was talking to.

  “No thanks,” the stranger said, sitting down. “It doesn’t do anything for me.”

  Cobb stared at the man. Something about him . . .

  “You’re wondering who I am,” the stranger said, smiling. “I’m you.”

  “You who?”

  “You me.” The stranger used Cobb’s own tight little smile on him. “I’m a mechanical copy of your body.”

  The face seemed right and there was even the scar from the heart transplant. The only difference between them was how alert and healthy the copy looked. Call him Cobb Anderson2. Cobb2 didn’t drink. Cobb envied him. He hadn’t had a completely sober day since he had the operation and left his wife.

  “How did you get here?”

  The robot waved a hand palm up. Cobb liked the way the gesture looked on someone else. “I can’t tell you,” the machine said. “You know how most people feel about us.”

  Cobb chuckled his agreement. He should know. At first the public had been delighted that Cobb’s moon-robots had evolved into intelligent boppers. That had been before Ralph Numbers had led the 2001 revolt. After the revolt, Cobb had been tried for treason. He focused back on the present.

  “If you’re a bopper, then how can you be . . . here?” Cobb waved his hand in a vague circle, taking in the hot sand and the setting sun. “It’s too hot. All the boppers I know of are based on supercooled circuits. Do you have a refrigeration unit hidden in your stomach?”

  Anderson2 made another familiar hand-gesture. “I’m not going to tell you yet, Cobb. Later you’ll find out. Just take this . . . ” The robot fumbled in its pocket and brought out a wad of bills. “Twenty-five grand. We want you to get the flight to Disky tomorrow. Ralph Numbers will be your contact up there. He’ll meet you at the Anderson room in the museum.”

  Cobb’s heart leapt at the thought of seeing Ralph Numbers again. Ralph, his first and finest model, the one who had set all the others free. But . . .

  “I can’t get a visa,” Cob said. “You know that. I’m not allowed to leave the Gimmie territory.”

  “Let us worry about that,” the robot said urgently. “There’ll be someone to help you through the formalities. We’re working
on it right now. And I’ll stand in for you while you’re gone. No one’ll be the wiser.”

  The intensity of his double’s tone made Cobb suspicious. He took a drink of sherry and tried to look shrewd. “What’s the point of all this? Why should I want to go to the Moon in the first place? And why do the boppers want me there?”

  Anderson2 glanced around the empty beach and leaned close. “We want to make you immortal, Dr. Anderson. After all you did for us, it’s the least we can do.”

  Immortal! The word was like a window flung open. With death so close nothing had mattered. But if there was a way out . . .

  “How?” Cobb demanded. In his excitement he rose to his feet. “How will you do it? Will you make me young again, too?”

  “Take it easy,” the robot said, also rising. “Don’t get over-excited. Just trust us. With our supplies of tank-grown organs we can rebuild you from the ground up. And you’ll get as much interferon as you need.”

  The machine stared into Cobb’s eyes, looking honest. Staring back, Cobb noticed that they hadn’t gotten the irises quite right. The little ring of blue was too flat and even. The eyes were, after all, just plastic, unreadable plastic.

  The double pressed the money into Cobb’s hand. “Take the money and get the shuttle tomorrow. We’ll arrange for a young man called Sta-Hi to help you at the spaceport.”

  Music was playing, wheedling closer. A Mr. Frostee truck, the same one Cobb had seen before. It was white, with a big freezer-box in back. There was a smiling giant plastic ice-cream cone mounted on top of the cab. Cobb’s double gave him a pat on the shoulder and trotted up the beach.

  When he reached the truck, the robot looked back and flashed a smile. Yellow teeth in the white beard. For the first time in years, Cobb loved himself, the erect strut, the frightened eyes. “Good-bye,” he shouted, waving the money. “And thanks!”

  Cobb Anderson2 jumped into the soft-ice-cream truck next to the driver, a fat short-haired man with no shirt. And then the Mr. Frostee truck drove off, its music silenced again. It was dusk now. The sound of the truck’s motor faded into the ocean’s roar. If only it was true.