Rudy Rucker - Realware.rtf

Realware (v2.0)

Rudy Rucker, 2000

CHAPTER ONE

PHIL

February 12

"Wake up, Phil. It's your sister on the uvvy. Something's happened." Kevvie's breath was alkaloidal and bitter in the dawn.

Phil woke slowly. He liked to take the time to think about his dreams before they evanesced. Just now he'd been dreaming about hiking again. For some reason, he always dreamed about the same three or four places, and one of the places was an imaginary range of mountains, an arc of icy little peaks that were somehow very-domesticated. Easy to climb.

"Wake up!" repeated Kevvie. Her voice was, as usual, flat and practical, though now a bit louder than before. As Phil's eyes fluttered open an interesting thought occurred to him: maybe the mountains were his teeth. Sleepily he started to tell Kevvie his idea.

"My teeth are the mountains that -- "

But she wasn't listening. Her blue eyes were intent, her fox-face was pinched with urgency. "You talk to Jane right now," she said, plopping the little uvvy onto the pillow next to Phil. The uvvy was displaying a tiny holographic image of Phil's sister.

Calm, practical Jane. But today Jane wasn't calm. Her eyes were red and wet with tears.

"Da's dead," quavered Jane. "It's horrible. A wowo got him? Willow says they were in bed and all of a sudden their wowo got really big, all bright and swirly, and it jumped inside of Da and the light was shining out of his eyes like searchlights and he was yelling and then his body collapsed and the wowo sucked him inside and crushed him. Da's gone! Willow's covered with his blood. It's so gnarly?" Jane's voice twisted up an octave on the last word and she began sobbing. "I can't believe it. Wowos are just a toy. Da and Tre made them up."

Phil felt a savage torrent of emotions, too fast to nail down. Relief, terror, joy, wonder, sorrow, confusion. His father was dead and he was free. No old man to judge him for not doing anything with his life. His father was dead and he was alone. No stand-up old guy between him and the Reaper.

"Dead? What ... When did Willow call you?" Phil's eyes began throbbing.

"Just now. From the car. She's scared the wowo might get her next. She left the house to go to the gimmie. She told me to tell you and for you to call her. I'm flying out. You pick me up."

"Wait, wait, this is all too -- " Phil broke off in confusion. Kevvie, who'd been avidly eavesdropping, smiled and offered him a piece of her chewing gum. Phil shook his head no. Kevvie tended never to have the correct emotional response. In company, she had to look at other people so she'd know when to laugh.

"What are you going to do?" demanded Jane's little face. Her pointy chin was trembling.

"I'll call Willow, then I'll drive Kevvie's car down to Palo Alto, and then I'll call you back. And yeah, I can pick you up. But -- are you sure Da's really dead? From a wowo? It's just a fancy hollow graphic that Da made up a story about! Wowos are math and bullshit!"

"Willow said the wowo pulled Da in like it was -- a garbage disposal. She said that. She's hysterical. She shouldn't be driving."

"I'll call her. I love you, Jane."

"I love you too, Phil. Be strong. I'll see you tonight. I'm going to the airport right now."

Phil clicked off the uvvy and the room was quiet. His eyes felt so strange -- bulging and puffy and aching. They wanted to cry, but for now they were dry. He imagined a wowo in his father's head. Light streaming out of his father's eye-sockets.

"Oh, poor Phil," said Kevvie. "It's terrible to lose your father. I want you to know that I'm here for you. But what was that about a wowo? That hologram thingie? Willow says that's what killed your father? A ball of colored light? The gimmie aren't going to buy it. She should get a top attorney right away!"

"That's too -- " Phil began, but broke off with a vague gesture. In his mind the full sentence was, "That's too stupid and autistic of you to deserve an answer," but he didn't have the heart to start a fight. Kevvie's inability to visualize other people's feelings was so extreme that Phil had come to think of it as a clinical psychiatric condition. Indeed, Kevvie habitually chewed a popular empathy-enhancement gum in a perhaps unconscious effort to try and correct her deficit. "E-gum makes you part-of," as the chanted commercials had it. But it seemed like the only person that e-gum made Kevvie more sensitive to was Kevvie. All these angry thoughts went racing through Phil's head as he made the little gesture. He reminded himself that he liked Kevvie. His father's death was filling him with irrational rage.

Da dead. Phil groaned and got out of bed, sliding the groan down into a keening moan. This hurt so much that he needed to keep making noise.

He wore only a plain white T-shirt. His butt was small, his legs were short and nimble. Phil's mother Eve was Greek, while his father Kurt had been German. Phil's body hair and chin-stubble were dark, but the hair on his head was a floppy shock of blond. His sly, hooded eyes and sardonic lips made him look dissipated, which was misleading. Phil had been clean and sober his whole life. When the mandatory grade-school screening had revealed that Phil carried the genes for alcoholism and drug addiction, Phil had taken it to heart and decided to spend his life Straight Edge. A singularly mature decision for one so young -- with the bonus of providing a way to be superior to Da, who'd been quite fond of booze and pot.

Phil's room was bright and messy, an odd-shaped room with a peaked ceiling and walls that slanted out on two sides. There was a lot of empty space near the ceiling, and Phil had some home-built robot blimps cruising around up there like sluggish tropical fish. Flying machines of all kinds were Phil's hobby. The blimps were like pets, and Phil had names for them: one was Led Zep of course, the others were the Graf Z, the Macon, the Penile Implant, and the largest and most colorful was the Uffin Wowo. The last name was a riff on Da's brilliant uvvy graphic that had somehow ended in disaster less than an hour ago. Da dead. Life ends in tears.

Distractedly humming, Phil put on some thick red tights he'd gotten from the thrift store. There was gray morning light from the room's skylight. Kevvie sat on a rolling desk chair, chewing e-gum and watching him.

Phil swung open his room's arched mouse-hole door to reveal the interior of what looked like a factory. His room was located inside a bigger room, that is, Phil's room was a wooden box on stilts inside a subdivided warehouse down near the bay-side Port of San Francisco. Some developer had sliced the giant warehouse up into five or six strips, and Phil rented one of the strips along with two other people: a guy called Derek and a woman named Calla. Derek was a chaos artist and Calla a genetic counselor, while Phil was a cook in an expensive restaurant. Each of the three lived in their own cobbled-together wooden box.

Phil's and Calla's boxes were on stilts, and Derek's hung by cables from the ceiling. The huge open warehouse floor was left free and clear for other purposes. The three boxes were a bit like birdhouses in an aviary -- quite literally so in the case of Phil's, as he'd designed his dwelling from the specs for a traditional pentagonal wren-house like a kid might bring home from shop class. He'd tried giving his room a round door, but after tripping over the curved threshold a few times, he'd compromised and made the door's bottom square and flush with his box's floor.

Phil started down his thin little chicken-walk of a staircase. He could see out the windows that lined the tops of the warehouse's walls: a view of the San Francisco Bay, of a floating gray ship and a docked red ship, of great four-legged cranes like giraffes or elephants, of concrete dockside elevators, of more warehouses beneath low clouds. Everything chilled and dismal. A Thursday in February.

High overhead hung a giant twisting model of DNA; this was Calla's. It was made of linked spheres that were hollow cocoons spun by a fabricant, a little DIM ant that could turn sunlight and wet leaves into filaments of rayon. The DNA model was a useful thing for Calla to show to her clients, who came here in person when the genetic information that Calla gave them was so harsh or so strange that uvvy contact wasn't enough. Phil well remembered when his genetic counselor had laid out his options: abstinence or addiction.

Down on the factory floor, two of Derek's "attractors" were active. One looked like a big wobbly green doughnut, the other like a purple cow-udder with twisting teats. They were patterns of air currents, flowing volumes of air made visible by color-lit fogs of vapor, fractally rich with eddies and schlieren. A dozen other attractor-devices sat idle: cryptic, mute technoclutter. Only when the attractors were powered up did they clothe themselves in beautiful, orderly chaos. Da's wowo had been a similar kind of thing.

Phil took a shortcut through the doughnut volume, careful not to bang into the machinery at its core. But he stepped on something anyway, something that yipped. Derek's mutt Umberto. The dog sometimes liked to sleep hidden inside the doughnut, warmed by the central generator.

"Hush, Umberto," said Phil. "It's okay." If only that were true.

In the bathroom, Phil drank some water. The water on his teeth like a mountain stream. Da dead? It was way too soon. There was still too much to say to the old man, too much to learn. Now the tears were beginning to come. A rough sob. He buried his face in a towel.

After a bit, Phil washed off his face with cold water, then cried some more and washed some more. The beautiful complexity of water, of its sounds and motions. Da wouldn't see water anymore. Phil's dream just before waking-he'd been climbing the teeth-mountains and -hadn't there been a ball of light in the dream? Phil leaned on the sink, resting his forehead against the mirror with his eyes closed, trying to look back into his dream. Wouldn't it make sense to have had a special dream just as his father died? Especially when Da had died so strangely.

"Here's some coffee," said Kevvie, who'd followed him as far as the kitchen the little area of the factory floor that passed for a kitchen, a sink and a stove and a table with chairs on the concrete floor beneath the seventy-foot-high truss-supported corrugated steel ceiling. She'd brought the uvvy as well. "Get away, Umberto," she said, and aimed a sharp kick at the dog, who'd come over to see if he might get some breakfast. Kevvie couldn't stand Umberto.

"Don't hurt him, Kevvie." Phil took the coffee. "Thanks. I can't believe this. I feel so -- it's like my head's exploding. Life's not a rehearsal. It's real." He took the coffee Kevvie handed him, but set it down without drinking.

"You better call Willow," said Kevvie. She glared at Umberto so hard that the dog went slinking away.

"I know." Phil told the uvvy to dial his stepmother Willow. Phil's father Kurt had left Phil and Jane's mother Eve for Willow when Phil was thirteen and Jane was eleven. Eve had successfully remarried, and the families had stayed reasonably close over the years, with Phil and Jane freely moving between the households of their two biological parents.

Willow answered on the second ring. "Willow Chen Gottner," her voice was loud and harsh, just short of a scream. Willow's image floated above the uvvy -- she was a thoroughly Californian Chinese woman with a symmetric face, full lips, and blonde hair so shiny and processed that it looked like metal. She moved with abrupt, birdlike gestures. There were smears of blood on her hands and on her cheeks. Her normally tidy features were blurred and twisted with anguish.

"Hi, Willow, it's Phil. I just talked to Jane."

"Kurt's really dead, yes, this is his blood all over me. I'm so scared, Phil. The wowo ate him like garbage."

"I'm coming right down. Where are you?"

"I'm at the gimmie station. They don't know what the fuck I'm talking about. They think I murdered Kurt or some shit." Willow was notoriously foul-mouthed. This was something that Phil and Jane's mother always tut-tutted over, but it made Phil and Jane like Willow more than they might have otherwise.

"You see!" interjected Kevvie. "Tell her to get a top criminal attorney!"

Phil glared at Kevvie, but felt he had to pass the idea on. "Do you have a lawyer?"

"Right! As if I need a lawyer to deal with some stupid gimmie pigs who I'm paying in the first place. As if a lawyer's going to protect me from a fucking hole to the fourth dimension that ground up my brilliant handsome husband like garbage!" She glared angrily at someone out of view. "Stay away from me, you sow!" The uvvy-view jerked wildly. "Stop it!" Then the uvvy went dead. Phil immediately called again; a gimmie answered.

"Officer Grady, Wackerhut Police Services, Palo Alto Station."

"I was just talking to Willow Gottner?" Phil said. "We were cut off?" He could hear Willow screaming curses in the background.

"She's out of control, sir," said the gimmie officer. "We're concerned she could injure herself. I'm afraid we're going to have to restrain her and administer a sedative."

"Take it easy! I'll be right there. I'm Kurt Gottner's son Phil. Where's your station located? I'm driving down from the city."

The gimmie gave Kurt directions and added, "I'm very sorry about this, Mr. Gottner."

"My father's really dead?" Kurt asked.

"We've got a response team up there. We're still not entirely sure what the situation is. The material evidence indicates a fatality, but there's no body. And, yes, your father's missing." There was a shriek from Willow. "She wants to tell you one more thing. I'll hold the uvvy out to her."

The little image showed Willow, sitting on a plastic couch squeezed between two Wackerhut policewomen. They had their arms twined with hers in some special cop way and one of them was in the process of pulsing a drug-mist squeezie in front of Willow's tiny triangular nose.

"Phil, be sure to call Tre Dietz," said Willow, her features already slackening. "I forgot to tell Jane."

"Don't worry, Willow. I'll be right there."

"Call him!" insisted Willow. "Tell Tre the wowos are real! The bastard." The uvvy clicked off.

"Who's Tre?" Kevvie wanted to know.

"Oh, you've heard of him. He's the uvvy graphics hacker in Santa Cruz who runs that new company Philosophical Toys? He got interested in Da's work on this weird shape called a Klein bottle -- and they did the wowo together. Just for a goof. Tre's only about thirty. He and Da used to hang together and tweak the wowos." The unreality of it all came crashing over Phil then and he was crying. "I don't understand, Kevvie. Da can't be dead."

"But who actually owns the rights to the wowo?" asked Kevvie.

"Kevvie, that's too -- " Phil broke off and slumped in his chair. This had really taken the wind out of his sails. "Can you drive, Kevvie? I don't think I can drive. I'm all torn up."

"I'll go dress."

When Kevvie left, Umberto came skulking back out of the doughnut. Phil petted him absently as he uvvied Tre. Tre was still in bed with his wife Terri, and none too talkative.

"Yaaar?"

"Tre, this is Phil Gottner. One of the wowos just killed my dad. You better turn the rest of them off."

"Myoor! That's so xoxxed! I should have thought of this. Your poor dad. I'll kill the wowos right now. Later."

Phil left a message at the restaurant where he cooked, and then he put on his silver boots and black leather jacket and went outside with Kevvie. There was a stink like sewage and cheese from the big moldie nest in the abandoned red ship that sat in a silted-in slip across the street from Phil's warehouse -- the Snooks family. A group of skungy sporeheads and slug-skaters were standing on the pavement by the ship talking to a couple of the Snooks moldies and buying camote, the sporeheads' drug of choice. Obviously they'd been up all night. Phil gave them the finger, pro forma. They jeered back; one of them halfheartedly threw a rock. Phil and Kevvie headed out.

It started raining as they got on the road. The traffic was light; the former Silicon Valley of the Peninsula had become something of a Rust Belt, and there wasn't much reason for anyone to go down there from San Francisco. There were only a handful of cars on the road, all tiny electric jobbies with hydrogen fuel cells. Overhead you could see a few of the richer travelers riding on great flapping moldies.

Kevvie wanted to listen to an old-fashioned morning audio show she liked, a smugly cynical guy and a woman with a dead flat that's-the-way-it-is-and-nothing-more voice just like Kevvie's. The theme of the show was that flying saucer aliens had been invading Earth for over a century and that the government was keeping it a secret. As if there were a government that mattered. As if the actual aliens who'd briefly appeared on the Moon this winter weren't more exciting than hundred-year-old lies. But Kevvie loved this shit. Phil threw a fit and made her turn it off.

"You're in a nasty mood today."

"My father's been murdered!"

"It's not like you two got along all that well. You had a big fight the last time you saw him."

Phil sighed as if his heart would break. "Poor Da. I wish I could see him just one more time." Up above the rainy freeway was a big sign temporarily wrapped in black plastic, the wind picking at the plastic and making it flap and billow in a way that spooked Phil. It was like a shroud. The brutal synchronicity of the universe displaying this just for him. Phil shuddered; the hair on the back of his neck stood on end.

February 14

On Saturday they held the memorial service on the grounds of the Bass School, the private school where Kurt had worked. A quartet of students played sweet music on violin, viola, flute, and harp. A big redwood towered overhead, fog in its branches. It had rained all night, but now the sky was clearing. The mourners sat in folding chairs on the flat ground in front of the school's main building, an enormous old two-story house, all glass and redwood, the home of a deceased software tycoon, the Bass of Bass school.

People took turns getting up and saying things about Kurt Gottner. Phil didn't feel able to speak. If he opened his mouth he'd be likely to start howling. Why expose himself like that, especially with all the Bass mucky-mucks here? Though he'd gone to Bass School for four years, Phil had no great love for the place. Da had met Willow Chen through Bass -- she was a professional fund-raiser who did contract work -- and Phil tended irrationally to blame Bass for his parents' breakup.

Phil's mother Eve had pulled Phil and Jane out of Bass after the breakup, and from then on they'd gone to public school -- which had been, on the whole, more fun. The larger classes of the public school made it likelier that you could find a kindred spirit. And public school had moldies working as teachers' aides. You could learn a lot really fast from an uvvy link with a moldie. Bass, on the other hand, prided itself on being moldie-free. Eve hated Bass. According to her, the students and faculty at Bass were a pack of freaks and losers, and the parents of the Bass kids were snobby self-indulgent artsy-fartsy crypto-Heritagist poseurs trying to buy themselves the illusion that their neurotic drug-addicted promiscuous bulimic dyslexic brats had one single grain of brains or talent. This, Eve's opinion. Phil, however, had found many of the Bass teachers quaint and nice. Especially his father.

At the funeral, Eve sat at left end of the front row, next to Phil, Jane, Kevvie, Willow, Willow's mother Jia, Da's brother Rex, Rex's wife Zsuzsi, Rex and Zsuzsi's daughters Gina and Mary, Kurt and Rex's mother Isolde, and Isolde's kind old sister Hildegarde, whose face could stop a clock.

Rex got up and spoke a little, about how Kurt had always been accident-prone as a child. "One time when Kurt was little he fell off his bicycle and I carried him home. A few years later he broke his ankle in a soccer game and a friend and I carried him home. Today's the last time we'll do it. We're carrying Kurt home."

Not that there was going to be much of Kurt to carry. The gimmie had scraped together maybe an ounce of blood and tissue-fragments. After freezing a sample of the DNA, the gimmie had incinerated the remains for Willow, who'd placed the ashes in a tiny octagonal madrone-wood box. The box sat before the mourners on a small Oriental rug on the ground.

Isolde got up and talked about Kurt as a child. She was a little woman with white hair and a strong voice. "Kurt was a wise soul," said Isolde. "He knew more than other people. He was shy and he didn't like to talk about it, but I could always see it in his bright brown eyes -- he knew. He knew more than anyone could teach him, and he spent his life exploring the world of ideas. Nothing else mattered to him. I used to say, 'Kurt, why don't you get a Ph.D. and work at a university?' 'I don't have time, Mom,' he'd say. 'I'm too busy.' And all he'd be doing would be sitting in his armchair looking at a sunbeam. Too busy. Maybe Kurt knew he wouldn't have as much time as the rest of us." She gave a mild, rueful laugh and wiped her eyes. "Kurt was so excited about his last discoveries, about his dimensions and his wowos. I only hope that some good can still come of them. We're all trying to understand this death. What happened? I'd like to think that Kurt knew -- and that somewhere he's still knowing. My son was an explorer."

Willow spoke next. The gimmie had cleared Willow of any wrongdoing; the cause of death had been written off as a freak electrical phenomenon, perhaps ball lightning, perhaps a corona discharge from Kurt and Tre's holographic wowo projection equipment. Willow looked stunning, slim and chic in a black wool suit, her face composed and perfect below her shiny bright hair.

"He was the best man I've ever known," Willow was saying. "He shouldn't be forgotten. And I've been working to set up a fitting memorial. The trustees of the Bass School have agreed to start a Kurt Gottner Scholarship Fund. An anonymous donor has agreed to match dollar-for-dollar any pledges made to this fund today. So please give generously."

"Sell it, Willow," Phil murmured to Jane.

Pretty soon one of the Bass administrators was speaking, a Doctor Peck, stringing together a line of fund-raising platitudes. "Bass School one big family ... Kurt Gottner the quintessential ... quick mind and open inquiry ... such a special place ... your unique opportunity ... Kurt Gottner Scholarship Fund ... "

Phil couldn't listen anymore. There were as many people standing as sitting, so he felt free to sidle out of his seat and wander over toward the deck of the school building where some little kids were already nosing around a big table full of canapés catered by the Bass School parents. Funeral meats. Phil cast a professional eye over the spread. He could have done a much better job, but oh well. He ate a salty deviled egg and a crustless triangle of bread with tank-grown salmon. Now a town councilman was butt-kissing the mourners, marveling at how "eukaryotic" was the nucleus of the Bass School community for Palo Alto at large.

Phil pushed open the big glass-paned front door and went inside the school, flashing back to his years here as a student. Fourth through eighth grades, with Da a genial distant figure teaching math and uvvy graphics to the seniors. Eve happy at home, taking care of them all, doing uvvy work for her family's olive-import business by running a dragonfly camera that talked to farmers in Greek. Those had been cozy years. The little family, the parade of days.

Phil walked down the creaky wood-floored hall, looking at the rows of pictures by primary-school students on display. Lots of hearts; odd as it seemed, today was Valentine's Day. Monday the hearts would come down, and spring flowers would be next. Or perhaps dead presidents. George Birthington's Washday, his English teacher had liked to call it-a bit of wordplay that Phil had found the very apex of worldly wit. The old school smelled the same as ever. Yes, it had been peaceful here until Willow appeared. She'd flown in like some bright magpie, snatching up Phil's woolly father for her nest.

"Are you a teacher?"

Phil's reverie popped. A slender dark-haired girl his age was looking at him. Her jawline was strikingly angled, her eyes clear, her mouth intelligent and kind. Her one nonidealized feature was her nose, which was a bit larger than normal, though it sat quite harmoniously in the calm oval of her face.

"Me? My father was the teacher."

"Oh God, I'm sorry, you're Kurt Gottner's son, aren't you? You must be so weighted that you don't know what to do."

"Yes, exactly. Thank you. My name is Phil." He held out his hand.

"I'm Yoke."

"That's a nice easy name. What was your connection with my dad?"

"Oh, I'm visiting Terri and Tre Dietz, so I came along with them to pay my respects. Tre's been so excited about your father's work, he talks about him all the time. Your father must have been a great man. How horrible that the wowo killed him."

"It's a nightmare. Everyone's scared to sleep in his house anymore. I've been down here in a motel since Thursday -- today's Saturday, right?"

"Yes. Time's strange for you now, isn't it? My mother died at Christmas -- which is another reason I'm here -- and for the few days afterward it was like there was this glowing light everywhere and time wasn't moving at all. I even started smoking for a week, something about the cigarettes made it easier to chop up the time. And where I come from, smoking is practically impossible."

"Cigarettes, what a concept," said Phil. "If I let myself, I'd be drunk and stoned through all this for sure. I'm glad I don't have to do that. I'm sorry to hear about your mother. She died on Christmas Day?"

"Christmas Eve. She was alone. I feel terrible." Yoke's eyes moistened.

"Poor Yoke," said Phil, and went on talking lest the two of them break down.

"You're right about the kind of glow everywhere. Luminous. Realer than real. My father's ashes are in that little box on the rug on the lawn and the rest of him is who knows where, he's really dead and someday I'm going to die too. This -- " Phil gestured at the old building around them, at the misty trees and the people outside. "This is what there is. We're like ants under lichen. Actual organisms crawling around in this shallow layer of fuzz on the Earth."

"Lichen?" smiled Yoke, wiping off her eyes. "I just saw natural lichen for the first time this week -- forest lichen instead of the stuff inside moldies. Terri took me on a tour of the Big Basin redwoods. The ranger said, 'Alice Alga took a lichen to Freddie Fungi, and ever since, their marriage has been on the rocks.' " When Yoke hit the "lichen" pun, she giggled and raised her eyebrows.

"Or maybe we're like beetles under bark," said Phil, trying to stay poetic and serious. "Or rabbits in a briar patch. I keep having this funny vision of how glued to the Earth's surface we are. And how shallow the atmosphere is. Gaia's skin."

"I totally know," said Yoke in a heavy Val accent. Phil couldn't tell if she was mocking him or if that was a way she really talked.

Outside, the last speaker had finished and people were standing up and starting to mill around.

...