Realware

Yoke held Willa Jean's beak shut while Babs took Randy's alla out of his pocket.

"This is what happens to stoned rednecks," hissed Babs, pocketing Randy's alla.

"Their powers disappear." Willa Jean let out an outraged cackle when they released her, but Randy slept on unperturbed.

And then Yoke and Babs went out to the front of the warehouse and started making things.

February 26

"I'm kind of waiting to see what's going to happen next," Yoke was saying. It was two days later, Thursday, February 26, 2054, about two in the afternoon. Yoke was on the uvvy with her twin sister Joke on the Moon. The to-and-fro response time for a message was about five seconds, due both to the large Earth-Moon distance and to the intricate diffusion-encryption software they were using for the call. Diffusion-encryption sent each byte of the message along a different path -- to prevent there from being any traceable signal binding the speakers together. It took a lot of computation.

With the five-second lag, the best way to converse was to take turns sending long blocks of speech and images. It was more like a fast E-mail exchange than a normal conversation.

Yoke continued her turn: "Babs and I have been making the best things. I already showed you some of my static sculptures, but now let me show you one that moves." The uvvy transmitted the images direct from Yoke's vision centers. She was looking at a sweeping loop of shiny wire with bright shapes sliding along the wire. "I made this on Tuesday. The rail is chrome steel and there's a linear induction field in it. The power comes from a quantum-dot generator embedded right inside the rail. The shapes are the Platonic and Archimedean solids, remember them?" Two of the polyhedra collided and reversed directions. They swooped along the track's twists and loops, rising and falling. The beautiful, shiny polyhedra were tinted crystal, grown around magnetic metal cores. "It's a magpie kind of thing. And I keep making myself more clothes. Look at my outfit." Yoke stepped in front of a fancy full-length wood-framed Art Nouveau mirror to show off her latest clothes, a short thin red leather jacket over baggy shin-length pants and a white T-shirt inset with lace spirals. "And Babs made a bunch of furniture. Like this mirror for instance. It was from a Sotheby's auction catalog. And she made a silk couch with ants embroidered all over it and a canopy bed. I made myself a bunk bed like we used to have on the Moon, only big enough this time. The thing Babs is proudest of so far is over here, check it out. Like a glass bowl of living spaghetti." Yoke pointed her gaze at a cubical quartz box holding a wriggling mass of imipolex worms of every color and thickness. The sharp edges of the square box contrasted with the lively antics within. "Babs could never have afforded this many plastic worms before. I think there's two hundred thousand of them, all custom made by her--well, you can tell the alla to make a whole lot of copies of something in a row, but I guess that's still custom. Custom mass-produced? Anyhoo, see how the same-colored ones band together and flow along like gouts of lava? I love it. Okay, now you talk." Joke's message started coming in: "Your clothes are floatin', Yoke. I have so many clothes ideas I want you to make. Like polka dots with the dots being cutouts. Look." The signal showed Joke's hands quickly sketching a girl with an outfit. Beyond Joke's hands was a lunar workshop crowded with equipment for making Silly Putters: shelves and shelves of chemicals, a hulking injection molder, and a workbench with imipolex-machining tools such as a piezomorpher and a volume-filling airbrush. Joke was living with her somewhat gnarly artist boyfriend, Corey Rhizome, who was visible at the other end of the workshop. A few of Corey's Silly Putters were hopping around; they were plastic pets a little like Willa Jean, but smarter and more autonomous. Yoke recognized two of the Silly Putters: the small green pig of a "rath" and the football-shaped, orange-beaked "Jubjub bird," the two forever engaged in mutual battle. Joke set down her pen and continued talking. "I hope you bring that alla back here really soon! Oh, and your sculptures are terrific. I never knew you could be such the artist, Yoke. That wire thing with the sliding blocks is sooo weightless. I guess you could make a really big one? I mean, like as big as a carnival ride, with each of the sliding thingies hollowed out so that a person could ride inside? I'm wondering if there's any limit to the power of the alla. I mean, could you hollow out a huge biosphere under the Moon's surface and fill it up with dirt and rivers and lakes and an atmosphere and maybe even a little fusion sun? There's no end to what people might ask you for. So you're right that it's really important to figure out how to copy the allas so that it's not just you and Babs being golden geese when everyone finds out. I'm glad that the people and moldies from Tonga haven't tracked you back to San Francisco. I guess the King is keeping quiet and the Cappy Janes really fell for the decoy. The tofu Sue Miller! We knew a girl just like that, remember Simmie Lipsit? I wonder if one of the Cappy Janes has chased down the tofu Sue by now. You know, I'm going to ask Emil and Berenice to check on the moldies' chat lines right now. While I do that, tell me what's up with Cobb's great-grandson. Did you ever give him his alla?"

Yoke: "Oh, that was so wild. All afternoon Tuesday, Randy was moping and dragging around all hung over while Babs and I made wavy stuff. He was wishing he had an alla and wondering where the aliens went, and we were like, 'Serves you right for getting so trashed.' But then after we alla-made a bunch of soup and bread and cheese for supper, Babs finally gave Randy his alla and it registered itself to him. That's a trip in itself, it's like the alla is memorizing your body and your mind -- your wetware and your software -- the whole package. I was for holding out on Randy, but Babs keeps wanting to be nice to him. Or get his attention or something. And then as soon as she had Randy's attention, Babs did a head-trip on him by going out on a date with this new guy Theodore. I have a feeling she's using Theodore to make Randy jealous. Anyway, Randy and I were alone together Tuesday evening. I showed him how the alla works, and the very first customized thing he did was to make a safe DIM control patch for his plastic chicken, Willa Jean. Willa Jean is sort of the same thing as a Silly Putter, except Randy has a control feed into her, and she's not as smart. Randy was using an illegal leech-DIM before, and he got Cobb to approve the new one as safe around real moldies; in fact Cobb helped him design it. Hey, there goes Willa Jean now." Yoke trained her vision on Willa Jean wandering across the floor, ostensibly pecking for stray crumbs of imipolex. "I'm surprised that plastic chicken's here, because Randy's gone out on his new motorcycle. I wonder if he's using her to eavesdrop on me. If so, you're a geek, Randy." Yoke swung her alla through the air to launch a buzzing, bouncing spark-machine that frightened Willa Jean off into the far corners of the warehouse. "But I still haven't told you the best part. After Randy fixed Willa Jean, he was tired, so he made himself a good bed and lay down on that and started creating all sorts of little samples of every kind of material he could think of, each sample in the shape of a Lego block, and he was snapping them together and then --this is the rich part-Randy fell asleep while he was wearing his uvvy, and he ended up hooking into his alla and making something that he'd been dreaming, God you should have heard him scream. The screaming started at like three in the morning and Babs wasn't back yet, so it was just me and Cobb to deal. Randy's realware dream thing was a giant snail with his mother's face. It was chasing him. A giant imipolex snail actually crawling around the warehouse at three in the morning, knocking things over, and I mean a snail this big." Yoke stretched both arms up high, shaking with mirth. "I really shouldn't be laughing because it's very sad, his mother died at the end of November and Randy had totally been neglecting to stay in touch and he missed the funeral and apparently he has these recurrent guilt nightmares about a giant snail, it has to do with being too late. It was crawling after him all around the warehouse and wailing 'What taahm is it?' in this bewildered, Kentucky-accented voice. 'You goin' be late for school if you don't hurry up, Randy Karl. When is Tuesday?' Except it said 'whiyun' instead of 'when.' " Yoke was struggling to keep her voice level, but now and then letting out shrieks of laughter. "It had a silver-frosted black shell, like a middle-aged lady's hair. And there was some incest thing in there too. It wanted to sit on his face. I heard it say 'Ah'm real hot to crawl on you, Randy Karl.' Randy was just completely freaking out. And finally he was cornered and the snail really did crawl onto him, right across his body and up onto his face, I think it must have weighed four hundred pounds. It moved a lot faster than you'd expect. Randy would have suffocated if Cobb hadn't been able to drag it outside; Cobb can be really strong. We burned the imipolex, but the shell's still there. I'll show it to you in a minute." Joke: "I can see where you'd think that's fu