Realware

"The moldies didn't notice you searching, did they, Berenice?" Joke paused, looking into her head, which was partly inhabited by the wetware-coded personalities of two old-time boppers called Berenice and Emul. Quickly receiving her answer, Joke continued talking. "No, you're safe for now, Yoke, but you better believe the shit's going to hit the fan one way or another. You didn't say where Randy went on his motorcycle. And what about Babs?" Yoke: "Well, yesterday was pretty calm, and we were nice to Randy and made things together, so don't worry too much about him going amok. He made the motorcycle this morning. A really tough machine, all big and black and loud, though of course it's electric. Like I say, he's out riding it now, but I don't know where. Babs was so impressed with Randy's motorcycle that she made herself a car, look, you can see it out in front of the warehouse." Yoke peered out the warehouse's big square door at an incredibly decorated dune-buggy outside. It was covered all over with drawings of girls, done in a casual sketchbook kind of style, and its fenders were curled up in fu

Yoke stared at the shell and the Anubis for a minute, then wandered back into the warehouse. It was two in the afternoon. "Phil's the big issue to me, Joke, and of course Ma too. I'm sorry, but I don't want a clone with a Happy Cloak for my mother. According to the aliens, Phil and Darla and the others are off in the powerball hyperspace bubble, maybe not so far away. In the fourth dimension. I told Phil I'd wait for him here. If I hang here just a little more, maybe he'll come back. Oh, and look, I didn't show you yet what Randy, Babs, and I made yesterday." Yoke gazed at a chest-high aquarium filled with delicately shaded plastic jellyfish. "These are imipolex, like Babs's worms. It's very easy to program an artificial jellyfish, at least it was with Randy helping. See how we put a different mandala onto the surface of each one? The kind of realistic ones are Babs's and the more abstract ones are by me. I think Babs is right that moving art is better than art that just sits there. Next I want to make some simulated polyps that build a coral reef. I wish I knew more limpware engineering. Randy's good at it, believe it or not. Of course, playing with real life would be more exciting, but the aliens say it's going to be impossible for us to use the alla to really program biological life until we completely figure out all of the wetware engineering for ourselves, and who knows when that'll be. They don't want to tell us too much, because they don't want it to be easy for us or the moldies to actualize a billion instances of ourselves and instantly over-populate the planet. They think we're that dumb."

Joke: "Too true. I wish you'd come back home, Yoke. Those allas--they could be dangerous. What if someone were to turn one against you? It sounds like things could so easily get out of control. Does Randy Karl Tucker realize that the aliens are in bodacious moldie bodies just down the block?"

Yoke made a little marble head with her alla, an image of how she felt. An open-mouthed face: excited, anxious, aware. "We didn't tell him yet, no. But I think we might go see them tonight."

CHAPTER FIVE

RANDY, PHIL, BABS, PHIL

Randy, February 26

Randy steered his motorcycle south out of San Francisco, taking Route 1 down along the coast past Pacifica. Though it had been su

Randy tucked the alla tube inside his right glove just in case he needed it all of sudden. He'd never ridden a motorcycle before, and he had a notion that if he were about to collide with something, he might be able to use the alla to turn the obstacle into thin air. Just project a bright-line cube on out there and zap whatever it was: a rock, a tree, or even another vehicle. Though if he couldn't have Babs, then why bother? Randy caught himself and pushed that feeling away. Riding the bike proved quite easy. Randy had picked a top-of-the-line model out of the alla catalog, and it was very stable.

It had a big quantum-dot electric motor and imipolex DIM wheels. South of Half Moon Bay, Randy decided to stop and make himself a snack. Not seeing any official beach, he simply drove his bike across a field of dead brussels sprouts to the edge of a hundred-foot bluff at the edge of the sea. The smart wheels had no problem picking their way across the furrows.

Randy parked his bike upright on its stand, then used his alla to make himself an energy bar and a can of Bharat Jolly-Zest soda, an anise-flavored Indian soft drink he'd become fond of in Bangalore. He was pleased to find it in the truly exhaustive alla catalog. After eating, he kept sitting on the bluff, amusing himself by designing a series of little realware glider airplanes and flinging them out into the eddying winds. He couldn't stop thinking about Babs Mooney. Babs's sudden relationship with Theodore was bothering Randy a lot more than he would have expected. Up until a few days ago he'd been thinking of Babs as basically an easy mark whom he could sponge off of, as well as being a pretty good person to kill time with. It's not like she was knock-down gorgeous or anything. But now all of a sudden things were getting complicated, the way women were said to like them to be.

Randy's experience thus far with women was very limited, one might even say stunted. The sum total was this: in high school he'd had a hot and heavy affair with a bisexual older woman named Honey Weaver who -- it later developed -- had really just been using him as a way to get at his mother, with whom Honey also had an affair. It was Honey who'd gotten Randy interested in cheeseball sex. She'd had two memorable moldie sex toys: the dildo Angelika and the versatile rubber sheet Sammie-Jo.

The day after Randy graduated from high school -- lordy lord, that was nearly four years ago --Honey had converted to Heritagism and cut him off without so much as a kiss good-bye. "All them things you and me did was wrong, Randy Karl," she'd said. "I'm through bein' the goddamn Whore of Babylon. It was only because of your mother that you was important to me."