Realware

The title of the show was a good idea, as everyone was still in the process of trying to assimilate what "Realware" might mean. There was a big crowd on opening night -- decked out in freaky S.F. outfits like never before seen --but the sales were disastrously weak. The potential customers seemed to want to go home and make their own copies of Babs's works with their allas. In fact, one woman with a beehive hairdo and a skirt made of dangling transparent dildos stood out on the sidewalk staring really hard at one of the worm-buggies for half an hour and then -- whoosh -- used her alla to make her own version, using the same base-model Metamartian alla catalog dune buggy that Babs had used. The art on the knockoff worm buggy wasn't quite the same, for it came out of the dildo-skirted woman's head and not Babs's, but it seemed to suit her well enough, and maybe better. She hopped in her new car and drove off, with Randy ru

The situation with the lace was a bit different. The decorations of the worm-buggies were big and easy to mentally represent, but the lace simply had too much pattern, produced as it was by colonies of interacting DIM-based fabricants. No casual gallery-goer would be able to mentally specify the twists and turns of all the lace knots for his or her alla. Even so, Randy did catch a tipsy man in orange leather leaving the gallery wearing a mantilla of crude knockoff lace on his shoulders. Rather than being knotted, the copied lace's threads were simply fused at the crossings. And the overall pattern repeated itself every four inches, instead of subtly varying all along the mantilla's length.

The plastic worms were the least susceptible to copying, as it was their living behavior that made them art. Their flocking, their wriggling, their subtly oscillating hues --all of these were based on limpware DIM designs that Babs had invented for them with Randy's help. And there was no way to "see" these microscopic code designs just by looking at the worms. Yet everyone was in such a do-it-yourself frenzy with their allas that they seemed to overlook this fact. The sole person to offer to purchase one of Babs's works was a sleek banker named Chock Fresser. Fresser wanted to acquire the show's centerpiece: a twelve-foot transparent pretzel filled with imipolex worms in a thousand different shades of blue and green; it was called "Wowo Worms." But Fresser didn't want to take delivery on the physical item; he wanted Babs to uvvy him a copy of the software design so he could alla-make the work in situ at his house. "Too much trouble to ship it home," said Fresser. "Packing, unpacking-- who needs it anymore? Give me the code and that way I can bring 'Wowo Worms' in and out of storage as needed."

The gallery owner, Kundry Asiz, was a good friend of Babs's from high school. When Babs suggested to her that they shouldn't sell the code to Fresser since money didn't matter anymore, Kundry pointed out that, yes, there was a sense in which money didn't matter anymore, but there were still several senses in which it did -- first of all, it was crass human nature for people to give more attention and respect to art they had to pay for, and secondly, the rent on a space like the Asiz Gallery was something the alla couldn't finagle them out of. So Babs agreed, and Fresser walked off with the complete code for the "Wowo Worms." And a week later, tacky little desktop copies of it were for sale in ever}' gift shop on Fisherman's Wharf--with nary an attribution to Babs. Kundry put some heavy pressure on Fresser and got him to triple the original purchase price, but it wasn't a fully satisfying resolution.

"We gotta figure out a way to sell a design for onetime use only," said Randy. He and Babs were sitting on the ant-decorated couch in Babs's warehouse. Babs's brother Saint was there too. It was the first of May.

"Use a one-time encryption zip," said Saint. "I learned about that stuff when I was working for Meta West. You can zip your design and send the zipped version to the user with an unzipper that trashes itself after its first use. Like cheap pants. The first time you open the fly, the zipper sticks for good. You can publish the image of your work in the alla catalog, and when somebody orders it, they get a single zip of the design with its own unzipper. And of course the unzipper is tailored only to feed the information into an alla and not into any kind of a storage device."

"I get it," said Babs. "I could make an art catalog that's like a catalog used to be. There's just images of things, and you have to uvvy in some funds to take delivery on an item. And if you want another one, you have to pay again. That's a brilliant idea, Saint. I wish I'd known about that before."

"Live and learn, sis," said Saint. "Just think about the poor companies that had every one of their products put into the Metamartian alla catalog."

"Like Modern Rocks," said Randy. He liked his Spider-Man gloves and anemone boots so much that he'd looked into the fate of their manufacturer. "I found out they really did go down the tubes. The Metamartians didn't leave no holes. Whatever the aliens put in that catalog is there one hundred percent, the whole design coded up in nanotech blueprints. Those Metamartians did their homework. Now, this trick of yours, Saint, is everyone go

"Maybe I should sell my trick," said Saint. "Call it the One-Zip. If I can actually figure out the details. I'm not really that much of a programmer. But you two sure went for it. Yeah, I need someone to help me productize."

"Why is everyone always talking about buying and selling these days?" said Yoke impatiently. She'd just walked in. "You sound like a bunch of businessman numberskulls. Guys with calculator DIMs in their heads. Phil's the worst of all. Going on and on about selling his blimps. Money lags! What does anyone need xoxxin' money for anyway? And meanwhile people are killing each other for fun." Without waiting for a response, Yoke stalked across the room to study the pair of huge aquariums she'd installed. One contained a realware South Pacific reef with hard and soft corals. The biologicals were all alla-made realware: primarily coral polyps and the diatoms they fed upon. The other tank held Yoke's work-in-progress, a colony of miniaturized limpware polyps that were supposed to build an artificial reef. Yoke's polyps weren't doing so well today. When he'd gotten up this morning. Randy had noticed that Yoke's artificial reef had petered out into ugly little crumbly excrescences, not at all like the smooth, branching staghorn shapes she was shooting for.

"Xoxx it," said Yoke, staring into her tanks. "This is the only thing I'm able to try and control -- and it's too hard. You have to help me tweak them some more, Randy."

"How's Phil's blimp doin'?" Randy asked Yoke.

"Oh, he's got it spread out on the roof," said Yoke, wandering over and alla-making herself a cup of coffee. "It's slowly getting better. The Phlyte Blimp. Can you hear the trademark? What is it about Phil and money all of a sudden, Randy?"

"Phil wants to make a mark on the world," said Randy. Looking into himself, Randy realized that he didn't share that ambition. He saw his role as a background guy, not a foreground guy. A consultant. Someone who helped people make co

"For some people money's a way to keep score," he said mildly. "Practically all it's good for anymore."