Rudy Rucker
Realware
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? What¼ 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.