The crash had widened the rip in the truck’s side, and clouds of helium were billowing out. The gas itself was invisible, but the low temperature filled the air with a mist of ice-crystals. A by-product of breathing the helium-rich air was that everyone’s voice was coming out a bit high-pitched.
“There’s a giant robot brain in the back,” Sta-Hi piped. “A big bopper. It’s the same one that killed my father and tried to eat my brain.”
Jackson looked doubtful. “A truck tried to eat your brain?” He raised his voice, “Hey, Don! You and Steve open it up! See what’s in back!”
“Be careful!” Wendy squeaked, but by then the door was open. When the mist dispersed you could see Don and Steve reaching in and poking around with billy-clubs. There was a sound of breaking glass.
“Whooo-ee!” Don called. “Got nuff goodies in here to open us a Radio Shack! Steve and me saw it first!” He swirled his club around, and there was more tinkling from inside the truck.
The others walked over to look in. The truck was lying half keeled-over. There was a lot of frost inside, like in a freezer chest. The liquid-helium vessel that had surrounded Mr. Frostee was broken and there in the center was a big, intricate lump of chips and wires.
“Who was drivin?” Action Jackson wanted to know.
“It could drive itself,” Sta-Hi said. “I rammed it and made a hole. It must have heated up too much.”
“You a hero, boy,” Jackson said admiringly. “You may amount to something yet.”
“If I’m a hero, can I leave now?”
A hard glance, and then a nod. “All right. You come in tomorrow make a deposition and I might could get you a reward.”
Sta-Hi helped himself to a bottle from the liquor-store window and went back to the car with Wendy. He let her drive. She pulled down a ramp onto the beach, and they parked on the hard sand. He got the bottle open: white wine.
“Here,” Sta-Hi said, passing her the wine. “And why did you say he was your father?”
“Why did you say I was your wife?”
“Why not?”
The moon scudded in and out of clouds, and the waves came in long smooth tubes.
Wetware
For Philip K. Dick 1928-1982
“One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
1
People That Melt
It was the day after Christmas, and Stahn was plugged in. With no work in sight, it seemed like the best way to pass the time . . . other than drugs, and Stahn was off drugs for good, or so he said. The twist-box took his sensory input, jazzed it, and passed it on to his cortex. A pure software high, with no somatic aftereffects. Staring out the window was almost interesting. The maggies left jagged trails, and the people looked like actors. Probably at least one of them was a meatie. Those boppers just wouldn’t let up. Time kept passing, slow and fast.
At some point the vizzy was buzzing. Stahn cut off the twist-box and thumbed on the screen. The caller’s head appeared, a skinny yellow head with a down-turned mouth. There was something strangely soft about his features.
“Hello,” said the image. “I’m Max Yukawa. Are you Mr. Mooney?”
Without the twist, Stahn’s office looked unbearably bleak. He hoped Yukawa had big problems.
“Stahn Mooney of Mooney Search. What can I do for you, Mr. Yukawa?”
“It concerns a missing person. Can you come to my office?”
“Clear.”
Yukawa twitched, and the vizzyprint spat out a sheet with printed directions. His address and the code to his door-plate. Stahn thumbed off , and after a while he hit the street.
Bad air out there, always bad air—yarty was the word for it this year. 2030. Yart = yawn + fart. Like in a library, right? Sebum everywhere. Sebum = oily secretion which human skin exudes. Yarts and sebum, and a hard vacuum outside the doooooooommmme. Dome air—after the invasion, the humans had put like a big airtight dome over Disky and changed the town’s name to Einstein. The old Saigon into Ho Chi Minh City routine. The boppers had been driven under the Moon’s surface, but they had bombs hidden all over Einstein, and they set off one a week maybe, which was not all that often, but often enough to matter for sure for sure. And of course there were the meaties—people run by remote bopper control. What you did was to hope it didn’t get worse.
So OK, Stahn is standing out in the street waiting for a slot on the people-mover. A moving sidewalk with chairs, right. He felt like dying, he really really felt like dying. Bad memories, bad chemistry, no woman, bad life.
“Why do we bother.”
The comment was right on the beam. It took a second to realize that someone was talking to him. A rangy, strung-out dog of a guy, shirtless in jeans with blond hair worn ridgeback style. His hair was greased up into a longitudinal peak, and there were extra hairgrafts that ran the hairstrip right on down his spine to his ass. Seeing him made Stahn feel old. I used to be different, but now I’m the same. The ridgeback had a handful of pamphlets, and he was staring at Stahn like one of them was something in a zoo.
“No thanks,” Stahn said, looking away. “I just want to catch a slot.”
“Inside your lamejoke private eye fantasy? Be here now, bro. Merge into the One.” The kid was handsome in an unformed way, but his skin seemed unnaturally slack. Stahn had the impression he was stoned.
Stahn frowned and shook his head again. The ridgeback gave him a flimsy plas pamphlet, tapped his own head, and then tapped Stahn’s head as if to mime the flow of knowledge. Poor dumb freak. Just then an empty slot came by. Safely off the sidewalk, Stahn looked the leaflet over. OR-MY IS THE WAY, it read. ALL IS ONE!
The text said that sharing love with one’s fellows could lead to a fuller union with the cosmos at large. At the deepest level, the pamphlet informed Stahn, all people are aspects of the same archetype. Those who wished to learn more about Organic Mysticism were urged to visit the Church offices on the sixth floor of the ISDN ziggurat. All this wisdom came courtesy of Bei Ng, whose picture and biography appeared on the pamphlet’s back cover. A skinny yellow guy with wrinkles and a pointed head. He looked like a big reefer. Even after eighteen clean months, lots of things still made Stahn think of drugs.
The Einstein cityscape drifted past. Big, the place was big—like Manhattan, say, or half of D.C. Not to mention all the chambers and tunnels underground. Anthill. Smart robots had built the city, and then the humans had kicked them out. The boppers. They were easy to kill, once you knew how. Carbon-dioxide laser, EM energy, scramble their circuits. They’d gone way underground. Stahn had mixed feelings about boppers. He liked them because they were even less like regular people than he was.
At one point he’d even hung out with them a little. But then they’d killed his father . . . back in 2020. Poor old dad. All the trouble Stahn had given him, and now it felt like he was turning into him, year by year. Mooney Search. Wave on it, sister, wiggle. Can I get some head?
Yukawa’s address was a metal door, set flush into the pumice-stone sidewalk. Deep Encounters said the sign over the door-plate. Psychological counseling? The folks in this neighborhood didn’t look too worried about personality integration. Bunch of thieves and junkies is what they looked like. Old Mother Earth had really shipped the dregs to Einstein. Like the South, right, Settled by slaves and convicts—since 1690. 2022 was when the humans had retaken the Moon. Stahn looked at the sheet that Yukawa had sent. 90-3-888-4772. Punch in the code, Stahn. Numbers. Prickly little numbers. Number, Space, Logic, Infinity . . . for the boppers it was all Information. Good or bad?