Whitey took note of the one salient fact and let the rest of the slushed babble shrink back into subliminality. Charles Freck had paused halfway across the gym to grin at Whitey with his knowing green eyes. “Don’t let her in,” repeated Whitey, just loud enough. “She’ll call the Gimmie and someone’ll die. Someone like you.”
“Wu-wei,” said Freck, wagging a minatory finger. “Means wave with it in China. I’ll tell Miz Krystle Carrington you went thataway.” He crossed the rest of the gym in three high, high hops.
“The shower,” said Darla.
Whitey followed her into the constantly running showers. The water splashed lavishly from every side of the great room. The floor was black-and-white-tiled in a Penrose tessellation, and the walls and ceiling were faced with polished bimstone, a marbled deep-red lunar mineral. Hidden behind the walls there was a highly efficient distiller—a cracking refinery, really—that kept repurifying the water through all its endless recycles. The bopper-built system had separate tanks in which it stored up the various hormones and ketones and esters that it cracked out of the sweat, saliva, mucus, and urine which it removed from the water. Many of the cracked biochemicals could be sold as medicines or drugs. The water was hot and plentiful and definitely worth the monthly dues that Whitey paid the Tun.
Water took on entirely different qualities in the low lunar gravity, one-sixth that of Mother Earth’s. The water jets traveled along much flatter trajectories, and the drops on the walls swelled to the size of plums before crawling down to the floor. Numerous suction-operated chrome drain grids kept the floor clear. Whitey and Darla stayed in there for fifteen minutes, cleaning themselves inside and out. The fans dried them, and they vended themselves clothes from a machine. Pajama pants for him and a loose top for her, just like Rock Hudson and Doris Day.
They went back out in the gym and relaxed on one of the mats.
“That was really a K-bit thing for you to do, Darla, whoring for merge on Bill Ding, with the enemies I’ve got. You gotta remember, all kinds of factions are watching the grid all the time. Some bopper wanted to get that mickeymouse little control unit on you, so you’d be a zombie.”
“Rank. Super rank. What do zombies do? What’s the difference from a meatie?”
“OK. It’s a big operation to turn a person into a meatie. The ratsurgeon cuts the person’s head open, takes out part of the right brain half, and puts in a neuroplug that connects to rest of the brain. The rat is a little robot-remote that hooks into the plug. They have to take part of the brain out to make room for the rat. The rat gives orders and makes up for the missing right brain tissue.”
“Which used to do what?”
“Space perception, face recognition, some memory, some left body control. Even after it’s all plugged in, the rat has better control over the left body half than over the right. But the rat can control the right body, indirectly, by giving headvoice orders to the left brain, or by making cross-cuing signals with the left half of the body. That’s why meaties move kind of weird. I should have noticed that about Ken right away. It’s just that I haven’t seen very many meaties.”
“But why was Ken’s rat trying to put a plug on my spine to make me a zombie? What does a zombie box do?”
“Well, it’s a crude version of a rat, only not plugged into so many nerves. The idea of a zombie box is that it would give quick control over your legs and arms. The boppers wanted you to go somewhere, Darla.”
“Like where?”
“I don’t know. Maybe to the Nest to get a neuroplug and a rat installed. Very few people are likely to volunteer for that operation, you wave.”
“Very few indeed.”
“But if they can get a zombie box on you, it paralyzes your speech centers and takes over your leg muscles, and marches you right in to the ratsurgeon.”
“Wherever he may be.” Darla giggled, euphoric with relief at their escape. “Can you imagine how that would feel, Whitey, doing the zombie stomp down echoing empty halls to the hidden bopper ratsurgeon?”
“Be good to watch on the vizzy,” said Whitey, also feeling oddly elated. “I wonder why they wanted to make you a meatie, if that’s what it was? Was it you special, or is it just whoever phones Bill Ding? Maybe the boppers want you to kill someone, like Buddy Yeskin.”
“Buddy’s dead? Della Taze’s funboy? Why didn’t you tell me that when you were talking about Della before, Whitey? Is this all tied in with merge?”
“Could be. I did sell some merge to the boppers, back last month when we were so beat. Maybe I shouldn’t have done that. Yeah, Buddy’s dead. Some guy killed him, and then Della Taze disappeared. It was probably a meatie that killed him. I haven’t seen it, but Bei Ng has it on tape. It might even have been our friend Ken Doll. Ken killed Buddy, and he must have done something weird to Della, too.”
“What about our cubby?” asked Darla. Her upswing was fading, and her voice shook. “Is it safe to go back? Don’t you think we should clean it out and move?”
“No use moving,” said Whitey after some thought. “The boppers have so many cameras planted, they’ll always know where to get us. I can probably hunt down Ken, but there’s mongo other meaties. Only really safe place for us now is sucko Earth. But mudders are dirty dooks, Darla. We’re loonies. I’m going to talk to Bei Ng, honey, and we’ll find a way to strike back. The boppers’ll pay for this.” He paused, alerted by a sound in his head. “Hold it. Mooney’s at the trade center now. Hush, Darla, this is heavy. He’s . . . he’s talking to a bopper called Cobb. Cobb has something for Mooney but—” Whitey broke off and shook his head in disgust.
“What happened?”
“The bopper scanned Mooney and found my mikespike. He took it out and crushed it. Xoxxox. Why don’t you come up to the ISDN building with me, Darla. I want to tell Bei about all this. I think we better stick together for now.”
“Check,” said Darla. “And let’s stop by the cubby and pick up Ken’s merge.”
“You’d still take that? From Ken?”
“Clear. It’s got to be supergood stuff .”
6
Cobb III
He died in 2020 . . .
. . . and woke up in 2030. Again? That was his first feeling. Again? When you’re alive, you think you can’t stand the idea of death. You don’t want it to stop, the space and the time, the mass and the energy. You don’t want it to stop . . . but suppose that it does. It’s different then, it’s nothing, it’s everything, you could call it heaven. Once you’re used to the Void, it’s really not so great to have to start up in spacetime again. How would you like to get out of college, and then have to go back through grade school again? And again?
Cobb Anderson, creator of the boppers, was killed in 2020. The boppers did it. They killed Cobb and dissected him—as a favor. They had to take his faltering body apart to get out the software; the leftover meat went into the pink-tanks. Ideally the boppers would have recorded and analyzed all the electrochemical patterns in all of Cobb’s various muscles and glands, but they only had time to do his brain. But they did the brain well; they teased out all its sparks and tastes and tangles, all its stimulus/response patterns—the whole biocybernetic software of Cobb’s mind. With this wetware code in hand, the boppers designed a program to simulate Cobb’s personality. They stored the digital master of the program on an S-cube, and they beamed a copy of it down to Earth, where it was booted into a big bopper named Mr. Frostee. Mr. Frostee had control of several humanoid robot-remotes, and he let Cobb “live” in them for a bit. The experiences Cobb had in these bodies were beamed back up to the Moon and added to the memory store of his master S-cube as they occurred.