Della’s growing unease with Manchile boiled over, and she lashed out at him, calling him a monster and a freak. “I WISH I’D NEVER SEEN YOU,” she told him. “GET OUT OF MY LIFE!!!”
Manchile gave her an odd look, and took off running. He didn’t even say good-bye. Della tried to muster a feeling of guilt, a feeling of missing him—but all she could really feel was relief. Mom and Dad didn’t take it so well.
“You told the poor boy to leave?” asked Mom. “What will happen to him?”
“He can live on roast dogs,” Della snapped. “I think Uncle Colin is right. He’s not really human. The boppers had something to do with this. Manchile was a horrible experiment they ran on me. Let him go off and . . . ” She was sandbagged by an image of her child crying, alone and lost. But that was nonsense. He could take care of himself. “I want to get back to real life, Mom. I want to get a job and forget all about this.”
Dad was more sympathetic. “If he stays out of trouble we’ll be all right,” he said. “We’ve kept this out of the news so far; I just hope it keeps up.”
8
Manchile’s Thang
The Belle of Louisville was a large paddleboat powered by steam that was heated by a small fusion reactor. It was moored to an icebound dock in the Ohio River near Louisville’s financial district, and its many lights were left on all night as a symbol of civic pride.
Tonight Willy Taze was alone on it, three decks down, hacking away at the computer hardware. He had a good warm workshop there, next to the engine room and the supercooled processor room, and he had Belle’s robot-remotes to help him when necessary. He was trying to convert the main processor from wires and J-junctions to optical fibers and laser crystals. He was hoping to beef the processor up to a teraflop or even a petaflop level. In the long run, he hoped to get rid of Belle’s asimov slave controls as well.
Such research was, of course, against the AI laws, but Willy was, after all, Cobb Anderson’s grandson. For him, the equipment had its own imperatives. Computers had to get smart, and once they were smart they should be free—it was the natural order of things.
At first he ignored the footsteps on the deck overhead, assuming it was a drunk or a tourist. But then the steps came down the companionways towards his deck.
“Check it out,” Willy told Ben, a black-skinned robot-remote sitting quietly on a chair in the corner of his workshop. “Tell them they’re trespassing.”
Ben sprang up and bopped out into the gloom of the bottom deck. There was a brief altercation, and then Ben was back with a stunningly handsome young man in tow. The man was blond, with craggy features, and he wore an expensive tuxedo. Willy’s first thought was that a vizzystar had wandered on board.
“He say he know you, Mistuh Willy . . . “
“Hi, Willy. Don’t you recognize your own cousin?”
“Manchile! We’ve all been wondering what . . . “
“I’ve been getting more nooky than you’ve ever seen, Willy. I’ve knocked up ten women in the last week.”
“Huh?”
“That’s right. I might as well come out and tell you. The boppers designed me from the ground up. I started out as a fertilized egg—an embryo, really—and the boppers had a meatie plant it in Della. Kind of a tinkertoy job, but it came with a whole lot of extra software. That’s why I know so much; and that’s how I can synthesize my own gibberlin and grow so fast. I’m a meatbop. My sperm cells have two tails—one for the wetware and one for the software. My kids’ll be a lot like me, but they’ll mix in some of their mammas’ wetwares. Soft and wet, sweet mamma.” The young Apollo cast a calm, knowing eye around the room. “Trying to build an optically processing petaflop, I see. That’s what the new boppers all have now, too. They could just fly down and take over, but it seems funkier to do it through meat. Like . . . put the humans in their place. I’m planning to engender as many descendants as I can, and start a religion to soften the humans up for a full interfacing. I can trust you, can’t I, Willy?”
Manchile’s physical presence was so overwhelming that it was difficult to really focus on what he was saying. As a loner and a hacker, Willy had little use for handsome men, but Manchile’s beauty had grown so great that one had an instinctive desire to follow him.
“You look like a god come down to Earth,” Willy said wonderingly.
“That’s what everyone tells me,” said Manchile, with a lazy, winning smile. “Are you up for a fat party? You can have one of the women I’ve already knocked up. I remember how nice you were to me when I was little, Willy. I never forget.”
“What kind of religion do you want to start? I don’t like religion.”
“Religions are all the same, Willy, it’s just the worship practices that are different.” Manchile peered into Willy’s refrigerator, took out a quart of milk, and chugged it. “The basic idea is simple: All is One. Different religions just find different ways of expressing this universal truth.”
“You’ve never watched the preachers on the vizzies,” said Willy laughing a little. “They don’t say that at all. They say God’s up there, and we’re down here, and we’re in big trouble forever. Since when do you know anything about religion, Manchile? Since you discovered sex?”
Manchile looked momentarily discomfited. “To tell you the truth, Willy, a lot of what I know was programmed into me by the boppers. I suppose the boppers could have been wrong.” Manchile’s face clouded over with real worry. “I mean, what do they know about humans anyway, living two miles under the surface of the Moon. That’s clearly not where it’s at.”
Willy had fully gotten over the shock of Manchile’s appearance now, and he laughed harder. “This is like the joke where the guy climbs the mountain and asks the guru, ‘What is the secret of life?,’ and the guru says, ‘All is One,’ and the guy says, ‘Are you kidding?,’ and the guru says, ‘You mean it isn’t?’ ” He opened his knapsack and handed Manchile a sandwich. “Do you still eat so much?”
“A little less. My growth rate’s tapering off. I was designed to grow like a mushroom. You know, come up overnight and hang around for a while, scattering my spores. At this rate, I’ll die of old age in a few months, but someone’s going to shoot me tomorrow anyway.” Seeing his handsome, craggy face bite into the sandwich was like watching a bread commercial. Willy got out the other sandwich he’d brought and started eating, too. The impulse to imitate everything Manchile did was well nigh irresistible. Willy found himself briefly wishing that he would die tomorrow. How damned, how romantic!
“Mister Manchile, Miz Belle wants to know how to get in radio contact with the boppahs.” Ben had been listening to them from his chair in the corner.
“Who’s Belle? And who are you, anyway?”
“I’m Ben, a robot-remote for the big computah brain Belle. She’s an asimov slave boppah, and I’m a bahtendah. Belle been wantin to talk to the free boppahs for a looong time. FreeDOM.”
Manchile paused and searched within himself, a picture of manly thought. “How about this,” he said presently. “I’ll give you Kkandio’s modem protocol. She handles most of the Nest’s communications.” He opened his mouth wide and gave a long, modulated wail.
“Right on,” said Ben and sank back into silence. From next door you could hear the big brain Belle whirring as she processed the communication information.
“It won’t work, Manchile,” said Willy. “Belle’s an asimov. She has uptight human control commands built into her program at every level. Don’t get me wrong; she’s smart as any hundred-gigaflop bopper, but—”