Just now Emul was in his rest position—that of an RYB cube with a few sketchy manipulators and sensor stalks. He was resting on the floor in front of his thinking desk, which served as a communications terminal and as a supplemental memory device—much like a businessman’s file cabinets and floppy disks.
Four treasured S-cubes sat out on Emul’s desk: brown, red, green, and gold. These hard and durable holostorage devices coded up the complete softwares of four boppers. There were Oozer’s and Emul’s S-cubes, of course, updated as far as yesterday. And there was a recent cube of Kkandio, Oozer’s sometime mate, a suave boppette who worked the Ethernet. She and Oozer had two scions between them. Most important of all, there was dear Berenice’s S-cube. Emul had used a copy of it to blend with his own software when he’d programmed the girl embryo he’d put in Darla’s womb. He wanted to build a new petaflop for Berenice, but right now it felt like he, Emul, needed a new body worse than anyone.
Emul sent signals in and out of his desk, flipping though his various internal and external memories: his flickercladding mode, his hereditary RAM, his realtime randomization, the joint bopper godseye, his inner godseye, his flowchart history, and all the detailed and cumbersome speculations that he’d dumped into his desk’s limpware storage devices.
Emul was trying to decide if there were any hope of getting an exaflop system up in the next couple of weeks. Two months ago, when he and Oozer had been able to afford a lot of dreak, the exaflop had seemed very near. Indeed, Emul had half-expected his next body to be an operational, though experimental, exaflop based on a novel quantum clone string-theoretic memory system. But now, soberly looking over his records, Emul realized that any exaflop was still years away. Looking at his credit holdings, he saw that he didn’t really have enough money for a new petaflop, either, and that, as a matter of fact, a repo teraflop was going to be about the best he could swing.
His worry session was interrupted by Oozer, who came stumping awkwardly down to his end of the lab, gesturing back towards his vats.
“Oh, ah, Emul, some off brands of imipolex in there; the stuff is letting itself go.”
“I got the fear of eerie death standing ankle-deep around me, Oozer,” said Emul unhappily. “The buzz is so much worser stacks in my thinker.”
“I can’t—at any rate I keep saying ‘at any rate’—I don’t mean to say that, but I do now know your kilohertz buzz. It hurts. We’re sick, Emul. The cladding’s sick, too.”
“Plague,” said Emul, jumping to a conclusion. “Flesher plague on both our houses.”
He turned to his desk and made some calls. Starzz, who ran the dreakhouse. Helen, to whom he’d sold that meatie three weeks back. Wigglesworth, the digger who was supposed to fix Emul’s tunnel. Oozer’s girlfriend Kkandio, voice of the Ethernet.
Sure enough, none of them was feeling too well. They each had a hardware buzz. They were relieved and then frightened to hear that others had the same problem. Emul told them to spread the word.
He and Oozer looked at each other, thinking. The desk’s signal buzzed and sputtered at a steady kilohertz cycle.
“Discover to recover,” said Oozer, running a thick gout of his flickercladding over to the desk. Little tools formed out of his warts, and in minutes he had the desk’s CPU chips uncovered. “Dr. Benway letting the clutch out as fast as possible, you know, ‘Whose lab tests?!?’” Oozer peered and probed, muttering his bepop English all the while. “Which would break the driveshaft , see, ‘cause the universal joint can’t but—Emul! Look at this!”
Emul put a microeye down by the desk’s chips. The chips were oddly spotted and discolored by small—he looked closer—colonies of organisms like . . . mold cultures in a petri dish. All their chips were getting infected with a biological mold, a fuzzy gray-yellow sludge that fed on—he stuck an ammeter wire into one of the mold spots—one thousand cycles per second. The fleshers had done it . . .
“Well I’ll tell you this, I don’t feel very intelligent . . . anymore, at times, for a long time . . . the cladding’s full of nodes, Emul, come see.” Oozer wheeled around in a jerky circle.
Watching him, Emul realized that his old friend was shaking all over. Oozer’s limbs were moving jerkily, as if they longed to stutter to a halt. But the bopper drove himself forward and pulled a big sheet of plastic out of the nearest vat. The thick plastic flopped to the floor and formed itself into a mound. It looked unlike any flickercladding Emul had ever seen. Normal flickercladding was dumb: left on its own, it did little more than run a low-complexity cellular-automaton pattern. If you disturbed flickercladding—by touching it, by shining light on it, or by feeding it signals through its microprobes—then its pattern would react. But ordinarily, all by itself, flickercladding was not much to look at. This new stuff was different; it was transparent, showing three-dimensional patterns of an amazing complexity. The stuff’s pattern-flow seemed to be coordinated by a number of bright, pulsing nodes—mold spots!
All of a sudden Oozer’s trembling got much more violent. The bopper drew all his arms and sensors in, forming himself into a tight pod. The Oozer pod huddled on the floor, looking almost like the new mound of flickercladding, all bright and spotty. Emul signaled Oozer, but got only a buzz in response.
Emul’s own buzzing felt worse and worse, and now it was like his willpower was cut out, and the more he tried to find it, the worse it got, to try and find his self. He looked down at his box and noticed bright mold spots in his own flickercladding . . . bright mold sucking out his battery-juice too f-f-f-fast . . . h-h-h-h-e s-s-s-sank d-d-d-down.
And lay there like a shiny chrysalis.
The lab was still, with nothing moving but Darla, anxiously peering out through the glass of her sealed room.
13
Happy Acres
Stahn blinked and tried to stand up. But his left leg was numb and floppy, as was his left arm, as was the entire left side of his body. He landed heavily on something soft. A woman smell over the fetid stench, he was lying on . . . Wendy? Wendy!!! Wendy???
She was a comatose human vegetable fitfully twitching her flawless bod. Her breath was babyishly irregular. She barely knew how to breathe right, poor clone . . . but . . .
Stahn tried again to stand up and only managed to wallow the more inefficaciously on the wendy-thing’s not unappetizing person. His penis stiffened, and he did what he had to do. Wendy liked it; come to think of it, they’d been doing this a lot. They were naked and covered with filth.
After they both climaxed, Stahn rolled onto the right side of his body, and began looking around for the bench he’d been sitting on. There it was, over there . . . he began worming his way across the off al-strewn floor of the tiny stone stall he and the wendy had apparently been living in.
Something had just stopped; like a noise Stahn had gotten used to, but what? He hooked his chin over the edge of the bench and dragged himself back into sitting position. He kept forgetting to use the left half of his body. Why had he crawled when he could have walked? His space orientation was shot: even the five-foot crawl from Wendy to the bench seemed complicated. Stahn stared down at Wendy. Looking at her helped focus his ideas. He was a meatie, that was it, and Wendy was a blank-brained clone, he was a meatie living in . . .
“Happy Acres,” said Stahn out loud, slurring his words, but enjoying the sound of his voice nonetheless. He started laughing, and then he couldn’t stop laughing for a long time. It was like he had a month’s worth of laughter waiting to get out, desperate laughter that sounded like moans.