Mad Professor (33 page)

“Fuck YOU!” he screamed, pounding his fist on the nanomatrix. The magical bit of alien high tech was a fuzzy gray rectangle, for all the world like a cheap plastic doormat. That's all the lab was, really. An empty room, some instruments, and a scrap of magic carpet on the floor.

“Roit,” said Threakman hoarsely, slumping down wearily next to him. “My old man, 'e was the same way. But for 'im it was the bottle. The Out-Monkeys, they use the 'igh to pull their pets in. Something sweet ‘n' sticky—like the bait for a roach motel. And, God 'elp me, I'm hooked. I won't make it back out next time. I need to . . . something else. Bloody hell—anything else.”

“Mom and Dad coulda left! They weren't stuck at all!”

“Yeah. I reckon.” Threakman was tired, shaky. Pale. “Lor' I feel bad, mate. I miss that rush like it was my only love. Whuh now?”

Wendel stared down at the nanomatrix. Tiny bubbles glinted in the hairs that covered it, endlessly oozing out from it. It was like a welcome mat that someone had sprinkled with beads of mercury. The little pockets winked up at him, as if say, “
Wanna get high
?”

“The chemical factory,” said Wendel. “Right next door. I know where there's a tank of nitric acid.” He pulled at a corner of the
nanomatrix. It was glued to the floor, but with Threakman working at his side, he was able to peel it free. He rolled up the grimy mat and tucked it under his arm, tiny bubbles scattering like dust.

The clock on the wall outside the lab said 12:03. All that crazy shit in the Big Bubble—it had lasted about a minute of real time. The next team wasn't scheduled till 2:00
AM
. The halls were empty.

Threakman shambled along at Wendel's side as Wendel led them out of the Research building and across a filth-choked field to the chemical plant, staying in the shadows on one side. Wendel knew the plant well from all the hours he'd spent looking at it and thinking about modeling it. The guards wouldn't see them if they cut in over here. They skirted the high, silver cylinder of a cracking tower, alive with pipes, and climbed some mesh-metal stairs that led to a broad catwalk, ten feet across.

“The acid tank's that way,” whispered Wendel. “I've seen the train cars filling it up.” The rolled-up nanomatrix twitched under his arm, as if trying to unroll itself.

“This'll be the hard bit,” said Threakman, uneasily. “The Out-Monkeys can see down onto us, I'll warrant.”

Wendel tightened his grip on the nanomatrix, holding it tight in both hands. It pushed and shifted, but for the moment, nothing more. They marched forward along the catwalk, their feet making soft clanging noises in the night.

“That great thumpin' yellow one with the writin' on it?” said Threakman, spotting the huge metal tank that held acid. Practically every square foot of the tank was stenciled with safety warnings. “Deadly deadly
deadly
,” added Threakman with a chuckle. He ran ahead of Wendel to get a closer look, leaning
eagerly forward off the edge of the catwalk. “Just my cuppa tea. Wait till I undog this hatch. Let's get rid of the mat before I change my mind.”

The nanomatrix was definitely alive, twisting in Wendel's hands like a big, frantic fish. He stopped walking, concentrating on getting control of the thing, coiling it up tighter than before. “Hurry, Jeremy,” he called. “Get the tank open, and I'll come throw this fucker in.”

But now there was a subtle shudder of space, and Wendel heard a voice. “Not so fast, dear friends.”

A businessman emerged out of thin air, first his legs, then his body, and then his head—as if he were being pasted down onto space. He stood there in his black, tailored suit, poised midway on the catwalk between Wendel and Threakman.

“George Gravid,” said the businessman. His eyes were dark black mirrors, and his suit, on closer inspection, was filthy and rumpled, as if he'd been wearing it for months—or years. “The nanomatrix is DeGroot property, Wendel. Not that I really give a shit. This tune's about played out. But I'm supposed to talk to you.”

There was another shudder and a whispering of air, and now Barley and Xiao-Xiao were at Gravid's side, Barley sneering, and Xiao-Xiao's little face cold and hard. The plant lights sparkled on their reflective eyes, black and silver and lavender. Wendel took a step back.

“Run around 'em, Wendel,” called Threakman. “I got the hatch off. Dodge through!”

Wendel was fast and small. He had a chance, though the bucking of the nanomatrix was continuously distracting him. He faked to the left, ran to the right, then cut back to the left again.

Gravid, Barley, and Xiao-Xiao underwent a jerky stuttering motion—an instantaneous series of jumps—and ended up right in front of him. Barley gave Wendel a contemptuous little slap on the cheek.

“The Higher One picks us up and puts us down,” said Xiao-Xiao. “You can't get past us. You have to listen.”

“You're being moved around by an Out-Monkey?” said Wendel.

“That's a lame-ass term,” said Barley. “They're
Higher Ones.
Why did you leave?”

“You're its pets,” Wendel said, stomach lurching in revulsion. “Toys.” The fumes from the nitric acid tank were sharp in the air.

“We're free agents,” said Gravid. “But it's better in there than out here.”

“The mothership's gonna leave soon,” said Barley. “And we're goin' with it. Riding on the hull. Us and your parents. Don't be a dirt-world loser, Wendel. Come on back.”

“The Higher One wants you, Wendel,” said Gravid. “Wants to have another complete family. You know how collectors are.”

The nanomatrix bucked wildly, and a fat silver pocket swelled out of its coiled-up end like a bubble from a bubble pipe. The pocket settled down onto the catwalk, bulging and waiting. Wendel had a sudden deep memory of how good the rush had felt.

“Whatcher mean, the ship is leavin'?” asked Threakman, drawn over to stare at the bubble, which was half the height of a man now. Its broad navel swirled invitingly.

“They've seen enough of our space now,” said Xiao-Xiao. “They're moving on. Come on now, Wendel and Jeremy. This is bigger than anything you'll ever do.” She mimed a sarcastic little kiss, bent over, and squeezed herself into the pocket.

“I want some too,” said Barley, and followed her.

“Last call,” said Gravid, going back into the bubble as well.

And now it was just Wendel and Threakman and the pocket, standing on the catwalk. The nanomatrix lay still in Wendel's hands.

“I don't know as I can live without it, yer know,” said Threakman softly.

“But you said you want to change,” said Wendel.

“Roight,” said Threakman bleakly. “I did say.”

Wendel skirted around the pocket, and walked over to where the acid tank's open hatch gaped. The nanomatrix had stopped fighting him. He and his world were small; the Out-Monkeys had lost interest. It was a simple matter to throw the plastic mat into the tank, and he watched it fall, end over end.

Choking fumes wafted out, and Wendel crawled off low down on the catwalk toward the breathable air.

When he sat up, Threakman and the bubble were both gone. And somewhere deep in his guts, Wendel felt a shudder, as of giant engines moving off. The pockets were gone? Maybe. But there'd always be a high that wanted to eat you alive. Life was a long struggle.

He walked away from the research center, toward the train station, feeling empty, and hurt—and free.

There were some things at the apartment he could sell. It would be a start. He would do all right. He'd been taking care of himself for a long time.

COBB 
Anderson had been dead for a long time. It was heaven.

But now someone was bringing him back to life. First came a white-light popping-flashbulb panic attack feeling of not knowing who or what or why, a pure essence of “
Huh?”
–but not even the word, not even the question mark, just the empty spot where a question would be, were there a way to form one. Yes, Cobb's new-started mind was like a cartoon image of something missing: a white void with alternating long and short surprise lines radiating out from a central lack. Huh?

Then came an interval of autonomous, frenzied activity as his encoded boot script mined his S-cube database to reconstruct the fractal links and dynamic attractors of his personality. Cobb became aware of himself waking up, and then went into an eidetic memory flash of the time back in 1965 when he'd had
surgery to remove his accidentally ruptured spleen, had woken from dreams of struggle to see an attractive private nurse leaning over him, and had realized with embarrassment that this pleasant woman, one of his father's parishioners, was the unseen force he'd been druggedly fighting and soddenly cursing while trying to pull a painfully thick tube from out of his nose. Ow.

Right after the nurse memory, Cobb felt his personality flaring up bright and lively, as if in a hearth pumped by the bellows of iterative parallel computations. He visualized a cozy fireplace, reflected on the image of
fire,
and was then off into another childhood memory, this one of visiting newly dead president JFK's grave and seeing the little eternal flame fluttering from a mingy metal rosette in the cold stone tombstone on the trampled muddy grass by the gray Potomac River.

But that meant nothing. Here and now, Cobb was alive, and just a few impossible seconds ago, he'd been dead. He made a convulsive crash effort to remember what it had been like.

Materialism to the contrary, there were indeed some haunting, phantasmagoric scraps of memory from the void downtime of no hardware, no wetware, no limpware. When Cobb was turned off, totally dead, he still
did
exist—in an supernal, timeless now. In that other state—Cobb readily thought of it as
heaven
–there lived all the souls of all the lives, woven together in a joyous, singing tapestry of light that added up to a kind and great cosmic mind, aka God. Cobb loved being inside God. And now he was back out in the cold. Born again.

“Oh no,” were Cobb's first murmured words.

His initial sorrow was quickly tempered by excitement at being back in the intriguing tangles of mortal time. He'd return to paradise soon enough. And meanwhile who knew what would happen!

Cobb had no sensation of a body, which suggested that he was being simulated as a subsystem of some larger computation. Though he had no ears, a sweet voice spoke to him. How quickly life's juicy, burdensome intricacies could become real.

“Hello, Cobb. Yee-haw and flubba geep. I'm Chunky, the seven-moldie grex who's running this emulation. Your grandson Willy hired me and my neighbor Dot to help do a limpware port of your sorry-ass old bopper machine code. I think we'll be ready in an hour, and then you get your own imipolex body, dear pheezer. Dot and I are running parallel sessions of you to confirm that there are no bugs. So welcome back! If all goes well, you'll be here for a good long time.”

“And eventually it'll be over again,” said Cobb. “And I won't mind. I've been in—oh, call it the SUN. Or just call it God. It's beautiful there; a serene and eternal river of joy. God is a song, Chunky, and all the dead souls sing it.”

“What does it sound like?”

“It sounds like this,” said Cobb and intoned the sacred syllable. “
Auuuuuum
.” The resonant vibration. “Haven't you ever been dead, Chunky? And what do you mean by saying that you're a seven-moldie grex?”

“I mean that I'm made up of seven individual moldies,” said Chunky. “A moldie being an intelligent imipolex slug with veins of fungus and algae growing inside it, you wave. We moldies evolved out of the flickercladding skins that the original bopper robots used to have, the original boppers being of course invented by
you,
Dr. Cobb Anderson. Which was why, as you got older and sicker, the boppers coded up your personality as the crusty old software that we just finished booting. Yes indeed. Now for the
grex
part of your question. A grex is a group organism voluntarily formed by moldies in order to accomplish life's main goal
of earning enough imipolex to reproduce themselves. When a group of moldies are joined into a grex, they're an
I
and not a
we;
they think as one. After enough scores, a grex dissolves, and the member moldies go off on their fucking way, ‘fucking' in the literal sense of having sex to make a baby. Finally, with regard to the
been dead
question, no I haven't, though of course most of my fourteen parental units are in fact dead and perhaps in heaven singing ‘Aum.' I don't suppose you noticed them?” Chunky giggled mildly, not seeming to expect an answer.

Floating in Cobb's sea of inchoate perceptions was a bright spot that he recognized as an optic feed. He focused his attention on it, and the spot grew to become a hemispherical visual field. Wobbly images flickered and died, hopelessly scumbled by feedback moirés of spiral diamonds.

“Ow, that's one of my eyes,” said Chunky gently. “Which I'm only temporarily lending to you. Turn down the gain, Cobb. We're talking about a delicate organ, old cruster. Um—act like you're rubbing your face.”