Wetware by Rudy Rucker

Author:Rudy Rucker [Rucker, Rudy]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: General, Fiction, Science Fiction, High Tech
ISBN: 9780380701780
Google: rAWnGwAACAAJ
Amazon: 0380701782
Publisher: Eos
Published: 1988-03-31T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

Manchile’s Thang

January 20, 2031

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 mamma’s 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 people 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.

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