Complete Stories (76 page)

But Carlo didn’t feel better, he felt like hot stuff was running over him, and the air was getting thick and hard to breathe. He looked up at the ceiling, over the door, and for an instant he saw a smoke alarm with a battery dangling from one wire. It meant something but—what?

And then some part of Carlo’s mind realized that he was burning to death in the room in the Ocean Inn motel, burning to death in a fire started by the melting of the oversized sandcandles. He tried to jump up out of the dream, tried to take them all with him — but none of them made it. Not Carlo, not Dina, not Andy.

Like three winged ants, their souls flew down and down, perhaps to heaven.

============

Written in 1995.

Gnarl!
, WCS Books, 2000.

Creating the character of Carlo was a way for me to convince myself that I was truly ready to get some help in giving up drinking. Working on the story, Marc and I had a lot of fun thinking about Andy Warhol. By way of research, I read all of
The Andy Warhol Diaries
, edited by Pat Hackett. An alternate version of the story makes it a UFO abduction tale, with Andy an alien, and with a happy ending where Carlo makes a successful career of selling celebrity-head-shaped sandcandles.

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.”

Cobb made the phantom gesture of rubbing his face, and the gesture was reinforced by a pleasant feeling of skin contact. His vision cleared. He was looking out through a smooth stone arch, as if from the inside of a well-worn cave. Outside the hole was a clutter of stones and boulders, and beyond that stretched a boulevard lined with small buildings. Bright, flexing figures moved down the avenue, and in the distance was a patch of blazingly bright sunlight. In the far distance, on the other side of the bright patch, was high curving wall twinkling with spots of colored light. Curious to have a better look, Cobb made as if to step forward, but he was quite unable to move.

“I’m glued here like a sea anemone,” said Chunky. “If I were to start humping around, it would tangle up my carefully cultivated mycelium dendrites, which are what make me so smart and employable in the first place. But you can push out your eyestalk. Just act like you’re craning your neck.”

Cobb craned, and the moldie-flesh neck that held his—or Chunky’s—eye stretched out one, five, ten meters. Chunky’s reference to the sea had set him to wondering if perhaps she were an artificial creature lodged in some deep ocean reef, but his ease of motion told him he wasn’t in any water. Far from it. It felt like there wasn’t even any air. He made a turning motion and looked back along his eyestalk at Chunky’s bod.

Chunky was a soft-looking squat disk, very like a sea anemone. A piezoplastic space anemone. His—”No, I’m a
her
,” said Chunky’s contralto voice, interrupting Cobb’s interior monologue—
her
flesh was tinged a pale green from the included algae, with highlights of purple and beige. Her body-plan was radial, with a central crown of perhaps a hundred pointy tentacles. Seven eyestalks rose out of the crown’s core, and one of them was allocated to Cobb. As he watched, the other six eyes stretched out to join him. For a silly minute the seven eyes bobbed and bumped, staring into each other.

“Being in me is like being in that heaven you were talking about, huh?” said Chunky. “Because really I’m seven different personalities—
eight
counting you now, Cobb—but they’re all merged into one big fat body. Fat is good. Do you like your eye?”

“This eye’s the only thing that’s all mine right now?”

“The eye is
ours
,” said Chunky, her six other eyes merrily staring into Cobb’s. “There is no
mine
. Why aren’t you picking up on the philosophical metaphor? Do you think an idea’s only interesting unless you made it up yourself? I can see your thoughts Cobb, clear as day. Now listen. My body—it’s a symbol of your God, your SUN, your cosmic One Mind jellyfish. Each individual sentient being is an eyestalk that the universe grows to look at itself with. Me, I’m a grex made of seven moldies who think as one, and usually each of my moldies has its own eyestalk to wave around. Bonk!” One of Chunky’s eyes caromed off Cobb’s, but it didn’t hurt, it felt nice, it felt like a kiss. Cobb and the fat anemone’s six other eyes bounced each other some more, until each had touched all the others, like champagne flutes raised in a toast.

“Here’s to the success of the new limpware Cobb Anderson!” said Chunky.

Gazing past bumptious Chunky’s six eyes, Cobb noticed that there was another cave just next door. And sticking out of that cave’s door were seven more eyestalks, and one of them was looking at him with the same peculiar fixity with which he was looking at it.

“Is that Dot right there?” Cobb asked Chunky. “I think you said Dot was running her own simulation of Cobb Anderson? Is that another
me
over there, inside that one eye that’s leaning closer?”

As Cobb craned across the space between the two caves, one of the eyes in the other group craned symmetrically nearer, approaching smoothly and steadily as a reflection in a mirror. Yes, he was sure that it was he.

“You want to talk to him,” whispered Chunky warmly. “Don’t you, Cobbie? Dot and I will patch you in.”

“Hello, Cobb,” Cobb said to the other eyestalk, and at the same instant he heard it saying hello to
him
. Their thoughts of speaking were being converted into signals that Dot and Chunky exchanged by radio waves and reconverted into signals that their emulations could interpret as sound.

“What did you think about when you woke up?” asked the other Cobb, just as Cobb started to ask it himself.

Expecting to be readily understood, Cobb answered concisely. “First I had white-light panic, then I remembered the spleen nurse, then JFK’s eternal flame, and then I got some memories of, of—”

“The SUN,” said the other Cobb. “I know. I saw the exact same things. The light, the nurse, the flame, the memories of heaven. That’s so strange.”

“It’s not strange,” put in Dot. “It’s logical.” Her voice came across as nasal and penetrating. “I could start this Cobbware up a hundred times, and each time the personality emulation would always remember the
exact
same scenes, every detail the same—because the early part of the boot process is a fully deterministic algorithm, no different in principle from tracking the orbit of a point on a strange attractor. If you start in the same place, you always get the same pattern.”

“But don’t worry,” said Chunky. “Once a Cobb personality session is up and running, it begins interacting with the ever-various real world and zigzags off into some wild and wacky new future. High Lyapunov-exponent dependence on perturbations, don’t you know. It’s just the early parts of the wake-up sequence that are completely predictable. In fact Dot and I have been simulating a shitload of Cobb wake-ups this week, pardon my French.”

“Just to torture me?” cried Cobb.

“No, cruster, just to get your port done. And believe me, there was a lot to do. When they cut up your brain in 2020, those crude boppers turned you from analog into digital. But thanks to our fungus and algae—we call it
chipmold
—we moldies are totally down with analog, so we’ve been retrofitting you. You’ll feel real wiggly. We’re ninety-nine percent there. Now relax. Talk to the other Cobb and let me and Dot listen.”

“Do you think Pop was fucking that spleen nurse?” the other Cobb asked Cobb. “There was something about the way she looked at him.”

“Yeah,” said Cobb. “I do think so. Pop was quite the philanderer.”

Dot and Chunky were transmitting more than just Cobb’s spoken words, they were sending a wide band-width transmission of sensations and emotions. If Cobb let himself relax, he could begin to merge into the other Cobb, and whether he was inside Chunky or inside Dot became a little less clear.

“Now do you see what it’s like to be a grex?” said Chunky.

“Shhhh!” said Dot.

“You know,” the other Cobb was saying, “If there’s two of us and Willy only brings one body, then one of us is going to get left out. Like a real simple game of musical chairs. Where the loser gets killed.”

“Would one of us dying really matter?” said Cobb. “The
I-am-me
feeling is the only part of us that isn’t the same, but that part is just a little piece of the SUN, so even
that’s
the same.”

“But,” said the other Cobb, “I wouldn’t like it to be me. Don’t you feel that way?

“Yeah,” said Cobb, not liking to admit it. “I do. Even though I know from personal experience that being dead is better than being alive. The survival instinct is really wired in.”