Mad Professor (34 page)

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 eyes talks 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 eye–stalk 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.”

“Then let's try and beat the game,” said the other Cobb. “If we can totally merge into one consciousness, then there's nobody extra to leave out.”

So Cobb relaxed further, completely drawing back from identifying with the Chunky Cobb or the Dot Cobb. Now the images from their two eyes fused into stereo perception, and he began to get some damn good depth perception. The jumbled stones on the ground leapt into clarity. Moving in complete
accord, the two Cobb eyes swiveled this way and that, looking around.

The walls of this great underground cavern rose above them like an upside-down funnel, perhaps two miles across and one mile high. A thick vertical shaft of light ran down from the small hole at the top. Cobb remembered that he'd been here before. This place was beneath the surface of the Moon; it was called the Nest. The bopper robots had lived here.

More and more memories were emerging, flocking out like startled birds from a cliff of nests. Cobb could remember being alive four times before. He started,
first,
as a human who lived from 1950 to 2020, at which time the bopper robots had disassembled his brain and coded it up as an S-cube of software. For his
second
life, the boppers gave him a robot body with a shortlived supercooled brain that followed him around inside an ice cream truck. This had only lasted for a few months of 2020, and had not worked out very well. Cobb's S-cube code had lain dormant until 2030 when,
third,
he'd gotten a sleek petaflop Moon bopper body. These new bopper bodies had no longer required a low temperature to operate. As part of an ill-fated scheme to start tinkering with the wetware of human DNA, Cobb had flown from the Nest all the way down to Earth. He'd been gunned down on a highway by state troopers. An even longer gap had followed until
fourth,
in 2053, Cobb had been allowed a very brief run as an emulation inside an asimov slave computer buried under Salt Lake City. He had almost no memories from that last run; nobody had told him much of anything, and all he'd had time to do was to say a few kind words to his great-grandson, an unwholesome Kentucky boy called Randy Karl Tucker. Today was the
fifth
time, and the date was, Cobb somehow knew, July 25, 2054.

As he came back to the present, it occurred him that there was no “other Cobb” anymore. They'd fully merged; the Dot Cobb and Chunky Cobb emulations were parts of a unified whole, inseparable as two overlaid color separations in an old-fashioned printed image.

“Right on!” said Cobb, congratulating himself. “I'm safe!”

“We couldn't be more pleased,” said Chunky. “This is exactly the final confirmation we've been hoping for.”

“I'll tell them it's time to bring Cobb's body,” said Dot, and her voice seemed to move off into the distance, where she began a lengthy, animated discussion with someone who sounded like a callow teenage girl.

“What kind of body do I get?” asked Cobb.

“An imipolex moldie body of course,” said Chunky. “Like Dot and me.”

“I'm going to look like a weird monster?”

“Yeah, the kind of weird monster that's called a human being. Your grandson Willy's artist friend Corey Rhizome made you a moldie body that looks just like you did when you were sixty. Except that Corey made you look fit and healthy instead of old and fat and drunk.”

Cobb let the dig go by. He had indeed been a drunk during the declining last decades of his human life. Remarkable that he kept getting these fresh starts. It occurred to him to ask for more. “Why not go ahead and give me a body that looks young? Like in my thirties or my twenties?”

“Willy wants you to look older than him because you're his grandfather. But hey, you'll be a moldie. If you don't like the way you look, you can change it.”

“And here come Jenny and Gaston with the new body!” rasped Dot. “You remember Jenny, don't you, Cobb?”

“I—I don't think so.”

Two moldies were bounding through the strewn rocks toward them. The one in front was shaped like a five-foot-tall carrot with a green fringe of tentacles on top. And the one in back was like a round red beet with a long, twitching tap-root. Between them swayed the slack dead weight of a lifeless human form. Cobb watched them with his two eyestalks, being careful to keep his stereo vision fused.

Jenny was the big carrot, and her radioed voice sounded like that of a gossipy teenage girl. “Well, hi there, Cobb Anderson. You don't remember
me
?”

“The voice sounds familiar. Were you the one running me in that asimov computer a few months ago?”

“Ta da! Jenny here, Jenny there, Jenny Jenny everywhere. Even inside a Heritagist asimov machine. That wasn't the true marvelous Moon moldie me, of course, it was just my software agent. Can you believe she's been trying to break free of my control, the little bitch? Anyway, the main point is that my agent was able to cryp all of that Cobbware and send it up here to the Moon so that we moldies can download it onto a moldie body that's all your own. Isn't that floatin' of us? Let's drop it right here, Gaston.”

“Yo,” said Gaston. “I'm down with that.”

Jenny and Gaston slung the limp plastic body down onto the ground. It was indeed the form of a nude sixty-year-old man, white bearded and white haired, a man with a big head and high cheekbones, his skin somewhat papery in appearance, much curly body hair, many freckles, a barrel chest, a flat stomach, and a respectable penis.

“Are you ready, Cobb?” asked Dot.

“I sure am.”

“All right then,” said Chunky. “Push both of your eyes down there, touch them to the body, and I'll send you in.”

Cobb moved his two eyes forward and down, the eyes
watching each other to make sure they kept an even pace. No point in taking a chance with some last-minute greedy race. The new body lay on its back on the dusty stone floor, waiting. Beneath the pale skin were blue lines of veins that were tubes of mold, not blood. As he drew closer and closer, Cobb filled with a desire to gush out, a feeling like wanting to ejaculate, and then
aaah
he touched down with both eyes, flowed out into his new body, and–twitch, twitch–sat up.