Jack L. Chalker - The wonderland Gambit 1 - The Cybernetic Walrus

The Cybernetic Walrus

Book One of The Wonderland Gambit

by Jack Chalker

To the late Philip K. Dick,

two of whose early works inspired this madness,

but didn't, to my mind,

face all the implications of the concept

An Introduction

And Explanation

This book and two others to follow will make up the saga known as The

Wonderland Gambit. Unlike most of my books, the very nature of this

allows people to read this book and get some resolution, although all the

questions and a lot of the real fun is yet to come.

I've come across discussions on such diverse platforms as conventions,

fanzines, and the Internet where people argue whether I write fantasy

novels or science-fiction novels. Most people think I write predominantly

fantasy, and in this they are wrong. What I do not write are engineering

stories—hey, gang, let's build a space station! Hey, let's terraform Mars!

Those are all well and good, and some folks do them well, but they are very

much in the tradition of Astounding in the Campbell era, a magazine I am

not going to ever denigrate but which, I think, told as many variations of

engineering sto-ries as I ever want to read.

Those kind of stories also pretend that they are predictive. Ah, yes—I well

remember George O. Smith's one-hundred-foot-tall vacuum tubes, the giant

state-sized computers, the total lack of portable computers and desktop

power (you'd think at least one writer would have predicted the word

pro-cessor, wouldn't you?). Stories with such wondrous vision—why, once

we put a man on the moon, there will be space stations in ten years and

moon colonies in twenty and mis-sions to Mars and beyond! Uh-huh.

My late father was born two months before the Wright brothers flew their

first plane at Kitty Hawk. He died twenty years after the last man walked

on the moon, the last one that's likely to walk on the moon or beyond in

my lifetime. I pray not in my children's lifetimes, but we are a world and a

nation who seem to have lost our dreams and are spiritually dying for it.

We can see that in the current generation (they hate the label "Generation

X" but "war babies" and "baby boomers" hated their labels, too). It's not a

dumb generation, it's not a generation wrapped up in fantasy like the late

six-ties, it's not "lost" like the generation of the twenties. It's just one

without faith in institutions and an unshakable belief that things are going

to get worse.

These are the folks who read cyberpunk; it's the boomers who read the

engineering stories and dreamed of terraforming Mars.

Me, I look in different places. I look in books and articles on the "new

physics," in arcane studies in biology, chemistry, and other subjects, and I

keep bumping up against visions of the future that are often not terribly

nice but hard to ignore. It doesn't matter if some of my readers think it's

far-out fan-tasy (or some psychological hangup); nothing pleases

some-body in my business more than getting equal fan letters from those

who like epic adventures or complex sociopolitical works and from university

physics and mathematics depart-ments and the like. The only downer is

increasing evidence as I get older that my own playing around with the

human mind and form seem increasingly more likely than terraforming Mars.

And now I come to computers. Not today's, of course, or maybe not

tomorrow's, but for all the wonders of cyberspace

it still looks like cyberspace. Why should it? How good can it really get?

Those who have run into me online know that I'm not a novice in this area

and that I got my Junior Pournelle Merit Badge long ago. Nothing at the

heart of the premise here isn't being discussed and worked on right now. I

think you should worry a little about it.

The basics come from a lesser-known and minor book by Philip K. Dick that

I read probably thirty or more years ago and which had been written a

decade before that. I've always felt an affinity for Phil Dick; after the four

millionth question of "Why do you always do all that body switching?" I

used to get upset and scream "Did hordes of people ever ask Phil Dick when

he was going to stop writing 'What is reality' sto-ries?" Well, I only knew

Dick slightly, but I happened to mouth off this question at an SF convention

within earshot of a number of people who'd known him well.

It turns out, yeah, they did.

Well, writers write certain kinds of tales. We're best when doing so. It's

nice there are so many to choose from. Comfortable and basically optimistic

old-fashioned SF of the terraforming-Mars variety is still being written, and

if you're of the "future is bleak" school we have cyberpunk as popular-ized

by Max Headroom and perfected by William Gibson, and everything in

between. I do write nontransformation tales, but while all these people

who are made uneasy by what I do to folks say they want them, they don't

buy them.

Which brings us to the current project. Please be warned that absolutely

everything is up for revision in The Wonderland Gambit, and I do mean

everything. By the time we're through, I hope we'll make some people

think, others will be offended, and we'll be going places like we've never

been before. Not in this book, though. This book simply estab-lishes the

premise, gives the background and some of out very large cast, murders a

few people (but not necessarily permanently), screws around with identity

and ego, contains a hookah-smoking caterpillar, a pipe-smoking dodo, an

all-female biker gang and drug cartel, a cigar-smoking Native American

woman who says she goes into a parallel universe via the trees, the

Roswell saucer, at least two possibly alien races, a little antigovernment

paranoia, a bunch of two-faced villains, and a lot of mind control.

We won't get complicated until the next book.

Jack L. Chalker

Uniontown, Maryland

Summer, 1994

PROLOGUE

RABBIT HOLE NUMBER SIX

I wonder how many of us would still have gotten into the god business if

we 'd read the fine print and studied the job description more carefully?

I once knew somebody who said that the only rational defi-nition of

insanity was when you saw a different world run by different rules than

anyone else, and that your alternate real-ity, whether pretty or ugly, good

or evil, was therefore false because it was yours alone. When most

everyone else saw the same things you saw, felt the same things you felt,

and be-lieved what you believed, then the one who didn't was the in-sane

one.

It was a scary, and eerily prophetic, definition of reality.

A sudden brilliant yellow-white light exploded into a hun-dred tiny beams,

spreading out as they headed straight for me. I was ready for it; I ducked,

rolled, and went down one level on the grid, coming up and firing back at

the point of light as close to its firing at me as I could. Neither of us scored

a hit, but I could see mine strike a bar and flare up, momentarily

illuminating the area in a dull orange glow and revealing the three dark

figures that were moving, almost like monkeys, along the grid.

They had the advantage of field of fire with those wide-spread needlers

that were absorbed by inert matter and fried only living flesh. No afterglow.

My single needler wouldn't get more than one of them, and maybe not kill

even that one, but it sure showed me the targets. I fired four shots in rapid

succession and jumped back up to the higher level where I'd just been.

I heard a scream that seemed to go down and down until it finally got

swallowed up in some infinite pit below. There was no faking that sort of

thing convincingly; at least one of them had bought it. I hoped it was

enough to take him com-pletely out, but deep down I knew that I'd see

these bastards yet again. This wasn't like in the Worlds; the rabbit holes

were less permanent if no less painful or difficult.

At least these forms were made for the holes. Perfect mobility in all

sectors, a full three-sixty ability, balance like a cat or monkey—too bad

they had exactly the same capabilities!

Or would you like to swing on a star...?

Oh, lord! No! Get that out of my head. All I needed was to wake up as

some singing priest in a bad Hollywood ver-sion of forties Chicago!

Not that it would be that simple. Not now. Not after all these transitions.

They were getting harder, more sophisticated, and more alien each time. I

bet I wasn't the only one who thought we were a pretty sick bunch.

Oh, where have you been, Ragle Gumm? Ragle Gumm?

Oh. where have you been. Darlin' Ragle?

Down two levels and to the left a bit. I knew somebody was there, but I

also figured that they'd split up: the one I didn't take would zero in on my

flash. Damn! What the hell did the others owe Stark, anyway, or whoever or

whatever he or she or it was, this incarnation? Might attracted the weak

and disaffected, I suppose. It didn't take much effort for the True Believer

types to latch onto some extreme. Stark cer-tainly offered that, a sense of

strength and dedication to pur-pose. He was nuttier than a fruitcake, of

course, but what did that matter?

If we only knew whether or not the universes kept on after we all got

booted out of them! On the other hand, which one of us dared go back and

find out, and leave the Ahead to the others? You'd never catch up, not if

time had any correlation at all between inside and out.

I listened closely, trying to make out movement or breath-ing in the dark,

and within a minute or two had the one I'd spotted before, a darker shadow

against the overall black-ness, still not too far below me. The other one—I

was certain it would be dear Al—was completely still, somewhere out ahead

and probably a little above, waiting.

I wasn't about to wait forever. Two against one was still two against one,

and I had no more hope that added enemies wouldn't show up than I had

hope that a horde of friends and allies would also appear. It was

possible—hell, anything was possible, and at no time in creation had that

been a truer statement than now—but not bloody likely.

But if I could move over, very slowly, very quietly, ever closer, closer, bit by

bit, to that one near me, I might have a chance to even things up. Of

course, if this one was Al Stark, then I was dead meat, but somehow I just

couldn't see him being this noisy or making himself this clear a target when

it would benefit somebody else.

The problem in this particular hole was that we had only the rafters, a sort

of glorified jungle gym going in all directions for probably infinite distance.

The weapons were ones that we picked up along the way. No real

illumination. By this point, however, I'd been able to pretty roughly

calculate the distance between bars and levels and had found a nice little

arithmatic progression. At this point, I was maybe one and a half meters

from the next one in back of me and about two meters down. This distance

would open a bit if I got closer to the target below me, but there was one

"rail" that would stay almost perfectly parallel to the bar one below me.

Moving down to that bar, then back to the next one behind me, was tricky

without making noise, but I'd been in here long enough now that I had it

pretty well down—or so I hoped.

Not so the target, who was clearly getting impatient and nervous, which

was just where I wanted him to be. Now I needed to ease over, carefully,

very carefully, until ... Yeah. One up from the target and so close I could

hear the breath-ing and almost smell bad breath. Now the trick was to

twist my body so that both feet and my left hand were steady on the rails

but my gun hand could go down, right behind the target, just so...

I fired up and to the right, getting a brief glimpse of a dark figure three

levels up from me. He, however, had only a bright flash and he was ready,

firing a full-spread volley right at the source of that flash.

The poor target, around whom I'd shot, never even had a chance to react,

still turning toward me and raising his or her own pistol to fire when the

partner, the stalker above, raked through the target body with all those

little finely focused beams.

The target cried out—a woman's voice!—as her body was almost split in

two, and she tumbled and fell down, down into the endless oblivion below.

I, on the other hand, was wasting no time at all, heading across on the

parallel beam toward the shooter but away from the former target, not as

concerned about noise now as taking advantage of the accidental kill.

"That's got to be you, Cory," the shooter commented, the voice eerie and

somewhat electronic-sounding, yet damped, with no echo. If this hole had

walls they were much too far away to interact with us. "You and your video

games again, I suspect."

He was trying to entice me into firing, giving me in effect a free shot so

that I would betray my position. No go, Stark. Not this time.

"I'll win, you know. In the end," he taunted, the cold and unpleasant

natural intonations of the Al Stark voice coming through even the strange

distortion of the hole environment. "You're better at playing this, but I'm

better at doing this for real," he continued. "It's different when it's for real,

even if, inside here, we know we won't really die. There's always that

hesitation, that unwillingness to bet it all, that you've inher-ited from your

own background. I cured it in myself. It was a weakness I could not afford.

I cured it not only here, but long before I ever knew that there was a 'here.'

Come on—take a shot. I'll take one, if you like. I'm not trying to hide from

you, because I know how little difference it makes. Are we in fact the first?

The tenth? The twentieth? Do we know? Do you care? I don't. I exist until I

control again. That's not difficult."

I could see a spot in the darkness where I knew he must be, but the odds

of me actually taking this looney out were no more than fifty-fifty, if even

that with the single-beam pistol, while his wide needler had much better

odds. I needed to get a lot closer to him before I could take him on with

confidence.

"That was a nice move back there," Stark commented, sounding like he

really meant it. "Very neat. You've been improving consistently, I must

admit. You know, this is getting kind of boring, though. Why not just have

it out and then translate to the next plane?" He began to walk along the

rail. but I began to detect a worried tone in his voice that hadn't been there

before.

"Cory? You are still here, I presume? Not trying to make a hasty exit below,

I trust?" He listened a moment, then relaxed. "No, you wouldn't. It isn't like

you. Hmmm ... Let me see .... Considering how much you've improved at

this sort of thing, what would you be doing right now? Too far from me to

be sure, and you want a sure shot, don't you? That trick won't work twice.

Over two meters below me here, so that's inconvenient for grabbing. That

means you'll try it on my beam, or on the beam above."

Wrong, you fascist bastard! Right behind you! I lunged for-ward, striking his

back with enough force to knock him over. The rail widened in an instant,

and I was upon him without even thinking about it. I had forgotten just

how strong he was, but I was too mad to care at this point. I wanted him,

wanted him dead and out of there. Even more, I wanted him dead for real,

but that didn't seem to be possible in the rabbit holes. Only pain was

possible, and lots of it.

He twisted around, and his knee caught me in the groin. The blow wasn't as

effective as it should have been, all things considered, but it still hurt and

had considerable power behind it, making me slacken my own grip on him.

He used this to twist in one neat motion, turning to face me while also

bringing up his needler. I couldn't see it but I could feel the twist and knew

what he held in his hand. I saw no choice but to kick away and hope I hit

the arm with the gun.

Instead, I kicked hard into empty air and lost my grips, my legs shooting

out from under me and my ass landing right on his face.

The moment he realized what had happened, he bit it.

I slid back quickly onto his chest, and he surprised me by managing to

actually sit up, while bringing up his legs to catch me in a kind of wrestling

hold. I clamped my legs around him and held on, bringing up my own pistol

and shoving it into his face.

He froze, then sighed.

"We're going over together, Stark," I told him. "You and me into the void."

He chuckled. "I'm almost tempted, but not in these cir-cumstances. That's

the difference between you and me, Cory. You have to win every time. I'm

patient. I can wait until the perfect situation comes along. I bounce back

quicker than most, you know. See you in the next Hell, sucker!"

Before I could do anything, he dropped back on his back and one hand came

up, grabbed my gun hand, and deliberately pressed the trigger stud which

was still aimed at his head. There was a flash of light, and what it showed,

I would have preferred not to see.

I felt his body convulse, and I backed off him, having no doubts that he

was dead. Although I should have felt triumphant, the fact was that I felt

sick and depressed instead. Not only at the thought of yet another round,

another Land, but also understanding full well that Al Stark had been right:

there was no way I'd have the nerve to do what he did, even here. "The

cowardly dictator" was a cliche; some Nazis had real guts.

So far the pattern had held true. We'd tended to come out in each Land as

at least social counterparts of what had gone in, whatever that was at this

stage. That meant that we'd meet again, and if one of us spotted the other

first, there, out in the "open" as it were, then for one of us this might well

be the end. At least if the Land was one of our own; God could not be

denied, even subconsciously.

Then, again, it would help to know just how many others were actually

along for this ride with us. I knew of seven so far, including Stark and

myself, but at least one Land hadn't fitted any of the obvious rules. How

big a playing field we were actually on, how many "real" people there

actually were in this, there was no way of saying. How could we know,

when we didn't really know about our own selves? Were we who and what

we thought, or did we echo one of the Lands? Were we instead something

else entirely, some sleeping dreamers of unknown alien origins? All the

data of the Lands had to come from somewhere; if it came from any of us

directly, it came at least partially from experience even if long forgotten. If

it came from programs, even algorithms, somebody or something had to get

that information down to that incredible detail and put it all in. Somewhere

out there was a strong reality, where things were always just so and we

were "real" as well. How did we get what we needed while our

consciousnesses were elsewhere? Who fed us, turned us, cleaned us, cared

for us? Or was it all automated?

The worst part was, I'd never been certain we'd recognize it if we saw it.

Any of us. What was reality, anyway? Something firm and concrete? Hadn't

we all once lived in a per-sonal reality we believed was just that? Was

reality what the senses brought you? Hell, even in my last static persona

we'd gone a good deal beyond that, to fooling the eye, the ear, the nose,

all the senses. A simple flight simulator could convince you that you were

plummeting ten stories to the ground when you were really falling only a

few meters. Even a giant wrap-around screen that filled the field of vision

could give your sense of balance a run for its money. Cinerama, IMAX,

those kind of things had been designed on exactly that principle. Then

there were virtual-reality helmets and gloves, and—but, of course, that's

jumping ahead of and around the story.

I had to make this maze, traveling down, and see if I made it before

anybody else. If I did, maybe, just maybe, I could end this thing if I could

face my own mental quirks and de-mons. Maybe.

There had to be an ending, just like, sometime long ago, there had to be a

beginning. Or was it long ago? Wasn't time in many ways a sense as well?

Was all this happening in the blink of an eye? My God—

Down and down I go, 'round and 'round I go...

I still had to be careful. I hadn't kept track of all of them, of course, and it

was more than possible that some got past me.

There was a sudden, inhuman screech below and just ahead of me, and I

began to smell a dank, dead flesh odor that grew more and more powerful.

There were Snarks down there ahead of me, too. There were always Snarks.

That was why I might still be first in this new branch. These sounded furry,

vicious, and full of rending teeth. I couldn't tell their number.

Beyond them could be Boojums and even an ambush. I might still not make

it. Probably wouldn't, although at least I knew this time Stark wouldn't

have any more advantage over me if they did kill me. Not in the next

incarnation.

I took some deep breaths, checked my weapons, and went forward. I was a

god, not an oyster, and, like all gods, I, too was insane.

*1*

THE CATERPILLAR'S QUESTION

I don't know what single factor had concentrated so much of the computer

industry in Washington State, but most of the time I was glad of it.

Winters could be a little unpleasant, but they were never grim, at least on

the western side of the mountains where I lived, and while you could see

the deep snow on the Cascades to the east and the Olympics to the west

and particularly on the vision of Mount Rainier that al-ways hovered like

some strange home of the gods over the southeastern sky, it was usually

above freezing in Seattle and the towns along Puget Sound to the north up

beyond Anacortes.

As somebody who'd been born and raised in the northeast, I always got a

kick out of Seattle-area people when it did snow or ice over just a bit. They

hunkered down and bun-kered down as if it were some horror like the

winters of Duluth or Nome and waited it out, rarely venturing outside the

confines of their metro area until it melted in a day or two and always

driving through that one to two inches of slush as if it were forty feet of

quicksand.

I'd been in the area about ten years, and if I hadn't quite achieved my

ambition to live on a luxurious houseboat moored in the lakes or canals like

the rich yuppies did, I nonetheless had a pretty large house on a decent lot

overlooking an arm of the sound over on the Bremerton side, and I was one

of those contented commuters who went down to the ferry in the morning,

read the paper and ate breakfast while it slowly crossed to the city, then

hopped a trackless trolley north to my old offices. They had once put "super

fer-ries" on the run, reducing the crossing from an hour to only thirty-five

minutes, but we'd boycotted and protested and marched until we got those

monsters slowed down to the old schedule. You couldn't have breakfast and

read even the lead-ing stories in the paper in a mere thirty-five minutes!

I was a whiz kid in my grad-school days, sought by all sorts. I was recruited

by IBM and DEC, all the biggies, but I always felt that I wasn't cut out to

work for one of those big monoliths. Nice companies, decent security and

benefits, but suit-and-tie types all the way; bureaucracies so big that it

was said that had the companies been oil tankers they couldn't have turned

in the middle of the ocean without going aground waiting for all the

captains to make up their minds and sign off on the idea. Even Apple

seemed to be losing its old image and going corporate then. No, I wanted

in on a ground-floor operation, find and perfect some suite of utilities or

some neat program that would knock their socks off and eventually cause

one of the big boys to buy me out for a few million, af-ter which I'd build

my dream house, put in my dream com-puter, and spend my days doing

nothing in particular unless I wanted to. I think they called it being an

"independent consultant."

I even got a job offer from the NSA and that had really surprised me. I

mean, the National Security Agency had only been admitting it existed at

all for maybe a couple of years back then, although anybody who was in

any way involved in computers knew all about them. It was the most

super-secret electronic spy agency the government had, or at least if there

was one even more secret, then it was really good. You had to have super

security clearances to even be looked at by them, and it'd be years before

you got cleared enough to get where you really wanted to be. Also, the

money was the usual GS government grade stuff, hardly what anybody good

enough for them to want would consider a decent wage.

That said, you might wonder why in hell anybody would want to go to work

for them. The answer is simple: they had a "black" budget, a budget that

was totally buried in every-body else's budget so nobody could tell how big

it was, and it was never itemized. That meant they spent like drunken

sailors on R&D, and that meant that they ran, developed, created, and

subsidized the greatest, fastest supercomputers in the known universe.

They were almost certainly years, maybe decades, beyond where anybody

else was, and everybody in the commercial sector knew that they were

playing with years-old NSA technological hand-me-downs.

It was said that by the early eighties they had achieved the Ultimate

Paranoia—they could intercept and decrypt literally any message sent

electrically anywhere in the world and they did. Think if it: every phone call,

every digital transmission, satellite transmission, radio, TV, all bands, all

waves, you name it. Countless billions and billions of them every day, any

day, constantly coming in and constantly growing.

Of course, you already see what happened, right? Big Brother had all the

answers George Orwell never dreamed of, but it never could figure out the

questions. The government was drowning in an unstoppable and monstrous

tidal wave of information that never ended and it still needed ESP to find

anything. A sort of infinite, quantum version of my own office. That was

why I had computers, even though they were a lot smaller and fit on desks.

The computers were the only places I could stick information and actually

find it again.

Provided, of course, I could wade through the junk and find the computer. I

knew there were three or four in my of-fice at any one time, but I never

was able to find more than two at a particular moment. The junk just kept

piling up, and after we got that wireless LAN...

Okay, okay, enough shop talk. It doesn't matter anyway, particularly not

now. In fact, it seems lifetimes ago, but it still forms a part of what I've

come to think of as my "core" self, and that's all the reality I've really got

left to hang onto.

Anyway, I went with this little startup in Seattle because I liked the area,

liked the culture and the scenery. It was also a damned sight cheaper and

cleaner than Silicon Valley, didn't make me feel like I was undressed in

somebody else's church like central Utah, didn't have New England winters

or south Florida's crime rate, and wasn't the government.

We'd gone into a cooperative venture with a Canadian company to develop

a really good, solid, fast wireless LAN and it was beginning to look like it

was going to pay off. A LAN is a local area network, which is simply a fancy

way of saying you want to string a bunch of small computers to-gether to

make one big one from which any data you want on any of them can be

retrieved by any machine, just like main-frames. Networks were the big

thing, of course, but running those miles of fiber-optic wires, installing

hubs, drilling through walls or putting in movable panels just to shift

ma-chines, was a pain for small businesses. There'd been a lot of wireless

schemes out there,, but they tended to be too slow, too restrictive, or too

liable to get garbled to bet your busi-ness on them, and it seemed like

every time you licked one problem it raised the problems in the other areas.

Kind of like the old arcade game of Whack A Mole—every time you hit one

of the critters on the head with a mallet another one popped up somewhere

else.

Not that we weren't selling product—our Canadian subsid-iary was doing

well putting LANs into local and provincial government operations, and we'd

done several major corpo-rate installations in Washington, Idaho, and

Oregon, but not a lot further than that. The problem was that we were too

small and in too competitive an area to get the big-buck investors that

would allow us to put a trained sales force all over North America and really

push this system. We had a few thousand individual customers but not the

big score. In fact, a lot of folks just hadn't heard of us in spite of our

becoming a cor-poration with more than forty million coming in.

Alas, all that wasn't profit. In fact, most of it went to pay off old expenses

and loans and to keep manufacturing going. It was a sober lesson in

capitalism for somebody who'd slept through those classes in college. Gross

versus net. It was frustrating. Here we had the best product on the damned

mar-ket and we couldn't get the word out!

Walt Slidecker, the man who'd recruited me, was one hell of an organizer,

but he seemed to lack that supersalesman's spark you saw in a Bill Gates

or Steve Jobs or any highly successful business head. When I'd first met

him, a few years back, he was only trying to build this business while

running a Netware installation and consultancy business, and I remember

Jack L. Chalker - The wonderland Gambit 1 - The Cybernetic Walrus

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: