Free The Complete Roderick by John Sladek

liked about it was the jar tops: “Fifty of your favourite cartoon characters – save ’em, swap ’em, loads of fun!” Something like that. Anyway the supermarkets were probably losing money on the crap, because they stopped handling it. So this kid just got on the old terminal, twiddled his way into the inventory computer of this big supermarket chain, Tommy Tucker, and made a few crucial changes. All of a sudden Tommy Tucker was swamped with the crap. They put it on special offer, they even gave it away – and I bet they had to throw away a few tons of it too. But they couldn’t stop their computer from re-ordering, more and more … When they caught up with him, this kid had forty-nine of his favourite cartoon characters – probably more than any other kid in the United States.’
    Dora looked for the waitress. ‘I’ve heard lots of stories like that. Kids are always using their school terminals to dig into some computer somewhere.’
    ‘Yeah, but what Danny did was kind of new. He invented some sinister algorithm, so he told me. I don’t even know what an algorithm is.’
    ‘You don’t? Honest? It’s only a set of instruc –’
    ‘And I don’t want to know. Whatever it was, after he planted it in Tommy Tucker’s computer, it just grew until it took over. I guess they had to finally throw away their whole program and start from scratch. I guess they lost a lot of money, that’s where the FBI came in.’
    ‘What happened to him, then?’
    ‘Oh, they put him on the payroll at Tommy Tucker. As a computer security consultant. All he had to do was promise to leave them alone. But the funny thing is –’
    The waitress arrived, with someone else’s drinks.
    ‘Sorry, kid, I got a bit mixed up, with all the characters in here tonight. Old Jack there’s teed off because he can’t read –’ she gestured at the man in the hunting cap, ‘– and the cowboy next tohim wants to know who’s drinking martinis – and then I got some joker in the front tries to tell me he’s a manicure. Crazy! Crazy! Crazy!’
    She delivered the Old-fashioned and the martini to Rogers and Hannah, who was saying:
    ‘… maybe the Blackfeet boy, Kut-o-yis, cooked to life in a cooking pot, but isn’t that the point? Aren’t they always fodder for our desires? Take Pumiyathon for instance, going to bed with his ivory creation –’
    ‘Look, these Indian stories are okay, but I don’t see –’
    ‘Indian? No, he was King of Cyprus, you must know that story, they even made a musical of it,
Hello Dolly,
was it? Something like that … But take Hephaestus then, those golden girls he made who could talk, help him at his forge, who knows what else … Or Daedalus, not just the statues that guarded the labyrinth, but the dolls he made for the daughters of Cocalus, you see? Love, work, conversation, guard duty, baby, plaything, of course they used them to replace people, isn’t that the point?’
    ‘Yes but the point, my point is –’
    ‘And in Boeotia, the little Daedala, the procession where they carried an oaken bride to the river, much like the
argeioi
in Rome, the puppets the Vestal Virgins threw into the Tiber to purge the demons; disease, probably, just as the Ewe made clay figures to draw off the spirit of the smallpox, so did the Baganda, they buried the figures under roads and the first –’
    ‘This is all very interesting, yes, but –’
    ‘First person who passed by picked up the sickness. In Borneo they drew sickness into wooden images, so did the Dyaks … Of course the Chinese mostly made toys, a jade automaton in the Fourth Century but much earlier even the first Han Emperor had a little mechanical orchestra but then he was a bit mad, you know. Imagine burning all the books in China
and
building the Great Wall, quite mad, quite mad … but the Japanese, Prince Kaya was it? Yes, made a wooden figure that held a big bowl, it helped the people water their rice paddies during the drought. Certainly more