Free A Good Old-Fashioned Future by Bruce Sterling Page A

in this town today? Steinbeck.”
    “Yeah, I know,” said Tug. “It’s kind of a postmodern culture-industry museum-economy tourist thing.”
    “Yeah. Cannery Row cans Steinbeck now. There’s Steinbeck novels, and tapes of the crappy movie adaptations, and Steinbeck beer-mugs, and Steinbeck key chains, Steinbeck bumper-stickers, Steinbeck iron-on patches, Steinbeck fridge-magnets … and below the counter, there’s Steinbeck blow-up plastic love-dolls so that the air-filled author of
Grapes of Wrath
can be subjectedto any number of unspeakable posthumous indignities.”
    “You’re kidding about the love-dolls, right?”
    “Heck no, dude! I think what we ought to do is buy one of ’em, blow it up, and throw it into a cooler full of Urschleim. What we’d get is this big Jell-O Steinbeck, see? Maybe it’d even
talk
! Like deliver a Nobel Prize oration or something. Except when you go to shake his hand, the hand just snaps off at the wrist like a jelly polyp, a kind of dough-lump of dead author flesh, and floats through the air till it hits some paper and starts writing sequels.…”
    “What the hell was that stuff you snorted last night, Revel?”
    “Bunch of letters and numbers, old son. Seems like they change ’em every time I score.”
    Tug groaned as if in physical pain. “In other words you’re so fried, you can’t remember.”
    Revel, jolted from his reverie, frowned. “Now, don’t go Neanderthal on me, Tug. That stuff is pure competitive edge. You wouldn’t act so shocked about it, if you’d spent some time in the boardrooms of the Fortune 500 lately. Smart drugs!” Revel coughed rackingly and laughed again. “The coolest thing about smart drugs is, that if they even barely work, you just
gotta
take ’em, no matter how square you are! Otherwise, the Japanese CEOs kick your ass!”
    “I think it’s time to get some fresh air, Revel.”
    “How right you are, hombre. We gotta settle in at Quinonez’s tank farm this morning. We’ve got a Niagara of Urschleim headed our way.” Revel glanced at his watch. “Fact is, the stuff oughta be rollin’ in a couple of hours from now. Let’s go on down and get ready to watch the tanks fill up.”
    “What if one of the tanks splits open?”
    “Then I expect we won’t use that particular tank no more.”
    When Tug and Revel got to Quinonez Motorotive, they found several crates of newly delivered equipmentwaiting for them. Tug was as excited as Christmas morning.
    “Look, Revel, these two boxes are the industrial robots, that box is the supercomputer, and this one here is the laser-sintering device.”
    “Yep,” said Revel. “And over here’s a drum of those piezoplastic beads and here’s a pallet of titaniplast sheets for your jellyfish tanks. You start gettin’ it all set up, Doc, while I check out the pipeline valves one more time.”
    Tug unlimbered the robots first. They were built like short squat humanoids, and each came with a telerobotic interface that had the form of a virtual reality helmet. The idea was that you put on the helmet and watched through the robot’s eyes, meanwhile talking the robot through some repetitive task that you were going to want it to do. The task in this case was to build jellyfish tanks by lining some of the garage’s big truck bays with titaniplast—and to fill up the tanks with water.
    The robot controls were of course trickier than Tug had anticipated, but after an hour or so he had one of them slaving away like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. He powered up the second robot and used it to bring in and set up the new computer and the laser-sintering assemblage. Then he crossloaded the first robot’s program onto the second robot, and it, too, got to work turning truck bays into aquaria.
    Tug configured the new computer and did a remote login to his workstation back in Los Perros. In ten minutes he’d siphoned off copies of all the software he needed, and ghostly jellyfish were shimmering across the