Read Online Bill 3 - on the Planet of Bottled Brains by Harry Harrison - Free Book Online Page A

the occasional spark landed on his skin. This was the first time he'd been warm and dry (because Brownnose had providentially erected a small two-person tent just before Bill's arrival and even had a small pot of stew brewing on the edge of it). Bill had a lot of questions to ask, and the stew was one of them. As he understood it, nothing real could exist here in this place. Even Bill was not real. His body, the really real part of him, was off slumbering in what Bill hoped was a safe place. The computer was the master of reality. It dictated not only what food Bill ate, but what that food would look like, taste like, and so the computer controlled how Bill would react to his food since the computer could shape it to get any response he wanted. If this were true, and there seemed no reason to doubt it, since Bill had seen his own body stacked on a cot in the waiting room while he hovered about in uncertainty for a moment, until the computer sucked him up and took him in. So in that case, how had Brownnose gotten here, and how come he was able to produce his own metaphor for food?
    “Brownnose,” Bill said to his stupidly grinning friend, “it's not really you, is it?”
    “Of course it's me,” Brownnose said, his grin turning just a shade anxious.
    “No, it can't be,” Bill said. “You must be one of the hallucinations or constructs that the computer produces. You couldn't be making this food, either, without the knowledge of the computer. So you're just another fake production of the computer, sent here to make me have false hope again so it can dash it.” Bill snuffled with self-pity and wiped a pendant drop from his nose with the back of his hand.
    “I'm nothing of the kind!” Brownnose said, wringing his hands with worry. “I'm your good friend, Bill, your old buddy, you know that. Say you know that!”
    “Of course I know that, moron!” Bill growled. “But if you were the computer trying to fool me that's what you'd say, isn't it?”
    “How do I know what I'd say if I was the computer,” Brownnose cried aloud, out of his meager intellectual depths with all this cerebration. All he really wanted was to be liked. Which was why everybody hated him. “I'm not something out of a computer like you said. I'm me. I think.”
    “If you're you,” Bill said, “then tell me something the computer couldn't know.”
    “How could I know what that'd be!” Brownnose cried. “I don't know what the computer knows!”
    “No, but the fact that you're here at all means that the computer knows what you know.”
    “That's not my fault,” Brownnose said.
    “I know that. But do you realize what it means? It means that, since the computer knows everything you know, it is you.”
    Brownnose thought about this furiously and still couldn't understand it. “Say, Bill, why don't you try some of this here real nice stew.”
    “Shut up you fake computer projection.”
    “No, I'm not. Bill, believe me, I'm me.”
    “Oh all right,” Bill said. “If I'm wrong, I'm wrong. How are you, Brownnose?”
    “Pretty well, Bill,” Brownnose smarmed happily. “I really had a tough time convincing the military to let me try to rescue you.”
    “How did you manage that?” Bill asked suspiciously.
    “They couldn't just leave you missing on patrol, could they? Not after I started making a fuss.”
    “That was good of you, Brownnose. And they let you volunteer?”
    “I think they just wanted to get rid of me. But they did let me go, and I came here and after a lot of difficulties, I found you.”
    “You wouldn't like to tell me just how in hell you managed that?”
    “What does it matter?” Brownnose shuffled his toe in the ice and looked uncomfortable. “The important thing now is to get you out of here.”
    Bill stared with some bitterness at the being who either was his old friend Brownnose or a computer simulation. It was really important to figure out which he was, because the real Brownnose would help him whereas Brownnose