Hylozoic (34 page)

By way of getting the feel of the moth rune, Chu programmed it onto a silicon atom in a pebble underfoot. As before, he had to push and twist to get the rune into the atomic silp's tiny mind, overlaying the rune upon the quantum computations already in place. After all, this Peng ranch atom had already been programmed with tulpa runes for the three Peng, the two buildings, and any number of moths and slugs that the Peng had eaten. Fortunately, runes had a linear quality, meaning that you could add them onto each other like color filters.

Chu programmed a few more atoms, improving his technique, and then he went into a modest speed-up, casting the moth rune into a few billion atoms in the pebble. The atomic silps began pumping out the right kinds of matter waves, but there weren't nearly enough of them to generate a visible tulpa. And by now Chu was too tired to do more.

“Wimp,” sniped Kakar. “Lightweight.”

“One-track tiny mind,” responded Chu. “Let's not forget that you'll never ever learn to teleport or teek at all. You can't put the rune on even one atom, let alone three billion of them.”

“At least I'm not a smelly ape.”

Setting aside any hopes for the zedhead power of accelerating his mind to the ten tridecillion cycle rate, Chu returned to the alternate approach he'd considered last night. Why not create viral runes that could spread on their own? Delving into his lazy eight memory, he examined the hybrid quantum operators he'd dreamed up. They were writhing around like chimerical tropical centipedes—tufted, horned, color-splotched.

“Those thought forms are—you say vibby?” said Kakar, telepathically watching over Chu's shoulder.

“Thanks,” said Chu. “I can show you how to make them. Here, you do this and this.” He pulsed out the relevant motions of his mind, stitching together quantum computational operators and wrapping them into loops.

Kakar cooed to himself, as he built a new-style thought pattern of his own: a birdlike form with hairy feathers. The mindbird seized passing thoughts and turned them inside out. Including Kakar's next sentence. “Hit's a wine dink fo' rats. I mean—this is a new kind of art.”

“You think so?” said Chu, flattered. “I'd call it math. I'm sorry I said you have a tiny mind.”

“Well, I called you a few things, too. Let's just be friends. Do you think you can learn to canerust for us? I mean runecast.”

“I don't feel so good right now,” admitted Chu. The gel was wearing off. “Maybe I'll try again tomorrow.”

“Lie down in our nest,” said Kakar. “Stad will dand guard. You know what I mean. Dad. Violence is the one thing he's good for.”

Chu dropped off to sleep amid tulpa pinfeathers. For the
first part of the night, the junk sickness blocked him from doing any meaningful dream work. His thoughts were frenzied rats in a circular maze with a bowl of Hrull gel at the unreachable core. In the wee hours he snapped awake to find himself frantically whistling. Shit. Leathery wings shadowed the moon-pale fog. Suller began steadily firing femtorays. Soon the citron-yellow beams had driven the mantas away.

Chu relaxed into the nest with a sense that he'd passed a crisis. The aches and nausea were fading. He teeped to Grew the redwood. Due to gnarl reduction, the tree's personality was wan, but it was comforting to be in touch with the gentle giant of the grove. The local silps were more than willing to help Chu work toward becoming a runecaster. Everyone wanted the Peng out of here.

Before dropping back to sleep, Chu hooked into his lazy eight memories of the previous night's thoughts. He closed his eyes and his work resumed.

 

 

He woke to passionate squawking. Suller and Gretta were arguing. Early morning sunbeams gilded the treetops. It was good to be awake. With Chu's mind running so fast, his night had lasted a terribly long time. A strange new shape—the fruit of his labors—was floating in his head.

“Hey,” teeped Kakar. The young bird was preening his rear feathers, with his neck twisted around. “Ready to play? I'm going nuts listening to my parents.”

“Sure,” said Chu, sitting up and telling his scalp to generate a teep block. “First let me wash.” He needed a minute alone.

He scrambled down from the Peng nest to splash in the dancing waters of the stream. Enough time had elapsed so that the
creek had refilled with living water from beyond the ranch's boundaries. The rune infection had an asymmetric quality. Matter that left a Peng ranch quickly went back to normal, whereas the stuff that came into an existing ranch remained in its natural, unprogrammed state.

Powered by the once again gnarly currents, Gloob had reemerged as his same cranky self. He was running tight eddies along the foundation of the Bosch house—undermining the improbable structure one grain of sand at a time.

Chu turned his attention to the snaky new form floating in his mind—he decided to call it Ouroboros after the legendary world-serpent who swallows his own tail. His Ouroboros operator was designed to transform ordinary runes into infectious, viral runes that might spread unaided from atom to atom. He was proud to have invented it with only the help of the local silps. He didn't like taking every problem to Gaia the way those stoner pigheads always did.

Heart pounding like a trip hammer, he stealthily brought the mandalic, quadrillion-spiked reset rune into his conscious mind—and fed it to his Ouroboros operator. The snake ate the rune and proceeded to swallow himself, starting at his tail. At the moment of evanescence, Ouroboros emitted a ghostly variation upon the reset rune, a moon to the original's sun.

“Come on, Chu!” squawked Kakar. “Why are you hiding down there?”

Hands shaking, Chu teeked the viralized reset rune into one of the oxygen atoms in the pool of water and—nothing happened. Shit. More thoughts from the dream work bubbled up.

Oh yeah, that's right, he'd already figured out that his Ouroboros operator wasn't going to work very well. The reset rune's quadrillion-spiked sun pattern made it particularly resistant to viralization. But maybe he could design a better version of the Ouroboros operator, and that would do the job.

A fountain of water shot up—Kakar diving into the pool.

“Are you runecasting?” demanded the alien bird, shaking drops from his feathers.

“Um—I was trying something out,” said Chu, his thoughts racing. “I can show it to you.”

It seemed okay to share this flawed Ouroboros because—yet more dream wisdom—
all
of the viral runes made by Ouroboros would have something wrong with them. Any Peng tulpas they produced would last at most a few days—if the viral runes even worked at all. Therefore—

“Stop blocking your teep,” twittered Kakar. “If you hold out on us, Dad will come after you. We don't want that.”

“Here,” said Chu, baring the top layers of his mind. “I wanted to get this new hack ready without you guys breathing down my neck. I call it Ouroboros. Let's test it out.”

In a way, spreading around more Peng runes might be a good idea. A taste of the dull life on a Peng ranch should shake the blind faith of the goobs backing Dick Too Dibbs and the Crown of Creation Church. And, given that the Ouroboros-built runes would decay rather quickly, no lasting damage would be done.

Settling down on the porch of Thuy and Jayjay's cabin, the youths resumed working with yesterday's spiky pink and green moth rune. Kakar watched as Chu fed the virtual moth pupa to Ouroboros. The snake ate the conch and then itself, generating a shimmery variant of the original moth rune.

“Wait, wait,” clucked Kakar. “I don't get it. What did you just do?”

“You input a rune into my Ouroboros operator, and it made a viral version of the rune. Instead of having to teek your moth rune into ten tridecillion atoms, I only have to program the viral moth rune into one single atom and let it spread on its own. It stops spreading once it's covered the
volume of a Peng ranch. And then it generates the moth tulpa.”

“Oh,” said Kakar, trying to keep his cool. “I see. Viral runes. Simple.”

“Simple—except nobody ever thought of them before. You guys have been using runes for—how long? A thousand years?” Chu had the sense that he'd totally aced Kakar. Victory was sweet.

“I can hardly believe you're doing this for us,” said the young Peng, studying Chu. “Is it a trick? Give me a demo. Put that doctored moth rune onto an atom and let's see what happens.”

Chu teeked the viralized rune onto an iron atom in the dirt—and watched as the moth program spread with exponential speed from one atom to the next. Just as his dream calculations had promised, the cascade stopped after infecting the hundred-kilometer cube of ground beneath them. A moth fluttered up.

“Wow,” said Kakar, snapping it from the air. He clacked his beak to assess the tulpa's savor. “Tastes fine. You're awesome, Chu.”

“Make a Peng for us, boys!” cawed Suller, who'd been watching them from the nest. “Let Pekka feed you one of our customer's runes. We have an attractive single female pioneer waiting for a spot—name of Floofy. We can fit her onto our ranch.”

“Floofy wants to come here?” warbled Kakar, his voice cracking with excitement. “She signed up with Warm Worlds?”

“She misses you, son. Pekka just told me. I'm more than glad to welcome the young hen. I want you to be happy.”

“Damn you, Suller!” screeched Gretta. “Isn't one mistress enough?”

“Floofy is for Kakar, not me,” trilled Suller, pleased to be taking the high road. “Open your ears and clamp your bill.”

“Will Ouroboros work well enough, Chu?” said Kakar, his discordant voice wistful. “Can we bring Floofy here?”

“Sure,” said Chu, starting to feel confident of his new trick—and also confident of his kicker—that the viral runes had an imperfect copying process that would inevitably make the tulpas decay.

“You have a secret,” said Suller, eyeing him suspiciously. “It's about the reset rune, isn't it?”

“Unfortunately, my Ouroboros operator can't put the reset rune into an effective viral form,” said Chu quite truthfully. He didn't mention that he hoped to do better very soon. “You guys don't have a thing to worry about. Give me the Floofy rune and I'll try making a tulpa of her.”

“You might as well get the rune straight from the Pekklet,” said Suller in a studiously casual tone. “She can send up some tendrils for quantum entanglement.”

“No way,” said Chu. “I saw what she did to Jayjay.”

“I'll fetch the rune for you,” said Kakar quickly. He closed his eyes, swaying and twitching his wings, soaking up the Floofy rune from afar. He passed Chu a copy of the rune and, while he was at it, appropriated a precise copy of the Ouroboros operator.

“Let's both try converting the rune so we can compare,” suggested Chu, genuinely curious to see if his invention was going to work.

The Floofy rune was much more complicated than the moth rune. Chu saw a square wooden temple with a roof that curled up at the corners. Oily lamps burned within the sanctum, the flames bouncing glints of light from a quintillion shelves of gilded beetles. The rafters were painted orange with cloudy
presences at the corners. Cascades of jewels dangled from the beams, strung onto threads by the sextillions, each gem etched with a glyph. In the shadow of the altar, a trio of shiny black frogs played instruments: a bone flute, a log drum, and a tendon-strung fiddle. The music sounded random and dissonant.

“That's Floofy to a T,” burbled Kakar. “Wait till you meet her. She's elegant. Can Ouroboros handle a rune this big?”

“Of course,” said Chu, although he had to wonder if this were true. “I'll race you.”

He nudged Floofy's rune into his operator snake, then bent the overfed serpent around to swallow his tail. Ouroboros twitched, pulsed—and froze. The transformation process—which was running in Chu's own brain—had used up all the available in-skull memory.

Chu moved carefully to fix the hang. When meddling with your mind's computational architecture it was possible to do something utterly disastrous—such as terminating your autonomic life support systems. Slowly, safely, he redirected the Ouroboros computation into his higher-dimensional lazy eight memory.

With the extra memory resources in play, Ouroboros finished swallowing himself, leaving behind a shimmering, viralized version of the Floofy rune.

Kakar was already done, indeed he'd had time to start twisting his version of Ouroboros around, as if looking for a more effective configuration. This was disturbing. What if Kakar perfected rune viralization before Chu did? But surely that was unlikely. Chu felt he was smarter than the bird.

A cursory check showed that the youths' transformed versions of the Floofy rune matched. “Hurry up and make her now,” urged Kakar, repeatedly clacking his beak. “All you have to do is zap one lousy atom!”

So Chu teeked his viralized Floofy rune onto a sulfur atom in a bluejay dropping on the ground. The rune rushed out across the Peng ranch, infecting each of the ten tridecillion neighboring atoms. And, lo, a new Peng tulpa appeared amid the trees. The ramshackle distributed construction had worked.