Mad Professor (18 page)

“Thank you,” Linda said, though she wasn't sure to whom. “But I still need a job.”

Looking up, she noticed rain running down the window above the tub. As if hearing her, the rivulets wavered to form a series of particular shapes–letters. Was she going crazy? Don't fight it. She wrote the letters down. It was a web address. And at that address, Linda found herself a job–maintaining an interactive Web site for the National Weather Service.

Jake Wasser was adding a column of penciled-in numbers on his preliminary tax form. Sure he could be doing this on a computer, but he enjoyed the mental exercise. Tax season was his time of the year for arithmetic.

Nine and three is two carry one. Two take away five is seven borrow one. If he hadn't blown off calculus and majored in history, maybe he would have been a scientist like his playful, bohemian wife Rosalie. Instead he'd ended up a foot soldier in a Wall Street law firm. It was a grind, though it paid the rent.

When the tax numbers were all in place, it was early afternoon. Jake was free. Even though he'd known he'd finish early, he'd taken a full day off. He needed one. Recently he'd had the feeling that life was passing him by. Here he was forty-two and he'd been working crazy long weeks for going on twenty years now. Kissing butt, laughing at jokes, talking about politics and cars, smoking cigars, eating heavy meals. He and Rosalie had never gotten around to having children.

He looked around the apartment, with its polished wood everywhere. The sight of their luxury flat never failed to lift his mood. In some ways, he and Rosalie had been very lucky. He drifted toward the window that faced Gramercy Park, passing the heavy vase of flowers their Dominican housekeeper had brought
in. They resembled heavy pink thistles—proteus? The odor was sweet, spiral, stimulating. It made him think of numbers.

He stood by the window and looked up Lexington Avenue, the blocks receding into the misty April rain. On a whim, he began counting the windows in the buildings lining the avenue—to his surprise he was able to count them all. And then he counted the bricks, as easily as taking a breath. Though he couldn't have readily put the quantity into words, he knew the exact number of bricks in the buildings outside, knew it as surely as he knew the number of fingers on his hands.

Leaning on the windowsill, he went on counting right through all the numbers. Whirl, whirl, whirl. And then he was done. He'd counted through all the numbers there are.

He caught his breath and looked around the quiet apartment. The housekeeper was gone for the day. What strange thoughts he was having. He went into the kitchen and drank a glass of water from the sink. And then, once again, he counted to infinity—the trick was to visualize each number in half the time of the number before. He could do it, even though it didn't seem physically possible.

Gingerly he felt his balding pate and the crisp curls at the back of his head. Everything was as it should be, all his parts in place. Should he rush to the emergency room? That would be a stupid way to spend his day off. He glanced down at the wood floor, counting the light and dark bands of grain. And then he counted to infinity again. He grabbed an umbrella and left the apartment in search of Rosalie.

Looking out the damp taxi's window on the ride uptown, he took in every detail. People's gestures, their magnificent faces. Usually he didn't pay so much attention, feeling he'd be overloaded if he let everything in. But today he was like a photo
album with an endless supply of fresh pages. A digital camera with an inexhaustible memory card. Calmly he absorbed the passing pageant.

At Sixty-Sixth Street the cab turned and drove to the research campus beside the East River. Jake didn't often visit Rosalie at work, and the guard at the desk called her on a speaker phone for permission.

“Jake?” she exclaimed in surprise. “You're here? I was just about to call you.”

“Something's happened to me,” he said. “I want to see you.”

“Perfect,” said Rosalie. “Let him in, Dan.”

The building was old, with shiny gray linoleum floors. Nothing to count but the hallway doors. Rosalie's short-cropped dark head popped out of the last one. Her personal lab. She smiled and beckoned, filled with some news of her own.

“You've gotta see my organic microscope,” exclaimed Rosalie, drawing him into her quarters. It was just the two of them there.

“Wait,” interrupted Jake. “I counted every brick on Lexington Avenue. And then I counted to infinity.”

“Every brick?” said Rosalie, not taking him seriously. “Sounds like you did the tax forms without a calculator again.”

“I'm thinking things that are physically impossible,” said Jake solemnly. “Maybe I'm dying.”

“You look fine,” said Rosalie, planting a kiss on his cheek. “It's good to see you out of that gray Barney's suit. The news here is the opposite. My new scope is real, but what it's doing is unthinkable.” She gestured at a glowing, irregularly shaped display screen. “I came up with this gnarly idea for a new approach to microscopy, and I had Nick in the genomics group grow the biotech components for me. It uses a kind of octopus skin for the display, so I call it a skinscope. It's the end, Jake. It zooms in—like
forever. A Zeno infinity in four seconds. Patentable for sure.” She closed her office door and lowered her voice. “We need to talk intellectual property, lawyer mine.”

“I'm tired of being a lawyer,” murmured Jake, intoxicated by Rosalie's presence. With his new sensitivity, he was hearing all the echoes and overtones of their melding voices in the little room, visualizing the endless sum of component frequencies. How nice it would be to work with Rosalie every day. Her face held fourteen million shades of pink.

“Here we go,” said Rosalie, blithely flicking a switch attached to the skinscope.

The display's skin flickered and began bringing forth images of startling clarity and hue, the first a desultory paramecium poking around for food. Jake thought of a mustached paralegal picking through depositions. The skinscope shuddered, and the zoom began. They flew through the microbe's core, down past its twinkling genes into a carbon atom. The atom's nucleus bloated up like the sun and inside it danced a swarm of firefly lights.

“This is inconceivable,” said Rosalie. “We're already at the femtometer level. And it's only getting started. It goes through all the decimals, you dig.”

A firefly broke into spirals of sparks, a spark unfolded into knotted strings, a string opened into tunnels of cartoon hearts, a heart divulged a ring of golden keys, a key flaked into a swarm of butterflies. Each image lasted half as long as the one before.

“I'm losing it now,” said Rosalie, but Jake stayed with the zoom, riding the endless torrent of images.

“Infinity,” he said when it was done. “I saw it all.”

“And to hell with quantum mechanics,” mused Rosalie. “My Jake. It's a sign, both these things happening to us today. The world is using us to make something new.”

“But the skinscope patent will belong to the labs,” said Jake. “I remember the clause from your contract.”

“What if I quit the lab?” said Rosalie. “I'm tired of thinking about disease.”

“We could start a company,” said Jake. “Develop skinscope applications.”

“We'll use them like infinite computers, Jake. A box to simulate every possible option in a couple of seconds. No round-off, no compromise, all the details. You can be the chief engineer.”

“Kind of late for a career change,” said Jake.

“You can do it,” said Rosalie. “You'll teach our programmers to see infinity. Teach me now. Show me how you learned.”

“Okay,” said Jake, taking out his pencil and jotting down some figures. “Add the first two lines and subtract the third one. . .”

GEORGE 
Bush doesn't sound as mean and stupid as I would have expected. Or maybe I'm just in a frame of mind to cut him slack. There are three armed Secret Service men here in my bedroom-slash-Dogyears-World-Headquarters.

They've been here for about half an hour. I'm mentally calling them the Boss, the Trainee, and the Muscle. The Boss and the Muscle are wearing Ray-Ban mirror shades—they're living the dream, true Men in Black. They have guns, and if they want to, they can kill me. I'm polite.

The Trainee's been doing the talking, he's a guy my age, a fellow U.C. Berkeley graduate, or so he says, not that I ever saw him at any of the places I used to hang, like the Engineering Library, Cloyne Co-op, or Gilman St. His name is Brad. All the SS guys have four-letter, monosyllable names. Dick, John, Mark, Jeff, like that. I'm Wag. My dog made up the name.

Brad starts out by asking me questions about my Web sites, and about the FoneFoon cell phone worm, being vaguely threatening but a little jocular at the same time, the way these field-ops always are. It's like they try and give off this vibe that they already know everything about you, so you might as well go ahead and roll over onto your back and piss on yourself like a frightened dog.

This isn't the first time the Secret Service has come to see me. The ultimate cause for their interest is that I run a small ISP company called Dogyears. “ISP” as in “Information Service Provider.” If you don't want to deed your inalienable God-given share of cyberspace over to Pig Business, you can get your e-mail and web access through my excellent
www.dogyears.net
instead of through the spam-pimps at AOL. Dogyears offers very reasonable rates, so do check us out.

The hardware side of my Dogyears ISP is a phone-booth-sized wire cage of machines in a server hotel in South San Francisco. I pay a monthly fee, and the server hotel gives me my own special wire, the magic Net wire, the proverbial snake-charmer's rope leading up into the sky. You'd think it would be a big fat wire, like one of those garden-hose-sized electrical conduits you see at step-down voltage transformer stations in the cruddier, more industrial parts of town such as the Islais Creek neighborhood where I actually live, but, no, the Net wire is standard twenty-gauge copper.

Since I run my own ISP, my Internet access can't be terminated easily. I put any whacked-out thing I like on my ISP, and so do my clients. And this is why both the Secret Service and the FBI are darkening my door, the SS about my Prexy Twins site, and the FBI about the FoneFoon worm that's recently dumped sixty terabytes of digital cell phone conversations onto one of my servers' hard drives.

The FoneFoon worm account is under the name of
[email protected]
, and I'm honestly unable to tell the FBI who that really is. They want my sixty Tb of phone conversations for their “ongoing investigation” and I've been stalling them, simply for the sake of the innocents whose cell phones were hacked. Also I've been cobbling together a browser so I can troll through the conversation records for laughs.

In any case, I'm quite sure it's The Prexy Twins, not FoneFoon, that brings the Secret Service here today. The Prexy Twins,
www.prexytwins.com
, is my online zine about the Bush girls. I have photos from the
National Enquirer,
rewrites of gossip, links, polls, and fun little webbie gimmicks like a rollover to change Jenna's hair color. The site has a guest book where people write things in. “Fuck” becomes “kiss,” “shit” becomes “poo,” and the obscene “Republican or Democrat” becomes “elephant or donkey.” Good clean fun. Now and then somebody posts a death threat against the Bushes, but I take those off manually when I notice them, and if I don't notice them, the SS phones me up to ask who posted them.

The SS guys came in person to my bedroom-slash-Dogyears-World-Headquarters two days after The Prexy Twins went up, just to find out where I'm at. But they could see that I have pure intentions and a clear conscience. I only do the site for—um, why
do
I run a Web site about the Bush girls anyway? Partly it's to game the media and to garner hits. It's a kind of art project too, despite the fact that even goobs like it.

I enjoy the feeling of having a smidgen of control over the news. I think it's nice that the twins drink, for instance, and that old people get so whipped up about it. And, yes, I get a kick out of Jenna. She looks so nasty that I'd like to scrub her with a wire brush. Not that I'm telling this to the SS. Or, for that matter, to
my girlfriend Hella. The less I talk to her about Jenna in my special slobbering Jenna-fan voice, the better!

+   +   +

The June day that I'm telling you about starts foggy. My bed-room-slash-Dogyears-World-Headquarters is quite near the San Francisco Bay, in an industrial shipping district. I'm staring out of my window, watching the early morning habits of the local tweakers. A place called Universal Metals is across from my window. The tweakers bring scrap or scavenged metal there to trade for money to buy methedrine, which sends them scurrying out for more metal. Tweakers talk almost all the time, whether or not anyone's near them. Studying the antlike activity of the tweakers can keep me occupied for hours—you can almost see the pheromone trails and scent plumes they leave behind.