Mad Professor (23 page)

“How do you mean—an ellipse, a catalog, a meter, and a vibrating plane?”

“They're like Robert Williams cartoon characters; each of them with little black legs with puffy white shoes and black stick-arms with white gloves for hands, each of these guys about three feet tall. They're humanoid enough to be like a woman, a man, a man, and a woman. The ellipse herself is a thick black outline like the frame of an oval mirror, higher than she is wide. She has tiny little brown eyes up near the top, and a thin mouth near the bottom. Inside the ellipse is nothing—well, not exactly nothing, something like an energy field. Whenever the ellipse is at the correct angle so that I can look through her, I see that part of the world in black and white. Like a diagram in a physics book, with everything cleaned up and simplified. The ellipse is a window to reality's blueprint. Now, the ellipse does a detox on the crackhead woman right away. Yep, as soon as the ellipse comes out of the fanny pack, she jumps at the crackhead woman and pushes herself over the woman's head. The ellipse wriggles her way all down the woman, passing over the woman like a hoop of flame passing over a leaping tiger. That's the thing that gets the woman clean and sober right off the bat. It's like she's been unwrapped from inside of dirty translucent plastic. She's out from inside of her body bag. Her eyes are alive again, her face is awake.”

“The mighty ellipse. What about the other three?”

“The catalog is a fat, old, cloth-bound book, like a Library of Congress catalog volume. His cover is brown, and he has an eye and an arm on both the front cover and on the back cover. His shiny brown eyes notice me watching. But mainly he's focused
on the woman he's helping. What he does, he holds the edges of his cover and spreads them open like a flasher, showing his store of information to the woman. She starts giggling as she looks at the flapping pages of the catalog. Not a rheumy giggle, but a light, clear giggle. Just about then I glance around to see if anyone else is seeing what I'm seeing. But, no, they aren't. In fact everyone around me has stopped moving. All the world is temporarily silent and frozen: the homies, the tourists, the streetcars, the cars on Market Street. Nothing is moving but me, the crackhead woman, the ellipse, the catalog, the meter, and the vibrating plane. I'm witnessing a secret miracle.”

“You're living right, man. Tell me more about the catalog. What was the woman seeing inside?”

“Well, I scoot a little closer to her so I can see too. Each page of the catalog is a picture, a picture of the things she's thought and seen and done. I can see her younger self inside the pictures. She's eating barbeque, going to movies, laughing with her friends. It's like a catalog of her life. All the bad stuff is in there too, of course: the rip-offs, the beatings, the hospitals, and the jails. And when I look closer I can see that the pictures themselves are made up of smaller pictures. Like mosaics. And the little pictures are made of even smaller pictures etcetera. There's this branching fractal catalog thing happening. The pictures in the pictures show other people doing the same kinds of things as the woman. I'm in there too. Everyone's good things and bad things are inside of everyone else's catalog.”

“Like we're all the same.”

“You got it. Now, the meter is the next one out. The meter, he's like a big voltmeter. He's got a black dial face with a red needle swinging back and forth and two brown-and-white eyes set into the dial. He reaches his hands out and touches the sides
of the woman's head, and his needle goes swaying back and forth with her feelings. The woman is staring at the needle and watching how her thoughts move her feelings up and down. At first the needle is just slamming back and forth, but in a minute it calms down to where it's mostly vibrating nice and even in the middle. She's still watching the catalog, you dig, and now and then she sees something that makes the needle jump. The woman likes it when the needle jumps, and she likes it when it calms down afterward. She's practicing with this for a long time, but there's no rush because the world's time has stopped for us. It's like the ellipse has detoxed her, the catalog has shown her about her past, and the meter is telling her about peace of mind.”

“Did she notice you watching her?”

“Yeah, she glances over at me and smiles real calm and easy. She's like, ‘Ain't this a trip?' And then the vibrating plane starts doing her thing. The vibrating plane is a vertical disk facing us. Her eyes and arms and legs are attached to her outer edge, and her actual vibrating plane part is her big round stomach. The plane is rushing forward and backward like the head of a bass drum, only with much bigger oscillations. The plane pushes right through the woman and me, and then it pulls back out in front of us, and then it does it again. Over and over. When the plane is behind me, I feel totally merged into the world, and when the plane is in front of me, I feel all separate and observational, the way I mostly do. The plane is vibrating at maybe three pulses per second, and I'm feeling it as this sequence of One / Many / One / Many / One.”

“How do you mean, One and Many?”

“The vibrating plane is showing us the natural rhythm of perceiving things, you wave? You merge into the world and
experience it, you separate yourself out and make distinctions; you flow back out into unity, you pull back and remember yourself; you sympathize with everyone around you, you focus on your own feelings—the eternal vibration between Us and Me, between One and Many. The teaching here is to understand the vibration as a natural and organic process of the mind. You can't stop the vibrating plane. You can't stay merged, and you can't stay cut off. You're flipping back and forth forever and ever, with a frequency of like I say maybe three cycles per second.”

“And then what happened?”

“Well, the ellipse, the catalog, the meter, and the vibrating plane all hold hands with each other and start dancing ring-around-the-rosy in a circle around the woman and me. We smile at each other again, and she stands up, all healthy and ready to live. And then the sounds of the tourists and the homeless woman singing and the cars on Market Street start back up. I see my wife across the street coming out of Nordstrom's. I cross the street and I meet her.”

“What about the crackhead woman?”

“When I look back she's gone. The vision was true.”

LIFE 
was hard in old Silicon Valley. Little Janna Gutierrez was a native Valley girl, half Vietnamese, half Latina. She had thoughtful eyes and black hair in high ponytails.

Her mother Ahn tried without success to sell California real estate. Her father Ruben plugged away inside cold, giant companies like Ctenephore and Lockheed Biological. The family lived in a charmless bungalow in the endless grid of San Jose.

Janna first learned true bitterness when her parents broke up. Tired of her hard scrabble with a lowly wetware engineer, Anh ran off with Bang Dang, the glamorous owner of an online offshore casino. Dad should have worked hard to win back Mom's lost affection, but, being an engineer, he contented himself with ruining Bang. He found and exploited every unpatched hole in Bang's operating system. Bang never knew what hit him.

Despite Janna's pleas to come home, Mom stubbornly stuck by her online entrepreneur. She bolstered Bang's broken income
by retailing network porn. Jaded Americans considered porn to be the commonest and most boring thing on the Internet. However, Hollywood glamour still had a moldy cachet in the innocent Third World. Mom spent her workdays dubbing the ethnic characteristics of tribal Somalis and Baluchis onto porn stars. She found the work far more rewarding than real estate.

Mom's deviant behavior struck a damp and morbid echo in Janna's troubled soul. Janna sidestepped her anxieties by obsessively collecting Goob dolls. Designed by glittery-eyed comix freaks from Hong Kong and Tokyo, Goobs were wiggly, squeezable, pettable creatures made of trademarked Ctenephore piezo-plastic. These avatars of ultra-cuteness sold off wire racks worldwide, to a generation starved for Nature. Thanks to environmental decline, kids of Janna's age had never seen authentic wildlife. So they flipped for the Goob menagerie: marmosets with butterfly wings, starfish that scuttled like earwigs, long, furry frankfurter cat-snakes.

Sometimes Janna broke her Goob toys from their mint-in-the-box condition, and dared to play with them. But she quickly learned to absorb her parents' cultural values, and to live for their business buzz. Janna spent her off-school hours on the Net, pumping-and-dumping collectible Goobs to younger kids in other states.

Eventually, life in the Valley proved too much for Bang Dang. He pulled up the stakes in his solar-powered RV and drove away, to pursue a more lucrative career, retailing networked toilets. Janna's luckless Mom, her life reduced to ashes, scraped out a bare living marketing mailing lists to mailing list marketers.

Janna ground her way through school and made it into U.C. Berkeley. She majored in computational genomics. Janna worked hard on software for hardwiring wetware, but her career
timing was off. The latest pulse of biotech start-ups had already come and gone. Janna was reduced to a bottle-scrubbing job at Triple Helix, yet another subdivision of the giant Ctenephore conglomerate.

On the social front, Janna still lacked a boyfriend. She'd studied so hard she'd been all but dateless through school and college. In her senior year she'd moved in with this cute Korean boy who was in a band. But then his mother had come to town with, unbelievable, a blushing North Korean bride for him in tow. So much the obvious advice-column weepie!

In her glum and lonely evenings, she played you-are-her interactives, romance stories, with a climax where Janna would lip-synch a triumphant, tear-jerking video. On other nights Janna would toy wistfully with her decaying Goob collection. The youth market for the dolls had evaporated with the years. Now fanatical adult collectors were trading the Goobs, stiff and dusty artifacts of their lost consumer childhood.

And so life went for Janna Gutierrez, every dreary day on the calendar foreclosing some way out. Until the fateful September when Veruschka Zipkinova arrived from Russia, fresh out of biohazard quarantine.

The zany Zipkinova marched into Triple Helix toting a fancy briefcase with a video display built into its piezoplastic skin. Veruschka was clear-eyed and firm-jawed, with black hair cut very short. She wore a formal black jogging suit with silk stripes on the legs. Her Baltic pallor was newly reddened by California sunburn. She was very thoroughly made up. Lipstick, eye shadow, nails—the works.

She fiercely demanded a specific slate of bio-hardware and a big wad of start-up money. Janna's boss was appalled at Veruschka's archaic approach—didn't this Russki woman get it that
the New Economy was even deader than Leninism? It fell to the luckless Janna to throw Veruschka out of the building.

“You are but a tiny cog,” said Veruschka, accurately summing up Janna's cubicle. “But you are intelligent, yes, I see this in your eyes. Your boss gave me the brush-off. I did not realize Triple Helix is run by lazy morons.”

“We're all quite happy here,” said Janna lightly. The computer was, of course, watching her. “I wonder if we could take this conversation offsite? That's what's required, you see. For me to get you out of the way.”

“Let me take you to a fine lunch at Denny's,” said Veruschka with sudden enthusiasm. “I love Denny's so much! In Petersburg, our Denny's always has long lines that stretch down the street!”

Janna was touched. She gently countersuggested a happening local coffee shop called the Modelview Matrix. Cute musicians were known to hang out there.

With the roads screwed and power patchy, it took forever to drive anywhere in California, but at least traffic fatalities were rare, given that the average modern vehicle had the mass and speed of a golf cart. As Janna forded the sunny moonscape of potholes, Veruschka offered her start-up pitch.

“From Russia, I bring to legendary Silicon Valley a break-through biotechnology! I need a local partner, Janna. Someone I can trust.”

“Yeah?” said Janna.

“It's a collectible pet.”

Janna said nothing, but was instantly hooked.

“In Russia, we have mastered genetic hacking,” said Veruschka thoughtfully, “although California is the planet's legendary source of high-tech marketing.”

Janna parked amid a cluster of plastic cars like colored seed-pods. Inside, Janna and Veruschka fetched slices of artichoke quiche.

“So now let me show you,” said Veruschka as they took a seat. She placed a potently quivering object on the tabletop. “I call him Pumpti.”

The Pumpti was the size and shape of a Fabergé egg, pink and red, clearly biological. It was moist, jiggly, and veined like an internal organ with branching threads of yellow and purple. Janna started to touch it, then hesitated, torn between curiosity and disgust.

“It's a toy?” asked Janna. She tugged nervously at a fanged hairclip. It really wouldn't do to have this blob stain her lavender silk jeans.

The Pumpti shuddered, as if sensing Janna's hovering finger. And then it oozed silently across the table, dropped off the edge, and plopped damply to the diner's checkered floor.