Authors: Rudy Rucker
Spaceland (23 page)
“Me again,” I said, attempting a debonair smile. “You have to listen, Clement. The money really did flip over. I was trying to take it from a bank. Of course I'll pay it back once we're funded.” I walked over to where the image of the antenna crystal floated on our screen. “The fourth dimension is real,” I said, pointing at it. I tried to remember how Momo had explained things to me. “Think of a Flatlander trying to imagine a third dimension,” I added, waving my hands. The shadows of my arms on the screen looked lumpy and odd. “It's a different direction completely.”
Treed turned away from me. “Good luck,” he told Tulip. “I really do admire Gandhi, you know.”
I used my third eye to peer up into the All. Momo was right there watching us. “Come help us!” I cried, beckoning wildly. “Show him, Momo!”
There was a wavering on the screen. The image of the chip seemed to swell and fatten, as if the screen had developed a big bulge in it. The bulge was a sphere of Momo's skin, a round ball appearing in front of the screen with the projector shining the image of the chip onto it. And now the Momo sphere floated across the room to bounce upon the floor at Clement Treed's big feet, bouncing up and down like a basketball, a basketball with an eve in it, a big blue Momo eye. The eye winked.
“Oh my yes,” said Treed, settling back into my chair and actually smacking his lips. “I'm in for this one. Consider yourselves funded. Better than that. If you can bring this thing to market, MeYou will rake care of daily operations.”
Bad News
After New
Year's Day came and went without a peep, the Y2K-bug consultants had started predicting a worldwide software seize-up for Leap Year Day. As chance would have it, they were right to worry about that particular day, not that the problem was going to have anything to do with the computers. No, it was thanks to the Mophones that humanity would face the end of the world on Tuesday, February 29, 2000. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Year's Day came and went without a peep, the Y2K-bug consultants had started predicting a worldwide software seize-up for Leap Year Day. As chance would have it, they were right to worry about that particular day, not that the problem was going to have anything to do with the computers. No, it was thanks to the Mophones that humanity would face the end of the world on Tuesday, February 29, 2000. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Before he'd sign over the bucks, Treed got Momo to agree on an exclusive contract to supply her antenna crystals only to us. He also wanted to know what was in the deal for Momo, and she told him about the supposed Dronner-repelling qualities of hyperspatial radio waves. This was a time where it was good to be working with a single rich business angel instead of a due-diligence, managerial-type venture capitalist.
Wednesday, January 5 was the day Clement Treed funded Mophone, Inc., and Monday, February 28 was the day we started shipping product. It was a wild eight weeks, a business major's wet dream. The richest guy in Silicon Valley was funding me to set up production, distribution and marketing for a water-walking product
with an off-the-hook buzz. There weren't enough hours in the day.
with an off-the-hook buzz. There weren't enough hours in the day.
I told people I was loving every minute of it, but that wasn't true. The “loving every minute” line was the kind of rah-rah, can-do bull that a guy like me feeds his boss. Not that I had a boss anymoreâI was the CEO. I was doing the cheerleader thing out of reflex. Treed didn't care if I loved Mophone or not.
My business plan projected Treed's take at ten million bucks. The way our deal worked was that Clement had forty percent of the founder's stock
,
while Jena, Tulip, Spazz and me each had fifteen. These weren't options, mind you, these were fully-paid shares. They weren't worth anything at all yet, but after the IPO., according to my spreadsheets, Clement's cut would be good for that ten million. And we others would get three point seven five mill each.
,
while Jena, Tulip, Spazz and me each had fifteen. These weren't options, mind you, these were fully-paid shares. They weren't worth anything at all yet, but after the IPO., according to my spreadsheets, Clement's cut would be good for that ten million. And we others would get three point seven five mill each.
Yes, things were looking good. The Mophone advance orders were pouring in as fast our three-tier website could pass them from the web page to the server to the database and back. A San Francisco service provider called monkeybrains . net was hosting our site and handling the billing for us.
The Mophone cases were being injection-molded by a plastics factory in Taiwan, using a slippery, metallic-looking red alkyd resin that Clement Treed had picked up at a fire sale price from a refinery in Indonesia. The redness of the Mophones was a branding thing, part of the campaign worked out by the advertising agency Jena had hired.
I'd found a maquiladora in Juarez to assemble our Mophones; they were using the same production line someone had used for knockoffs of Motorola StarTacs. The big difference was that each Mophone included a four-dimensional antenna crystal and a call-routing “Motalk” chip. Tulip had used a firmware compiler to instantiate Spazz's Java design for the Motalk chips, and ExaChip was fabbing them for us.
At first we'd thought it would be more dramatic for Mophones not to have the old-style antennas, but it made production easier to
leave them in. Another win in taking this route was that we were able to put a dual functionality into the Mophone. If you subscribed to a regular cell-phone service, a Mophone could use its old-style antenna to access that, too. Clement got us a deal with PacBell to resell their standard cell-phone services for those who wanted them as a Mophone add-on. At least for now, it was worth having standard cell so you could call people who didn't have Mophones.
leave them in. Another win in taking this route was that we were able to put a dual functionality into the Mophone. If you subscribed to a regular cell-phone service, a Mophone could use its old-style antenna to access that, too. Clement got us a deal with PacBell to resell their standard cell-phone services for those who wanted them as a Mophone add-on. At least for now, it was worth having standard cell so you could call people who didn't have Mophones.
Everything depended on everything else; it was like a dance floor that was rising into the sky lifted by a dozen giant balloons spaced around its edges, and I was the guy racing around the parquet adjusting the balloons to keep the platform level. Like I said, it was a business major's wet dream.
Why wasn't I loving every minute? I had three issues.
My first issue was that I didn't have a woman to love me. Jena had successfully retaken Spazz from Tulip; every night the two of them were going back to my old house together. Though Tulip was still renting a room from me, nothing romantic was happening between us. Tulip was depressed about Jena and Spazz; I could hear her crying almost every night. I wanted to comfort her and cheer her up, but she'd been even more distant since my number with Spazz's aorta. She still hadn't let go of her idea that Momo was an evil spirit who'd bewitched me. In fact, I think she felt a little guilty about helping with the Mophone at all. In other words, there was no hope with Tulip or with Jena. And I didn't have time to look further afield until we got the Mophone shipped.
My second issue was the sinking feeling that maybe Momo really
was
an evil spiritâeven though she did come from the Aladdin's lamp of modern science and not from the cesspool of old-time superstition and magic. On the plus side, Momo had used some of Clement Treed's cash to square things with the banks, but I kept having the feeling she was leading me down the garden path to a pit of poison punji sticks. New versions of Wackle kept showing up in my bedroom to give me heavy, incomprehensible warnings,
but Momo would always hyperbazooka the Wackles before they could finish. She killed with an ugly glee, and I hadn't forgotten the cruelty with which she'd sent pain into my spine. I would have liked to have heard what the Wackles had to tell me, but with Momo around I didn't dare go vinnward to Dronia to talk to them alone.
was
an evil spiritâeven though she did come from the Aladdin's lamp of modern science and not from the cesspool of old-time superstition and magic. On the plus side, Momo had used some of Clement Treed's cash to square things with the banks, but I kept having the feeling she was leading me down the garden path to a pit of poison punji sticks. New versions of Wackle kept showing up in my bedroom to give me heavy, incomprehensible warnings,
but Momo would always hyperbazooka the Wackles before they could finish. She killed with an ugly glee, and I hadn't forgotten the cruelty with which she'd sent pain into my spine. I would have liked to have heard what the Wackles had to tell me, but with Momo around I didn't dare go vinnward to Dronia to talk to them alone.
My third issue was the realization that I'd become clinically addicted to grolly. Whenever I wanted more grolly, all I had to do was step into my bedroom, pull the blinds and close the door. I'd hold out my hand with my thumb and index finger making a circle, a sign for Momo, who was usually watching these days. She'd appear with a Iittle pastel bagel tor me, telling me to work harder. She was a killer, a tyrant, a pusher. The upside of my addiction was that I could work unbelievable hours, but I was using three or four bagels of grolly a day, and I felt like crap whenever it started wearing off. An odd side effect was that I'd completely stopped dreaming. I'd lie down to sleep and I'd stop moving, but all night my mind would be going over business plans. I wished I'd never met Momo; I wished she were dead.
My life was a loveless desert of work and grolly and I had the sick feeling there was big trouble ahead. After a while, the only thing keeping me going was Clement Treed's plan to have MeYou take over our operations once we made it past product launch.
The Mophones went on sale the morning of February 28, and by that evening, we'd moved twenty thousand units. It was all over the news. People were using Mophones in every corner of the country, and some ultrasurfers had already found a way to use Spazz's open Motalk architecture to hook a Mophone to a computer and send real-time, uncompressed, full-screen video. No more lurching, muddy, low-bandwidth, postage-stamp video
.
With Mophone, your computer screen was a window looking at a scene a thousand miles away. We were the only broadband communication channel that
mattered anymore. Our competitors didn't have a chance.
.
With Mophone, your computer screen was a window looking at a scene a thousand miles away. We were the only broadband communication channel that
mattered anymore. Our competitors didn't have a chance.
We watched the news together at the office: Jena, Tulip, Spazz, Clement Treed and me. Channel 4 had filmed an interview with us that afternoon. While we watched ourselves. Clement Treed busted out a magnum of Cristal champagne and five crystal glasses. We toasted, the news ended, I muted the TV, and then what?
You'd think we'd be all chattering and cheerful, but we were burnt out from the big push, and more than a little sick of each other. Jena and Spazz in particular hadn't been talking to each other all day.
Clement drank half a glass of champagne, flopped down on our soft, low couch, took out his Mophone, and began calling up associates all over the world, using his Palm Pilot to time and chart the connection latency speeds
.
His knobby knees stuck up nearly as high as his shoulders.
.
His knobby knees stuck up nearly as high as his shoulders.
Spazz had his Mophone hooked to his laptop and its digital camera He sat at the kitchen counter alternating between videophone conversations with excited programmers and cruising the Web looking at airplanes. The first thing he wanted to buy himself was a private jet.
Tulip watched over Spazz's shoulder for a minute, then got on her own Mophone and drifted into her room, talking with her brother-in-law in Fremont about going out tomorrow to get a good deal on a new Mercedes. We didn't quite have our money yet, but Lord did we have good credit.
I sat in my chair with my feet on my desk, my computer turned off for the first time in two months, enjoying doing nothing. The business was in MeYou's hands now. I'd crossed the desert and made it to the oasis. All I had to do now was wait for the IPO. The price of our stock would shoot up and up, and when I couldn't stand it anymore
,
I'd sell off my founder's shares. Jena sidled up to me and refilled my champagne glass.
,
I'd sell off my founder's shares. Jena sidled up to me and refilled my champagne glass.
“Are you happy, Joe?” she asked.
“I should be,” I said, and left it at that.
“I should be happy too,” said Jena, sitting down on the edge of my desk. Her face looked a little out of focus, a little lost. “I'm footloose and fancy free
.
Spazz is leaving me.”
.
Spazz is leaving me.”
“How do you mean?”
“He's not going to be staying at our old house anymore. All he wants to do is get his new plane and fly around the world. Alone. Find a girl in every port or something.” She drained her glass and poured herself another. “But don't worry about me. You guys are really going to give me my shares, right, Clement?”
Treed looked up from fiddling with his Mophone and Palm Pilot, his eyes lively in his little head. “Not to worry, Jena,” he said. “I never stiff a start-up collaborator. You're in high clover.” He smiled down at his little screen, now and then poking a virtual button. “If we IPO every bit as expeditiously as the SEC allows, my current trends equate your worth to the total real-estate value of, hmmm, Rwanda. Belgrade could be next.”
“I should be happy,” said Jena again, and rubbed her face. “Would one of you guys please take me home?”
Treed regarded her alertly, as if studying a visual illusion or a chess puzzle. “If this is a not-driving issue, I'd be glad to drop you off. I'm leaving in a few minutes.” He turned his attention back to his Mophone, placing a test call to a friend called Kelvin in Switzerland.
Meanwhile Jena pursed her lips at me in her best come-hither way. “Maybe it's time for us to make up and be friends,” she said to me very softly. “I mean
not
friends. Be like we used to be. I've been missing you, Joe. I'm lonely.”
not
friends. Be like we used to be. I've been missing you, Joe. I'm lonely.”
“I'm lonely too,” I said, almost melting. But not quite. I remembered too well how it was to live with my sense of well-being perpetually linked to Jena's whims. I wasn't all that happy these days,
but at least I wasn't being jerked around. I hardened my heart. “Go on home,” I told Jena. “Let Clement drop you off. It's time for bed.”
but at least I wasn't being jerked around. I hardened my heart. “Go on home,” I told Jena. “Let Clement drop you off. It's time for bed.”
“Thanks for nothing,” said Jena, hopping off my desk. She flounced into the kitchen and knocked Spazz's laptop off the counter so hard that its case smashed open on the floor.
“Oops,” she said.
“You bitch,” yelled Spazz. “I just finished getting the video configured! I'll kill you!”
“That's an actionable threat,” said Jena. “Did the rest of you hear him? He's a violent, abusive man, and if he ever talks to me again, I'm going to sue this company
.
” She put on her coat, jingled her car keys, and went outside.
.
” She put on her coat, jingled her car keys, and went outside.
I was out the door after her. “Don't drive, Jena,” I said. “You've had too many drinks for that.”
“Come home with me, Joe.”
Before I had to answer this one, Tulip was out there too.
“Do you think he's your dog, Jena?” said Tulip. “You think you can kick him out and whistle him back? Joe's too good for that.”
“Thanks,” I told Tulip.
“Limo Service,” said Clement Treed, out on the porch too. “Come on, Jena.”
“Everyone hates me,” said Jena, not very emotional at all. It was like she'd been messing with our heads just for the hell of it. Or to be the center of attention. “Let's go, Clement,” she continued. “We have to stop by the supermarket, okay? What do rich people eat at home?”
“I recommend port and preserved kumquats,” Treed told her as he folded himself into the back of his limo. “With brandy-soaked plum pudding. But I'm not coming into your house.”
“Oh, Clement, you think I'm too rich for you?” Jena closed the door after her and they motored off, leaving Tulip and me on the
porch. I could have used my third eye to peer after them, but I didn't want to.
porch. I could have used my third eye to peer after them, but I didn't want to.
The door to the house flew open once more. Spazz shouldered his way past us, too angry about his laptop to speak. He jumped on his motorcycle and roared off towards Santa Cruz.
I looked at Tulip and Tulip looked at me. “I meant that,” she said. “You are good. All this time I've had too low an opinion of you.”
“Are you finally ready to kiss me?”
“Sure.”
It was just as I'd hoped. Tulip's lips were soft, her smell intimate and spicy, her skin warm and smooth, her voice a friendly music in my ears. She called me her dear sweet Joe. She spent the night with me in my room.
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