Transreal Cyberpunk (16 page)

“All the oil in Texas is turning into Urschleim,” said Revel. “And we’re the only ones who know what to do about it. Let’s land this thing and start makin’ us some deals.”

The giant sea nettle hovered uneasily, rippling a bit in the prop-wash of the anxious helicopters. Tug made no move to bring them lower. “There’s no we and no us as long as you’re talking that salary bullshit,” said Tug angrily. “If you want me to bust ass and take risks in your startup, it has to be fifty-fifty down the line. I want to be fully vested! I want to be on the board! I want to call my share of the shots!”

“I’ll think about it,” Revel hedged.

“You better think fast, Revel.” Tug looked down between his legs at the jostling crowd below. “Look at them all. You don’t really know how the hell we got here or what we’re doing, Revel. Are you ready to face them alone? It’s nice up here in this balloon, but we can’t ride a balloon forever. Sooner or later, we’re gonna have to walk on our own two feet again, and look people right in the eye.” He reached up into the tissues of the giant sea nettle, manipulating it.

Now the sun-baked quake-prone ground began rising up steadily again. Tattooed local hipsters billowed away from beneath them in San Francisco’s trademark mélange of ecstasy and dread.

“What are you going to say to them when I land us?” demanded Tug harshly.

“Me?” Revel said, surprised. “You’re the scientist! You’re the one who’s s’posed to explain. Just feed ‘em some mathematics. Chaos equations and all that bullshit. It don’t matter if they can’t understand it. ‘There’s no such thing as bad publicity,’ Tug. P. T. Barnum said that.”

“P. T. Barnum wasn’t in the artificial life business, Revel.”

“Sure he was,” said Revel, as the great jellyfish touched down. “And, okay, what the hey, if you’ll stick with me and do the talkin’, I’ll go ahead and cut you in for fifty percent.”

Tug and Revel stepped from the jellyfish and shook hands, grinning gamely, in a barrage of exploding flashbulbs.

Notes on “Big Jelly”

Asimov’s Science Fiction
, November 1994.

Written Fall, 1992.

Rudy on “Big Jelly”

In May, 1992, Bruce and I were panelists in Monterey at a conference about computer user interfaces. At the same time, there was a big show on jellyfish at the Monterey Aquarium, and Bruce and I went and looked at the tanks together. The jellyfish made a big impression on us. So as to ring a change on the classic macho SF two-guys story mode, I made my character be gay this time.

Another element in this story was that, on the way to conference, Bruce visited my house, which was then drawn into the maelstrom of our tale. Bruce did a considerable amount of research on industrial uses for jellyfish while we were working on our story—in fact he discussed this topic with the futurist Esther Dyson.

“Big Jelly” turned out to be one of our favorite stories, and to this day both Bruce and I remain obsessed by the idea of flying jellyfish. It’s one of the somewhat rare cases where our obsessions overlap. To this day, Bruce still sends me jellyfish-related links and even toys.

Bruce on “Big Jelly”

As collaborators, our paths rarely cross physically, but when we meet, sparks fly. Monterey, California inspired “Big Jelly,” a work which is obviously self-parodistic. Or, rather, it’s “transreal” in the strict Rucker sense. In transreal writing, roman a clef elements are jammed into a narrative, not because they’re appropriate to the story-line, but because real-life incidents become surreal and provocative within the context of science fiction.

For the addled, fearful protagonists of “Storming the Cosmos,” nothing can ever work out. By contrast, the all-American heroes of “Big Jelly” are an effective start-up team, with ambitious goals and complementary talents.

Rudy was again carrying the major burden for both of the characters here—Tug Mesoglea is obviously a Rucker creation, while Revel Pullen is a squalid satire of Texas that no native Texan could have invented. My own big effort here was in framing the work as a social satire of the technology business. “Big Jelly” is about start-up thinking and dot-com boom language, which is easy to science-fictionalize, because it’s soaked in the genre’s sensibility. The true “big jelly” is not a jellyfish, but the elasticity of high-tech business jargon. Tech rhetoric can be verbally stretched to cover almost any form of excess.

Revel Pullen and Tug Mesoglea do pretty well as inventive entrepreneurs, but whenever either lead is removed from the policing eye of his partner, utter chaos looms. The transreal truth behind this situation is that the authors themselves are tearing their story to shreds. The cage of fiction can barely hold us, and even poor John Steinbeck, a writer who truly knew Monterey, gets sucked into the swirling backwash of gelatin.

The character “Edna Sydney” is, of course, technology consultant and event organizer Esther Dyson. The business applications for our artificial jellyfish were invented by Esther Dyson, when I casually mentioned our story project to her. This fantastic effort took Esther maybe three minutes.

A good egg, Esther Dyson. Her dad and her brother are also swell people. All science fiction writers should study their works with care.

Junk DNA

Life was hard in old Silicon Valley. Little Janna Gutierrez was a native Valley girl, half Vietnamese, half Latino. 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 Ctenophore 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 Ctenophore piezoplastic. 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 stakes and drove away in his solar-powered RV—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 UC 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 Ctenophore 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, Janna played you-are-her interactives, romance stories, with a climax where she’d 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 breakthrough 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 seedpods. 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.

Veruschka smiled, slitting her cobalt-blue eyes, and leaned over to fetch her Pumpti. She placed it on a stained paper napkin.

“All we need is venture capital!”

“Um, what’s it made of?” wondered Janna.

“Pumpti’s substance is human DNA!”

“Whose DNA?” asked Janna.

“Yours, mine, anyone’s. The client’s.” Tenderly Veruschka picked up the Pumpti, palpating it with her lacquered fingertips. “Once I worked at the St. Petersburg Institute of Molecular Science. My boss—well, he was also my boyfriend…” Veruschka pursed her lips. “Wiktor’s true obsession was the junk DNA—you know this technical phrase?”

“Trust me, Vero, I’m a genomics engineer.”

“Wiktor found a way for these junk codons to express themselves. The echo from the cradle of life, evolution’s roadside picnic! To express junk DNA required a new wetware reader. Wiktor called it the Universal Ribosome.” She sighed. “We were so happy until the mafiya wanted the return on their funding.”

“No National Science Foundation for you guys,” mused Janna.

“Wiktor was supposed to tweak a cabbage plant to make opium for the criminals—but we were both so busy growing our dear Pumpti. Wiktor used my DNA, you see. I was smart and saved the data before the Uzbeks smashed up our lab. Now I’m over here with you, Janna, and we will start a great industry of personal pets! Wiktor’s hero fate was not in vain. And—”