Transreal Cyberpunk (22 page)

“The original genetic Space Friend!” said Veruschka in awe. “It’s been waiting in their junk DNA since the dawn of time!”

As Kelso clattered down the stairs, the saucer charged at the three of them, far too fast to escape. Kelso, Janna, and Veruschka were absorbed into the saucer’s ethereal bulk.

Everything got white, and in the whiteness, Janna saw a room, a round space expressing wonderful mathematical proto-design: a vast Vernor Panton 1960s hashish den, languidly and repeatedly melting into a Karim Rashid all-plastic lobby.

The room’s primary inhabitants were idealized forms of Tug Mesoglea and Revel Pullen. The men’s saucer bodies were joyous, sylphlike forms of godlike beauty.

“I say we spin off the company to these girls and their lawyer,” intoned the Tug avatar. “Okay by you, Revel? You and I, we’re more than ready to transcend the material plane.”

“There’s better action where we’re going,” Revel agreed. “We gotta stake a claim in the subdimensions, before the yokels join the gold rush.”

A pen appeared in Tug’s glowing hand. “We’ll shed the surly bonds of incorporation.”

It didn’t take them long to sign off every interest in Magic Pumpkin. And then the floor of the saucer opened up, dropping Janna, Veruschka, and Kelso onto the street. Over their awestruck heads, the saucer briefly glowed and then sped away, though not in any direction that a merely human being could specify. It was more as if the saucer shrank. Reorganized itself. Corrected. Downsized. And then it was gone from all earthly ken.

And that’s how Janna Gutierrez and Veruschka Zipkinova got rich.

Notes on “Junk DNA”

Asimov’s Science Fiction
, January, 2003.

Written Fall, 2001.

Rudy on “Junk DNA”

This time out, our two chracters are two women; I’m Janna and Bruce is Veruschka. And we also brought back our Tug and Revel characters from “Big Jelly.” Bruce found it very easy to write the Revel character—my notion of a comically overbearing Texan.

Due to having two young daughters, Bruce was at this time focused on
Pokemon
characters, which led to the notion of the personal Pumpti pet. It was fine that I found
Pokemon
toys completely repellent and uninteresting, as this gave the story an edge.

The “Junk DNA” collaboration was tumultuous; I began finally to understand why a synergistic pair like, say, Lennon and McCartney might stop working together. Although pleasant and soft spoken in person, both Bruce and I can be bossy collaborators, capable of being very cutting in our emails.

This time out, it was like two guys playing tennis and trying to kill the ball and blast it down the other guy’s throat.
Whack!
Some of this abrasive energy shows up in the interactions between the pairs of characters in this story: Janna vs. Veruschka and Tug vs. Revel.

On the upside, I noticed that working with Bruce was having a permanent effect on my writing, and in a good way. I also noticed that bits of his vocabulary were making his way into mine. “Gamely,” for instance—that’s a word I never used in the past, but now I like to slip it in.

I think my favorite line in this story is, “I got a powerful hankerin’ for Pumpti meat.”

“Junk DNA” rated a cover illustration when it appeared in
Asimov’s
.

Bruce on “Junk DNA”

In our third collaboration, I was determined that we should create a more or less proper science fiction story, a genre work set years distant in the future, with extrapolated technology. “Storming the Cosmos” is historical fiction, it’s “atompunk.” “Big Jelly” is a technothriller satire more-or-less of its present day. For “Junk DNA” it seemed interesting to combine our earlier stories and drag them both into the future condition, so that “Veruschka Zipkinova” shows up as a grand-daughter of Vlad Zipkin, the hero of “Storming the Cosmos,” while Pullen and Mesoglea, the young venture capitalists of “Big Jelly”, have aged into seasoned business gurus.

Despite its vivid colors and its obsession with cute kid toys, this is by no means a rollicking, carefree story. “Junk DNA” has a middle-aged bitterness about it, and a pervasive sense that things will never be so good as they once were. Most of the characters are snatching at scraps of happiness that their bleak circumstances have denied them. They’re willing to defraud, seduce, embezzle or kill to get a break, and when the two author stand-ins, Pullen and Mesoglea, belatedly show up in the narrative, it’s as if they’re telling an unhappy, frenzied world to calm down.

I was pleased by the level of invention in this story, but the ending’s like a mental breakdown. All Rucker-Sterling collaborations are overheated steam contraptions. They’ve got their solid, steely components, but also much duct-tape and baling-wire. As you become more familiar with another writer’s tricks of composition, you become a sharper critic of his work. That can get painful. Rudy’s not a critic by nature, but I most definitely am.

Still, we got it up and running, and it chugs right along.

Hormiga Canyon

Part 1

Stefan Oertel pulled a long strand of salami rind from his teeth. He stared deep into wonderland.

Look at that program go! Flexible vectors swarming in ten-dimensional hyperspace! String theory simulation! Under those colored gouts of special effects, this, at last, was real science!

Stefan munched more of his sandwich and plucked up an old cellphone, one of the ten thousand such units that he’d assembled into a home supercomputer. “Twine dimension seven!” he mumbled around the lunchmeat. “Loop dimension eight!”

The screen continued its eye-warping pastel shapes. Stefan’s ultracluster of hacked cellphones was searching Calabi-Yau string theory geometries. The tangling cosmic strings wove gorgeous, abrupt Necker-cube reversals and inversions. His program’s output was visually brilliant. And, thus far, useless to anybody. But maybe his latest settings were precisely the right ones and the One True String Theory was about to be unveiled—

“Loop dimension eight,” he repeated.

Unfortunately his system seemed to be ignoring his orders. There might be something wrong with the particular phone he was holding—these phones were, after all, junkers that Stefan’s pal Jayson Rubio had skimmed from the vast garbage dumps of Los Angeles. Jayson was a junk-hound of the first order.

Ten thousand networked cell phones had given Stefan serious, number-crunching heavy muscle. He needed them to search the staggeringly large state space of all possible string theories. The powerful Unix and RAM chips inside the phones were in constant wireless communication with each other. He kept their ten thousand batteries charged with induction magnets. The whole sprawling shebang was nested in sets of brightly-colored plastic laundry baskets. Stefan dug the eco-fresh beauty of this abracadabra: he’d transformed a waste-disposal mess into a post-Einsteinian theory-incubator.

Stefan had earned his programming skills the hard way: years of labor in the machine-buzzing dungeons of Hollywood. And he’d paid a price: alienated parents in distant Topeka, no wife, no kids, and his best coder pals were just email addresses. Furthermore, typing all that computer graphics code had afflicted him with a burning case of carpal-tunnel syndrome, which was why he preferred yelling his line-commands into phones. Cell phones had kick-ass voice-recognition capabilities.

Stefan dipped into a brimming pink laundry-basket and snagged a fresher phone, an early-90s model with a flapping, half-broken jaw.

“Greetings, wizard!” the phone chirped, showing that it was good to go.

“Twine dimension seven, dammit! Loop dimension eight.”

The system was still ignoring him. Now Stefan was worried. Was the TV’s wireless chip down? That shouldn’t happen. The giant digital flat-screen was new. And, yes, the phones were old junk, but with so many of them in his ultracluster it didn’t matter if a few dozen went dead.

He tried another phone and another. Crisis was at hand.

The monster screen flickered and skewed. To his deep horror, the speakers emitted a poisoned death-rattle, prolonged and sizzling and terrible, like the hissing of the Wicked Witch of the West as she dissolved in a puddle of stage-magic.

The flat screen went black. Worse yet, the TV began to smell, a pricey, burnt-meat, molten-plastic odor that any programmer knew as bad juju. Stefan bolted from his armchair and knelt to peer through the ventilation slots.

And there he saw—oh please no—the ants. Ants had always infested Stefan’s rental house. Whenever the local droughts got bad, the ants arrived in hordes, trouping out of the thick Mulholland brush, waving their feelers for water. Stefan’s decaying cottage had leaky old plumbing. His home was an ant oasis.

He’d never seen the ants in such numbers. Perhaps the frenzied wireless signals from his massive mounds of cell phones had upset them somehow? There were thousands of ants inside his TV, a dark stream of them wending through the overheated circuit cards like the winding Los Angeles River in its manmade canyons of graffiti-bombed cement. The ants were eating the resin off the cards; they were gorging themselves on his TV’s guts like six-legged Cub Scouts eating molten s’mores.

Stefan groaned and collapsed back into his overstuffed leather armchair. The gorgeous TV was a write-off, but all was not yet lost. The latest state of his system was still stored in his network of cellphones.

He reached for his sandwich, wincing at a stab of pain in his wrist.

The sandwich was boiling with ants. And then he felt insectile tickling at his neck. He jumped to his feet, banged open the door of his leaky bathroom, and hastily fetched-up an abandoned comb. He managed to tease three jolly ants from his strawy hair, which was dyed in a fading splendor of day-glo orange and traffic-cone red.

Before he’d moved into this old house, Stefan hadn’t realized that most everybody in LA had an ant story to tell. Stefan had the ants pretty badly, but nobody sympathized with him. Whenever he reached out to others with his private burden of ant woes, they would snidely one-up him with amazing ant-gripes all their own: ants that ate dog food; ants that ate dogs; ants that carried off children.

Compared to the heroic tales of other Angelenos, Stefan’s ant problems seemed mild and low-key. His ants were waxy, rubbery-looking little critters, conspicuously multi-ethnic in fine LA style, of every shape and every shade of black, brown, red and yellow. Stefan had them figured for a multi-caste sugar-ant species. They emerged from the tiniest possible cracks, and they adored sweet, sticky stuff.

Stefan bent over the rusty sink and splashed cold water on his unshaven face. He’d done FX for fantasy movies that had won Oscars and enchanted millions of people on six continents. But now, here he stood: wrists wrecked, vermin-infested, no job, no girlfriend, neck-deep in code for a ten-dimensional string-theory simulation with no commercial potential.

Kind of punk and cool, in a way. It sure beat commuting on the hellish LA freeways. He was free of servitude. And he definitely had a strong feeling that the very last tweak he’d suggested for his Calabi-Yau search program was the big winner.

Just three months ago, he’d been ignoring his growing wrist pains while writing commercial FX code for Square Root Of Not. The outfit was a cutting-edge Venice Beach graphics shop that crafted custom virtual-physics algorithms for movies and the gaming trade.

Of course, Stefan’s true interest, dating way back to college, had always been physics, in particular the Holy Grail of finding the correct version of string theory. Pursuing the awesome fantasy of supersymmetric quantum string manifolds felt vastly finer and nobler than crassly tweaking toy worlds. The Hollywood FX work paid a lot, yes, but it made Stefan a beautician for robots, laboring to give animated characters better hair, shinier teeth, and bouncier boobs. String theorists, on the other hand, were the masters of a conceptual universe.

Though the pace of work had nearly killed him, Stefan had had a good run at Square Root Of Not. Their four-person shop had the best fire-and-algebra in Los Angeles, seriously freaky tech chops that lay far beyond the ken of Disney-Pixar and Time-Warner. The Square Rooters’ primary client, the anchor-store in the mall of their dreams, had been Eyes Only, a big post-production lab on the Strip.

But Eyes Only had blundered into a legal tar pit. All too typical: the suits always imagined it was cheaper to litigate than to innovate. Disney’s Giant Mouse was crushing the copyrighted landscape with the tread of a mastodon.

Stefan hadn’t followed the sorry details; the darkside hacking conducted in Hollywood courtrooms wasn’t his idea of entertainment. Bottom line: rather than watching their lives tick away in court, the Square Rooters had taken the offered settlement, and had divvied up cash that would otherwise go to lawyers.

Their pay-off had been less than expected, but all four Square Rooters had been worn down by the grueling crunch cycles anyway. Liberated and well-heeled, each Square Root partner had some special spiritual bliss to follow. Lead programmer Marc Geary was puffing souffles at a chef school in Santa Monica. Speaker-to-lawyers Emily Yu was about to sail to Tahiti on an old yacht she’d bought off Craig’s List. Handyman Jayson Rubio was roaring around the endless loops of LA’s freeways on a vintage red Indian Chief motorcycle. As for Stefan—Stefan was sinking his cash into his living expenses and his home-made ultracluster supercomputer. Finally, freedom and joy. Elite string-theory instead of phony Hollywood rubber physics.