Transreal Cyberpunk (28 page)

As they motored into the sprawling heart of Los Angeles, it was clear as the fruit-scented air that they were eons into the future. Stefan had always known his town as a jammed, overloaded, makeshift, somewhat threatening city, with large patches of violent poverty and film-noir urban decline. But the future Los Angeles was as neat as a Le Corbusier sketch: spacey radiant towers, picturesque ragged palms, abundant fruit trees.

Sure enough, they came across a nearly spherical cask-ant dispensing distilled fruit alcohol from her rear end. When prodded by the handlebars of Jayson’s bike, she dribbled a handy fill-up into his tank.

Twilight fell, and little ball-shaped lights blinked on. They had no visible source of power.

“String theory on parade,” said Stefan, pointing them out to Jayson. “Zero-point energy. I was planning to invent all that some day.”

“Sure, dog, sure.”

Every ant within this city was a wheeled giant. The ants were clearly the dominant species in town. Most of the city was devoted to their cloverleaves, off ramps and parking-lots.

Then there were the people: gleaming, healthy Californians with amazing skin-tones. There were steady little streams of them, going about their own business, often with bundles on their heads: water-jars and fruit-baskets, mostly.

It seemed that humans as a species had been much harder to kill off than one might have expected. These far-future humans were not making much of a fuss about themselves any more, but given how many were deftly creeping in and out of cracks in the shining towers, they probably had the giant ants outnumbered.

“They’re all walking,” Stefan noted.

“Nobody walks in L.A! We’re the only cats in this town with our own wheels?” Jayson lifted one hand from the throttle. “Hey look! My cosmic string wristband is gone.”

“Everything except the ants is the right size here, dude,” said Stefan, examining his own bare wrist. “That means our bracelets are smaller than protons now.”

Jayson waved his wrist as if this news stung him a little. Then he suddenly veered to the side of the road. “Hey dog, check her out! This rich chick is flagging us down!”

The woman in question was wearing a fetching little antskin cuirass. Her glossy hair was high-piled on her head and she wore a necklace, a belt, and neat platform sandals. She had an unknown flower in her hair and a very nice tan.

“Pleased to meet you,” said Jayson gallantly. “Do you speak Eloi?”

The woman thoughtfully caressed the glassy headlight of Jayson’s bike. The two boys were dirty, unshaven, and stinking of camp-fires. They also spoke no known language and were riding a mechanical ant, but their new friend seemed willing to overlook all that. She might even think such things were cute and dashing.

She smiled at Jayson in a sunny, mystical fashion, opened her beaded shoulder-bag, and offered him a fresh orange.

Jayson ripped into it, grinning.

“She’s not your normal type, Jayson.”

“Yeah, she’s a cool, classy dame straight outta Beverly Hills! I think my luck is finally changing!”

A small crowd of men, women, even children clustered around the bike. These sidewalk gawkers definitely liked a show. They chatted pleasantly, tapping each other reassuringly on the heads and shoulders.

“We’re drawing a big crowd,” Stefan said. “Should we split?”

“Are you kidding? This is the public! We’ll entertain them!”

Jayson fashioned a bit of his orange peel into a set of jack-o-lantern snaggle teeth and wore them in his mouth. The woman in the antskin cuirass laughed with pleasure.

Stefan picked a smooth pebble off the ground, showed it off to the gawkers, palmed it, and pretended to swallow it. The onlookers were stunned. When he “burped it back up,” they applauded him wildly.

Stefan gazed across their pleased, eager faces. “This is a very soft audience, Jayson. I think they’re truly starved for techno-wizardry.”

A shy girl stood at the back of the crowd. She looked sober and thoughtful. She knew he had done a trick. She wondered why. She was like Emily Yu: smarter than the rest, but too tenderhearted.

Stefan waved at her and offered his best smile. She stood up straighter, startled. She looked from one side of herself to the other, amazed that he was paying attention just to her.

He beckoned at her. He pointed. He waved both his arms. Yes, you. She was so excited by this that he could see her heart beating softly in the side of her throat.

He was instantly in love.

Notes on “Hormiga Canyon”

Asimov’s Science Fiction
, August, 2007.

Written Fall, 2007.

Rudy on “Hormiga Canyon”

In person, Bruce is very charismatic. I don’t actually see him in person very often—usually several years go by between our face-to-face encounters. But whenever I do meet up with him, I always feel like co-authoring a story with him again. Even though I remember how difficult the last collaboration was. So when Bruce turned up at my house for a night or two in the summer of 2007, we eagerly began making new plans. It had been over five years since we’d collaborated on a story.

Bruce’s initial idea was that we should write about a city in a large bottle in an apartment in a slum in LA. The city would be a bit like the city of Kandor in the
Superman
comics. For my part, I wanted to write a story about giant ants, a classic SF power chord which has, in my opinion, been insufficiently explored. (
Hormiga
is Spanish for
ant
, you understand.) And never mind any prissy kill-joy claims that giant ants would collapse under their own weight. In SF, you can always invoke whatever rubber physics you need to make your effects work.

So we got the story going. I’m the spaced-out hacker Stefan Oertel, and Bruce is the bluff, can-do, media-savvy Jayson Rubio. The story was a wild run, a roller-coaster ride. Even though it can be hard, it’s worthwhile working with Bruce. I think the stories that I’ve written with him are among my best.

When I collaborate, I get a different texture in the story’s prose. This holds whether I’m working with Bruce or with one of my other collaborators—Marc Laidlaw, Paul Di Filippo, John Shirley, Terry Bisson, Eileen Gunn, or my son Rudy Rucker Jr. Co-authoring a story is like being in an intense writer’s workshop.

But with Bruce, the transformation is more extreme. Sometimes he’ll go in and cut a couple of words out of ©nearly every sentence that I’ve written. So then—
if it’s going to be like that
—I take out his weaker lines. It makes the prose stronger. Of course, after the cuts, there’s a lot of broken segues to fix—if you want the story to make logical and emotional sense. It’s often me—something of a compulsive perfectionist—who ends up doing the clean-up. And then feeling resentful about it. Like, “I washed all these dishes, and you never said thanks.”

So far as I can tell, Bruce himself never feels emotional about our collaborations. He loftily reminds me that it’s only ink on paper—or bits in a datastream.

After ten rounds of revisions on “Hormiga Canyon,” I was on the point of collapse. And then, like a celestial trumpeter in the sky, Bruce produced a beautiful, visionary, emotionally rich ending. It was what I’d been hoping for all along. A glimpse of heaven.

And once again we scored an
Asimov’s
cover illo.

Bruce on “Hormiga Canyon”

Rudy is not likely to show up in my stomping grounds of Austin, Belgrade and Turin, so we generally meet in California. As this story was written, I was spending a year in Los Angeles, so this effort is LA all the way.

The theme of “Hormiga Canyon” is ants. Giant ants are rather often on Rudy’s mind. I was willing to indulge him in this conceit, as, from a Los Angeles perspective, there’s something cheerfully appropriate and LA pop-surrealist about giant ants: the classic sci-fi movie
Them
is all about giant ants invading Los Angeles. It was pleasant to invent a couple of Los Angeles special-FX guys who would be entirely willing to accept giant ants on their own terms. The fantasies of Tinseltown are their daily bread, after all.

The story’s visual and cinematic, and had to go through a lot of editing, which Rudy hates to do. Still, if you’re going to create a B-movie epic with motorcycles and mastodons, the script needs to move right along. Clipped footage littered our cutting room floor, and screening the many rushes was heavy labor for both of us. But it may be our best story as story-telling goes, and it even features a technicolor Hollywood happy ending.

Colliding Branes

“But why call this the end of the universe?” said Rabbiteen Chandra, feeling the dry night air beat against her face. The rollicking hearse stank of cheap fried food, a dense urban reek in the starry emptiness of the Nevada desert. “At dawn our universe’s two branes collide in an annihilating sea of light. That’s not death, technically speaking—that’s a kalpa rebirth.”

Angelo Rasmussen tightened his pale, keyboard-punching hands on the hearse’s cracked plastic wheel. His hearse was a retrofitted 1978 Volvo, which ran on recycled bio-diesel cooking-oil. “You’re switching to your Hindu mystic thing now? After getting me to break that story?”

“I double-checked my physics references,” Rabbiteen offered, with an incongruous giggle. “Remember, I have a master’s degree from San Jose State.”

Rabbiteen knew that this was her final road trip. She’d been a good girl too long. She tapped chewing tobacco into a packet of ground betel-nut. Her tongue and her gums were stained the color of fresh blood.

“The colliding branes will crush the stars and planets to a soup of hard radiation,” she assured Angelo. “Then they rebound instantly, forming brand-new particles of matter, and seeding the next cycle of the twelve-dimensional cosmos.” She spread her two hands violently, to illustrate. “Our former bodies will expand to the size of galactic superclusters.”

Angelo was eyeing her. “I hope our bodies overlap.” He wore a shy, eager smile. “Given what you and I know, Rabbiteen, we might as well be the last man and woman on Earth.” He laid his hand on her thigh, but not too far up.

“I’ve thought that issue through,” said Rabbiteen, inexpertly jetting betel spit out the window. Blowback stained her hand-stitched paisley blouse. “We’ll definitely make love—but not inside this hearse, okay? Let’s find some quaint tourist cabins.”

As professional bloggers, Rabbiteen and Angelo knew each other well. For three years, they’d zealously followed each other’s daily doings via email, text messages, video posts, social networking and comment threads.

Yet they’d never met in the flesh. Until today, their last day on Earth—the last day for the Earth, and, in stark fact, also for Earth’s solar system, Earth’s galaxy, Earth’s Local Group galactic cluster, and Earth’s whole twelve-dimensional universe shebang.

The end was near, and Rabbiteen didn’t care to watch the cosmos collapse from inside her cramped room in her parents’ house in Fremont. Nor did Angelo want to meet the end in his survivalist bunker in the foothills of the Sierras near Fresno—a bunker which, to untrained eyes, resembled an abandoned barn in the middle of a sun-killed almond farm.

So, after a dense flurry of instant-messages, the two bloggers had joined forces and hit the great American road together, blasting one last trump from the hearse’s dirge-like horn, a mournful yet powerful blast which echoed from Rabbiteen’s parents’ pink stucco house and all through the table-flat development of a thousand similar homes.

Chastely sipping biodiesel through the apocalyptic traffic, they’d made it over Tioga Pass onto Nevada’s Route 6 by midnight. They were out well ahead of mankind’s last lemming-like rush to universal destruction.

“I’ve been obsessing over Peak Oil for years,” Angelo confessed. He was feeling warm and expansive, now that Rabbiteen had promised him some pre-apocalypse sex. “As a search-term, my name is practically synonymous with it. But now I can’t believe I was such a sap, such a piss-ant, when it came to comprehending the onrushing scope of this planet’s disaster! I was off by...what is it? By a million orders of magnitude?”

Rabbiteen patted his flannelled arm supportively. Angelo was just a political scientist, so he was really cute when he carried on about “orders of magnitude.”

He was rueful. “I was so worried about climate change, financial Singularities and terror attacks in the Straits of Hormuz. And all the time the parallel branes were converging!” He smacked the Volvo’s cracked dashboard with the flat of his pale hand. “I’m glad we escaped from the dense urban cores before the Apocalypse. Once people fully realize that cosmic string theory is unraveling, they’ll butcher each other like vicious animals.”

“Don’t insult our friends the animals,” said Rabbiteen, flirtatiously bending her wrists to hold her hands like little paws.

Rabbiteen’s “What Is Karmic Reality?” blog cleverly leveraged her interest in scientific interpretations of the Upanishads into a thriving medium for selling imported Indian clothes, handicrafts and mosaics.

Angelo, unable to complete his political science doctorate due to skyrocketing tuition costs, had left Stanford to run his own busy “Ain’t It Awful?” website. His site tracked major indicators for the imminent collapse of American society. The site served to market his print-on-demand tracts about the forthcoming apocalypse, which earned him a meager living.