Transreal Cyberpunk (34 page)

“I can get you guys through the next episode,” said Ganzer, knocking the little statue against the table. “If you don’t mind some, uh, stylistic innovations.”

“Innovations aren’t gonna cut it,” said Presburg, shaking his head. “I need something more ontological. More hermeneutic.”

Morse groaned. “Why do you always say that, Bobby? What does those words even mean?”

“It means get off the mattress! Guy buys a dream about a car—he sees it in his driveway when he wakes! Girl buys a dream about a diamond necklace—she’s wearing it in the morning!”

“For all intents and purposes,” said Morse. “In her mind.”

Presburg shook his head. “Not when the studio gets that Chinese ribbonware. You get a billion dreamers all focused on one thing, the sky’s the limit. Like the Moon, baby.”

Maya the waitress simpered up and set down a cup of tea. “The usual, Mr. Presburg?”

“Surprise me,” said Presburg with irritation. “I mean, if you can surprise me. Try real hard.”

Maya crossed her eyes and dramatically stuck out her tongue. Presburg ignored her. Maya flounced off.

Presburg reached for the sexy little Tigra figurine. “Whatcha got there?” Ganzer kept it in his hand.

“It’s a tie-in toy,” Morse lied. “Can we talk about my contract, Bobby? And, like I was telling you, I want to bring in Jimmy here as a consultant.”

“No more contracts for
Skaken
,” said Presburg flatly. “We’re in a paradigm shift. Best I can offer you is boys is a consulting fee. No residuals. And it’s up to you how you split it.”

“I’ll walk,” said Morse.

Presburg rolled his eyes.

“I’ll float out the goddamn keyhole! “ ranted Morse. “Working on
Skaken
makes me feel like a grubworm paralyzed by parasitic wasps. That frikkin’ bug metropolis has been filling my brain like maggots in a rotten piece of meat!”

Presburg stopped with his cup of tea halfway to his lips. “Look, I’m about to eat a meal here. You screwballs want a better deal? Bring some serious action to the table! You know a lot of low-lifes, Ganzer. Get me a hot ribbonware plug-in.”

“You’re sure that stuff works?” said Ganzer, giving Morse a look.

Maya the waitress slapped down a plate of twitching live shrimp. Their bodies were shelled, but their heads were still in place. “You can drip Tabasco on them if they slow down kicking, Mr. Presburg.”

“My compliments to the chef,” said Presburg, examining the writhing mass of tortured arthropods. “I was wrong to ever doubt the crew at Schwartz’s. You guys are pros.”

Maya dimpled. “Thanks a lot, Mr. Presburg. You’re a charmer.”

“Maya, you work the noon-to-nine shift, right? Did you happen to notice the Moon last night?”

“I don’t care about the Moon,” said Maya. “Here in LA, the sky’s a solid dreamy dome of urban glare. The Moon’s way out of style.”

“Thank you,” said Presburg. “You may go. Next witness? Carlo Morse?”

“I see what you’re getting at,” said Morse. “The Moon’s goddamn gone.”

Presburg sampled a live, vigorously kicking shrimp. “Not exactly gone,” he said, his mouth full. “Real different. The Chinese ribbonhackers have been dreamfabbing on it. You tell me what that means for our business.”

“No more tides?” said Morse.

“Oh we’d get decent tides from the Sun’s gravity anyway,” said Presburg dismissively. “Think harder.” He bit the body off another shrimp. “Meanwhile, you should try some of these. With that hot sauce, they’re fantastic.”

“Pretty soon food will be totally free,” said Ganzer, intently studying his figurine of Tigra. “We’ll be dreaming garbage into food.”

“The new market,” said Presburg with a quick nod. “Reality is the ultimate medium to productize.”

“If dreams become real—” put in Ganzer, still fiddling with the figurine. “Well, I’d like to be an amorphous blob. I wanna fly, too. Remember flying dreams, Carlo? Nobody buys those these days.”

“I always really wanted to fly,” mused Morse. “In my flying dreams, I’ll be hovering over people, and talking down to them, and they just answer back in a normal, everyday fashion. There’s no panic, no corny sense of wonder about it—”

“Hey!” exclaimed Ganzer. He’d managed to twist the little Tigra-figure’s head loose. He pulled it off the little body. Attached to the head was a gleaming ribbon, like a tiny sword.

“That’s a ribbonware plug-in!” exclaimed Presburg.

With a smooth, nimble motion, Ganzer stabbed the ribbon into the side of his own head.

His gut bulged out, his neck shrank, his head merged into his body. His stained sportswear burst and dropped to floor in scraps. Ganzer slumped across the table—jiggly, shiny, ciliated, magnificent. A huge paramecium with his slipper-mouth agape.

Presburg jumped to his feet and screamed—a rich scream, filled with vibrato and with a ragged crackle in the upper registers.

“I can fly,” blubbered Ganzer. He floated off the tabletop and drifted towards the room’s low ceiling.

As if guided by fate, Maya came racing across the deli, carrying a big carving knife from the countermen. With a quick gesture, she slit Ganzer open like a hog.

Flying ribbonware shards tumbled out like viruses from an infected cell. Nimble as dragonflies, some of the ribbons plunged themselves into the heads of the people in the deli. And the rest of them surged out the deli door and into the early evening streets.

Yokl the doorman politely ushered them outside, where the populace was gently floating over their abandoned cars.

“Can we fly up there and get a decent dessert on the Moon?” said Presburg, his voice sounding odd. He was turning into Jimmy Ganzer. “I mean, this all stands to reason, right? We’ll find Tigra up there, too.”

Morse patted his old friend on the back and gazed into the lambent sky. Something was rising over the dark horizon. A cosmic jewel, with its facets etched in light, slowly turning and unfolding.

“Dream on,” said Morse. “Dream on.”

Notes on “Good Night, Moon”

Tor.com
, October, 2010.

Written May - June, 2010.

Rudy on “Good Night, Moon”

Two years went by and I started to miss collaborating with Bruce. And then he passed through San Jose, California, near where I live. He was in town for a conference on augmented reality—the idea being to overlay computer-generated images upon real-world views. I went to hear Bruce’s keynote speech at the conference, and I brought him home to spend a day at our house in Los Gatos. As always I was dazzled by his charisma—and we agreed to do another story.

As I’ve mentioned, I’m always very pleased with the way our collaborations come out. Our intense give and take generates something quite unlike the stories that either of us writes alone. The stories feel like gifts from the muse.

In “Good Night, Moon” we went back to the default of having two guys for the main characters. Bruce is the market-savvy Carlo Morse, and I’m his flaky wildman pal Jimmy Ganzer. We mixed in some augmented reality, but the real core of the story is to discuss what it’s like to be a pair of aging science-fiction writers. Transrealism in action. It was Bruce who came up with the great title, “Good Night, Moon.”

We’d sent all of our previous collaborations to good old
Asimov’s SF Magazine
, but this time out, we went to the
Tor.com
online science-fiction site—at this point
Tor.com
seemed to have more visibility, and they were paying more.

Bruce on “Good Night, Moon”

Of course we had to get around to metafiction about two writers collaborating. The story makes as little rational sense as dreams do, but the tone is completely on-pitch. That Ruckerian transreal mix of the visionary and the mundane—I can never accomplish that alone. We’re not television writers, but that’s some snappy sit-com dialogue sitting on the page there. Also, the story’s the right length for what’s basically a one-off joke.

The science fiction critic Damon Knight used to call science fiction “The Old Baloney Factory.” Science fiction writers are pop-cultural figures, they’re something like Nashville acts or maybe graffiti street artists. However, I never met a science fiction writer who didn’t have some astral and profound disturbance of the psyche—and I’ve met plenty.

Loco

“Waverly’s dead?” said Becka, verging towards a shriek. “How can Waverly be dead? Without him to cover our ass, we’re finished! They’ll rub us out and say we never existed!”

“You hear that rumbling outside?” said Gordo. “A steamroller. That’s how they got him.” Gordo’s breath misted the frigid air, for Dr. Waverly had ignored paying the power bills to heat their safehouse.

“What kind of bodyguard are you anyway? Hopeless ape! We’re doomed.” With one burgundy fingernail, Becka slit a spy-hole through the aluminum foil duct-taped to the window. “What is that monster doing out there?”

Gordo rubbed his chapped hands. “I was watching Dr Waverly like a hawk. Who knew a steamroller could pounce?” Laughing darkly, Gordo dropped into a leather executive armchair. From this throne, Dr. Fred Waverly had once ruled a federal research empire. The chair’s glossy arms were cracked and its casters were flat as broken feet.

“This means we’re on a hit-list,” said Becka.

“Lighten up,” said Gordo, his voice echoing in the unheated room. “This means we’re on our own. We’ll close down Project Loco. Sell off the secrets. And get the hell out while we can.”

“Was it Yellco who got Waverly?”

“Not likely,” said Gordo, blinking at her. “But I’m glad we’ve got a barricade. In case that roller makes a charge.” He gestured at the walls, stacked with debris.

The contents of Project Loco’s offices had been manhandled by forklift robots and crammed into their hideout: a derelict McMansion in dismal Middleburg, Virginia.

During the seven weeks of their increasingly uneasy confinement, Gordo and Becka had passed the time by piling the federal debris against the walls. Graceless steel desks, empty water-coolers, dead coffeemakers, and oddly angled surge-protectors—plus their specialized locative-science equipment: GPS units, atomic sextants, flux oscillators, nanolasers, and neutrino sieves.

The house was a jumble of crazed debris—except for one shining treasure, the culmination of years of off-the-books black-budget research, a bubbling, green-lit aquarium-tank, with glassy little cells subdividing it like an uneasy high-rise—a tenement for leeches.

Eight or nine species of leeches. Careful Loco research had proved that leeches in particular excelled as plug-and-play biotech implants. Leeches were simple and rugged, they ran off human blood, and their boneless flesh could hold a fine payload of wetware programming. Plus, once you got used to the concept of interfacing with leeches, it didn’t hurt all that much to stick them on.

Happier than clams and flexing in slimy topological ease, the bioprogrammed invertebrates were the ultimate product of the Loco Project. They carried the experimental Loco translocation apps. The parasites’ aquarium boasted its own battery-operated power supply to keep the creatures at a comfortable blood-warm heat.

Gordo pressed his chilly hands against the warm green glass. Outside the safehouse walls, the steamroller clattered on like a coffee grinder, casually, remorselessly. Every once in a while a ragged stranger would wobble by on a bike, but nobody seemed much bothered by the goings-on at a derelict house.

Meanwhile the steamroller was methodically flattening everything near the safe house’s garage. With digital efficiency, it crushed the abandoned doghouse. Then the thorn-tangled rose bushes. Then some cheap concrete garden statuary.

So much for the anonymous safety of the Loco Project’s final redoubt. The front yard was a maze of roller-marks in snow.

Uneasily, Becka rubbed the back of her neck. “What actually happened? Did Waverly morph into a giant leech? Like Patel did at the lab? Waverly was claiming he’d fixed that in his latest wetware build?”

“He slumped to the ground,” said Gordo thoughtfully. “That’s all I know for sure.”

“Was he writhing at all? Did he display spastic invertebrate activity?”

“The way it came down—” Excited now, Gordo crouched in the middle of the room, his heavy body nimble as he moved his hands, mapping things out. “He went soft. The steamroller attacked. And Waverly was like a gingerbread man under a rolling pin. A thirty-foot smear of smashed mathematical physicist. No blood, no bones. I used my hands to pry him off the lawn. I rolled him up like a tortilla and carried him into the garage.”

“Not much like Patel,” mused Becka.

“I can’t say,” replied Gordo. “Remember, I only joined your team after the Patel incident.”

“I wish you’d stop bitching about ‘the Patel incident.’”

“Look,” said Gordo, “you can’t just morph a federal scientist into a giant invertebrate that catches fire. That’s not an acceptable protocol.”

“Security guys like you can never keep your traps shut,” said Becka, angrily pacing back and forth through the debris. “Forget about Patel, he’s stuffed in a nuclear waste barrel. Let’s talk about Waverly. Even if a steamroller crushed him, it’s not scientifically established that he’s dead.”