Transreal Cyberpunk (37 page)

And then, with a smooth affine transformation, Gordo restored the dozer to its full stature. It trundled outside, making another yawning hole in the wall, opening a Pompeii-like vista.

Silence fell. The dozer was motionless beneath the pearly winter sky. In the garage, the steamroller was silent too. A few dark dots of snow began to fall. The frigid air smelled somehow like steel.

“You overdid it,” said Becka critically.

“Women always say that,” shrugged Gordo. “You wanted me to solve your problem... Hey, problem solved now, it’s all rubble.”

“Look,” said Becka, pointing.

A wide, flat sheet was creeping across the snowy winter lawn, reflecting glints of rainbow color from the low, gray clouds.

“He’s like a flounder,” said Becka. “ Or no, he’s like a soap film.”

Waverly the soap-film man undulated and rose into the air. As if seen through a haze of static on a clouded video screen, he twinkled, stuttered, jaggified, and broke up—into frantic dots. A swarm of Waverly gnats. Bright and glittering, the gnats swirled in a slow tornado.

“He’s going everywhere,” said Becka. “He predicted this. He’s encysted himself into a quintillion particles.”

With a dip and salute, the swarm of Waverlys scattered itself to the vagrant breezes of winter.

“I don’t think that’s an attractive career choice,” said Gordo.

“Do you want to try and pry your leech loose, before it really digs in?” asked Becka. “I think it’s too late for me.”

“I’m riding this all the way,” said Gordo. “Wherever it leads. Having this superpower—it feels like the first time I’ve ever really been alive. It’s just you and just me against the world. So first, before anyone else shows up—” He nodded his head towards the house.

“Hot funeral sex?” said Becka, her expression unreadable.

“Please,” said Gordo.

Notes on “Loco”

Tor.com,
June, 2012.

Written December, 2011.

Rudy on “Loco”

Bruce emailed me an idea for a story that would somehow be related to locative art, that is, to virtual-reality art providing an experience that relates to a viewer’s specific location. I wasn’t exactly sure where to go with this notion, but I knew it would be fun to work with him again. As is customary for our collaborations, “Loco,” is a two-person story, with the characters loosely based on Bruce and me.

This time, instead of directly arguing with each other about the story via email, Bruce and I transrealized our bickering into actual dialog within the story. I’m the punky woman, and Bruce is the tough, hard-bitten man. There’s also a bit of me in the professor who’s been run over by a steam-roller.

Having a guy be flattened like a pancake without actually dying was one of those odd story-twists that simply occurs to a writer like me—and then, just for the hell of it, I throw it in and see if I can make it work within a tale’s internal logic. The tank of leeches, the attack of the road-grader, and the paper robots are what-the-hell ideas too—it was Bruce who came up with those three.

In the end, the story has a fine, mad logic. I relish Bruce’s rich vocabulary, his contrarian attitude, and his obsessions—refreshingly different from mine. Cory Doctorow wrote a nice bit about our story on the
Boing Boing
blog:

“‘Loco,’ a new story by Rudy Rucker and Bruce Sterling is the weirdest fucking thing I’ve ever read that managed to still make sense. I’ve read pretty much every word both of them ever published and together, they are infinitely weirder and more interesting than they are on their own. I’m willing to bet that writing this was half euphoric loony-laughter, half weird-out contest, and 100 percent awesome.”

Bruce on “Loco”

This story might have been a rather standard cyberpunk technothriller about federal research scientists who blunder into their own Manhattan Project. I had an idea along that line—because I’m beset with ideas, I have thousands of them—but I’ve done work of that sort before, and I didn’t know where such a story might go.

Rudy immediately attacked the story with brazen cartoon elements—a living man smashed flat by a bulldozer, an attack of paper robots from an angry landlord. The trick in “Loco” is to subsume these aggressive provocations without breaking character. The two leads are government workers, and they stay feds no matter what. The result is some spectacularly weird cyberpunk-transreal dialogue, almost certainly the best such exchanges we’ve written.

”Loco” is not a great science fiction story, but it features some unearthly scenes that convey the world-smashing feeling of a Surrealist exquisite corpse. Two conceptual worlds have been collaged together, and the jagged edges are smoothed out nicely. So the sentences work, they’re grammatical and even rational, but they state weird things that are simply unheard-of, unthinkable thoughts that no single human brain could produce.

I don’t like to play the suffering tortured artist as Rudy does, because I don’t write from the heart; I’m critical and analytical, and for me it’s all about text construction. Nevertheless, I dare to declare that “Loco,” for all its extreme daffiness, is deadly-serious sci-fi high-artwork. This is pulverizing psychedelia jam-band action where the guitars get bulldozed live on stage.

Totem Poles

Dirt Complaining and Dirt Harkening were a long-buried married couple.

“I haven’t minded being dead one bit,” said Dirt Complaining. “But now we’ve got space aliens nosing around. And they’re curious about totem poles? Why did you men even make those things?”

“We were great artists,” said Dirt Harkening.

“Fools conjuring up cosmic forces.”

“I miss potlatch,” said Dirt Harkening. “That’s what I’ve missed most, down here in the Earth’s dirt.”

“Potlatch again,” said Dirt Complaining. “Ha! All you big chiefs, pretending to be above all wealth, so spiritual, so potent! Whose robes and amulets were you burning and throwing into the sea? Women’s crafts, women’s treasures!”

“Easy come, easy go,” said Dirt Harkening. “With flying saucers in the sky, our whole Earth is in play. But come what may, dear wife—our squabbles don’t matter anymore.”

“The heirs of our dead flesh still walk the Earth, husband.”

“The living take no account of us. People have forgotten that sacred truth was captured in the mighty symbolism of our totem poles. Even though the saucers understand.”

“Your totem poles were vulgar,” said Dirt Complaining. “Big phallic brags !”

“We artists like that sort of thing. A totem pole that stands up good and stiff—very fine.”

“Let’s see how this ends,” said Dirt Complaining.

§

Ida lowered her combat binoculars. She had pale skin, a heart-shaped face and a bob of lustrous dark hair. “It’s a shame that nobody sees the point of our struggle. What if we’re wrong?”

Kalinin adjusted his brimless fur Cossack hat. He was a bony, waxy-skinned warrior with high cheekbones and a great beak of a nose. “You and I will be heroes,” he said, looking tenderly upon Ida. “Once we learn how to kill this race of flying saucers.”

“But the saucers are saving the very Earth that mankind destroyed!”

“If you wash an apple before eating it, do you do that for the apple’s good?”

Heaped with garbage, a chain of filthy diesel trucks lumbered toward the vast scar of the coal mine, here in the Donbass region of the Ukraine. One after another, with distant groans and screeches, the great trucks dumped their trash. It was high noon, with a glaring sun.

The alien creatures had three primary forms—one for the air, one for the sea, and one fearsome form that infested the Earth itself.

The air invaders resembled classic flying saucers. They haunted Earth’s skylines, absorbing pollutants. In their seagoing form, the saucers took on shapes like whales. They devoured poison gyres of floating plastic with their ivory teeth, and filtered toxins with their dark baleen. And the subterranean saucers were colossal, rubbery, saucer worms. They infested mankind’s mines and landfills, erasing every scrap of poison they found.

Thanks to the aliens, the withered fields and rain forests, stricken by every form of human rapacity, were blooming again. Happy dolphins and gallant tuna swam the open seas. Wild pigs roamed the taiga like the wind. The planet’s molten poles were freezing again as the rising seas receded.

The very largest of the chthonic saucer worms was here in a Donbass coal mine. Kalinin’s sworn goal in life was to kill this worm. For weeks, militarized Russian diesel trucks had been dumping nuclear waste into the mine, filling it with choice bait for the saucers. Lured by this bonanza of filth, an armada of the flying saucers had burrowed into the shaft and had merged their bodies to form a vast and lumpy worm.

Sheltered by a rampart of wet sandbags, Kalanin and Ida watched one of the great, silvery saucers fly by overhead. Kalinin’s ragtag paramilitary warriors set up a rousing antiaircraft fire from their muddy ambush holes. But they weren’t firing bullets.

The living saucers, it seemed, had a weakness. They carried within them some prime directive about intelligent life, some ethic that manifested itself as a tenderness towards human beings. The saucers were unwilling or even unable to harm people. They had an especial loathing for dead people. Therefore Kalinin’s paramilitary troops fired human body-parts at any saucer within range—making the innocent blue sky above the radioactive coal-mine into an aerial graveyard of human carrion.

The saucer flexed, ducked, and dodged its way through the sprays of gore. The fierce militia-men concentrated their bloody fire the more. The saucer’s capacities, although great, were not infinite. Under the harassment of flying carnage, the saucer’s smooth seamless edges grew rough. The alien invader slowed, faltered, and broke into a hailstorm of twitching mirror-scraps. These were saucer grubs, actually quite good to eat.

The paramilitary troops howled with glee, and fired off celebratory blasts from their small arms. Their hot bullets would fall to earth somewhere, often killing civilians. No matter. Graveyards were a useful source for the body-parts. Flying saucers might spurn killing people, but no cosmic rule decreed that the Russians couldn’t kill themselves.

“Our best warriors are our dead,” remarked Ida, shaking her head.

“Only the dead stay true,” said Kalinin. His corps of armed volunteers was dwindling day by day. They shared Ida’s sense that the saucers were good. They feared the battle was unwinnable. And the local Ukrainian peasants were filling the warriors with wild tales. Supposedly a salamander-shaped saucer-being had resurrected a farm wife from her grave. The villagers were calling the old woman a saint.

“I do wonder why the saucers are so kind to us,” said Ida. “We’ve done nothing to deserve redemption.”

“They’re saving us up,” said Kalanin. “For a last supper.”

Silently Ida studied Kalanin, her expression a mixture of cunning and tenderness. A former painter turned Kremlin intriguer, Ida was Kalinin’s state-support liaison in his desperate, unauthorized war. She brought Kalinin black money, grim volunteers, experimental weapons, and deniable orders from the Kremlin.

Kalinin was a veteran of the Russian nuclear-missile corps. During his military career, he’d been at ease with the idea of human beings destroying the Earth. And he felt an instinctive hatred for the flying saucers and their campaign to heal the world. It was a horror to see beings who were immune to human malice.

When the saucers first invaded, Kalinin had been commanding a nuclear launch center. His hydrogen bombs had failed to impress the space invaders. The saucers merely shimmered and swayed through the thermonuclear shockwaves—insolent as striptease dancers. Russian military lasers did nothing to faze them. Particle beams, the same. Meanwhile the other nations were making peace with the aliens.

The Kremlin’s Higher Circles had encouraged Kalanin to resign from the Russian army, and to strike out on his own. And now Ida was the only ally he trusted.

A talented portraitist, Ida had at one time enjoyed the intimate patronage of the Russian Minister of the Environment. But then the flying saucers had cruelly dissolved her oligarch’s pipelines and nuclear plants. The Minister had shot himself. Casting about for a new role, Ida had found her place as Kalinin’s liaison. But now she was ready to move on, and Kalanin knew it. She had a stash of jewelry to help her along. But what about Kalanin?

The nuclear-waste trucks retreated to fetch more garbage. The harsh sun beat upon the rutted earth.

“Let’s eat,” said Kalanin, and produced a loaf of tainted Chernobyl bread. He cut off a slice with his ever-ready bayonet.

Ida unsheathed a chunk of dried sausage. The meat within its casing was the flesh of a Przewalski horse. Methodically, the couple chewed their meager rations.

“That giant saucer worm likes you,” Ida told Kalanin. “You’ve fed it so much trash that it thinks you’re its best friend on Earth.”

“I’ve spoiled the worm, yes,” said Kalinin with a thin smile. “It’s like a decadent intellectual. A lazy gourmand that never spent a day on duty.”

“Don’t hate intellectuals, Kalinin. I’m one too. An artist, don’t you remember?”