Transreal Cyberpunk (40 page)

But even in the trackless, bird-chirping depths of the redwood forest, Jorge could never get Sharp’s wiseguy voice entirely out of his head. “Why not turn your dog into a methane tank?” Sharp had said once. “And burn its farts for a space heater.”

But Jorge’s dear old dog was long dead now. Jorge had become a forest sage, and he had no time for Sharp’s worldly antics any more, nor for any mundane thing that wasn’t serious.

§

A foggy spot of light bumbled around in the damp, green branches of his primeval tree.

This glowing apparition moved with a considered urgency, like the Zen butterfly that never hastens, even when pursued. It drifted on the air like ancient plankton—a floating thing of many soccer-ball facets, a gleaming polyhedron. Its planes were wobbly and bubbly, a stripped-down, minimal, ultra-primitive life-form, its grip on life so tentative that a bubble-pop would annihilate it.

Slowly yet steadily, the luminous herald drew closer, tracing a path through the three-dimensional maze of Jorge’s great tree. The uncanny cyst was feeling its way toward him with wiry, delicate cilia that writhed from its tinted geometric corners.

The plankton-bubble bumped the sharp tip of a broken branch. Jorge held his breath, but the blob didn’t burst. Those shining membranes were tougher than they looked.

Jorge grew uneasy, watching the creature draw closer. No use trying to enjoy his morning tea and cereal. The floating entity was homing in on him. But who knew that he lived thirty meters up a tree in the middle of nowhere? Even the government spooks who’d spirited him to this mountain redoubt had agreed to forget about him. Frank Sharp had arranged that deal.

§

Frank Sharp, dealmaker. Not exactly a government agent, not exactly a criminal, not exactly a lawyer. Frank presented himself to the world as a high-paid consultant, offering services worldwide to high-tech industries who’d lost their way in the tangled jungles of humanity.

Jorge called out to the shining, airborne bubble. “Frank Sharp? No more schemes. You have nothing I want.”

In response, the lantern-like creature dipped and drew closer, its facets swirling with color. And just then something touched Jorge on the back of his neck.

“Fuck!” screamed Jorge, whirling around, all traces of sagely aplomb gone.

It was a second levitating polyhedron, all in shades of black and gray. This dark floater had crept up from behind him in utter dewy silence, arriving at Jorge’s bare neck with the stealth of a vampire bat. And this one was indeed the avatar of Frank Sharp, hired to escort the first blob, the colorful one. Step by computational step, that first bubble shaped itself into a model of the head of Jorge’s former student, Betty Yee.

§

Delicate, intelligent, and more plain than beautiful, Betty Yee was a techie of the Pacific Rim. Although her floating head was merely a mockup made of taut organic membranes, Betty had her usual expression: an ingratiating yet self-serving look. Betty had always been ambitious to change the world in her own direction.

“I’m honored to meet you again, Dr. Jones,” said the floating head of Betty Yee. “A wild storm, then a day of sun! Seeing you lifts my heart.”

“You know my policy about leaving the world behind,” Jorge scolded. “I told you my plans back at the Stanford Biological Accelerator.”

“Yo, yo, yo!” yelled the dark Frank Sharp floater, maneuvering to wedge in bubble-like between Jorge and the head of Betty Yee. “Don’t forget what she did to you, professor! She robbed your lab and stole your ideas.”

“You said you would let me explain the crisis to him,” admonished Betty Yee.

“I said I would let you plead, yes,” said the Frank Sharp floater. “If Gold Lucky pays by the minute. And the clock started when our bubbles drifted up this tree.”

“I can be brief,” said Betty Yee. “Dear, good, wise Doctor Jones: you changed the world. In China, we adopted your changes to our methods. We embraced them, we extended them. Mistakes were made.”

“Back up,” said Jorge. “Did Frank just say he was renting me out by the minute?”

“We must have your help in Shenzhen. We’ve aroused a dangerous computational form of life. We set that process running—now we can’t shut it off without your skill.”

“I named this new outbreak the Kraken,” Frank confided. “After Tennyson’s poem. The primordial sleeping monster of the deep. Roused by the folly of man. Arising for the end of human days.”

Jorge’s gaze flicked between the pretty glowing lantern and the vampire bubble that had poked him. “Betty, why are you bobbling around with this guy? Don’t you know any better?”

“Gold Lucky Company hired Mr. Sharp as our connection man,” Betty confessed. “It was the only way that I could find you in time to save the world.”

“Her problem is giant monsters made of intelligent mud,” said Frank.

Betty Yee nodded her floating head. “Awkward.”

Jorge considered the situation. “What’s in this for me?”

“Let me explain that face to face,” Frank offered. “Betty’s not around here, because she’s fighting for her life in the Shenzhen disaster zone. As for me, though, I’m running this floating bubble while I’m actually standing right down at the base of your tree.”

Frank Sharp had arrived in the flesh. There had never been one episode when that situation hadn’t turned out to be crap.

§

Jorge’s windlass wheel was powered by three hundred organically computing squirrels. Once Betty’s Chinese bubble had burst in a glowing patch of slime, the rodents set to work with brisk muscular efficiency. They were a jostling tide of fur inside the squeaking wheel. The sequoia’s little-used wooden lift cage hauled Frank Sharp straight up the trunk.

His character armor well in place, Frank Sharp stepped into the treehouse and raised his elegant brows. “It’s a privilege to visit your sequoia retreat, Jorge. I know you deserve your serenity, after all we’ve been through together. I told the big boys back at the Agency, I told ‘em: yo, we can’t squeeze blood out of a redwood stump. Let Professor Jones be. He’s old, he’s lost it, he’s pretty near death. Forget him. We’ll find some younger math genius who can avert this Lovecraft-scale catastrophe.”

Jorge looked at his stained fingertips, seeing them very clearly just now. They were dirty, with a glossy sheen over the dirt. A bum’s hands. He hadn’t bathed or shaved in days, or maybe weeks. Was his chosen life so great? Frank Sharp, by contrast, looked like he’d just stepped out of a five-star hotel lobby.

“
What
other genius?” Jorge said.

“Oh, well, we both know about you math guys. You always do your best work before thirty.”

“Maybe so, but we live to be a hundred,” countered Jorge. “Can you tell me again who you’re working for this time?”

“I work for the high-enders on any given day,” smiled Frank. “Whenever an industry peaks, they start to die—so they call in a futurist. I serve them their final cheese course.”

“Me, I’m not an industry anymore,” said Jorge sourly. “I’m a lonely, resentful old man with some broken patents.”

“That’s all thanks to Betty Yee and geopolitics. Be fair, Jorge, it was never easy to keep a guy like you out of prison or the nuthouse.”

Jorge glared at Frank. “Before you showed up here in my sequoia tree, I had a chance to end my days in dignity.”

“What the hell do you with yourself, way up here? Besides feeding your squirrels.”

“I perform gedankenexperiments,” said Jorge. “I confront great conundrums that can only be resolved by sheer Einstein-style chin-stroking.”

Sharp stared blankly into the gently waving redwood foliage, baffled by this assertion. Finally he shrugged. “Fine! Feel sorry for yourself. Sulk. Me, I’m a man of the world, okay? Because if I don’t take power, I’m a dirt-common schnook. I’m the nameless ox that dies in harness. Cut to the chase, Jorge. Save the world for me. I need the world.”

Jorge had a crushing rejoinder ready, but when he saw the obscure pain haunting Sharp’s darting, dishonest eyes, a moment of sagely compassion touched him. Despite all that had happened between the two of them, he found it within himself to know pity.

“All right, Frank. We should love the world. Keep your world off my back, and I’ll debug your problems on principle.”

§

The disaster-stricken city of Shenzhen was entirely closed to air traffic and internet access. An industrial region beset with giant mud monsters had to clamp down on unharmonious thinking. However, Frank Sharp, hired Chinese agent, was able to lay out the full, uncensored story for the ears of Jorge Jones, global disaster consultant.

While working R&D for the potent Gold Lucky Corp, Betty Yee had abused Jorge’s patented technology of organic computation in a self-referential and radically improper manner.

Gold Lucky had planned to recreate the so-called “Cambrian Explosion” of Earthly evolution—an ancient geologic epoch, reborn in the form of creatures generated by Jorge’s organic computations. Let a thousand mutants bloom. Gold Lucky’s software engineers, feverish at the prospect of productivity bonuses, had imagined that they might extract a master program from China’s enormous Big Data fossil record of primeval worm tracks, ammonite shells and algae stains. This was a straightforward matter of collating the entire Cambrian fossil record and stochastically interpreting the fossils as ideograms.

Unfortunately, this brilliant scheme, like most software startups, had been an abject bust.

When Betty Yee took over the research program, she went much smaller, more nano-scale. She focused on a special class of fossils known as “stromatolites.” Stromatolites were pancaked stacks of calcified primitive algae.

Betty’s efforts revealed that these fossilized microbial mats were a computational archive. The fossil stromatolites were the historical record of millions of years of super-advanced single-celled life—a full core-dump, source-code, and stack-trace for the primeval cellular-automata soup that had covered planet Earth for nameless geologic eons, long before nature had evolved any spines, mouths or bones. The dense primeval brew, the oldest form of life on earth, had been a hot and sour soup of computation.

Of course no one had believed Betty’s science findings, so she’d boldly ported this fossilized database straight into the Gold Lucky medicated-mud factory. Then everybody believed, because behold: the Kraken awoke.

§

Frank and Jorge were quickly ushered past customs in Shenzhen, because no mere functionaries were allowed to inspect Jorge’s latest version of his Hydra tool—newly revamped for battlefield action. Betty Yee met them with an armored Chinese limousine.

“Why did you publish that paper in the
Hong Kong Journal of Genomics
about stochastic flows across membrane diffusors?” Jorge promptly demanded. “Was it to break my patents?” He’d been brooding over the issue during the long trans-Pacific flight.

“Then you remember my work!” said Betty Yee. She sounded pleased, but in person she looked careworn. Betty was dressed in standard global nerd style: pink jeans, white athletic shoes, a sweatshirt with a corny graphic, a purple windbreaker. Her hair was newly streaked with gray and she had dry crowsfeet at her temples.

“My patents were not about commercial advantage,” lectured Jorge. “I put the patents there to protect this world from things men were not meant to know.”

“Your patents weren’t stopping anyone,” said Betty. “Especially not your National Security Agency and our Chinese cyberwar units. While you’ve been living in your tall woods like an exiled Taoist poet, everyone here in China has been building Hydra units for years.”

Jorge locked eyes with his former student. He was angry, but she steadily returned his gaze. As man and woman, they were of different generations and had once had an entirely decent, productive teacher-student relationship. However, many years had passed. Betty had become a woman of discretion, while Jorge, although ancient, was not entirely dead to male lust.

“Yo, what’s up with the stromatolite codes?” Frank interrupted, seeking some normalized conversation.

Betty blinked and cleared her throat. “Imagine the unthinkable patience of plankton, passing endless yugas under the sun,” she offered. “The legacy of the living Earth before plants and animals. Much like the placid, stable, civilized Middle Kingdom, before the West showed up and wrecked the Confucian utopia.”

“A nanotech-style gray-goo singularity is a legacy?” said Frank Sharp. “Like, thanks a lot.”

“The singularity was never ahead of us,” said Betty. “It was always behind us. On hold, deep in the limestone strata.”

§

In the distance, towards the battered metropolis, the Chinese earth shook with disaster. Hoarse and loud. Military observation planes were flying in slow circles. Dozens of helicopters swarmed overhead—some of them napalm bombers, some of them carrying tanks of water and fire retardant, some of them medics carrying off the wounded.

The armored robot limo rolled with cybernetic slickness toward the Gold Lucky plant, swerving to avoid the bomb craters in the road, skirting the slumped rubble of charred, collapsed buildings, sometimes taking a detour to avoid the urban structures that were still in flames. The earlier airstrikes were releasing their bent, stinking billows into the glowering sky, spark-filled pillars of dust and toxic urban smoke.