Transreal Cyberpunk (41 page)

The first Kraken mud-monster caught Jorge and Frank by surprise, stepping out from behind a glass office building, like a threatening ghoul in a funhouse ghost ride. And then another, another and another, ten meters, twenty meters, thirty meters tall. Although they were faceless and eyeless, the Kraken monsters were very alive. They stank powerfully of digestion and sewage.

They walked the terrified Earth, huge, slimy, shaggy, bipedal golems of computational mud, flaking off writhing chunks in the crude shapes of horseshoe crabs, scorpions, sea worms, sea cucumbers. The cellular computers were recruiting modern germs from the local peasants’ synergistic duck, fish, and pig manure ponds. And the monsters promptly assimilated any bewildered animals or hapless human locals that fell into their slimy grip.

“They’re made of smart cells, embedded in flowing mud,” said Betty Yee. “They compute in parallel. Each cell processes food scents and physical contacts. Gradients of wetness and light. I released them from the fossil stones with Professor Jones’s language for organic computation. I freed the Kraken with a Chinese Hydra, and now, I know: mistakes were made.”

The slick clay golems rose up much faster than the angry choppers could burn them down to Chinese porcelain. A herd of the salty, reeking, stop-action claymation monsters rumbled past and over the limousine, powerful on their vast dented legs. The Kraken monsters were huge, and with every astounding step on the Chinese soil, they grew visibly bigger.

Frank straightened his tie and gave a thin smile. “Betty, your military attacks don’t even hurt their feelings.” His exquisitely tailored, black suit made the leather of the limo look cheap. “They’re generating body forms like they’re leafing through Charles Darwin and highlighting the hot parts.”

“Let us join the welcome banquet at the Gold Lucky plant,” Betty recited. “We must formulate a war plan.”

§

The Gold Lucky welcome banquet was a spartan emergency lunch where terrified employees wolfed down cold noodles from stamped aluminum bowls.

“Jorge here can degrade, attrit, and suppress your Krakens, I have no doubt,” Frank Sharp told Betty Yee. “The American press calls him the John von Neumann of organic computation.”

“Do you still read the American press?” said Betty doubtfully.

“That’s not what matters,” said Frank, deftly chopsticking his chilly ramen. “Because Jonny von Neumann was a shadowy, zoned out guy who was in there, at the start, with the players. Von Neumann created the first digital computer. Also, the first atomic bomb. That’s the American way: throw the big brainiac at the big problem. Save the moral indignation for when you can pay for it. One man against the universe. Just keep moving his bar, extending his finish line, until he comes up with some ecstatic, dreadful breakthrough that can cap it all. If he fails, and his brain turns to slush in his hospital bed, that’s all part of his legend.”

Betty decanted a plastic squeeze bottle of hot-sauce into her lukewarm noodle bowl. “Why do you say such painful things, Frank?” she said, meeting his eyes. “Dr. Jorge Jones is a great man. You torment him. You mock him. Why?”

“Free speech won’t kill a great man,” said Frank. “Your mud monsters might kill him.”

“You know what killed von Neumann?” said Jorge. “The hydrogen bomb tests. He had to go and gawk at all of them, he didn’t have the sense to stay home.”

For two minutes they ate in silence.

There were certain matters that Jorge Jones and Frank Sharp never talked about. Like the treason charge that had hung for years over Jorge’s head, for his ruining spook encryption with his massive stash of secret and heretofore unknown prime numbers. Through a Byzantine legal maneuver, Sharp had finally gotten the hacker charges dismissed.

As a quid pro quo, the secrets of the Hydra, Jorge’s programming tool, had been handed over to the Washington security establishment. Jorge himself, legally scot-free, and carefully stripped of any possible role in government, business or academe, had been given control of a nice, tall sequoia tree in a quiet, misty, federal park.

An ingenious secret arrangement, but of course it could not last. The vampire that was power might be buried, but then every living thing around it would rot. The Hydra’s design specs and its proprietary control software, had been released by a malcontent at the NSA. Or else hacked by Chinese military disguised as computer-science students. Or maybe just sold off by Frank Sharp, who rarely asked for more than ten percent on a deal.

All that pain and trouble to keep things tight and shipshape, and the genie still blew out of the bottle. The genie whistled howling through the bottleneck and flew worldwide on the cloudy winds. They were like that, genies.

“John von Neumann transformed this world, and so did I,” said Jorge over the candied bean cakes. “If some obscure Hungarian exile can turn America into an atomic, computational superpower, then it’ll be easy for me to obliterate Chinese Kraken monsters with my Hydra.” Jorge wiped his mouth and set down his chopsticks. “So what? The reward for being a low-empathy know-it-all.”

Sensing Jorge’s moment of self-doubt, Frank leaned forward over the flimsy folding table. “To live alone, a man must be very like a god—or very like a wild beast.”

“This Chinese banquet wasn’t supposed to have a cheese course,” said Jorge.

“Our conversation would be easier if you’d ever studied literature,” said Frank. “Politicians adore the classic quotes from ancient Greek. But for you, old geek: what is it? Differential equations?”

Jorge stared him down. “Being rescued by you is worse than prison.”

Betty Yee looked from one to the other. “Gentlemen, we have a problem in the field.”

§

Shenzhen had been a prosperous city where an industrious people pursued their own happiness and minded their own business. Now it looked like Godzilla’s birthday cake.

Betty Yee herded Frank and Jorge into a robot helicopter, which promptly rose aloft. “I feel so ashamed,” she announced. “The world would be a happier place if this had only happened in Washington instead. Where you vainly seek to control the rest of us. And where men like Frank Sharp make dirty money.”

“I am the king-hell futurist!” barked Frank Sharp over the noise of the rotors. “You wanted to bring in Jorge Jones, the sage of organic computation, you had to suit up a cowboy first! Take us to the front lines!”

During the brief flight, Jorge hastily prepared the Hydra that he’d brought along. Jorge’s Hydra had four bright blue eyes set into its waist, and a working mouth inside its ring of eight tentacles. Each tentacle had an opening at its tip for puffing out viral spores. This Hydra’s interface consisted of EEG patches that could monitor Jorge’s brain impulses and thus, to some extent, read his thoughts. Jorge wore the Hydra atop his head.

“Fun,” said the Hydra, settling into place. Its inhuman voice was high and cheerful.

“Good boy,” said Jorge, brushing tentacles from his eyes.

A battlefield was a young man’s arena, but in a cyberwar an old man was ferocious. Firing from the chopper with the advantages of air supremacy, Jorge destroyed twenty-five of the Krakens in rapid succession, poofing them with aerial squirts of Hydra mist. The Krakens crumbled below him like sandcastles in the tide. The remaining monsters absorbed this battlefield fact on the ground. Stumbling and lumbering, they retreated, redesigned themselves, and returned to combat.

The second wave of mud golems were armored lumps. They resembled dog-sized trilobites and cow-sized ankylosaurus dinos—each with a spiky ball on its tail. There was even one ghastly thing like a rolling, gawping human head that, Frank Sharp boldly insisted, was clearly modeled on himself.

Solving the relevant reaction-diffusion equations in his head, Jorge reprogrammed his Hydra’s viral mist—and began picking off Krakens again. He’d fly low, get close to one of them, and
poof
.

Frank Sharp began yelling unwanted advice, a target observer calling the shots on the slaughter. “Zap that one who’s a crooked pig, melt that ugly sucker looks like a snail, and then get the slobbering kangaroo. God, they’re ugly!”

Then, with covert suddenness, there were no more Krakens in sight.

“I seriously doubt this is—mission accomplished,” said Jorge. “With me killing them and Frank insulting them, these Cambrian mud monsters are going to want to build a Kraken a kilometer high.”

But for now all was calm.

§

Back at Gold Lucky’s damaged, smoke-stinking headquarters, the uniformed employees were gleefully celebrating Jorge’s swift victory with rounds of sorghum liquor. Betty shyly proffered an attache case loaded with high denomination bills.

“That’ll do for earnest money,” said Frank, stuffing the sheaves of money into his pigskin bag.

“The Chinese invented paper money,” said Betty. “The old ways are simple and strong.”

“It’s world-changing stuff, money,” nodded Frank. “A shame what Jorge did to crypto-money and electronic funds transfer. I warned him to knock it off with that prime-number research, but he was a wild man. Jorge had no brakes, in his younger days. He didn’t even know what brakes were.”

The victory party was as brief as a stock-market rally. A short distance from the corporate HQ, the Krakens’ roaring and burbling had resumed.

“Oh wow,” said Jorge, realizing something.”I’ve been dissolving them, but their spores become seeds. They rise back up like a battalion of Chinese clay soldiers!”

“I’m losing the thread here, Jorge,” Frank complained. “Plankton, stromatolites, horseshoe crabs, trilobites, dinosaurs—everything but jellyfish and ants. And now it’s clay soldiers?”

Betty was regaining her confidence. “Our brave pilots are improving with the napalm. Although the Kraken is made of germs that compute, germs are just germs. We can’t lose with Professor Jones and his Hydra.”

“Thing is,” put in Frank Sharp. “It’s the Hydra itself that’s the real Kraken. The Hydra, metaphorically, is the American Kraken.”

Jorge wanted to protest, but Frank forestalled him with an upraised hand.

“Consider the prophetic words of
The Kraken
, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson,” said Frank, in full lecture mode. “I shall quote this visionary Victorian work
in extenso
.”

Below the thunders of the upper deep,

Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,

His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep

The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee

About his shadowy sides; above him swell

Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;

And far away into the sickly light,

From many a wondrous grot and secret cell

Unnumbered and enormous polypi

Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.

There hath he lain for ages, and will lie

Battening upon huge sea worms in his sleep,

Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;

Then once by man and angels to be seen,

In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.”

A ringing silence followed.

“Only a fatuous English major would call a Kraken a metaphor,” said Jorge, fighting his way clear of Tennyson’s spell. “Organic computation is real.”

“Scientist,” spat Frank Sharp. “Robot.”

Betty Yee was upset. “You foolish men will never save China. Why do you quarrel as if our catastrophe is all about you?”

“Frank should
become
the Kraken, if he thinks it’s poetry,” said Jorge. “Would make me laugh. You, a Kraken, like a trademarked balloon of hot air in a Thanksgiving parade.”

“Is this the sage of computation talking?” said Frank Sharp. “You’re no sage, you’re California granola, Jorge, you’re a nut, a fruit, and a flake. All the time kvetching like some granny who spilled tea on her embroidery.”

“We’ll see,” said Jorge, sending cool, War-of-the-Worlds-alien type thoughts into his personal Hydra unit, still hibernating atop his head. “We’ll see who spills what.” He puffed a newly programmed cloud of viruses into the room.

Frank Sharp tried to hold his breath, failed, grew apoplectic. “What are you doing? That stinks.”

“We’ll feel feverish for a few minutes,” said Jorge. “And then we’re good. Jones flu. The new subprogram will give us somatic compatibility with the Krakens. That way, even if it devours us, we’ll retain autonomy.”

“Can we get back to the fighting now?” asked Betty Yee. “Our tanks are waiting.”

“Take us to where the Krakens roar.”

§

Their armored tank clanked across a kilometer of wasteland to their next battlefield encounter.

This time Betty had brought along her own Chinese-built knock-off of the Hydra. She was getting maybe a little dubious about the military merits of Frank and Jorge. Her rig was a full two meters long, a stumpy torpedo, with twelve snaky viral-spore-puffing tentacles at one end.

“I like the look of production-level biotech military gear,” said Frank Sharp, studying the Chinese Hydra. “Milspec design—it’s so functional and conservative. And you load it up with—what? Did I hear you talking about glass ampules of powdered computation?”