Transreal Cyberpunk (42 page)

“I have ammunition on hand, yes,” said Betty Yee, opening a small wooden case. “My lab synthesized a batch of the viruses that Professor Jones used in the battlefield before our break. One single ampule of them is enough. The Hydra will remember. I’ll activate it now.” She tossed the little glass tube into the Hydra’s mouth. It chomped up the glass round as if it were a peanut.

“But we, hey, we need to stay loose,” said Jorge. “Change tactics on the fly, with our boots on the ground. This Hydra of yours, you can program it?”

“Certainly,” said Betty Yee. “Its interface is voice-activated. However, since this is classified military hardware, it only speaks Chinese.”

Frank Sharp looked smug. “Hell, I know enough Mandarin to order up a two-day party with sword-swallowers and dancing girls.”

Frank, and Jorge found their places inside the squat Chinese tank, with an anxious Betty offering final advice on its interfaces and affordances. Just then another slimy giant Kraken lurched up from the muddy soil, implacable as a Frankenstein monster assembling itself in a grave. It rose a hundred meters high, roughly humanoid, and flaking off fractal chunks as before. The newly spawned stromatolites were continually and obsessively recruiting fresh germs from the dirt. Slurping shit up, knocking shit down.

Frank barked broken Mandarin at the tank’s complex dashboard, and the tank roared forward. Their heavyweight Chinese Hydra puffed out a vast cloud of viral stink-gas. The collapse of the shambling hundred-meter-high Kraken was total and abrupt. From the bottom up, its flesh deliquesced into diarrhea. A sudden, awful, computational crash into a vast sewer-puddle of shit-germs.

“Next?” crowed Frank Sharp.

A passing military helicopter framed another Kraken in a target beam. This monster resembled a giant starfish humping across the tormented soil. Jorge lowered the tank’s muzzle and picked it off, letting the over-engineered military-grade Hydra puff its cloud of viruses out through tank’s barrel. On they rolled, crunching a swath through a killing-zone of bursting stromatolites.

“Let me kill that giant scorpion on my own!” said Frank Sharp, hankering for a big-game-hunter-type personal kill.

Exhausted by the horrific stench of the infected mire, Jorge let Frank tend to the massive Hydra. Frenzied with battle lust, Frank somehow felt it necessary to give the weapon a rousing pep talk in his pidgin Chinese.

The Hydra misinterpreted Frank’s jabber as a series of commands regarding its program codes. It reformulated the virus that it was squirting. The result? Far from being destroyed by the randomly tweaked Hydra spores, the scorpion golem was galvanically energized. Moving with unholy, frenetic speed, it dug into the topsoil, scratching out a massive hole—shooting up clouds of dust and then fractured rock.

Deep its newly dug stone den, the scorpion proceeded to infect the landscape. The dirt and stone underfoot were morphing into a supernal Kraken, a litho-being that heaved the ground like an earthquake. The tremors tossed the mighty tank around like a Hong Kong plastic toy. Frank and Jorge were battered against its harsh interior like two wasps trapped in a bottle. Clawing their way through the hatch, they abandoned the Hydra and sprinted for higher ground.

§

“Nice work,” Jorge jibed at Frank Sharp. “Very professionally done.”

Panting and rubbing their bruises, they were wobbling weak-kneed on a hilly parking lot, surveying the growing havoc. The ground was erupting with long, stony arms of bursting rubble. These violent tendrils of fracked rock could easily swat down a helicopter.

“It wasn’t acting like that before,” said Frank uneasily. “What’d I do?”

“Those are Frank-Sharp-modified scorpion cells.”

Silently, Frank unwrapped a pack of Panda brand Chinese cigarettes, lit one, and offered it to Jorge, who was still talking.

“The Kraken cells wriggled down between the grains of sand and soil, down through the cracks in the rocks, all the way down to the water table. A natural paradise for the right kind of microbe. Your new cells multiplied in darkness. Hyperexponentially. And they roared back. Nice fast turnaround on that cycle, Frank. Hats off.”

“I’m sure this is all for the good,” said Frank, coughing on rock dust as he struggled to light his own cig. “Take a big-picture perspective, man. What we formerly thought of as organic life on Earth arose as a local glitch. The Cambrian explosion was a matter of moving a stalled system to a higher level of efficiency. Initially, our kinds of multi-cellular bodies were monsters. Our ancestors were glitches in the cell-colony status quo. And then the system rolled down a hill, through a valley of chaos, and up to the top of a higher peak. Producing us.”

“
Sure
we say we’re higher forms of life,” said Jorge. “Both sides of a morphogenetic bifurcation always say that.”

“You can’t compare human beings to primeval mud monsters.”

“Yes I can. Because I just now did the math.”

“Did the math? That’s—”

“I did the math with my ass muscles while we’re standing here smoking bad Chinese cigarettes.”

Unsteadily Frank Sharp lit a new cigarette from the stained butt of the last. “I guess you’re saying—that we’re different, but not any better. We’re all creatures of Earth. Figures in the dance.”

“Exactly. And now that your tweaked scorpion has fracked itself into the water table, we’ll never kill the Kraken. We need to cut a deal here.”

“Okay. How?”

“Surely we humans have something that immortal Kraken mud monsters would want.”

“But how would we even talk with them?” asked Frank. “They’re made of germs and dirt. They don’t have eyes and ears.”

“I’m thinking they hear us anyhow,” said Jorge. “We could talk about prime numbers and the Riemann Hypothesis,” he added, blowing smoke. “Or maybe the poetry of Tennyson. Because Tennyson is fucking buried. Like them.”

Frank tried to take offense, then laughed sourly.

“We could tell the stromatolites about quantum-entanglement-based networks,” continued Jorge. “Being virus-based, they must be closer to that issue than us.”

“Maybe we could interest this intelligent mud in establishing a broader global presence,” said Frank. “More followers. A ubiquitous brand. The mud could come out of the underground and go mainstream.”

“Yeah!” said Jorge, livening up. “You’re on it, Frank! Promo. Buzz. Offer them a deal. You yourself would have to turn Kraken for the big meeting, you understand.”

“I’m game,” said Frank. With insouciant bravado, he dabbed his finger against one of the fallen mud monsters—and took a taste.

§

Frank’s voice grew louder and more insistent as the cellular computation invaded his body tissues. Riddled with viral activism, he was lecturing on and on. About media and sociology in the modern Chinese novel. About the long-dead expat Japan-based author, Lafcadio Hearn. About viral push-pull cool-hunting web-bots. About the archetypal nature of industrial design, even for cellular entities.

The palpitating mound that had once been Frank Sharp grew upwards at supersonic speed, drawing dirt into itself. As a comradely gesture, the Frank Sharp mountain had a sharp valley set into one side—and this left a field where Jorge Jones could survive the tectonic devastation.

Tiny Chinese fighter jets buzzed around Frank like biplanes swarming King Kong. No no, much smaller than that. Like butterflies above the slopes of Mount Fujiyama.

And then—the eruption. A deep, subsonic rumble, and a sharp, explosive crack. Starting from the top, the Frank Sharp mountain dissolved into the sky. The peak was shattering into dust. The eruption continued for half an hour, volcanic, unstoppable, spawning a vast plume that mingled with the jet streams, sowing the Kraken substance across every square centimeter of the old planet Earth. The Chinese urban landscape on the far side of the mountain was as lava-engulfed as ancient Pompeii or Herculaneum. And Jorge Jones still stood in the valley along the near edge.

“A very tasty world,” rumbled Frank, slowly subsiding back to his old self. “I’m the One. I’ve got the answers.”

§

The shock and awe subsides. Everyone is a Kraken, all the time, everywhere. Sermons in the stones, and good in everything.

Jorge, Frank, and Betty spend some quality time discussing matters in the hot springs near Jorge’s sequoia. Playing with the freaky minnows. Looking at rocks and fossils. Revisiting that idea that the sedimentary stones are archives. Jorge and Betty getting closer than before.

Turns out there’s an entire Golden Age literary and cultural archive down there in the geological strata. It’s like cave paintings or cuneiform or hieroglyphs—or even like the cool old paper SF magazines, the ones that primeval sci-fi fans used to root through in the 1950s, before computers were invented. The protocols of the Old Ones.

Betty finds she can use the profound Confucian-style New Age teachings of the prehistoric worm-tracks to educate the global biotech Kraken. And thereby to rectify all names and to set forces in harmony. And even to live with Jorge, in his tree, for awhile. But then she goes home to rebuild her city.

Frank throws in his lot with the trilobites. He retrofits his mitochondria, and becomes a half-billion-year old cultural relic. Occasionally he appears in a five-gallon goldfish tank at an ultra-elite gathering of the planet’s new trillionaires, emitting long speeches via a piezoplastic hookup on his primitive, chitinous shell. Mostly, though, Frank dwells at the bottom of the hot springs by Jorge’s sequoia, where the heavy action is chemosynthetic and the cultural movers and shakers are so far underground that they don’t even need eyes.

Jorge gets Frank registered as an endangered species, to assure his friend of long-term peace. Then Jorge takes to painting Taoist ink-wash scrolls. The great misty Kraken mountains, and the little old man in the robe. The mountains are vast and eldritch and timeless, and the sage is just a passing figure, crabbed and energetic in his wise little niche.

Now and then Frank surfaces in the springs and jets out some sepia for Jorge’s inkhorn.

The Kraken and Sage, they don’t compete, or quarrel, or annul one another’s being. They just make the scene: they’re just plain there.

Notes on “Kraken and Sage”

Original for
Transreal Cyberpunk
.

Written March - August, 2015.

Rudy on “Kraken and Sage”

I wanted to publish our joint stories in an anthology,
Transreal Cyberpunk
. But Bruce didn’t feel like “Totem Poles” was a worthy story to end with. We wanted to go bigger. So once again we started corresponding about possible ideas. Bruce was interested in something relating to the so-called Cambrian explosion of new species in the fossil record. And I had an image of an old scientist living in a sequoia tree. Bruce and I had an illusion that this time we’d finally write a really tight plot outline before starting our tale.

It’s always best if I can see Bruce in person when we write a story together, and we were in fact slated to be on a panel about the legacy of cyberpunk, held at UCLA in March, 2015. So I wrote up the first page of a story and did a painting of an old man encountering a floating jellyfish in a tree. And then Bruce and I talked some more about our story while in LA.

In the end, of course, we didn’t hew very closely to any of our plans. But we did use the plans in a different kind of way. Around the fourth revision, when things were bogging down, I went ahead and did a Burroughs-inspired cut-up. I combined in a single document two successive drafts of our story plus a lot of passages taken from our email threads about possible scenes. And then I removed randomly selected blocks of text from the document and shuffled the remaining blocks around. And sent that to Bruce.

Nothing daunted, Bruce removed even more material, arranged the remaining chunks in something like a chronological order, and numbered the chunks. It looked a little like his wonderful Ballardian 1984 story, ““Life in the Shaper/Mechanist Era: Twenty Evocations.”

For our joint story, the numbering scheme didn’t really seem to work. We did however keep the hip-hop / jump-cut style of a narrative broken into chunks. This framework lightened the load, and made us more nimble. We worked through four more revisions—improving the voices, the eyeball kicks, the flow—and then we were done.

One funny thing. Just before we started our work in late March, 2015, Bruce sent me an email with this line: “I’m wondering if maybe we could write just one story that doesn’t involve huge kraken-style catastrophes or both the authors transreally dropping dead.” I started laughing to myself about the word
kraken
, and I decided that not only should our story include a kraken, but our “Bruce” character should
become
a kraken.

Along the way, Bruce unearthed Alfred Tennyson’s amazing poem, “The Kraken,” and we collaged that into our text for texture. A Victorian hip-hop sample. Battening upon huge sea worms in our sleep.

The ending is drawn from another of Bruce’s’ emails—it was a dreamy, early idea for a scene, and a nice place to wind up. It’s like we’re walking offstage hand in hand after our fierce Punch & Judy show. A sweet, mellow, real-time moment; a break from the punk guitar sludge and the insane screaming.