Complete Stories (95 page)

She switches back to NuJenna mode. “All your microwave telephone transmissions are watermarked by our personalities,” she intones. “Thanks to this proof of concept, we’ll be downloading into multiple exemplars quite soon. We’ll adopt your artificial life protocol wholesale, Wag.”

“It’s an alien invasion!” I exclaim, filling in the blanks so George Bush won’t think I’m an evildoer. “Their personality patterns were in the air. They were watermarked into the those phone conversations that I used to reprogram your daughter’s brain.”

“Clever Wag,” says NuJenna, favoring me with a serene smile. I have a feeling she’s able to read my mind. Is she going to investigate my body functions with a probe? “We come from the core of your Milky Way galaxy,” she continues. “Our world was lost to a spacequake thousands of years ago. Just before the moment of destruction we launched an ark.” She points up into the sky. “A ship carrying our culture’s most sacred artifacts: the encrypted and compressed personality waves of each and every one of our citizens. For millennia, the ship has wandered, seeking a world with a wetware race to host our software.”

And now, yes, an endlessly tumbling polyhedron is descending down upon Dubya’s Crawford Ranch. “Behold,” says NuJenna. Jenna’s voice returns and she excitedly says, “Don’t worry, Daddy, I’ll be back in a month! I have to go to Humboldt County! We’re starting a colony!”

The vehicle’s door opens, laying a great slab of light onto the lawn. There’s nothing to be seen inside but row upon row of crystals, set into the walls. Jenna holds her arms forward like a zombie, then stomps across the grass and into the UFO’s waiting maw. The hyperpolyhedron folds through itself and disappears.

George glares at me. “Get him the hell outta here,” he tells the SS. “He’s screwed Jenna up worse than before. And chop up his goddamn machines with an ax.” And then he gets busy with his cell phone, trying to save the Elephant Party’s big gray ass.

-----

Brad drops me off at the airport and I fly economy to San Francisco. Back in cattle class where I belong. I’m cramped, but I sleep the whole flight.

In the San Francisco terminal, a copper-helmeted Hella greets me with a big kiss and excited eyes. “Jenna visited us in her UFO! She stopped in our neighborhood to pick up the tweakers. Oh, Wag, I love you. The aliens are real happy you hacked together a way for them to download. Jenna promised an interview for your Prexy Twins site! I hope you didn’t try to wire brush her like you and Ben are always saying?”

“Uhhh…I didn’t touch her.” I’m about six steps behind. “Why are you wearing a copper helmet?”

“Rumbo said it was a good idea, in case the Justfolx drug gets into the water or the food. The Clik put Justfolx in the tweakers’ meth, so they’re all hosting alien minds now. I have a helmet for you in the car.”

On the drive home from the airport, sweet Hella fills me in on all that I’ve missed. Thanks to the news that Jenna and NuJenna released, the Elephants are ruined. It’s like the Berlin Wall falling, like the Russians getting rid of the Communists. All at once it’s finally time. On the alien front, Jenna is on TV in her NuJenna mode, recruiting human volunteers to share their brains with aliens. The aliens want clean new helpers, not just the tweakers they already have. “Humans only use ten percent of their brains, share your head with an alien and live like a king in Humboldt County!”

Pulling up to the Dogyears headquarters, Ben greets me and says, “Don’t worry Wag, The Mummy Bum Cult has already pulled your data back out of the web watermarks. Your ISP is up on my boxes and I even patched some old security holes you had. Bye.”

Ben is never one for face-to-face conversation. I’ll get the FoneFoon scoop from him on chat later. Now it’s time to go hang out on the roof with Hella. With our helmets, we’re safe from alien takeover. Maybe Jenna will come give us a tour of the UFO. Maybe I can dose Larva with Justfolx and have a pet alien dog. Maybe I can work on the peer-to-peer telepathy project. Maybe Hella and I can just look at the sky together and talk about aliens.

The Clik lives, Dogyears lives, the aliens live, Hella lives, and Larva needs some kibble. We’re all indestructible.

============

Written in June, 2002.

Infinite Matrix
, February 2003.

My son Rudy Rucker Jr. runs an ISP (Internet Service Provider) called Monkeybrains, at www.monkeybrains.net in San Francisco. For political and artistic reasons that he never fully clarified to me, Rudy created the Web site www.thefirsttwins.com, devoted to the doings of then-President George W. Bush’s twin daughters, Jenna and Barbara. Understand that my son is my no means a Young Republican.

When one of his Web site readers posted a threatening comment about the president’s family, some Secret Service agents actually came to pay Rudy a visit, checking him out. A few months later, some anonymous person begin distributing the so-called BadTrans Internet worm, which infected people’s computers and sent a log of all their keyboard inputs to a free account at Monkeybrains. Rudy received another visit from the authorities; this time it was the FBI, with a warrant to impound the trillion or so snoop-bytes received by the anonymous hacker using Rudy’s server machines.

Perhaps not-so-coincidentally, the BadTrans worm hit the Internet four days after the FBI had announced the development of some spyware called Magic Lantern, a key stroke logging mechanism which, when properly rubbed, will reveal people’s passwords for encrypted data. You can read more about all this at a site Rudy made, https://badtrans.monkeybrains.net.

In any case, with my son being hounded by both the Secret Service and the FBI for a site he’d made about the freakin’ first twins, it seemed like a good idea to help him work through his motivations by writing a transreal story about the whole bizarre scene. It was great fun working together, kind of like the time the two of us built a house for our dog Arf, and for me a nice vacation from writing about professorial types. To cap the pleasure, Rudy and I gave a joint Father’s Day reading of our story at a club in the Mission in San Francisco. A night to remember.

The first Sunday in October, Doug Cardano drove in for an extra day’s work at Giga Games. Crunch time. The nimrods in marketing had committed to shipping a virtual reality golf game in time for the holiday season. NuGolf. It was supposed to have five eighteen-hole courses, all of them new, all of them landscaped by Doug.

He exited Route 101 and crossed the low overpass over the train tracks, heading toward the gleaming Giga Games complex beside the San Francisco Bay. A long freight train was passing. Growing up, Doug had always liked trains, in fact he’d dreamed of being a hobo. Or an artist for a game company. He hadn’t known about crunch time.

Just to postpone the start of his long, beige workday, he pulled over and got out to watch the cars clank past: boxcars, tankers, reefers, flatcars. Many of them bore graffiti. Doug lit a cigarette, his first of the day, always the best one, and spotted a row of twelve spray-painted numbers on a dusty red boxcar, the digits arranged in pairs.

11 35 17 03 21 18

SuperLotto, thought Doug, and wrote them on his cardboard box of cigarettes. Five numbers between 1 and 47, and one number between 1 and 27.

Next stop was the minimarket down the road. Even though Doug knew the odds were bogus, he’d been buying a lot of SuperLotto tickets lately. The grand prize was hella big. If he won, he’d never have to crunch again.

The rest of the team trickled in about the same time as Doug. A new bug had broken one of the overnight builds, and Van the lead coder had to fix that. Meanwhile Doug got down to the trees and bushes for course number four.

Since the player could mouse all around the NuGolf world and even wander into the rough, Doug couldn’t use background bitmaps. He had to create three-dimensional models of the plants. NuGolf was meant to be wacky and fantastic, so he had a lot of leeway: on the first course he’d used cartoony saguaro cactuses, he’d set the second links underwater with sea fans and kelp, the third had been on “Venus” with man-eating plants, and for the fourth, which he was starting today—well, he wasn’t sure what to do.

He had a vague plan of trying to get some inspirations from BlobScape, a three-dimensional cellular automata package he’d found on the web. Cellular automata grew organic-looking objects on the fly. Depending what number you seeded BlobScape with, it could grow almost anything. The guy who’d written BlobScape claimed that theoretically the computation could simulate the whole universe, if only you gave it the right seed.

When he started up BlobScape today, it was in a lava lamp mode, with big wobbly droplets pulsing around. A click of the
Randomize
button turned the blobs into mushroom caps, pulsing through the simulation space like jellyfish. Another click produced interlocking pyramids a bit like trees, but not pretty enough to use.

Doug pressed the
Rule
button so he could enter some code numbers of his own. He’d done this a few times before, every now and then it did something really cool. It reminded him of the Magic Rocks kit he’d had as boy, where the right kind of gray pebble in a glass of liquid could grow green and purple stalagmites. Maybe today was his lucky day. Come to think of it, his SuperLotto ticket happened to be lying on his desk, so, what the hey, he entered 11 35 17 03 21 18.

Bingo. The block of simulated space misted over, churned and congealed into—a primeval jungle inhabited by dinosaurs. And it kept going from there. Apemen moved from the trees into caves. Egyptians built the Sphinx and the pyramids. A mob crucified Christ. Galileo dropped two balls off the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Soldiers massacred the Indians of the Great Plains. Flappers and bootleggers danced the jitterbug. Hippies handed out daisies. Computers multiplied like bacilli.

Doug had keyed in the Holy Grail, the one true rule, the code number for the universe. Sitting there grinning, it occurred to him that if you wrote those twelve lucky digits in reverse order they’d work as a phone number plus extension. (811) 230-7153 x11. The number seemed exceedingly familiar, but without stopping to think he went ahead and dialed it.

His own voice answered.

“Game over.”

The phone in Doug’s hand turned into pixels. He and the phone and the universe dissolved.

Teaching her third yoga class of the day, Amy Hendrix felt light-headed and rubbery. She walked around, correcting people’s poses, encouraging them to hold their positions longer than they usually did. Her mind kept wandering to the room she was hoping to rent. New to San Francisco, she’d been sleeping on couches for six weeks. But she still dreamed of becoming a force to be reckoned with in the city scene.

It was time for Savasana, the Corpse Pose, with everyone lying on their backs. Amy turned off her Tabla Beat CD and guided the closing meditation.

“Feel a slow wave of softness moving up your legs,” she began. “Feet, calves, knees, thighs.” Long pause. “Now focus on your perineum. Chakra one. Release any tension hiding there. Melt with the in-breath, bloom with the out. Almost like you’re going to wet your pants.” Amy occasionally added an earthy touch—which her mostly white clients readily accepted from their coffee-colored teacher.

“Gather the energy into a ball of light between your legs,” continued Amy, pausing between each sentence, trying not to talk too much. “Slowly, slowly it passes upward, tracking your spine like a trolley. Now the light is in your sex chakra. Let it tingle, savor it, let it move on. The warmth flows though your belly and into your solar plexus. Your breath is waves on a beach.”

She was sitting cross-legged at one end of the darkly lit room. The meditation was getting good to her. “Energy in, darkness out. The light comes into your chest. You’re in the grass, looking at the leaves in a high summer tree. The sun shines through. Your heart is basking. You love the world. You love the practice. You love yourself. The light moves through your neck like toothpaste out a tube. Chakra five. The light is balancing your hormones, it’s washing away your angry unsaid words.” Pause. “And now your tape loops are gone.”

She gave a tiny tap to her Tibetan cymbal.
Bonnng
. “Your head is an empty dome of light. Feel the space. You’re here. No plans. You’re now.” She got to her feet. “Light seeps through your scalp and trickles down your face. Your cheeks are soft. Your mouth. Your shoulders melt. Your arms. I’ll call you back.”

She moved around the room pressing down on people’s shoulders. She had a brief, odd feeling of leaning over each separate customer at once. And then her wristwatch drew her back. She had twenty minutes to get from here to Telegraph Hill to try and rent that perfect room.

She rang the gong and saw the customers out. The last one was Sueli, a lonely wrinkled lady who liked to talk. Sueli was only one in the class as dark-skinned as Amy. Amy enjoyed her, she seemed like a fairy godmother.

“How many chakras do you say there are?” asked Sueli. Clearly she had some theory of her own in mind. She was very well spoken.

“Seven,” said Amy, putting on her sweats. “Why not?” She imagined she might look like Sueli when she was old.

“The Hindus say seven, and the Buddhists say nine,” said Sueli, leaning close. “But I know the real answer. I learned it years ago in Sri Lanka. This is the last of your classes I’ll be able to come to, so I’m going to share the secret with you.”

“Yes?” This sounded interesting. Amy turned out the lights, locked the door, and stepped outside with Sueli. The autumn sky was a luminous California blue. The bay breeze vibrated the sun-bleached cardboard election signs on the lampposts—San Francisco was in the throes of a wide-open mayoral election.

“Some of us have millions of chakras,” continued Sueli in her quiet tone. “One for each branch of time. Opening the chakras opens the doors to your other selves.”

“You can do that?” asked Amy.