Transreal Cyberpunk (23 page)

Some days the physics work got Stefan so excited that he could think of nothing else. Just yesterday, when he’d had been feeling especially manic about his code, doll-faced Emily Yu had phoned him with a shy offer to come along on her South Seas adventure. Idiotically, Stefan had blown her off. He’d overlooked a golden chance at romance. Instead of hooking up, he’d geeked out.

Today he was nagged by the sense that he should call Emily back. Emily was smart and decent, just his type. But—the thing was—he couldn’t possibly think about Emily without also thinking about work. Those years of servitude were something he wanted to forget. In any case, right this minute he was for sure too busy to call Emily, what with all these friggin’ ants.

Stefan glared at his unshaven clown-haired visage in the mirror. He knew in his heart that he was being stupid. How many more women were likely to ask for face-time with him? He’d never get another such offer from kind-hearted Emily Yu. There were a million pretty women in LA, but never a lot of Emilys. Call her now, Stefan, call her. Do it. You have ten thousand phones in here. Call.

Alright, in a minute, but first he’d call his landlord about the ants.

Back in his living room, long tendrils of ants were spreading out from the TV. Amazingly tiny ants: they looked no bigger than pixels, and their jagged ant-trails were as thin as hairline cracks. They were heading for the laundry baskets.

“Not my cell phones, you little bastards,” cried Stefan, hauling his baskets outside to the dilapidated porch.

He found a phone that seemed to hold a charge.

“Call Mr. Noor,” Stefan instructed. He’d cloned a single phone account across all ten thousand of his phones.

He heard ringing, and then his landlord’s, dry, emotionless voice.

“This is Stefan Oertel, Mr. Noor. From the cottage in the back of your estate? I’m being invaded by ants. I need an exterminator right now.”

“Hyperio,” said Mr. Noor. “You tell Hyperio, he fixes that.” This was Mr. Noor’s usual response. Unfortunately Mr. Noor’s handyman Hyperio was some kind of illegal, who appeared maybe once a month. Stefan had seen Hyperio just the other day, trimming the bushes and hand-rolling cigarettes. This meant that the ants would rampage unchallenged for weeks.

“Does Hyperio have a telephone?” asked Stefan. “Does he even have a last name?”

“Use poison spray,” said Mr. Noor shortly. “I’m very busy now.” Mr. Noor was always on the phone to rich friends in the distant Middle East. End of call.

Stefan snorted and squared his shoulders. The ant-war was up to him.

He found his cyber-tool kit and extracted the coil of a flexible flashlight. He poked his instrument through the slots in the back of his TV. The ants had settled right in there, ambitious and adaptable, like childless lawyers lofting-out a downtown high-rise. In the sharp-edged shadows lurked a sugar ant as big a cockroach. The huge ant was tugging at something. A curly bit of wire, maybe. For a crazy, impossible instant the ant looked as big as a hamster.

Stefan rocked back on his heels. These ants were blowing his mind; they were dancing on the surface of his brain. He was losing it. It was very bad for him to be deprived of a computer. He needed some help right away.

“Call Jayson,” he told his phone.

Although Jayson Rubio sometimes worked Stefan’s nerves, the two of them had a true and lasting bond. During each year they’d spent at Square Root of Not, they’d ventured to Burning Man together, displaying their special-FX wizardry to the festival crowds in the desert.

Both of them had all-devouring hobbies: Stefan’s was string theory; Jayson’s was memorabilia. Since leaving the FX company, Jayson had started his own little online business, marketing Renaissance-Faire-type costume gear that he made. Stefan maintained Jayson’s website.

Jayson was old-school, very analog. At Square Root Of Not, he’d been the go-to guy for everything physical: stringing power cables, putting up drywall, sanding the floors, fixing the plumbing. As a fix-it wizard, Jayson was a human tornado. He always carried a sheathed multitool on his belt: knives, pliers, wrench, saw, scissors, cutters, strippers, punchers, pokers, rippers, pounders, and more. Jayson never lacked for options.

The phone was successfully ringing. Now that Stefan was in a jam, a jam full of sugar-ants, good old Jayson would pitch in.

“Stefan!” shouted Jayson, answering. “Call me back later.”

“No no no, listen to me,” Stefan babbled. “Ants are eating my hardware!”

Someone else was angrily yelling at Jayson in the background. Jayson had a fetish about holding his cellphone at arm’s length, so that the powerful microwave phone-rays wouldn’t foment a brain tumor. Whenever you called Jayson Rubio, you weren’t calling an individual, you were calling an environment.

Jayson’s current environment featured an echoing garage roar of biker engines and snarling heavy-metal music. “What? Not one more dime!” Jayson was barking. “Your ad said ‘runs great,’ it didn’t say ‘skips gears!’ Are you waving that tire-iron at me, you friggin’ grease monkey? What? Sure, go ahead, call the cops, Lester! I love the LA cops!”

Stefan heard more angry demands, and finally the roaring of a motorcycle. The engine noise rose to a crescendo, then it smoothed down. “Stefan, dog,” said Jayson at last, wind whipping past his phone. “You still there?”

Stefan explained about the ants.

“Ant-man on the way!” Jayson soothed over the ragged pounding of his motorbike. “Don’t even think about poison bug bombs! Bad chemical karma is never the path.”

Stefan hung up. His mood had brightened. What the hell, he would fix his system somehow. He’d buy a new TV. The basic program was still in the cell-phone memory chips, also his very last tweak: twine dimension seven, loop dimension eight. For sure that had been the key to the One True String Theory. The One True String Theory was worth every sacrifice he had ever made. Cosmic strings were the key to an endless free source of non-polluting energy. His noble work would be a boon to all mankind.

Stefan wandered outside. It was another ruthlessly sunny June day, the sky blank and blue. The dry hills around Mr. Noor’s estate were yellow, with scrubby olive-green oak and laurel trees. Stefan felt glad to be out of the house and away from his crippled hardware. Why did he labor indoors when he lived in California? That was crazy. Comprehending nature was, after all, the end goal of physics. Why not skip the middle-man? Why not go out in nature and comprehend it in the raw?

Maybe the ants were grateful to him for discovering the One True String Theory. In return, the ants had come to teach him a finer way of life. The ants were prodding him to recast his research goals. Maybe, in particular, he could search for a woman to live with? That search was well-known to be solvable in linear time.

He would phone Emily Yu before tonight. Of course he would. How hard could that be? His friend Jayson always seemed to have a partner on his arm, often boozy and tattooed, but undeniably female. All Stefan needed to do was to reach out at a human level. Here he was, unemployed yet still feverishly programming, like the cartoon coyote who skids off a cliff, spinning his legs in mid-air, until finally realizing that, sigh, it’s time for that long tumble into the canyon.

Overhead the leaves on a eucalyptus tree shimmered in the hot breeze. Universal computation was everywhere. Behind the facades of everyday life were deep, knotted tangles of meaning. Yes, yes....

Jayson’s sturdy red Indian motorcycle putted up the hill and into view, all 1950s curves and streamlining, with a low-skirted rear fender. A beautiful old machine, with Jayson happy on it.

Jayson shed his dusty carapace of helmet and jacket. He wore ragged denim cargo shorts, black engineer’s boots, and a black T-shirt bearing a garish cartoon image of a carnivorous Mayan god. Jayson’s brawny arms had sleeve-like tribal tattoos under intricate chain mail wristbands. Jayson wove the chain-mail in his idle moments, frenetically knitting away with pliers. Jayson’s freaky metal wristbands were the best-selling items on his website. They were beloved by fantasy gamers and Society for Creative Anachronism types.

Stefan offered a cheery wave and hello, but Jayson raised a hand and hauled his phone from his shorts pocket. He listened at arm’s length to the tinny bleating of the speaker, lost his temper and began to rage. “Huh? You reported it stolen? So try and find me, Lester! I got no fixed address! You’ve got a what? Back off, man, or you’re never gonna get your money!” Angrily Jayson snapped shut his phone.

“A little trouble with your hog?” said Stefan delicately.

“Aw, that Lester,” said Jayson, staring uneasily at his precious red bike. “Nasty old biker, long gray ponytail down his back.... Lester’s a crook! He sold me a sick Indian, what it is. A beauty, a rare antique, a New York cop bike with all the original paint... but it shifts rough. On paper I still owe him… but if he won’t fix my bike our contract is void. No way he’s calling the cops.”

Reassured by his own bravado, Jayson grinned and drew a crumpled paper sack from his pants pocket. “Next topic. Your ants are history. I brought ant aromatherapy.”

“Didn’t you used to have a big tow-trailer for your bike?” said Stefan, studying his friend. “That had all your stuff in it, didn’t it?”

A pained scowl furrowed Jayson’s bearded face. “Lupe says she’s throwing me out. My trailer’s locked in her garage in Pasadena until I pay back rent. It’s always money, money, money with her. Man, I hate gated communities. Like, why put yourself into a jail?”

“You were pretty serious about Lupe. You told me she was the best woman you ever dated. You said you loved her.”

Jayson winced. “Forget Lupe. Forget my stuff. The world’s full of stuff. What’s the difference who has what?”

“I like where your head’s at,” said Stefan, feeling empathy for his companion. “Material possessions are mere illusions. Everything we see here, everything we think we own, it all emerges from the knotting and unknotting of a hexadecillion loops of cosmic string.”

It was Jayson’s turn to offer a pitying look. “Still at that, huh?”

“Jayse, I’m just a few ticks of the clock away from the One True String Theory. In fact I think maybe... I think maybe I already found it. I found the truth exactly when those ants showed up to eat my system. So if I can just publish my science findings in a reputable journal—who knows! It could lead to golf-ball-sized personal suns!”

“Yeah, bro, it’s all about the universal Celtic weave,” said Jayson. He brandished the chain-mail of his hand-made wristlets, beautifully patterned, with loops in four or five different sizes. Then his indulgent smile faded; he twisted his head uneasily. “Do you, um, hear a helicopter over the valley? Let’s hide my bike in your garage. Just in case Lester really did file a report. Those ghetto-birds are hell on stolen vehicles.”

“Why don’t you just pay the man?” asked Stefan as they wheeled the fine old machine into his tiny, cluttered garage. “This is a beautiful bike. Heavily macho.”

Jayson grunted. “Thing is, I spent my Square Root of Not money on primo collectibles. Sci-fi costumes that I picked right off the studio set. They’re in my trailer, locked up in Lupe’s damn garage. But really, that’s okay, because all I need to do is flip those costumes for a profit on my website. Then I can make good on Lupe’s rent, and get at the costumes, and also pay off the motorcycle. See, it goes round and round. Loop-like.” Another cloud crossed Jayson’s face. “My website’s still okay, right? Inside your parallel computer?”

“Your site is down. Like I’ve been telling you—the ants ate a crucial part of my system. Your website still exists.” Stefan waved his hands. “It’s distributed across the memory chips of ten thousand cell phones. In terms of customer service, though, your website’s a lost world.”

“I hate computers.”

“They love you.”

“I hate ants.”

“That’s what I want to hear,” said Stefan. “Let’s go get ‘em, big guy.” He led his friend inside.

They knelt and peered inside the TV, using the flexible light-wand.

“Hey, I’ve seen lots worse,” grunted Jayson in typical LA style. “Your ants are practically too small to see!”

“They come in all sizes, man. I saw one as big as, I dunno, as big a miniature dachshund.”

“Get a grip,” advised Jayson, and the irony of this insult, coming from him, cheered Stefan no end. Yes, he was having a bad ants-in-your-hair day, but compared to Jayson, he was the picture of bourgeois respectability. He had money in the bank, a roof and a bed. For all his swagger, Jayson was practically living in a dumpster. But—Jayson didn’t even care. Jayson wasn’t daunted, not a bit. Stefan could learn from him.

Jayson was staring at Stefan’s cracked leather armchair. “You gonna finish that sandwich? Is that baloney organic?”

“It’s salami,” said Stefan. “I’ll get you a bottle of beer.”

Jayson wolfed down the ant-teeming sandwich in three bites. “Tastes like dill pickles.”

“That would be the formic acid.”

Jayson chugged the whole bottle of Mexican beer and fetched himself another. He then focused his professional attention on the four little glass phials he’d brought, deftly unlimbering his multitool and twisting off the screw-tops. Jayson loved using his pliers.

“Eucalyptus, peppermint, cinnamon, and verbena,” intoned Jayson. He dribbled reeking herbal essences on the floor by the television. “Organic, non-toxic, all-natural, ants hate it. This potion never fails.”