by Rudy Rucker
“Perfect,” said Frank. “Sit down here and watch this with me.” He offered me a wooden folding chair, then sat down on a decrepit wheeled chair behind his desk and used a remote controller to turn up the TV’s volume. A crackling hiss filled the air: steady, insistent, monotonous, sounding a bit like a waterfall and a bit like frying bacon. The dots continued to dance. The white dots were bigger than the black ones.
“Frank, this is nothing,” I said after a minute. “This is video static. When we were little, my brother and I called this flea circus. You could get flea circus on almost every channel back then. Louisville in the 1950s.”
“‘Flea circus’ isn’t the right name,” said Frank primly. “It’s called snow. Did you know that most TV snow is signals that come in from outer space? Just keep looking, and pretty soon there’ll be a big wash of extra snow. And I happen to know that it comes from the Crab Nebula.”
I was both relieved and disappointed at the method behind Frank’s seeming madness. I humored him by continuing to stare at the screen. Every now and then I’d see something like a line which would bend up and form itself into a loop. I made a half-hearted effort to imagine that the lines were forming into outlines of the canonical Gray alien face.
“Let me read something to you while you watch,” continued Frank and picked up a book from his desk. “Actual fucking library research. Is Anyone Out There? by Frank Drake, he’s an astronomer over to U. C. Santa Cruz.” And he proceeded to read me the following passage, his voice clear and resonant over the hissing of the TV:
“The Crab Nebula Pulsar remains to this day the only one that alternates its ordinary pulses with giant pulses that are about one thousand times more powerful. In fact, those giant pulses are among the brightest radio signals we have found in the universe. They are so strong you can see them on your television set with an ordinary household antenna. Just turn to a channel that has no program and stare at the screen. Every five minutes you’ll get a lot of snow that covers about one third of the screen. That’s coming from the pulsar in the Crab Nebula, about six thousand light-years away.”(5)
(5) Frank Drake and Dava Sobel, Is Anyone Out There? The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Delacorte Press 1992.
And just about then, as if on schedule, the TV screen did indeed fill with extra snow. “You see?” crowed Frank. “It’s true! Not that tuning it in is so easy. Drake doesn’t mention that the Crab Nebula signal is at a frequency of around a hundred megahertz. Channel six is eighty-eight megahertz, and channel seven is one-seventy-four. It doesn’t have to be that precise, though, so channel six picks up the Crab just fine. You have to choose a time of day when the Crab is high in the sky, and it helps to use an outside antenna.”
I looked around the room uncertainly. Overhead were bare rafters and the underside of the low, peaked roof. An antenna cable ran up over the rafters and through a small hole where the wall met the slanted ceiling. I was out in the middle of nowhere and this man was showing me video snow on a television. My confidence was fading again.
“You don’t get it yet, do you?” said Frank Shook, catching my expression.
“You’re not giving me a lot to go on.”
“Well get ready, Rudy, because now I’m going to tell you. The aliens are radio waves!”
“The aliens are the flea circus we’re watching on your TV?”
“Yes!” He stared at me provokingly, then threw back his head and chortled. “Professor Rucker is not amused. But wait! I’m not done yet! The aliens are in the signals, yes, but they’re all encrypted and compressed. My secret is that I know how to get them to unzip!”
He picked up the video camera on his desk and turned it on. The camera had, I noticed, a cable that led to the center TV. Frank jabbed the remote control and now the TV was showing the output of the video camera. He aimed at me, at himself, all around the room. The color was dark and murky.
“You know about chaotic feedback, right?” said Frank. He pointed the camera at the TV, and the feedback generated an endlessly regressing image of a TV screen inside a TV screen inside a TV screen…
“I’ve done that with my own camera,” I said.(6)
(6) Here’s a quote about video feedback experiments from Heinz-Otto Peitgen, Hartmut Jurgens and Dietmar Saupe, Chaos and Fractals: New Frontiers of Science, (Springer-Verlag 1992). I’ve interpolated some additional comments of my own in brackets.
“The experiment should be set up in an almost dark room. The distance between camera and monitor [and/or the zoom control factor] should be such that that the mapping ratio is approximately 1:1. [That is, the image of the TV screen should be just about the same as its actual size. Making the image either slightly smaller or slightly larger than the screen can also produce interesting effects.] Turn up the contrast dial on the monitor all the way and turn down the [monitor] brightness dial considerably. The experiment works better if the monitor or the camera is put upside down. Moreover, the tripod should be equipped with a head that allows the camera to be turned about its long axis, while it faces the monitor. [Even if you don’t have a tripod like this, decent results can be gotten using a hand-held camera which you hold nearly upside down.] Rotate the camera some 45° out of its vertical position. Connect the camera with the monitor. Now the basic setup is arranged. [If the camera has a manual shutter-speed control, set the shutter speed to a slow value like 1/100 or 1/250.] The camera should have a manual iris [sometimes called the brightness setting] which [you should turn down to a low value to keep the screen from being all white, and which] is now gradually opened while the lens is focused on the monitor screen. Depending on the contrast and brightness setting you may want to light a match [or flick a flashlight] in front of the monitor screen in order to ignite the process. [Alternately you can turn the brightness value quickly up and down to get something into the system. Or you can briefly aim the camera away from the TV and at a bright object such as lit doorway on the other side of the room. Or you can use a “picture-in-picture” image from a broadcast channel as a seed.]”
“Yeah,” said Frank. “Everybody has. And you probably know what happens when you turn the camera over.” As he rotated the camera about its long axis, the screens within screens twisted into a spider-web pattern with a symmetry that shuddered between three-fold and five-fold. “I call this a god’s-eye,” said Frank. “But it’s not enough. The next thing is that we need to bring the aliens’ signals into the mix. For that I use PIP.”
“Pip?”
“Picture in picture.” He fiddled with the remote and now a small preview picture of the staticky channel six appeared in a rectangle in a corner of the TV’s screen. Receding small images of the rectangle wound in towards the screen’s center. As Frank moved his hand-held camera about, the spirals pulsed and warped.
“Now even this is something that I’m sure other people have tried,” said Frank. “God’s-eye plus snow-PIP. Thing is, it’s still not enough to get the attention of the aliens. The image is just too simple; it’s slightly gnarly, sure, but it’s only one level of feedback. To get the aliens’ attention, you need to add more into the mix. You need to turn on the other TVs and video cameras and hook everything up into a loop. Turns out three’s enough.”
“Barnsley fractals,” I said suddenly. “You’re going to make real-time analog Barnsley fractals. You’ve seen Barnsley’s ‘fern’ haven’t you?”
“No,” said Frank shortly. “But if you want to call my patterns fractals, don’t let me stop you. All I know is that the aliens like them. Look, as long as you’re all set to analyze this in terms of mathematical logic or something, let me draw a picture of my set-up. ‘Cause once I get it tuned in, things tend to happen kind of fast—and then I might not feel like talking anymore. Can I have your pen and paper again?”
I handed Frank my pen and the pad of paper. He set down his camera, and started a new drawing. “It’s like a daisy-ch
ain,” he said. “Right now this camera here on my desk is feeding its image into the center TV, but in a minute I’ll change the connector so that feeds into the TV on the right. The connector wire from the camera in front of the right TV runs to the TV on the left. And the camera on the left sends its image to the center TV. So there’s a loop.” Frank tilted the paper so I could see it clearly. “And PIP feeds the outer-space signal into the loop,” concluded Frank.
Figure 6: Three cameras and three TVs.
“Yes, according to how the cameras are positioned you can get all kinds of fractal patterns this way,” I said.
“Fractals, huh?” said Frank, still doodling. “They’re very organic, very lively. The details look like the whole thing. Have you ever seen a Navajo dream-catcher? Rawhide mesh things. Supposed to screen out the bad dreams and preserve the good dreams. This set-up of mine is an alien-catcher.” He tore off his new drawing and added it to the other torn-off sheet; I put them into my briefcase with the others. I wasn’t sure any more what to expect next.
“What would you like me to ask them?” Frank said, fixing me with a level gaze.
“You mean ask the aliens? Assuming you talk to them now, that is? Well, if they can show you the future, I’d like—oh, I’d like to know what’s going to happen to computers. Are we going to succeed in the Great Work? That’s a phrase I like to use about what we’re doing here in Silicon Valley. The Great Work. Like building a cathedral or a rocket-ship. Only it’s not obvious to everyone what the goal really is. I think of there as being two main goals: the first goal is for everyone to have full, rich, nearly telepathic communication with everyone else, and the second is the creation of really intelligent machines. Maybe you could ask the aliens to take you into the future to see if the Great Work is going to succeed? Maybe just checking out the first thing would be enough. The future of communication.” I trailed off, suddenly feeling my request to be absurd. But Frank seemed to take it perfectly seriously.
“All right,” said Frank, standing up. “Fine.” He put my fountain pen in his pocket and tucked my pad of paper into his waistband behind his back. “I’ll ask them and I’ll take notes.”
The Saucer Demo
He walked around his desk and turned on the other two televisions and all three video cameras. He moved the connector from his hand-held camera to the right-hand TV and plugged the wire from the left-hand camera into the middle TV.
He fiddled with the two tripod-mounted cameras for a minute, then sat down behind his desk and began wielding his hand-held camera. The PIP of outer space static was still in a corner of the central TV, but the rest of the screen—and of the other two screens—was occupied by incredibly strange life-like fractal forms. They looked like plants and insects, like spores, like mushrooms, like creepy little frogs.
“I’m gettin’ it, Mary!” he hollered. “It’s gonna happen really soon!”
Although Mary didn’t answer, I could hear her rattling around in the kitchen. It sounded like she was cooking something.
Frank got more and more excited and then in the space of an instant, with an almost inconceivable abruptness, his expression changed and he collapsed back into his chair, letting the camera fall to the desk-top. I would later seem to recall that there was a flickering effect in that instant of change. As if for just the tiniest fraction of a second Frank had momentarily disappeared.
He looked over at me without any immediate recognition.
“Frank?” I said. “Are you okay?”
“Oh, wow, Rudy Rucker, you’re still here. Perfect. I’ve been…so far! It feels like it’s been days or even weeks. I was all over the future. Finding out about the Great Work.”
Footsteps came down the hall, it was Mary carrying a glass of orange soda and a plate of scrambled eggs on a tray. “Here Frank. Was it a good trip?” She went around to the other side of Frank and leaned over him, taking the items off the tray to set a little place for him at his desk.
“One of the best, Mary.”
“Can you tell me about it?” I asked.
“I’m pretty tired,” said Frank. “But—I can give you the notes I took. You look at those for a few days and then we’ll get back in touch.” Moving slowly and wearily he reached behind his back and pulled out my pad of paper. “And here’s your pen.”
“You better let him rest now,” said Mary as Frank handed me the pad and pen.
It was seemingly the same block of unlined paper I’d handed Frank just a few minutes before, but now a bunch of the pages were torn off and resting loose on the top, all filled with Frank’s writing and his sketches. The ink looked like the same black ink I use in my pen. Just to check the color, I opened my pen and tried to make a test mark on a corner of the top sheet. Mary watched as I scribbled fruitlessly. Though I’d put a fresh cartridge of ink in my pen that morning, the pen was dry.
Frank was bent forward over his plate of eggs, eating like a starved man, now and then taking deep gulps from his orange soda.
“Please, Rudy,” urged Mary. “It’s time for you to go.”
“No, wait. You can’t send me out of here without answering a few questions. Frank! What happened just now?”
He drained his soda with a crackling slurp. “A little more please, Mary,” he said weakly. “Bring me the whole bottle.”
“He’s very tired,” Mary said to me admonishingly, and left the room.
Frank gazed at me with a weak, weary smile. “You said you wanted the future of communication? It’s all there. Take my notes home and read them. And some other time maybe I can find out about that other ‘Great Work’ thing you asked about—intelligent computers, wasn’t it? But I’ll want to research something else first. There’s a lot of unanswered questions about the aliens themselves, if I can get them to answer.” Frank, yawned, rubbed his face, yawned again. “One thing, Rudy, this stuff is so good, I’m going to have to charge you way more than two percent.” Then his head fell down on his chest and he began to snore.
Mary reappeared and ushered me out onto the front deck.
“What do you think?” she asked.
“I’m impressed,” I said, riffling through the notes. “These look very interesting. But the incredible thing is that it didn’t seem to take Frank any time at all to write these down.”
“He wrote them in paratime,” said Mary quickly. “In the saucer.”
“I wonder,” I said.
“You wonder what?” said Mary sharply.
“Well—I wonder if maybe he wrote up the notes before I came here, and then the two of you did a little sleight of hand.”
Mary made a wordless sound of outrage, a kind of high-pitched hmmph. I backed off a little. “I’m not saying that’s what I believe, Mary, but it’s the kind of possibility that some people might think of.”
“Well what would satisfy you, Mr. Suspicious? If Frank didn’t write the notes just now, what happened to all the ink in your pen?”
I shrugged. “Don’t worry, if the notes are good, we’ve probably got the beginnings of a book. I can’t wait to read them. How can I get in touch with Frank again?”
“Oh, I’m sure he’ll call you in a day or two.”
“Okay then. Thanks Mary. Nice to meet you. Give Frank my best.”
There was an annoying amount of traffic on the way home, but the view from the ridge was beautiful, with the western sky turning yellow and the sun low over the misty Pacific. I tried to bring up an exact recollection of how Frank had looked during that transitional instant at his desk. Had he really dematerialized for an instant? It was hard to be sure.
I had thought Audrey would be anxiously waiting for me, but it turned out she wasn’t even home. I’d forgotten to bring my house key, so I had to let myself in with the spare key that we kept in our garbage shed down by the street.
Audrey turned up a few minutes after I let myself in; she’d gone
up to San Francisco for the day. She was in a good mood; she’d bought shoes, seen a good show at the museum, and had found a place where she could eat jellyfish for lunch. Like me, Audrey works all winter teaching college classes, and we like to enjoy our summers.
“It was a really dreamy place, Rudy,” she told me. “Up on the top floor of this uptight office building in Chinatown where you’d least expect it. There was a big blue-lit tank with the jellyfish in it, and you could pick out the one you wanted. I was completely goofing. They serve them in vinegar and soy sauce.” Audrey was a big fan of jellyfish. She liked to paint them and to think about them and, now, even to eat them.
I had fun telling Audrey all about Frank and Mary Shook, and then after supper I spent the evening looking at the notes while Audrey worked on a new painting of jellyfish. She’d done four or five good ones already this year, and the new one looked even better.
Chapter Four: Notes On Communication
Reading the first batch of Frank’s handwritten notes, I found that each of the sheets was primarily related, if sometimes loosely, to the specific query I’d posed to Frank: what is the future of communication?
This fact alone was quite a surprise. There had only been three or four minutes between when I asked the question and when Frank handed me his notes. Had an invisibly rapid UFO really whisked Frank off to spend a couple of days in perpendicular paratime? This was more than I was yet prepared to believe. I thought it much more likely that Frank had written up his adventures before I even came to his house. And that he’d written up enough diverse topics for his eavesdropping partner Mary to be able to quickly pick out a nice sheaf of pages relating to any question I asked. And that Mary had passed Frank the papers under the tray.
But maybe, just maybe, I was wrong. In any case, the answers were fascinating; they were far richer and more original than anything I’d anticipated. My only disappointment was that I wished the notes had more information about the aliens themselves; presumably that was my own fault for not asking the right question. I resolved that if I did get another opportunity, I’d definitely ask Frank to find out more about the saucerians.