Transreal Trilogy: Secret of Life, White Light, Saucer Wisdom

by Rudy Rucker

  By and large, each page of Frank’s notes deals with a single topic in terms of a set of related scenes which the aliens allegedly showed him. Many of the scenes take place in or near San Jose, the gets-no-respect capital of Silicon Valley, down at the south end of the San Francisco Bay, not far from San Lorenzo. And, with the exception of a few late scenes in South Dakota, the events that aren’t in San Jose are in the Bay Area.

  Later I would question Frank about this. If the aliens could take him so far into the future, then why didn’t they take him to different locations as well? Why not Tokyo, Paris, Dakar, Hanoi, New York, and Rome? Why not Mars and the Moon? Frank had several answers for this. First of all, and most fundamentally, California is the place he was most comfortable with exploring. Secondly, by examining the future of only one region, Frank was better able to perceive the changes that were due only to the passage of time. And finally, there seem to be some concrete physical limitations on what the aliens can supposedly do. Although they were capable of taking Frank to other places, doing so would generally cost them more energy than they cared to expend.(7)

  (7) A final point relating to saucerian travel: Frank would eventually learn that if the aliens were to leave him off somewhere other than where they picked him up, the trip would have a nasty side-effect.

  Each page of notes includes one or more drawings, along with several dozen scrawled words. The brief texts are cryptic and fragmentary; and the meanings of the drawings are not obvious. But Frank was happy to explain them to me.

  In preparing his notes for publication, Frank and I decided to print his brief texts verbatim, to use his crude but informative drawings unaltered, and to have me write up accounts based on Frank’s rambling but always vivid commentaries on his notes. I should remark that in a few places I’ve used my scientific background to cast Frank’s words into a more technically accurate language than he could be expected to use.

  The Lifebox

  Lifebox. Big Ad REMEMBER ME! Old man talk, it ask questions. Grandchildren call lifebox Gran’pa. Ask about high school dances—he/it tell about date—ask about girl—he tell about her—Sis ask if he fucked—lifebox change subject. Everyone get one, people trade them. Full context. Finally machines can understand humans.

  A City Is Like A Lichen

  The aliens take Frank into the future, into the middle of the twenty-first century. They’re hovering over San Jose looking down at the city, hanging out right near the flight path where the metal airplanes still fly in, the planes looking like saucers themselves from the side; the wings have gotten shorter and wider.

  As on his earlier saucer trips, Frank is unable to directly see the aliens. He can’t ever seem to turn his eyes directly towards them. It’s like they’re flickers in the corner of his eye, or as if they’re shielded by a blind spot.

  They communicate with Frank by projecting voices directly into his mind. The mind merge seems to have a two-way quality to it. As long as he’s linked up with the aliens, Frank’s brain feels larger and more intelligent than usual.

  From the air the city looks like a spreading lichen, an oddly semi-natural growth—Frank muses that people think of a city as an artifact, but at a certain size scale a city is not planned, it obeys the same universal laws of growth as a mold or a fungus.

  “Me-shows”

  Whenever the aliens want to, they can zoom down to the city and get a closer look at things. As well as looking at real things, Frank and the aliens can pick up signals from TV broadcasts. The aliens can sift through thousands of TV transmissions at once so as to find things that match some current interest.

  Frank tells the aliens that he wants to find out more about the future of communication. They begin by telling him that in the future, “TV” is called “UV,” for universal viewer. In the future there are as many different UV signals as there are web pages now. Some of them are just non-stop round-the-clock “me-shows” about individual people.

  Frank and the aliens flip through a series of “me-shows.” One of them is nothing more than a man driving home from work, watching the long, moving shadow of his car on an evening road, a long California car shadow that crawls over every obstacle like magically stretchable plastic.

  Grandpa Ned And The Lifebox

  And then the aliens jump to a commercial for something called a lifebox. The slogan is REMEMBER ME. The lifebox is a little black plastic thing the size of a pack of cigarettes and it comes with a light-weight headset with a pinhead microphone, like the kind that office workers use. The ad suggests that you can use your lifebox to create your life story, to make something to leave for your children and grandchildren.

  Frank gets the aliens to find an old man who is actually using a lifebox. His name is Ned. They watch Ned from the saucer. Somehow the saucer can use dimensional oddities to get very close to someone but still be invisible to them, even with time running. In addition, the aliens have control over their size-scale and refraction index; they can make the saucer tiny and transparent as a contact-lens.

  White-haired Ned is pacing in his small back yard—a concrete slab with some beds of roses—he’s talking and gesturing, wearing the headset and with the lifebox in his shirt pocket. The sly saucer is able to get close enough to hear the sound of the lifebox: a woman’s pleasant voice.

  The marketing idea behind the lifebox is that old duffers always want to write down their life story, and with a lifebox they don’t have to write, they can get by with just talking. The lifebox software is smart enough to organize the material into a shapely whole. Like an automatic ghost-writer.

  Figure 7: The Saucer Watching The Grandchildren

  The hard thing about creating your life story is that your recollections aren’t linear; they’re a tangled banyan tree of branches that split and merge. The lifebox uses hypertext links to hook together everything you tell it. Then your eventual audience can interact with your stories, interrupting and asking questions. The lifebox is almost like a simulation of you.

  Frank gets the aliens to skip forward in time until past when Ned has died. As they do this, Frank is struck by the fact that you can fast-forward past anyone’s death. We all die, no matter what; it’s as fixed and obvious a thing as the fact that each of us has a set maximum height.

  Frank gets the aliens to zoom in on two of Ned’s grandchildren who are playing with one of the lifebox copies he left. The aliens are pleased at this zoom, which is not something they would have thought of doing. They really like for Frank to suggest things for them to zoom in on. Otherwise they can’t tell what’s interesting.—they’re like humans who try to have fun watching ants but don’t know what to look for. The aliens value Frank for his ability to help them find the significant behaviors. They tell him that he’s a much more satisfying kind of saucer-passenger than the abductee types who only expect to be humiliatingly masturbated and to have things shoved up their butt.

  The flying saucer is a lens-shaped little flaw in the spacetime of a San Jose garage converted into rec-room; Frank and the aliens hover there watching Ned’s grandchildren: little Billy and big Sis. The kids call the lifebox “Grandpa,” but they’re mocking it too. They’re not putting on the polite faces that kids usually show to grown-ups. Billy asks the Grandpa-lifebox about his first car, and the lifebox starts talking about an electric-powered Honda and then it mentions something about using the car for dates. Sis—little Billy calls her “pig Sis” instead of “big Sis”—asks the lifebox about the first girl Grandpa dated, and Grandpa goes off on that for awhile, and then Sis looks around to make sure Mom’s not in earshot. The coast is clear so she asks some naughty questions. “Did you and your dates do it? In the car? Did you use a rubber?” Shrieks of laughter. “You’re a little too young to hear about that,” says the Grandpa-lifebox calmly. “Let me tell you some more about the car.”

  Lifebox Contexts

  Frank and the aliens skip a little furt
her into the future, and they find that the lifebox has become a huge industry. People of all ages are using lifeboxes as a way to introducing themselves to each other. Sort of like home pages. They call the lifebox database a context, as in, “I’ll UV you a link to my context.” Not that most people really want to spend the time it takes to explicitly access very much of another person’s full context. But having the context handy makes conversation much easier. In particular, it’s now finally possible for software agents to understand the content of human speech—provided that the software has access to the speakers’ contexts.

  Dragonfly Cameras

  Like “darning needles”. Wings beat in figure eights, never stop.

  3 follow a hot starlet to her rendezvous. Ugly boyfriend drives them off. Laser pistol, butterfly nets. Laser bounce off us.

  You can see your own news, preview travel. Rent them. Air stability vs. small size. We abduct a gnat camera. Buzzing laughter.

  “Why hide?”

  Dragonfly News

  Frank can’t get over the fact that the future TV—the UV—isn’t a uniform set of broadcast channels. There are thousands, millions, of UV signals you can tune in with your UV set, which of course has powerful computer gear built into it. Frank notices a special new kind of image on a lot of the freelance news shows: views of stars, criminals and politicians shot from strange, rapidly moving angles, as if by particularly nimble paparazzi. Finally he hears an announcer mention that one of these scenes is “shot with our dragonfly camera.”

  The saucer zooms down to find some dragonfly cameras in action. Three of them are following a visiting pop superstar, Milla Maize, who’s in San Jose for a concert. Milla is big sex symbol, and the public is very interested in her doings. The cameras swarm around Milla as she walks from her hotel to her limo.

  The cameras remind Frank of the small dragonflies they used to call “darning needles” when he was growing up in Wisconsin. Two or three inches long, with fast-moving wings that never stop beating.

  Figure 8: Dragonfly Camera

  The saucer briefly goes into perpendicular time so as to freeze one of the dragonfly cameras in place so they can get a good look at it. There are four wings, driven by piezoelectric plastic “muscles.” The aliens turn their time axis very slightly towards the world’s time axis, and now they can see the wings beating in slow-motion figure eight patterns, sculling the air like two pairs of oars. At the front end of each of the electromechanical darning needles is a tiny camera no bigger than the bead on a glass-headed pin. The lens is coupled to a minute charge-coupled device just like in a video-camera.

  Now Milla gets into her limo, and the dragonflies dart under the vehicle to affix themselves leech-like to the car’s undercarriage.

  The Dragonfly Paparazzo

  While the limo is on the road, Frank and aliens go look at one of the camera operators, who turns out to be an obese cross-dressed man sitting in front of a console in his living-room in Milpitas north of San Jose. His name is Jeremy. With his make-up on, he looks a little like Divine in Pink Flamingos. One of Jeremy’s friends, a very thin Vietnamese woman, is there talking with him. Jeremy is bragging about his dragonfly; it was quite expensive. Up to a point it’s a somewhat autonomous robot—it balances itself and avoids obstacles automatically. But it uses Jeremy’s input to decide what to do next. Jeremy watches the camera’s view on a computer screen, and directs the camera’s motions with spandex sensor-equipped VR gloves. The gloves are gold and glittery.

  Milla And The Dragonflies

  Frank and the aliens jump to the spacetime location where Milla’s limo gets to its destination: a mansion high in the hills above Silicon Valley. Milla gets out and looks around—no dragonflies. But as soon as she disappears into the house, the sly little cameras come buzzing out, circling the house and peeking in the windows.

  Figure 9 Carlo Zaps the Dragonflies

  Later Milla is outside, nude in a hot-tub with Carlo, her lover for this evening. Carlo is smart and rich, but he’s conspicuously uncharismatic; he’s a balding round-shouldered engineer, and not at all the kind of hunk whom Milla likes to be seen with.

  Of course the three nosy darning needles are perched near the hot-tub in a bower of jasmine vines, avidly watching. But then Jeremy tries to get his dragonfly a bit closer, and Carlo hears its whirring wings. He snatches up something like a plastic pistol, points it at the sound, and fires an intense pulse of blue laser light, blinding the little cameras. It’s a special dragonfly-stunner that Carlo’s invented for Milla! That’s why she’s here making love to him!

  The next second Carlo’s out of the tub with something like a butterfly net, beating the vines and catching the three dragonflies. Milla pulls the wings off them and Carlo crushes them with a hammer. The aliens love all the excitement. They’re happy as myrmecologists catching sight of frantic ants in pitched battle.

  For a frightening second, Carlo seems to see Frank’s saucer, and shoots a jolt of his light at it. But the light bounces right off the spacetime anomaly, albeit in a strange and disquieting way. Milla starts crying, thinking it’s a new and tougher kind of dragonfly. She and Carlo go inside. The saucer follows, and watches them begin to kiss.

  Then they dart across town to look at Jeremy; he’s crying too. His dragonfly was the chief asset of his fledging Long Tooth Noser Girl UV Show and he doesn’t have insurance. The aliens take Frank back up to their preferred hover-point above the San Jose airport and skip through a few more years, watching for things about dragonflies.

  U-Rent-Em Flying Eyes

  Dragonflies stay pretty expensive. A drawback with small dragonflies is that they can’t fly very fast. People all over the world have dragonflies up for rental, so that you can log in to some remote site, borrow a local dragonfly, and use it to look around, remotely manipulating it and seeing through its glittering glass eye. Of course if there’s big news in some random spot, then the rates go up and you have to get on a waiting list. But on an ordinary day it’s reasonable to rent a dragonfly to take a look around, say, some town you might be interested in visiting. Or perhaps to check out some dangerously sleazy action, like the doings in the alley behind the Will Call bar in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, where Frank and the aliens observe a veritable swarm of tourist-driven dragonflies watching the never-ending parade of sex, drugs and debauchery.

  Gnat Cameras

  For ultra-invasive snooping, some dragonflies carry gnat cameras on their underbellies; they can spawn off a few gnats and send them in through a house’s ventilation system and, if all goes well, right under a star’s sheets. A gnat camera’s flight-range is so small, though, that it needs a big dragonfly to ferry it around.

  Alien Brain Etching

  Just for a goof, and with much audible grab-assing, the aliens take one of the gnats aboard for fifteen minutes, and they skip a few days into the future to watch the ensuing UV news reports about the gnat-cam videos of a flying saucer’s interior.

  The aliens have always prevented Frank from being able to directly see them, so he’s very excited to see the UV feeds. The videos show a crazy-looking man—that’s our Frank!—with a trio of aliens always standing behind him. No matter how the man in the video moves, the aliens remain out of his view. And what do they look like to the gnat-cam? It’s a big let-down. For the purposes of stirring up the human ant-hill, the aliens have formed their bodies into the most obvious mass-media archetype.

  In other words, they’re disguised as Grays: about the size of children, thin and spindly, with big bald heads and enormous slanting eyes, with noses, ears and mouths that are non-existent or rudimentary. The Grays look like creatures evolved to do nothing but watch; it’s as if they think and see, but do not taste, smell, speak, or listen.

  As they watch the agitated newscasters slavering over the gnat-cam Grays, the aliens’ laughter sounds like crickets chirping. Frank isn’t actually positive that it
is laughter, that’s just what he assumes.

  He asks the aliens why they are always so sneaky, and why don’t they just come out and like land on the White House lawn and meet openly with humanity? Why forever be skulking around?

  Their answer is shrill and discursive, it’s a super-intense ray of information playing across Frank’s head like a dentist’s drill—it feels like alien ideas being etched right into the bones of his skull. Frank is sorry he asked, he can’t remember what he did ask, oh yeah, he asked why the aliens hide. Their answer: “We don’t want people to ask us things.”

  Piezoplastic

  Plastic wires, plastic batteries, and then it can move. Piezoplastic made of beads. Like a jellyfish. Eats light.

  Sewer slug. Toys, LuvSlugs. Slugskates, bottom ripples. Millipede. Big ones for slugmobiles. Snail Man.

  Ugly monochrome change to color. Furniture with live paisley. Limpware hackers.

  Soft plastic computer chips. Sluggies. The toaster sluggie.

  Precious oil. Polyglass.

  Piezoplastic Sewer Slugs

  While the gnat-cam is in the saucer with him, Frank manages to briefly catch hold of it and to examine its rapidly beating little wings. As an inveterate tinkerer with things like broken video-tape players, Frank is thrilled by the fact that the gnat-cam’s wings have no gears, no linkages, and no worm-screws. He loves the concept of plastic muscles. It occurs to him that if people can replace gears with soft plastic, maybe they can do the same with all kinds of machines. He decides to use soft machines as his route into the future of communication.