by Rudy Rucker
To find out more about the programmable plastic, Frank gets the aliens to skip around in the first half 21st Century until the aliens find a promising year when there’s a lot of UV talk about plastic wires, plastic batteries, and the and a new material called “piezoplastic”. Piezoplastic flexes in response to electrical impulses and, conversely, sends out weak electric signals if it is flexed.
The plastic battery technology is incorporated into piezoplastic; in addition, the stuff holds a powerful electrical charge, and it can amplify very small signal voltages into heavy-duty contractions. As if that weren’t enough, piezoplastic is solar-powered; you charge it up by leaving it out in the sun or by putting it under a high-wattage lamp.
The first commercial application for piezoplastic is very prosaic: sewer slugs. They crawl down a drain pipe and polish the pipe to a glorious inner sheen.
The sewer slugs have a subtle cellular structure; they are sintered together out of piezoplastic beads—that is, the beads are squeezed into a mold and heated to a point that’s short of their melting point but sufficiently high to make the beads stick together. Each bead has a preprogrammed set of response curves specifying the way that it interconverts electricity and motion, and the parallel interaction of this mass of beads leads to emergent behaviors such as rubbing and crawling.
The LuvSlug
A plumber takes a sewer slug home, cleans it up, files off its belt of abrasive teeth, and lets his kids use it for a toy. Frank and the aliens watch as the delighted children christen their new pet Foo-Foo. The eyeless Foo-Foo flops up and down flights of stairs. It likes to crawl into patches of sunlight and drowse there. If you hold Foo-Foo, the slug writhes around inside your hands. Sort of like a cat, or a toothless pet rat—or a jellyfish.
It’s the aliens who put the jellyfish analogy in Frank’s mind. They explain to Frank that Foo-Foo is like the sea-nettle jellyfish that he’s seen on display at the Monterey Aquarium. Jellyfish have no nervous systems at all; they’re actually colonies of individual polyps. When one of a polyp’s neighbor-cells contracts, the polyp contracts too—and then it relaxes—and then for a second or two it’s too tired to contract again. First it’s stimulated and then its inhibited. The net effect of the interacting excitation/inhibition is circular waves that travel out from the center of the jellyfish to its rim like ripples in a pond. This is, the aliens tell Frank, exactly the same kind of parallel computation that LuvSlugs use.
Frank and the aliens skip forward. The plumber leaves his family for another woman, and his abandoned wife, an enterprising woman, uses the plumber’s credit line to purchase five hundred sewer slugs. She and her male cousin strip off the slugs’ teeth and start selling them over the UV as LuvSlugs.
In the UV ad, the LuvSlug is a small brown oblong with two bumps on it. The bumps undulate slowly, sensually, there are folds in the piezoplastic which crease and uncrease. The wife uses it on her neck, the cousin on his foot, the wife on her leg, the cousin on his lower back. “Happy to rub you,” says the slug’s voice-over. The LuvSlug business takes off.
Newk’s Oaktown Slugskates
Figure 10: Slug-blades
Frank and the aliens zoom in on a Black skater/engineer in Oakland who tinkers with a batch of piezoplastic beads to set the stuff’s response rate to nineteen times the rate of beads used in LuvSlugs. He programs the beads by changing the symmetries of the rungs in the long-chain molecules of the plastic. His name is Newk. He explains to a friend that the piezoplastic’s molecules are a bit like DNA; each rung of the long molecule can have one of two mirror-symmetric orientations which means that he can code up one bit per rung. “DNA gives two bits per rung,” allows Newk, “But a giant polymer can have as many rungs as you want.”
Newk sinters his beads together to make two plastic sausages that he attaches to the bottom of a pair of boots. And then he’s skating across the grass beside Oakland’s Merritt Lake on his new Slugskates. The blades have ripples that get up on top of each other and bulge out into dozens of little fingers that whip along like the legs of a centipede. On downhill runs, the plastic goes into a circular flow mode, and when the terrain is level or uphill it runs along on little legs. Newk’s Oaktown Slugskates become a national fad.
Dustin The Snailman
The slugs get bigger and faster, and then people start having vehicles like all-weather snowmobiles, with big corrugated slugs on the bottom—the corrugations swing forward and backward in a wave-like motion, trotting across the countryside without damaging the ground.
Figure 11: Dustin the Snail Man
Frank and the aliens follow along as a paraplegic man named Dustin drives a slugmobile up to the top of Half Dome in Yosemite. Dustin’s unwieldy, customized device has metal framework that clanks and scrapes against the rocks. The other hikers are annoyed, though mostly they try to be polite. Dustin, who’s a tinkerer and inventor, gets the idea of eliminating every part of the slugmobile except for the piezoplastic. Three months later, he returns to Yosemite wearing a hundred pounds of piezoplastic around his lower body; he calls himself Snail Man. He’s found a way to control the plastic with all-but-imperceptible signals from the nerves in his dead limbs. Now he blends into the Sierras as seamlessly as a banana slug.
3D Paisley
At this point the plastic slugs are still ugly to look at: translucent grayish beige. But then a Santa Cruz woman hacker friend of Dustin’s has the idea of throwing some iridescent shimmery stuff in with a batch of piezoplastic beads and sintering the whole thing together in her oven. Her name is Shirley. Frank and the aliens hover in Shirley’s kitchen watching her. Outside it’s a sunny day and the ocean is crashing. Shirley has long carrot-colored hair. The breeze flutters her white kitchen curtains. The shimmery stuff she is adding to piezoplastic beads is rhodopsin-2, a synthetic analog of the visual purple that lines the eye’s retina. It’s sensitive to electricity. Shirley flops the newly sintered slug out on the table and pokes it. Fuzzy veins of green and mauve bloom within the murky plastic.
Figure 12: Beanbag Chair With Live Paisley
The pattern’s nice, but not gnarly enough, so Shirley and Dustin set to work tweaking it. Dustin has the idea of mixing a few ounces of generator beads into the sinter-mix; the generator beads send out uniform oscillatory pulses. They play with the rates and phases of the pulses until suddenly they get piezoplastic that’s filled with a beautiful pattern of living three-dimensional paisley.
Shirley drives Dustin back to his workshop, and Dustin uses his giant industrial sintering furnace to make up a hundred-pound wad of the new formula. It’s gorgeous. Shirley flops down onto it laughing. “I want everyone to have a lifty chair like this! Programmable piezoplastic! Let’s farm a world of beanbags, Dustin!”
Chaotic Engineering
Shirley and Dustin dub their new craft “limpware engineering,” and begin posting their recipes on the UV as freeware. More and more people start playing with the techniques, and soon the colorful piezoplastic limpware reaches a point where it is doing as much computation as a computer chip. Except it isn’t a chip. It’s a soft three-dimensional matrix of linked-up cells. And—at least initially—the computations don’t perform any “useful” function. They just make pretty colors.
Limpware engineering is a completely chaotic process, as the effects are parallel and emergent, rather than serial and logical. Chaos has its own agenda. The aliens know a lot about chaos, and being linked up with them enhances Frank’s understanding of the slippery concept.
One of Frank’s alien-catalyzed insights into chaos is that, viewed as a cultural paradigm, chaos means accepting that the half-assed parallel-computed way in which social decisions arise is much more robust and adaptive than any kind of dictatorial guiding could be. The chaos of life means that, willy-nilly, things will tighten around some strange attractor, and you can only hope that the attractor you end up on is where you want to be. And if it isn’t
what you like—well, you only need to wait a little longer, as the shapes of the basins of attraction are undergoing chaotic evolutions of their own and soon you’ll orbit on over to another attractor. Not that this is a very efficient regimen for designing software.
The limpware engineers try lots and lots of different things. One of the slug-hackers, a buzz-cut Chinese boy called Jerry, is writing a three-dimensional cellular automata (CA) program to simulate the outcomes of various recipes for piezoplastic—the idea being that its cheaper and faster to simulate, say, a thousand alternate kinds of piezoplastic than it is to physically whomp up a thousand batches.
The 3D CA displays are intoxicatingly beautiful, though Jerry spends much more time typing in code than he spends watching the images. The aliens stop and watch Jerry for a really long time, much longer than Frank wants to—it feels like two days, maybe—but when Frank complains, the aliens zap him with that skull-etching information ray and he has to shut up.
It’s not so much that the aliens are interested in Jerry’s 3D cellular automata, it’s that they like observing Jerry in the process of programming. They are naturalists of a kind; for them, watching a human hacking is like watching a bird build a nest or watching a spider weave a web.
Texas Machine Language
Even with the speed-up of computer simulations and the ability to automatically try out thousands or even millions of parameter settings, custom-designing limpware piezoplastic is insanely difficult. But then a chemical engineer called Chad breaks through to a high-level programming technique, a way to describe the global behavior you want and to then program that right into an already sintered slug.
Figure 13: Chad beating on a slug with his mallet
Frank and the aliens watch Chad in his Sunnyvale lab. Chad is from Texas. Chad has a contract with a tool company that needs a shock-resistant microprocessor controller for an oil-well drill-bit, and Chad’s idea is to make the controller out of piezoplastic. He has a complete list of the specifications for the controller, lines of instructions like “when the temperature goes above such and such, adjust the angle of the drill-bit-teeth to so and so.” The old solution would be to design a silicon circuit to control electromechanical servomechanisms, but instead, Chad invents programmable piezoplastic.
Each bead of Chad’s new-style piezoplastic is made of but a few hundred vast macromolecules, incredibly folded and twisted. Chad has a big diagram of one of them, and the polymer’s tangled line reminds Frank of Earth’s fractal time-line. Each super-molecule include tiny metallic dipoles which act as a myriad of antennae, each antenna sensitive to a different frequency of radio waves.
A slug of the new piezoplastic lies there, inert on Chad’s lab bench. Input and output wires are attached to the slug here and there with toothy, painful-looking alligator-clips. Next to the slug is the parabolic broadcast antenna of a small radio-transmitter. Rubbing his hands with callow glee, Chad begins teaching the slug how to act right.
His method is to repeatedly feed a sample stimulus into the slug, meanwhile using his radio transmitter to “tune” the piezoplastic’s component molecular types until the slug’s physical and electrical outputs are as desired. As soon as the desired response is happening, Chad pounds on the slug really hard with a wooden mallet, which forces the molecules to break any bonds that might have kept them from wanting to stay in their current radio-wave-influenced position. It looks crazy, but it works. Chad hammers his list of specs into the plastic, one after another. The drill-bit controller is a big success.
One of the next applications for piezoplastic is smart door hinges, and from here it’s only a short jump to the smart muscles used for the flapping wings of the dragonfly cameras. Soon there are improvements on Chad’s “Texas machine language” method of literally beating the program into the slug—and far more complicated applications become possible.
Soft Displays
One of the biggest breakthroughs is when a man named Abbott finds a way to use Shirley and Dustin’s colored piezoplastic for real-time programmable displays. All of a sudden, a computer or UV display screen is a cheap, flexible piece of plastic instead of being a expensive, fragile sandwich of glass or a dim bag of liquid crystal. This Holy Grail of ubiquitous computation is finally achieved around 2070. As well as providing cheap, flexible video display, patches of the piezoplastic can vibrate like a speaker membrane.
So now a UV television set is basically just a wad of piezoplastic with a few chips. And then the chips turn into piezoplastic, too, and televisions are soft. Some media junkies even use them for pillows. Others wear video clothes.
Figure 14: Soft Television Set
Sluggie Processors
The new softly computing limpware-programmed bits of piezoplastic are called sluggies. By the late 21st Century, sluggies have replaced silicon computer chips entirely. Sluggies are sintered from submicron-sized beads, so that the computational density of the limpware becomes as high as silicon’s ever was. Just as in the 1990s nobody would dream of using gears for the controls of a microwave oven, say, or of a video receiver, in the future nobody dreams of using a silicon chip. All control circuits are smidgens of limpware.
One thing that makes sluggies especially different from silicon chips is that they can move about. And the crawling behavior of sluggies is not a rare or an unimportant activity, no, it’s an essential and necessary feature of sluggie self-maintenance. Unless a sluggie gets its daily bit of exercise, its computational circuits fade out and become unusable in a matter of weeks.
This has the benefit that it’s very easy to install a sluggie into an appliance. They simply crawl into the device, like a toaster, where they work. But, on the other hand, they also crawl out. Frank and the aliens zoom in on an empty morning kitchen, where the sluggies are all crawling out of their appliances—for the exercise, the air, the light, and just to be with each other. Sluggies communicate via electromagnetic fields, and also by small acoustic chirps.
The sluggies gather together on the kitchen windowsill, lolling there in the morning sun. There are brisk footsteps and the woman of the house walks into the kitchen, dressed and ready for a quick breakfast before hurrying off to work. She wants to turn on the toaster and coffee-maker and the stove—so now the sluggies have to all crawl back. She pokes them with a special sluggie-herding wand to order them back into their machines.
Figure 15: Kitchen sluggies.
One of the sluggies—the toaster sluggie—is very slow to obey, and the woman gets angry at it. When she comes home from work, she has a limpware upgrade, a new toaster sluggie. She pops it out of its blister-pack and sets it down by the toaster. The new sluggie crawls inside, eats the old one—though not without savage, squealing struggle—and installs itself. When Frank tells me about this, I think of how when you upgrade software on your computer, the new software writes over the old one’s directories.
Smart Furniture
A few years later, nearly everything a person owns is at some low level alive, made of piezoplastic that knows what to do. Most of the objects in a person’s home can talk a little bit, and for awhile there’s a fad for making pieces of furniture with the intelligence of, say, a dog. They get out of the way if you’re about to bump them. They adjust their shape to whatever you say. They can change their patterns to match any design that you show them. But smart furniture turns out not to be a good idea.
Frank and the aliens watch as a photographer’s family comes home from a week’s trip to find that the furniture has been bouncing around the house laughing and bathing its tissues in the studio’s klieg lights, breaking all the dishes and running up a huge electrical bill. Yes, the photographer steps into his harshly lit studio and catches his furniture going wild. A rambunctious over-amped armchair is howling like a coyote, the sofa is galumphing around in pursuit of a long-legged tea-table, the side-board is dancing a tarantella on shards of broken crockery, and six dining-c
hairs are clambering on top of each other to form a pyramid. He loads the rogue furniture into a truck and hauls it off to Goodwill.
In another home, a young woman’s disgruntled suitor kicks one of her chairs across the room—and the chair runs back and breaks the guy’s leg. A cat sharpens its claws on a couch, and the couch flings the tabby out the window. After a few more incidents like this, the manufacturers go back to making furniture stupid again—though people still like for it to be made of piezoplastic.
Polyglass
As more and more plastic is used for colorful limpware goodies, it becomes less and less acceptable that oil be made into gasoline and burned. Petroleum is so much more valuable if its turned into plastic. Burning oil for fuel is now considered as wasteful as, say, feeding haute cuisine to a barnyard pig. There are only a few rare internal-combustion car-driving ranges; oddly enough one of them ends up being Big Sur, the home of so very many auto commercials. But most people have electric cars with slug feet.
Not as much plastic goes into ordinary kinds of things either. Many household items that were formerly made of dumb plastic are now made of special new kinds of glass and ceramics. A man named Junious Gomez capitalizes on the fact that glass is a (very viscous) liquid, and invents a soft, squishy glass called polyglass.
Everything in the future is getting softer and less angular. As the new technologies of piezoplastic and polyglass spread across the planet, the centuries-long tyranny of the right angle begins to fade away.
Radiotelepathy
Gruel and water, how many days has it been?
A man on a stage making a light-show with his brain.