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

by Rudy Rucker

  Larky and Lucy like two radios vibing off each other. Tweak tweak, fractal filigree of scream.

  Lifebox context makes sense. Radiotelepathy and the bigwig. Links to universal viewer. It’s a global party.

  Perfect computer interface, hack hack. Superanimation.

  Record your dreams and play them back. Nelda’s dream tape of me and the aliens, disguised as Grays. I think really they’re beetles.

  Hey, I’m mentioned on future UV! This book will make me famous.

  Nelda made it stink in here, ugh.

  Take me home!

  Life In The Saucer

  While absorbing all that information about piezoplastic, Frank starts wondering how long he’s been out in the saucer with the aliens—not that the question has a clear answer, given that he and the aliens are darting around in infinite-dimensional paratime, cutting across the fractal bends of Earth’s time-line in order to see far into humanity’s future. The aliens are going all out to research the future of communication. They like having something specific to investigate, and they don’t care how long it takes. But Frank’s getting homesick and tired.

  In terms of his biological clock it feels like he’s been off in the saucer for four or five days. He would be starving by now, except that the aliens provide him with an inexhaustible supply of food and water. The food is a kind of porridge in a bowl that never gets empty. And there’s an endless mug of incredibly pure water. These items hang in the dark saucer air next to Frank, and when he reaches out for one of them, it jumps into his hand.

  The porridge is sweet and exceedingly homogeneous, as if made to a scientific formula for generic human food. Frank thinks of it as “people-chow.” Frank tries to scrape down to the bottom of the porridge bowl to see where the porridge comes from; at the bottom he can make out a little shiny patch, but never for long, as more porridge oozes out of it whenever its uncovered. Peering into his cup of water he sees the same kind of shiny glint at the bottom of the glass. Feeling dirty and sweaty, he empties the mug over his head every now and then, and if he looks up into the mug, he can see endless drops of water sweating off the little patch. He can reach his finger up to touch the shiny patch, but it doesn’t feel like much of anything, just very slippery, so slippery that in fact that he’s not sure he’s really touching it.

  “I want to go home now,” he tells the aliens, but they give him the usual kind of skull-etching answer, and plow on forward into the future, flipping through endless UV channels and waiting for Frank to pick up on something.

  Larky’s Brain Concert

  Wearily Frank focuses on the strange image of a man standing on an empty stage with tight hood of piezoplastic cupping his head. The hood covers the sides, top and back of the man’s head, but not his face. The alien saucer zooms in on this; it’s a kind of show being held in a medium-sized San Francisco concert-hall. Frank quickly recognizes the hall as none other than the fabled Fillmore, massively retrofitted.

  Figure 16: Larky’s Brain Show

  The performer’s name is Larky, and the show is called a brain concert. The piezoplastic on Larky’s head is seeded with super-sensitive brainwave sensors, and it’s amplifying Larky’s brain signals and sending them out to piezoplastic receivers all over the hall. The receivers are giant floppy sheets of piezoplastic lying on the floor and hanging down from the venerable Fillmore balconies. The sheets are ablaze with colors and fuzzy shapes; some of them are barely recognizable images. In addition, the sheets are writhing, undulating, vibrating, and in fact acting like giant panel speakers, pulsing out hauntingly structured music. Larky is doing all this just by standing on the stage and thinking a certain way into his transmitter-hood. The hood, by the way, is something Larky invented; he’s a little like Les Paul or Bo Diddley with their home-made electric guitars.

  Telepathy Feedback

  Frank and the aliens follow Larky around for awhile. The sensors in his hood are off-the-shelf medical imaging devices which reach into the brain with tight vortexes of superquantum electromagnetic fields. Nobody’s ever thought of using the sensors for art before. “This is the way perfect tool for me,” Larky happily tells his lover Lucy. Up till now he’s been a second-rate guitarist who makes his own videos. But his fingers have never been nimble enough, nor his eye quick enough. Finally he has an instrument he can drive with his brain.

  Lucy thinks this over and decides that she’s in the same boat. ““I can’t write or paint or play an instrument at all—but I’m a starry thinker, Larky. Can you make me a hood too? We can do duets. And our brains can talk to each other. It’ll be so floatin’.”

  Larky’s a little worried about the possible feedback interactions between two piezoplastic transmission-hoods, but he and Lucy go ahead and try it.

  Curious about what’s going to happen, the aliens manage to passively hook into the signals which Larky and Lucy are sending back and forth. They beam the information right into Frank’s head, using one of their higher-dimensional mind-rays, and that way Frank can interpret the signals for them.

  At first it’s mellow. Larky and Lucy lie there side by side on the floor, smiling up at the ceiling, thinking colors and simple shapes. Blue sky, yellow circle, red triangle. Now Larky puts his hand in front of his face, stares at it, and the image goes over to Lucy. But Lucy isn’t able to see the hand yet. She can’t assimilate the signal. “You try and send a picture to me,” says Larky. He doesn’t say the words out loud, instead he imagines saying them—he subvocalizes them as it were—and Lucy is able to hear them. Words are easier than pictures. Lucy stares at her piezoplastic bracelet, fixating on it, sending the image out. Larky can’t get it at first, but then after a minute’s effort, he can. Eureka!

  “You have to let your eyes like sag out of focus and then turn them inside out, only without physically turning them, you wave?” explains Larky none too clearly, but when Frank tries the technique it works. He too can see through Larky and Lucy’s eyes. “It’s sort of like the trick you do in order to see your eyes’ floaters against the sky,” amplifies Frank. “You’re looking far away, but you’re looking inside your head.”

  So now Larky and Lucy can see through each other’s eyes, but then Larky glances over at Lucy and she looks at him and they get into a feedback loop of mutually regressing awareness that becomes increasingly unpleasant. Frank says it’s kind of like the way if you stare at someone and they stare back at you, then you can read what they think of you in their face, and they can read your reaction to that, and you can read their reaction to your reaction, and so on. It gets more and more intense and pretty soon you can’t stand it and you look away.

  But with a direct brainwave hookup, the feedback is way stronger. In fact it reminds Frank of what happens when he points his video cameras at his TVs. Lucy’s view of Larky’s face forms in Larky’s mind, gets overlaid with Larky’s view of Lucy and bounced back to Lucy, and then it bounces back to Larky, bounce bounce bounce back and forth twisting into ragged squeals.

  Figure 17: Larky And Lucy

  Lucy and Larky are starting to tremble, right on the point of going into some kind of savage epilepsy-like fit—not a pleasant experience for Frank either, as the fucking aliens still have him locked into monitoring the loop!—but Larky does a head-trick that makes it stop.

  Larky’s method for stopping the feedback is like one of the things you can do with the video camera to keep the TV screen from getting all white: you zoom in on a detail. You find a fractal feather and amplify just that. In the same way, Larky shifts his attention to a little tiny part of his smeared-out mouth, a little nick at the corner, and a soon as that starts to amp up, he shifts over to a piece of Lucy’s cheek, just keeps skating and staying ahead of the avalanche. Lucy gets the hang of it too, and now they’re darting around their shared visual space.

  The Mind Modem

  Frank and the aliens skip forward through the days, watching La
rky and Lucy slowly develop a language for transmitted emotions. Part of the trick is to keep a low affect, to speak softly as it were. If you scream a feeling, it bounces back at you and starts a feedback loop. You can think a scream, but you have to do it in a calm low-key way. The way Lucy puts it, “Just go ‘I’m all boo-hoo,’ instead of actually slobber-sobbing.” So pretty soon Larky and Lucy are good at sending the emotions in that gentle chilled-out kind of way.

  The aliens occasionally enjoy poking a stick into the human ant-hill. So, just for a laugh, the aliens patch Frank actively into the Lucy/Larky loop and get Frank to say, “I am a man from 1994, watching you do telepathy from inside my flying saucer.” And they send some Franks-eye images of the vague, round saucer-room he’s sitting in.

  Lucy thinks it’s just a prank that Larky did, but Larky freaks out so much that he’s scared to use the equipment again for several days. So Frank and the aliens lay off and let the thing develop further.

  Larky actually knows some business guys, and he and Lucy do a demo for them. They go in different rooms and think things back and forth. The business guys try the hoods out, and after some practice they can do it too. It’s decided that the word radiotelepathy will be the name for this new communication medium. Larky, Lucy and the business guys form a company called Telepath Inc., and they get to work developing a commercial product.

  For the longest time, there is the persistent problem that if two people use radiotelepathy wrong they can get into that really nasty feedback loop capable of escalating all the way up to a full-blown grand mal seizure. Not everyone can remember to stay chilled out and to not stare into the feedback. But finally the Telepath Inc. technicians develop a chaos-damping algorithm for the hoods’ piezoplastic; the damper automatically kicks in to cut off transmission if things get too intense.

  The other big hurdle is to make the signals readily comprehensible. Larky and Lucy were able to communicate quite easily because they knew each other really well: they’re lovers and best friends. But what happens when you try and link with a relative stranger? None of his/her references and associations make sense.

  The trick turns out to be to first exchange copies of your lifebox contexts. As well as using the analog signals of the superquantum brain sensors, you also use standard hyperlinks into the other user’s context. The combination of the two channels gives the effect of telepathy.

  Frank and the aliens are there at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose to witness the product roll-out. Telepath Inc. calls the hoods “Mind Modems,” but nobody likes that name, and the hoods end up being called bigwigs on the street. This is not because the hoods are big and funny-looking, but because when you first put one on, the tingling of the electromagnetic vortex fields feels like you have big gnarly dread-locks or egg-white-stiffened Mohawk spikes shooting out of your head. Bigwigs catch on slowly at first, as they’re quite expensive and because people are scared of them.

  Wigged In

  But pretty soon there are stories about fabulous apps, some real and some apocryphal, and the bigwigs spread far and wide. What are the fabulous apps? Frank and the aliens track some of them down.

  The obvious bigwig app is, of course, to make sex better. But sex is already pretty good. In some ways people already have all the telepathy they need, what with the multiple channels of sight, sound, scent, touch, facial expressions, body language. If you’re in the right mood, you can pretty much read people’s minds just by looking at their faces, let alone by making love.

  The fact is, to really get an unusual sex-thrill out of bigwigs you have to disable the damper, which of course everyone soon knows how to do. Some couples become addicted to the dangerous intensity of skirting around the white hole of feedback, of bopping around right on the fractal edges of over-amplification, letting their thoughts and emotions bend and whoop. But this isn’t for everyone.

  The real killer bigwig app comes about when Telepath releases the software protocols and drivers that let users hook their bigwigs up to the global UV “universal viewer” network. Up until then, a bigwig’s range was only about a quarter mile. Creating the link is a bit tricky because the bigwig signals are totally analog and UV is digital.

  Once you can bigwig together with anyone in the world, the key fun thing becomes looking through other people’s eyes. It’s like using a dragonfly, but better, because you’re looking through actual organic eyes, with a good sampling of the shades of feelings and emotional colorings that come with real experience. And you can talk back and forth with the person watching.

  Frank and the aliens observe a guy named Conrad walking on a hill outside Los Perros, California. Conrad’s feeling lonely, but he has his ‘wig with him and he calls up, just out of the blue, his old friend Ace Weston in Massachusetts. Ace has a bigwig too, and he’s walking on the beach, so the two old friends walk together, Conrad on the hill, Ace on the beach, looking through each others’ eyes and feeling each others feelings. It’s magical.

  The UV-linked bigwig shrinks down from being like a wetsuit-hood to being just a floppy thick patch that you wear on the back of your neck. The price drops way down, and now that they’re being used over the UV the name changes: everyone starts calling the things uvvies. “Uvvy” is pronounced soft like “lovey-dovey.” The uvvy completely replaces the telephone and the television set.

  The immediacy of uvvy conversations is seductive, people spend more and more time in them, it’s an endless interplanetary party that everyone is involved with. It’s pleasant and life-enhancing, like you can always plug in with other people like yourself in the country and hang out with them. Being connected via uvvy is called being “wigged in.” The diffuse quality of the medium means that you can be wigged into someone without really having any particular message.

  Soft Satellites

  One of the remarkable things about the uvvy is that there are no uvvy-signal stations, no centralized antennae as with 1990s cell-phones. Each uvvy acts as a switching point, with signals being handed off from one to the other, just like nerve impulses travelling through neurons. When you buy an uvvy, you don’t have to sign up with anything like a local phone company or a service provider—at least for local calls. The uvvies handle this themselves.

  The catch is that when an uvvy signal need to cross a big blank space—like an ocean—it still has to fly up into space to bounce off a satellite. And, for awhile, one does need to subscribe to a big satellite service for this. It’s evident from the news which Frank and the aliens watch that, as of 2080, the satellites are all still owned by what one Frank variously calls the Pig, the Man, Big Brother, General Bullmoose, or the Evil Empire—i.e., government and big business. And so long as these ruthless and mercenary forces maintain their control over satellite communications, they continue to broadcast commercial messages and propaganda, to monitor what people do with their uvvies, and to license and control uvvy access.

  But in 2085, the final link in truly decentralized global communication is forged. A woman named Ping Wu invents a low cost communication satellite known as a skyray, and by “low cost” Frank’s talking about maybe two thousand dollars. Ping is a high-cheekboned woman with a straight mouth that is often pursed in thought. Frank can’t say enough good things about her. Part limpware engineer and part rocket scientist, Ping comes up with a clean and simple design for the skyrays.

  They’re made entirely of piezoplastic. A skyray is launched as a helium filled balloon. When the balloon reaches the upper limits of the atmosphere, it splits open and forms itself into a tight cylinder with an ion drive fueled by some newly developed stuff called quantum dots—quantum dots being a story in themselves, being an incredibly clean and compact source of energy, but no time for that just now.

  Once a skyray is at the edge of the atmosphere, its ion drive sends it up into low Earth orbit where it undergoes a final transformation: it becomes a solar-powered dish antenna, capable of picking up uvvy signals an
d beaming them either back down to Earth or, for longer hops, to the next skyray in sight. Many people send up a personal skyray of their own, others get clean unmonitored skyray access from some other individual for a small monthly payment.

  With the coming of the skyrays, as Frank puts it, “the Pig’s pens collapse as fast and flat as the Berlin wall”. Wireless electronic communication becomes as unfettered as the conversation among the members of a milling street-crowd.

  Uvvy Files And Superanimation

  The limpware engineers get into using uvvies as the interface to their soft computers. A guy called Omid develops a digital file format for saving uvvy-states. Omid’s trick is to use a block of piezoplastic as the recording device; nobody had thought of this before. The soft, richly computing piezoplastic is able to digitize uvvy-states down into its individual microbeads. Omid calls his new storage medium the S-cube because he loves a woman named Szilvia, though this is a secret he never reveals to the world at large; Frank and the aliens know the secret because they watch Omid telling Szilvia.

  Once there is the stable S-cube medium for saving uvvy files, programmers and writers start using uvvies instead of their personal computers. And then the graphic artists get in on the act too.

  Frank and the aliens check out a guy called Kotona. He’s a superanimator. He has this insanely detailed world he’s maintaining, doing a kind of waking dream about it every day, building up his data base on scores, no hundreds, of S-cubes. Kotona’s world is nothing less than a recreation of the world as painted by Bosch and Brueghel. All the set-piece paintings are there: Brueghel’s fairs and weddings and feasts and hunting parties as well as Bosch’s allegories and lurid, teeming apocalypses, each painting fully fleshed out into a three dimensional scene which—and here lies Kotona’s genius—still looks like a great painting from every angle.

  Day after day, Kotona enters and re-enters his work, ever more smoothly sewing the scenes together into a single continuous world. Not satisfied to have this world be a static diorama, he breathes life and physics into it, giving the loaves and jugs a mass and inertia, animating the men and beasts to dance and embrace, to whine and to writhe.