by Rudy Rucker
Frank gets a sudden vision of the aliens’ journey as being like a universe-wide road-trip where you keep falling into new scenes, no two the same. Incredibly great fun. And finally the aliens are talking openly with him. Frank hardly knows where to begin; he feels like Aladdin in the treasure-cave.
“What was that about your travel seeming instantaneous?” he blurts, almost at random. “How does that work?”
“We travel at the speed of light,” says Herman. “As electromagnetic waves.” Frank is gratified to hear this; it’s the answer he was hoping for.
Personality Waves
Radio waves, I was right, like faxing themselves. People start to do it in 1000 years. Piezoplastic butterfly wings. Glork money is batteries. 22nd C Turla knows about me and my book. Saucer Wisdom! Personality zettabyte crunches into petabyte S-cube that Turla can mindfax.
3rd Millennium, San Jose is gone, grow your house. Lulu’s alla creates living matter. What is femtotechnology?
Galactic core. Starfish squeeze out a signal, it snags on our mind-thicket. Seven hundredth stop on a dime. Stripper in the zone.
Fax You!
One of the things that gives Frank his great sense of superiority towards ordinary saucer believers is that most folks imagine the aliens to be solid, meat-type beings who physically fly here in air-filled metal containers—”Like Spam shipped to the Solomon Islands,” Frank likes to say. “I mean, why not say that they ride here on horseback? Or sail here in boats? It’s ridiculous.”
Yes, for a long time already, Frank has thought that the aliens travel as radio waves; he came to this conclusion back at Western Appliance when he and Peggy Sung discovered that triple video-feedback attracts aliens. From this Frank deduced that the aliens are incorporeal aether vibrations from outer space. To his contempt and disgust, Peggy Sung instead drew the conclusion that aliens are cosmic spirits who have infiltrated the TV broadcasting industry! Peggy was also confused about why Frank kept talking about radio waves when it was TV they were looking at. Like many people, Peggy didn’t realize that TV signals and radio waves are simply low-spectrum relatives of light waves.
Now Herman the starfish is confirming Frank’s thinking. The aliens do indeed travel as electromagnetic radiation which is capable of, whenever necessary, manifesting itself as gross matter. It would be too ridiculously inefficient to send physical bodies across the light-years and parsecs of empty space.
“Certainly none of us would travel great distances in the flesh,” says Herman.
Frank compares the process to faxing a picture with a cell-phone. Instead of mailing a drawing (read “flesh-and-blood body”) in an envelope (read “spaceship”), you code the picture up as bits, send the bits out as a radio wave, and reconstitute the image at some distant location, plucking the necessary info out of the passing electromagnetic vibrations.
“There is one little complication,” says Herman. “Although we look like ordinary electromagnetic waves to your limited technology, we’re actually coded as higher-dimensional waves. There’s a lot more information in our signals than what you see. You might think of it as being like an ice-skater.”
“Huh?” says Frank.
“When I travel as a higher-dimensional electromagnetic wave, I’m like a skater resting on a little line of a blade that carves a clean curve across the ice. The blade-line is the ordinary electromagnetic wave that you see.”
The fact that the aliens travel as something like radio waves explains why they are tickled and attracted by the gnarly feedback piled upon the snow-PIP signal in Frank’s jury-rigged alien-catcher.
Soul Broadcast
“Humans will someday begin trying to ‘fax’ their bodies, just as we do,” says Herman. “Look.” The saucer lurches, vibrates, and cuts through paratime to intersect the second year of the twenty-second century.
Herman flies the saucer down into San Jose and darts invisibly into a little shop called “Endless You Mindfax”.
A woman named Turla sits on a beautifully shaded piezoplastic chair; the thing’s patterns are much more subtle and baroque than what Frank was seeing in the 21st C smart furniture. Turla is talking with a customer, a man named Dak. They’re far enough into the future that their language sounds pretty strange.
“It’s not so waka much to pay,” says Turla. “Visualize that it gives you access to the wholo universe.”
“How will I know if it very works, Turla?” Dak is old and unhealthy-looking.
“What’s to wonder?” says Turla. “We’re gonna beam the cosmos a copy of your lifebox context and your DNA code. With lifty tech, some far off dooks can use the DNA-crypt to grow your bod and then use the context to arrange its mind. You’ll be reborn.”
“Will I be able to sensey when it happens?”
“You won’t know it here and now, Dak, but I’m locked that someday…somewhere…another you will know. Everybody very digs that lotsa space-dooks use radio waves for interstellar travel. Aliens are raining down us from the stars, Dak. Deep-space radio signals are crypted life-forms, zipped-up alien derangements.”
“How come nobody ever really sees the aliens inside those rays?” asks Dak.
“The crypt is so lifted that we can’t crack it yet. The signals sound like white noise, hissy-hiss. But, Dak, there are plenty wack dooks who say they have sensey the aliens.”
This is the point where, according to Frank, Turla whips out a yellowed, century old copy of Saucer Wisdom and shows it to Dak, holding it out so clearly that Frank can read the title. To strain my belief the further, Frank claims that Turla reads aloud the Turla-and-Dak passage in Saucer Wisdom—presumably this passage right here—and gives a greeting to the invisible Frank and the saucer. When he recounts this tall tale to me, Frank says this is more proof that our book is going to be a big success, and more reason why I should be grateful to him for letting me work on it.
Figure 22: Turla and Dak
And then Dak is paying Turla; he’s giving her three glorks—which are things like coins except they’re incredibly small and powerful batteries, each holding several kilowatts of clean energy stored in the form of quantum dots. Energy is an eternally valuable commodity.
Dak puts a very fuzzy piezoplastic patch on his neck, and Turla gets out a green little patch of her own.
“I call this Captain Crunch,” says Turla, flicking her piece of green plastic. “It’s got mongo throughput.” She eyes the uvvy already on Dak’s neck. “You’ve fully put your lifebox context onto it, yes yes Dak?”
“Affirmo,” says Dak. “I did it.”
“The context makes Captain Crunch work terrif better,” says Turla, and puts the green patch of custom piezoplastic on top of Dak’s uvvy, followed by a something like a little cube of red Jello which she places on top of that. “You going into the S-cube now, Dak. Whoosh!”
The uvvy’s electrosensitive tendrils feel into Dak’s brain, and Turla’s custom cruncher compresses the information on the fly, feeding it into the red S-cube.
“We taking a zettabyte of Dak down to a petabyte of crypt,” says Turla.
[Note by R.R.: Frank said he distinctly heard Turla use that word, “zettabyte.” I’d never heard of that particular magnitude, but when I looked up the official Scientific Bureau of Standards size prefixes in John H. Conway and Richard K. Guy, The Book Of Numbers, (Springer-Verlag 1996), I found it as shown on the table below.]
Name
Numerical Symbol
Prefix
Thousand
1,000
Kilo-
Million
1,000,000
Mega-
Billion
1,000,000,000<
br />
Giga-
Trillion
1,000,000,000,000
Tera-
Quadrillion
1,000,000,000,000,000
Peta-
Quintillion
1,000,000,000,000,000,000
Exa-
Sextillion
1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
Zetta-
Septillion
1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
Yotta-
And then Turla turns on a small radio-dish antenna and broadcasts the S-cube code for Dak straight up into the sky.
“For your three glorks, I’m sending your crypt out a hundred fold times. It’ll scoot off in a hundred different ups, Dak,” says Turla. “I so visualize you getting unpacked somewhere somewhen somebody.”
Matter Rays
“Turla’s wrong about that,” Herman tells Frank, “So far as I know, nobody ever decrypts other creatures’ personality waves.”
“Too much trouble?” asks Frank.
“Of course,” says Herman. “Like do you really think anyone would bother to try and nano-fabricate an alien being’s wetware and grow it a body? And decrypt some kind of life-box code? The very fact that you would need to decrypt someone’s personality wave means that it was made by someone with such low technology they’re not going to have anything interesting to tell you. Like, I mean, you don’t see humans expending much effort in trying to translate pig-squeals into narratives of hog consciousness do you?”
Figure 23: Butterfly people
The starfish twitches and chuckles, continues talking. “You have to make a signal that’s self-extracting, and you have to master femtotechnology to extract out into a physical form. You humans won’t actually figure that out until what you call your third millennium. Let’s take a quick peek.”
The saucer heels over to one side and knifes further into the future, though the trip doesn’t seem to take any time at all.
San Jose isn’t there anymore in the year 3003; apparently the Big Quake has come and gone, quite radically enlarging the San Francisco Bay. People are flying around like giant butterflies, their bodies encased in piezoplastic suits with great gossamer wings. The air is clean, the bay water is pure, pollution is a thing of the past.
There are some nice waterfront cities spreading up the foothills of the Santa Cruz mountains, and in one of them is a small house covered with flowering vines. A Burmese scientist named Lulu Ma lives here with her husband and assistant Yanno.
Figure 24: Lulu, Yanno, and the Alla
On closer inspection, not only is Lulu’s house covered with vines, the house itself is made of redwood, only it’s living redwood, a great wondrous burl of the stuff which has somehow been coaxed to grow into three or four generously proportioned rooms, complete with cunning knothole doors and windows. It reminds Frank of the house in The Little Fur Family, a picture book he loved as a child.
One of Lulu’s rooms is kind of a lab. There’s a ledge in the thick redwood wall bearing a variety of small, utterly incomprehensible hand-made devices. One of them has the look of a magic wand, with a business end consisting of a triad of three mutually perpendicular little rods. Lulu and Yanno are talking, but it’s almost impossible for Frank to understand their speech. It’s some kind of English, sure, but their intonations and slang are too different. Frank watches them like he’s watching a foreign movie, though every now and then a single recognizable word will jump out.
“Blur blur yabba alla now,” says Lulu, adjusting the wand thing, which Frank assumes is the “alla” Lulu mentioned.
“Udda yudda zing zang femtotech,” says Yanno. Frank’s just heard Herman mention “femtotechnology,” but he doesn’t know what it is—and nobody’s going to tell him yet today.
“Sst sst sst,” laughs Lulu and turns on the alla. It’s pointed at an empty little stool on the other side of the room. The stool seems to be made of something like glassy black stone with lots of patterns cut into it. The air on the table-top shimmers and a little puddle of pink water appears, now more and more water—or is it blood? It seems to be getting darker in color, and it’s running off the stone table onto the redwood floor.
“Gonna wong flaboot!” says Yanno, clearly annoyed. He doesn’t like the mess on his floor. He whistles sharply and something like a big pink tongue appears from somewhere, undulating along on its belly like a slug. The tongue laps up the liquid. “Oo bam,” says the mollified Yanno.
“Loka moka,” says Lulu, waving the alla, and now a growing sausage of scaly green—is it the tail of a snake?—starts coiling and piling up on the stone table. But suddenly the alla runs out of power and the demo comes to a stop. The green snake or lizard-tail is impatiently twitching.
“Needa glork,” says Yanno.
Herman interrupts. “Let’s go back to 1994 before we lose track of your spacetime coordinate, and then I’ll show you a mental movie of how we put mind-faxing and matter-transmission together back home.”
From The Galactic Core
In another instant there they are above the S. J. airport again, and something a little like an educational science cartoon starts up in Frank’s head.
“So now I’ll tell you more about how we get here,” continues Herman. “I’m enjoying opening up for once. You’re a singularly receptive person, Frank. First let me show you where we come from. Our home is a planet near the center of the galaxy.” Herman flashes an image into Frank’s brain.
Frank sees a big whirlpool of spacetime, a chaotic maelstrom of light, a vast superheated gas spiral around the bloated black hole at the galactic core.
A few score light years out from the core is a reddish sun with a bulging blue planet. “This is our home,” says Frank. “We call it S.” The name is a shape and a color, not a sound, but since the conversation is telepathic it doesn’t matter. The view zooms in on S, and Frank can see legions of the alien starfish, packed as thick as anemones in a tide-pool.
S is a water world—or is covered with some kind of clear liquid anyway—only not very deep. Frank can see through the stuff to the starfish crawling around on the rocky bottom.
Figure 25: Starfish Aliens On a Tower Beneath A Black Hole Sky
But they are doing more than crawling around, Frank realizes. Looking closer, he can see that the shallow sea’s bed is structured in intricate patterns. He sees gently curved cracks leading to lower levels, and submarine lacework arches, and towers that rise above the gently lapping waves. The starfish are moving about along smoothly plotted paths, propelled by little devices like water jets. Frank’s looking down at a submarine city.
“We like to climb into the towers at night to gaze at the galactic center,” says Herman. “The great central black hole makes a remarkable lens-like effect against the sky. And the accretion disk is an ever-changing cascade of light. There’s some strange energy beings who live in there, you know. They look like corkscrews. We call them the wigglers, but we have very little to do with them. They’re not wetware based, so we have almost nothing to talk about. But it was they who gave us the idea for full transmission.”
Frank’s looking down at a swaying gossamer spire on S. The structure seems to grow as he watches, it’s alive. Perched in the top of the tower are five starfish. They touch each other and suddenly there’s a flash and crackle as a signal beams up from the tower. This is an higher-dimensional electromagnetic encryption of the creatures’ whole selves: body, mind and soul.
Perhaps a bit too artily, the mental cartoon splices in an image of an Earthly dandelion in full bloom: a sphere of gossamer white with the breeze liftin
g off little feathery parachutes, each carrying a seed.
“Yes, yes, throughout the universe, beings send out copies of themselves,” says Herman. “It’s a universal imperative; replicate or die. Beyond the ordinary wetware-style reproductive copying of self lies the higher, holistic non-genetic duplication. Full transmission. The result? An eidetic copy of the whole self which can leave the home world and join the cosmic net of traveling minds. It’s life at a higher level.”
The Smell Of Souls
“Although the trip is the main thing,” continues Herman, “The stops we make along this journey are valuable in and of themselves. Your planet is approximately the seven hundredth location where we’ve broken our journey and visited. It’s incalculably more primitive than our home, but a nicely exfoliated wetware world just the same. And of a very fine chaoticity.”
“How do your personality waves know where to dig in and unpack themselves?” asks Frank.
Herman explains that the way they tell if a place is interesting is by looking at the fractal dimension of the particle world lines at that venue. Because sentient creatures observe things so sharply, they make the line of time more zigzagged and less smooth. By way of explaining this, Herman asks Frank to imagine a coin being flipped by dumb, blind machine. If there’s no conscious mind to look at the coin, the universe is content to let the line of time near the coin be a bit vague and fuzzed, a kind of half-heads-half-tails situation. But if there’s a thinking creature looking at the coin-toss, then the flow of time has to fork either towards “heads” or towards “tails”. The upshot is that the presence of consciousness makes bumpy patterns in the otherwise even flow of time. The patterns are like rumble-strips near a toll-booth, or perhaps like trees in a spring-swollen river. Yes, for the aliens, there’s a perceptible aura or “smell” about any spacetime location where sentient beings live.