by Rudy Rucker
Wetware Engineering
Frank is curious about how the Biobot engineers designed the Big Tongue, so the saucer zips over to their labs. A few hundred Big Tongues—and what look like other Biobot products—are growing in vats of viscous blue amniotic fluid. In a workshop at the end are two scientists named Gene and Jean. Gene is a young man with burr-cut hair and a receding hairline. Jean is a rather fat woman in her thirties.
Gene and Jean have uvvy patches on their necks; this gives them radiotelepathic contact with each other and with a virtual reality simulation the big Biobot supersluggie is running. The aliens give Frank a feed of what the two wetware engineers are looking at: a spiraling double helix of spheres that represents the DNA of a bumblebee.
“I hate my neighbors,” Gene is thinking to Jean. “They make noise all the time. They have lots of electric machines. Pool-pumps, leaf-blowers, loud radios. They’re morons. Today I want to invent something to stop them. Let’s chunk up this bumblebee’s DNA, see if there’s anything there to work with.”
“When did you get this DNA model?” Jean asks. “I haven’t seen this one before.”
“Oh, I downloaded it from the Department of Agriculture” says Gene. “They’re using the scanning tunneling microscope to map the genes of all kinds of useful animals. Of course they don’t have your techniques, so they can’t do all that much with it. Do your thing, Jean.”
“All right,” says Jean, and a sylph-like silver version of her appears in the shared mental cyberspace where the DNA molecule is floating. The winged Jean sylph darts up and down the long double helix, and the molecule is replaced by a complicated-looking machine of springs, gears and levers. “This is abstraction-level two,” says Jean.
“Run it,” says Gene.
Jean sets the big virtual DNA machine into motion, and its components shuttle this way and that, weaving tapestries that scroll out of slots all over the long machine. The glittering little images show various pictures of pieces of a bumblebee: legs, feelers, compound eyes. To make the vision all the more wondrous, many of the pictures are in fact animated; the legs, for instance, are repeatedly flexing over their entire range of motion.
“Okay, I think I see where I want to do my programming,” says Gene. “Can you raise us on up to abstraction-level four, Jean?”
“Meta meta meta,” says Jean, and now the DNA takes on the appearance of a short spindle with distorted pieces of a bumblebee set into the shape. It reminds Frank of an image he once saw of a human brain with the corresponding body parts drawn on top of it: a big tongue all across the cortex, bulging eyes on the side, tiny hands and feet. But its not just the physical parts of the bumblebee that are present in this level four view; the behaviors of the bumblebee are there too, represented as little film loops—wing-flapping is over here, flower-seeking over there, mating on this side, and so on.
“Yes,” says Gene. “Now what if I take this little ear membrane and make it bigger. No, better, I’ll cut and paste it thirty times. Snip snip snip glue glue glue, and the bumblebee has thirty ears. Wavy. And now the behavior: I’m going to make the bumblebee hate sound. But only a certain kind of sound. Electrical motors. Drop the view of the ear DNA down to level three, would you Jean?”
“Okay,” says Jean, and a graph of the ear’s stimulus-response curve appears; Gene fiddles with it to put a big hump in at the sixty-cycle-per-second frequency characteristic of electric motors.
Now Jean has a thought. “You haven’t thought about how a bumblebee is supposed to attack an electric motor, Gene. He can’t just fly in there and get squashed. We need to give him something to use to jam the motor.”
“Glue?” suggests Gene.
“Yes!” says Jean. “Remember the barnacle DNA we were looking at? And how it grows the glue glands the barnacle uses to attach itself to a rock? I’ll call up some barnacle DNA right now.”
A new level-four DNA representation appears and Jean and Gene collage a barnacle’s glue glands into their sound-hating bumblebee.
“I just thought of something else,” chortles Gene. “Let’s put Colorado River toad venom into its stinger. That stuff is supposed to be incredibly disorienting. This way if anyone tries to stop my bees, they’ll get stung and the venom will flip them out so bad that later they won’t even remember what happened. It wears off in about five minutes, I understand.”
“I like it,” says Jean with a soft chuckle. “My neighbors have a pool-pump too. Let’s just pull down your toad DNA from the Web.” Jean’s virtual shape makes some quick efficient gestures, and the toad DNA appears.
“Of course this isn’t exactly a product that Biobot is going to be able to advertise,” says Gene as he finishes editing his chimera’s genes.
“Oh, maybe Saleem will think of an innocuous way to position it,” says Jean. “He’s good at that. You’re done editing? All right, I’ll have the synthesizer fabricate two hundred of these gene strands and then we’ll put them into some living cells and grow the new—what shall we call them?”
“ShushBees?” suggests Gene.
The ShushBees, the Neatnik Bird and the FlushFish
Frank and the aliens zip forward a few weeks to find Jean and Saleem knocking on Gene’s door late one Sunday morning. Saleem has a bag of bagels, and Jean holds a little basket with a domed woven lid: a miniature bee-hive.
Gene’s house is a low beige bungalow on a hillside. And just down the slope from Gene is a sprawling long yellow house with a swimming-pool. These are Gene’s noisy neighbors. Their pool-pump is a shrill drone. Country music plays from loudspeakers by their pool. A blank-faced neighbor woman comes out of the yellow house and starts up a leaf-blower. The mechanical shriek drowns out all other sounds; the big wonderful world shrinks to shrilling point.
Figure 33: ShushBees Vs. The Leaf-Blowing Neighbor
The three Biobot scientists repair to Gene’s rickety deck, and Jean removes the lid from the little hive. Nine identically plump ShushBees stare up with their compound eyes. They’re nestled in the hive head-to-tail like a scarab bracelet. The leaf-blower screeches on, numbingly loud.
Moving in unison like aerobatic biplanes, the nine fat gene-tweaked bumblebees rise up and circle in the air. It seems as if the bees can sense the transparent little lens of the saucer which hangs above the scientists; they fly repeatedly at the saucer, only to bounce harmlessly off it. The sight of the giant bees is a bit unsettling to Frank, though the aliens seem to enjoy it. Quickly the bees give up on the slippery saucer and stream down the hill towards the noisy neighbors.
“Bagel anyone?” says Saleem.
There’s a sudden bellow from down the hill, followed by a clatter and a wild cackling. And then, blessedly, the leaf-blower stops.“One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish,” the neighbor lady is hollering over the country music and the pool-pump’s whine. Then the music stops. And then the pool-pump. It’s a lovely quiet Sunday morning in California, the air is cool as water, the sunlight’s bright and full of fun.
Jean sets a tiny saucer of honey inside the hive; six ShushBees fly back to Gene’s deck; apparently three of their number were squashed by the neighbor, or by the machinery. The survivors crawl inside their hive for breakfast.
Meanwhile the neighbor lady’s raving voice mutates into song. “Oh what a beautiful morning!” she roars. “Oh what a beautiful day! Fuck working! Wooo-ork? I’m gonna to take a swim and just lay out and relax. Yee haw!” Great splashing, more singing, and then a profound yawn as she stretches out on her chaise longue for a nap. It’s a calm, calm Sunday.
“BeeLab,” exclaims Saleem. “That’s the ticket. An experimental product with no explicit purpose. ‘Learn more about our friend the bumblebee with the Biobot BeeLab. Each BeeLab includes nine ShushBees and three easily cleaned electrical buzzers. The genetically engineered ShushBees have been designed to home in on sound sources and to jam them with a glue-like marker
substance. Warning, due to an unavoidable side-effect, the stings of the BeeLab ShushBees are causing a short-lived psychotomimetic effect. Do not attack the bees! Wear protective clothing. Do not use around unprotected individuals. Do not use in the vicinity of unpleasant noise sources belonging to other people. Biobot Inc. assumes no responsibility for improper or irresponsible use.’”
“He’s never going to get away with that,” says Frank to the aliens, and he’s right. They saucer jumps a few months into the future, and Frank finds that the Biobot BeeLab never makes it to market. While Jean is testing it, a BeeLab ShushBee stings a leaf-blowing gardener who then gets his leg broken by a passing car. Despite the toad venom, the gardener is able to remember that the ShushBee came from Jean’s balcony, and Biobot ends up having to settle with him out of court.
So the ShushBee project dies, but the silence-obsessed Gene has the idea of making Neatnik Birds and FlushFish to replace leaf-blowers and pool-pumps.
Jumping a bit further into the future at Gene’s house, the saucer is able to see a neighborhood at piece. Gene has given his downhill neighbors a Neatnik Bird, a FlushFish and a set of new uvvy receivers so that they can silently listen to their music.
Figure 34: Neatnik Bird
The Neatnik Bird obsessively hops around the neighbors’ yard, eternally gathering twigs, leaves, and trash for an ever-growing nest-mound on top of their compost heap. It’s based on a miniaturized ostrich with its nesting genes tweaked so that it always thinks it’s about to lay an egg. The FlushFish is combination of a miniature whale and a puffer fish. It floats in a corner of the neighbors’ pool sucking in water, filtering the liquid with its baleen, and spewing the water back out through a clever little blowhole.
Thanks to Biobot and their followers, the world is more and more a place of ease. Noisy machines give way to quiet animals.
Pet Dinosaurs
Frank and the aliens skip forward through time, keeping an eye on the UV broadcasts. Early in the 22nd Century, the proprietary Biobot DNA editing technology leaks out to the world at large. And pretty soon there’s a pet construction kit called Phido.
The saucer hovers at the shoulder of a twelve-year-old Black boy named Jimi. Jimi’s Dad is well-off, and Jimi has an uvvy link to a fat sluggie processor that’s been equipped with the Phido design kit. Jimi’s sister Sara is sitting next to him, wearing an uvvy and kibitzing. They’ve been educated to a fare-the-well, but Jimi likes to talk Ebonic just the same.
“They say a pit-bull be a manly dog,” says Jimi, picking an image of a sturdy bulldog-like beast.
“I want him to be purple,” says Sara, shoving in and changing the image’s color before Jimi can object.
“Thass juicy-def,” says Jimi. “But, Sara, I’m thinkin’ maybe a pit-bull be too nasty. I want me a dog I can wrassle with. I don’t want no dog gonna bite my ass.”
“Give him a beagle’s head,” suggests Sara. “Beagles are gentle.”
They try that, but the dog doesn’t look right. “He’s so ugly it hurts my hurt,” says Jimi. “But watch me work out with these go-licious Phido tools, sistah Sar’. We gonna E-volve this pooch till he be flyin’ fly.”
Jimi asks the software to do a Mutate step, and the virtual display shows nine possible variations on the purple pit-bull/beagle blend. One of them looks sleeker than the others, so Sara and Jimi pick that one, then generate nine further mutations of it, pick the best, mutate off nine more variations, and so on. Along the way they go for a longer fluffier tail. And some orange spots appear amidst the purple fur.
Once Jimi and Sara are done they send off the Grow command to a Phido-compatible incubatorium called the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm. At the farm, the custom DNA molecule will be assembled, implanted in a live cell—just about any kind of cell at all will do—and the cell will be goosed and cajoled into acting like a fertilized egg that can be grown to maturity in an amniotic bath. Of course Dad has to OK the substantial billing charge.
Frank and the aliens are there when, a few months later, the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm truck arrives with the new dog. The custom hound is quite attractive. And most friendly. The upbeat outcome is a little boring for Frank; he and the aliens circle around looking for a Phido user who’s doing something more transgressive and weird.
They light on a shy, skinny girl named Dona, aged eighteen. She has buck teeth and a big laugh; she’s obsessed with dinosaurs. Her room is full of models and images of dinos. Her pal Wyla is there with her. Cute, blonde Wyla isn’t a social reject like Dona; nevertheless she considers Dona her best friend.
“I’m figuring out how to use the Phido kit at the deepest level,” says Dona. “So I can make dinosaurs.”
“Isn’t Phido just for making dogs and cats?” asks Wyla.
“If you read way down into the help files and the source code, it turns out you can make any kind of animal with it,” says Dona. “It’s not too well documented. As if anything ever is. You’re allowed to plug in a function pointer to an arbitrary user-supplied DNA code oracle. And, get this Wyla, I just downloaded a compsognathus DNA map from the Smithsonian Institute.”
Figure 35: Dona and the Compsognathi
“Aren’t they pretty vicious?” asks Wyla.
“Well, yeah,” says Dona. “But I’m going to splice in part of a dachshund’s brain so that maybe it’ll act like a pet. Dachshund seems to fit somehow. But of course it’ll still look just like a compsognathus. All green and scaly.”
“I don’t like scaly things,” says Wyla. “I like a furry thing I can pat.”
“To each her own, kiddo,” laughs Dona.
Two months later, Frank and the aliens find Dona out in her back yard with a little flock of six compsognathi. They’re green little beasts the size of chickens. They have long necks and alert little heads. They jump up in the air a lot. Dona sets out a bowl of fresh chicken livers and the compsognathi are all over it, squealing, gobbling, and biting each other. Dona is wearing boots, glasses, heavy pants, a leather jacket, a tightly wrapped scarf, leather gloves, and a snug-fitting wool cap pulled down low over her ears. Nothing’s exposed except for the tip of her nose.
In the background Wyla lets herself in through a gate in the yard’s high fence. She has a boy in tow. He has dirty black hair and glasses.
“Hey Dona, this is Chu. I told him about your pets.”
“Be careful,” calls Dona. “They bite big-time.”
“They are so lifty!” exclaims Chu. He steps forward and one of the compsognathi leaps at him. Chuck gets his arm up in time to deflect the small dinosaur from biting his neck, but even so it makes a nasty scratch on his arm.
“Get out!” cries Dona. “It’s too dangerous.”
“We’ll wait in the house,” calls Chu. “I’ll put some skin-tape on my cut.”
Later in the house, Frank and the aliens hover there watching Chu and Dona talk. Wyla’s not around anymore. She’s brought a boy for Dona, and now she’s gotten out of the way. Frank can see out the window to the back yard where the compsognathi squawk and tussle. They’re thoroughly unpleasant little monsters.
“They’re not going to work out,” says Dona sadly. “I’m going to have to kill them. I’ll get them stuffed, maybe. They were expensive! I was greedy to get a whole half dozen of them. Maybe I can get some money for them after they’re mounted.”
“It’s a shame,” says Chu. “But, yeah, I know a place that would buy stuffed compsognathi. It’s a bar in the City. I’d like to work with you on the next round. I have some money too. There’s gotta be a way to use the Phido program’s Evolve feature to keep testing the behavior of the simulated mutants—instead of just looking at their bodies. Of course starting out with a placid, herbivorous dinosaur would make things a lot easier. A triceratops or a brontosaurus.”
“Yeah,” says Dona. “But the carnivorous ones are so much more—”
“I know,�
�� says Chu. “I know. I’ve never met a girl like you, Dona.”
The two dino geeks stare into each other’s eyes, draw closer, kiss.
“And—don’t use dachshunds!” says Chu a little later. “Whoa. Yap yap yap, bite bite bite. What were you thinking, Dona?”
“I—I guess I picked dachshunds because they’re the dogs who act the most like dinosaurs!” laughs Dona. Her cheeks are flushed and her eyes are sparkling. She looks pretty. Chu kisses her again.
Frank and the aliens skip a year forward to find Chu and Dona with a full menagerie of dinos, all of them tame as can be. There’s compsognathi, some friendly little triceratops, and a mud wallow full of sleek, green collie-sized brontosaurs. Chu has a special pet velociraptor, and Dona has a T. Rex so gentle that she that can feed it raw meat right out of her hand
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Figure 36: Frank And the Aliens Watching A Rhamphorhynchus Chasing A Cat
Needless to say, the tame dino pets are everywhere before long. A hearty roaring rises across the land. Perhaps the most striking of all are the pet pteranodons and rhamphorhynchi. These leathery-winged pterodactyls are gene-tailored so as not to exceed a wing-span of three feet, and they all have the benevolently fuzzy brains of miniature spaniels.
Frank and the saucer spend a half hour following around a rhamphorhynchus who repeatedly tries to peck a cat. Dog-brained as it is, the rhamphorhynchus always misses, and follows each miss with raucous I-coulda-had-ya squawking.
Tweaked Plants
Amparo and Jose get a Giant Beanstalk cornfield with knives. It’s good at first, then it’s sad. Rusty rattling. The dead deer.
Try again. Garlic the size of pumpkins, strawberries like red devil heads. Yes. Señor Pepita gives them a gourd seed in a pizza-box. Mexican refugees live in the gourds.