by Rudy Rucker
So on Saturday, June 14, 1997, Frank Shook and I slowly walked the Red Beds Trail, frequently pausing to sit and stare up at the great stone shape. And all the while we discussed Frank’s notes on femtotechnology.
It had been one year of his time since Frank had taken these notes, so it took him a while to get going. And it had been three years of my time since I’d last been with Frank, so it took me a few tries to get back my old rhythm of questioning him. I had to jog his memory quite a bit. But in the end, the information flowed as freely and as entertainingly as ever.
Matter Transmutation
Woke up at Peggy’s, read Saucer Wisdom, it’s tremendous! But the cops are coming. I’ll get the aliens to take me far away. Mount Rushmore, South Dakota!
Peggy calls a dragon-saucer. Purple reading light. They like Saucer Wisdom. Steffi is a big pile of rope. Femtotechnology built the alla. The ultimate knapsack for the third Millennium. Rust and Biit take it camping. Steffi fakes their voices for me.
Femtotechnology Unlimited founded by Professor Harry and Surfer Joe. They flip quarks to transmute matter.
The families Robinson in the asteroid. Allas hollow it out. A pond in each end, how nicely they jiggle. Software is your uvvy, hardware is your alla, wetware is your body. An ark from your mouth.
The Rope Aliens
On Friday, July 1, 1994, Frank wakes up on the floor of Peggy Sung’s trailer. He’s stiff and sore, feeling foggy, and then he notices the stolen computer on the floor next to him. “Oh shit!”
Peggy hears him and comes in from her bedroom. She’s wearing jogging clothes as usual. “I ready print out Saucer Wisdom file now,” she says. “Then you can give back Rudy Rucker his computer system. I no like to have stolen property here.”
So they print out the Saucer Wisdom manuscript, which is a rough-draft version of most of the material in Chapters One through Seven. And they sit there in plastic lawn chairs next to the trailer, under the redwoods, drinking coffee and reading.
Frank is relieved to find the book not nearly as insulting as he’d feared. The only things that particularly rankle are where in Chapter One it has something about “the termites that live in his gunjy saucer-nut brain,” and the reference at the end of Chapter Five to “Frank’s evident mental instability.” He really likes the write-ups of his saucer visions.
Peggy doesn’t like the Saucer Wisdom manuscript, and she’s voluble in her criticism. She finds the approach too science-and-technology oriented. She’d prefer to see the saucer beings discussed as cosmic spirits, rather than as traveling aliens. Also she doesn’t like the tone; she feels a book of this nature ought to be more serious. The curse words shouldn’t be there, for one thing. And furthermore she’s not so sure it’s all right for the book to be mentioning her—but Frank repeats his promise to give her half of whatever money the book earns him.
Around then Spun and Guster stop by to say hello. “You boys very nice to keep an eye on Frank for me,” says Peggy. “I glad you bring him here with Rudy Rucker computer system so I know what is going on.” She gives them each fifteen dollars and they’re off on their merry way.
“You’ve been paying them to spy on me?” demands Frank.
“Yes,” says Peggy Sung. “But it a big waste of money. What Rudy Rucker write—I very disappoint. This book never publish.”
It’s nearly noon by now, and the phone rings. Peggy picks up the portable handset she has resting by her chair.
“Hello, Mary. Yes, Frank here, he spend night. No way! On my floor. Yes, he have. Cops coming? Oh goddamn hell!” She throws down the phone and runs for the trailer. “Hurry up, Frank! We hide the computer system and you run into woods! Cops coming here!”
Frank snatches up the pages of the manuscript, folds the whole thing in thirds and stuffs it into the back pocket of his jeans. And then Frank and Peggy wrestle the pieces of the computer into the hidey-hole which Peggy has under her rug. Frank lurks in the woods behind Peggy’s house for the rest of the afternoon, but the cops don’t come. Finally around dusk he skulks back down.
“You can’t stay here no more,” Peggy tells Frank.
“Don’t worry,” says Frank. “I have a plan. The saucer can take me away. Just let me use your rig. I’ll have the aliens put me back somewhere else. Somewhere far away.”
“You think they can do?” asks Peggy.
“I bet they can,” says Frank, turning on the TVs and the cameras. “I’m ready to try.”
“Let me handle the controls,” says Peggy, taking the hand-held camera from Frank. “I no want you screw up my system. You sit here and stare at screen and wait for cosmic spirits. I stand behind you.”
“You mean, ‘wait for saucer aliens,’” says Frank. “Because that’s what they are.”
“I hope they take you away and we don’t have to argue anymore,” says Peggy, twitching the camera this way and that.
As Peggy works the controls, a green and yellow knot of spirals appears on the TV screens. The thing looks like—like a dragon. It folds back on itself once, twice, three times, and then somehow it lifts itself out of the central screen.
And now, though Frank hates to admit it, there’s a Chinese dragon floating towards him. Its body is made up of bright wire-frame lines just like the saucer visions, but instead of being a nice clean lens-shape, this baby is a snaky scaly pop-eyed curvy-clawed triple-happiness golden-luck dragon.
“He coming eat you now Frank,” whispers Peggy over his shoulder. “Good-bye.”
Figure 42: Dragon-Saucer Coming Out Of Peggy’s TVs
Tossing its head like a prancing pony, the dragon surges forward, mouth agape. It’s bright lines surround Frank and he feels like he’s inside a fireworks display with bright tracers shooting every which way around him. And then there’s a lurching sensation and he’s sitting on an amorphous black bench in a round little room with a transparent floor—just like all the other times the aliens have picked him up. Peggy Sung may have made the craft look like a dragon, but really it’s a saucer.
Looking down through the floor, Frank sees Peggy Sung’s trailer receding below. They’re flying up through the redwoods, up into the sky. The dragon-saucer slopes across the sky and settles into hovering at the familiar location above the San Jose airport.
“Herman?” calls Frank. He has the usual sensation that the aliens are watching him from behind. He whirls around a few times, but no spatial acrobatic he can perform is going to bring the aliens into view. “Let me see you!” Frank calls.
A sudden blast of pain fills Frank’s head as a higher-dimensional control beam pokes at his brain. Zzzzt-zzzzt-zzzzt!
“Ow!” cries Frank. “Don’t do that! I’m not some regular goob who’s just here to get a hand-job and to be lectured about ecology! Ow ow ow! Stop it! I’m Frank Shook!” He fumbles the folded manuscript out of his hip pocket and holds it up high. “I’m writing a book about you guys to educate the Earthlings! Saucer Wisdom! Check it out!”
Figure 43: The Rope Aliens
The etching-ray becomes a shaft of pale purple laser light. The light busily scans over Frank’s wad of papers, penetrating the sheets to read every page at once. There’s a thoughtful pause and then Frank has a sense of being rotated, as if he’s a show-car on a dias. Slowly the aliens come into view.
They look like a pile of rope—thick, oily, multiple-strand manila rope with a half dozen loose ends raised up like watchful cobra heads.
“Rope?” says one of the heads, reading Frank’s mind. “An all-purpose tool of physical connection and force-transmission!” And then it laughs, a thin little laugh like an old witch in a German fairy-tale. “Hi hi hi hi!”
“Where are you from?” asks Frank.
“We’re from what you would call the Andromeda galaxy, Frank Shook,” says the high-voiced rope end. “A wetware planet called d.” The glyph-image is like a ball of twine, like a
can of worms. “My name is—oh, call me Steffi.”
“You’re a woman?” says Frank.
“No,” says Steffi. “I’m a live piece of rope from d!”
The other pieces of rope flail around in mirth at this zinger, letting out a big chorus of, “Hi hi hi hi!”
“But, yes, you can think of me as a she,” continues Steffi. “And, oh gnarly-brained Frank Shook, we think it will be amusing to continue your work on the Saucer Wisdom notes. So I ask what aspect of the future you want to investigate next?”
“I’d like to find out about future physics,” says Frank. “There’s this word I heard when Herman showed me some people in the early 31st Century. ‘Femtotechnology.’ I want to find out what that is.”
“We can research that,” says Steffi. “Although I am already guessing that your ‘femtotechnology’ is what we on d call ‘direct matter control’. Let’s do like your friend Herman from S; let’s skim through future UV signals and scan for the target word.”
“There’s one problem,” says Frank. “When I go really far into the future I can’t understand the way people speak.”
“Oh, then Herman must not have been very good at neurolinguistics,” says Steffi. “I can easily improve upon the interface. We d citizens specialize in communication. Like you say, we’re ropes that tie things together! Can you give me some mental models of how you like people to speak?”
Frank thinks of himself talking, he thinks of Rudy, he thinks of his wife, he thinks of a surfer friend of his called Wet Willie, he thinks of people on television. Steffi listens to Frank’s mental simulations for a few minutes and then she’s got them down cold.
“All set?” says Steffi.
“Sure,” says Frank. “Let’s do it.”
Frank would like to bring up the fact that he doesn’t want the dragon-saucer to return him to Peggy Sung’s near Benton in the Santa Cruz Mountains on Friday, July 1, 1994. But just for now he’s too shy to ask. He’s scared that if he pushes for too much at once, Steffi and the other rope-aliens might start etching him again. He figures he can always ask later.
The Alla
They make a big jump into the future, a thousand and ten years—to 3002. And the first mention of ‘femtotechnology’ which they find is in a futuristic UV ad for something called an alla.
The alla ad is a completely immersive and interactive virtual reality. For Frank, mentally flying around inside the ad feels just like using the saucer to fly around inside a real-time scene.
Figure 44: The Alla
Two men are out hiking in the Santa Lucia Mountains above Big Sur. Their names are Rust and Biit. Their clothes are plant-woven cotton, with muted cellular automata patterns. The sun is gorgeously setting above the foggy, wrinkled sea.
“Okay, Rust,” says Biit. “Time to explain. You said you were bringing all our camping supplies, but you don’t have a knapsack.”
“I’m going to use my Femtotechnology Unlimited alla!” says Rust, drawing something out of his pocket. “The alla can make most anything!”
Thanks to Steffi’s seamless subliminal interpretation, it sounds like they’re talking 1990s English, a rather bland TV-commercial kind of English at that.
Frank’s attention zeroes in on the object in Rust’s hand. It’s a lumpy little thing, about the size of a golf-ball, encased in what looks like green suede leather. Rust makes a coaxing noise with his lips, a kind of smeep-smeep sound, and the green “leather” case separates itself from the object and crawls up his arm to perch itself on the back of his neck. The alla-case is, it seems, a piezoplastic sluggie which is also a uvvy. But what of the alla itself?
The business end of the alla is a solid-looking little object made of a tough shiny metal. This object’s shape is that of a tri-bar, that is, it’s three short metallic rods which meet at right angles like the corner lines of a room. The little rods are of slightly unequal lengths, and set into each rod’s flat end is glittering little lens. Attached to the corner of the alla is a contoured hand-grip a few inches long.
Unlike all the piezoplastic and biotechnological things Frank’s been seeing in the other saucer visions, the alla appears refreshingly hard and angular. It’s a piece of masculine fetish technology if you will, like an old-time fountain pen or pocket camera or ultra-light computer.
“What’s it do?” asks Biit.
“It makes stuff,” says Rust. “Whatever I think of.”
“Then how about some dinner,” says Biit. “And something soft to sleep on. And some protection against the cold.”
“Check this out,” says Rust, holding the alla by its grip. Sudden bright lines shoot out of the alla’s three blunt metallic rods. The lines are laser-straight, but they’re not beams of light, because they go out only a few inches and then they make right-angle turns, growing and turning until there is bright-edged box of space enclosed by the lines. The region is about the size of a large beer-mug.
“Dinner,” says Rust holding the alla down near the ground. The space inside the bright box begins to glow. A web of dark lines and surfaces appears in the region, dividing the space up into cellular blocks. The lines warp and buck, subdividing the blocks into smaller cells that break up and divide again and again. There’s a whooshing sound and a perceptible breeze as air flows into the alla, feeding in mass for the matter transmutation. The space-patterning grows thick as taffy, opaque and shiny. And then the bright box-lines disappear and a rectangular cup plops down out of the box onto the ground. The cup is shiny yellow metal, and its filled with a hot, fragrant broth. The radiotelepathic ad includes smells, and Frank’s mouth waters at the rich aroma.
“Mmmm!” exclaims virtual Biit, flaring his nostrils. Rust brandishes the alla and produces a second cup like the first.
“These mugs are an alloy of silver, platinum and gold,” says Rust, tapping one of them. “And the soup contains a complete assortment of human nutrients. I’ll make the beds and the covers while our supper cools.”
Rust critically eyes the surrounding terrain, then settles on a spot and kneels down. He holds the alla with two of its little rods horizontal and one rod pointing straight down. A bright pair of three foot by seven foot rectangles spring out of the alla, making a horizontal slab four inches thick. Rust jiggles it like a giant frying-pan, then lowers the wire-frame slab so that its bottom rectangle is buried in the dirt and the top rectangle lies evenly with the ground. The rocky dirt inside the bright surface rectangle turns clear yet lumpy—the box looks like a shallow stream flowing over an uneven bed. A shoal of vortices thickens the material, spinning off smaller vortices like fleas jumping off fleas. Each level of smaller vortex-fleas is duskier the level before, and then the box-lines wink off and the slab is—
“Like foam rubber!” exclaims Biit, feeling the transformed patch of ground.
Rust quickly fabricates a second rubbery mat next to the first. The sun is fading and the air’s getting cold. “Bring the soup over here, Biit,” says Rust, and poses grinning with the alla held high over his head like a sword. Like the blade of a sword, the bright-line alla-box is long and thin. Rust makes several passes with the light-sword, and downy silken blankets fall from the air in its wake—followed by waterproof ponchos.
“Wow,” says Biit, as the two sit on their comfortable beds slurping their soup, with soft blankets and ponchos wrapped around them. “You rule, Rust. You’re king!”
“Me and my alla,” says Rust, holding the grip so that the bright-line box appears right in front of him. He smiles through the box, and then he digs it into the ground in front of the mats and a tiny campfire appears in a tidy stone pit.
Flickering above the fire is a link to Femtotechnology Unlimited for information on how to order an alla.
Femtotechnology Unlimited
“Let’s go back in time and find the start of Femtotechnology Unlimited,” says Frank, and Steffi readily a
grees. Like the other aliens before her, she enjoys using Frank as a native guide for seeking out stimulating bits of humanity’s future history.
Early in the year 3001, they find the Femtotechnology founder, a dumpy guy with thick lips and a slobbering way of talking. He’s telling his plans to a tall skinny assistant who has a little tuft of curly hair. For the moment, Steffi leaves their voices untranslated, and Frank can’t even tell where one word ends and the next one begins.
“Make them sound like scientists and surfers this time,” suggests Frank. “Like a combination of Rudy Rucker and Wet Willie.”
“Fine,” says Steffi. “Their names are Harry and Joe.”
“We’re going to invent femtotechnology now,” sloppy Harry is saying. “To make a long story short.”
“Say what?” says curly-top Joe.
“I’ll explain it again,” says Harry. “First of all, here’s the official prefixes for small numbers.” A radiotelepathically projected chart appears in the minds of Harry, Joe, and the eavesdropping Frank.
Name
Numerical Symbol
Prefix
Thousandth
0.001
Milli-
Millionth
0.000001
Micro-
Billionth
0.000000001
Nano-
Trillionth
0.000000000001
Pico-
Quadrillionth
0.000000000000001
Femto-