by Rudy Rucker
Joe takes a drink of the water, tastes the spinach, turns it back into ice-cream, fills his mouth with water, and squirts the water out of his mouth in a thin stream, letting the alla change the water into air. “Jerk. What we need is a way to directly copy a physical object. Instead of coding it up as a blueprint you let the object be its own description. Like making a rubbing of a gravestone. Or putting ink on a fish and using it to print a picture of its scales. Would there be any way to do this in three dimensions?”
“If we could fold a piece of space over,” muses Harry. “And then make the matter pattern soak through. Matter is really just bumps in space, you know. The old Flatland thing.” Harry draws a picture which Frank copies down.
“Strange quark matter,” says Harry, using his alla to turn the light-bulb into a malted-milk ball which he eats. “I got a rather large amount of it yesterday.”
“Lecture?” says Joe, using his alla to stir carbonation into his water.
Figure 47: Copying a Space Bump by Folding
Harry grins and begins to talk. “As I’ve mentioned to you before, ordinary matter is made of up and down quarks. There are four other, less common, kinds of quark called the strange, the charm, the top, and the bottom quarks.” With each quark name he flicks his alla and sends a bouncing little polyhedron tumbling across the tabletop. “Usually you only have three quarks in a quark-bag—remember a proton is two ups and a down, while a neutron is two downs and an up. But if you throw in other kinds of quarks, you can have as many quarks in the bag as you like. I’m using a mixture of all six kinds. This makes something that’s called strange matter. A small ball of strange matter is strangelet, and a star-sized chunk is a strange star. Each of them is just the one quark-bag, you understand.”
“Like a turkey-basting bag,” says Joe, gingerly cleaning between his teeth with his alla. “And you’re saying you’ve got the strange matter now?”
“Follow me outside,” says Harry.
Outside on the grass there is an incredibly dark-looking black disk. The whole lawn seems to sag beneath it’s weight. The disk is the size of a hockey-puck. It has an intense, plutonic aura.
Figure 48: Wave Splitter With Two Thumbs
“It’s got 1039 quarks and a mass of a billion tons,” says Harry.
“Where’d you get all that mass?”
“The Robinsons. This used to be an asteroid about one kilometer across. They wanted new allas. I sent them a quark converter and had them turn one of their neighboring asteroids into strange matter. It’s so heavy and dense that it’s pushing down with a force of—oh—ten million tons per square inch.”
“Why doesn’t it sink into the Earth?” asks Joe. “Like the tip of a high heel.”
“Ah,” says Harry happily. “Good question. The thing is, I stiffened the ground.”
“Huh?”
“I injected some fast-growing bucky-fungus into the soil. We’re standing on about an acre of the stuff by now. It fills the soil with a mycelium of super strong buckytubes. You know what mycelium is, Joe, it’s like the white webby stuff in the ground under a mushroom.”
“Whoah!” Joe steps forward and stretches out his arm as if to touch the intensely black disk. “I think I can even feel a little bit of gravitational attraction. Or—ow!” There’s a sizzling sound. Joe snatches back his hand, clutching it to his chest. “It zapped me!”
“It’s got a very big cloud of electrons,” says Harry. “You could think of it as a single giant atom. And the space distortion around it is—bizarre. I knew you’d try and touch it, Joe. Show me what it did to your hand.”
Joe gingerly uncovers his hand, still held cradled against his chest. The hand is red and sunburned-looking, but no permanent damage seems to be done—except—
“Whoah!” cries Joe. “I’ve got three thumbs!” He jerks in surprise and the extra thumb drops to the ground.
“So it even works on human flesh,” says Harry. “Thanks for testing it, Joe.”
“What happened?” Joe is anxiously rubbing his hands and staring down at the thumb on the ground. It’s twitching.
“Watch,” says Harry. He plucks a dandelion and throws it at the slug of strange matter. There’s a high, singing buzz, and two dandelions bounce off of the disk. Joe picks up the flowers and examines them, with Frank and the saucer watching over his shoulder. The blossoms are identical in every respect.
“The strange matter yanks space over itself like a chilly sleeper pulling on a blanket,” says Harry. “It makes space take a rubbing of itself, like you said. Put differently, it acts sort of like a beam-splitter; like a partially silvered mirror that reflects an image, and also passes an image through. Ordinary matter is a pattern of ripples in space, and the distortion from the strange matter is splitting these ripples in two.”
A buzzing honeybee flies at the dark disk, there’s a small pop, and two honeybees fly away.
“This isn’t exactly a consumer product like the alla,” says Joe, chewing the nail of his extra thumb. “Does it have to weigh a billion tons?”
“Yes,” says Harry. “In fact it should weigh a lot more if I’m ever going to 3ox something big. Smaller masses don’t affect a big enough region of space. And, you know, even these billion tons aren’t going to last forever. Every time it copies something it loses an equivalent amount of mass. And whenever there’s a breeze, it’s copying air.” He looks around. “I’m going to grow a dome over this piece of lawn today and start charging people to use this thing before it melts.”
Cloning Collectibles
Frank and the aliens jump a few months further into the third millennium, scanning the UV signals for someone talking about using 3ox technology. They hit upon a solitary, yellow-skinned dweeb.
His name is Pol. He has pursed self-indulgent lips like a fat lady, a raggedy beard, long greasy hair, and a white shirt. He is sitting in his home, which is seemingly grown from a fungal puffball. The walls are lined with mushroom-gill shelves, and the shelves are laden with hundreds of little porcelain figurines—Disney characters, Hummel figurines, Kincaid houses—antiques with their colors faded to shades of beige and gray. Pol is examining an ancient paper book on figurines. The illustrations in the book are small and musty, page after page of them. Pol keeps turning back to a picture of a statuette of a bearded little man called Hermit Huck. A Gerard Walloon original. For whatever reason, Pol has got to have this statuette.
He uses his uvvy to call the dealer, a slippery woman named Lona. “Hi Lona,” drones Pol. The simultaneous translation gives him a reedy, monotone voice. “I really must acquire a Hermit Huck. I have three other pieces by Walloon, you know. The Cork-Soaker, the Sock-Tucker, and the Mortar-Forker. Hermit Huck will add a new tone.”
“There’s only one original Hermit Huck in existence,” says Lona. She has hollow cheeks, black lips, and her ears are coated with glued-on diamonds. She lives in a big gold-filigreed barnacle shell on a cliff overlooking the Golden Gate. “Since you’re such a good customer, I can get you a deal. With my brokering fee it would come to just under twelve thousand glorks.”
“That’s—that’s impossible,” protests Pol. “That’s more money than I paid for my whole collection.”
“Hermit Huck is one of a kind,” repeats Lona. “Would you settle for a reproduction?”
“What do you think I am,” splutters Pol. “An amateur?”
“I’m talking about a femtotechnological quark-for-quark 3ox copy,” says Lona. “All the weathering, the patina, the glaze chemistry—the whole thing will be there. 3ox is the latest technique. There is absolutely no difference between the copy and the original—in fact there’s no way to tell which is which. In fact it’s debatable if there even is a difference. We dealers have agreed, however, to always pick one of the pair and fungus-tag it as being a copy, so that we don’t get an explosion of originals. You’ll get the fungus-tagged one, of course. But none of
your friends needs to know. And, though I wouldn’t tell this to anyone but you, Pol, you can remove a fungus-tag with the right kind of retro-virus.”
“And the price?”
“I’ll have to talk it over with the present Hermit Huck owner. But I think we can agree on something reasonable. Perhaps eighty glorks. And, Pol, you’ll be able to recover some of that money by 3oxing off second-generation copies of your Hermit Huck. They’ll still be perfect.”
“This is going to destroy collecting,” says Pol.
“It’s happening, baby,” says Lona. “So why not get on it early. In fact I’d like to 3ox your Three Caballeros salt and pepper shakers for a client in the East Bay.”
“So be it,” says Pol. “Where should I meet you?”
“At Femtotechnology Unlimited,” says Lona. “They’ve got the 3ox disks in a bunch of domes there.”
Matter Maps
So Frank and the alien saucer follow Lona and Pol back to Femtotechnology Unlimited. There are six domes beside the main building now, each dome bigger than the one before. Smart dog-sized sluggies patrol the grounds, encouraging people to stay in orderly lines. Each person carries some treasured item, and the sluggies direct people to the dome with the proper-sized 3ox disk.
It seems odd to Frank, this far into the future, to see people physically carrying things around. Objects are so atavistic. Some customers have antiques and collectibles that they want 3oxed, others have brought beloved pets, and still others are there to get their children or even themselves copied.
The astounded Frank watches as a wealthy old man leaps at a trillion-ton manhole-cover of strange matter. He holds his nose as if he’s jumping into a well. The disk makes a sharp crackle like a bug-zapper, and two half-as-wealthy old men come bouncing off. Just like Lona said, the transformation happens so smoothly that it’s impossible to say which is the original.
Figure 49: Man Getting Twinned
“I wonder what that’s like for him?” says Frank.
“It’s very consciousness-expanding,” says Steffi. “To have multiple bodies—it makes you realize very clearly that the cosmos is filled with one great Mind which is God. As it happens, two of my shipmates are identical to me. Lalla? Henny?” Two pieces of rope rear up next to Steffi, and the three of them sway back and forth as one.
“Can we follow that old man home?” asks Frank. The idea of following someone home makes him suddenly remember that he still hasn’t asked the aliens to help him escape from the cops. “Oh, but there’s something else I need to ask you about, too.”
“What is that?” says Steffi.
“When we’re done finding out about femtotechnology, could you set me back at a different place from where you picked me up?”
“Why? It would be confusing for your fellow Earthlings.”
“The cops are after me.” He gets out the Saucer Wisdom manuscript again. “I stole this from Rudy, you see. I’m afraid that if I go back to the Santa Cruz mountains I’ll get arrested before I can patch things up with him.”
“You want to return to a different location but on the same planet?”
“Yes. I thought—why not Mount Rushmore? It’s in South Dakota. I’ve always wanted visit there.”
“It would cost us quite a bit of energy,” says Steffi, after peering into Frank’s brain for details. “But I suppose we could do it. Be warned that if we leave you at a different space location, there will be a time difference as well. It won’t be like your other saucer excursions. You won’t come back at the same instant where you left.”
“Nobody’s going to notice anyway,” says Frank, cavalierly assuming that Steffi is talking about an interval equivalent to the time it might take to fly from California to South Dakota. “So that’ll be fine. Thank you. Can we follow that old man now?”
“I think I’d rather finish our initial line of investigation,” says Steffi primly. “We were trying to find out if humans will fully master femtotechnology.”
“This is getting too confused for me,” protests Frank. “First there was the alla, and that can make pretty much any kind of simple stuff you want. And then the Robinsons were using software descriptions to create DNA that they put into cells from their mouths that grew into plants and animals. And now there’s the 3ox disks and they’re like physically cloning people. It’s too many different things. And you want to show me more? Maybe you should just take me to Mount Rushmore right now.”
“No,” says Steffi. “We want to see how this comes out. And you have to help. We’re not good at finding the interesting moments without you.”
So they skip through the next year or so at Femtotechnology Unlimited, and finally they focus upon a Burmese woman named Lulu Ma who makes the breakthrough discovery. Frank recognizes her from an earlier saucer trip; Herman once took him to Lulu’s home lab and he watched Lulu using the alla to make part of a snake.
“It’s in the sizzle,” Lulu is telling Harry and Joe. She and the two men are on a kind of wooden shuffleboard court in a filigreed alla-made ivory building behind the 3ox domes of Femtotechnology Unlimited. It’s an employee recreation area. Each of them has an alla at the end of a long stick, and they’re sliding odd things around on the floor.
“When something bounces off the 3ox disks,” continues Lulu, “there’s a burst of sound and a chirp of what I initially took to be electromagnetic radiation. But it turns out that the chirp has a very extensive Hilbert space spectrum. Although the chirp has a superficial resemblance to, say, a megahertz uvvy signal, if you run it through a Twistermann-Levy dimensional analyzer, you discover that its higher dimensional components are carrying information in the eight yottahertz range. A yottabyte of information per second, in other words.”
Figure 50: Lulu And Her Wand
“Yottabyte,” murmurs Joe. “That’s the information capacity of a human body. Septillions.”
Lulu grins, waves both hands upwards dramatically, and forges on. “And what kind of information is the chirp carrying? Exactly what one would hope. A matter map. The entire information of the object being duplicated is in the yottahertz Hilbert chirp. It’s a holographic matter map, accurate down to the subquark scale. These are my observations. And to cap the discovery, I’ve found a way to use compression technology to save the chirp as a tidy little file that I can play back through my alla. My magic wand.” Lulu sweeps her alla-ended shuffle-board stick and a chain of little animals appears—snakes, mice, birds, lizards.
“The Holy Grail,” says Harry softly.
“Anything’s possible now,” continues Lulu. She poises her alla-wand , makes a dramatic gesture—and a plump white baby boy appears on the floor, kicking and cooing. “I saved his matter map from when a woman copied him last week. Her name was Maria.”
“Oh, wow,” says Joe. “Are we stuck with that baby now? Who’s going to take care of him?”
“Don’t worry,” says Lulu, scooping up the baby and jouncing it cozily. “I told Maria I was going to try making another copy and she said that if it worked, she wanted him.”
“This is going to change everything,” says Harry.
Mount Rushmore
“He’s right,” says Steffi. “Though they don’t realize it yet, they’re on the way to personality waves. First they’ll need to figure out how to get the matter-map without having to 3ox the object. And then they’ll need to find the way to code the map into a higher-dimensional electromagnetic wave that can reconstitute itself without an alla. So they can draw the necessary mass right out of the higher-dimensional aether. That’s what we do, anyhow. Shall we push on into the future and find out if the humans will succeed? Probably by the mid-4000s would do. Help us tune in on it, Frank.”
Frank balks. The thought of going so very far into the future makes him sick with fear. He makes his mind as blank and unhelpful as he can, meanwhile begging at the top of his lungs. “Please ta
ke me back! And remember, I can’t go back to California, because the cops are after me. Drop me at Mount Rushmore!”
The saucer bucks and yaws, working its way back to the 1990s. Now Frank sees the good old San Jose airport down below, dry and shimmery beneath the beating sun. An airplane hangs in the air near them, static in frozen time.
“Hang on,” says Steffi, and all of a sudden the airplane roars towards them, the pilot’s face a mask of terror. The saucer—it’s a big bright dragon again—makes a brisk whizzing noise and takes off for the east, shooting across the High Sierras, the wastelands of Nevada, the flats of Utah, the rolling ranges of Wyoming, and the wooded Black Hills of South Dakota. The landscape flickers stroboscopically as they move; it’s hard for Frank to decide if it’s day or night. He can’t seem to locate the sun. Now they’re coming down on Mount Rushmore, a white granite outcrop amidst a pine forest. The park service has built an elaborate reception center for the great carved cliffs. It’s definitely daytime all of a sudden, and people are all around, but they people are like frozen statues—because the saucer’s switched back to perpendicular time.
The next thing Frank knows he’s been set down inside an empty men’s room next to the snack bar. He sags against the sink, then starts washing his face. The door opens and another man comes in.
“Excuse me! You forgot to turn the lock.”
“That’s okay,” says Frank. “I’m done in here.” He dries his face and exits to the snack bar. There’s a great horde of tourists.
Frank picks up a free pamphlet guide to the Black Hills of South Dakota, and gets himself an enormous vanilla ice-cream cone. He goes and sits outside, eating his cone and staring at the distant stone heads of the presidents. Washington, Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, and Lincoln. The heads aren’t as big as he’d expected. What’s Teddy Roosevelt doing up there, anyway? Frank formed a lasting dislike for the guy in his tedious grade-school history classes.