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

by Rudy Rucker

  As they work, there is a ringing sound and the face of a young man appears on a view screen. “May I speak to my father?” His voice is cold and snobby.

  “Of course, Mr. Sloane,” says Carol, with a knowing wink at Dieu. She patches the S-cube into the uvvy call, and now Mr. Sloane’s life-box begins carrying on a conversation with his son.

  “How are you feeling, Dad?” says the son. “I wish you’d let me come by and visit.”

  Next, Carol attaches the S-cube to a large, hood-like uvvy which she slips over the clone’s head. The seconds tick by. Carol does something else to the S-cube, and now a twitching starts down in the clone’s toes and travels up his body. The clones legs tremble as if marching in place; his fingers began to flutter. Another couple of seconds elapse, and now the clone abruptly sits up and pulls the uvvy hood off his head.

  “I’m back!” exults the clone. The timbre of his voice is just the same as the old man’s had been.

  “Do you want to tell Brett the bad news?” says Carol.

  “I—” The Sloane clone pauses, staring off into the air. “I’ve just been with God, Carol.”

  “Sir?”

  “God is love. And I’m alive again. Why should I further torture my poor son?”

  “Mr. Sloane,” puts in Dieu, “If you don’t mind my saying so, your son Brett is a jerk. He doesn’t deserve anything from you.”

  “Yes and no, Dieu,” says the clone. “Yes, he’s a jerk, but he exactly deserves everything I have. Maybe it’s a reward—or maybe it’s a punishment. Just go ahead and tell him old Mr. Sloane is dead. Me—I’m taking off to bum around the world. I don’t need any money. I’m young and strong, with a lifetime’s wisdom. More than a lifetime.”

  The Sloane clone pulls on the clothes they’ve laid out for him and walks across the lab. He stops at the door and glances back. “Carol. Want to come along?”

  “Cut!” chuckles Balaam and skips out into paratime.

  Shekk’s Ohmies

  “As you just saw,” says Perl. “The 24th Century cloning process had certain imperfections. One, a person had to die in order to get their memory molecules properly extracted, and, two, even then the clone’s behavior was not reliably similar to the anticipated outcome. By the 26th Century the situation was somewhat improved. Inevitably the life-box technology got better. And people found a fairly crude biotech method of synthesizing the memory molecules. Creating programmed clones of oneself became quite the rage. People called the programmed clones ohmies, though I’m not sure why.”

  “It stood for ‘other me,’” says Goola. “Perl’s going to show us some of the ohmies right now, Frank. I’ve always heard they weren’t very vibrant. And that the second and higher-level ohmies were even more zombie-like.”

  “Well I’m not surprised,” says Balaam. “Those pre-femtotechnology times were so squalid, so barbaric. Have you scanned Shekk yet, Perl?”

  While Perl scans, Goola is busy leaning over Frank’s lap to look at his note-pad. “Those marks Frank makes on his paper are to help him remember things, right Frank?” she says. “I think it’s delicious to be so archaic!”

  Right about then Perl finds what he’s looking for.

  The saucer zooms in on a 26th Century man named Boba Shekk. Boba Shekk is an unkempt fellow with a big nose, prominent wrinkles, thinning hair and blemished skin. The one attractive thing about him is his broad, slightly deranged smile, not that he smiles very often. As Frank and the saucerians tune in on him, he’s engaged in a business call through his uvvy. As usual, the saucerians are translating the future voices into an appropriate-seeming idiom of 20th Century English.

  “I’m working as fast as I can, Manny,” Shekk wheedles. “The hurrieder I go, the behinder I get!”

  “Boba, Boba, Boba. You’re contracted to deliver me the pilot for My Mermaid by next week. And now I’m hearing you’re not outta life-box devo yet? And, excuse me if I heard you wrong, but you say you want two more months? You think Hyenadon Productions is maybe a foundation for the nurture of great artists?”

  “My special touch, it takes time,” snaps Shekk. “If you want the hurry-up garbage, then go to some schlock crafter who’s gonna use off-the-shelf life-boxes for his simmie actors. But if you want a show that’s gonna connect to people’s hearts, if you want a hit, then you gotta let Boba Shekk craft you some real characters to carry the plot.”

  “Six months of character crafting already?”

  “The public only sees one-tenth of the ice-berg, Manny. For my characters to sing, they gotta have the life experiences, the quirks, the personal anecdotes. It takes gold to make gold.”

  “I’m giving you three more weeks, Boba, and then I’m gonna pull the plug. In fact I’m gonna call Schneidermann and get him to start work on a back-up pilot for My Mermaid today. You’re not ready in three weeks, we go with Schneidermann. It’s your call, big boy.” Manny closes the connection.

  Boba Shekk slumps in the chair niche of his grown home, rubbing his temples. His partner enters the room. She’s a Japanese woman with animated green and purple hair that echoes her motions with graceful swirls.

  “I’m losing it, Etsuko,” says Boba Shekk. “The ideas aren’t coming. I’m trying to craft as if it doesn’t matter, to just put down anything, but even that’s not working. I’m gonna lose this gig.”

  Figure 56: Boba Sneezing On His Ohmies

  “Why not get yourself a couple of ohmies to help you?” says Etsuko. “We could afford it, just barely. It’s a risk, but it could be a powerful investment. I can’t stand to see you so unhappy.”

  So Boba Shekk makes an uvvy call and orders up two ohmies, biological tank-grown clones of himself that will arrive already programmed with Shekk’s massively detailed life-box file.

  Balaam skips them forward a week, which is all the time it takes in 26th Century to force-grow a clone to full adulthood. Frank and the saucerians find Boba Shekk treating the still unconscious ohmies with his synthesized memory molecules. It’s a strange procedure.

  Shekk has a red nose and keeps sniffling. Etsuko is watching him from across the round wooden room. She’s wearing a complicated biological filtration mask. The two ohmies, who look exactly like Boba Shekk, are laid out on the floor side by side, still unconscious, still wrapped in the pale blue cloths they came in.

  “What if the prions linger?” says Etsuko, her voice muffled from behind the mask.

  “They won’t,” replies Shekk. “The prions are tailored to last no longer than about fifteen minutes. Their gene ends break off extra fast or something.” His voice is manic with excitement. He checks the time. “Okay, it’s been ten minutes since I infected myself. Meanwhile the prions have been through thousands of generations and they’ve started mimicking my memory molecules. All I gotta do to finish programming these handsome ohmies is to sneeze on them. And here it comes.”

  Boba Shekk leans over the sleeping clones, wildly sneezing. Aboard the saucer, Goola, Perl and Balaam exclaim in disgust. Meanwhile the clones continue their slow deep respiration, breathing in untold numbers of Shekk droplets.

  “Your personality is like a disease they’re catching?” says Etsuko. “Your memories? What if you went out into a crowd?”

  “It would be a beautiful thing, wouldn’t it,” grins Shekk, loudly blowing his nose. “Gesundheit, baby.”

  In another five minutes the memory prions have died off and Boba Shekk’s nose stops running. But Etsuko’s loath to take off her mask.

  “You’re gonna scare them wearing that thing,” says Shekk. “I’m about to wake them up.”

  “I’m not taking off the mask till tomorrow, Boba,” says Etsuko. “If you can handle it, so can your ohmies.”

  So depleted is Boba Shek’s imagination that he names his ohmies Mark and John. They’re a bit soft and unformed looking, like people who’ve recently spent time in an institutio
n. But Boba Shekk likes them a lot; he spends the rest of the day kickin’ with his ohmies.

  The saucer skips forward a few days, and it’s evident that the clone-programming process has worked really well. The ohmies are hard-working crafters just like Boba Shekk at his best. They have lots of ideas, but not quite the same ideas as Boba would have had.

  “Thought is so chaotic that even the slightest differences in initial conditions send us off on different trajectories,” Shekk muses to Mark and John. “It’s a wonderful thing. Let’s all take a little stroll, each in a different direction, and get back together with our ideas for My Mermaid in an hour or so. I’m sure we’ll all come back at the same time anyway.”

  The saucer skims along in fast forward, watching. Boba is totally accepting of what his ohmies do. There’s no sense of competition. There’s complete unanimity. And there’s no financial problems, as Mark and John live with Boba and share all income. The ohmies get their own female partners, Japanese women just like Etsuko, and they add two more house domes to the Shekk compound. Everyone swaps partners freely. It’s the perfect idyllic commune.

  “But now they’ll start fighting,” says Perl. “That’s the way it always happened with people and their ohmies.”

  The saucer jumps a little further, and now Boba is telling Etsuko, “More and more I feel like there’s something fundamentally bogus about the crafting that Marc and John do. They’re superficial. Inauthentic. Not real. Not true.”

  “But Hyenadon likes the new stuff a lot,” says Etsuko. “My Mermaid is a major hit. Manny’s offering you better and better deals.”

  “I don’t care, I want to get rid of the ohmies.”

  “You’re not getting rid of John. No way. He’s more of a man than you’ll ever be.”

  When Frank and the saucerians check a few months later, they find that John is the king-pin at the Shekk compound. The three women are spending most of their time in his dome, and John rarely uses any of Boba’s ideas for the shows he’s crafting. As the ultimate indignity, John has started insisting that he’s the original womb-born Shekk in the group, and that Boba and Mark are his ohmies. Perversely, Mark agrees.

  A year later, Boba starts believing it too.

  The Ang Ous

  “Onward to the Third Millennium,” says Perl. “The age of femtotechnology at last.”

  “I saw some of that on my last trip,” Frank says. “I saw about Femtotechnology Unlimited and how they were using big heavy disks of strange matter to make perfect femtoclones of things. Of people, too. And then this woman named, um, Lulu Ma found a way to do it with software or something. It was confusing.”

  “I’ll try and make it simple for you,” says Perl. “I’ll go on up into the 35th Century, when the alla and femtocloning technology is quite well established. The copies are completely exact. Eidetic.”

  “Show him the thousand Ang Ous,” suggests Goola. “That was a key turning point.”

  “Perl’s on it, love,” says Balaam.

  The saucer zeroes in on building like a honeycomb, down near the waters of the San Francisco Bay. There’s a crowd of angry people outside the building. Glaring out of the building’s windows are hundreds upon hundreds of identical orange-skinned men, each of the men with the same bowl haircut, each with the same lime-green shirt, each with a thin, wispy mustache. Someone in the crowd yells something unpleasant, and each and every one of the men in the windows shakes his fist. Their raised arms moving in unison like the bows in the violin section of an orchestra.

  “Those are the thousand Ang Ous,” says Perl.

  “Which one is the real him?” asks Frank.

  “They’re all equally real,” says Perl. “That’s the thing about femtocloning. There’s no difference, even in principle, between a thing and its femtoclone. Femtocloning specifies an individual’s information so exhaustively that the copy is the same as the original. It’s just like the way that any two oxygen atoms are the same: once you say ‘eight protons, eight neutrons, and sixteen electrons,’ you’ve said it all. That’s how it is with the femtotech description of an Ang Ou.”

  “But doesn’t the original one know?” says Frank.

  “Frank won’t understand till we tune in on Ang himself,” says Goola. “Take us closer, Balaam.”

  The saucer goes into Ang Ou’s building, an organically grown structure with long, thin rooms. The particular room they enter is standing-room-only with Ang Ous. There’s even more of them than Frank had seen through the windows.

  At the far end of the room is a little titanium tri-bar device with glowing wands of light coming out of it. An alla. The air in the alla box shimmers and a fresh Ang Ou steps out, and then another and another. It’s like an automatic bubble-blowing machine that’s turning out people.

  Frank and the saucerians hop through a series of walls looking at more of the crowded rooms of the Ang Ou building. In each room there is another alla puffing out ever more Ang Ous.

  Balaam links Frank into Ang’s mind. It’s a strange mental space to comprehend, because Ang is seeing out of all his of the many bodies’ eyes at once. The many brains are linked together by a radiotelepathic contact made perfect by the fact that they’re all eidetically the same.

  “But they’re not wearing uvvies,” protests Frank. “How can they do telepathy without uvvies?”

  “From the 32nd Century on, people’s uvvies are internal,” explains Perl. “It’s a permanent aug that almost everyone has programmed into their genes. So each of has an electromagnetic uvvy organ in the back of his or her neck. If memory serves, the aug was originally based on some wetware from an electric eel.”

  As Frank adjusts to the feeling of the Ang consciousness, he begins to feel a sense of exhilaration. So much mental space! It’s like having the walls of a confining prison cell fall away to reveal an open plain. What wonders a person could achieve, with a thousand brains to think with! Ang’s thoughts seem to involve mathematics, physics, and an odd kind of mysticism.

  Figure 57: Launching A Space Bug

  But for now Ang is preoccupied with the hostile street-crowd. People are battering down the honeycomb building’s doors, forcing their way inside, and fighting to turn off the Ang Ou allas. Sharing in the Ang Ou consciousness, Frank feels like he’s struggling with hundreds of people at once. It’s terrifying. Ang is fighting like a tiger, careless of which of his bodies lives or dies.

  The word of the battle spreads across the city, and more and more people arrive to attack the Ang Ous. Frank is pleased to see that in the Third Millennium, there is no organized police or army, simply the massed will of the populace.

  In a short time, the pullulating Ang Ous are overwhelmed. All 1,234 of them are out in the street, tightly bound by their hands and feet. The shared pain of their thousand-plus bodies is vast and somewhat pitiful. The Angs are thinking about pink, sunlit clouds.

  “You’re so selfish and greedy!” people are yelling into the Ang faces. “You can’t stay on Earth!”

  The saucer jumps two months further in time, and Frank can see how the Angs have been dealt with. It would have been too inhuman to exterminate them. Instead, they’ve been subjected to massive amniotic-bath treatments to convert them into leathery spindle-shaped beings with symbiotic colonies of algae in their skins.

  “Space bugs,” says Goola.

  One by one, the Ang Ou space bugs are being launched up through the atmosphere, sent out to live together in space near one of the stable attractor points of the Earth/Moon orbit. A thing something like a cannon is shooting them high out over the Pacific Ocean.

  Looking into the mind of Ang Ou, Frank can see that Ang’s resigned to this state of affairs. He’s planning to do a lot of scientific thinking, out there in space with his thousand-fold group mind.

  The view through Ang’s eyes is remarkable. Some of his bodies are already up in the sky. Merging furth
er into Ang’s mind, Frank can get a slight understanding of the specific problem Ang wants to work on. Ang’s thinking about the fact that people need high-tech equipment like allas in order to turn a person into femtotech source-code and to pop the code back into reality. Ang feels like there should be a way to do this solely with the programming of the human mind. A way to make self-extracting personality waves.

  Ang feels confident that he will solve the problem. Perhaps it will take his thousand minds two hundred years. That’s all right. A space bug should have very good longevity. And when Ang has the answers, the normals will let him return.

  Transcending The Body

  Teleportation:turn, squeeze, lift. Little Goola like a moth.

  The transhumans grow their own saucer.

  Eve takes us to the astral plane. It’s wonderful. God is love.

  Teleportation

  “Let’s pick up the pace a little,” says Balaam, as Perl jumps them back into paratime. “I’m bored, Frank’s pooped.”

  “Don’t get bitchy,” says Goola. “Not when it’s finally time for me to do my thing. Would you like me to teach you transcendence, Frank?”

  “You bet,” says Frank. He’s sitting next to Goola, drinking some water out of his eternally refilled cup. “I’m loving every minute of this. I don’t want it to be over. I don’t want to be back in South Dakota.”

  “All right,” says Goola, rising to her feet. “I’ll show you teleportation. It was none other than the Ang Ou swarm who discovered the trick. And in 3666, the Angs taught it to everyone. People were so grateful, they agreed to let the Angs have an Ang Ou island right back here in the San Francisco Bay. They alla-formed it themselves, and there’s still Ang Ous living on Ang Ou Island in our own time—in the 41st Century. It’s a lush place to visit. The Ang Ous have fabulous gardens.”

  “Gardens?” wonders Frank. “A superintelligent group-mind like Ang Ou is into gardening?”