by Rudy Rucker
“Smell it,” urged Veruschka.
And, Lord yes, the Pumpti did smell good. Sweet and powdery, like clean towels after a nice hot bath, like a lawn of flowers on a summer morn, like a new dress. Janna smoothed it against her face, so smooth and soft. How could she have thought her Pumpti was gnarly?
“Now you must squeeze him to make him better,” said Veruschka, vigorously mashing her Pumpti in her hands. “Knead, knead, knead! The Pumpti pulls skin cells from the surface of your hands, you know. Then pumptose reads more of the junk DNA and makes more good tasty proteins.” She pressed her Pumpti to her cheek, and her voice went up an octave. “Getting more of that yummy yummy wetware from me, isn’t he? Squeezy-squeezy Pumpti.” She gave it a little kiss.
“This doesn’t add up,” said Janna. “Let’s face it, an entire human body only has like ten grams of active DNA. But this Pumpti, it’s solid DNA like a chunk of rubber, and hey, it’s almost half a kilo! I mean, where’s that at?”
“The more the better,” said Veruschka patiently. “It means that very quickly Pumpti can be recombining his code. Like a self-programming Turing machine. Wiktor often spoke of this.”
“But it doesn’t even look like DNA,” said Janna. “I messed with DNA every day at Triple Helix. It looks like lint or dried snot.”
“My Pumpti is smooth because he’s making nice old proteins from the ancient junk of the DNA. All our human predecessors from the beginning of time, amphibians, lemurs, maybe intelligent jellyfish saucers from Mars—who knows what. But every bit is my very own junk, of my very own DNA. So stop thinking so hard, Janna. Love your Pumpti.”
Janna struggled not to kiss her pink glob. The traceries of pink and yellow lines beneath its skin were like the veins of fine marble.
“Your Pumpti is very fine,” said Veruschka, reaching for it. “Now, into the freezer with him! We will store him, to show our financial backers.”
“What!” said Janna. She felt a sliver of ice in her heart. “Freeze my Pumpti? Freeze your own Pumpti, Vero.”
“I need mine,” snapped Veruschka.
To part from her Pumpti—something within her passionately rebelled. In a dizzying moment of raw devotion, Janna suddenly found herself sinking her teeth into the unresisting flesh of the Pumpti. Crisp, tasty spun cotton candy, deep-fried puffball dough, a sugared beignet. And under that a salty, slightly painful flavor—bringing back the memory of being a kid and sucking the root of a lost tooth.
“Now you understand,” said Veruschka with a throaty laugh. “I was only testing you! You can keep your sweet Pumpti, safe and sound. We’ll get some dirty street bum to make us a Pumpti for commercial samples. Like that stupid boy you were talking to before.” Veruschka stood on tiptoe to peer out of the bank’s bronze-mullioned window. “He’ll be back. Men always come back when they see you making money.”
Janna considered this wise assessment. “His name is Kelso,” said Janna. “I went to Berkeley with him. He says he’s always wanted me. But he never talked to me at school.”
“Get some of his body fluid.”
“I’m not ready for that,” said Janna. “Let’s just poke around in the sink for his traces.” And, indeed, they quickly found a fresh hair to seed a Kelso Pumpti, nasty and testicular, suitable for freezing.
As Veruschka had predicted, Kelso himself returned before long. He made it his business to volunteer his aid and legal counsel. He even claimed that he’d broached the subject of Magic Pumpkin to Tug Mesoglea himself. However, the mysterious mogul failed to show up with his checkbook, so Magic Pumpkin took the path of viral marketing.
Veruschka had tracked down an offshore Chinese ooze farm to supply cheap culture medium. In a week, they had a few dozen Pumpti starter kits for sale. They came in a little plastic tub of pumptose-laced nutrient, all boxed up in a flashy little design that Janna had printed out in color.
Kelso had the kind of slit-eyed street smarts that came only from Berkeley law classes. He chose Fisherman’s Wharf to hawk the product. Janna went along to supervise his retail effort.
It was the start of October, a perfect fog-free day. A song of joy seemed to rise from the sparkling waters of San Francisco Bay, echoing from the sapphire dome of the California sky. Even the tourists could sense the sweetness of the occasion. They hustled cheerfully round Kelso’s fold-out table, clicking away with little biochip cameras.
Kelso spun a practiced line of patter while Janna publicly adored her Pumpti. She’d decked out Pumpti in a special sailor suit, and she kept tossing him high into the air and laughing.
“Why is this woman so happy?” barked Kelso. “She’s got a Pumpti. Better than a baby, better than a pet, your Pumpti is all you! Starter kits on special today for the unbelievably low price of— “
Over the course of a long morning, Kelso kept cutting the offering price of the Pumpti kits. Finally a runny-nosed little girl from Olympia, Washington, took the bait.
“How do I make one?” she wanted to know. “What choo got in that kit?” And, praise the Holy Molecule, her parents didn’t drag her away; they just stood there watching their little darling shop.
The First Sale. For Janna, it was a moment to treasure forever. The little girl with her fine brown hair blowing in the warm afternoon wind, the dazedly smiling parents, Kelso’s abrupt excited gestures as he explained how to seed and grow the Pumpti by planting a kiss on a scrap of Kleenex and dropping the scrap into the kit’s plastic jar. The feel of those worn dollar bills in her hand, and the parting wave of little Customer Number One. Ah, the romance of it!
Now that they’d found their price point, more sales followed. Soon, thanks to word-of-mouth, they began moving units from their Web site as well.
But now Janna’s Dad Ruben, who had a legalistic turn of mind, warned them to hold off on shipments until they had federal approval. Ruben took a sample Pumpti before the San Jose branch office of the Genomics Control Board. He argued that since the Pumptis were neither self-reproducing nor infectious they didn’t fall under the Human Heritage provisions of the Homeland Security Act.
The hearings investigation made the Bay Area news shows, especially after the right-wing religious crowd got in on the story. An evangelist from Alameda appeared on San Jose Federal Building’s steps, and after an impassioned speech he tore a Pumpti apart with pincers, calling the unresisting little glob the “spawn of Satan.” He’d confiscated the poor Pumpti from a young parishioner, who could be seed sobbing at the edge of the screen.
In a few days the Genomics Control Board came through with their blessing. The Pumptis were deemed harmless, placed in the same schedule category as home gene-testing kits. Magic Pumpkin was free to ship throughout the nation! Magic Pumpkin’s Web site gathered a bouquet of orders from eager early adopters.
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Kelso’s art-scene friends were happy to sign up to work for Magic Pumpkin. Buoyed by the chance of worldly success, Kelso began to shave more often and even use deodorant. But he was so excited about business that he forgot to make passes at Janna.
Every day-jobber in the start-up was issued his or her own free Pumpti. “Magic Pumpkin wants missionaries, not mercenaries,” Janna announced from on high, and her growing cluster of troops cheered her on. Owning a personal Pumpti was an item of faith in the little company—the linchpin of their corporate culture. You couldn’t place yourself in the proper frame of mind for Magic Pumpkin product development without your very own darling roly-poly.
Cynics had claimed that the male demographic would never go for Pumptis. Why would any guy sacrifice his computer gaming time and his weekend bicycling to nurture something? But once presented with their own Pumpti, men found that it filled some deep need in the masculine soul. They swelled up with competitive pride in their Pumptis, and even became quite violent in their defense.
Janna lined up a comprehensive array of related products. First and foremost were costumes. Sailor Pumpti, Baby Pumpti, Pumpti Duckling, Angel Pumpti, Devil Pumpti, and even
a Goth Pumpti dress-up kit with press-on tattoos. They shrugged off production to Filipina doll clothes makers in a sweatshop in East L.A.
Further up-market came a Pumpti Backpack for transporting your Pumpti in style, protecting it from urban pollution and possibly nasty bacteria. This one seemed like a sure hit, if they could swing the Chinese labor in Shenzhen and Guangdong.
The third idea, Pumpti Energy Crackers, was a no-brainer: crisp collectible cards of munchable amino acid bases to fatten up your Pumpti. If the crackers used the “mechanically recovered meat” common in pet food and cattle feed, then the profit margin would be primo. Kelso had a contact for this in Mexico: they guaranteed their cookies would come crisply printed with the Pumpti name and logo.
Janna’s fourth concept was downright metaphysical: a “Psychic Powers Pumpti Training Wand.” Except for occasional oozing and plopping, the Pumptis never actually managed conventional pet tricks. But this crystal-topped gizmo could be hawked to the credulous as increasing their Pumpti’s “empathy” or “telepathy.” A trial mention of this vaporware on the Pumpti-dot-bio Web site brought in a torrent of excited New Age e-mails.
The final, sure-thing Pumpti accessory was tie-in books. Two of Kelso’s many unemployed writer and paralegal friends set to work on the Pumpti User’s Guide. The firm forecasted an entire library of guides, sucking up shelf space at chain stores and pet stores everywhere. The Moron’s Guide to Computational Genomics. Pumpti Tips, Tricks, and Shortcuts. The Three-Week Pumpti Guide, the One-Day Pumpti Guide, and the Ten Minute Pumpti Guide. Pumpti Security Threats: How to Protect Your Pumpti from Viral DNA Hacks, Trojan Goo, and Strange Genes. And more, more, more!
Paradoxically, Magic Pumpkin’s flowering sales bore the slimy seeds of a smashing fiscal disaster. When an outfit started small, it didn’t take much traffic to double demand every week. This constant doubling brought on raging production bottlenecks and serious crimps in their cash flow. In point of fact, in pursuit of market establishment, they were losing money on each Pumpti sold. And the big payback from the Pumpti accessories wasn’t happening.
Janna had never quite realized that manufacturing real, physical products was so much harder than just thinking them up. Magic Pumpkin failed to do its own quality control, so the company was constantly screwed by fly-by-nighters. Subcontractors were happy to take their money, but when they failed to deliver, they had Magic Pumpkin over a barrel.
The doll costumes were badly sized. The Pumpti Backpacks were ancient Hello Kitty backpacks with their logos covered by cheap paper Pumpti stickers. The crackers were dog biscuits with the stinging misprint “Pumpti.” The “telepathic” wand sold some units, but the people buying it tended to write bad checks. As for the User’s Guides, the manuscripts were rambling and self-indulgent, long on far-fetched jokes yet critically short on objective facts.
Day by day, Janna stomped the problems out. And now that their production lines were stabilized, now that their accessories catalog was properly weeded out, now that their ad campaign was finally in gear, their fifteen minutes of ballroom glamour expired. The pumpkin clock struck midnight. The public revealed its single most predictable trait: fickleness.
Instantly, without a whimper of warning, Magic Pumpkin was deader than pet rocks. They never even shipped to any stories the Midwest or the East Coast, for the folks in those distant markets were sick of hearing about the Pumptis before they ever saw one on a shelf.
Janna and Veruschka couldn’t make payroll. Their lease was expiring. They were cringing for cash.
A desperate Janna took the show on the road to potential investors in Hong Kong, the toy capital of the world. She emphasized that Magic Pumpkin had just cracked the biggest single technical problem: the fact that Pumptis looked like slimy blobs. Engineering-wise, it all came down to the pumptose-based Universal Ribosome. By inserting a properly-tweaked look-up string, you could get it to express the junk DNA sequences in customizable forms. Programming this gnarly cruft was, from an abstract computer-science perspective, “unfeasible,” meaning that, logically speaking, no human would be able to design such a program within the lifetime of the universe.
But Janna’s Dad, fretful about his investment, had done it anyway. In two weeks of inspired round-the-clock hacking, Ruben had implemented a full “OpenAnimator” graphics library, using a palette of previously unused rhodopsin-style proteins. Thanks to OpenAnimator, a whiff of the right long-chain molecule could now give your Pumpti any mesh, texture, color-map, or attitude matrix you chose. Not to mention overloaded frame-animation updates keyed into the pumptose’s ribosomal time-steps! It was a techie miracle!
Dad flew along to Hong Kong to back Janna’s pitch, but the Hong Kong crowd had little use for software jargon in American English. And the overwrought Ruben killed the one nibble they got by picking a fight over intellectual property—no way to build partnerships in Hong Kong.
Flung back to San Francisco, Janna spent night after night frantically combing the Web, looking for any source of second-round venture capital, no matter how far-fetched.
Finally she cast herself sobbing into Kelso’s arms. Kelso was her last hope. Kelso just had to come through for them: he had to bring in the seasoned business experts from Ctenophore, Inc., the legendary masters of jellyfish A-Life.
“Listen, babe,” said Kelso practically, “I think you and the bio-Bolshevik there have already taken this concept just about as far as any sane person oughta push it. Farther, even. I mean, sure, I recruited a lot of my cyberslacker friends into your corporate cult here, and we promised them the moon and everything, so I guess we’ll look a little stupid when it Enrons. They’ll bitch and whine, and they’ll feel all disenchanted, but come on, this is San Francisco. They’re used to that here. It’s genetic.”
“But what about my dad? He’ll lose everything! And Veruschka is my best friend. What if she shoots me?”
“I’m thinking Mexico,” said Kelso dreamily. “Way down on the Pacific coast—that’s where my mother comes from. You and me, we’ve been working so hard on this start-up that we never got around to the main event. Just dump those ugly Pumptis in the Bay. We’ll empty the cash box tonight, and catch a freighter blimp for the South. I got a friend who works for Air Jalisco.”
It was Kelso’s most attractive offer so far, maybe even sincere, in its way. Janna knew full well that the classic dot-com move was to grab that golden parachute and bail like crazy before the investors and employees caught on. But Magic Pumpkin was Janna’s own brain child. She was not yet a serial entrepreneur, and a boyfriend was only a boyfriend. Janna couldn’t walk away from the green baize table before that last spin of the wheel.
It had been quite some time since Ctenophore Inc. had been a cutting-edge start-up. The blazing light of media tech-hype no longer escaped their dense, compact enterprise. The firm’s legendary founders, Revel Pullen and Tug Mesoglea, had collapsed in on their own reputations. Not a spark could escape their gravity. They had become twin black holes of biz weirdness.
Ctenophore’s main line of business had always been piezoplastic products. Ctenophore had pumped this protean, blobject material into many crazy scenes in the California boom years. Bathtub toys, bondage clothing, industrial-sized artificial-jellyfish transport blimps—and Goob dolls as well! GoobYoob, creator of the Goob dolls, had been one of Ctenophore’s many Asian spin-offs.
As it happened, quite without Janna’s awareness, Ctenophore had already taken a professional interest in the workings of Magic Pumpkin. GoobYoob’s manufacturing arm, Boogosity, had been the Chinese ooze-farm supplier for Pumpti raw material. Since Boogosity had no advertising or marketing expenses, they’d done much better by the brief Pumpti craze than Magic Pumpkin itself.
Since Magic Pumpkin was going broke, Boogosity faced a production glut. They’d have to move their specialty goo factories back into the usual condoms and truck tires. Some kind of corporate allegiance seemed written in the stars.
Veruschka Zipkinova was transf
ixed with paranoia about Revel Pullen, Ctenophore’s chairman of the board. Veruschka considered major American capitalists to be sinister figures—this conviction was just in her bones, somehow—and she was very worried about what Pullen might do to Russia’s oil.
Russia’s black gold was the lifeblood of its pathetic, wrecked economy. Years ago Revel Pullen, inventively manic as always, had released gene-spliced bacteria into America’s dwindling oil reserves. This fatal attempt to increase oil production had converted millions of barrels of oil into (as chance would have it) raw piezoplastic. Thanks to the powerful Texas lobby in Washington, none of the lawsuits or regulatory actions against Ctenophore had ever succeeded.
Janna sought to calm Veruschka’s jitters. If the company hoped to survive, they had to turn Ctenophore into Magic Pumpkin’s fairy godmother. The game plan was to flatter Pullen, while focusing their persuasive efforts on the technical expert of the pair. This would be Ctenophore’s chief scientist, a far-famed mathematician named Tug Mesoglea.
It turned out that Kelso really did know Tug Mesoglea personally, for Mesoglea lived in a Painted Lady mansion above the Haight. During a protracted absence to the Tweetown district of Manchester (home of the Alan Turing Memorial), Tug had once hired Kelso to babysit his jellyfish aquarium.
Thanks to San Francisco’s digital grapevine, Tug knew about the eccentric biomathematics that ran Pumptis. Tug was fascinated, and not by the money involved. Like many mathematicians, Mesoglea considered money to be one boring, merely bookkeeping subset of the vast mental universe of general computation. He’d already blown a fortune endowing chairs in set theory, cellular automata, and higher-dimensional topology. Lately, he’d published widely on the holonomic attractor space of human dreams, producing a remarkable proof that dreams of flight were a mathematical inevitability for a certain fixed percentage of the dreams—this fixed percentage number being none other than Feigenbaum’s chaos constant, 4.6692.