by Rudy Rucker
“I don’t like it here,” said Haut. “I want you boys to get me out right away. I’m not signing off on those dissertations unless we’re outside.” With the preternatural alertness of the unhinged, he’d spotted the pages in my hand.
“I’m not sure we can do that,” I said cautiously. Indeed, the nurse at the desk had told us that although a code 5150 involuntary commitment for inpatient psychiatric evaluation was only for seventy-two hours, Saturdays and Sundays didn’t have to count, as those weren’t regular work days for the doctors, at least not at Summit Psychiatric. So Haut was legally obliged to stay until Wednesday. The doctors hadn’t yet gotten around to evaluating him. For sure nobody was in a rush to put Haut back on the street.
“Why did you throw the chair through your office window?” asked Paul, sitting down on Haut’s bed. He was careful to sit precisely perpendicular to the mattress. “Were you going to jump out?”
“Who told you that?” said Haut.
“It’s not exactly a secret,” I said. “I mean—the window’s gone. Maintenance is patching it up.”
“Didn’t anyone notice that all the glass ended up on the inside?” said Haut, lowering his voice. "I didn’t break the window. Something broke the window to get at me. I threw the chair at it.” He paused, chewing on the tip of his thumb. "Close the door,” he told me. “If the whitecoats hear this, they’ll want to keep me here for weeks.”
When I turned back from the door, I saw Haut making rapid, silent gestures to Paul, like he was trying to get Paul to club me over the head or choke me. Paul shook his head and shrugged.
“You have to sign these papers now,” I said, laying them down on the room’s rolling table. “Here, I’ve got a pen. Just sign them for us, Roland. Paul and I kept up our end of the deal. We finished our dissertations and we wrote a joint paper with you. Don’t be so—”
“Oh, suddenly this is my fault?” said Haut. “I said you have to get me out of here.”
“That’s not going to happen,” I said. “You have to stay here till Wednesday. It’s the law. You’re 5150, dog.”
"It’s good for you to be here for a few days, Roland,” said Paul. “It’s safe.”
“What day is it now?”
“It’s Monday,” said Paul patiently “Our defense is tomorrow. Graduation is Friday. Sign the papers.”
“Don’t you want to hear about the thing that broke the window?” said Haut, finally taking the pen from me.
“First sign the papers,” said Paul, aligning them. “Don’t talk about the window if it upsets you.”
"It resembled a flying cone shell snail,” said Haut, signing the pages with two quick scribbles. “Like that little shell on my desk that Stephen Wolfram gave me? With the pattern of white and orange triangles wrapping around it like a rolled-up cellular automaton? The pattern is orderly but not predictable, a classic example of computational complexity. But the creature floating outside my window was ten feet long. It wasn’t an Earthly cone shell snail, you understand. It was an alien. I saw it while I was working with our theorem Friday, looking for applications. I’d just discovered a remarkable, although stunningly obvious, method for turning a vibrating membrane into a universal paracomputer. A thinking drumhead.”
Haut, paused and gave me a sharp look, his eyes bright and mad. And then he jabbered on. “The boy is baffled. Yes, Kis, I say ‘paracomputer’ not ‘computer’ to point out the fact that this is a natural object which behaves like computer. Not a high-tech totem that we monkeys made. Any complex natural process is already a universal paracomputer, as our theorem helps to show. But any practical use of a paracomputer requires a coder-decoder method to handle the formats you choose. I was in my office, and about 4:30 p.m. I solved the coder- decoder problem for a paracomputer based upon a vibrating membrane. Finding the solution felt like having a light come on in a dark room. I looked up from my work into the mirror on my wall, wanting to admire the face of genius—and I saw a cone shell the size of a canoe hanging in the air outside the window behind me. Not an empty shell. It was alive, with a mollusk inside. I could see its snout, its eyes.”
Haut handed Paul my pen, but his hand was still pressing down on the signature sheets. He continued talking. “The horrible thing was that a tentacle was already extending from the creature’s mouth snout to me. Reddish, quite thin, passing through the window glass and attached to the back of my head. Apparently the cone shell had been communicating thoughts. Tutoring me. Its mouth was like a funnel with transparent edges, the red tendril leading from it like a tongue. Plugged into my brain stem. I saw all this synoptically in my mirror. In a fraction of second.”
“You must have been very surprised,” said Paul gently. He and I exchanged a glance, edging closer, waiting for our chance to snatch our precious pages back from Haut.
“To the contrary,” said Haut. “I’d already had a sense of otherness while formulating my solution to the codec problem. A sense of imminent arrival. But, yes, when I actually saw the cone shell in the mirror I became agitated. I turned and picked up my chair. Although the shell was now invisible, I knew it was still there.” His trembling fingers drew together, dragging the papers along, beginning to wrinkle them. “Perhaps it meant me no harm, but I was frightened. The cone shells of the South Pacific harpoon small reef fish and other mollusks, did you know that? The killer snail fires out a detachable tooth that’s filled with hallucinogenic conotoxins; it drags the disoriented victim into its floppy maw; and the next day, all that remains of the lovely tropical fish is a pack of bones wrapped in—”
“Look out1. Cone shell!” I shouted, pointing towards the window. Haut threw up his hands and shrieked. There was a whinny mixed into his cries; I was loving it. In a heartbeat, Paul had snatched the papers, squared their edges, and shoved them inside his shirt.
“Oops,” I said. "Maybe not. Sorry Roland.”
Quick footsteps padded down the hall. A nurse and an orderly appeared.
“This door has to stay open during visiting hours,” said the nurse.
“Would you like a nap, Mr. Haut?” said the orderly.
“I have another little pill for you,” said the nurse.
Haut whipped his head around, not quite able to figure out what had just happened.
“It was good to see you,” I said. “I hope you’re better soon.”
“Little bastard. I hate you.”
I pointed quietly at the window one more time, and cupped my hand like a shell. And then we left.
Friday morning the math department had a small ceremony and reception at Pearce Hall. It was cool and cloudy with misty sprinkles of rain. I still felt weird and shaky from working so hard on the thesis. We all wore the traditional red robes and flat triangular caps. The applause was like soft confetti.
Eventually Chairman Kitchner read out Paul’s name and my name and said we were Doctors of Philosophy. It was very satisfying. My mother, my big sister Margit, and Margit’s husband Bert were there, smiling and clapping and taking pictures. Margit was an accountant for an insurance company in San Francisco; she actually worked in the pointy Transfinita Building. Bert was a very junior stockbroker at Schwein and Son, one step up from a telemarketer—although he talked as if he were a major financier.
I would have liked for Alma to be there, but she had her own graduation to deal with that afternoon. She was spending the morning organizing her stuff and getting gussied up. The plan was that I’d meet her and her parents after the undergrad commencement at the campus’s Egyptian Theater, which was this awesome stone Art Nouveau amphitheater dating back to the early 1900s.
Paul’s parents weren’t at the Pearce Hall ceremony either; what with being divorced, neither of them felt like making the long trip from Kentucky alone. And although Roland Haut was out of Summit Psychiatric now, he was absent as well. I felt just a bit guilty about teasing him the other day. Like I’d been kicking him when he was down. But then I heard something that got me mad at h
im all over again.
“The University of California is filing a patent on the theorem you two proved with Roland Haut,” Chairman Kitchner told Paul and me as we got our cookies and plastic cups of wine from the reception table. Kitchner was a tall, bald man with lugubrious wrinkles running down the sides of his face. “I thought you should know. Roland just told me this morning.”
“I already heard,” said Paul a little sheepishly. “I was waiting for a chance to tell you, Bela.”
“You can patent a theorem?” I said, taking a long pull of wine.
“Sure,” said Paul. "Like Lempel, Ziv, Welch and the LZW compression algorithm. Or Rivest, Shamir, Adleman and the RSA encryption method. The Bridge-Haut-Kis theorem could lead to some valuable commercial processes.”
“So why does the university end up owning it?” I asked.
“It’s in the terms of Roland’s research grant,” said Kitchner. “Standard practice. If you have any lingering questions, he can go over it in person with you when he’s feeling less agitated. But I wouldn't bother him for a few weeks, Bela. He seems to have an—attitude towards you. It’s unfortunate. The problem when mathematicians go off the deep end is that they still think they’re being logical.”
“Why does anyone listen to him?” I asked Kitchner. “He told
Paul and me that he saw a giant cone shell snail in the air outside his window!”
“I know,” said the chairman. “He’s still talking about that. Alien cone shells and cockroaches the size of people. He sees them, but only in mirrors.” He gave a dour smile and shook his head. “I’m not sure how the window incident is going to play out. The administration is quite concerned over the legal exposure this kind of thing opens up. But Roland’s tenured and he does a lot of good work. The patent comes at a fortunate time for him.”
“The glass from the window,” put in Paul. “Roland said it was all inside his office because the cone shell—”
“He told me that too,” said Kitchner, rolling his eyes. “There was glass all over the place—inside, outside, on the sidewalk, everywhere. If it had cut someone—forget it!”
“There’s no way to undo his patent?” I said. “I still don’t have a job, and I’d been hoping to maybe make some money off our theorem myself. Paul and I did most of the work. It doesn’t seem right.”
“That’s academia,” said Kitchner with a shrug. “And there’s no reason you can’t make money off the theorem. The patent provides a framework. It’s really quite an honor to have coauthored a patentable result. The way it works is that you consult for commercial ventures who license your theorem from the UC. In all likelihood you’ll find improvements that your new employers can patent on their own. And, Bela, I’ll be glad to help you with the job search. The department’s very proud of you. Stop by the office next week, and I’ll see what we can do.” And with that he moved to the next knot of students.
“Smile, Bela,” said my sister, and took my picture. She was tall, like me, with her hair bleached, and starting to get a double chin. A comfortable person. “Stand next to him, Ma.”
“You get in there, too, Margit,” said her husband Bert, taking her camera.
“Doctor Kis,” said Ma, adjusting my triangular red mortarboard and patting my cheek. “Wonderful! A Ph.D. in the family!” She was short, with high cheekbones, lots of wrinkles, and eyes that curved like commas. She was always in a good mood, unlike my father, whose moods had fluctuated between anger and despair.
Bert snapped our picture. “Now I’ll take a picture of Bela and Paul together,” said Ma, hefting her own camera.
Ma had taken a liking to Paul when she, Margit, and Bert had come by our Ratvale apartment this morning. Paul had impressed Ma with his efficiency and liveliness, although I halfsuspected that Paul’s pep resulted from his having dipped into his leftover methedrine. He’d been up all night packing everything he owned into his new camper van, getting set for his move to Stanford. Everything tidy, everything at right angles. Alma had kept him company, putting her stuff in cardboard boxes in my room, including those of her possessions that had still been at Leni’s.
Despite a lot of probing by Alma, I hadn’t come up with any good suggestions for where she might live next—other than with her parents. My Ratvale lease was due to run out in a week and a half. Alma was unhappy about this. It was like she expected to me to provide her with a place to live even after graduation. I resented this, although at the same time I felt apologetic about my inability to deliver.
I myself was paralyzed at the prospect of leaving Hume- locke. In denial. My stuff was strewn all over the echoing apartment. If I could come up with some money, maybe I’d extend the lease for a month, although this prospect was so unlikely that I hadn’t mentioned it to Alma.
Certainly I was in no rush to move back with Ma. She was all set to begin nagging me to getting a job. After I’d told her in the coffee shop this morning that the Chulo State job had fallen through, she’d picked up a newspaper from the next table and begun mock-innocently checking to see, just as a matter of interest, if the category “mathematician” appeared in the classified ads. After being loudly surprised when no such listing could be found, she’d moved on to wondering what kinds of job slots a mathematician could fill. Bookkeeper? Loan officer? Payroll clerk? Teacher? Sign installer?
“You know what Ph.D. really stands for, Mrs. Kis?” said Paul, standing next to me. We had our arms across each other’s shoulders.
"Tell me, Paul,” said Ma, pointing her camera at us.
“B.S. is bullshit, M.S. is more shit, and Ph.D. is—”
“Piled high and deep!” I chimed in as the camera beeped. The sun came out; a breeze caressed us; the sky was a beautiful pale shade of blue.
“Oh, you boys,” laughed Ma. “That’s all you learned in grad school? Get your frail old mother some refreshments, Bela.” Ma was about as frail as beef jerky or a coiled steel spring. But I was happy to tend to her. I was very fond of my mother, and proud to have her here today.
About twenty plastic cups of rice wine waited on the refreshment table. The sunlight danced enticingly among them, making arrows and cusps of light on the white paper tablecloth, bright condensations of energy. At the morphon level, we guests at the reception were akin to the caustic curves of refracted light; we were concentrated fields, like the candles of the birthday cake morphon. I felt a twinge of prospective melancholy, an intimation of my future nostalgia for this particular moment. Graduation was the end of something. Who knew if I’d ever again see so deeply into math as I did at this moment?
“What was that about a patent?” asked brother-in-law Bert when I rejoined Paul and my family. Bert was tan and fit, Filipino with a fair amount of Chinese blood. He’d shaved his head bald last year at the first sign of hair loss. “You dogs ready to run with the venture capitalists?”
“Our results are mostly theoretical,” I said. “We can figure out how different kinds of systems should match up so that the one system emulates the other. And we have a few pet examples that happen to work. But in general—”
“Can you use it for technical market analysis?” said Bert. “That’s the question. Like the Prediction Company, it was started by those guys from the Santa Fe Institute, Doyne Farmer and Norman Packard? That big Swiss bank UBS was funding them to play the currency exchange market.”
“There’s a stumbling block,” put in Paul. “Codec.” Paul and I had been hung up on this concept ever since hearing Roland Haut raving about it. On the street, a codec was a software or hardware package used to code audio or video into small files and to decode such files back into audio or video. But to us, codec meant so much more.
“What’s codec?” asked Bert.
“Coder/decoder,” said Paul. “Our Morphic Classification Theorem shows that all kinds of natural processes can act as good simulations for each other. But if you want to learn something specific from a simulation, you have to code your data into the si
mulation’s world and decode it back out. Like suppose you’re going to make predictions about the weather by reading tea leaves. To get concrete answers, you code today’s weather into a cup of tea made with loose leaves. You swirl the cup around, drink the tea, look at the leaves, and decode the leaf pattern into tomorrow’s weather. Codec.”
“Huh?”
“It’s like if you ask a Hungarian mathematician a question,” I said. “You have to code your plain English question into Hungarian mathematics, and then you have decode the mathematician’s batshit answer into plain English. Codec.”
“Ah, those genius Hungarians,” said Margit, fluffing her blonde shag with the back of her hand.
Almost as smart as Chinese people,” said Ma.
“What is it with the Chinese-Hungarian connection, Mrs. Kis?” interjected Paul. "Bela’s never quite explained it me.”
“During the Cold War years, Hungary was one of the only European countries where the Red Chinese could go,” said Ma. “Budapest developed a lively Chinatown, where I was born. My father was Chinese and my mother was Hungarian. They had two children: Xiao-Xiao Wong, which is me, and my younger brother Zoltán Wong. My mother died too young, poor thing, run over by a streetcar. And then my father didn’t know how to raise us. So he sent Zoltán and me to grow up with his cousin Shirley Woo in San Jose. We adapted, we became Silicon Valley kids. In high school I fell in love with a Hungarian-American boy named Tibor Kis. We married young and were blessed with Margit and Bela. And then my brother Zoltán married Tibor’s sister Zsuzsa! Always Hungarian and Chinese in our family. Tibor’s been dead for five years. He would have loved seeing this graduation, Bela. He would have been proud. He loved you even if he didn’t say so. How come you didn’t tell Paul about your family?”
“It’s complicated,” I mumbled. The truth was, I didn’t like thinking about my far-flung, vociferous family.
For one thing, I wasn’t crazy about my San Jose relatives—I found them old-fashioned, always talking about money and family, and I felt guilty for thinking that, although, yeah, my bad-ass double cousin Gyula Wong was pretty hip. He’d been almost like an older brother to me when we’d been kids.