by Rudy Rucker
“What I can’t believe is that Cammy’s dead.”
“I hear you, man. How dark. This is gonna be such the epic show. How about webcasting it? I got a video rig right here in the club and a radiant geek living on our best couch. Andrew Silverfish. He can stream your show through my club’s Web site.”
“Okay. And run it with a text crawl at the bottom of the screen asking for donations to the Fugue Cammy Fund. Say ‘Cammy Fund’ on the posters, not ‘Musicians Rescue Fund.’ It’s gotta be all about Cammy.”
“I hear you.”
I drove over to Paul’s. He hadn’t been at the courthouse today as he’d already spent most of Saturday and Sunday with the cops. I’d gotten e-mail from him last night, urging me to come by. He wanted to talk about the Gobrane, about Alma—and about Cammy.
Two TV trucks were encamped outside Paul’s house, and when I got out of my squinty-whale station wagon, the reporters were on me like flies on shit, asking questions about Cammy and Van Veeter.
I looked past them, trying to see the spot where Cammy had died. But by now of course the cops had hosed it off. I pushed past the cameras and made it onto Paul’s little lawn. The reporters had to stay in the street unless you were talking to them. Those were the rules of the game. I knocked on Paul’s door until eventually he peeked out and let me in.
A reporter with slick black hair began hollering our names. "Mr. Kis, Mr. Bridge, Mr. Kis, Mr. Bridge! ” He had a peremptory tone that was hard to ignore.
“I need to get out of here,” said Paul, closing the door and leading me into his kitchen. He looked wretched. All the blinds were drawn. He was wearing slippers and pajamas. “The cops still have my car. They impounded it for evidence.”
“Poor Cammy,” I said.
“She was so hot,” said Paul. “What a waste. I hope I don’t have to meet her parents. I keep thinking I should have driven her to the train. I hope you’re not mad at me, Bela.” He flopped down and filled a bowl with Raisin Bran. He had the cereal box and a plastic gallon of milk sitting right next to the dish. The magic teapot was off to one side of the messy table. “You hungry?” asked Paul, his mouth full.
“No thanks.”
“My fifth bowl today,” he said indistinctly. “Helps my stomach. I’m kicking Ritalin. I got some at the Health Center; I told them I had an attention deficit disorder. Boy, have I been attentive this week. I’m telling you, Ritalin’s worse than meth. How’s Alma?”
“She’s fine. Settling into Humelocke with me.” No point mentioning she’d temporarily bailed for Cruz.
“I want her back,” said Paul.
“Alma’s insidious, isn’t she?”
“Like Scarlett O’Hara,” said Paul. “The belle of the ball, the steel magnolia. She’s powerful and manipulative, but she gives off this vibe of needing a man, and you want to be, like, her knight.”
“Mr. Kis, Mr. Bridge, Mr. Kis, Mr. Bridge!” The voice bayed like a hound on a scent.
“I love Alma,” I told Paul. “She’s got me hypnotized too. But I’d give her up if that would bring back Cammy. And if I’m not mad at you it’s because I feel like it was my fault.” I picked up the magic teapot, peering down at the lively skin of the Go- brane. It was still connected to Veeter’s laptop; he’d left that for us too. “Do you think there’s any way to change the past?”
“Funny you should mention that,” said Paul. “Roland Haut says that a Gobrane paracomputer might be able to tear a hole in spacetime. And then who knows? I talked to Roland for three hours Saturday night when I was on my Ritalin run. I hadn’t meant to call him at all because I figured he’d try to muscle in on my grant from Veeter. But, you know, I got on this telephone kick. Tweak out and jabber someone. And it turns out Roland has this cool idea for a self-referential prediction paradox that would create a singularity. A tunnel. He thinks it could lead to those aliens you guys talk about.”
“You’ve seen the aliens, too?”
“No. But if my crazy mathematician collaborators are encountering giant roaches and flying cone shells, it’s my job to explain why. Me, I’ve been having bizarre, loathsome dreams—but that’s from the murder and the Ritalin rebound. I’m lucky the cops didn’t give me a blood test. This has been a wake-up call. I’m off speed for good.”
“I hope so,” I said. "Did you see Veeter on TV with Joe Doakes? I think Doakes is gonna make our paracomputer top secret. We might not have our magic teapot for much longer.” “President Doakes? Wow. Have you ever noticed that he always sounds angry—like just on the point of lashing out? He’s the strict father that serious losers wish they’d had. I haven’t been watching television at all. I’ve been eating cereal and doing math.”
“Mr. Kis, Mr. Bridge, Mr. Kis, Mr. Bridge!’’The voice had taken on a tone of angry reproof. Like how dare we ignore someone so important.
“I wish I had a rifle,” said Paul, rising to peek out through the curtains. “Explode his head like a rotten pumpkin. That’d be good to see on the news.”
“They’re about to give up,” I said. “The networks are dropping the story. Veeter will get a free pass. What kind of math have you been doing?”
“Axiomatizing the Gobrane. And working on a morphic model for individual human decision making. A prize problem, don’t you think? I already told Van; he definitely wants it solved.”
“Show me.”
Paul handed me a pad of paper covered with lines of symbols, many of the lines overwritten and crossed out. An old- school mathematician’s way of doing things. Nail the theory before starting any experiments.
“I know it’s messy, I’m about to rewrite all this,” said Paul. “The first part is about the Gobrane axioms. And the rest is my model for predicting people’s actions. I start with the assumption that your mind is a bunch of obsessive thought loops, with your external inputs sparking trains of thought that plow through your thought loops. And I turn that model into mor- phons.”
I looked over his symbols, asked questions, read some of the formulae again.
“The thought loops are cakes on dishes and the thought trains are fish dragging rakes, and they fit inside the teapot of the skull,” I said after a bit. “Very elegant. But I still don’t understand why this simulation works on the Gobrane. Do you understand the Gobrane?”
“It’s a mat of some sextillion long-chain polymers,” said Paul. “An activator-inhibitor reaction-diffusion system with ten-to-the-twenty-first computational nodes. What makes it programmable is that there’s different species of molecules in there, and as long as they get a little solar energy now and then to power up the reactions, the molecules keep converting back and forth from one species to another, with some species catalyzing certain reaction paths.”
“Sounds like chemistry,” I said uneasily. I didn’t like getting too far from the diamond clarity of math.
“Never mind,” said Paul. “I found a way to abstract away from the details. I’ve discovered a set of universal paracompu- tation axioms to specify how the Gobrane behaves. And I think lots of other systems can obey the very same axioms. You’ll help me clean up the axioms, and we’ll publish them. All sorts of naturally occurring systems can become paracomputers, just like we expected: dripping faucets, wind-blown ribbons, candle flames. Van’s opened a lot of avenues.”
“But now he’s gonna be closing them down,” I said. “Van and his new pal Joe Doakes won’t want anyone to have paracomputers except for their secret police and the Heritagist party central office. And maybe their business buddies.” Out in the street, the two trucks started their engines with a roar—and drove away. “The word’s already come down from the top,” I said. “They’re leaving so nobody sees the goons come to kick our butts and take away our Gobrane.”
“You’re so paranoid,” said Paul. “We signed contracts. Here’s yours by the way.” It was lying face down where I’d left it two days ago, duh, in a puddle of milk under the cereal box.
“Thanks,” I said, ex
amining the stained paper. Sure enough, a bail-out provision lurked in clause twenty-three: Premature termination of the agreement would be allowed at the discretion of Rumpelstiltskin with a settlement of ten percent of remaining monies to be paid to the contractor after all Rumpelstiltskin equipment had been returned as specified in clause seventeen. I read this part to Paul.
“But we’re not done,” he protested, in a calm, reasonable tone. “We’re just getting started. Van knows that. He’s excited about my mind model. He’ll want us to finish our work. This is Nobel Prize territory. Hell, if Haut’s right, it could be even bigger than that. Newton, Einstein, Godell ” He pushed back on the bridge of his glasses, worry setting in. “I wish I hadn’t called Haut. He really is crazy, you know. And of course now he wants to see the Gobrane. I’m a little scared of what he might do. He’ll flip if he hears about Veeter sharing our work with Joe Doakes. Maybe If I can keep Haut out of it, Veeter will still be okay with us.”
"To the media we’re filthy tar babies, Paul,” I said, folding my contract into my pocket lest I misplace it again. “Listen to me. We’re beyond redemption. The networks have been showing that vlog clip of Van with Cammy’s face and your face in the foreground, and you’re all flushed and sweaty. The other clip they show is from the concert when that prick Sandoval is trying to grab Cammy, and Thuggee throws him off the stage, and I’m in the foreground yelling and holding my crotch. In the public mind it’s almost like we killed Cammy. Van’s gonna cut us loose, dog. Let’s hide the magic teapot before it’s too late.”
“Van wouldn’t double-cross us,” said Paul stubbornly. “He’s an engineer. One of us. A scientist.”
“Scientists are nice guys? Did someone mention Roland Haut?”
“Look,” said Paul, growing agitated. “I told the secretary I’d be in my office at Stanford this afternoon. I have an appointment with Cal Kweskin and his student Maria Reyes. They’re doing some morphonics research for the National Security Agency. You’ve got a new career as a rock musician, so whatever you do is fine. But I can’t afford more craziness. I’m a rookie professor.”
“We need to hide you and the Gobrane. It’s not like you’re teaching classes. And even if you were, summer school isn’t even in session yet. The campus is dead, Paul,”
“Stop it. You’re freaking me out. Everything’s set. I want to start my job.” Paul hated unexpected change.
“Why don’t we ask the paracomputer if Van’s going to invoke clause twenty-three?” I suggested. “Good way to test if your mind model works. If the Gobrane’s so fast, maybe it can predict Van’s moves before they happen.”
“Well, I don’t have a very good codec yet,” said Paul, getting his excuses ready. “That ham-handed computer-science hack Van came up with—devolution—it works, but it’s computation- intense. To get your codec, you use a genetic algorithm that runs evolution backwards to arrive at a linked list of inverse hash tables, and the tables grow so big that you have to use a network of computers to hold them. But I still don’t have that kind of account on the Stanford system, and Van says he can’t give me time on the Rumpelstiltskin network either.”
“See? He’s getting ready to dump you.”
“Shit.” Paul turned on Veeter’s laptop. “Well, anyway, I do have a crude, toy version of a codec for the mind model. Instead of devolving it, I figured it out from first principles.”
“Mathematics is the way. Does your codec work?”
“Kind of,” said Paul. “A little. Some of the time. What data would we use to simulate Veeter?”
“We Web search for Veeter’s biography,” I said. “His speeches and interviews. Feed in the news stories from the last few days. And especially use his news conference with Joe Doakes.” I cast out a hook for Paul’s vanity. “But I don’t guess you could program our little question as fast as Veeter programmed his chip-futures inquiry the other day.”
“Oh, yes I can,” said Paul, his fingers busy on the laptop. “I looked at Veeter’s chip futures market hack, by the way. It was good. Were you the one who thought of measuring the shadows of the fish?”
“The square roots of the areas,” I said.
“Yeah,” said Paul. “Alright, here we go, we’ll see if we can simulate Veeter making his plans.”
In a remarkably short time, Paul was ready.
“You talk to the paracomputer and it talks back,” he said, rubbing our teapot like a magic lamp. “That’s the best part of my homemade codec. It talks. I ripped the guts out of some public domain speech-recognition software. The Gobrane membrane vibrates with the sound of your voice, munges that into a morphonic computation, and then it vibrates the answer back like a little speaker.” He leaned closer to the pot’s colored, shivering surface. “What’s your name?”
“Van Veeter,” said the brass teapot. The synthesized voice sounded ever so slightly like Van's.
“What’s your latest invention?” continued Paul.
“A Gobrane paracomputer,” said the teapot. “Publicly it’s for antiterrorism, and privately I’ll be using it for market speculation and political strategy.”
“Let’s get to the point,” I said to the pot. “Are you going to
break your contracts with Paul Bridge and Bela Kis? Are you going to confiscate their Gobrane?”
“I’m sorry I don’t understand,” said the teapot. “Please restate your input.”
“Will you send someone to take the Gobrane away from Paul Bridge?”
“Yes,” said the teapot. “This is likely.”
“How soon?” asked Paul, getting to his feet.
“They could arrive anytime within the next sixty-five thousand five-hundred and thirty-six years.”
“That’s not an actual number; that’s an overflow error,” said Paul. He leaned over the laptop.
“Is it possible that Veeter’s agents could arrive within five minutes?” I asked the teapot.
“This is tautological,” replied the paracomputer. “Five minutes is less than sixty-five thousand five-hundred and thirty- six-six-six—urk.”
Paul was furiously typing and mousing on the laptop.
“Oh, let’s turn this bullshit off,” I said, closing the teapot’s little lid. “Use common sense, dog. They could be here any minute.”
Paul sighed and looked up. “I need more time with this apparatus. If Haut’s Paradox were to come into play—well, things could get very interesting. I have to tell you more about that.” He rose to his feet. “All right, Bela. I’ll get dressed.” He hurried into his bedroom.
“Bring your toothbrush and pajamas!" I called, closing the teapot’s lid and powering down the laptop. “We might be gone for a couple of days.”
“What about my office hours?” hollered Paul, still anxious about this point.
“Tell them you’re overcome by grief. Tell them you’re doing
special research on how to change the past and save Cammy’s life!" Until I said this, I hadn’t quite realized that was my real hope. The paracomputer felt like magic, and once you had magic, there was no telling where it might end. I put the teapot and the laptop into a plastic shopping bag.
“I’m ready,” said Paul charging out of his bedroom with a red nylon Stanford duffel bag of neatly folded clothes. “Let’s go!” Sure enough, we passed Gyula on the way out, tooling down Page Mill Road in the long white Rumpelstiltskin Hornswoggle. A thick-necked Asian guy sat in the front seat next to him, and in the back were two figures shadowy behind the dark glass. Gyula saw me, but he didn’t veer or slow down. All he did was lick his index finger and mark an imaginary tally in the air. Like, “You owe me.”
“They’re not busting us?” said Paul, noticing.
“The driver's my cousin,” I said. “Gyula Wong. Almost like a brother.”
“Then why would Veeter send him to get you? He’s not that dumb.”
“Van doesn’t know Gyula and I are related. We Chinese don’t leave much of a paper trail.”
“I thought you were Hungarian,” said Paul.
“Whatever works. Have you ever seen that guy riding with Gyula before?”
“Oh yeah. He’s bad news. I’m glad we didn’t have to face him. They call him Owen but his name’s really Yuan. He was with Van the other day, and Van was bragging that he smuggled Owen from Shanghai in a shipping container and that Owen will do anything Van says. He barely speaks English.”
I drove a few miles on the main highway up the peninsula and then, just to be evasive, I cut over the Santa Cruz Mountains to the less traveled coast highway, Route One. Meanwhile Paul used his cell phone to call the Stanford math department and cancel his meetings through Wednesday, his voice serious and sad.
It was foggy on the coast. As we drew ever further from Paul’s new life, he looked less and less enthused.
“So where are we going?” he asked. Out to the left the surf was breaking in long tubes below the low cliffs, everything soft and pale in the mist.
“I myself am going back to Humelocke,” I said. “But I figured I’d park you and the magic teapot in, like, a random motel that Veeter won’t be able to predict even if he’s using your new mind model.”
“Incommunicado in a motel. Great. Maybe I’ll hang myself.”
“I’ve been feeling suicidal myself,” I admitted. “Because I keep flashing on those images of Cammy dead in the road and hating myself for not being there for her.”
“Exactly,” said Paul. “But at least you have Alma. If you were a real friend, you’d tell Alma to come back to me.”
I didn’t touch that one. After a bit, I tried a change of subject. “That was kind of weird what we just did—to ask the teapot to make a prediction about itself,” I said. "Asking it if Veeter would confiscate it. Is that the kind of self-reference Haut was talking about? Did he explain the details of his paradox?”
“I don’t feel like talking about it now,” said Paul, disconsolately staring out the window. The fog was getting thicker. You could hardly see the ocean.
“How about this for the paradox,” I said coaxingly. “We program the Gobrane to predict its own predictions, and to then say the opposite of what it predicts it’ll predict. So that it says yes if and only if it predicts that it’ll say no. Boom, contradiction, and that tears a hole in spacetime?”