by Rudy Rucker
“I just talk to the Gobubble?” said Paul.
“Sure,” said Henry. “That’s the interface.”
“Can you model Pete Ziff of Santa Cruz, California?” Paul asked his Gobubble.
“Yes,” said the apple-sized ball, and its shimmering surface formed an image of Pete riding on his motorcycle down Route One, the wind blowing back his hair. Pete looked grim. He was wearing a vlog ring. The image was as perfect as if Pete were inside a toy snow-dome.
“Is Pete mad at Bela and me?” asked Paul.
“Pete is planning to inflict felonious assault upon you two,” said the Gobrane. The image zoomed in on a detail. “Note the pool-cue club affixed to the frame of his motorcycle. The club is drilled out and weighted with lead.” The picture did a fast forward to show Pete pulling into the hospital parking lot, yanking me out of Henry’s car, smashing my head open with his pool cue, sprinting around the car to catch up with fleeing Paul, clubbing him as well, and then moving back and forth, beating our limp bodies at will.
“I knew I should have brought Tito,” said Henry. “But I get sick of the way he spits out the window and it gets on my car.”
“We’re outta here, Henry,” I said. “We can keep the Gobub- bles?”
“Of course,” said Henry. "Under nondisclosure, of course. You’re going to Paul’s in Palo Alto first?”
“Don’t tell Pete,” I said, already out of the car. “Hey, Cammy! We gotta run!”
“I’ll come too,” sang Lulu. “I’d like to see your house, Paul. And maybe you can get me into the grad program at Stanford. I call shotgun!” She giggled. “That takes on new meaning if you’ve ridden with Tito.”
“Hurry!” I said. “Pete Ziff is about to show up and beat Paul and me to death with a pool cue.”
The women sat in front, with Paul and me in back.
“Go towards the beach instead of towards the highway,” I told Cammy. “So we don’t pass Pete.”
“I think you’re right about him,” said Cammy. “I remember what he said when we three picked up Alma.”
Paul and I glanced at each other. Our new pasts were partly unknown. Just as we turned onto the Monterey beach road, I glimpsed Pete’s motorcycle far uphill, pulling off the highway into the Steinbeck Memorial Hospital lot. We were safe, at least for now.
“Show us what’s in the boxes,” said Lulu as Cammy worked her way through Monterey and back to Route One.
“I’d like to,” said Paul. “I’d like to use mine to keep an eye on Pete. But Henry said I shouldn’t let you see the new devices. You’re not spying on us for Van and Henry, are you, Lulu? Or for the Heritagists?”
“Leni’s the one hooked into the Heritagists,” said Lulu. “I was just hanging with Henry because I thought I might move in with him, or at least get a good programming job, now that my Buzz career’s gone up in a catfight. You’re the guy helping the Heritagists, aren’t you, Paul? Like those scientists who built the hydrogen bomb. Myopic, in denial, sexually impotent.”
“Soooo, let’s assume you already know about these Gobub- bles,” said Paul, opening his box. “And to hell with nondisclosure. Gobubbles are prediction oracles.”
“Yeah, I saw Henry’s.” said Lulu. “I even peeked at Van’s source code for the operating system, not that any mere mortal can read it. Bottom line: a Gobubble is like a fortune-teller’s crystal ball. And your group is giving them to the Heritagists for their hundred-percent campaign. You’re worse than the bomb builders, Paul, you’re like Hitler’s death-camp architects. Suicidal, life-hating, and quite possibly incapable of love.” Lulu had a take-no-prisoners style of flirting.
“Is Pete gonna chase us up the coast?” Paul asked his Go-bubble.
The bubble showed a scene of Pete sobbing over Alma’s body in the hospital morgue, and then fast-forwarded to Pete drinking heavily in a Monterey bar. It made me queasy to be spying on the guy’s life this way.
“Put it back in the box,” I told Paul. “And let’s put the boxes under our wetsuits in back. I’m thinking the Gobubbles can spy on us, now that they’re wireless. Like Veeter’s laptop before.”
“Right,” said Paul as we stashed the boxes in the rear. He gave Lulu a thoughtful look. “I wasn’t impotent last time I got a chance to check. But I guess it wasn’t webcast around here. What’s all this about a Heritagist hundred-percent campaign?”
“Like you haven’t heard of it?” said Lulu. “You’re playing the innocent robot geek?”
Cammy glanced sharply at us in the rearview mirror. “You have memory loss, too, Paul? Just like Bela?”
“I don’t know what Bela told you,” said Paul, cautiously. “I wouldn’t want to contradict him.”
“We got high on conotoxins with Alma,” I said quickly. “And we forgot a lot of stuff.”
“We even forgot about taking the conotoxins,” said Paul with a rueful smile. “That’s how bad off we are. Can someone inform my damaged brain about the hundred-percent campaign?”
So I told Paul about what I’d heard on the radio. Lulu and Cammy chimed in with more details. Veeter had been using the Gobranes to simulate people’s reactions to possible Heritagist ads and news releases—with the result that the Heritagist candidates were hitting nothing but home runs.
Like, for instance, the probable Common Ground presidential candidate Winston Merritt was a clean-living, highly decorated war hero, while Doakes himself had been a party-animal draft dodger. But the Heritagists had come up with the angle of finding a few of Merritt’s fellow soldiers to say that Merritt hadn’t deserved his medals, and that Merritt had thrown his medals away, and that Merritt wasn’t a real patriot. And the public went for it. Merritt wasn’t even nominated yet, and his campaign was dead in the water. And it wasn’t like there were any viable alternates. Every Common Ground candidate for every single office across the country was on the ropes. Thanks to the oracular Gobranes the hundred-percent campaign was all but assured of success.
Paul groaned and rubbed his face. “We helped do that? Is Roland Haut involved?”
"Your old thesis adviser?” said Lulu. “He’s not in the loop, so far as I know.”
“Good,” I said. “Let’s keep it that way.”
“Maybe on this Earth, I never got high enough to phone him,” muttered Paul.
“You think you’re from another Earth too?” asked Cammy. “Like Bela? Is that a common side effect of conotoxins?”
“Whatever,” said Paul. “We’re here now. We’ll work with what we have. That story about the hundred-percent campaign—have you guys ever heard of the logician Kurt Godel?”
“There’s a classic mathematician pickup line for you,” said Lulu. “Of course I’ve heard of him; I’m a computer scientist!”
“I’m thinking the hundred-percent campaign fulfills a prophecy of Kurt Godel’s,” said Paul. "This goes back to the 1940s. Our Kurt, the king of logicians, was at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and he applies for his citizenship, and he hears that the judge might ask him some questions about the constitution. So Godel studies the U. S. constitution as only Kurt fucking Godel can study a logical system. He’s gonna pass that test. And supposedly he discovers some weird loophole via which our constitution allows a sufficiently ruthless president to install himself as dictator for life. Godel runs to tell his pal Albert Einstein about this—Einstein’s at the Institute too, he’s like an uncle figure for young Kurt. They love taking walks and talking together; nobody else is as smart as these two. On the constitution thing, Einstein tells Godel to calm down, and he even comes along with Godel to his naturalization hearing, and when Godel starts in on the judge about the impending Amerikan dictatorship, Einstein defuses the situation by cracking a joke and signing some autographs, and Godel gets his papers and that’s the end of it. But mathematicians have always wondered exactly what was that constitutional loophole that Godel found. And now in this brave new world, I’m finding out that Godel’s loophole is for re
al; it’s the hundred-percent campaign. Good work on picking such a wonderful Earth for us to live on, Bela.”
Veeter’s limo showed up at Paul’s house in Palo Alto at the same time we did. Cousin Gyula was driving as usual. And sitting next to Gyula was big Owen, still alive on Earth-2.
Van said he needed to talk to us in private, so Paul and I went into the house with him while Cammy and Lulu waited by the car, working on the words and moves for “Lug Bi War Bride,” using Gyula and Owen as their test audience—Gyula was enjoying it, but Owen seemed to have no idea what was going on.
Veeter was carrying a metallic umbrella. He popped it open as soon as we were inside Paul’s house. The thing had a foil skirt hanging down around it and some electronic boxes taped to its ribs; one of them was an audio jammer emitting a jagged hiss. Veeter beckoned us to get under the umbrella with him. The three us were so closely crowded together that I could smell the other two men’s breath.
“This is my state-of-the-art privacy chamber,” said Veeter. “I call it a hushbrella. The reason it looks so funky is that I made it myself—otherwise it would have an NSA microphone in it, right? I’m staying at my ranch up on the ridge just now, so I ran down to see you in person. The good news is that I’m the Speaker of the House now. And we’ve got those new Gobubbles to program, which is fun. The joy of tech. Everyone already knows that you showed a Gobubble to Cammy and Lulu, and that’s not a big deal, but please, boys, for your own safety, be careful of what you say about the Heritagists. I’ve got enemies.”
“Ramirez?” I guessed.
“Quick as ever, Bela,” said Van. “Yes, Ramirez is deep into the NSA. He’s got access to all the Monogrub vlog data-mining results. And Cal Kweskin and Maria Reyes are reporting directly to him. And there’s other agents as well. I wouldn’t be too sure about Leni, for instance. Buzz was a prototype for the Monogrub One in a Million show, which is totally NSA.” Veeter shook his head. “Can you imagine? People are volunteering for intimate surveillance!”
“I thought that show was my idea,” said Paul.
“That’s what Leni wanted you to think,” said Veeter. “If you review the tapes, it’s quite clear it was her idea.”
“Paranoia, the destroyer,” I intoned, harking back to the day when I’d fantasized that Haut might shoot me from his office window.
“It’s not paranoia when it’s true,” said Veeter. “The reason we need to worry about Ramirez is that I just got Joe Doakes to promise me the vice-presidential slot on the ticket this fall. I used a carrot and a stick. For the carrot, I showed him some Gobrane predictions that make it clear the switch is a slam dunk for the hundred-percent campaign. For the stick, I told him that I’d stop supplying and programming the Gobubbles if he didn’t put me on the ticket.”
“Pull the plug, Van,” implored Paul. “Don’t help the Heritag- ists anymore. Disable the Gobranes and Gobubbles that they already have.”
“Actually, I thought of that,” said Veeter. “I’m pretty uneasy about what’s in the cards. But it’s too late to freeze out Doakes and his handlers. Kweskin and Reyes have all our data, all our notes. They can replicate anything that we’ve done. Even if I pulled out completely, at most they’d lose a month of time. And the elections are still five months away. Doakes knows my stick is weak, but he likes the smell of the carrot. Ramirez is unpopular in all the mainstream demographics. Even the Latinos don’t like him; they know the guy’s an amoral thug. And Gobrane simulations show that Ramirez is the one factor that could drag down the hundred-percent campaign. I’m the best man to replace him.”
“But why not pull out anyway?” I asked. “Like Paul said. Why help Doakes at all? You’re not a fascist, Van. You’re a regular guy. Practically a mathematician.”
“Face it, if things go as the Heritagists plan, there won’t be another free election for many years to come,” said Van. “It’ll take an armed revolution to get them out. I want to stay on board to try and keep things from getting too far out of hand. You don’t know how it is in the inner party circles. They’re talking about brainwashing and assassination squads, about torture and secret prison camps.”
“What if I gave the Gobubbles to the Common Ground party?” I asked.
“You’d be dead,” said Veeter. “And it’s not even clear that the Common Grounders would have the balls to use Gobubbles the right way. Winston Merritt, for crying in the sink? He’s letting a draft dodger wipe the floor with his Medal of Honor.”
“I’d be dead?”
“Believe it. All three of us might be hit pretty soon, as a matter of fact. Yesterday I heard that Ramirez is so steamed about getting bumped off the ticket that he wants to do something drastic. That’s why I’m holed up on my ranch with my guards and some robot defenses I’ve put together. I’ve been running Gobrane simulations of Ramirez around the clock, but of course his boys are doing the same on me. It’s like chess. I came here to warn you two that some of the scenarios get ugly.”
“Why not give Gobubbles to everyone in the world?” suggested Paul. “If the Heritagists were discredited, they wouldn’t have the power to come after us.”
“That’s a thought,” said Veeter after a pause. “The open- source path to liberation. Maybe I should tell you the Gobubble recipe.”
Cammy and Lulu interrupted us then, saying that Gyula wanted Veeter out in the limo to take a secure call from Washington. Van was out there a long time, leaving his hushbrella in the kitchen with us. Lulu, Paul, Cammy, and I ate some food from Paul’s fridge. Lulu was still flirting hard with Paul and he was starting to go for it. Although the women thought we were being pompous, Paul and I got under Van’s hushbrella for a side conversation.
The topic: Should we jump back to La Hampa? Neither of us was up for repeating the whole rigmarole right away. After all, we weren’t particularly welcome in La Hampa anymore, and if we traveled to yet another Earth, that one might be even worse than Earth-2. The divine jellyfish’s notions of “better world” were, to say the least, inscrutable. Nevertheless, we agreed that if things got desperate we’d bail, assuming we could make a hypertunnel again.
“Super secret spy stuff,” said Lulu as we emerged. “Are you boys bi?”
Paul found this amusing. “Stay here with me tonight, Lulu,” he said. "You can straighten me out. Or kink me up. Either way. You’re fun to have around.”
And then Veeter came back in, looking very grim.
“Let it come down,” he said. “I need to talk to Paul alone under the hushbrella.”
I was curious of course, but by now Cammy was seriously impatient with all the male secrecy. She and I said goodbye and headed out for Klownetown alone.
My alternate life as a rocker pulled me back in. We had a great rehearsal with Naz, K-Jen, and Thuggee. They were very stoked about playing with AntiCrystal on Saturday; the promoters had given Thuggee three dozen tickets to the zone by the stage, and he shared those out.
Fueled by a mound of take-out Tanzanian rice and fried bugs that Naz brought, we ran through our whole repertoire, including two new songs: “Lug Bi War Bride,” and a political call to arms by K-Jen attacking the Heritagists’ hundred-percent campaign. She called her song “Hundred-Percent Asshole.”
At first I thought that maybe we’d have a chance of reaching more people if we called it “Hundred-Percent Tyrant.” But K-Jen said I was being as wimpy as Winston Merritt, the impotent stuffed-shirt-mandarin Common Grounder candidate, and that these desperate times called for radical confrontation. So, okay, we did it K-Jen’s way, using the title for a chorus and hammering out fresh verses as we went along. Pretty soon the song got good to us. It gave me goose bumps to imagine playing our inflammatory anthem to tens of thousands of people at no less a venue than Heritagist Park.
We caught our breath for a few minutes, and then somehow I got into a gentle ballad inspired by Alma’s death, and by Cammy’s death before that. I was calling it “Where Are You?” and I drew some of the i
magery from the visions I’d shared with Alma inside the Nataraja jellyfish.
It was odd, odd, odd to see people die. The world rolled on the same as before, as heedlessly as if a person were an ant or a wildflower or a puff of wind. Nature kept on making more and more of everything, and never mind that birth is a death sentence. And now that I’d been to La Hampa, I knew that creation was even more prodigal than I’d ever imagined. There were worlds upon worlds filled with people struggling and swarming like fretful gnats, all of them doomed to vanish into dust while the cosmic dance spun on.
After the deaths, I was very grateful to see a Cammy standing there calm and solid and alive, drawing beautiful music from her bass guitar.
Thuggee, K-Jen, and Naz left, and Cammy stayed over—this was no big deal for her, as she’d already slept with a Bela. I had a moment of hesitation as we got into bed together; I missed Alma-1, and I felt sad and guilty about Alma-2. But the Almas were nowhere on this Earth, and Cammy was right here in my bed: her shape, smell, voice, and touch crowding my senses. I wasn’t going to flub my chance again.
The sex was great. Cammy tasted good: her mouth, her skin, her body, her pheromones like keys fitting into rusty locks. We talked awhile after we were done; I told her a little more about how I’d gotten here; she still didn’t really believe it. She especially didn’t like the notion of me raising her from the dead by tunneling to a parallel reality—nobody wants to hear someone talk about their murder. So I dropped the topic, and we chatted lazily about our music and our plans for the band, and then we made love again. The second time around, I realized that sex with Cammy wasn’t all that different from sex with Alma— which had always been great, too. Like most men, I’m ridiculously easy to satisfy.
I awoke near noon, still tired. My hierophantically supercharged brain had been spinning all night long. Cammy was gone; she’d left a note; she was in San Francisco to meet with Waclaw Smorynski to work out a deal where we could use some of AntiCrystal’s equipment—they had, like, sixty thousand watts worth of amplification on tap. She’d be back for rehearsal around six o’clock. XXX, Cammy.