by Rudy Rucker
“Me too,” said Paul, on the beam as usual. “Come by tomorrow morning.”
“See ya.”
That night Washer Drop had another good rehearsal, with the band in an ebullient mood. Cammy was a little distant with me, though, treating everything I said like a joke. When we finished playing, she asked Thuggee for a ride back to San Francisco. As they prepared to go, I loaded Thuggee down with warnings about Roberto Sandoval and the nefarious NSA minions of Frank Ramirez’s Heritagist henchmen.
“Lighten up, Bela,” said Cammy. “What are you, my Dad?”
“Klaus Vendt,” I said. “That’s me.”
“How the hell do you know his name? I never told you that.”
“I met Klaus and Dagmar at your funeral in the world where Sandoval stabbed you sixteen times. That’s why I keep telling you to be careful.”
“Washer Drop singer-guitarist Bela Kis suffers delusional psychotic break,” announced K-Jen into the Monogrub vlog ring she insisted on wearing. “Band members are increasingly concerned.”
“Our man’s in training for his big match with Waclaw is all,” said Naz, sending a shower of beats from his drum-vest and singing a couplet.
Gobubble goblin wonder-wall,
Who's the hundred-percentest dreg of all?
“Bela’s a way better fuck than Waclaw,” said Cammy. “Except when he starts ranting about resurrecting me. Nail me to the cross, Bela, nail me to the cross.” She danced down the Ratvale stairs with her arms stretched out and gracefully swaying.
“I am on the very highest alert for conotoxic hyperspace hit men,” Thuggee told me, feigning a salute.
Goofing and pranking, my band made their way to the street. I watched them out my window—waving to them, laughing with them, loving them. Maybe everything was okay. I went to bed alone and I got my first good night’s sleep in several days.
I woke fresh and rested on Saturday morning. The La Hampan hierophantic brain-boost had finally worn off. I didn’t miss it. I’m smart enough just being a mathematician.
I jumped in the squinty whale and drove to Paul’s, bringing my Gobubble in its case in the back of the car. I could have reattempted asking it what Paul was up to, but I didn’t. Whenever I was using my Gobubble, the Heritagists were spying on me.
Paul greeted me with a smile. An odd smell wafted from his house, accompanied by a staticky hiss. Resting on the hall table was a Gobubble showing Paul mowing the grass around his house while lustily singing the “Star Spangled Banner.”
“That’s Special Paul,” said Paul. "He lives in my Gobubble to blind the Pig’s eyes. Come on in my kitchen.” He led me through a foil-covered plastic curtain he’d rigged up across his kitchen door. “It’s like a big hushbrella in here. A temporary autonomous zone.”
He’d papered the ceiling, walls, window, and floor of his kitchen/work-room with aluminum foil. The long sheets were tidily aligned, and he’d taped a plastic tarp over the foil on the floor so that we didn’t tear it when we walked around. An audio jammer sat on the counter pulsing out its pseudorandom hiss. And the microwave oven was humming with its door open, filling the aether with electromagnetic interference.
It smelled like the ocean in Paul’s silver kitchen—and like a Chinatown butcher’s shop with offal piled in the alley. I breathed through my mouth, not my nose. Pots of turbid, glistening fluids sat upon his stove. A laptop computer and a homemade bubble wand rested on Paul’s kitchen table beside a steel mixing bowl filled with foamy, iridescent liquid. The counters and the floor were strewn with—Gobubbles.
“Way to go, Paul! Did Veeter—”
“He gave me the recipe right after you left the other day. How to make the bubble fluid, and how to put his morphonic operating system onto it. And he gave me a download link for the operating system, source and executable both. Remember that phone call he took in his car, and then he said ‘Let it come down’? He’d just found out that Ramirez outmaneuvered him. Van’s not gonna be on the ticket after all—Ramirez told Doakes that if he was dropped, he’d tell the press the details about how Doakes has been gaming Tariq Qaadri’s terrorism to help the Heritagists in the polls. Skyscraper-bomber Qaadri pops up to scare our voters whenever there’s an election, and Doakes makes sure that nobody catches Qaadri. Van actually gave me an access code for this secret video that shows Doakes’s personal chopper air-lifting Qaadri outta the siege in Lilliputistan to his safe haven in Blefescustan. The Presidential seal on the helicopter is, like, covered with black paint, but you can see its outline anyway.”
“Whoah. Van gave you all that?”
“He says he’s had a change of heart. Says he hadn’t realized just how rotten his grand old party had become. But I think mainly he’s mad that he’s out of the power loop. The guy’s a politician. He wants us to bring down the administration so he can step in. Dig it, he’s Speaker of the House, and according to the Constitution, that puts him third in line after the Prez and the Veep. So, like I said, he gave me the recipe. And when Lulu left on Friday morning I got busy. I was able to get some supplies from the Stanford labs.”
“Good deal,” I said. “And Lulu? You really like her?”
“She reminds me of myself,” said Paul, which was his highest form of praise. “She’s off at the admissions office trying to become a Stanford CS grad student. I could get serious about her. But just now my heart is still a little—you know. Off-line. How about Cammy? Are you living the dream?”
“She spent the night with me on Thursday and it was great. But then Friday she hooked up with Waclaw Smorynski. I don’t know. I miss Alma.”
“Me too,” said Paul quietly “And what about Pete Ziff? I’ve been expecting him to kill me even before I’m martyred by the Heritagists.” He said this in such a flat, offhand way that I couldn’t tell if he was kidding—or if he cared.
“I used Gobubble simulations to defuse Pete; I tested out his reactions to possible approaches, and I found a line that worked. He’s not such a bad guy. He’ll be scattering Alma’s ashes at Pleasure Point on Tuesday. You should be there, too. You were her boyfriend in this world.”
“Yeah,” said Paul sadly. “And I screwed it up. I’m really something. First I killed Cammy by not taking her to the train station, and then I killed Alma by encouraging Haut to show up with his ray gun.” He held up his hand. “Don’t interrupt me, Bela, I have to speak the truth. I’ve been thinking about it. It was Haut’s energy ray that triggered the earthquake.”
“Who knows, Paul,” I said, patting his shoulder. “Maybe the jellyfish god made Earth-2 this way on purpose. Or maybe she couldn’t help having it turn out like this. Everything in the world is inextricably interlinked. Maybe something good depends on our pain right now.”
Paul sighed and rubbed his face. “Funeral on Tuesday? Yeah, pick me up on your way to Cruz. Assuming we’re still here in three days. Assuming people are still having funerals by then. Henry Nunez was right, we’ve entered a technological singularity. And just wait till we hand out ten thousand Gobubbles at your stadium concert tonight. That’s the plan, right?”
“You can make ten thousand?” I said. “You’re my hero, dog. Tell me about your process.” Looking more closely at the Gobubbles scattered around the room, I noticed that they were all showing images of Paul doing wildly improbable things, with no two of the images the same. “Why is every one of these Gobubbles simulating you?”
“They’re testing the draft versions of Special Paul,” said Paul, his gloom lifting.
“What is this with Special Paul?”
“He’s gifted,” said Paul. “He’s so bright it’s frightening. But he’s intermittently chaotic. I keep Special Paul running on my personal Gobubble out in the hall; he’s like my screen saver. He screws up the Web’s Paul Bridge data-set updates on a realtime basis. And that makes me Gobubble-unpredictable. But before we get into that, I’ll show you how to make Gobubbles.”
“Yeah.”
Pa
ul stepped over to the kitchen table, clearing his throat like a professor. “To make a Gobubble, you blow a bubble from this goo,” he said, jiggling the steel bowl of glistening liquid. “Bovine pancreatic juices mixed with kelp-stem pulp and a bit of hog melanin in a gelatin, glycerin, and detergent base. The base produces extremely long-lived bubbles, and the organics catalyze a colorful activator-inhibitor paracomputation. Oh, and the recipe includes traces of magnesium and gallium for the wireless access.”
“No way is a soap bubble going to be pulling in the wireless Web unless it has some kind of ground-level program to begin with,” I said, thinking out loud. “So you must be loading Van’s operating system onto the membrane while you blow the bubble, right?”
“Behold the magic wand,” said Paul. His bubble wand had a comb of copper teeth around the bubble hole. A wire led from the teeth down the handle to a laptop computer. “The laptop feeds an electromagnetic signal into the bubble wand,” continued Paul, dipping it into the shiny fluid. “It sets up certain eddy currents and long-term resonant vibrations in the spherical membrane, yes. These currents and vibrations constitute Van Veeter’s Morphonic Operating System for the Membrane Paracomputer, Release 2.0, Spherical Version. MOSMP 2-SV. Here we go.”
He pursed his lips and puffed a gentle stream of air. The Gobubble swelled, wobbled, and came free. I caught it in my hand. Its surface was slightly rippled; it was patterned with azure spirals and ecru polka dots.
“Show me what Cammy’s doing,” I said on a whim.
“No data,” answered the newborn Gobubble.
“This bubble doesn’t work!” I exclaimed.
“Duh? The kitchen’s a temporary autonomous zone, remember? No wireless, no Web. Take the Gobubble out in the living-room, and it’d work just fine, although the Heritagist data-mining bots might squawk about an extra bubble coming on-line.”
“Okay, so now tell me why all the other bubbles in here are working—and showing you."
“These are special bubbles; they have the Special Paul screensaver. Special Paul doesn’t need Web access to run. How’d I make him? I studied Veeter’s operating system and figured out a hack. The Special Paul screensaver is based on the NSA’s Paul Bridge simulation that I snarfed off the Web. Except I added a chaotic cubic wave equation into its update step.” He gestured around the room. “Computational pseudorandomness makes these Pauls special. It took me quite a few tries till I got the algorithm just right. The big win is that now I can carry a Gobubble around and use it to predict things— and with Special Paul as my Gobubble’s screensaver, the Heritagists can’t be using the bubble to track me.”
“Could you do that for me?” I said. “I have my Gobubble in my car. I didn’t bring it in because I’m so worried about the spying problem.”
“Suffer the little Gobubbles to come unto me,” said Paul, patting his laptop. “I can make a Special Bela screensaver for you, dog.”
So I fetched my Gobubble from the car. When I took it out of its box, my Gobubble was off-line due to the wireless shielding in Paul’s kitchen; it was showing wavy vermilion grids with lemony horseshoes. Paul used his landline to get the NSA’s data set on Bela Kis; built a Special Bela simulation using his batshit cubic wave equation; and waved his magic bubble wand to put Special Bela onto my Gobubble.
My Gobubble displayed an image of me driving my car across the Bay Bridge towards Klownetown. In the middle of the bridge I slammed on my brakes, causing a chain reaction pile-up behind me. Ignoring that, my image began walking back towards San Francisco. And that was only scene one. Over and over the image wavered and displayed fresh notions of what the absurd Special Bela might do. He was, successively, smearing brown shoe-polish on his car; masturbating over an anatomy book in the Stanford Library; eating a Monogrub triple burger; building a campfire out of dynamite sticks; shopping for an SUV; and doing pushups on a floor covered with shattered bottles.
“Special Bela,” said Paul. “Keep him near you always, my son. But right now, park him in the living room. From now on, you can use your Gobubble without the Heritagists tracking you. Whenever it has a spare moment, your Gobubble will be running Special Bela to ruin everyone’s predictions about you.”
“That’s so great,” I said. "Yesterday I was trying to falsify my Gobubble’s predictions about me and I couldn’t do it. Even when I was using hierophantics.”
“That doesn’t surprise me,” said Paul. “Hierophantics is software. You’re still working with the same brain, with the same physics. We’re in what Rowena calls a docile zone of reality. In principle you’d expect most naturally occurring processes to be computationally unpredictable—but that doesn’t absolutely have to be the case. In the docile worlds, the underlying cosmic computation happens to be a simple, predictable one, and predictability cascades out of that. In docile worlds there actually are computational short-cuts for predicting natural phenomena. The physics on Earth-2 is predictable.”
“How do you know?”
“Yesterday I was testing my Gobubble on falling leaves, on candle flames, on the clouds, on the weather, on a dripping faucet—it was predicting them all. Nature isn’t nearly as gnarly as we always thought. At least not on Earth-2 and not, for that matter, on Earth-1.”
“Our home Earth never felt docile to me.”
“Yeah, it was docile; that’s why Osckar won the bet against Rowena. We’re predictable. Why? Humans are physical systems; the physics of Earth-1 is docile; therefore the humans of Earth-1 are predictable. But, at least while we were there, Earth-1 science never reached the point of being able to make the predictions. However, on Earth-2, paracomputation has taken off. Earth-2 science has reached the point of being able to make the not-so-difficult-after-all predictions about our docile reality. The Gobubble can predict human behavior.”
“I’m finding this hard to believe,” I said. “Okay, maybe we don’t have ectoplasmic souls, maybe we’re just physics, but physics is supposed to be computationally irreducible. Unpredictable. Intrinsically random. Nondocile. Fierce!”
“Not when you’re in a docile zone like Earth-2,” said Paul with a shrug. “But that doesn’t have to stop a couple of crazy mathematicians from making things weird enough to be fun. Check this out.”
He produced a gas-powered leaf blower from beneath the kitchen table. Wired copper bubble wands were taped to the nozzle, fed by plastic tubes snaking back around the engine to a plastic gas can filled of bubble goo. Three more full cans were under the table.
“The craziest mathematician of them all,” I said admiringly. “You’re a monster.”
“My motorized multiwand bubble blower can pump out ten thousand bubbles in under five minutes. I’m bringing it to your concert tonight. Lulu’s coming with me.”
“Power to the people,” I said, handing him two tickets and Crew passes. “Which reminds me: I gotta head up to Heritagist Park for our sound check with AntiCrystal.”
We made some plans for what to do after the concert, and then I was back in the squinty whale, with Special Bela busy in the Gobubble next to me on the passenger seat. Special Bela was canvassing door-to-door for the Heritagist party.
I had it in my mind that we should be playing “Hundred- Percent Asshole” when we released the bubbles at the concert’s end, so at the sound check I talked up the song to AntiCrystal, that is, to Waclaw Smorynski, Jutta Schreck, guitarist Stanislaw Mostowski, and drummer Abdul Mohammed.
Being near the AntiCrystal members felt like mingling with gods: each of them had the indestructible aura of a Platonic archetype. I hardly knew which of them to stare at. Seeing Waclaw in the flesh, glowing and twinkling, any thought of my being jealous about Cammy and him evaporated. This guy was way out of my league. AntiCrystal was an astronomically bigger name than Washer Drop. Even so, I kept pitching the notion of them playing our new song until, what the hey and opanować się, Waclaw, Jutta, Stanislaw, and Abdul said yes.
They were loose enough to think it
would be a fun goof to surprise their fans by a two-band encore jam with the Washer Drop newbies. It helped that Jutta had become obsessed with Cammy and with our song “Oil Pig”—which was why we’d been asked to open for them. And that, by now, Waclaw had a thing for Cammy. Jutta was flirting with me too, I think, but I kept my distance. She was pretty formidable with her mask-like expression, mirror-reflecting full-eye contact lenses, and thigh- high silver leather boots—even though she was laughing and smoking pot and goosing people with the tip of her bass guitar.
I could hardly wait for dark, and finally it came. The concert was everything we’d hoped.
Washer Drop played the first set. It was amazing to perform at such a big venue. According to the roadies, we had a gate of thirty thousand souls in those towering stands. In the audience near the stage lurked Paul and Lulu with the tanks of bubble goo and the bubble machine, temporarily idle. I was glad to see them securely stationed in the midst of Pete and his dreggy posse: sociopathic Prescription John, manic Jeremiah, hyper-vigilant Lizard Girl, and the nihilistic Wrong Wave Jose with his pompadour and his grommeted earlobes. I was a little concerned that Sandoval might show up to execute a hit on us— although so far he was nowhere to be seen.
Thanks to the massive AntiCrystal sound system, our music overflowed the huge outdoor space. It was mind-boggling how one little flick of my guitar pick could stir so vast a volume— literally hundreds of tons of air were undulating with the motions of my fingers. And to sing a phrase and have thirty- thousand voices call it back at you—talk about positive feedback! This beat the hell out of publishing a math paper. I felt merged into the public hive-mind like never before.
And when the giant, fueled spaceship that was AntiCrystal came onstage, we saw what it really meant to work a crowd. Waclaw was an amazing frontman: wildly charismatic and lithe as a flickering flame, his voice smoothly rocketing up past the heavy-metal falsetto register into the operatic zone, his face a Punch-and-Judy show of conflicting emotions. Jutta Schreck was a cartoon superheroine come to life, a jolly powerful robot, and not too high at all tonight. Their guitarist Stanislaw Mostowski was a hyperactive maniac, splitting his notes in two, and then splitting them again, his mouth wide open, stomping around the stage in a spraddle-legged crouch. Abdul Mohammed was shamanic and magical; even amidst his most explosive fireworks of sound, his arms remained somehow languid, floating above his drum kit like kelp stems in surf, his drumsticks always where they needed to be, calm at the heart of the maelstrom.