by Rudy Rucker
As AntiCrystal ended their set with "Crying Chainsaw Clown,” Paul started up his bubble machine, its leaf-blower roar barely audible over the rhythmic chanting of the crowd. The bay breeze began sweeping great drifts of the Gobubbles across the crowd. Paul had programmed his electric wand to load this batch with screensavers showing realtime predictions of things that would happen if the Heritagists met with success in November.
Waclaw beckoned to Washer Drop; we were waiting at the rear of the stage. We stepped into the light and plugged in. A melee had broken out in the audience near the stage. Security guards were trying to force their way into the crowd to get at Paul and his motorized bubble blower. But a bunch of dregs were holding back the guards, and Wrong Wave Jose was leaning across to smack the guards’ heads with Pete’s pool cue.
“We’ve got a hundred-percent problem in this country,” I yelled into the mike, my voice booming back at me. “See your future in the bubbles! See what the Heritagists want with their hundred-percent campaign! And, thank you, thank you, thank you, AntiCrystal for letting us play this song! Joe Doakes is—A Hundred-Percent Asshole!” I swung my arms down like a conductor and the bands dug in, K-Jen and Waclaw screaming the lyrics with a classic dreg/metal mix of joy and defiance.
It was a wild ride. Naz and Abdul were pounding the drums in a goose-stepper’s march, Cammy and Jutta were bubbling up fat sarcastic bass notes, Stanislaw was playing a wallpaper of paisley-shapes and I was stabbing rusty triangular knives of ostinato guitar feedback into K-Jen’s stark text.
He’s a hundred-percent jerk—Never had to work.
He’s a hundred-percent war—Our friends are dying for.
He’s a hundred-percent Pig—Why let him be so big?
He’s a hundred-percent hate—Stop him now, it’s late!
We all had mikes, and we came in together on the chorus, with the crowd pumping their fists and roaring the words along with us, over and over again, Waclaw s hugely amplified voice soaring above it all, barking out the refrain with a quirky passion that made each repetition new
Hundred-percent asshole/
Hundred-percent asshole1.
Hundred-percent assholel
The promoters cut the power to our amps after perhaps the thirtieth repetition of our chorus, but they were way too late. We’d gotten over.
And yes, I know the lyrics look crude on the printed page, but forget not the transformative power of rock and roll. Imagine, if you will, thirty thousand people screaming these words at once, and imagine ten thousand Gobubbles floating among them, with each bubble showing a simulated moment of the projected hundred-percent Heritagist administration: truculent Joe Doakes announcing another war in the service of big business, police attacking poor people with clubs, industrial pipelines pouring poisons into rivers, American tanks razing mosques and minarets, hard guy Frank Ramirez telling FBI agents to shut up, another skyscraper collapsing from a terrorist bomb, peevish Doakes and his marshmallow family hobnobbing with glittering billionaires, a fresh-faced American soldier dying, a cancer-stricken old woman staring into an empty cupboard, a child in a nightgown begging outside a factory, heavy rain washing away the soil of a clear-cut forest, Doakes testily signing another tax cut for the rich—hundred-percent asshole!
Backstage we were filled with a sense of imminent revolution. Cammy was hanging tight with Waclaw. K-Jen was flirting with Stanislaw, and Abdul was playing with Naz’s drum vest. A dauntingly merry Jutta Schreck gave me a big kiss and rubbed my face against her pumped-up tits. But I was worried about the Heritagists. Even if we’d struck a decisive blow against their empire, they still had time to gun me down. Paul and I were planning to lie low in San Ho.
Quickly I disguised myself as an AntiCrystal fan. I rubbed some of Jutta’s pale make-up on my face, squirted my hair with Abdul’s green hair gel, and painted on K-Jen’s black lipstick and dark eye shadow. To complete the look, I pulled on an black XXL AntiCrystal concert T-shirt showing a busty devil-girl playing a crystalline guitar in front of three empty crosses and an atomic mushroom cloud.
And then I melted into the night, with Special Bela in my pants pocket jamming all predictions of my next move.
7
The Best of All Possible Worlds
Most people in the audience lucky enough to snag a Gobubble had taken it home with them. Yet a fair number of the bubbles had blown loose in the wind. Outside the stadium, the iridescent spheres were bouncing past on the sidewalk, each of them holding an image of some different person’s future. Homeless people were busy collecting the bubbles, stuffing the futures into ragged sacks.
I’d thought maybe the Heritagists would be out in force trying to confiscate the Gobubbles. But it seemed like for now they were off-balance, perhaps even stunned into silence. Surely that wouldn’t last long.
I’d arranged to meet Paul at the commuter-train station across the street, and there he was, dressed up like a Washer Drop fan in a red T-shirt showing a grinning washing-machine embedded in the roof of an SUV with an X-eyed pig hanging out the door. Paul had gel-dyed his hair black and moussed it into a Mohawk, had attached a temporary ring to his nose, and had decorated his arms with press-on tattoos. We high-fived each other, looking for all the world like a pair of seasoned headbangers on their way home to San Jose.
“What a concert,” said Paul. “You outdid yourself, Bela.”
“We shouldn’t use our real names,” I cautioned.
“We’ll be Joes,” said Paul. “Okay, Joe?”
“Sure thing, Joe. A hundred-percent!”
“Hundred-percent asshole!” echoed Paul, and his cry was repeated by half a dozen people around us.
“Hundred percent!” I yelled again, and got the same enthusiastic response, this time with twenty voices chiming in. The phrase had a stickiness to it; people liked to say it. With any luck, in a few days the response would be universal.
A lot of the people in the train car had Gobubbles from the concert; Paul and I switched seats after each stop to get an idea of what people were doing with the bubbles.
A smooth-talking backwards-baseball-hat-wearing guy was wooing a full-lipped beauty. She had a Gobubble, and he didn’t. “Let me stay over tonight,” he said. “I don’t want to be apart from you. We’ll go to the beach in the morning.” The woman looked in her Gobubble, and saw him sneaking out of her house the next morning before she woke up. “I don’t think so,” she said. “But you can drive me home from the station.”
A ruminative, slow-moving boy in an SJSU cap was playing on-line poker on his pocket computer while watching himself in his Gobubble. His actions were fully in synch with the Gobubble’s predictions; he bet big and won when the bubble predicted he’d bet big and win; he bet small and folded when the bubble predicted he’d bet small and fold. I visualized the positive feedback loop as a teapot morphon with its spout pouring into its top. “What would happen if you did the opposite of what the Gobubble predicts?” Paul asked him. “Why would I do that?” said the boy, brushing Paul off.
A rough-skinned guy with burr-cut hair was watching predictions of lottery drawings in his Gobubble: tomorrow’s Pick 3 and Fantasy Five. He jotted down the numbers to bet. “Tomorrow’s gonna be the last day ever for lotteries,” Paul murmured to me. “With thousands of people picking the correct winning numbers, the pay-off will be less than the ticket price.”
A lean, hungry, business-obsessed guy was leaning over his Gobubble talking to it, honing his Monday morning pitch, attentive to the simulation’s reactions. I remembered how I’d used my Gobubble to get on the right side of Pete Ziff.
Two giggling Goth girls were playing Scissors-Paper-Rock while watching their Gobubbles. The Gobubbles kept changing their predictions of course, each bubble reacting to the new data put out by the opponent’s Gobubble. An ongoing negative feedback loop; two morphonic fish chasing each other with rakes. Even so, whenever the girls finally did stick out their fingers to show their final p
icks, the Gobubbles always had them right.
An academic type with wire-rimmed glasses was watching us watching the girls. “Check this out,” he said to me. He wagged his finger at his Gobubble. “In one minute you’ll be white or red,” he instructed his Gobubble. “I’m going to ask you to do two things: Predict what color you’ll be in one minute, and set your color to the opposite of what you predict.” “I can’t do that,” piped up the Gobubble, “It would be a contradiction.”
Paul and I played dumb, but after the guy got off the train, Paul said, “It looks as if Van Veeter’s current operating system tries to block Haut-style paradoxes in the software. That could make it hard to build another a hypertunnel.”
“We didn’t use software at Miller Beach,” I pointed out. My Gobubble was displaying Special Bela watching golf on television. “We just zapped a spot on the Gobrane.”
“Yeah,” said Paul. “We used a point whose distances from the two edges were in the golden ratio to each other. But on a sphere there’s no edges to measure from.”
“Maybe zap a Gobubble in three spots,” I suggested. “One zap sets the north pole, the second zap sets the prime meridian, and the third zap can do the golden-ratio thing in longitude-latitude coordinates.”
“Let’s try that tomorrow,” said Paul. Our half-empty train was rattling into San Jose. “Where are we gonna stay tonight?”
“How about my mother’s place,” I said. “I miss Ma.”
“Her house is gonna be totally staked out, Joe.”
“I have to see her now,” I said stubbornly. “I was wrong to leave Earth-1 without saying good-bye.”
“It’s not the same Ma here, Joe.”
“I don’t care. And she’ll know someplace we can stay. Don’t worry about the surveillance, I know a back way. We can walk to Ma’s from here.”
We followed the edge of the tracks for awhile, then climbed down into a gully and worked our way up a dry creek bed. Walking the secret byways of my boyhood filled me with nostalgia. With Earth-1 forever behind me, I could never truly go home. But here I was anyway.
We came up from the creek bed and through a bamboo thicket to the rarely used back door of Ma’s garage. Paul and I slipped in there beside Ma’s little white car. Fortunately the garage’s big front door was closed. Standing well back from the slit windows, we could see a black car parked across from our driveway with two figures in it.
The garage had a side door that led right into the kitchen. I stood there listening, wondering if Ma was alone. I could hear her TV; she was watching the late news. She would have known I was giving a concert tonight.
Just then the announcer began talking about our show, with our music faintly in the background. The Heritagists had regrouped; the attack machine was in gear. The Gobubbles were “interactive occult amulets based on illegally obtained top-secret government intelligence technology.” People were required to turn in their Gobubbles to the police—or face the possibility of criminal prosecution. The foreign AntiCrystal band members were being expelled from the country. Dreg-rocker Bela Kis and Stanford mathematician Paul Bridge were being sought in connection with felony charges of violating the Homeland Security Act.
“A hundred percent,” murmured Paul.
I tapped very faintly on the door to the kitchen. Ma had sharp ears. Right away the door swung open and there she was, no taller than my chest, her eyes like inquisitive quotation marks, her face lighting up. She gave us a good once-over, smiling at my green hair and black lipstick, and at Paul’s Mohawk and nose ring.
“Ma,” I whispered, touching my finger to my lips.
“Bela,” she breathed. We hugged. Ma put her hands on my waist as if hefting me, the way she liked to do. Weighing her baby.
Paul made a sleeping gesture, putting his hands by the side of his head. Ma nodded knowingly, pursing her lips to exaggerate the gesture, stretching her neck forward and nodding for a very long time. She went back into the kitchen, exclaiming, “Where is that cat?” for the benefit of any audio bugs, and returned with a note written in Chinese.
It was an introduction to Mabel Wang, the plump old widow of Wing Wang. Mabel was the sister of Wah Woo, who was the husband of my mother’s father’s first cousin Shirley Woo, who was also the grandmother of Ling-Ling Woo—the high school girl whose interest in the vlog footage of me in the shower had inspired my song “Bela’s Weenie.” Aunt Mabel, as I called her, was a remote enough relative that her house was surely unwatched—indeed, it was doubtful if any official databases even registered the fact that I had any connection to Mabel. My relatives were all kind of sneaky.
I hugged Ma again and she patted my head. It was painful to part, knowing that I might soon leave this world as well. As Ma said good-bye to me, she looked just the slightest bit uncertain— and she was never uncertain. It broke my heart. Could Ma at some level sense that I wasn’t her natural-born Bela-2?
With a heavy heart I led Paul back through the bamboo, down into the streambed, across the soccer field at the elementary school, through a culvert under the Guadalupe Freeway, around a lumberyard, and up a gravel alley to Mabel Woo’s tiny cottage. I hadn’t been there in years.
It was two A.M. and we had to knock for quite awhile. For the longest time old Mabel pretended she didn’t hear us, but when we wouldn’t let up, she finally shuffled from the bedroom and peered through the little glass window in the door. Given that we were still dressed as dreg/metal concertgoers, Mabel’s expression was suspicious and sour. Fortunately I had Ma’s note to press against the glass, which made all the difference.
“Little dragon!” she said letting me in. “You dressed for stage! Famous musician. Your mamma Xiao-Xiao tell me.” She touched my cheek and my lipsticked mouth and looked at her finger to see if the colors came off. "You need wash,” she said, and flicked her finger against Paul’s nose ring. “In China we lead cow that way. I Bela’s Aunt Mabel. You like Chinese food?”
“I’m Paul,” he said, unclipping his nose-ring and smoothing out his hair. “Yes, thank you, Mabel, I’m quite hungry. And would you happen to have some beer?”
“Tsingtao,” said Mabel. “Four big bottle. We make after- hours party. Very nice waking up to see you two boys. I was dreaming about husband Wing’s funeral. Every night I dream it again. Too lonely being old. All my friends dead. My son Jackie only visit once in a while. He very busy San Francisco.” Jackie was the bookkeeper for a Chinese tong that owned several of the residential hotels in Chinatown, including the Tang Fat. Mabel bustled across the room and lit a candle inside a red lantern above her miniature dining table. I’d been fascinated by Mabel’s place as a boy; it was like a doll’s house.
“Do you have a computer?” Paul had to ask.
“Of course,” said Aunt Mabel, “I modern woman. Jackie give me. You play with computer tomorrow. Big after-hours party now.”
I was still totally wired from the concert, and Paul, he now confessed, had taken a little taste of Pete Ziff’s meth. We ended up eating, drinking, and talking with Mabel for several hours; after the beer was gone, Mabel brought out some clear Chinese liquor that tasted like paint remover. Mabel was up for hearing us talk for as long as we were able.
When I explained to her that it had to be a secret that we were here, she reminisced about how, back in China, her mother had hid a cousin for a whole year from the Red Guards, keeping him in the hayloft above the cow with the nose ring like Paul’s. She never asked why the law was looking for us; she only said she’d be glad to shelter me and my friend for as long as we liked.
Dawn was breaking when we finally crashed. Aunt Mabel’s house had only two rooms; Paul and I slept on a quilt she laid on the little living room/dining room/kitchenette floor. I woke in the late morning, head throbbing, tongue salty and dry.
Paul was busy on Mabel’s laptop, a clunker with a faint, fuzzy screen and a slow landline link. He informed me that, over the last two hours, he’d Pollinated the world with:
(a
) The Gobubble recipe, which he knew by heart;
(b) Practical tips about how to make a serial-bus bubble wand for programming your Gobubble;
(c) An archival copy of the source and executable code for Veeter’s Gobubble operating system MSOMP 2SV; and
(d) A digitally signed and authenticated copy of the NSA video of Doakes’s helicopter rescuing Qaadri from the American troops in Lilliputistan.
Good old Paul. I drank a quart of water from Mabel’s wee sink. I could see her through the window, in her backyard watering her many roses, wearing a white bonnet with an enormous bill. It was another ruthlessly sunny California day. I peered over Paul’s shoulder at the computer. “Nobody can trace this back to Aunt Mabel’s machine?”
“You gotta trust Onar Anders,” said Paul. Like me, Paul had known Onar before Onar left our math grad program to become the chief Web honcho for the Kingdom of Tonga in the South Pacific, there to provide such sorely needed computer liberation tools as his Pollinator ware. The laptop gave a beep and displayed the fluffy white ball of a dandelion head. Paul had gotten over. Onar’s bots had posted our subversive info on hundreds of thousands of sites worldwide. "The small axes are chopping,” said Paul. “Cutting the big tree down.”
I was glad, but I felt uneasy. “What if, um, Doakes’s agents get to us before he’s out of power? I’d feel more comfortable if I knew we could tunnel back to La Hampa.”