by Rudy Rucker
“So let’s do some experiments,” said Paul. He dug down into his baggy pants pockets and produced his Special Paul Gobubble. The bubble showed Special Paul standing in a long, long line outside a breakfast spot in Los Perros. “Let’s try zapping this bubble in three spots like you said. We don’t necessarily have to go through if it works. We can always get another bubble. Battery?”
After some poking around, I found a flashlight, electrical tape, and wire in a drawer near Mabel’s sink. I remembered that drawer from when I’d been a little boy. Mabel’s place was like a sailboat, with each object stashed away in its one particular place.
“Better take our experiment outside,” I said. “If we make a tunnel in here, Mabel’s whole house could get sucked in.” If I’d been holding a walking stick in my hand I would have been able to touch every wall in this room, the place was that small.
In the yard Mabel cheerfully sprayed water at us, then asked what we were up to.
“We have these fortune-telling balls,” I said, showing her my Gobubble. “You can ask them questions and see the future. And now Paul and I want to zap one with the battery from your flashlight and see if it gets big.”
“Like firework?” said Aunt Mabel. “I stand ready with hose.” “Good idea,” I said agreeably. “But keep a good distance back.” Paul was bent over his Gobubble, battery and wires in hand. So far not much was happening. “How you mean fortune-telling?” asked Mabel after a bit. “Can I ask about stock market?”
“Um, you can try,” I said. “But aren’t the markets closed today? It’s Sunday, right?”
“Shenzhen Exchange in China is trading seven days,” said Mabel, starting towards Paul. “I following Asian blue-chip stocks. I want to ask which will be biggest gainer today.”
“Hold on, Aunt Mabel, let Paul do his thing. You can use my magic ball instead.” Special Bela was using a noisy, gasoline-powered, high-pressure water pump to hose off his SUV. A man’s hose for a man’s car. I handed the Gobubble to Mabel. “Just ask it whatever you’re interested in.” I turned my attention to Paul, who didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. “You did understand what I said about the three points?” I said.
“Duh!” he said sharply. “It doesn’t work. A simpler way to express your notion is to pinprick a right triangle that has two of its sides in the golden ratio to each other, by the way. And that doesn’t work either.” He fumbled around some more, teasing his Gobubble with tiny sparks—but to no avail. “We need a better idea,” said Paul, flopping back on the grass and tossing aside the battery and wires in disgust.
"Let me keep these to try later,” I said, picking them up and shoving them in my pocket.
“Fine,” said Paul, staring up at the sky.
“Look here, Bela,” said Mabel, still busy with my Gobubble. “ZTE do very well today. Spike ten percent.”
“ZTE?” I walked over to her to see.
“Zhongxing Telecommunication Equipment. High-ranking Chinese wireless company. You think I should buy a hundred share?”
“Don’t gamble unless you can afford to lose,” I cautioned. “The economy’s gonna be thrashing for the next few days. That prediction could be wrong. The Gobubble predictions feed back into the system and alter what they’re trying to predict.”
“I call Jackie now. Buy two hundred share.”
“Please don’t,” I said.
“Not worry,” said Aunt Mabel. “I no tell about you. I tell him I have dream.”
She phoned Jackie and placed her order, but a few minutes later Jackie called back with the news that the Shenzhen exchange had closed down. He hadn’t been able to place Mabel’s trade.
“Your ball no good,” said Mabel. We were back in the house now, Mabel busy at her little stove, fixing rice-flour pancakes for our breakfast. Paul and I were slouched on her couch.
“It’s like that Scissors-Paper-Rock game on the train,” said Paul.
“I put on TV, we watch real news while we eat,” said Mabel, setting down the pancakes on the table. “Maybe hell break loose from what you bad boys do.” She nodded towards the shelf with the bottle of clear, oily Chinese liquor. “Hair of dog?”
“God no,” I said.
The TV news was wonderful. All the networks were airing special reports on a nation in crisis. At long last the news media had turned on their puppet masters. The journalists, too, had been peering into Gobubbles to see the real future that the Heritagists had in store.
Over and over the TV showed the video of our president’s helicopter rescuing the terrorist Qaadri from our troops. Violent street demonstrations against the Heritagists were in progress all across the nation. The White House was under siege, surrounded by a crowd of demonstrators estimated at a hundred thousand, and growing by the minute. Police cars were being overturned and set on fire. The president had scheduled a special address—and here he came.
It was a classic performance. Doakes was like a wounded shark snapping at his own dangling guts. The Gobubbles were Satanist; the Common Grounders were traitors; Van Veeter was a criminal; the demonstrators were terrorists; war was peace; obedience was freedom; ignorance was strength; and more than ever we needed a hundred-percent Heritagist victory in November. To my delight, the megacorporate news station had the nerve to post a hip, mocking caption across the bottom of the screen while Doakes was still ranting: 100% A-Hole?
Paul and I stood up and cheered, with Mabel smiling at us, not quite sure what was going on. And that’s when we heard the knock on the door.
Framed in the door’s little glass window was the face of Ling-Ling Woo, her mouth open in an excited smile, her ponytail sticking straight out from the back of her head.
“I tell her keep the secret,” said Mabel, even as Ling-Ling came bursting in.
“Aunt Mabel!” she shrilled. “You’ve got Bela visiting? Oh. My. God. Your concert last night was so awesome, Bela! I was there!” Her voice shot up on the final word, twisting it into a squeal. “I had no! Idea! You’d be here! I’ve been out all afternoon trying to sell these, like, raffle tickets for my band so we can go to Hawaii for the band contest at Christmas? But everyone’s like, let us watch television, and I’m like, why? Is something happening?” Not waiting for an answer, Ling-Ling jabbered on. “Please buy some tickets, Aunt Mabel? Five dollars each. And my friends won’t even believe that I saw you, Cousin Bela. Look, guys!” She stretched out her hand towards me— and that’s when I noticed she was wearing a vlog ring.
“Take her outside for a minute,” I told Paul. “And then bring her back in.”
“What are you doing, you weird man,” cried Ling-Ling as Paul bundled her out the front door. “Are you a total freak?”
“Do you know cousin Gyula’s cell phone number?” I asked Mabel.
She did. I got Gyula on the phone and talked Chinese with him, asking him to meet us at the lumberyard. He was in a good mood. He said he could be there soon. Paul brought Ling-Ling back in. I loosely tied Mabel’s quilt over the angry Ling- Ling, covering her and her camera so she couldn’t report which way we went. Sirens were approaching.
“Bye, Mabel. Tell them you don’t know anything.”
“I don’t speak English,” she said in Chinese, her wiry arms wrapped around the enquilted Ling-Ling. “Good luck, little dragon. And you be quiet, niece!”
Paul and I crouched at the back of the lumberyard for what felt like forever, squeezed under the shelter of a crooked pile of plywood. We could hear sirens and cop loudspeakers all around the neighborhood. A chopper was beating the sky. We distracted ourselves by talking some more about how we might get Haut’s Paradox to work on the Gobubble. But just now we were fresh out of ideas. We were stuck on Earth-2, in the midst of the anthill we’d stirred up.
Whoosh, Gyula pulled up in Veeter’s white Hornswoggle stretch limo with the dark glass and the official plates. Gyula had a Gobubble mounted right on his dash. The bubble was set to show an aerial view of the neighborhood streets one minu
te from now; Gyula was playing the cop patterns as handily as an old-school videogamer leading Pac-Man away from his ghostly enemies.
Quite soon we were doing a hundred and twenty miles an hour on Route 280 heading north out of San Jose. Paul and I were in front with Gyula; the passenger compartment was mounded with guns and ammo.
“Glad you called,” Gyula told me, “Van wants to see you guys. He’s getting ready to make his move.” He was cheerful, pumped up. “Van figures Doakes and Ramirez will have to step down now,” he continued. “And thanks to his Gobubbles, he’s next in line. Speaker of the House.”
“Van’s at his ranch on Skyline Boulevard?”
“With his personal guards and automated defense system. He doesn’t trust the Secret Service. We’ve got me, big Owen-slash- Yuan, Tito Cruz, a new guy Tito brought in, I forget his name, and now you two. Plus the robots and the Tomahawk missiles. We’re armed and dangerous, bud. Van’s Liberation Army. Reach back there and pick weapons, in case some fool might want to fight.” Gyula’s excited grin reminded me of the old days when he and I would amass fireworks for the Fourth of July.
Paul and I peered into the back seat, with Gyula watching in his mirror and swerving a bit as he gloated over his stash: four Colt .45 automatic pistols like L-shaped candy bars, two MAC M10 submachine guns resembling green quarts of milk with nozzles, an Ml6 assault rifle, an all-metal Barrett 50-caliber semiautomatic rifle like a farm implement with two hand-grips, and a pair of insectile RPG-7 rocket-propelled grenade-launchers with a dozen rockets piled into a wooden box.
“Maybe one of you should fire off a rocket,” said Bela. “There’s a chopper on our tail. And they’re using a Gobubble to predict us as fast as I can use my dashboard Gobubble to predict them. We’ve got to shoot them.”
Paul and I looked at each other. “We’re mathematicians,” I said presently. “Not terrorists.”
“I’m not into murdering strangers,” added Paul. “Let’s see how we do using my Gobubble.” He threw the one on the dash out the window and replaced it with his. “Mine jams the Pig’s predictions.” He turned to stare out the rearview window. “And what if that’s only a traffic helicopter, anyway?”
“It’s NSA,” said Gyula. “Look at the freakin’ cannon on it.” As he drove, Gyula was continually speeding up and slowing down, one eye always on Paul’s Gobubble.
But even Paul’s special Gobubble could keep us safe for only so long. Soon the chopper’s savage roar was directly overhead. Three rounds pounded the car roof and dust popped from the upholstery overhead.
"There was no way to dodge that one,” said Gyula. “At least we’re armored. Up to a point. But I’m seeing all the paths from here as dead ends unless we fire that rocket. Come on, Bela. Don’t be a wimp. It’s them or us.”
“You shoot, Gyula,” I said. “I’ll drive.”
“Okay professor,” said Gyula, glad to get his hands on the guns. “Get ready.”
“You monitor the Gobubble for me, Paul,” I said. “I’m gonna have to focus on the road.”
Gyula opened the sunroof and slammed on the brakes so that the chopper was way out ahead of us. The gunship’s turret rotated, swinging our way. “Go, go, go!” yelled Gyula, worming over the seat-back into the rear of the car as I slid into the driver’s seat.
“Speed up right now, Bela,” said Paul, staring in the Gobubble. I mashed on the gas; the acceleration flattened me against the back of the seat. And as we went under the chopper, Gyula fired the rocket.
The whoosh was deafening; the car filled with smoke. Glancing in the mirror, I saw an orange ball of flame with the helicopter wobbling brokenly to the side of the road. Gyula had taken off its tail; possibly the passengers were alive.
Meanwhile, coming up fast behind us was a cop car with his flashers on.
“Right lane,” said Paul. “Slow down. Twitch left!” A bullet ripped through the car’s right fender. “Real fast again,” said Paul. I heard more bullets whizzing past. “Can’t you go faster than that, Bela? Left lane! He’s coming. He’s blocking off our strategies. He’s gonna get us. Shoot him, Gyula!”
Baring his teeth in a stark grin, Gyula leaned out the side window, holding the 50-caliber rifle’s two implement grips, wedging its butt against the window frame. He blasted off a few shots, but then the gun clattered onto the 130-mile-per-hour pavement. The rifle’s powerful recoil had twisted it from even Gyula’s strong hands.
“It’s okay, you got him!” cried Paul. “You hit his engine block! Look at that smoke and steam! He’s pulling over!”
And then I was off 280, slithering uphill on Alpine Road, shaded by oak trees, with the sun-yellowed fields flashing past. Thanks to Paul’s anonymizing Gobubble I dodged the cops all the way uphill—now and then ducking into someone’s driveway to avoid an encounter. I offered to let Gyula take the wheel again, but he said I was doing fine. He got a kick out of seeing his brainiac cousin play the gangster.
Up on the ridge, three unmarked black cars had roadblocked Skyline Boulevard, just a half-mile short of the turnoff to Van’s house. Gyula reached past me to hit a custom switch on the dashboard; it raised the Hornswoggle three feet off the ground. Without slowing down, I swerved onto the rugged yellow-grass shoulder, closely following Paul’s Gobubble instructions, swooping and swerving like a salmon swimming upstream. We had a clear path past the roadblock. The agents were shooting at us, but thanks to Paul’s instructions they kept missing us. We were the good guys in this movie.
“Our futures dead-end when we pass those cars,” said Paul in a worried tone. “They’ll be firing at point-blank range.”
“Hell they will,” said Gyula. He launched an airborne rocket low over the agents’ heads and toggled yet another switch on the dash. This one unleashed a blanket of fire from beneath our car. Our would-be captors scattered like termites off a campfire log.
“Flamethrower system in the trunk,” said Gyula happily. "Nozzles on both sides of the car. You can turn it off now.”
As we sped down Van’s long driveway, I noticed metallic figures loping through the dry weeds like double-jointed aluminum deer. They were carrying rifles mounted on their backs. “Armed robots!” exclaimed Paul.
A high, green steel fence surrounded the core of Veeter’s property with a watchtower every twenty yards. Robot machine guns tracked us from the two nearest towers. A roboticized cannon was waiting at the main gate; it recognized us and moved to one side. Three honest-to-god Tomahawk missiles were set up on portable launch-pads just inside the gate, with spider robots perched on their controls. Silicon-Valley Van was even ready to fend off an air strike.
His house was out of sight from the gate, fifty yards down the ocean side of the ridge and set right into the hillside, much of it underground, with oak trees all around it and a patio made of smoothed-off giant boulders with a view across the rolling Santa Cruz mountains to the low afternoon sun gilding the fog-blanketed Monterey Bay. Van stood at the near edge of the patio beckoning us, big Owen at his side.
I asked Paul’s Gobubble on the dash what awaited us in Van’s house. But Van had a jamming system as good as Paul’s. The Gobubble wasn’t showing anything meaningful.
“You talk to him, Paul,” I said, getting myself a submachine gun from the back. “I’m staying out here in case something’s screwed up. I’m paranoid.”
“Tito said I should bring you and Paul in together,” said Gyula, climbing out of the bullet-pocked rear door. “He’s coordinating security.”
“Tito sucks,” I said, thumbing the safety off the MAC M10 and checking that it was fully loaded. “I’m staying the fuck out here.” I was a little deafened from all the gunfire. It was hard to tell how loud I was talking. I rolled down the driver’s-side window. “Don’t try anything on me,” I told Gyula.
Gyula stared in the open car window at me clutching my submachine gun. “Little Bela,” he said softly. “You think I couldn’t take you down right now?” He reached in and patted my
cheek. “Don’t hurt yourself.” I was way out of my depth here.
“I’ll check things out and come right back,” said Paul.
Still sitting in the driver’s seat, I watched Paul and Gyula walk around the side of the house to the patio. They talked to Van for awhile, and then they went inside. Right before they went in, Paul looked over and gave me a last wave. And then they were gone, leaving fat-necked Owen alone on the patio, watching me with eyes as unreadable as Rowena’s. I noticed that in this world Owen had his gold chain again.
Nothing happened for a little while. I got out my Gobubble with the battery and wires and began exploring the problem of setting up an Haut’s Paradox on a sphere. I had the placement of the sparks right; after watching Paul, I knew the golden ratio by heart. But nothing was happening. It occurred to me that the timing of the sparks could be important. In the case of the Gobrane that hadn’t been an issue, as we’d only needed the one spark. But with three sparks—maybe you had to wait till the effects of each previous spark had wrapped all the way around the little ball. Yes. The correct model here was, I now realized, the cake morphon instead of the rake morphon.
I zapped the ball a few times, getting a sense of the cycle time and how to spot it. So, okay, if I did one spark, waited a cycle, did the second spark, waited a cycle, and—
Two shotgun blasts boomed from Van’s house. Owen disappeared from the patio, running heavily into the house. Pistol shots and a scream. I stared at the house through the open car window, clutching the MAC M10 on my lap. Should I quick try and open a hypertunnel? Or start the car and go for the gate? Or run in to save Paul and Gyula? But were they even alive? And what chance would I have against professional killers? I hesitated, torn, feeling like a coward.
A figure burst out of Van’s house, running towards me with a shotgun in his hand. With a shock I recognized the bestial features. It was Roberto Sandoval.
Sandoval raised his shotgun, aiming at me and displaying some kind of badge. He had blood on his hands. “Freeze!” he yelled. “You killed them! You were jealous that they loved each other! Get out with your hands up!”