by Rudy Rucker
But sleep was slow in coming. Suppose Pullen swelled up horribly and died from toxic Tug effects? The Feds would find the alien DNA in him, and the law would be on Janna right away. And what if the Therapies really did improve the two old men? Risen to some cold, inhuman level of intelligence, they’d think nothing of wiping out Janna and Veruschka like ants.
Janna rubbed her cell phone nervously. Maybe she could give poor old Tug some kind of anonymous warning. But she sensed that Veruschka was also awake, over on the other side of Janna’s California King bed.
Suddenly the phone rang. It was Kelso.
“Yo babe,” he said airily. “I’m fresh back from sunny Mexico. The heat’s off. I bought myself a new identity and an honest-to-God law degree. I’m right outside, Janna. Saw you and Vero go jammin’ by on Market Street just now, but I didn’t want to come pushing up at you like some desperado tweaker. Let me in. Nice new logo you got on the Magic Pumpkin digs, by the way, good font choice too.”
“You’re a lawyer now? Well, don’t think we’ve forgotten about that box of petty cash, you sleaze.”
Kelso chuckled. “I didn’t forget you either, mi vida! As for that money—hey, my new papers cost as much as what I took. Paradoxical, no? Here’s another mind bender: even though we’re hot for each other, you and me have never done the deed.”
“I’m not alone,” said Janna. “Veruschka’s staying with me.”
“For God’s sake will you two at last get it over,” said Veruschka, sleepily burying her head under her pillow. “Wake me up when you’re done and maybe the three of us can talk business. We’ll need a lawyer tomorrow.”
§
The next morning Tug Mesoglea arrived at Magic Pumpkin and started acting—like Revel Pullen.
“Git along little doggies,” he crooned, leaning over the incubator where they were keeping their dozen or so new-model Pumptis. And then he reached over and fondled Janna’s butt.
Janna raced out of the lab and cornered Veruschka, who was noodling around at her desk trying to look innocent. “You gave Tug the Pullen potion, didn’t you? Bitch!”
Before Veruschka could answer, the front door swung open, and in sashayed Pullen. He was dressed, unbelievably, in a caftan and striped Capri pants. “I picked these up in the hotel shop,” he said, looking down at one of his spindly shanks. “Do you think it works on me, Janna? I’ve always admired your fashion sense.”
“Double bitch!” cried Veruschka, and yanked at Janna’s hair. Janna grabbed back, knocking off the red cowboy hat that Vero was sporting today.
“Don’t think we haven’t already seen clear through your little game,” said the altered Pullen with a toss of his head. “You and your nanoPumptis. Tug and I had a long heart-to-heart talk on the phone this morning. Except we didn’t use no phone. We can hear each other in our heads.”
“Shit howdy!” called Tug from the lab. “Brother Revel’s here. Ready to take it to the next level?”
“Lemme clear out the help,” said Revel, sounding Texan again. He leaned into the guard room and sent Hoss Jenks and his mirrorshades assistants out for a long walk. To Jenks’s credit, he didn’t bat an eye at Revel’s new look.
“Let’s not even worry about that Kelso boy up in Janna’s room,” said Tug, reverting to his old accent as well. “He’s still asleep.” Tug gave Janna an arch look. “Don’t look so surprised, we know everything. Thanks to the Pumpti Therapy you gave us. We’ve got, oh, a couple of million years of evolution on you now. The future of the race, that’s us. Telepathy, telekinesis, teleportation, and shape-shifting too.”
“You’re—you’re not mad at us?” said Janna.
“We only gave the Therapy to make you better,” babbled Veruschka. “Don’t punish us.”
“I dunno about that,” said Revel. “But I do know I got a powerful hankerin’ for some Pumpti meat. Can you smell that stuff?”
“Sure can,” sang Tug. “Intoxicating, isn’t it? What a seductive perfume!”
Without another word, the two men headed for the lab’s vats and incubators. Peeping warily through the open lab doors, Janna and Veruschka saw a blur of activity. The two old men were methodically devouring the stock, gobbling every Pumpti in sight.
There was no way that merely human stomachs could contain all that mass, but that wasn’t slowing them down much. Their bodies were puffing up and—just as Veruschka had predicted, the eyeballs were bulging forward out of their heads. Their clothes split and dropped away from their expanding girths. When all the existing Pumptis were gone, the two giants set eagerly to work on the raw materials. And when Tug found the frozen kilograms of their own personal Pumptis, the fireworks really began.
The two great mouths chewed up the red and blue Pumpti meat, spitting, drooling, and passing the globs back and forth. Odd ripples began moving up and down along their bodies like ghost images of ancient flesh.
“What’s that a-comin’ out of your rib cage, Tuggie?” crowed Revel.
“Cootchy-coo,” laughed Tug, twiddling the tendrils protruding from his side. “I’m expressing a jellyfish. My personal best. Feel around in your genome, Revel. It’s all there, every species, evolved from our junk DNA right along with our super-duper futuristic new bodies.” He paused, watching. “Now you’re keyin’ it, bro. I say—are those hooves on your shoulder?”
Revel palpated the twitching growth with professional care. “I’d be reckoning that’s a quagga. A prehistoric zebra-type thing. And, whoah Nellie, see this over on my other shoulder? It’s an eohippus. Ancestor of the horse. The cowboys of the Pullen clan got a long relationship with horseflesh. I reckon there was some genetic bleedover when we was punchin’ cattle up the Goodnight-Loving Trail; that’s why growin’ these ponies comes so natural to me.”
“How do you like it now, ladies?” asked Tug, glancing over toward Janna and Veruschka.
“Ask them,” hissed Veruschka in Janna’s ear.
“No, you,” whispered Janna.
Brave Vero spoke up. “My friend is wondering now if you will sign those Magic Pumpkin founders’ shares back over to us? And the patents as well if you please?”
“Groink,” said Revel, hunching himself over and deforming his mouth into a dinosaur-type jaw.
“Squonk,” said Tug, letting his head split into a floppy bouquet of be-suckered tentacles.
“You don’t need to own our business anymore,” cried Janna. “Please sign it back to us.”
The distorted old men whooped and embraced each other, their flesh fusing into one. The meaty mass seethed with possibilities, bubbled with the full repertoire of zoological forms—with feelers, claws, wings, antennae, snouts; with eyes of every shape and color winking on and off; with fleeting mouths that lingered only long enough to bleat, to hiss, to grumble, to whinny, screech, and roar. It wasn’t exactly a “no” answer.
“Kelso,” shouted Janna up the stairs. “Bring the papers!”
A high, singing sound filled the air. The Pullen-Mesoglea mass sank to the floor as if melting, forming itself into a broad, glistening plate. The middle of the plate swelled like yeasty bread to form a swollen dome. The fused organism was taking on the form of—a living UFO?
“The original genetic Space Friend!” said Veruschka in awe. “It’s been waiting in their junk DNA since the dawn of time!”
As Kelso clattered down the stairs, the saucer charged at the three of them, far too fast to escape. Kelso, Janna, and Veruschka were absorbed into the saucer’s ethereal bulk.
Everything got white, and in the whiteness, Janna saw a room, a round space expressing wonderful mathematical proto-design: a vast Vernor Panton 1960s hashish den, languidly and repeatedly melting into a Karim Rashid all-plastic lobby.
The room’s primary inhabitants were idealized forms of Tug Mesoglea and Revel Pullen. The men’s saucer bodies were joyous, sylphlike forms of godlike beauty.
“I say we spin off the company to these girls and their lawyer,” intoned the Tug avatar. “Okay by you
, Revel? You and I, we’re more than ready to transcend the material plane.”
“There’s better action where we’re going,” Revel agreed. “We gotta stake a claim in the subdimensions, before the yokels join the gold rush.”
A pen appeared in Tug’s glowing hand. “We’ll shed the surly bonds of incorporation.”
It didn’t take them long to sign off every interest in Magic Pumpkin. And then the floor of the saucer opened up, dropping Janna, Veruschka, and Kelso onto the street. Over their awestruck heads, the saucer briefly glowed and then sped away, though not in any direction that a merely human being could specify. It was more as if the saucer shrank. Reorganized itself. Corrected. Downsized. And then it was gone from all earthly ken.
And that’s how Janna Gutierrez and Veruschka Zipkinova got rich.
Notes on “Junk DNA”
Asimov’s Science Fiction, January, 2003.
Written Fall, 2001.
Rudy on “Junk DNA”
This time out, our two chracters are two women; I’m Janna and Bruce is Veruschka. And we also brought back our Tug and Revel characters from “Big Jelly.” Bruce found it very easy to write the Revel character—my notion of a comically overbearing Texan.
Due to having two young daughters, Bruce was at this time focused on Pokemon characters, which led to the notion of the personal Pumpti pet. It was fine that I found Pokemon toys completely repellent and uninteresting, as this gave the story an edge.
The “Junk DNA” collaboration was tumultuous; I began finally to understand why a synergistic pair like, say, Lennon and McCartney might stop working together. Although pleasant and soft spoken in person, both Bruce and I can be bossy collaborators, capable of being very cutting in our emails.
This time out, it was like two guys playing tennis and trying to kill the ball and blast it down the other guy’s throat. Whack! Some of this abrasive energy shows up in the interactions between the pairs of characters in this story: Janna vs. Veruschka and Tug vs. Revel.
On the upside, I noticed that working with Bruce was having a permanent effect on my writing, and in a good way. I also noticed that bits of his vocabulary were making his way into mine. “Gamely,” for instance—that’s a word I never used in the past, but now I like to slip it in.
I think my favorite line in this story is, “I got a powerful hankerin’ for Pumpti meat.”
“Junk DNA” rated a cover illustration when it appeared in Asimov’s.
Bruce on “Junk DNA”
In our third collaboration, I was determined that we should create a more or less proper science fiction story, a genre work set years distant in the future, with extrapolated technology. “Storming the Cosmos” is historical fiction, it’s “atompunk.” “Big Jelly” is a technothriller satire more-or-less of its present day. For “Junk DNA” it seemed interesting to combine our earlier stories and drag them both into the future condition, so that “Veruschka Zipkinova” shows up as a grand-daughter of Vlad Zipkin, the hero of “Storming the Cosmos,” while Pullen and Mesoglea, the young venture capitalists of “Big Jelly”, have aged into seasoned business gurus.
Despite its vivid colors and its obsession with cute kid toys, this is by no means a rollicking, carefree story. “Junk DNA” has a middle-aged bitterness about it, and a pervasive sense that things will never be so good as they once were. Most of the characters are snatching at scraps of happiness that their bleak circumstances have denied them. They’re willing to defraud, seduce, embezzle or kill to get a break, and when the two author stand-ins, Pullen and Mesoglea, belatedly show up in the narrative, it’s as if they’re telling an unhappy, frenzied world to calm down.
I was pleased by the level of invention in this story, but the ending’s like a mental breakdown. All Rucker-Sterling collaborations are overheated steam contraptions. They’ve got their solid, steely components, but also much duct-tape and baling-wire. As you become more familiar with another writer’s tricks of composition, you become a sharper critic of his work. That can get painful. Rudy’s not a critic by nature, but I most definitely am.
Still, we got it up and running, and it chugs right along.
Hormiga Canyon
Part 1
Stefan Oertel pulled a long strand of salami rind from his teeth. He stared deep into wonderland.
Look at that program go! Flexible vectors swarming in ten-dimensional hyperspace! String theory simulation! Under those colored gouts of special effects, this, at last, was real science!
Stefan munched more of his sandwich and plucked up an old cellphone, one of the ten thousand such units that he’d assembled into a home supercomputer. “Twine dimension seven!” he mumbled around the lunchmeat. “Loop dimension eight!”
The screen continued its eye-warping pastel shapes. Stefan’s ultracluster of hacked cellphones was searching Calabi-Yau string theory geometries. The tangling cosmic strings wove gorgeous, abrupt Necker-cube reversals and inversions. His program’s output was visually brilliant. And, thus far, useless to anybody. But maybe his latest settings were precisely the right ones and the One True String Theory was about to be unveiled—
“Loop dimension eight,” he repeated.
Unfortunately his system seemed to be ignoring his orders. There might be something wrong with the particular phone he was holding—these phones were, after all, junkers that Stefan’s pal Jayson Rubio had skimmed from the vast garbage dumps of Los Angeles. Jayson was a junk-hound of the first order.
Ten thousand networked cell phones had given Stefan serious, number-crunching heavy muscle. He needed them to search the staggeringly large state space of all possible string theories. The powerful Unix and RAM chips inside the phones were in constant wireless communication with each other. He kept their ten thousand batteries charged with induction magnets. The whole sprawling shebang was nested in sets of brightly-colored plastic laundry baskets. Stefan dug the eco-fresh beauty of this abracadabra: he’d transformed a waste-disposal mess into a post-Einsteinian theory-incubator.
Stefan had earned his programming skills the hard way: years of labor in the machine-buzzing dungeons of Hollywood. And he’d paid a price: alienated parents in distant Topeka, no wife, no kids, and his best coder pals were just email addresses. Furthermore, typing all that computer graphics code had afflicted him with a burning case of carpal-tunnel syndrome, which was why he preferred yelling his line-commands into phones. Cell phones had kick-ass voice-recognition capabilities.
Stefan dipped into a brimming pink laundry-basket and snagged a fresher phone, an early-90s model with a flapping, half-broken jaw.
“Greetings, wizard!” the phone chirped, showing that it was good to go.
“Twine dimension seven, dammit! Loop dimension eight.”
The system was still ignoring him. Now Stefan was worried. Was the TV’s wireless chip down? That shouldn’t happen. The giant digital flat-screen was new. And, yes, the phones were old junk, but with so many of them in his ultracluster it didn’t matter if a few dozen went dead.
He tried another phone and another. Crisis was at hand.
The monster screen flickered and skewed. To his deep horror, the speakers emitted a poisoned death-rattle, prolonged and sizzling and terrible, like the hissing of the Wicked Witch of the West as she dissolved in a puddle of stage-magic.
The flat screen went black. Worse yet, the TV began to smell, a pricey, burnt-meat, molten-plastic odor that any programmer knew as bad juju. Stefan bolted from his armchair and knelt to peer through the ventilation slots.
And there he saw—oh please no—the ants. Ants had always infested Stefan’s rental house. Whenever the local droughts got bad, the ants arrived in hordes, trouping out of the thick Mulholland brush, waving their feelers for water. Stefan’s decaying cottage had leaky old plumbing. His home was an ant oasis.
He’d never seen the ants in such numbers. Perhaps the frenzied wireless signals from his massive mounds of cell phones had upset them somehow? There were thousands of ants insid
e his TV, a dark stream of them wending through the overheated circuit cards like the winding Los Angeles River in its manmade canyons of graffiti-bombed cement. The ants were eating the resin off the cards; they were gorging themselves on his TV’s guts like six-legged Cub Scouts eating molten s’mores.
Stefan groaned and collapsed back into his overstuffed leather armchair. The gorgeous TV was a write-off, but all was not yet lost. The latest state of his system was still stored in his network of cellphones.
He reached for his sandwich, wincing at a stab of pain in his wrist.
The sandwich was boiling with ants. And then he felt insectile tickling at his neck. He jumped to his feet, banged open the door of his leaky bathroom, and hastily fetched-up an abandoned comb. He managed to tease three jolly ants from his strawy hair, which was dyed in a fading splendor of day-glo orange and traffic-cone red.
Before he’d moved into this old house, Stefan hadn’t realized that most everybody in LA had an ant story to tell. Stefan had the ants pretty badly, but nobody sympathized with him. Whenever he reached out to others with his private burden of ant woes, they would snidely one-up him with amazing ant-gripes all their own: ants that ate dog food; ants that ate dogs; ants that carried off children.
Compared to the heroic tales of other Angelenos, Stefan’s ant problems seemed mild and low-key. His ants were waxy, rubbery-looking little critters, conspicuously multi-ethnic in fine LA style, of every shape and every shade of black, brown, red and yellow. Stefan had them figured for a multi-caste sugar-ant species. They emerged from the tiniest possible cracks, and they adored sweet, sticky stuff.
Stefan bent over the rusty sink and splashed cold water on his unshaven face. He’d done FX for fantasy movies that had won Oscars and enchanted millions of people on six continents. But now, here he stood: wrists wrecked, vermin-infested, no job, no girlfriend, neck-deep in code for a ten-dimensional string-theory simulation with no commercial potential.