Transreal Cyberpunk

by Rudy Rucker

  Jayson ripped into it, grinning.

  “She’s not your normal type, Jayson.”

  “Yeah, she’s a cool, classy dame straight outta Beverly Hills! I think my luck is finally changing!”

  A small crowd of men, women, even children clustered around the bike. These sidewalk gawkers definitely liked a show. They chatted pleasantly, tapping each other reassuringly on the heads and shoulders.

  “We’re drawing a big crowd,” Stefan said. “Should we split?”

  “Are you kidding? This is the public! We’ll entertain them!”

  Jayson fashioned a bit of his orange peel into a set of jack-o-lantern snaggle teeth and wore them in his mouth. The woman in the antskin cuirass laughed with pleasure.

  Stefan picked a smooth pebble off the ground, showed it off to the gawkers, palmed it, and pretended to swallow it. The onlookers were stunned. When he “burped it back up,” they applauded him wildly.

  Stefan gazed across their pleased, eager faces. “This is a very soft audience, Jayson. I think they’re truly starved for techno-wizardry.”

  A shy girl stood at the back of the crowd. She looked sober and thoughtful. She knew he had done a trick. She wondered why. She was like Emily Yu: smarter than the rest, but too tenderhearted.

  Stefan waved at her and offered his best smile. She stood up straighter, startled. She looked from one side of herself to the other, amazed that he was paying attention just to her.

  He beckoned at her. He pointed. He waved both his arms. Yes, you. She was so excited by this that he could see her heart beating softly in the side of her throat.

  He was instantly in love.

  Notes on “Hormiga Canyon”

  Asimov’s Science Fiction, August, 2007.

  Written Fall, 2007.

  Rudy on “Hormiga Canyon”

  In person, Bruce is very charismatic. I don’t actually see him in person very often—usually several years go by between our face-to-face encounters. But whenever I do meet up with him, I always feel like co-authoring a story with him again. Even though I remember how difficult the last collaboration was. So when Bruce turned up at my house for a night or two in the summer of 2007, we eagerly began making new plans. It had been over five years since we’d collaborated on a story.

  Bruce’s initial idea was that we should write about a city in a large bottle in an apartment in a slum in LA. The city would be a bit like the city of Kandor in the Superman comics. For my part, I wanted to write a story about giant ants, a classic SF power chord which has, in my opinion, been insufficiently explored. (Hormiga is Spanish for ant, you understand.) And never mind any prissy kill-joy claims that giant ants would collapse under their own weight. In SF, you can always invoke whatever rubber physics you need to make your effects work.

  So we got the story going. I’m the spaced-out hacker Stefan Oertel, and Bruce is the bluff, can-do, media-savvy Jayson Rubio. The story was a wild run, a roller-coaster ride. Even though it can be hard, it’s worthwhile working with Bruce. I think the stories that I’ve written with him are among my best.

  When I collaborate, I get a different texture in the story’s prose. This holds whether I’m working with Bruce or with one of my other collaborators—Marc Laidlaw, Paul Di Filippo, John Shirley, Terry Bisson, Eileen Gunn, or my son Rudy Rucker Jr. Co-authoring a story is like being in an intense writer’s workshop.

  But with Bruce, the transformation is more extreme. Sometimes he’ll go in and cut a couple of words out of ©nearly every sentence that I’ve written. So then—if it’s going to be like that—I take out his weaker lines. It makes the prose stronger. Of course, after the cuts, there’s a lot of broken segues to fix—if you want the story to make logical and emotional sense. It’s often me—something of a compulsive perfectionist—who ends up doing the clean-up. And then feeling resentful about it. Like, “I washed all these dishes, and you never said thanks.”

  So far as I can tell, Bruce himself never feels emotional about our collaborations. He loftily reminds me that it’s only ink on paper—or bits in a datastream.

  After ten rounds of revisions on “Hormiga Canyon,” I was on the point of collapse. And then, like a celestial trumpeter in the sky, Bruce produced a beautiful, visionary, emotionally rich ending. It was what I’d been hoping for all along. A glimpse of heaven.

  And once again we scored an Asimov’s cover illo.

  Bruce on “Hormiga Canyon”

  Rudy is not likely to show up in my stomping grounds of Austin, Belgrade and Turin, so we generally meet in California. As this story was written, I was spending a year in Los Angeles, so this effort is LA all the way.

  The theme of “Hormiga Canyon” is ants. Giant ants are rather often on Rudy’s mind. I was willing to indulge him in this conceit, as, from a Los Angeles perspective, there’s something cheerfully appropriate and LA pop-surrealist about giant ants: the classic sci-fi movie Them is all about giant ants invading Los Angeles. It was pleasant to invent a couple of Los Angeles special-FX guys who would be entirely willing to accept giant ants on their own terms. The fantasies of Tinseltown are their daily bread, after all.

  The story’s visual and cinematic, and had to go through a lot of editing, which Rudy hates to do. Still, if you’re going to create a B-movie epic with motorcycles and mastodons, the script needs to move right along. Clipped footage littered our cutting room floor, and screening the many rushes was heavy labor for both of us. But it may be our best story as story-telling goes, and it even features a technicolor Hollywood happy ending.

  Colliding Branes

  “But why call this the end of the universe?” said Rabbiteen Chandra, feeling the dry night air beat against her face. The rollicking hearse stank of cheap fried food, a dense urban reek in the starry emptiness of the Nevada desert. “At dawn our universe’s two branes collide in an annihilating sea of light. That’s not death, technically speaking—that’s a kalpa rebirth.”

  Angelo Rasmussen tightened his pale, keyboard-punching hands on the hearse’s cracked plastic wheel. His hearse was a retrofitted 1978 Volvo, which ran on recycled bio-diesel cooking-oil. “You’re switching to your Hindu mystic thing now? After getting me to break that story?”

  “I double-checked my physics references,” Rabbiteen offered, with an incongruous giggle. “Remember, I have a master’s degree from San Jose State.”

  Rabbiteen knew that this was her final road trip. She’d been a good girl too long. She tapped chewing tobacco into a packet of ground betel-nut. Her tongue and her gums were stained the color of fresh blood.

  “The colliding branes will crush the stars and planets to a soup of hard radiation,” she assured Angelo. “Then they rebound instantly, forming brand-new particles of matter, and seeding the next cycle of the twelve-dimensional cosmos.” She spread her two hands violently, to illustrate. “Our former bodies will expand to the size of galactic superclusters.”

  Angelo was eyeing her. “I hope our bodies overlap.” He wore a shy, eager smile. “Given what you and I know, Rabbiteen, we might as well be the last man and woman on Earth.” He laid his hand on her thigh, but not too far up.

  “I’ve thought that issue through,” said Rabbiteen, inexpertly jetting betel spit out the window. Blowback stained her hand-stitched paisley blouse. “We’ll definitely make love—but not inside this hearse, okay? Let’s find some quaint tourist cabins.”

  As professional bloggers, Rabbiteen and Angelo knew each other well. For three years, they’d zealously followed each other’s daily doings via email, text messages, video posts, social networking and comment threads.

  Yet they’d never met in the flesh. Until today, their last day on Earth—the last day for the Earth, and, in stark fact, also for Earth’s solar system, Earth’s galaxy, Earth’s Local Group galactic cluster, and Earth’s whole twelve-dimensional universe shebang.

  The end was near, and Rabbiteen didn’t care to watch the cosmos collapse from inside her cramped room in her parents’ house in Fremont.
Nor did Angelo want to meet the end in his survivalist bunker in the foothills of the Sierras near Fresno—a bunker which, to untrained eyes, resembled an abandoned barn in the middle of a sun-killed almond farm.

  So, after a dense flurry of instant-messages, the two bloggers had joined forces and hit the great American road together, blasting one last trump from the hearse’s dirge-like horn, a mournful yet powerful blast which echoed from Rabbiteen’s parents’ pink stucco house and all through the table-flat development of a thousand similar homes.

  Chastely sipping biodiesel through the apocalyptic traffic, they’d made it over Tioga Pass onto Nevada’s Route 6 by midnight. They were out well ahead of mankind’s last lemming-like rush to universal destruction.

  “I’ve been obsessing over Peak Oil for years,” Angelo confessed. He was feeling warm and expansive, now that Rabbiteen had promised him some pre-apocalypse sex. “As a search-term, my name is practically synonymous with it. But now I can’t believe I was such a sap, such a piss-ant, when it came to comprehending the onrushing scope of this planet’s disaster! I was off by...what is it? By a million orders of magnitude?”

  Rabbiteen patted his flannelled arm supportively. Angelo was just a political scientist, so he was really cute when he carried on about “orders of magnitude.”

  He was rueful. “I was so worried about climate change, financial Singularities and terror attacks in the Straits of Hormuz. And all the time the parallel branes were converging!” He smacked the Volvo’s cracked dashboard with the flat of his pale hand. “I’m glad we escaped from the dense urban cores before the Apocalypse. Once people fully realize that cosmic string theory is unraveling, they’ll butcher each other like vicious animals.”

  “Don’t insult our friends the animals,” said Rabbiteen, flirtatiously bending her wrists to hold her hands like little paws.

  Rabbiteen’s “What Is Karmic Reality?” blog cleverly leveraged her interest in scientific interpretations of the Upanishads into a thriving medium for selling imported Indian clothes, handicrafts and mosaics.

  Angelo, unable to complete his political science doctorate due to skyrocketing tuition costs, had left Stanford to run his own busy “Ain’t It Awful?” website. His site tracked major indicators for the imminent collapse of American society. The site served to market his print-on-demand tracts about the forthcoming apocalypse, which earned him a meager living.

  The end of the Universe had begun with a comment from trusted user “Cody” on Rabbiteen’s blog. Cody had linked to a preliminary lab report out of Bangalore’s Bahrat University. The arXiv dot-pdf report documented ongoing real-time changes in the fine-structure constant. Subtle dark and light spectral lines hidden in ordinary light were sashaying right up the spectrum.

  Rabbiteen had pounced on this surprising news as soon as it hit her monitor, deftly transforming the dry physics paper into an interactive web page with user-friendly graphic design. To spice up her post for user eyeballs, she’d cross-linked it to the well-known Cyclic Universe scenario. This cosmological theory predicted that the fundamental constants of physics would change rapidly whenever two parallel membranes of the cosmic twelve dimensions were about to—as laymen put it—”collide.”

  Although Rabbiteen didn’t feel supremely confident about the cataclysmic Cyclic Universe scenario, that theory was rock-solid compared to the ramshackle Inflationary notion that had grown up to support the corny, old-school Big Bang.

  Cosmologists had been tinkering with the tired Big Bang theory for over fifty years. Their rickety overwrought notions had so many patches, upgrades, and downright mythologies that even that the scheme of a cosmos churned from a sea of galactic cow milk by a giant Hindu cobra seemed logical by comparison.

  After Rabbiteen’s post, Angelo had horned into the act, following a link to Rabbiteen posted by that same user Cody on Angelo’s “Ain’t It Awful” blog. With the help of vocal contributors from a right-wing activist site, Angelo quickly unearthed a pirated draft of speechwriters’ notes for an impending Presidential oration.

  Tonight the U. S. President was planning to blandly deny that the cosmos was ending.

  The leaked speech made commentary boil like a geyser on Angelo’s catastrophe blog—especially since, unable to keep his loyal users in the dark, he’d been forced to announce to them that their entire Universe was kaput. The likelihood of this event was immediately obvious to loyal fans of “Ain’t It Awful,” and the ripples were spreading fast.

  “Listen, Rabbiteen,” said Angelo, tentatively slowing the hearse. “Why bother to find a motel? It’s not like we want to sleep during our last night on Earth. It’d be crazy to waste those precious few remaining hours.”

  “Don’t you want to dream one more great dream?”

  He turned his thin, abstracted face from the bug-splattered windshield, his expression gentler than she’d expected. “I’d rather post one last great blog-post. Exactly how many minutes do we have left in our earthly existence?”

  Their Linux laptops nestled together on the gray-carpeted floor of the hearse, the screens glowing hotly, the power cords jacked into a luxurious double-socketed cigarette-lighter extension. USB jacks sucked Internet access from a Fresnel antenna that Angelo had made from metal tape, then jammed on the hearse’s roof.

  Rabbiteen plopped her warm laptop onto her skirted thighs. She scrolled through a host of frantic posts from her over-excited readers.

  “Still almost five hundred minutes,” she said thoughtfully. “It’s two a.m. here, and the latest doom estimate is for ten-twenty a.m. local time. Hmm. This scientist woman net-friend of mine—Hintika Kuusk from Estonia—she says that, near the end, the force of gravity will become a quantized step function. Six minutes after that, the strong force drops to the point where our quarks and gluons fly apart.”

  “And then the Big Splat hits us?”

  “Full interbrane contact comes seven yoctoseconds after our protons and neutrons decay.”

  “Seven yoctoseconds?” Angelo’s gauzy, policy-oriented knowledge of hard science was such that he couldn’t be entirely sure when Rabbiteen was serious.

  “That’s seven septillionths of a second,” clarified Rabbiteen. “A short time, but a definite gap. It’s a shame, really. Thanks to our crude nucleon-based human bodies, we’ll miss the hottest cosmic action since the start of our universe, fourteen billion years ago. But, Angelo, if we hug each other ever so tightly, our quarks will become as one.” And with this, she laughed again.

  “You think that’s funny?”

  “I don’t know. Isn’t it funny? How could it not be funny? If I let myself cry, that’ll be worse.”

  “There’s no time left to weep and mourn, not even for ourselves,” mused Angelo. “I realize that you approach the problem of death in your own way. That motto you posted—’the dewdrop slides into the shining sea.’”

  Rabbiteen was moved by the proof that he’d been reading her blog. She clapped her glowing laptop shut and gazed out at the stricken moon above a purple ridge of low mountains. “The moon looks so different now, doesn’t it? It’s redder! The changes in the fundamental constants will affect all electromagnetic phenomena. No more need for fancy big-science instruments, Angelo. We can see the changes in the fundamental constants of physics with our own wet, tender eyeballs.”

  She wiped her eyes, smudging her lashes. “In a way, it’s wonderful that everything will dissolve together. The mountains and the moon, the rich and the poor, all the races and colors.”

  The road’s fevered white line pulsed against Angelo’s pale blue eyes. When he spoke again his voice had turned grating and paranoid. “I keep trying for the high road, Rabbiteen, but I can’t fully buy that this is the End. I’ve bot a feeling that certain shadowy figures have been preparing for this. There are so many hints on the Internet... You want to know the real truth about where we’re going?”

  “Tell me, Angelo.” Rabbiteen valued his insights into human society, which was a system she herself h
ad trouble confronting.

  “Cody calls it the Black Egg. It’s hidden in the Tonopah Test Range, a secret base in Nevada, right near Area 51. He says the fascist slavemasters have built a back-door escape route of our condemned cosmos.”

  “That’s where we’re headed?” said Rabbiteen, sounding dubious. “On Cody’s say-so?”

  “Those in the know have an inside track to the Black Egg survival pod against the collapse of the universe. As major intellectual figures on the blogosphere, we should definitely be going there, right? Why should we be left outside the Dr Strangelove mine-shaft bunker when the lords of creation have their own transhuman immortality?”

  Rabbiteen was unconvinced. “Oh, Angelo, why do you always blog so much about rulers and power? Everything’s emergent. The old white men on top are helpless idiots. They’re like foam on a tsunami. Can bacteria stop a bucket of bleach?”

  “You’re naive,” said Angelo loftily. “Do you think it’s mere coincidence that we were contacted and guided by a heavy operator like Cody? You’re a key blogger on weird physics, and I—I rank with the world’s foremost citizen-journalists.”

  “But Cody is just some blog commenter,” said Rabbiteen slowly. The frank lunacy of the Black Egg story made her uneasy. “Cody never seemed like a particularly helpful guy to me. He’s more like a snoop, a troll, and a snitch.”

  “He’s just geeky, Rabbiteen. Cody doesn’t have a whole lot of human social skills.”

  “On my blog he comes across like a stalker.”

  “He told me he’s a veteran working physicist employed on black-ops projects by the federal government. A lonely old man whose whole life has been top-secret. I had to work hard at it, but I’ve won Cody over. He never had any trace of freedom in his life, except for the Internet. He thinks of you and me as his most intimate friends.”

  “Okay, fine,” said Rabbiteen. “Why not the Tonopah Test Range? If that makes you happy.”

  But rather than smiling at her agreeability, Angelo was antsy. “I wish you hadn’t said that. Now you’ve got me all worried. What if Cody is lying to me? All that amazing physics data could be clever disinformation. Maybe he’s just some kind of crazy online pervert who, for whatever twisted reason—”