Transreal Cyberpunk

by Rudy Rucker

  “Even your black helicopters can’t work today,” said Rabbiteen a little impatiently. “It’s not just the batteries, Angelo. It’s spark-plugs, ignition, control chips—everything. No electrical machine will ever function again.” Seeing his stricken look, she tried to soothe him. “Maybe all the refugees are here already. Maybe they’re all crowded into the brane collision survival pod. Imagine the fun when they see us.”

  “The Black Egg of Area 52,” said Angelo, drawing fresh strength from the idea. “Let’s walk there.”

  “I’m ready. We’ll walk to the end of the earth.”

  Angelo loaded a stained khaki knapsack with food and water, daintily lotioned his skin, and even produced a couple of wide-brimmed hats, blister packs and a telescoping metal walking-stick.

  “Rabbiteen Rasmussen,” he murmured as they gamely trudged the sandy road. “What a fantastic name. That would be a king-hell blogger handle.”

  Rabbiteen’s heart glowed with joy.

  They came to a fork in the troubled road—with both alternatives equally bleak. “My compass is useless now,” Angelo griped. “Also, I think the sun is exploding.”

  Indeed the swollen, ruddy sun was spiky with fractalized flares. Its face was mottled with dark writhing sunspots, vast cavities into the star’s inner layers. Old Man Sol was visibly breathing his last. It was like seeing a beloved parent succumb to a disfiguring disease.

  They picked the road to the left and slogged forward.

  Rabbiteen’s love-smitten psyche was bubbling over with happy thoughts, yet the fear goblins ran fast behind, eating them. Compulsively, her mind returned to that demonic toad face she’d glimpsed in the midnight of her soul—but she didn’t share this inner terror with Angelo. He’d only make fun of her or, worse, drive himself frantic with speculation.

  Their few remaining moments of togetherness were passing all too fast. There was no sign of any secret base, or of any human beings at all. They were trudging endless, badly-colored terrain in utter forlornness, like the last two holdout players in some outdated Internet game.

  Angelo was stumbling, leaning heavily on his fancy high-tech walking-stick.

  “My feet are asleep,” he complained.

  “Me too.” Rabbiteen rubbed one tingling hand against another. “I guess—I guess the changes in the electrical constants are finally getting to our nerves and our bodies.” Against her will, a sudden wail forced itself from her. “Oh, Angelo, do you love me?”

  “Did I forget to say that? I get so distracted sometimes. Yes, I love you. I do love you. I’d post it in letters of fire bigger than the sun.”

  This declaration revived her a little; they wobbled on, teetering on their rubbery ankles.

  Angelo was thinking hard. How strange it was that a woman’s welcoming body could nail a man to the fabric of space and time. This was a mystical proof to him that sexual intercourse was an inherent part of the fabric of the universe. His brain was working very fast—as if some kind of electrochemical friction had vanished inside his skull—but the fringes of his nervous system were fading. It was terrible to know he would soon die, and worse to know that Rabbiteen’s kindly, ardent body would smear across the cosmos like a spin-painting.

  “Look!” she cried. Another unguarded, open gate. They tottered through, their knees wobbling. In the fractured, crystalline distance they could see sun-blasted buildings and a sandy airstrip. “It’s too far,” added Rabbiteen, bursting into tears. “And we’re too slow! We won’t make it.”

  They sat in the shadow of a boulder, arms around each other, awaiting the end—or the strength to rise and slog on. But now a deep rumble filled their ears. Sand rose into the air as if blown by an impalpable gale; rocks flew off the mountains with the ease of tumbling dice.

  The two lovers fell upwards.

  There was frantic, incomprehensible activity all around them, as if they were mice in the grinding engine of a merry-go-round. Like the maculated sun overhead, the planet’s surface had come unmoored. Geological strata had gently unpacked like the baked layers of a baklava, sending the surface debris crashing about in search of new equilibria.

  Eerie pink sunlight glittered from the hearse’s window as, plucked from beyond the horizon, it tumbled past them, its hood and doors slamming rhythmically, bouncing up the slopes of the nearest peak.

  In ordinary times, the earthquake noise alone might have crushed their clinging bodies, but the booming of this planetary destruction was oddly muted and gentle. The fundamental constants had plateaued for a moment. A new order of gravity settled in, with everything that could come loose from the Earth being messily sorted according to its mass.

  Belatedly, a reluctant mountain tore itself loose and rose ponderously into the lemon sky.

  Rabbiteen and Angelo were floating a few score yards above the remains of the ancient desert—a patch of fine dust beneath a layer of sand with pebbles admixed, topped by bones, sticks, stones and target-range military rubble.

  A venomous little Gila monster tumbled past them, dislodged from some flying mountain redoubt, its stubby tail twisting, its skin glittering like a beaded arm-band.

  Angelo’s blown mind irritably snatched for facts. “Are those nerve-gas canisters up there? They’re like weather balloons.” He beat his helpless legs against the empty air and began to twist in place. “Can you explain this to me, Ms. Karmic Science?”

  Rabbiteen’s mind had frozen with awe. The mountains of the firmament were floating across the spotted face of the bloated sun. She had no way to think clearly—with thunderhead shelves of granite and feldspar poised to crush her.

  “Hold me, Angelo! You’re drifting away! I want to be with you till the very end!”

  “We’re doomed,” said Angelo. He squinted into the hazy, polymorphous distances. The stark concrete hangers and wooden shacks of Area 52 were piled in midair like badly-assembled Ikea shelving.

  The humbled remnants of the secret federal base showed no signs of life. No super scientists, no fat cats there, no Black Egg. All those cogent hints about close encounters in the American Southwest with psychic saucer-craft, and nobody was even here. People were so cynical about the miraculous that they couldn’t even bother to show up.

  “I can almost feel that other brane arriving now,” said Rabbiteen. “Once the force of gravity has changed, we only have six minutes.”

  “Cody!” hollered Angelo, his voice echoing off the floating islands of stone. He cupped his hands around his mouth. “Help us, Cody!”

  “Come on, Cody!” shrieked Rabbiteen. Giggling shrilly, she grappled at Angelo. Her fingers were numb, and the flesh of his neck and shoulders felt spongy and strange. “The desert’s so beautiful, Cody! Especially upside down! We had great sex, and next time you can watch us, I promise!”

  “Cody, Cody, Cody!!!”

  A lens-like shape formed in mid-air, magnifying the tumbleweeds and boulders. Slowly, it opened a dark throat.

  “Hello?” said Angelo.

  The blackness folded in on itself and took form. The hole became crooked, then everted, like a giant origami tentacle. It swayed around in mid-air like a hungry feeler.

  It took note of the two of them.

  The warped tentacle wriggled and dimpled; the tip flexed to assume the shape of a staring, glistening face. Complex forces within the bulging shape were manipulating it like a sock puppet. The eyes bulged like a rubber mask, the mouth stretched and gaped like a toad’s.

  “Cody?” said Angelo, yet again, one arm wrapped around Rabbiteen. “Are you here to save us?”

  The demonic toad twisted his head this way and that. He had large, golden eyes. “Do I look properly embodied within your planet’s three spatial dimensions?”

  “No!” Rabbiteen squeaked, stiff with unearthly terror. “You look like hell!”

  “Interaction was so much easier on the Internet,” said the toad, smacking his thin lips. “It’s a lot of trouble to manifest this low-dimensional form to you.” The creature’
s voice was modulated white noise, like sand sculpted into letters.

  “I saw him last night, Angelo,” cried Rabbiteen. “I saw him peeking into the hearse! And he was in the motel parking lot. Cody was stalking us.”

  “I was monitoring you,” said Cody, his head billowing like a black pillowcase. “You two alone have reached Area 52, naturally selected from the many billions on your planet. You are like sperm cells beating their way up a long canal—”

  “—to reach the Black Egg,” completed Angelo hurriedly. His molecules felt overstretched. “Okay, yes! Here we are! Let us inside!”

  Cody leered at them provokingly. “The Cosmic Mother,” he said, “is the immortal entity that fills the band of hyperspace between the twin branes of the cosmos. I am the tip of one of Mother’s many tentacles. If you can imagine that.”

  “Of course we can imagine that!” jabbered Rabbiteen. “Don’t let us die!”

  “Let us in,” repeated Angelo. His fingers felt and looked like orange circus peanuts.

  “This Black Egg is prepared for you, my blogger friends,” said Cody simply. “The universe is collapsing, so the Cosmic Mother has placed a Black Egg on every space and place that supports intelligence. Billions of eggs, spewed in the cosmos like dewdrops in the shining sea.”

  “Oh Cody,” said Rabbiteen. “You read my blog too.”

  “Of course I do. Physics is collapsing, but the network will persist. All the Black Eggs are linked via quantum entanglement. Telepathy, if you will.”

  Momentarily, Angelo forgot his fears. “Wow, I always wanted some telepathy.”

  “There’s also infinite connectivity and infinite storage in the network of eggs,” Cody evangelized. “The network has an infinite number of users. They’re all upset and angry, just like you, because they’re all indignant to see their universe collapse. They all believed they were the most important aspect of the universe. Imagine the confusion. We have an infinite number of anthropic principles—one for each race!”

  “Then you’ll need moderators,” said Rabbiteen practically. “You need some users that know how to link and comment.”

  “Absolutely we do,” said Cody. “This cosmic cycle was planned-out and architected rather poorly. It’s closing down much earlier than the Cosmic Mother expected. Instead of crashing like this, the universes are supposed to get more stable with each new release.”

  “We’re just the kickass bloggers you need!” crowed Angelo. “We can keep up our moaning and complaining for millions of years! Assuming that we’re rewarded for our efforts. I mean—is there any kind of revenue stream inside there?”

  “You’ll lack for nothing inside your race’s Black Egg,” leered Cody. “Except your human need to eat or breathe. There will be sex, of course. There’s always sex on the Net. The Cosmic Mother adores sex.”

  “Wow,” said Rabbiteen.

  “Now come closer to me,” said the toad-headed tentacle. “Technical detail: your Black Egg is a hyperdisk where the branes are riveted together via a wormhole link in the twelfth dimension. In this one special region—it’s down my gullet—the branes can’t collide. I know your primitive minds can’t understand that. Think of me as a pinecone that protects a tree’s seeds from the heat of a fierce wildfire.”

  Angelo shook his bloating hands. “Never mind the license agreements, just sign us up and log us in!”

  Rabbiteen had to annotate. “Really, Cody, I think it’s more accurate to say the cosmic branes pass through each other serenely.”

  “Ah, you refer to the Twisterman coordinatization,” said Cody, his bloated demon head expanding with a ragged jolt. “Yes, under that viewpoint, we’ll all be transformed into our mirror-images. If you calculate in terms of the diffeomorphic quiver bundles, then it’s—”

  “Hurry up!” screamed Angelo—losing his composure as his left thumb snapped off.

  “Fine,” said Cody. “Over the next ten million years we can discuss these issues fully.” His wide mouth gaped open. The inside looked dank and slimy.

  Rabbiteen felt another flicker of unease. Could it be that Cody was an underworld demon after all? Under his promise of cosmic transformation, was he luring them to a fate infinitely worse than mere death? How would the toad behave any differently, if he were doing that?

  Cody waited with his silent mouth agape.

  Up in the sky, the sun went out. The stars and moon were gone as well. Utter darkness reigned. A shrill buzz filled the nonexistent air and slid menacingly down the scale.

  Pressing together, Angelo and Rabbiteen crawled into the toad’s mouth. Pushing and pulling, moving as one, the lovers wriggled their way down to the womb of the Black Egg. And of our world they saw no more.

  Within the Egg’s twelve-dimensional kalpas, time and space regressed. There was neither room nor duration in which to hunger, to tire, or draw a human breath. Yet in another sense, this was a weightless and limitless utopian paradise in which happy Neetibbar and wry Olegna could gambol and embrace.

  The mortal races of the next universe would occasionally comment on two glorious superclusters, titanic arcs of creative energy stenciling the void like a net—sharp and sleek, stable and sweet, weaving the warp and weft of the reborn cosmos.

  Notes on “Colliding Branes”

  Asimov’s Science Fiction, February, 2009

  Written May - July, 2008.

  Rudy on “Colliding Branes”

  In April, 2008, I fell under the spell of a popular science book, The Endless Universe, by Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok. I got Bruce to help me work the ideas into this science fiction story, “Colliding Branes.” Bruce had the excellent idea of making the main characters be bloggers, and later he came up with the killer twist of having the space between branes be in some sense a living thing—like a Lovecraftian Great Old One.

  I decided it was finally time to have our transreal stand-ins for our tale be a man and a woman. My character is the woman, that is, Rabbiteen. Bruce is the politically involved guy Angelo. Once again we went through ten drafts, with the usual wrangling, interspersed with rewarding moments of visionary joy.

  I especially love a phrase that Bruce wrote into our ending for this tale: “…a weightless and limitless utopian paradise in which happy Neetibbar and wry Olegna could gambol and embrace.”

  After the last week of the collaboration I went to the hospital with a cerebral hemorrhage—what used to be called a fit of apoplexy. I nearly died, but then I rebounded and went back to being my old self, essentially unscathed.

  Later I told Bruce that the attack was his fault. It told him he’d pushed me over the edge. I didn’t literally think this was true, but it seemed like a good thing to tell him. I was, like, testing to see if I could evoke any hint of human empathy from the man.

  Bruce imperturbably replied that I wouldn’t have any further problems if I would just accept that he’s always right.

  Bruce on “Colliding Branes”

  Since every Rucker-Sterling story has dual characters—sometimes men, sometimes women—it seemed inevitable that the dual leads would eventually have a romantic interest. “Colliding Branes” is a love story, although it’s entirely about death. Mere everyday death couldn’t possibly be enough for a Rucker-Sterling composition, so it’s visionary, grandiose, universal death, death that outdoes the Lovecraftian scale of cosmic horror.

  Writers are mortal. But bloggers, who are pitifully dependent on their Rube Goldberg tangle of obsolescent software and hardware, are even more mortal than other writers. So if “love against death” is a grand, time-honored literary theme, then “blogging against cosmic annihilation” must surely be even more touching and pitiful.

  There are scenes in “Colliding Branes” that are a down-market sci-fi version of the Dantean vision of Paolo and Francesca, as those doomed, posthumous lovers waft through the fierce winds of Hell. These two star-crossed lovers get much more humane sympathy than most protagonists of Rucker-Sterling stories; they’re comic figures, but they�
��re more emotionally open, better-rounded people, and they fully share the story’s dualized point-of-view, which switches from boyfriend to girlfriend at the drop of a proton.

  Death tends to be a major advance in a writer’s career. I’ve learned a lot of useful things from long-dead writers. I don’t care much for the work of Dante, but Boccaccio’s Decameron opens with the horrific, totalizing slaughter of the Black Death, and then proceeds to shuck, jive and wisecrack through dozens of weird anecdotes and comic set-ups. Boccaccio left us a great legacy; he swept up a bunch of raunchy Renaissance bar-stories, and then even Shakespeare ripped him off.

  They say that Geoffrey Chaucer may have met Petrarch. I quite like the idea of these two old-school maestros getting together, swapping a few opinions over the mead, then writing an inventive travel-tale together. Maybe they did that, and maybe they decided that, although collaboration is a pretty intense experience, it would be more discreet not to publish it.

  Good Night, Moon

  “They say the Moon’s gone missing,” said Carlo Morse. He set another fabule on the checkered tablecloth at Schwarz’s Deli.

  Jimmy Ganzer examined the growing collection of dream nuggets. The fabules were tightly patterned little pastel spheres, pockmarked and seamed, scattered across the tabletop like wads of gum. “Nobody goes for space travel dreams anymore,” said Ganzer. “I don’t want to work on that.”

  “I don’t mean the Moon’s supposed to be in our new fabule for Skaken Recurrent Nightmare,” said Morse. “I’m telling you that the Moon has really gone missing. Reports from Shanghai say the Moon faded from the sky a few hours ago. Like a burnt-out firework. Everyone’s waiting to see what happens when night hits Europe and the US.”

  Ganzer grunted.

  Morse adjusted his augmented-reality necktie, whose dots were in a steady state of undulation. “That’s gotta mean something, don’t ya think?”

  “It’s not even sunset yet in LA,” said Ganzer carelessly. “So what if there’s no Moon?”