Transreal Cyberpunk

by Rudy Rucker

  “What am I supposed to do in those countries, swathe my face in a Hermes scarf? I’m a brilliant American federal scientist with years of loyal service! I’m staying right here in my own country. My only problem is that Project Loco is so freaking astral it makes LSD look like Medicare.”

  “The feds aren’t going to fund you anymore. Not when your boss is a self-flattening radioactive pancake.”

  “It’s not exactly radioactivity,” said Becka. “But, yeah, I know.”

  “So, how about we hook up with private enterprise,” suggested Gordo. “My pals at Yellco. They’re in big business, they can deal with the feds. You go and do the kabuki for them. A live demo. Lay sample loco leeches on those awestruck investor geeks. Then I can close the venture deal.”

  “Selling government-funded research results is unethical,” said Becka in a lofty tone. “Since you’re not a scientist like me, you know nothing of the proper research and development protocols.”

  Gordo nodded quietly, grimly. “Oh, I agree with you. I appreciate that, the way you just put me down. I’d love to see you cut a deal for yourself.” He stroked his stubbled chin, pooching out his lips to assume a wise expression. “You’re guilty of warping the fabric of spacetime with a leech stuck to your neck. You’ll get the gas chamber. The networks will run it live.”

  “Oh god, oh god, oh god!”

  “You’re fine if I’m here to protect you,” said Gordo, stout and manly. “Waverly’s flatter than toast, but nothing’s happened to you yet. You know what we need? A drink. A drink, two trench coats and a handgun.”

  “How can you even talk about booze when we’re in so much trouble?”

  “Bust out that ouzo you’ve got hidden in your knapsack. Translocate us an apple pie.”

  “No pie for you,” said Becka primly. “It’s not even ten in the morning.” She turned to the coffee maker that sat atop an unstable heap of lab equipment. “I’ll make you a nice strong coffee.”

  “Whatever,” said Gordo. “Rough day. I hate seeing dead people. Especially when I have to clean them up.”

  Becka sniffed. “The noise of that steamroller is giving me such a headache.”

  Gordo reached absently into his shirt pocket. “Hey, you want some aspirin? I copped it last week in that shell of a mall. It’s German! Really pure.”

  “You can be a handy guy sometimes, El Gordo,” said Becka, gratefully eating a painkiller.

  “Real soon now, we burst into action,” said Gordo, “Caffeine and sugar, aspirin and ouzo! We’re gonna take the war to the world outside!”

  Just then they heard a clumsy scratching at the front door, followed by a series of light, precise knocks.

  Gordo peered through the fisheye spyhole in the center of the mansion’s bolted door. “This is the living end,” he said. “Now someone sent us a robot.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “No way, look for yourself. It’s one of those Japanese quadruped things, those herky-jerky origami dogs. I’ve never seen one outside a YouTube video.”

  “I can see it through my loco leech,” said Becka with an inward look. “Maybe we’d better find out what it wants.”

  Gordo opened the door to reveal a disposable droid, a creature that had been created as a 3D-printed construction of grid-wired plastic. It was cheap and flimsy, tidily folded to balance on four pointed feet. Graphic displays flowed across its surfaces.

  The closest surface resolved into the plump face of their landlord. His name was Yonnie Noe, and he was famed for having bought up three thousand houses in the blasted Northern Virginia suburbs. Keen on personal service, Mr. Noe printed out fresh rent-collector droids every day.

  “I need to speak with Dr Fred Waverly,” said Yonnie’s face, his tone peremptory. The sound emanated via vibrations from the collector droid’s surfaces. The creature cocked its head, aiming its photosensitive patches into the house, sampling the air with a roughened surface near the tip of its triangular nose.

  “Dr Waverly’s in the garage,” said Gordo. “He’s getting a massage.”

  “That’s nice, but I smell burnt wiring,” announced Yonnie. The bot slid a papery leg through the open door. “Did you use a two-prong plug in a three-prong hole, sir? I’ll have to inspect for that.”

  This was a ruse. Once a collector droid had somehow folded and slithered its way into a deadbeat’s sanctum, valves would open and it would emit a spray.

  “You can’t evict us,” bellowed Gordo, giving the droid a savage kick.

  “You didn’t pay your landlord,” chirped the paper robot, skittering right back. “Allow me to display your deadbeat financial status.” A series of charts, blueprints, progress bars and spycam views scrolled rapidly across its back and its legs.

  Yonnie’s face reappeared, threatening and serious. “The ambient biometric feeds shows the renter of record to be lying on floor of the garage.”

  “I just told you that,” said Gordo. “But you weren’t listening.”

  “Dr. Fred Waverly’s brainwaves are subnominal,” intoned Yonnie. “I deem him incapacitated. Your evident failure to file a police report is a crime! Prepare for immediate eviction, followed by arrest!”

  “Dr. Waverly’s only resting,” babbled Becka over Gordo’s shoulder. “He’s in a deep trance. He’s an ascended master. I know you want your back rent, Mr. Noe, but we don’t have the password to activate Professor Waverly’s credit account.”

  “This is unacceptable,” snapped Yonnie.

  “You can’t arrest us,” said Gordo. “You’re made of paper and coat-hangers.” He gripped the robot by its papery midriff and threw it into the snow. He slammed the door and shot the steel bolts.

  The robot pattered and scratched at the door, emitting a buzzing series of escalating threats. And they could hear a second droid fumbling at the window.

  With trembling hands, Becka stuffed a few things into her backpack and shrugged it onto her shoulders. “I’m not strong enough for this,” she said. “I can’t beat up robots. I’m a scholar.”

  “I can handle this crisis,” said Gordo, watching her. “Pick me out a loco leech.”

  “Okay, try the top left box in the tank,” Becka counseled. “Put a leech straight up your nostril and it’ll hook to your brain immediately. It takes a whole hour to interface it if you stick it on your neck.”

  Leaning over the aquarium, Gordo pincered out a writhing brown West Virginia leech. Holding it tight between finger and thumb, he snorted it up.

  “Oof,” said Gordo, staggering. He held up his hands, staring at them like he’d never seen fingers before. “Sextillion,” he muttered. “I’m counting the molecules, yeah. Septillion.”

  The collector droids were scritch-scratching at the door and the window, earnestly trying to slide in through the cracks. But this algorithm failed them. They were quiet for a minute, and then they emitted two tightly collimated chirps. One of the window panes shattered into shards. Instantly two folded-up shapes glided through the empty pane like paper airplanes. The droids unfolded themselves to stand on all fours, wavering like drunken hat stands.

  One of the collector bots lifted his tail and began to spew a thin stream of repulsive gas.

  With a savage effort of his will, Gordo dove into the locative mental spaces of his leech. Immediately he found the city construction yard. Translocating physical objects was as easy as lifting a fork from a table.

  “Roar,” Gordo declared.

  A bulldozer crashed gloriously through the wall into the littered dining room, its blade raised like a tear-stained guillotine. The dozer’s tracks and blade made a lethal, pig-slaughtering racket. Fresh, cold air streamed in.

  “This all goes on your bill,” screeched Yonnie No’s voice, and then his origami droid was crushed.

  Gordo bobbled his head, manipulating the bulldozer as effortlessly as a wire-frame graphic. Its dirt-stained teeth knocked the aquarium from its stand in a geyser of shattered glass and wallowing parasites. The dozer whi
rled, its dirt-stained treads gouging the floor.

  “I’m voiding your deposit,” chirped Yonnie Noe’s remaining collector droid, scuttling out of reach. It hid in the crannies of the junk piled against the walls, preparing to vent its own supply of gas.

  The bulldozer rotated in place, lining up for an attack. Gordo zoomed the dozer’s dimensions down to a nimbler size. With a blur of motion, the miniaturized bulldozer darted like a rabid terrier to crush the last droid to bits.

  And then, with a smooth affine transformation, Gordo restored the dozer to its full stature. It trundled outside, making another yawning hole in the wall, opening a Pompeii-like vista.

  Silence fell. The dozer was motionless beneath the pearly winter sky. In the garage, the steamroller was silent too. A few dark dots of snow began to fall. The frigid air smelled somehow like steel.

  “You overdid it,” said Becka critically.

  “Women always say that,” shrugged Gordo. “You wanted me to solve your problem... Hey, problem solved now, it’s all rubble.”

  “Look,” said Becka, pointing.

  A wide, flat sheet was creeping across the snowy winter lawn, reflecting glints of rainbow color from the low, gray clouds.

  “He’s like a flounder,” said Becka. “ Or no, he’s like a soap film.”

  Waverly the soap-film man undulated and rose into the air. As if seen through a haze of static on a clouded video screen, he twinkled, stuttered, jaggified, and broke up—into frantic dots. A swarm of Waverly gnats. Bright and glittering, the gnats swirled in a slow tornado.

  “He’s going everywhere,” said Becka. “He predicted this. He’s encysted himself into a quintillion particles.”

  With a dip and salute, the swarm of Waverlys scattered itself to the vagrant breezes of winter.

  “I don’t think that’s an attractive career choice,” said Gordo.

  “Do you want to try and pry your leech loose, before it really digs in?” asked Becka. “I think it’s too late for me.”

  “I’m riding this all the way,” said Gordo. “Wherever it leads. Having this superpower—it feels like the first time I’ve ever really been alive. It’s just you and just me against the world. So first, before anyone else shows up—” He nodded his head towards the house.

  “Hot funeral sex?” said Becka, her expression unreadable.

  “Please,” said Gordo.

  Notes on “Loco”

  Tor.com, June, 2012.

  Written December, 2011.

  Rudy on “Loco”

  Bruce emailed me an idea for a story that would somehow be related to locative art, that is, to virtual-reality art providing an experience that relates to a viewer’s specific location. I wasn’t exactly sure where to go with this notion, but I knew it would be fun to work with him again. As is customary for our collaborations, “Loco,” is a two-person story, with the characters loosely based on Bruce and me.

  This time, instead of directly arguing with each other about the story via email, Bruce and I transrealized our bickering into actual dialog within the story. I’m the punky woman, and Bruce is the tough, hard-bitten man. There’s also a bit of me in the professor who’s been run over by a steam-roller.

  Having a guy be flattened like a pancake without actually dying was one of those odd story-twists that simply occurs to a writer like me—and then, just for the hell of it, I throw it in and see if I can make it work within a tale’s internal logic. The tank of leeches, the attack of the road-grader, and the paper robots are what-the-hell ideas too—it was Bruce who came up with those three.

  In the end, the story has a fine, mad logic. I relish Bruce’s rich vocabulary, his contrarian attitude, and his obsessions—refreshingly different from mine. Cory Doctorow wrote a nice bit about our story on the Boing Boing blog:

  “‘Loco,’ a new story by Rudy Rucker and Bruce Sterling is the weirdest fucking thing I’ve ever read that managed to still make sense. I’ve read pretty much every word both of them ever published and together, they are infinitely weirder and more interesting than they are on their own. I’m willing to bet that writing this was half euphoric loony-laughter, half weird-out contest, and 100 percent awesome.”

  Bruce on “Loco”

  This story might have been a rather standard cyberpunk technothriller about federal research scientists who blunder into their own Manhattan Project. I had an idea along that line—because I’m beset with ideas, I have thousands of them—but I’ve done work of that sort before, and I didn’t know where such a story might go.

  Rudy immediately attacked the story with brazen cartoon elements—a living man smashed flat by a bulldozer, an attack of paper robots from an angry landlord. The trick in “Loco” is to subsume these aggressive provocations without breaking character. The two leads are government workers, and they stay feds no matter what. The result is some spectacularly weird cyberpunk-transreal dialogue, almost certainly the best such exchanges we’ve written.

  ”Loco” is not a great science fiction story, but it features some unearthly scenes that convey the world-smashing feeling of a Surrealist exquisite corpse. Two conceptual worlds have been collaged together, and the jagged edges are smoothed out nicely. So the sentences work, they’re grammatical and even rational, but they state weird things that are simply unheard-of, unthinkable thoughts that no single human brain could produce.

  I don’t like to play the suffering tortured artist as Rudy does, because I don’t write from the heart; I’m critical and analytical, and for me it’s all about text construction. Nevertheless, I dare to declare that “Loco,” for all its extreme daffiness, is deadly-serious sci-fi high-artwork. This is pulverizing psychedelia jam-band action where the guitars get bulldozed live on stage.

  Totem Poles

  Dirt Complaining and Dirt Harkening were a long-buried married couple.

  “I haven’t minded being dead one bit,” said Dirt Complaining. “But now we’ve got space aliens nosing around. And they’re curious about totem poles? Why did you men even make those things?”

  “We were great artists,” said Dirt Harkening.

  “Fools conjuring up cosmic forces.”

  “I miss potlatch,” said Dirt Harkening. “That’s what I’ve missed most, down here in the Earth’s dirt.”

  “Potlatch again,” said Dirt Complaining. “Ha! All you big chiefs, pretending to be above all wealth, so spiritual, so potent! Whose robes and amulets were you burning and throwing into the sea? Women’s crafts, women’s treasures!”

  “Easy come, easy go,” said Dirt Harkening. “With flying saucers in the sky, our whole Earth is in play. But come what may, dear wife—our squabbles don’t matter anymore.”

  “The heirs of our dead flesh still walk the Earth, husband.”

  “The living take no account of us. People have forgotten that sacred truth was captured in the mighty symbolism of our totem poles. Even though the saucers understand.”

  “Your totem poles were vulgar,” said Dirt Complaining. “Big phallic brags !”

  “We artists like that sort of thing. A totem pole that stands up good and stiff—very fine.”

  “Let’s see how this ends,” said Dirt Complaining.

  §

  Ida lowered her combat binoculars. She had pale skin, a heart-shaped face and a bob of lustrous dark hair. “It’s a shame that nobody sees the point of our struggle. What if we’re wrong?”

  Kalinin adjusted his brimless fur Cossack hat. He was a bony, waxy-skinned warrior with high cheekbones and a great beak of a nose. “You and I will be heroes,” he said, looking tenderly upon Ida. “Once we learn how to kill this race of flying saucers.”

  “But the saucers are saving the very Earth that mankind destroyed!”

  “If you wash an apple before eating it, do you do that for the apple’s good?”

  Heaped with garbage, a chain of filthy diesel trucks lumbered toward the vast scar of the coal mine, here in the Donbass region of the Ukraine. One after another, with distan
t groans and screeches, the great trucks dumped their trash. It was high noon, with a glaring sun.

  The alien creatures had three primary forms—one for the air, one for the sea, and one fearsome form that infested the Earth itself.

  The air invaders resembled classic flying saucers. They haunted Earth’s skylines, absorbing pollutants. In their seagoing form, the saucers took on shapes like whales. They devoured poison gyres of floating plastic with their ivory teeth, and filtered toxins with their dark baleen. And the subterranean saucers were colossal, rubbery, saucer worms. They infested mankind’s mines and landfills, erasing every scrap of poison they found.

  Thanks to the aliens, the withered fields and rain forests, stricken by every form of human rapacity, were blooming again. Happy dolphins and gallant tuna swam the open seas. Wild pigs roamed the taiga like the wind. The planet’s molten poles were freezing again as the rising seas receded.

  The very largest of the chthonic saucer worms was here in a Donbass coal mine. Kalinin’s sworn goal in life was to kill this worm. For weeks, militarized Russian diesel trucks had been dumping nuclear waste into the mine, filling it with choice bait for the saucers. Lured by this bonanza of filth, an armada of the flying saucers had burrowed into the shaft and had merged their bodies to form a vast and lumpy worm.

  Sheltered by a rampart of wet sandbags, Kalanin and Ida watched one of the great, silvery saucers fly by overhead. Kalinin’s ragtag paramilitary warriors set up a rousing antiaircraft fire from their muddy ambush holes. But they weren’t firing bullets.

  The living saucers, it seemed, had a weakness. They carried within them some prime directive about intelligent life, some ethic that manifested itself as a tenderness towards human beings. The saucers were unwilling or even unable to harm people. They had an especial loathing for dead people. Therefore Kalinin’s paramilitary troops fired human body-parts at any saucer within range—making the innocent blue sky above the radioactive coal-mine into an aerial graveyard of human carrion.