Transreal Cyberpunk

by Rudy Rucker

  “You always understood them better than anyone else, Kalinin,” said Ida. “Do they plan to annihilate us? Is that why they sent you back?”

  “They’re refining us,” said Kalinin. “Like ore within a crucible. Like vapor in an alembic. Life and death are philosophical mistakes.”

  “Sometimes I miss the old Kalinin,” said Ida. “It was noble to be so stubborn. Fighting the inevitable, no matter what.”

  “Discarded dross,” said Kalinin. “Economics, government, military power—nonsensical, distorted, irrelevant.” Imposing as he seemed to others, when he gazed at Ida, his eyes were as warm as ever before. “Love remains. Art is the path to the final unification.”

  “Everyone at the party was saying things like that,” said Ida, shrugging her bared shoulders in her shining gown. “People are so full of themselves in America! They talk as if they were demigods, but what do they do? They crank themselves up on grubs and watch someone’s thousand-hour video in ten minutes.”

  “A mirage that flies by, half-seen, half-sensed,” said Kalanin. “The saucers want a richer kind of art. They want us to change the world.”

  “But Kalinin, what if the saucers are like children who poke sticks into anthills to watch the ants seethe? The ants build and build, they strive and strive—but are any of them famous artists?”

  “We’ll craft a great work of ant,” said Kalanin.

  “Everyone at the party was talking about totem poles,” said Ida. “In the old days, the Native Americans of the northwest carved faces on sticks with stone knives. That was their art. But then, one day—one strange day—the sailing ships came to them, and strangers brought them steel axes. How did they respond? They made huge totem pole logs, from Oregon to Alaska!”

  “Totem poles,” said Kalinin slowly. “Yes. Of course. Totem poles are good.”

  “But the story is tragic! The old world that the natives knew by heart became someone else’s New World. A world of syphilis and smallpox, with the totem poles stored in museums.”

  “The grubs are our steel axes,” said Kalanin.

  “Why don’t the saucers speak to us, Kalinin? Will they let us join their world? Can we join the Higher Circles of galactic citizenship?”

  Kalinin gave a dry laugh. “Higher than the Kremlin.”

  They walked along in silence for a few minutes, bringing their minds into synch. They even got a levitation thing going, loping along in long strides, laughing at each other.

  “You see it too?” said Kalanin, coming to a stop, panting for breath. “You’ll make a painting. Monumental. And then—

  “The end of the world,” said Ida. “Brought to you by a crazy woman who made her crazy boyfriend slit his own throat with a bayonet.”

  “And who brought him back to life. This is holy, Ida. No need to joke.”

  Ida held out her hands. “I laugh because I’m scared.”

  The two of them embraced, lit by the moon and the silver saucers and the first rays of the rising sun. A gentle puff of breeze came off the bay.

  “I’ll paint now,” said Ida.

  “Paint everything,” said Kalanin. “Can it fit?”

  “I’ll use—poetic compression,” replied Ida. “Room to spare.”

  She raised her arms and the skies opened. Tens of thousands of saucer grubs rained down upon her. Some of the grubs became brushes, others formed pools of paint.

  Ida and her living brushes set to work, painting on the street, on the sidewalks, on the nearby warehouse walls, Ida swinging her arm from the shoulder, carving sweeps of color and form. Her loose strokes limned buildings and people and trees. She depicted the insides of the buildings as well as the outsides, and the meanings of the things to be found in there, and the lives of those who’d made the things.

  “Be sure to include an image of your painting,” urged Kalinin.

  Ida nodded, uninterruptedly busy, sharpening the identities of her scribbles and blots. A tight spiral of darkly energetic grubs began converging onto a certain section of her mural. Ida was crafting a secondary world-mural within the main one.

  Just like the main mural, the secondary mural held a image of the entire world. And within it you could see a third mural, with a yet tinier fourth mural inside that, and so on and on.

  “Keep going,” said Kalinin.

  “We’ve only begun,” said Ida. Flecks of paint bedizened her bobbed dark hair like stars in a night sky.

  Kalinin closed his eyes and his lips moved. Rays of light flickered into life, one of them stellating out from Ida’s regress—the others from points across the globe.

  Twelve poles of supernal light, needles of prismatic brilliance, radiating into the cosmos, dissolving the substance of our world. Bathing in its native glow, the Earth became a silver, dodecahedral orb, a mysterious cosmic traveler.

  §

  “I like this potlatch,” said Dirt Complaining.

  “The best ever,” Dirt Harkening agreed.

  Notes on “Totem Poles”

  Tor.com.

  Written June - December, 2014.

  Rudy on “Totem Poles”

  “Totem Poles” began with me emailing Bruce about how the advent of European traders with steel axes had set the Northwest First Nations people to making large totem poles in the early 1900s, and about how the Europeans then crushed the tribal cultures. I wanted to create an analogous SF scenario in which cryptic aliens arrive and give us radically powerful creative tools with catastrophic consequences.

  To get things rolling, I sent Bruce a scene featuring a woman painter in San Francisco. Bruce responded with a scene about a male Russian soldier and a female Russian administrator. Also a scene with two dead First Nations people talking. We couldn’t immediately see a good way to connect the scenes. For the next few revisions we kept tweaking each other’s scenes and repairing our own scenes.

  We also toyed with the idea of adding on more scenes, wondering if we might make the story itself a kind of totem pole—and Bruce came up with a scene in India involving a man and a woman. At this point we’d done six versions of the story.

  I did an extreme push, thinking about the story day and night until I’d found a plausible through-line for our tale. At this point, I was the woman painter and the woman Russian—who by now were the same person. Bruce was the Russian soldier. I thought the story was finished. Bruce approved of what I’d done, but even so he made changes—and so the process went on. We did four more revisions. It didn’t feel like we were converging. Bruce said it was like we were baking bread while floating in thin air. Or like we were cartoonists creating a jam strip for Zap Comix.

  After version eleven, Bruce said he didn’t want to work on the story anymore, but that he didn’t think it was properly finished. I viewed this as my opportunity for an unsupervised final cut. I went into a blood-lust revision frenzy, and sent the resulting version twelve to the editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden at Tor.com. Patrick’s quick response: “This may be the weirdest thing we’ll have published yet, but I like it and I want it.” Whew. I was glad for this validation.

  So, okay, Tor.com paid us for the story, but then a year went by, and they kept not actually publishing it, who knows why, and then it was time for Transreal Cyberpunk to appear in our antho, and I’m finalizing this note, and I’m not sure if Tor.com is going to post the story or not. I’ve been having a hard time getting info out of them. Oh well! I’ll update this info in a later edition…

  Anyway, I think “Totem Poles” is trippy and cool, with a couple of great shock-cut scenes, and a lot of different levels working in it. Bruce wan’t happy with the story, but you can decide for yourself.

  By the way, “Totem Poles” was our fourth story in a row that ends with the world as we know it coming to an end. Kind of tells you something about where we’re at. In the evening of our lives.

  Bruce on “Totem Poles”

  Rudy and I have been at it quite a while, so for “Totem Poles” we had little in the way of conceptual fram
ework, and decided just to jam around a loose theme, and see what happened. The result was a violently disordered series of drafts which were rather more interesting than the resultant final text. You sort of had to be there, and nobody else was there, so, well, no one else will ever know how brilliant this scheme was; all we’ve got left is this burnt soufflé from a kitchen on fire.

  “Totem Poles” is formally interesting, but it strongly reminds me of one of those Brian Eno “curiosities” recordings where Eno sets up loops and tracks on his hacked equipment and then deserts the studio to go ponder Long Now clocks. I happen to be quite the Brian Eno fan, and I will cheerfully forgive Professor Eno most anything, but even Jove nods. “Totem Poles” is our worst story. It’s the most disjointed and threadbare of our works, but it does have the virtue of revealing our compositional methods. If you can work your way through the haze of free-jazz distortion, you might see us flinging our favorite fantasy-riffs, Jackson-Pollack style, splattering onto the page. We were making soup from a single iron nail, and the two quarreling chefs smashed every spice-rack in sight.

  Although it’s morbid, “Totem Poles” doesn’t feel like a proper conclusion to anything; on the contrary, it feels like a teenage garage band rehearsal for something that might become really good, after a thousand hours of practice. I hope we write at least one more story. We may not have the time, but we’ve got the power. Ars longa, vita brevis, folks.

  Kraken and Sage

  Early in his career, Jorge Jones turned himself into a supercomputer. By deftly biohacking the Golgi apparatus and mitochondria power molecules of his cells, Jorge brought every part of his body into his mental network. With a little hacker yoga, he pushed his mathematical thinking out of his busy brain-matter, down his spine and nervous system, and into the flexing meat of his muscles and tendons. He used his fat cells for data storage.

  Soon after this feat, Jorge’s activated ponderings allowed him to create an organic programming tool he called the Hydra. A user could design a Hydra program, download the code into a customizable virus known as the “Jones Flu,” and then infect some hapless plant or animal to carry out whatever strange demands possessed the programmer.

  Thanks to the Hydra, life on Earth could be forced to serve Mammon’s passing whim.

  Whales carried passengers. Sheep grew colored wool. Jones flu cows were milk-emitting silos, big enough to live in. Feverish chickens could fire up within their insulating feathers and roast themselves on the spot. Exquisite glass bottles grew upon winery vines, slowly filling themselves with champagne. Clean water and snug shelter were as trivial as disposable phones.

  The Jorge Jones Hydra was the dominant, global-scale tool of biotech—patented, licensed, and the only platform of its kind. The Hydra supported armies of engineers, divisions of lawyers, battalions of designers, and conspiracies of investors. A stack, a network, a global octopus.

  Then the bubble burst.

  §

  It was a misty morning in the mountains, blessedly quiet. Jorge Jones was surrounded by living timber, graciously bent to his will. His possessions were few, but perfect: a polished wooden bowl, a voluptuously curved chair, a carved table, a horn spoon, and garments of down and spider-silk. Jorge Jones, the guru of organic computation, had no more need for copper, silicon, or plastic.

  Other than his organically programmed crows and squirrels—and the occasional freebooter nuthatch, woodpecker, or beetle—the visitors to Jorge’s sequoia tree were few and far between, and he liked life that way. Jorge Jones liked life to go entirely his own way. And he still had his Hydra working for him.

  He’d infected his crows with the Jones flu virus, and they ferried raisin bran to him. And he’d coaxed this sequoia tree into hollowing out a spacious two-story apartment within its massive trunk. A hidden cave, with a few choice pieces of elegant temperfoam Milanese furniture, and a generous balcony with swirling art-deco railings. Design was important to Jorge. His last marriage had broken up over his wife’s horrid appliance choices.

  So here he was, after the revolution, living alone in his sequoia—in an ascended state of computation and meditation. He’d become a sage of pure science and lofty conceptual metaphysics, with no annoying legal, ethical, social, economic, or military complications. He was finally free of nagging hassles from his best friend, or more likely his worst enemy, Frank Sharp.

  But even in the trackless, bird-chirping depths of the redwood forest, Jorge could never get Sharp’s wiseguy voice entirely out of his head. “Why not turn your dog into a methane tank?” Sharp had said once. “And burn its farts for a space heater.”

  But Jorge’s dear old dog was long dead now. Jorge had become a forest sage, and he had no time for Sharp’s worldly antics any more, nor for any mundane thing that wasn’t serious.

  §

  A foggy spot of light bumbled around in the damp, green branches of his primeval tree.

  This glowing apparition moved with a considered urgency, like the Zen butterfly that never hastens, even when pursued. It drifted on the air like ancient plankton—a floating thing of many soccer-ball facets, a gleaming polyhedron. Its planes were wobbly and bubbly, a stripped-down, minimal, ultra-primitive life-form, its grip on life so tentative that a bubble-pop would annihilate it.

  Slowly yet steadily, the luminous herald drew closer, tracing a path through the three-dimensional maze of Jorge’s great tree. The uncanny cyst was feeling its way toward him with wiry, delicate cilia that writhed from its tinted geometric corners.

  The plankton-bubble bumped the sharp tip of a broken branch. Jorge held his breath, but the blob didn’t burst. Those shining membranes were tougher than they looked.

  Jorge grew uneasy, watching the creature draw closer. No use trying to enjoy his morning tea and cereal. The floating entity was homing in on him. But who knew that he lived thirty meters up a tree in the middle of nowhere? Even the government spooks who’d spirited him to this mountain redoubt had agreed to forget about him. Frank Sharp had arranged that deal.

  §

  Frank Sharp, dealmaker. Not exactly a government agent, not exactly a criminal, not exactly a lawyer. Frank presented himself to the world as a high-paid consultant, offering services worldwide to high-tech industries who’d lost their way in the tangled jungles of humanity.

  Jorge called out to the shining, airborne bubble. “Frank Sharp? No more schemes. You have nothing I want.”

  In response, the lantern-like creature dipped and drew closer, its facets swirling with color. And just then something touched Jorge on the back of his neck.

  “Fuck!” screamed Jorge, whirling around, all traces of sagely aplomb gone.

  It was a second levitating polyhedron, all in shades of black and gray. This dark floater had crept up from behind him in utter dewy silence, arriving at Jorge’s bare neck with the stealth of a vampire bat. And this one was indeed the avatar of Frank Sharp, hired to escort the first blob, the colorful one. Step by computational step, that first bubble shaped itself into a model of the head of Jorge’s former student, Betty Yee.

  §

  Delicate, intelligent, and more plain than beautiful, Betty Yee was a techie of the Pacific Rim. Although her floating head was merely a mockup made of taut organic membranes, Betty had her usual expression: an ingratiating yet self-serving look. Betty had always been ambitious to change the world in her own direction.

  “I’m honored to meet you again, Dr. Jones,” said the floating head of Betty Yee. “A wild storm, then a day of sun! Seeing you lifts my heart.”

  “You know my policy about leaving the world behind,” Jorge scolded. “I told you my plans back at the Stanford Biological Accelerator.”

  “Yo, yo, yo!” yelled the dark Frank Sharp floater, maneuvering to wedge in bubble-like between Jorge and the head of Betty Yee. “Don’t forget what she did to you, professor! She robbed your lab and stole your ideas.”

  “You said you would let me explain the crisis to him,” admonished Betty Yee.


  “I said I would let you plead, yes,” said the Frank Sharp floater. “If Gold Lucky pays by the minute. And the clock started when our bubbles drifted up this tree.”

  “I can be brief,” said Betty Yee. “Dear, good, wise Doctor Jones: you changed the world. In China, we adopted your changes to our methods. We embraced them, we extended them. Mistakes were made.”

  “Back up,” said Jorge. “Did Frank just say he was renting me out by the minute?”

  “We must have your help in Shenzhen. We’ve aroused a dangerous computational form of life. We set that process running—now we can’t shut it off without your skill.”

  “I named this new outbreak the Kraken,” Frank confided. “After Tennyson’s poem. The primordial sleeping monster of the deep. Roused by the folly of man. Arising for the end of human days.”

  Jorge’s gaze flicked between the pretty glowing lantern and the vampire bubble that had poked him. “Betty, why are you bobbling around with this guy? Don’t you know any better?”

  “Gold Lucky Company hired Mr. Sharp as our connection man,” Betty confessed. “It was the only way that I could find you in time to save the world.”

  “Her problem is giant monsters made of intelligent mud,” said Frank.

  Betty Yee nodded her floating head. “Awkward.”

  Jorge considered the situation. “What’s in this for me?”

  “Let me explain that face to face,” Frank offered. “Betty’s not around here, because she’s fighting for her life in the Shenzhen disaster zone. As for me, though, I’m running this floating bubble while I’m actually standing right down at the base of your tree.”

  Frank Sharp had arrived in the flesh. There had never been one episode when that situation hadn’t turned out to be crap.

  §

  Jorge’s windlass wheel was powered by three hundred organically computing squirrels. Once Betty’s Chinese bubble had burst in a glowing patch of slime, the rodents set to work with brisk muscular efficiency. They were a jostling tide of fur inside the squeaking wheel. The sequoia’s little-used wooden lift cage hauled Frank Sharp straight up the trunk.