by Rudy Rucker
His character armor well in place, Frank Sharp stepped into the treehouse and raised his elegant brows. “It’s a privilege to visit your sequoia retreat, Jorge. I know you deserve your serenity, after all we’ve been through together. I told the big boys back at the Agency, I told ‘em: yo, we can’t squeeze blood out of a redwood stump. Let Professor Jones be. He’s old, he’s lost it, he’s pretty near death. Forget him. We’ll find some younger math genius who can avert this Lovecraft-scale catastrophe.”
Jorge looked at his stained fingertips, seeing them very clearly just now. They were dirty, with a glossy sheen over the dirt. A bum’s hands. He hadn’t bathed or shaved in days, or maybe weeks. Was his chosen life so great? Frank Sharp, by contrast, looked like he’d just stepped out of a five-star hotel lobby.
“What other genius?” Jorge said.
“Oh, well, we both know about you math guys. You always do your best work before thirty.”
“Maybe so, but we live to be a hundred,” countered Jorge. “Can you tell me again who you’re working for this time?”
“I work for the high-enders on any given day,” smiled Frank. “Whenever an industry peaks, they start to die—so they call in a futurist. I serve them their final cheese course.”
“Me, I’m not an industry anymore,” said Jorge sourly. “I’m a lonely, resentful old man with some broken patents.”
“That’s all thanks to Betty Yee and geopolitics. Be fair, Jorge, it was never easy to keep a guy like you out of prison or the nuthouse.”
Jorge glared at Frank. “Before you showed up here in my sequoia tree, I had a chance to end my days in dignity.”
“What the hell do you with yourself, way up here? Besides feeding your squirrels.”
“I perform gedankenexperiments,” said Jorge. “I confront great conundrums that can only be resolved by sheer Einstein-style chin-stroking.”
Sharp stared blankly into the gently waving redwood foliage, baffled by this assertion. Finally he shrugged. “Fine! Feel sorry for yourself. Sulk. Me, I’m a man of the world, okay? Because if I don’t take power, I’m a dirt-common schnook. I’m the nameless ox that dies in harness. Cut to the chase, Jorge. Save the world for me. I need the world.”
Jorge had a crushing rejoinder ready, but when he saw the obscure pain haunting Sharp’s darting, dishonest eyes, a moment of sagely compassion touched him. Despite all that had happened between the two of them, he found it within himself to know pity.
“All right, Frank. We should love the world. Keep your world off my back, and I’ll debug your problems on principle.”
§
The disaster-stricken city of Shenzhen was entirely closed to air traffic and internet access. An industrial region beset with giant mud monsters had to clamp down on unharmonious thinking. However, Frank Sharp, hired Chinese agent, was able to lay out the full, uncensored story for the ears of Jorge Jones, global disaster consultant.
While working R&D for the potent Gold Lucky Corp, Betty Yee had abused Jorge’s patented technology of organic computation in a self-referential and radically improper manner.
Gold Lucky had planned to recreate the so-called “Cambrian Explosion” of Earthly evolution—an ancient geologic epoch, reborn in the form of creatures generated by Jorge’s organic computations. Let a thousand mutants bloom. Gold Lucky’s software engineers, feverish at the prospect of productivity bonuses, had imagined that they might extract a master program from China’s enormous Big Data fossil record of primeval worm tracks, ammonite shells and algae stains. This was a straightforward matter of collating the entire Cambrian fossil record and stochastically interpreting the fossils as ideograms.
Unfortunately, this brilliant scheme, like most software startups, had been an abject bust.
When Betty Yee took over the research program, she went much smaller, more nano-scale. She focused on a special class of fossils known as “stromatolites.” Stromatolites were pancaked stacks of calcified primitive algae.
Betty’s efforts revealed that these fossilized microbial mats were a computational archive. The fossil stromatolites were the historical record of millions of years of super-advanced single-celled life—a full core-dump, source-code, and stack-trace for the primeval cellular-automata soup that had covered planet Earth for nameless geologic eons, long before nature had evolved any spines, mouths or bones. The dense primeval brew, the oldest form of life on earth, had been a hot and sour soup of computation.
Of course no one had believed Betty’s science findings, so she’d boldly ported this fossilized database straight into the Gold Lucky medicated-mud factory. Then everybody believed, because behold: the Kraken awoke.
§
Frank and Jorge were quickly ushered past customs in Shenzhen, because no mere functionaries were allowed to inspect Jorge’s latest version of his Hydra tool—newly revamped for battlefield action. Betty Yee met them with an armored Chinese limousine.
“Why did you publish that paper in the Hong Kong Journal of Genomics about stochastic flows across membrane diffusors?” Jorge promptly demanded. “Was it to break my patents?” He’d been brooding over the issue during the long trans-Pacific flight.
“Then you remember my work!” said Betty Yee. She sounded pleased, but in person she looked careworn. Betty was dressed in standard global nerd style: pink jeans, white athletic shoes, a sweatshirt with a corny graphic, a purple windbreaker. Her hair was newly streaked with gray and she had dry crowsfeet at her temples.
“My patents were not about commercial advantage,” lectured Jorge. “I put the patents there to protect this world from things men were not meant to know.”
“Your patents weren’t stopping anyone,” said Betty. “Especially not your National Security Agency and our Chinese cyberwar units. While you’ve been living in your tall woods like an exiled Taoist poet, everyone here in China has been building Hydra units for years.”
Jorge locked eyes with his former student. He was angry, but she steadily returned his gaze. As man and woman, they were of different generations and had once had an entirely decent, productive teacher-student relationship. However, many years had passed. Betty had become a woman of discretion, while Jorge, although ancient, was not entirely dead to male lust.
“Yo, what’s up with the stromatolite codes?” Frank interrupted, seeking some normalized conversation.
Betty blinked and cleared her throat. “Imagine the unthinkable patience of plankton, passing endless yugas under the sun,” she offered. “The legacy of the living Earth before plants and animals. Much like the placid, stable, civilized Middle Kingdom, before the West showed up and wrecked the Confucian utopia.”
“A nanotech-style gray-goo singularity is a legacy?” said Frank Sharp. “Like, thanks a lot.”
“The singularity was never ahead of us,” said Betty. “It was always behind us. On hold, deep in the limestone strata.”
§
In the distance, towards the battered metropolis, the Chinese earth shook with disaster. Hoarse and loud. Military observation planes were flying in slow circles. Dozens of helicopters swarmed overhead—some of them napalm bombers, some of them carrying tanks of water and fire retardant, some of them medics carrying off the wounded.
The armored robot limo rolled with cybernetic slickness toward the Gold Lucky plant, swerving to avoid the bomb craters in the road, skirting the slumped rubble of charred, collapsed buildings, sometimes taking a detour to avoid the urban structures that were still in flames. The earlier airstrikes were releasing their bent, stinking billows into the glowering sky, spark-filled pillars of dust and toxic urban smoke.
The first Kraken mud-monster caught Jorge and Frank by surprise, stepping out from behind a glass office building, like a threatening ghoul in a funhouse ghost ride. And then another, another and another, ten meters, twenty meters, thirty meters tall. Although they were faceless and eyeless, the Kraken monsters were very alive. They stank powerfully of digestion and sewage.
They walked
the terrified Earth, huge, slimy, shaggy, bipedal golems of computational mud, flaking off writhing chunks in the crude shapes of horseshoe crabs, scorpions, sea worms, sea cucumbers. The cellular computers were recruiting modern germs from the local peasants’ synergistic duck, fish, and pig manure ponds. And the monsters promptly assimilated any bewildered animals or hapless human locals that fell into their slimy grip.
“They’re made of smart cells, embedded in flowing mud,” said Betty Yee. “They compute in parallel. Each cell processes food scents and physical contacts. Gradients of wetness and light. I released them from the fossil stones with Professor Jones’s language for organic computation. I freed the Kraken with a Chinese Hydra, and now, I know: mistakes were made.”
The slick clay golems rose up much faster than the angry choppers could burn them down to Chinese porcelain. A herd of the salty, reeking, stop-action claymation monsters rumbled past and over the limousine, powerful on their vast dented legs. The Kraken monsters were huge, and with every astounding step on the Chinese soil, they grew visibly bigger.
Frank straightened his tie and gave a thin smile. “Betty, your military attacks don’t even hurt their feelings.” His exquisitely tailored, black suit made the leather of the limo look cheap. “They’re generating body forms like they’re leafing through Charles Darwin and highlighting the hot parts.”
“Let us join the welcome banquet at the Gold Lucky plant,” Betty recited. “We must formulate a war plan.”
§
The Gold Lucky welcome banquet was a spartan emergency lunch where terrified employees wolfed down cold noodles from stamped aluminum bowls.
“Jorge here can degrade, attrit, and suppress your Krakens, I have no doubt,” Frank Sharp told Betty Yee. “The American press calls him the John von Neumann of organic computation.”
“Do you still read the American press?” said Betty doubtfully.
“That’s not what matters,” said Frank, deftly chopsticking his chilly ramen. “Because Jonny von Neumann was a shadowy, zoned out guy who was in there, at the start, with the players. Von Neumann created the first digital computer. Also, the first atomic bomb. That’s the American way: throw the big brainiac at the big problem. Save the moral indignation for when you can pay for it. One man against the universe. Just keep moving his bar, extending his finish line, until he comes up with some ecstatic, dreadful breakthrough that can cap it all. If he fails, and his brain turns to slush in his hospital bed, that’s all part of his legend.”
Betty decanted a plastic squeeze bottle of hot-sauce into her lukewarm noodle bowl. “Why do you say such painful things, Frank?” she said, meeting his eyes. “Dr. Jorge Jones is a great man. You torment him. You mock him. Why?”
“Free speech won’t kill a great man,” said Frank. “Your mud monsters might kill him.”
“You know what killed von Neumann?” said Jorge. “The hydrogen bomb tests. He had to go and gawk at all of them, he didn’t have the sense to stay home.”
For two minutes they ate in silence.
There were certain matters that Jorge Jones and Frank Sharp never talked about. Like the treason charge that had hung for years over Jorge’s head, for his ruining spook encryption with his massive stash of secret and heretofore unknown prime numbers. Through a Byzantine legal maneuver, Sharp had finally gotten the hacker charges dismissed.
As a quid pro quo, the secrets of the Hydra, Jorge’s programming tool, had been handed over to the Washington security establishment. Jorge himself, legally scot-free, and carefully stripped of any possible role in government, business or academe, had been given control of a nice, tall sequoia tree in a quiet, misty, federal park.
An ingenious secret arrangement, but of course it could not last. The vampire that was power might be buried, but then every living thing around it would rot. The Hydra’s design specs and its proprietary control software, had been released by a malcontent at the NSA. Or else hacked by Chinese military disguised as computer-science students. Or maybe just sold off by Frank Sharp, who rarely asked for more than ten percent on a deal.
All that pain and trouble to keep things tight and shipshape, and the genie still blew out of the bottle. The genie whistled howling through the bottleneck and flew worldwide on the cloudy winds. They were like that, genies.
“John von Neumann transformed this world, and so did I,” said Jorge over the candied bean cakes. “If some obscure Hungarian exile can turn America into an atomic, computational superpower, then it’ll be easy for me to obliterate Chinese Kraken monsters with my Hydra.” Jorge wiped his mouth and set down his chopsticks. “So what? The reward for being a low-empathy know-it-all.”
Sensing Jorge’s moment of self-doubt, Frank leaned forward over the flimsy folding table. “To live alone, a man must be very like a god—or very like a wild beast.”
“This Chinese banquet wasn’t supposed to have a cheese course,” said Jorge.
“Our conversation would be easier if you’d ever studied literature,” said Frank. “Politicians adore the classic quotes from ancient Greek. But for you, old geek: what is it? Differential equations?”
Jorge stared him down. “Being rescued by you is worse than prison.”
Betty Yee looked from one to the other. “Gentlemen, we have a problem in the field.”
§
Shenzhen had been a prosperous city where an industrious people pursued their own happiness and minded their own business. Now it looked like Godzilla’s birthday cake.
Betty Yee herded Frank and Jorge into a robot helicopter, which promptly rose aloft. “I feel so ashamed,” she announced. “The world would be a happier place if this had only happened in Washington instead. Where you vainly seek to control the rest of us. And where men like Frank Sharp make dirty money.”
“I am the king-hell futurist!” barked Frank Sharp over the noise of the rotors. “You wanted to bring in Jorge Jones, the sage of organic computation, you had to suit up a cowboy first! Take us to the front lines!”
During the brief flight, Jorge hastily prepared the Hydra that he’d brought along. Jorge’s Hydra had four bright blue eyes set into its waist, and a working mouth inside its ring of eight tentacles. Each tentacle had an opening at its tip for puffing out viral spores. This Hydra’s interface consisted of EEG patches that could monitor Jorge’s brain impulses and thus, to some extent, read his thoughts. Jorge wore the Hydra atop his head.
“Fun,” said the Hydra, settling into place. Its inhuman voice was high and cheerful.
“Good boy,” said Jorge, brushing tentacles from his eyes.
A battlefield was a young man’s arena, but in a cyberwar an old man was ferocious. Firing from the chopper with the advantages of air supremacy, Jorge destroyed twenty-five of the Krakens in rapid succession, poofing them with aerial squirts of Hydra mist. The Krakens crumbled below him like sandcastles in the tide. The remaining monsters absorbed this battlefield fact on the ground. Stumbling and lumbering, they retreated, redesigned themselves, and returned to combat.
The second wave of mud golems were armored lumps. They resembled dog-sized trilobites and cow-sized ankylosaurus dinos—each with a spiky ball on its tail. There was even one ghastly thing like a rolling, gawping human head that, Frank Sharp boldly insisted, was clearly modeled on himself.
Solving the relevant reaction-diffusion equations in his head, Jorge reprogrammed his Hydra’s viral mist—and began picking off Krakens again. He’d fly low, get close to one of them, and poof.
Frank Sharp began yelling unwanted advice, a target observer calling the shots on the slaughter. “Zap that one who’s a crooked pig, melt that ugly sucker looks like a snail, and then get the slobbering kangaroo. God, they’re ugly!”
Then, with covert suddenness, there were no more Krakens in sight.
“I seriously doubt this is—mission accomplished,” said Jorge. “With me killing them and Frank insulting them, these Cambrian mud monsters are going to want to build a Kraken a kilometer high.”
But for now all was calm.
§
Back at Gold Lucky’s damaged, smoke-stinking headquarters, the uniformed employees were gleefully celebrating Jorge’s swift victory with rounds of sorghum liquor. Betty shyly proffered an attache case loaded with high denomination bills.
“That’ll do for earnest money,” said Frank, stuffing the sheaves of money into his pigskin bag.
“The Chinese invented paper money,” said Betty. “The old ways are simple and strong.”
“It’s world-changing stuff, money,” nodded Frank. “A shame what Jorge did to crypto-money and electronic funds transfer. I warned him to knock it off with that prime-number research, but he was a wild man. Jorge had no brakes, in his younger days. He didn’t even know what brakes were.”
The victory party was as brief as a stock-market rally. A short distance from the corporate HQ, the Krakens’ roaring and burbling had resumed.
“Oh wow,” said Jorge, realizing something.”I’ve been dissolving them, but their spores become seeds. They rise back up like a battalion of Chinese clay soldiers!”
“I’m losing the thread here, Jorge,” Frank complained. “Plankton, stromatolites, horseshoe crabs, trilobites, dinosaurs—everything but jellyfish and ants. And now it’s clay soldiers?”
Betty was regaining her confidence. “Our brave pilots are improving with the napalm. Although the Kraken is made of germs that compute, germs are just germs. We can’t lose with Professor Jones and his Hydra.”
“Thing is,” put in Frank Sharp. “It’s the Hydra itself that’s the real Kraken. The Hydra, metaphorically, is the American Kraken.”
Jorge wanted to protest, but Frank forestalled him with an upraised hand.
“Consider the prophetic words of The Kraken, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson,” said Frank, in full lecture mode. “I shall quote this visionary Victorian work in extenso.”