by Rudy Rucker
“I just wanted to scare him,” I said. I glanced over at the lump of flesh next to me. It was the size of a small dog, with a mouth, an ear, and a hank of blonde hair. The mouth looked angry. “Spazz was trying to ruin the company,” I added, “It’s me who’s working things out for you, Momo. I’m your man.”
“You spoke with a Wackle as well,” she said coldly. “That’s what caused you to release your rival’s heart. It was a Wackle who knocked you loose. You and he engaged in a colloquy, his goal being, I well know, to undermine and subvert.”
“Maybe,” said, barely moving my lips. “I don’t know. I have to watch the road. I have to think about the meetings today. I’m doing them for you.”
“You blotch, you stain, you cartoon,” said Momo. A tendril of her flesh reached towards me and seemed to sink through my skin and into the fibers of my spine. I felt a shiver of pain, like the lightest of notes struck upon a harp. Another twinge, stronger this time. And then a true spasm that forced me to pull the car off the road and bend forward moaning in agony. “Don’t presume!” said the blob on the seat next to me. “Don’t pick and choose which of my orders you should obey.”
“I won’t, Momo,” I whispered. “I won’t do it again.” I felt a thousand needles in my back.
“What won’t you do?” insisted the blob.
“I won’t go into Dronia again.”
The pain stopped, and the mouth formed a smile. “Very well then. Remember this: I’ll be close by.”
The day’s meetings started very badly. Ken Wong and some old Taiwanese guy showed up before any of us had had a chance to talk and clear up our unresolved issues. The room was so tense it felt like the air was tied into knots.
Spazz had made another call to Ken Wong on his way into our Mophone headquarters, and with all the crossed signals, Ken didn’t know what to believe or who to listen to, which is not a state of mind conducive to dropping a bundle of cash on anyone. He stopped Jena halfway through her presentation and remarked that Spazz and I would be welcome to come back to our old johs if this didn’t work out. And then he and his partner were gone.
We had twenty minutes till the next prospective business angel, and now I had a chance to coach Jena about the slides. She’d done Ken’s presentation cold. While we were going over the slides, Spazz started heckling me, saying I’d scanned the wrong UML diagrams.
“We don’t have time to change them,” I snapped. “Maybe if you’d stuck around and helped last night instead of taking off.”
“I just can’t believe you think you’re running this show,” said Spazz. “Pinhead. Nazi. Murderer.” He broke into a long bout of coughing.
“Don’t get so angry, Spazz,” said Tulip. “You’ll make yourself sick again.”
Evidently Spazz hadn’t yet told Tulip. what had really happened in the cabin. But now he spilled the beans. “It was Joe who made me sick,” Spazz told Tulip. “He went up into the fourth dimension, and he reached down inside my chest to squeeze my heart. Or he got Momo to do it for him.” His face still looked a little blotchy, and he hadn’t shaved. He glared at me. “If you pull that again. Cube, I’ll tell the cops.”
“There’s not a jail that can hold me,” I said, feeling cocky. I really had him on the ropes.
“You put a curse on Spazz?” said Tulip, shrinking back a little. “You and your familiar hexed him in the cabin?”
“What are you talking about?” asked Jena, looking up from the computer.
“Spazz was all set to double cross Joe with Ken Wong,” Tulip told Jena. “And Joe gave Spazz a heart attack. It was dreadful. I think maybe all of this is black magic.”
Jena’s eyes got narrow. “We’re getting ready to pitch to six prospects in a row. Our big break. So stop freaking out. All of you. We can fight later. I’m the one who should be mad anyway. With Spazz running out on me like that.” She pouted her lips and trembled her chin a little. “I thought you were tired of Tulip, Spazz.”
“I am,” said Spazz weakly. “I’m sorry about last night.”
Tulip threw down the Mophone she was holding and disappeared into the kitchen. There was a knock on the door.
The business angels were all over the map in appearance, approach, and behavior: a gray-haired fatherly blood-sucker from the chip industry; a shrink-wrap billionaire bent on collapsing the self confidence of anybody with the ambition of following in his footsteps ; a seen-it-all portfolio manager ready to rewrite our business strategy as soon as he met us; a shy, liquid-eyed Colombian who said he was a rancher looking to diversify; and two twenty-year-old day-traders who said they’d spent the morning playing volleyball on the beach. I talked a little volleyball with the day-traders—volleyball was one of my things, too, though I didn’t get in as many games as I would have liked.
Jena’s presentation got better and better—it was like a dance, like the miniature theatrical performances that airline stewardesses do to accompany the safety messages, like cheerleading. Spazz was mesmerized, but none of the investors were buying it. The chip guy didn’t like our staffing, the shrink-wrap guy thought our Mophones were fakes, the portfolio guy didn’t like our numbers for scaling to the mass market, the rancher—if that’s what he really was—couldn’t understand the point of our product, the day-traders thought our timeline to a hundred percent profit was way too long.
And then Clement Treed showed up. There were footsteps on the porch, the door swung open, and it was him, tall and lanky, his froggy mouth bent in the shape of a smile, his eyes alert behind his glasses. He had a surprisingly small head, made smaller by his monkish haircut. He was wearing preppy J. Crew clothes so new they looked like they were right out of the UPS box. Compared to Clement, I was almost grungy. He gave a high sign to his limo driver and came on in. He spotted Tulip right away.
“We paid to use Gandhi’s image, you know,” he told her in a quiet tone, as if continuing a conversation from two or three minutes ago. “A charity in Calcutta. His family picked it.”
“Oh, I’m sorry I ever brought that up,” said Tulip, twisting a long strand of her hair. “I was just having a little fun at your expense to impress my cousin.”
“Fun at my expense,” echoed Treed, snagging my desk chair and lightly sitting down. He was a thin man with a slight paunch, in his late thirties. “That’s something the government likes too. You’d think the public would be more appreciative of what MeYou has done for everyone. And I’m not done yet. I’m out to diversify. Who’s the CEO?”
“Me,” I said, stepping forward. “Joe Cube.”
Treed shook my hand, his grip firmer than I’d expected. “You’ve got ten minutes,” he said. “Amaze me.”
Jena did her cheer routine. Treed interrupted only once, to volunteer a detailed correction to one of the UMI, diagrams. When Jena was done, he sat staring at the last slide, the one with the picture of the antenna crystal. And then he started polishing his glasses.
“Can somebody tell me more about this so-called superchannel?” he said, still looking down at his glasses. “How does it work
“That’s our core trade secret,” I said.
“I signed your non-disclosure form,” said Treed in a mild but impatient voice. “And now I need to know if you have something, or not.”
“Tell him, Joe,” said Spazz.
“It’s—it’s the fourth dimension,” I said. “The antenna crystal has a wire that sticks into hyperspace.”
“Cute,” said Treed, his long mouth spreading in a rueful smile. “Science fiction.” He put on his glasses and got to his feet. “I have to ask—that thing in the paper yesterday, the mirror-money hoax. Was that a set-up for this?” It was like Clement Treed’s riny head held an all-seeing web-crawler that ran a thousand times as fasr as my brain. “Which of you four is the one who convinced the others?” he demanded.
“Me again,” I said, attempting a debonair smile. “You have to listen, Clement. The money really did flip over. I was trying to take it from a bank. Of course I’ll p
ay it back once we’re funded.” I walked over to where the image of the antenna crystal floated on our screen. “The fourth dimension is real,” I said, pointing at it. I tried to remember how Momo had explained things to me. “Think of a Flatlander trying to imagine a third dimension,” I added, waving my hands. The shadows of my arms on the screen looked lumpy and odd. “It’s a different direction completely.”
Treed turned away from me. “Good luck,” he told Tulip. “I really do admire Gandhi, you know.”
I used my third eye to peer up into the All. Momo was right there watching us. “Come help us!” I cried, beckoning wildly. “Show him, Momo!”
There was a wavering on the screen. The image of the chip seemed to swell and fatten, as if the screen had developed a big bulge in it. The bulge was a sphere of Momo’s skin, a round ball appearing in front of the screen with the projector shining the image of the chip onto it. And now the Momo sphere floated across the room to bounce upon the floor at Clement Treed’s big feet, bouncing up and down like a basketball, a basketball with an eve in it, a big blue Momo eye. The eye winked.
“Oh my yes,” said Treed, settling back into my chair and actually smacking his lips. “I’m in for this one. Consider yourselves funded. Better than that. If you can bring this thing to market, MeYou will rake care of daily operations.”
10
Bad News
After New Year’s Day came and went without a peep, the Y2K-bug consultants had started predicting a worldwide software seize-up for Leap Year Day. As chance would have it, they were right to worry about that particular day, not that the problem was going to have anything to do with the computers. No, it was thanks to the Mophones that humanity would face the end of the world on Tuesday, February 29, 2000. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Before he’d sign over the bucks, Treed got Momo to agree on an exclusive contract to supply her antenna crystals only to us. He also wanted to know what was in the deal for Momo, and she told him about the supposed Dronner-repelling qualities of hyperspatial radio waves. This was a time where it was good to be working with a single rich business angel instead of a due-diligence, managerial-type venture capitalist.
Wednesday, January 5 was the day Clement Treed funded Mophone, Inc., and Monday, February 28 was the day we started shipping product. It was a wild eight weeks, a business major’s wet dream. The richest guy in Silicon Valley was funding me to set up production, distribution and marketing for a water-walking product with an off-the-hook buzz. There weren’t enough hours in the day.
I told people I was loving every minute of it, but that wasn’t true. The “loving every minute” line was the kind of rah-rah, can-do bull that a guy like me feeds his boss. Not that I had a boss anymore—I was the CEO. I was doing the cheerleader thing out of reflex. Treed didn’t care if I loved Mophone or not.
My business plan projected Treed’s take at ten million bucks. The way our deal worked was that Clement had forty percent of the founder’s stock, while Jena, Tulip, Spazz and me each had fifteen. These weren’t options, mind you, these were fully-paid shares. They weren’t worth anything at all yet, but after the IPO., according to my spreadsheets, Clement’s cut would be good for that ten million. And we others would get three point seven five mill each.
Yes, things were looking good. The Mophone advance orders were pouring in as fast our three-tier website could pass them from the web page to the server to the database and back. A San Francisco service provider called monkeybrains . net was hosting our site and handling the billing for us.
The Mophone cases were being injection-molded by a plastics factory in Taiwan, using a slippery, metallic-looking red alkyd resin that Clement Treed had picked up at a fire sale price from a refinery in Indonesia. The redness of the Mophones was a branding thing, part of the campaign worked out by the advertising agency Jena had hired.
I’d found a maquiladora in Juarez to assemble our Mophones; they were using the same production line someone had used for knockoffs of Motorola StarTacs. The big difference was that each Mophone included a four-dimensional antenna crystal and a call-routing “Motalk” chip. Tulip had used a firmware compiler to instantiate Spazz’s Java design for the Motalk chips, and ExaChip was fabbing them for us.
At first we’d thought it would be more dramatic for Mophones not to have the old-style antennas, but it made production easier to leave them in. Another win in taking this route was that we were able to put a dual functionality into the Mophone. If you subscribed to a regular cell-phone service, a Mophone could use its old-style antenna to access that, too. Clement got us a deal with PacBell to resell their standard cell-phone services for those who wanted them as a Mophone add-on. At least for now, it was worth having standard cell so you could call people who didn’t have Mophones.
Everything depended on everything else; it was like a dance floor that was rising into the sky lifted by a dozen giant balloons spaced around its edges, and I was the guy racing around the parquet adjusting the balloons to keep the platform level. Like I said, it was a business major’s wet dream.
Why wasn’t I loving every minute? I had three issues.
My first issue was that I didn’t have a woman to love me. Jena had successfully retaken Spazz from Tulip; every night the two of them were going back to my old house together. Though Tulip was still renting a room from me, nothing romantic was happening between us. Tulip was depressed about Jena and Spazz; I could hear her crying almost every night. I wanted to comfort her and cheer her up, but she’d been even more distant since my number with Spazz’s aorta. She still hadn’t let go of her idea that Momo was an evil spirit who’d bewitched me. In fact, I think she felt a little guilty about helping with the Mophone at all. In other words, there was no hope with Tulip or with Jena. And I didn’t have time to look further afield until we got the Mophone shipped.
My second issue was the sinking feeling that maybe Momo really was an evil spirit—even though she did come from the Aladdin’s lamp of modern science and not from the cesspool of old-time superstition and magic. On the plus side, Momo had used some of Clement Treed’s cash to square things with the banks, but I kept having the feeling she was leading me down the garden path to a pit of poison punji sticks. New versions of Wackle kept showing up in my bedroom to give me heavy, incomprehensible warnings, but Momo would always hyperbazooka the Wackles before they could finish. She killed with an ugly glee, and I hadn’t forgotten the cruelty with which she’d sent pain into my spine. I would have liked to have heard what the Wackles had to tell me, but with Momo around I didn’t dare go vinnward to Dronia to talk to them alone.
My third issue was the realization that I’d become clinically addicted to grolly. Whenever I wanted more grolly, all I had to do was step into my bedroom, pull the blinds and close the door. I’d hold out my hand with my thumb and index finger making a circle, a sign for Momo, who was usually watching these days. She’d appear with a Iittle pastel bagel tor me, telling me to work harder. She was a killer, a tyrant, a pusher. The upside of my addiction was that I could work unbelievable hours, but I was using three or four bagels of grolly a day, and I felt like crap whenever it started wearing off. An odd side effect was that I’d completely stopped dreaming. I’d lie down to sleep and I’d stop moving, but all night my mind would be going over business plans. I wished I’d never met Momo; I wished she were dead.
My life was a loveless desert of work and grolly and I had the sick feeling there was big trouble ahead. After a while, the only thing keeping me going was Clement Treed’s plan to have MeYou take over our operations once we made it past product launch.
The Mophones went on sale the morning of February 28, and by that evening, we’d moved twenty thousand units. It was all over the news. People were using Mophones in every corner of the country, and some ultrasurfers had already found a way to use Spazz’s open Motalk architecture to hook a Mophone to a computer and send real-time, uncompressed, full-screen video. No more lurching, muddy, low-bandwidth, po
stage-stamp video. With Mophone, your computer screen was a window looking at a scene a thousand miles away. We were the only broadband communication channel that mattered anymore. Our competitors didn’t have a chance.
We watched the news together at the office: Jena, Tulip, Spazz, Clement Treed and me. Channel 4 had filmed an interview with us that afternoon. While we watched ourselves. Clement Treed busted out a magnum of Cristal champagne and five crystal glasses. We toasted, the news ended, I muted the TV, and then what?
You’d think we’d be all chattering and cheerful, but we were burnt out from the big push, and more than a little sick of each other. Jena and Spazz in particular hadn’t been talking to each other all day.
Clement drank half a glass of champagne, flopped down on our soft, low couch, took out his Mophone, and began calling up associates all over the world, using his Palm Pilot to time and chart the connection latency speeds. His knobby knees stuck up nearly as high as his shoulders.
Spazz had his Mophone hooked to his laptop and its digital camera He sat at the kitchen counter alternating between videophone conversations with excited programmers and cruising the Web looking at airplanes. The first thing he wanted to buy himself was a private jet.
Tulip watched over Spazz’s shoulder for a minute, then got on her own Mophone and drifted into her room, talking with her brother-in-law in Fremont about going out tomorrow to get a good deal on a new Mercedes. We didn’t quite have our money yet, but Lord did we have good credit.
I sat in my chair with my feet on my desk, my computer turned off for the first time in two months, enjoying doing nothing. The business was in MeYou’s hands now. I’d crossed the desert and made it to the oasis. All I had to do now was wait for the IPO. The price of our stock would shoot up and up, and when I couldn’t stand it anymore, I’d sell off my founder’s shares. Jena sidled up to me and refilled my champagne glass.
“Are you happy, Joe?” she asked.