Nested Scrolls

by Rudy Rucker

  Autodesk got a new CEO named Carol Bartz, and she closed down the Advanced Technology division. The company offered me the option of moving to Michigan and working on postmodern mathematical methods of describing curves in space, but I couldn’t face leaving California. And so, in the fall of 1992, I was out of my software engineering job. I got a good severance package from Autodesk, and I decided to postpone my return to teaching until the fall of 1993.

  During the fall of 1992, I worked on my transreal Silicon Valley novel, The Hacker and the Ants, and in the spring of 1993, I finished the code and the manual for my Artificial Life Lab project. Autodesk had gladly granted me the rights to this package, they didn’t care about at all. They were, like, “Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.”

  I hacked pretty hard that spring to get the Artificial Life Lab program working. The best part of it was a colony of virtual ants that I called “boppers,” just like the robots in my Ware novels. By way of testing out my new software before its publication in the fall of 1983, I gave a talk on my boppers program at a Silicon Valley company called Interval.

  The manager who’d issued the invitation struck me as a vain blowhard. He wanted to bend my ear about some fundamental contradiction in mathematics he thought he’d discovered, when all he’d really done was to have a sloppy stab at some of the same old puzzles that occur to everyone who ever writes a thesis in mathematical logic.

  “I’m no mathematician,” he’d begin his declamations with feigned humility.

  “I can see that you’re not!” I wanted say.

  How is it that guys like that end up being managers, while the smart people are the peons? While we talked, some poor guy who’d applied for a job as an Interval hardware tech was off in a corner assembling a balsa wood model airplane. This was supposed to be a dexterity test to see if the guy was qualified. What an obnoxious thing to do to someone at an interview.

  The MacArthur prize-winning chaos theorist Rob Shaw had a research spot at Interval at this time. I’d always admired Shaw, he’d tried to use chaos theory to beat the roulette wheels in Vegas, and, in a more academic vein, he’d written a famous monograph called The Chaotic Dynamics of a Dripping Faucet. He looked more like a hippie or a biker.

  I knew Shaw from the early cellular automata days. The very first time I’d encountered him, he’d been sitting next to me on a plane to Las Alamos, and I’d thought he was a carpenter. He’d been doing this odd calculation with a pencil on a matchbook cover—it looked like long division, and he seemed to be doing it wrong. Later, when I realized who he was, Shaw had informed me he’d been computing the square root of two in binary notation, to see if the sequence of zeroes and ones in the answer would appear chaotic—and, yes, they did.

  After my talk on my virtual ants, I went up to Shaw’s office with him to hang out. He showed me a virtual stream of water that he’d designed, and some nice artificially alive insects. He gave my virtual ant program his blessing.

  “That’s a wild piece of code, Rudy.”

  In the fall of 1993, I headed back to teaching computer science full-time at San Jose State. I was glad the department had kept my position open for me.

  It was little weird to be teaching yet again. Everything felt slow and dull compared to the scene in the Autodesk research labs. I was back to grading tests and homework programs, back to worrying about the ratings the students gave me on their evaluations, back to worrying if I was ever going to get tenure.

  Attending a department party, I visualized myself as a rabbit caught in a snare, struggling against a tightening wire noose around my neck. I’d learned from having pet rabbits in Lynchburg that, when frightened or upset, rabbits can in fact make a sound. In my head at the faculty party, I was going, “Wheenk, wheenk, wheenk!”

  Head trips like that cheer me up. They make the world more like a novel. In fact I became so fond of the word “wheenk,” that I began using it a technical lit-crit sense to mean, “strong and touching emotions felt by a character in a work of fiction.” And then, if some story I was writing seemed too cold and scientific, I’d give myself the shorthand reminder, “Put in more wheenk.”

  A couple of months after I returned to teaching, President Bill Clinton passed through Los Gatos—he and Hillary were having dinner with some tech leaders in a restaurant here. My family and I were standing on the sidewalk as the Clintons’ limo tooled by—with the Autodesk exec Carol Bartz riding in there with them.

  “Carol!” I yelled, leaning out into the street. “I want my job back!”

  The people around us laughed. They understood.

  As I became a more established member of the San Jose State Math & CS department, I was expected to teach harder courses, to advise more students, and to attend more committee meetings. With the age of fifty coming up on me, I still didn’t have tenure—my checkered career had delayed any decision—and now I wanted finally to close the deal.

  I put a lot of energy into learning the object-oriented languages C++ and Java, and into figuring out how to teach Windows programming and the principles of software engineering. All through the decade of 1994 through 2004, I worked on developing a framework of extendible object-oriented code to make it possible for my students to write complete videogames for their semester projects. To my mind, games are one of the most interesting areas in computer science, combining nearly every aspect of the field.

  The purpose of writing the framework—which I called the Pop framework after my father—was to make it possible for my students to bypass most of the difficulties in graphics programming, and to quickly achieve a certain level of artistic self-expression. I wrote up a fresh iteration of the Pop framework and the accompanying notes every semester, and sold printed copies of the notes through the campus bookstore. Eventually I ended up publishing a final version of my notes as a textbook called Software Engineering and Computer Games, which appeared in 2003.

  I’d started out with two dimensional games, but along the way I figured out how to extend my software framework to three-dimensional worlds. I wrote the 3D code over a couple of weeks in June of 2001, in what John Walker would call a “bloodlust hacking frenzy.”

  At the end of this particular effort, I was so excited and drinking so much coffee that my heart was palpitating in my chest. I considered going to the hospital, but instead I set off to go SCUBA diving with brother Embry on Grand Turk Island instead—after many years in Louisville, Embry and his wife had moved back to the Caribbean. An hour after I left my computer behind, my heart was fine.

  It’s hard to communicate just how exciting and addictive computer programming can become. It’s akin to the experience of playing a videogame, but more intense and creative. As a hacker, you’re able to reach down into your artificial worlds at very deep levels. You can add in anything at all if only you can visualize it clearly enough. What makes the work especially fascinating is that unexpected things may emerge, happy accidents of the interacting computations. And you can capitalize on these quirks to create previously undreamed of features.

  On the cellular automata front, I somehow talked the Electric Power Research Institute at Palo Alto into a grant that ran from 1993 to 1997, and released me from some of my teaching duties. Each semester I’d work with a small team of students, pressing forward on a new software package for exploring cellular automata. I wanted the colors to be smoother and less blocky, so I was putting a continuous range of values into my cells. I named my new software CAPOW, an acronym for Cellular Automata for POWer simulation.

  Our program was never very useful to any electric power engineers, but the images were gorgeous. They were really and truly like oil-glob light-shows now, far more beautiful than anything I’d been able to achieve before. Even better, I found some CA rules that could spontaneously grow screens of lovely, throbbing paisley. These rotating patterns—called Belousov-Zhabotinsky scrolls among biochemists—resembled lichen on rocks, pairs of eddies behind an oar, cross-sections of mushroom caps,
fetuses, and many other naturally occurring shapes. The scrolls have a pleasing way of nesting within each other; think of little whirlpools on the rim of a bigger one.

  More and more often, I spent my evenings at my computer screen, eternally tweaking my programs. Over time I learned to see nested scrolls everywhere, even within my thoughts. And that’s where the title for my memoir comes from. A life story is made of scrolls within scrolls, divagations within tangential tales within related anecdotes—and all the stories are forever turning and rotating, throbbing with their own kind of life. Nested Scrolls, yes.

  Remember to Write

  In Silicon Valley, my life was becoming more and more exciting, what with my faculty friends, the Bay Area science fiction writers, and the hackers I was meeting. I was out of the cave and into the marketplace. New opportunities kept cropping up. I was like some Darwin’s finch with a beak evolved for cracking open a special kind of seed. There’d been no seeds of the proper type in Lynchburg, but they were all over the place in the California.

  A guy called Marty Olsen phoned me at my office at San Jose State, very voluble and friendly. “You sound bummed,” said Olsen. “A guy like you shouldn’t be bummed. You’re a great writer.”

  I was in fact feeling a little downcast because I wasn’t getting much writing done anymore. Olsen had an interesting proposal. He wanted me and my old SF mentor, Robert Sheckley, to write scripts for a TV series about the future. The show would be hosted by no less a figure than the psychedelic pioneer Tim Leary.

  Olsen wrote me a couple of letters to set up the visit. He was in Venice, California, trying to make a living as a screenwriter. He had a penchant for pretending he was living in the Venice of the Italian Renaissance. The letters would begin, “Dear Ruckella.”

  In the spring of 1988, I flew to L.A. and met up with Olsen and Sheckley. It was great to see the Sheck-man again, he was mellow and relaxed. My hero. It was like being with the magic gnome in a fairy tale.

  “This is all bullshit down here, Rudy,” Sheckley affably told me. “Just get as much money in front as you can. I had a deal here to write a TV series about two robots running a filling station on Mars. We had lots of meetings, everyone acted excited, and the project died.”

  Tim Leary and his wife were glad to see us. He was friendly and personable, handsome and charismatic. He’d cleared off a dining-table and set out pencils and pads of paper so we could brainstorm and take notes. But first I showed Tim some cellular automata.

  I had my cellular automata card with me, my axe, and I took apart his PC-clone box and jacked it in. Tim liked the images, of course, and thereafter he started dropping the phrase “cellular automata” into his diffuse but rewarding essays.

  We sat around the table for an hour or so, thinking of good topics for shows—we could do one about virtual reality, one about robots, one about smart drugs, and so on. Tim would be the genial anchorman, reading the scripts that Bob and I would produce. It sounded great to me.

  “These are the guys,” Leary told Olsen happily. “You found the right guys.”

  But the show never got funded and none of us got paid.

  When Sylvia and I arrived in California in 1986, a couple of Berkeley freaks named Queen Mu and R. U. Sirius were editing a radical magazine called Mondo 2000. I saw my first copy of it in a rack of screwball zines at the fabled City Lights Books in San Francisco. The Mondo editors were pursuing a weird fusion of computers and psychedelic drugs.

  Somehow hearing of my arrival, Queen Mu got in touch with me and asked me to give a talk on cyberpunk at a ratty venue on San Pablo Street in Oakland. She was a fey, breathless woman my age, elegant in a New England kind of way, given to showing all her teeth in the ecstatic rictus of a smile. And R. U. Sirius was a highly educated street hipster with a goofy grin.

  I’d asked Mu if she might pay me for my talk—after all, she was charging the public an admission fee to attend. She was somewhat tight-fisted with her workers, and a payment wasn’t possible. But she did make me a gift of a flat metal peppermints box filled with buds of pot.

  So one evening in the winter of 1986, I went to Berkeley, got high, ranted about cyberpunk, and read some weird scene from Wetware. And there with I’d brought the Movement to the Bay Area! Soon fellow cyberpunk John Shirley would be relocating here as well.

  After my talk, we had a show and tell session. The evening was more like a soirée than a lecture. Some of the Mondo people had brought brain toys that they’d discovered or even made on their own. One that intrigued me was a pair of ping pong ball halves that you wore over your eyes like goggles. The balls were lit in stroboscopic flashes from little diode lights you controlled with a dial on a box.

  I donned the device and began tuning it. To my amazement, I started seeing—deeply zoomed images of the Mandelbrot set fractal! Had I discovered the essentially fractal nature of the human sensory system? Or was this just Mu’s insanely strong pot?

  When I’d experiment with the flicker effect later, I could never see the fractals quite so well as that first time. But I did learn that almost any flashing light source can set off patterns on your closed eyelids, and you don’t really need an electronic strobe system. Simplest of all is to lie on your back on the beach with your eyes closed, spread your fingers, and move your hands up and down above your eyes, casting a series of rapidly flickering shadows. Of course if you do this, the people walking by think you’re weird…but in California that’s not such a big deal.

  In any case, my point is that you do see some nice stuff if you pay attention to your immediate and unfiltered perceptions. We have a tendency to ignore the more subjective aspects of our perceptions in favor of the shared elements that everyone sees at the same time. But at some level there’s an equal reality to the things you see with your eyes closed, or to those darting shapes that you sometimes see at the edges of your visual field.

  Mondo 2000 magazine would ramp up to national distribution and I’d write a few reviews and short articles for them, but not very many. The problem was that Queen Mu tended to lose whatever I mailed in and to make me send it again. And then when she’d finally read it, she’d demand a complete rewrite, and then she’d lose that, and I’d have to mail in the rewrite again. And after the article came out, she’d never pay me.

  Hardly a viable literary market. Nevertheless I valued our relationship. Mu and R. U. were such cool people. It was always a treat to go to the Mondo parties—Mu had rented an immense California Craftsman style house in Berkeley for the magazine’s offices, and some of the staffers lived there as well. Everyone there would so frikkin’ hip. It was this Kentucky boy’s dream come true.

  I ran into the intensely charismatic Tim Leary a couple more times at Mondo 2000 events and parties. Tim would always act like he and I were old pals. I was proud to know him. To Sylvia’s surprise, Tim was curious about where she’d gone to high school in DC.

  I remember asking Tim a question I’d always wondered about. “Tim, I only took psychedelics, like, two or three times, and that was enough to last me a lifetime. It would always wipe me out. How is that you can keep on tripping year after year and still be able to use your mind?”

  Rather than speaking directly to my question, Tim told me about an acid trip he’d taken that week. He’d wandered out into the streets of downtown L.A. and had totally forgotten where he was. He’d ended up sitting on a bench with an old homeless woman, drinking in the cosmic beauty of her face. Listening to him, it almost seemed like he was an indestructible cartoon character. Or maybe a great sage, a con man, a revolutionary leader—or all of the above.

  After Georgia finished college as an art history major in 1991, she spent some time working as a temp in the San Francisco offices of Pacific Gas and Electric, known as PG&E. For a while there, she began calling herself GE&O. She was hungry for a more art-related job, and I urged her to ask Mondo 2000 to hire her to help with the graphics, reminding her that, as Mondo was so flaky, she’d need to phone them three or
four or five times. And, lo and behold, in 1993, it worked out.

  Mu, being fairly paranoid, worried that anyone she hired might be from the CIA, so she felt safer bringing in someone like Georgia, the child of a personal friend. And Georgia had a true flair for graphical design. Her time at Mondo was like a postgraduate education for her, readying her for a professional career in the field.

  In the end, I did finally score some money from Mondo. This was in 1991, when Queen Mu and R. U. Sirius got a contract to do a major book with the full title, Mondo 2000: A User’s Guide to the New Edge: Cyberpunk, Virtual Reality, Wetware, Designer Aphrodisiacs, Artificial Life, Techno-Erotic Paganism, and More. R. U. phoned me up and asked me to edit the book for them. The idea was to take excerpts of articles that that had appeared in the magazine and somehow arrange them into a book. But neither Mu nor R. U. could quite see how.

  “We need a mathematical logician for this, Rudy,” said R. U. “You’re the man.”

  I agreed to do it, but only if they’d negotiate a contract through my agent, good old Susan Protter, and only if they’d pay me my share in advance. I knew that otherwise all the money would disappear before I ever saw any.

  So we worked out a deal and I organized the book as a kind of encyclopedia, alphabetically arranged by keyword hot topics, with good bits from the magazine pasted in and some additional entries that I made up myself, such as the one on “wetware,” which I defined in terms of viewing your DNA as a kind of computer program for constructing your body. As my authority, I quoted Max Yukawa, who was in fact the William-Gibson-based character in my novel Wetware, not that anyone picked up on this.

  The book hit with a big splash. A photographer from Time magazine came to take photos of us—I remember posing in a gully behind the Mondo house, along with Mu, R.U., and the Mondo art director Bart Nagel. We were dressed like punks or acidheads, and I felt like a member of the Jefferson Airplane. We made the cover of the February 8, 1993, issue of Time magazine with an illustration by Bart and and the following text.