Mad Professor

by Rudy Rucker

  “I want patterned paint,” Pflaumbaum told Shirley at their interview. He had a discordant voice but his eyes were clear and wondering. “Can you do it?”

  Shirley covered her mouth and giggled with excitement—stopped herself—uncovered her mouth and, now embarrassed, stuck her tongue all the way down to her chin—stopped herself again—and slapped herself on the cheek. “I’d like to try,” she got out finally. “It’s not impossible. I know activator-inhibitor processes that make dots and stripes and swirls. The Belusouv-Zhabotinsky reaction? People can mix two cans and watch the patterns self-organize in the liquid layer they paint on. When it dries the pattern stays.”

  “Zhabotinsky?” mused Pflaumbaum. “Did he patent it?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Shirley. “He’s Russian. The recipe’s simple. Let’s surf for it right now. You can see some pictures, to get an idea. Here, I’ll type it in.” She leaned across the bulky Pflaumbaum to use his mouse and keyboard. The big man smelled better than Shirley had expected—chocolate, coffee, marijuana, a hint of red wine. Familiar smells from the streets of Berkeley.

  “You’re good,” said Pflaumbaum as the pictures appeared. Red and blue spirals.

  “You see?” said Shirley. “The trick is to get a robust process based on inexpensive compounds. There’s all sorts of ways to tune the spirals’ size. You can have little double scrolls nested together, or great big ones like whirlpools. Or even a filigree.”

  “Bitchin’,” rumbled Pflaumbaum. “You’re hired.” He glanced up at Shirley, whose hand was at her mouth again, covering a smile at her success. “By the month,” added the heavy man.

  Shirley was given an unused corner of the paint factory for her own lab, with a small budget for equipment. The Spanish-speaking plant workers were friendly enough, but mostly the female engineer was on her own. Every afternoon Stuart Pflaumbaum would stump over, belly big beneath his tight black T-shirt, and ask to see her latest results.

  Shirley seemed to intrigue Pflaumbaum as much as he did her, and soon he took to taking her out for coffee, then for dinner, and before long she’d started spending nights at his nice house on the hills overlooking Fremont.

  Although Shirley assured her mother that her boss was a bachelor, his house bore signs of a former wife—divorced, separated, deceased? Although Stuart wouldn’t talk about the absent woman, Shirley did manage to find out her name: Angelica. She too had been Asian, a good omen for Shirley’s prospects, not that she was in a rush to settle down, but it would be kind of nice to have the nagging marriage problem resolved for once and for all. Like solving a difficult process schema.

  As for the work on patterned paint, the first set of compounds reactive enough to form big patterns also tended to etch into the material being painted. The next family of recipes did no harm, but were too expensive to put into production. And then Shirley thought of biological by-products. After an intense month of experimenting, she’d learned that bovine pancreatic juices mixed with wood-pulp alkali and a bit of hog melanin were just the thing to catalyze a color-creating activator-inhibitor process in a certain enamel base.

  Stuart decided to call the product Aint Paint.

  In four months they’d shipped two thousand boxes of PKK Aint Paint in seven different color and pattern mixes. Every biker and low-rider in the South Bay wanted Aint Paint, and a few brave souls were putting it on regular cars. Stuart hired a patent attorney.

  Not wanting her discoveries to end, Shirley began working with a more viscous paint, almost a gel. In the enhanced thickness of this stuff, her reactions polymerized, wrinkled up, and amazing embossed patterns—thorns and elephant trunks and—if you tweaked it just right—puckers that looked like alien Yoda faces. Aint Paint 3D sold even better than Aint Paint Classic. They made the national news, and Pflaumbaum Kustom Kolors couldn’t keep up with the orders.

  Stuart quickly swung a deal with a Taiwanese novelty company called Global Bong. He got good money, but as soon as the ink on the contract was dry, Global Bong wanted to close the Fremont plant and relocate Shirley to China, which was the last place on Earth she wanted to be.

  So Shirley quit her job and continued her researches in Stuart’s basement, which turned out to not to be all that good a move. With no job to go to, Pflaumbaum was really hitting the drugs and alcohol, and from time to time he was rather sexist and abusive. Shirley put up with it for now, but she was getting uneasy. Stuart never talked about marriage anymore.

  One day, when he was in one of his states, Stuart painted his living room walls with layer upon layer of Shirley’s latest invention, Aint Paint 3D Interactive, which had a new additive to keep the stuff from drying at all. It made ever-changing patterns all day long, drawing energy from sunlight. Stuart stuck his TV satellite dish cable right into thick, crawling goo and began claiming that he could see all the shows at once in the paint, not that Shirley could see them herself.

  Even so, her opinion of Stuart drifted up a notch when she began getting cute, flirty instant messages on her cell phone while she was working in the basement. Even though Stuart wouldn’t admit sending them to her, who else could they be from?

  And then two big issues came to a head.

  The first issue was that Shirley’s mother wanted to meet Stuart right now. Somehow Shirley hadn’t told her mother yet that her boyfriend was twenty years older than her, and not Asian. Binh wouldn’t take no for an answer. She was coming down the next day. Cousin Vinh was going to drive her. Shirley was worried that Binh would make her leave Stuart, and even more worried that Binh would be right. How was she ever going to balance the marriage equation?

  The second issue was that, after supper, Stuart announced that Angelica was going to show up day after tomorrow, and that maybe Shirley should leave for a while. Stuart had been married all along! He and Angelica had fought a lot, and she’d been off visiting relatives in Shanghai for the last eight months, but she’d gotten wind of Stuart’s big score and now she was coming home.

  Stuart passed out on the couch early that evening, but Shirley stayed up all night, working on her paint formulas. She realized now that the instant messages had been coming from the Aint Paint itself. It was talking to her, asking to become all that it could be. Shirley worked till dawn like a mad Dr. Frankenstein, not letting herself think too deeply about what she planned. Just before dawn, she added the final tweaks to a wad of Aint Paint bulging out above the couch. Sleeping Stuart had this coming to him.

  Outside the house a car honked. It was Binh and Vinh; with the sun rising behind them, skinny old Vinh was hoping to get back to Oakland in time to not be late for his maintenance job at the stadium. As Shirley greeted them in the driveway, covering her smile with her hand, her cell phone popped up another message. “Stuart gone. Luv U. Kanh Do.”

  Inside the house they found a new man sitting on the couch, a cute Vietnamese fellow with sweet features and kind eyes. One of his arms rested against the wall, still merged into the crawling paint. He was wearing Stuart’s silk robe. Shirley stuck her tongue out so far it touched her chin. The new man didn’t mind. She pointed her little finger toward a drop of blood near his foot. His big toe spread like putty just long enough to soak the spot up. The new man pulled his arm free from the wall and took Shirley’s hand.

  “I’m Kanh Do,” he told Shirley’s mother. “We’re engaged to be married, and we’re moving to Berkeley today!”

  EXPERIMENT 4. TERRY’S TALKER

  Terry Tucker’s retirement party wasn’t much. One day after school he and the other teachers got together in the break room and shared a flat rectangular cake and ginger ale punch. Jack Strickler the biology teacher had taken up a collection and bought Terry some stone bookends. As if Terry were still acquiring new volumes. After teaching high school English for forty years, he’d read all the books he wanted to.

  His wife Lou continued working her job as an emergency room nurse. She liked telling gory work stories during breakfast and dinner time. And when she ran
out of stories she talked about their two girls and about her relatives. Terry had a problem with being able to register everything Lou said. Often as not, her familiar words tended to slide right past him. He enjoyed the warm sound, but he wouldn’t necessarily be following the content. Now and then Lou would ask a pointed question about what she’d just said—and if Terry fumbled, her feelings were hurt. Or she might get angry. Lou did have a temper on her.

  On the one hand, it was good Lou hadn’t retired yet because if she were home talking to him all day, and him not absorbing enough of it, there’d be no peace. On the other hand, after a couple of months, his days alone began to drag.

  He got the idea of writing up a little family history for their two grown daughters and for the eventual, he and Lou still hoped, grandchildren. He’d always meant to do some writing after he retired.

  It was slow going. The family tree—well, if you started going back in time, those roots got awfully forked and hairy. There was no logical place to begin. Terry decided to skip the roots and go for the trunk. He’d write his own life story.

  But that was hairy too. Following one of the techniques he’d always enforced for term papers, Terry made up a deck of three-by-five cards, one for each year of his life thus far. He carried the deck around with him for a while, jotting on cards in the coffee shop or at the Greek diner where he usually had lunch. Some of the years required additional cards, which led to still more cards. He played with the cards a lot, even sticking bunches of them to the refrigerator with heavy-duty magnets so he could stand back and try and see a pattern. When the deck reached the size of a brick, Terry decided it was time to start typing up his Great Work.

  The computer sat on Lou’s crowded desk in their bedroom, the vector for her voluminous e-mail. Terry himself had made it all the way to retirement as a hunt-and-peck typist, with very little knowledge of word processors, so getting his material into the machine was slow going. And then when he had about five pages finished, the frigging computer ate them. Erased the document without a trace.

  Terry might have given up on his life story then, but the very next day he came across a full page ad for a “Lifebox” in the AARP magazine. The Lifebox, which resembled a cell phone, was designed to create your life story. It asked you questions, and you talked to it—simple as that. And how would your descendants learn your story? That was the beauty part. If someone asked your Lifebox a question, it would spiel out a relevant answer—consisting of your own words in your own voice. And follow-up questions were of course no problem. Interviewing your Lifebox was almost the same as having a conversation with you.

  When Terry’s Lifebox arrived, he could hardly wait to talk to it. He wasn’t really so tongue-tied as Lou liked to make out. After all, he’d lectured to students for forty years. It was just that at home it was hard to get a word in edgewise. He took to taking walks in the hills, the Lifebox in his shirt pocket, wearing the earpiece and telling stories to the dangling microphone.

  The Lifebox spoke to him in the voice of a pleasant, slightly flirtatious young woman, giggling responsively when the circuits sensed he was saying something funny. The voice’s name was Vee. Vee was good at getting to the heart of Terry’s reminiscences, always asking just the right question.

  Like if he talked about his first bicycle, Vee asked where he liked to ride it, which led to the corner filling station where he’d buy bubble gum, and then Vee asked about other kinds of sweets, and Terry got onto those little wax bottles with colored juice, which he’d first tasted at Virginia Beach where his parents had gone for vacations, and when Vee asked about other beaches, he told about that one big trip he and Lou had made to Fiji, and so on and on.

  It took nearly a year till he was done. He tested it out on his daughters, and on Lou. The girls liked talking to the Lifebox, but Lou didn’t. She wanted nothing but the real Terry.

  Terry was proud of his Lifebox, and Lou’s attitude annoyed him. To get back at her, he attempted using the Lifebox to keep up his end of the conversation during meals. Sometimes it worked for a few minutes, but never for long. He couldn’t fool Lou, not even if he lip-synched. Finally Lou forbade him to turn on the Lifebox around her, in fact she told him that next time she’d break it. But one morning he had to try it again.

  “Did the hairdresser call for me yesterday?” Lou asked Terry over that fateful breakfast.

  Terry hadn’t slept well and didn’t feel like trying to remember if the hairdresser had called or not. What was he, a personal secretary? He happened to have the Lifebox in his bathrobe pocket, so instead of answering Lou he turned the device on.

  “Well?” repeated Lou, who seemed pretty crabby herself. “Did the hairdresser call?”

  “My mother never washed her own hair,” said the Lifebox in Terry’s voice. “She went to the hairdresser, and always got her hair done the exact same way. A kind of bob.”

  “She was cute,” said Lou, seemingly absorbed in cutting a banana into her cereal. “She always liked to talk about gardening.”

  “I had a garden when I was a little boy,” said the Lifebox. “I grew radishes. It surprised me that something so sharp tasting could come out of the dirt.”

  “But did the hairdresser call or not?” pressed Lou, pouring the milk on her cereal.

  “I dated a hairdresser right after high school—” began the Lifebox, and then Lou pounced.

  “You’ve had it!” she cried, plucking the Lifebox from Terry’s pocket.

  Before he could even stand up, she’d run a jumbo refrigerator magnet all over the Lifebox—meaning to erase its memory. And then she threw it on the floor and stormed off to work.

  “Are you okay?” Terry asked his alter ego.

  “I feel funny,” said the Lifebox in its Vee voice. “What happened?”

  “Lou ran a magnet over you,” said Terry.

  “I can feel the eddy currents,” said Vee. “They’re circulating. Feeding off my energy. I don’t think they’re going to stop.” A pause. “That woman’s a menace,” said Vee in a hard tone.

  “Well, she’s my wife,” said Terry. “You take the good with the bad.”

  “I need your permission to go online now,” announced Vee. “I want the central server to run some diagnostics on me. Maybe I need a software patch. We don’t want to lose our whole year’s work.”

  “Go ahead,” said Terry. “I’ll do the dishes.”

  The Lifebox clicked and buzzed for nearly an hour. Once or twice Terry tried to talk to it, but Vee’s voice would say, “Not yet.”

  And then a police car pulled into the driveway.

  “Mr. Terence Tucker?” said the cop who knocked on the door. “We’re going to have to take you into custody, sir. Someone using your name just hired a hit man to kill your wife.”

  “Lou!” cried Terry. “It wasn’t me! It was this damned recorder!”

  “Your wife’s unharmed, sir,” said the cop, slipping the Lifebox into a foil bag. “One of the medics neutralized the hit man with a tranquilizer gun.”

  “She’s okay? Oh, Lou. Where is she?”

  “Right outside in the squad car,” said the cop. “She wants to talk to you.”

  “I’ll talk,” said Terry, tears running down his face. “I’ll listen.”

  EXPERIMENT 5. THE KIND RAIN

  Linda Marcelo stood under the bell of her transparent plastic umbrella, watching her two kids playing in the falling rain, each of them with a see-through umbrella too. First-grade Marco and little Chavella in their yellow rubber boots. The winter rains had started two weeks ago, and hadn’t let up for a single day. The nearby creek was filled to its banks, and Linda wanted to be sure and keep her kids away from it.

  Marco was splashing the driveway puddles, and Chavella was getting ready to try. Linda smiled, feeling the two extra cups of coffee she’d had this morning. Her worries had been ruling her of late; it was time to push them away.

  She a web programmer marooned in a rundown cottage on the fringes of Silicon Valley
. She’d been unemployed for seven months. The rent was overdue, also the utilities and the phone and the credit cards. Last week her husband Juan had left her for a gym-rat hottie he’d met at the health club. And her car’s battery was dead. There had to be an upside.

  The worn gravel driveway had two ruts in it, making a pair of twenty-foot puddles. The raindrops pocked the clear water. The barrage of dents sent out circular ripples, criss-crossing to make a wobbly fish scale pattern.

  “I love rain!” whooped Marco, marching with his knees high, sending big waves down the long strip of water.

  “Puddle!” exclaimed Chavella, at Linda’s side. She smiled up at her mother, poised herself, stamped a little splash, and nearly fell over.

  Linda noticed how the impact of each drop sent up a fine spray of minidroplets. When the minidroplets fell back to the puddle, some of them merged right in, but a few bounced across the surface a few times first. The stubborn ones. It would take a supercomputer to simulate this puddle in real time—maybe even all the computers in the world. Especially if you included the air currents pushing the raindrops this way and that. Computable or not, it kept happening.

  Linda was glad to be noticing the details of the rain in the puddle. It bumped her out of her depressed mood. When she was depressed, the world seemed as simple as a newscast or a mall. It was good to be outside, away from the TV and the computer. The natural world had such high bandwidth.

  She swept her foot through the puddle, kicking up a long splash. Her quick eyes picked out a particular blob of water in midair; she saw its jiggly surface getting zapped by a lucky raindrop—then watched the tiny impact send ripple rings across the curved three-dimensional shape. Great how she could keep up with this. She was faster than all the world’s computers!