Mad Professor

by Rudy Rucker

  “Yes and no,” answers George, sounding sad. A pause and then he switches to the bullying presidential tone you hear on the news clips. I’ve never seen him on TV, actually, but I’ve downloaded plenty of video. When I look at a screen, it’s got to be something I can hack.

  “And that is exactly precisely the problem you gone haveta help us deal with,” George declaims. “I’m not gonna describe it to you on the, not paint a picture on the telephone. The operatives are in place to bring you in.”

  Go to Texas? What a truly bizarre thought. Like going to Antarctica or to the inside of the Sun. Maybe this is all a put-on. The voice sounds a lot like George Bush, but on the other hand it’s just possible that it’s Ben Blank.

  Ben and his friends in the Mummy Bum Cult posse are deep into voice filters and digital phone phreaking. They rent a basement under Market Street with, yes, an actual mummified bum in one of the far corners, a decades-old corpse that’s air-cured down to leather ’n bone.

  Ben likes talk about advanced AI tricks like evolving neural nets, but in fact he and the other Mummy Bums tend to slap together undocumented opcode hacks with never a thought to remembering what they’ve done. The main neural nets he’s evolving are the ones in his skull. But the Mummy Bums get some surprising things to work, which is why I’m half-wondering if this Bush call might be one of their pranks.

  I look across my room at the Men in Black. They have metal wristwatches, shiny shoes, and gel in their hair. Man, these are definitely government agents. The Boss SS man makes an impatient gesture, wanting me to hurry up and answer George fucking Bush.

  “I normally charge a consultant’s fee,” I say. Like this kind of request comes up all the time. “And travel.”

  “Don’t never mind about paperwork,” says George. “My boys will reimburse anything reasonable. Keep it under your, keep your lip shut off the record. I’ll see you tonight. We’ll have barbeque. Lemmie have a last word with my agent.”

  So I hand the phone to the Boss, he does a few yessirs, hangs up, and then says something to his men—not a real word, just a number. Something like, “Let’s four-six-six the site.”

  The action code sets the Muscle and Brad the Trainee to clearing away my piles of dirty clothes so they can get at my computer. They’re gonna take my machines, which happens to be just what the FBI has been itching to do on account of the FoneFoon worm, but I’ve been making them wait for their court order to come through, and even then I’m only going to copy stuff onto DVDs for them, not hand over my sacred machine! I try and explain this to the Boss, but he waves me off. The SS doesn’t worry about legal shit. And if I try and stop them, they might kill me.

  I do some yoga breaths and force a grin as the Muscle yanks loose my sacred beige box, snapping its cables like the nerves and blood vessels of a crudely extracted tooth. Ow. And then my other machine as well. Yoga breath.

  Well, whatever happens, my info’s secure; I can pretty easily recover it. First of all, it’s stored on the Dogyears servers. And if, Dog forbid, something were to happen to those, I’ve been using a very gnarly Mummy Bum hack for saving my data in watermark form.

  Something like a big image or a sound file, you can flip some tiny percentage of the bits, and it’ll look or sound about the same. And you can use these flipped bits to save data you care about. It’s called a digital watermark. The word “watermark” is from the way you can hold a dollar bill or a quality sheet of paper up to the light and see a pattern of light and dark, which is the old kind of watermark. The Mummy Bums have a killer little applet that’ll break into a target server and munge your whole hard disk contents into watermarks in the sounds and pictures on the server. Me, I’ve got Dogyears backed up onto an Amsterdam music site. When you listen to the Lincoln Logs play “Stink Bowl,” you’re reading my e-mail, dude.

  “Can I keep this?” I say, holding up my laptop. “There’s no particular data on it, I just need it to—to think and live and breathe.” The Boss nods.

  I pack the laptop and some relatively clean backup clothes in a little canvas bag, and then I pause to handwrite a note to Hella. “Gone to Texas with the Men in Black! Don’t worry. Consulting gig. Back soon, I’ll call tonight. XXX Love, Wag.” Writing the note I’m thinking about Hella’s high forehead and her wide smile. Her low, intimate voice. She’s a beauty. I don’t mention Jenna or George Bush on the note.

  My housemate Charles is in the shower, talking to himself in a variety of British-sounding voices like he always does. Like, “Hello, Professor Elbow! After you, Sir Smelly Ankle. Cor, I never seen the like o’ this rain!” Charles is surprised when he steps out wrapped in a towel and sees me with the Men in Black. He kindly agrees to keep an eye on Larva while I’m gone.

  And then we’re outside. The black SUV’s stubby antennas have attracted the attention of Rumbo the copper-helmeted tweaker. In the minute and a half it takes The Muscle to stash my computers in the back, Rumbo has ranted three-point-seven hours’ worth of convolutional thought patterns.

  “Yep, a whole gollywog pile of copper down by the Bay,” squeaks the tweak. “Piles of microwaves storm through our heads. Don’t forget to recycle the wire in Wag’s computers. Train tracks got copper under ’em: I’ve seen it. I’ll strip it all out for you and give you half the profit; you ride shotgun and haul the load. Any monocrystalline copper, I keep for my helmet, you understand. There’s enough copper in my hat to string it around the entire Bay. Copper helmets protect the Head from the Microwaves. See that little box with the antenna on the lamppost? They’re on every block. 5.4 gigahertz. Repeaters peaters peaters peaters peaters. . . . This city is gonna be full of slave servo brain matter, I tell you.”

  “You know this individual?” asks the Boss. “He’s among your circle of friends?”

  “I know him just a bit.” A few months back, I let Rumbo show me what he said was the secret labyrinth path into a really choice abandoned warehouse I’m curious about. This was before Rumbo got into his copper coat-of-mail helmet-against-microwaves thing. Back then he was more into a Lord of the Rings bag. We walked around through empty sewers for a couple of hours with flashlights, Rumbo leading me, my sister, and Charles. Charles says he took acid 300 times, and the last 250 times were horrible bummers; he says he’s a slow learner. But Charles was the one who finally realized it was nuts to be walking around inside a sewer with a tweaker leading the way. The fact that Charles figured this out before me makes me wonder about myself. I think I’m spending too much time on my computer.

  The Boss Man in Black is staring at me. For a second I have a bad feeling I’ve just said all these thoughts out loud. But, no, he’s just doing the intimidation-via-eye-contact thing. I for sure don’t want to engage in any conversation about the lamppost cell antennas at this time. The FoneFoon caper clued me to the potency of those little boxes. “Rumbo’s harmless,” is all I say. For his part, Rumbo’s had enough of the federal stink-eye, he’s back on the curb across the street, his twitching hands busy with the pliers and the wire.

  But the Boss is still watching Rumbo. “Deploy the seven-seventy-six,” he tells the Muscle. “Might as well take care of that mission too. I’d say this looks like the ideal neighborhood.” The big guy goes around to the back of the SUV and opens it up again. He’s going to leave my computers after all? But, no, he’s digging down into the spare tire compartment, pulling out a dusty white brick tightly wrapped in transparent plastic. The way he’s glancing around makes it clear he’s doing something shady. And now he pitches the brick across the street; it slides to a stop right near Rumbo. It’s a fucking key of meth!

  “Look what fell off Santa’s sleigh!” whoops Rumbo.

  As we drive off, a horde of tweakers converges on the brick.

  + + +

  We head south toward San Francisco Airport, which seems fine to me. But then, shit, it turns out the Men in Black want to make a side trip to the server hotel to bag the rest of my Dogyears hardware. They’re fully out to ruin my business. A
ll these insidious connections between AOL and the Elephant Party are filling my head as we ride the elevator to the server hotel’s third floor.

  The building has major security; it’s full of cameras and hand-scanning equipment. I have a white card with a hologram of the ProxPass logo. ProxPass has a monopoly on all the hand scanners in the USA. Every now and then, another business or ISP will get hacked and they’ll hire me to harden their servers. They tell me a building and locker number, call up ProxPass headquarters, and voilà: my ProxPass card and palm grant me access to another server room. The ProxPass logo has a nonsensical graphic of some computer circuit. Normally, I open doors by pressing my pass to a black square on the wall, stick my hand in a gray box, wait three seconds for the click of the door lock, and then pull the door open. The delay is due to all the gray boxes talking to a central ProxPass server somewhere in Texas. Before George came into office, there wasn’t a delay. ProxPass’s fast peer-to-peer authentication was replaced with a countrywide big-brothering system. I’m pretty sure it has something to do with the Elephants getting paid off by AOL.

  The Boss walks up to the scanner on the third floor, and pulls out an ultra blue card with a little hologram of—is that Jenna? I can’t believe my eyes! The door clicks open when the Boss’s card is still a foot away from the reader. No hand scan or network check needed with an SS Jenna Card!

  The server room is noisy and cold. On those rare hot days in San Francisco, I walk my dog down to the server hotel, and check my e-mail in the cool confines of the Internet backbone. After spending an hour in the server room, I start to have auditory hallucinations. My mind always tries to pull sense out of chaotic patterns.

  No one else ever hangs out in the server room except Ben Blank. In fact, he rents a whole three-foot-by-five-foot cage and has a little office desk and a mini keyboard called the Happy Hacker. Most people do a minimal configuration on their servers and then return to cubicle land. Not Ben, he likes the idea of being directly connected to his hardware. He says the only safe network is a network of two computers.

  Ben’s computers are a mess of old hardware cobbled together. His view screen, for instance, is six text lines high; he scavenged it off a Mattel Speak and Spell toy. I’ve been known to tease Ben by comparing his using retrofitted electronics to the tweakers making stuff out of like shopping carts. Ben insists that, even so, his stuff is better than mine. He’s quite oblivious to the stellar quality of the superfine multiprocessor machines Dogyears assembles for their clients. My lovely white server towers are boxes the size of suitcases, with fans like kitchen ventilators.

  On a normal day, I talk face to face with Ben when I come in. Ben always talks real fast about parallel computing and hyper-space and genetic algorithms, and I always tell him sure, sure. Usually after we do the voice greeting, I log into a chat window and talk some more to Ben across the room through the copper wires running through the building. Ben prefers old school chat over face to face. He’ll be chatting to his mother, the Mummy Bum Cult group, Rotten.com employees, his girlfriend Hexy on the Peninsula, and me—all at the same time. On chat, he logs all the conversations and refers back to old chat sessions endlessly. He wants to devolve his neural net’s need for in-skull short-or long-term memory.

  Not that he’s fully an out-of-it zombie. Today he instantly understands what kind of deal is going down, and he gives me a heartfelt look of sympathy.

  The Feds yank out power and Ethernet cables from the Dogyears servers, hideously bringing down my ISP. My poor, orphaned customers! Ben yelps in pain and anger. Hearing the intensity in Ben’s voice, The Boss senses the possibility of him turning berserker. He wheels around, his gun magically moved to his hand from his holster. It’s up to him to show Brad how it’s done. Ben returns to his hacking.

  As my plugs are being pulled on my top two machines, I notice the power LEDs on the bottom three machines in my stack of five are cycling up and down. It reminds me of the Knight Rider car from that old TV show. That’s my emergency Mummy Bum Cult backup system, watermarking my more recent files into the workers’ porno library on an oil rig in the middle of the North Sea. My list of customers is, like, being tattooed on some Scandinavian Bibi’s boob. Glancing over at Ben again I can see an eye slyly rolled my way behind his honkin’ big glasses. He’s noticing my ongoing backup too. The Pig can try and stop us, but they’ll never ever win.

  The Muscle has the Prexy Twins server under one arm, and the FoneFoon hard-drive jukebox server under the other. At first I think they’re going to spare my other servers; I have eight of them to host the Dogyears accounts and some bottom-feeder dotcom outfits who co-locate with me. But now the Boss takes out a conical device with copper windings around it and taps it on the six remaining servers, one by one. A directional magneto cone. Their RAM, ROM, and hard drives are wiped. My flashing LEDs are blank and dead.

  As of right now, my customers have no service. They’ll be leaving me for Time-Warner-AOL if this goes on for long. Elephant poo.

  + + +

  Brad accompanies me to Texas on Southwest Air; the others stay in San Francisco. He and I sit in the front row of the first-class section. I’ve never flown first class before. Free drinks and shrimp cocktail. Under us the desert terrain of Nevada rolls by. I have the window seat, and wouldn’t you know it, when we’re passing Area 51, I look up and see a UFO high in the sky.

  At first I want to think it’s another plane, but it’s not acting like a plane. It’s a few thousand feet above us, matching our route and speed so accurately that I wonder if it might be some kind of reflection in the window glass. But no matter which way I angle my head, it’s still there, a polyhedral shape, not an airplane shape, a tumbling polyhedron like a pyramid or a cube but with many more sides, rolling over and over and over like a wheel matching our pace.

  “What are you looking at, Wag?” asks Brad.

  “It’s a UFO,” I say leaning back to he can push his head close to the window.

  “I’d rather trade seats than lean across you,” says Brad. “You’re in custody.” He doesn’t want to expose his neck to a felonious karate chop.

  So we swap, and Brad peers out and he sees the UFO too. He gets excited and calls the stewardess back to ask her a question or two, and the stewardess goes up to talk to the pilot. Right away the pilot’s voice comes on the speakers, talking that relaxed low-blood-pressure Middle-American drawl. “If you look out to our right, one o’clock high, you’ll see a Nevada weather balloon”

  “Some balloon,” mutters Brad, but he doesn’t want to talk about it any more than that. Instead he jumps to a fresh topic. “You ever had oxblood burger?” he asks. “No? That’s what the president likes to make. Juicy, mmm good.”

  In Austin there’s a couple more Men in Black to meet us. A burr-haired one is in charge, and the other one has a neck as wide as his head. To keep it simple for me, I garbage-collect their names and label them with the Boss_tx and Muscle_tx handles. That saves me a couple-three memory clusters in my skull-based neural nets.

  The surprise in Austin is that they’ve shipped my Dogyears server with the jukebox-hard drive with us, wrapped up in a government courier bags. It’s the first thing out on the baggage belt. Why exactly will I be needing the sixty terabytes of Fone-Foon data for this gig?

  The Muscle_tx bundles the massive box under his arms like a notebook. And then we’re out in the hot odorless air, boarding their SUV for the drive to Crawford, Texas.

  It’s early evening when we arrive. Pink light filters through thick barbeque smoke in the backyard of the presidential ranch. George is grilling with a NA Beer in one hand and a 3-foot Texas-size spatula in the other. There’s a satellite dish on the ground next to his house, just like any other house in Texas. At first it looks like it’s just George, some SS agents, and a middle-aged guy with flesh-colored frames on his glasses.

  “Welcome to my spread, Wag,” says George. He jerks his thumb at the middle-aged guy. “This here’s Doc Renshaw. He’s a neur
ologian, a brain doctor, an asshole, and a jerk.” He doesn’t sound like he’s kidding. He really doesn’t like this guy. “Ren-shaw, this is Wag, the fella we been talkin’ about.”

  Breathing hard, the president hands the spatula off to Brad and pushes aside the hanging branches of a weeping willow tree beside the grill. Under the willow is a picnic table.

  Jenna’s sitting there, blank and drooling. It’s almost like someone’s held a directional magneto cone up to her head. Jenna’s been erased! George and I sit down across from her, the SS guys hanging back a bit, Renshaw peeking in.

  “She’s gone to the circus, and she’s not comin’ back,” George says mournfully. “Go ahead and talk to her. She knows when somebody talks to her.”

  “Uh, hi Jenna,” I say lamely. Here I finally am with Jenna, and that’s the best I can do? She looks kind of hot with that thin stand of drool dripping onto her pale blue spaghetti-strap sundress. Immediately I have two thoughts: I can’t think that way it’s sick, and I hope I get her alone.

  Gathering composure from the thought of getting Jenna alone and really giving her a good scrub with a wire brush, I turn on my charm for the president of the United States of America. I figure it’s better to start with flattering him a little before trying to figure out what to say about blank Jenna. “That barbeque meat smells good,” I say. “Like oxblood.”