by Rucker, Rudy
He labored all afternoon. He found a pair of cookie sheets in the kitchen—the housekeeper often did baking for him. He poured a quarter-inch of his specially treated gelatin solution onto each sheet—as it happened, the gelatin was from the bones of a pig. Man’s best friend. He set the oven on its lowest heat, and slid in the cookie sheets, leaving the oven door wide open so he could watch. Slowly the medium jelled.
Alan’s customized jelly contained a sagacious mixture of activator and inhibitor compounds that he’d been tweaking and retweaking every day, adjusting the morphonic balance to match that of the womb. If he was truly on track, the latest stuff was tailored to promote just the right kind of embryological reaction-diffusion computation.
Carefully wielding a scalpel, Alan cut a tiny fleck of skin from the tip of Zeno’s cold nose. He set the fleck into the middle of the upper cookie sheet, and then looked in the mirror, preparing to repeat the process on himself. Oh blast, he still had honey and hair on his chin. Silly ass. Carefully he swabbed off the mess with toilet paper, flushing the evidence down the commode. And then he took the scalpel to his own nose.
After he set his fleck of tissue into place on the lower pan, his tiny cut would keep on bleeding, and he had to spend nearly half an hour staunching the spot, greatly worried that he might scatter the drops of blood. Mentally he was running double-strength error-checking routines to keep himself from mucking things up. It was so very hard for him to be tidy. As a schoolboy, he’d always had ink on his collar.
When his housekeeper arrived tomorrow morning, Alan’s digs should look chaste, sarcophagal, Egyptian. The imitation Turing corpse would be a mournful memento mori of a solitary life gone wrong, and the puzzled poisoners would hesitate to intervene. The man who knew too much would be dead; that was primary desideratum. After a perfunctory inquest, the Turing replica would be cremated, bringing the persecution to a halt. And Alan’s mother might forever believe that her son’s death was an accident. For years she’d been chiding him over his messy fecklessness with the chemicals in his home lab.
Outside a car drove past very slowly. The assassin was wondering what was going on. Yet he hesitated to burst in, lest the neighbors learn of their government’s perfidy.
Sitting quiet in a chair, Alan wondered where he’d be right now if the killers had succeeded. All scientific logic said that death was a terminal halting that one wouldn’t even experience. But yet… The most basic question about the world was, after all, unanswerable: Why is there something instead of nothing? An afterlife wasn’t utterly out of the question. And if that were the case… As so many times before, his thoughts flew to his cherished, childish dream of meeting his first love in heaven. Christopher Morcom. Dead now for—good lord!—twenty-four years. Dragged into the depths of time’s sullen, heedless river.
With shaking hands, Alan poured himself a glass of sherry. Steady, old man. See this through.
He moved his kitchen chair close to the open oven door. Like puffing pastry, the flecks of skin were rising up from the cookie sheets, with disks of cellular growth radiating out as the tissues grew. He’d jolted the flecks of skin into behaving like pieces of embryos.
Slowly the noses hove into view, and then the lips, the eye holes, the forehead, the chins. As the afternoon light waned, Alan saw the faces age, Zeno in the top pan, Alan on the bottom. They began as innocent babes, became pert boys, spotty youths, and finally grown men.
Ah, the pathos of biology’s irreversible computations, thought Alan, forcing a wry smile. But the orotund verbiage of academe did little to block the pain. Dear Zeno was dead. And Alan’s life as he’d known it was at an end, at age forty-one. He wept.
It was dark outside now. He drew the pans from the oven, shuddering at the enormity of what he’d wrought. The uncanny empty-eyed faces had an expectant air; they were like holiday pie crusts, waiting for steak and kidney, for mincemeat and plums.
Bristles had pushed out of the two flaccid chins, forming little beards. Time to slow down the computation. One didn’t want the wrinkles of extreme old age. Alan doused the living faces with inhibitor solution, damping their cellular computations to a normal rate.
He carried the bearded Turing face into his bedroom and pressed it onto the corpse. The tissues took hold, sinking in a bit, which was good. Using his fingers, he smoothed the joins at the edges of the eyes and lips. As the living face absorbed cyanide from the dead man’s tissues, its color began to fade. A few minutes later, the face was waxen and dead. The illusion was nearly complete.
Alan momentarily lost his composure and gagged; he ran to the toilet and vomited, though little came up. He’d neglected to eat anything today other than those two bites of apple. Finally his stomach-spasms stopped. In full error-correction mode, he remembered to wash his hands several times before wiping his face. And then he drank a quart of water from the tap.
He took his razor and shaved the Turing face of the dead man in the bed. The barbering went faster than when he’d shaved Zeno in the hotel. It was better to stand so that he saw his face upside down. Was barbering a good career? It would be risky to work as a scientist again. Given any fresh input, the halted Turing persecution would restart.
Alan cleaned up once more and drifted back into the kitchen. Prying up a paving stone just outside the door, he removed the bills that he’d stashed there in a screw top jar. The war years had given him a lasting distrust of banks. Combining this stash with his travel funds, he had a fine wad of bills.
It was time to skulk out through the dark garden with his travel funds and with Zeno’s passport, to bicycle through the familiar woods to a station down the line, and there to catch a train. Probably his tormentors wouldn’t be much interested in pursuing Zeno. They’d be glad Zeno had posed the murder as a suicide, and the less questions asked the better.
But to be safe, Turing would flee along an unexpected route. He’d take the train to Plymouth, the ferry from there to Santander on the north coast of Spain, a train south through Spain to the Mediterranean port of Algeciras, and another ferry from Algeciras to Tangier.
Tangier was an open city, an international zone. He could buy a fresh passport there. He’d be free to live as he liked—in a small way. Perhaps he’d master the violin. And read the Iliad in Greek. Alan glanced down at the flaccid Zeno face, imagining himself as a Greek musician.
If you were me, from A to Z, if I were you, from Z to A...
Alan caught himself. His mind was spinning in loops, avoiding what had to be done next. It was time.
He scrubbed his features raw and donned his new face.
Chapter 2: The Skug
When Alan Turing reached Tangier in June, 1954, the city’s whitewashed lanes and towers seemed a maze of joy. He was elated with his escape from the shadowy agents who’d tried to assassinate him. And glad to leave the tedious, pawky computing machines of Manchester. He rented a comfortably furnished apartment and hid his money beneath a floorboard.
For now, Alan was free to do as he pleased—perhaps to idle, perhaps to push further with his startling new work on the chemical keys to biological morphogenesis. If he could fully fathom how Nature grows her knobby, gnarly forms, then he might well complete his lifelong quest to build a mind, to create a purely logical sentience by whom he could, at last, be understood.
He found that he loved Tangier on a visceral level. Every morning, Alan would take a long run on the empty beaches—the locals had little interest in the seaside. The quality of the light was uplifting. The muezzin calls to prayer were like intricately encrypted signals from a higher mind. And the cheeky street-boys of Tangier were a visual delight. For Alan, the Casbah was like a holiday fair with sweets at every turn—although, as yet, he hadn’t quite dared to sample the boys. He was still in some fear of hidden enemies.
Seeking out fellow expatriates, he encountered the louche international café society of Tangier. At home, he’d rarely hit it off with mannered aesthetes, but in this odd backwater, everyone was hun
gry for companionship.
In his first month, Alan often spent the evenings at the Café Central in the Socco Chico square, enjoying the free-wheeling euphoria, the cognac, the mint tea and the kief. A dissipated Oxford poet named Brian Howard would hold forth on beauty, and then William Burroughs, a sexy, sardonic American of Alan’s age, would send the group into gales of laughter with his scandalous routines. Alan noticed that amid the expatriates’ merry intimacy there was no stigma in being homosexual.
One night the camaraderie loosened Alan’s tongue to the point where he bragged to his raffish companions that he wasn’t really the man whose name stood in his Greek passport.
“I’m not Zeno Metakides,” Alan announced to the ring of smirking expats, his voice hoarsened by kief. “I only wear his face. In reality I’m a top-drawer mathematician who cracked the Hun’s cryptographic codes. I won the war, don’t you know—and now the Queen’s mandarins want to rub me out.”
The next morning Alan awoke with a start of horror. He must be suicidal, to be spilling his secrets to foppish wastrels who’d cut him cold, were they all back in London. He avoided the cafés from then on, going for his long runs along the sea in the mornings, visiting the market, and resuming his researches on computational morphogenesis.
To make his lab work more interesting, Alan had always preferred what he termed the “desert island” ideal. That is, he was in the habit of creating his experimental chemicals from substances that came readily to hand—things like foods or weeds or bits of offal that he found in the street. And so he began searching out suitable reagents and catalysts in the wares of the Moroccan street markets. Finding his way in the bedazzling maze of the souq was slow.
“What you look for?” asked a boy standing next to him at a shaded market stall one brilliant afternoon. He had sharp, crisp features and a friendly smile. He was about twenty—half Alan’s age.
“Elixirs,” said Alan, eying the youth. “Strong flavors.”
“I am Driss,” said the boy. One of his eyes was black, the other was hazel. “I can help you.” He walked around Alan, studying him from every side. And then he puckered his pretty lips and clucked, as if calling a chicken.
Alan’s heart fluttered within his chest. “I’m Alan,” he said. “I’ve only just moved here.”
“Ouakha,” said the boy, meaning something like okay. “Well met, al’An. We’ll cook dinner together, if you wish.”
“Excelsior,” said Alan.
Driss helped Alan pick out cardamom seeds, ginger root, pickled lemons, saffron, olives, semolina grain, lamb, incense, a small block of hashish and a bunch of odd-shaped vegetables. When they got back to Alan’s room, Driss smoked some of the hashish, and, growing coquettish, let Alan make love to him. As the afternoon waned they cooked a Moroccan couscous with lamb stew.
“Wonderful,” said Alan after the meal, feeling a rare moment of calm. “A feast for a sheik.” The evening walls were amber with shadows of lavender. A cool dry breeze wafted in a scent of resin from the hills’ gnarled pines. The muezzin wailed atop his minaret.
“You make medicine?” asked Driss, pointing toward the corner where Alan’s chemical concoctions sat. “Perfume?”
“I’m habitually lonely. You might say I long to grow a friend.”
Driss laughed merrily. “I am your friend, al’An. I am here and now. Full grown.”
“But perhaps I want to grow a gnome,” said Alan, getting to his feet with a spoon in hand. The rich food and the fumes of hashish had emboldened him. “Let me take a sample of your code. Open your mouth.”
Driss parted his lips and waggled his tongue. Alan ran the edge of the spoon along the smooth pink lining of the boy’s inner cheek, surely gathering up a few loose cells. And then he ran the spoon along the inside of his own cheek. He went and smeared the spoon against a layer of jellied mutton stock that sat in one of his flat pots.
“Our child,” said Alan.
Driss watched from his chair, eyes alert. He was wearing Alan’s bedroom slippers, his extra shirt and a pair of his boxer shorts.
“I must go home to my mother and my brothers,” said Driss as Alan returned to the table. He gestured at his borrowed garments. “Do you mind if I keep?”
“Ouakha,” said Alan with an extravagant gesture. “No matter.” He was free of England for good.
Over the coming weeks, Driss became a regular visitor. He’d run errands for Alan or guide him around the town. And often he’d spend a morning or an afternoon in Alan’s bed.
Fondly watching the youth’s comings and goings from his balcony, Alan would scan for signs of a security breach, vaguely strategizing his plans for further flight. But so far, nothing he did in Tangier seemed to have real consequences. Perhaps he’d escaped Her Majesty’s scrutiny for good.
Driss knew a fair amount of English, and he seemed to have a flair for abstract reasoning. Sometimes when they had an idle half hour, Alan would feed Driss a tidbit of mathematics. One day, for instance, he showed him a visual proof of the Pythagorean theorem—the figure involved a smaller square inscribed at an angle within a larger one. Another day he pasted together a paper Mobius strip, and got the youth to cut the strip down the middle with Alan’s nail scissors.
“How many pieces will we have?” asked Alan in his role of maths master.
“Cut makes two,” said Driss.
“Tallyho!” said Alan. “The phantoms of maths are more wriggly than you dream, young wizard. Snip and see.”
“Only one piece!” observed Driss when he was done snipping along the length of the band. “The two are twisted into one.”
“Like us, dear Driss,” said Alan, venturing to caress the youth’s cheek. Driss smiled and set the curling band of paper on Alan’s head like a crown.
The golden days slid by. Though dwindling, Alan’s hoard of cash was not yet exhausted. He pressed forward on his morphogenesis research. The smooth, fluid, self-generating mechanisms of biology were a relief from the electromechanical brains with their gears, wires, relays, electronic valves. The dabbling play in his makeshift lab was wonderfully unlike the communal politics of building an unwieldy computing machine. Thanks to his new biotweaking procedures, his cultured tissues would become programmable life forms.
The key was to create universal cells. The human body was known to have over two hundred distinct types of cells, all of them descended from the original cells of the early embryo. Alan’s near-term goal was to coax the culture of his and Driss’s cells into a primitive, Edenic state. These embryo-style cells would have great powers. By manipulating their morphonic fields, Alan would interact with them and train them to behave in desirable ways.
Patiently, and one small step at a time, Alan treated his burgeoning colony with delicate amounts of the catalysts that he’d found around Tangier. As well as the market spices, he drew venom from the jaws of a centipede he’d crushed, squeezed a drop of liquid resin from a lump of hashish, and even contributed a few drops of his own semen.
A bad smell was developing in the apartment, a nasty pong. When Alan first noticed it at, he thought it was the accumulating garbage.
Meanwhile he was finally bringing the little culture into a truly primordial state. These undifferentiated cells were theoretically capable of becoming any kind of cell at all—skin, blood, bone, neuron, muscle—whatever. But Alan wasn’t quite sure how he’d communicate with his undifferentiated tissue. As a way of getting started, he began talking to the culture when he was alone. Trying to teach it like a child or a pet seemed to make sense.
“Look what I have here,” he told Driss, when the youth next appeared. It was noon, with the slanting sun lying on Alan’s floor like a slab of iron. “Our offspring. A smart slug. Potentially smart, in any case.”
Alan held out the dish, with the consommé supporting a thumb-sized glob of tan cells, longer than it was wide. The dish itself was glazed in labyrinthine patterns of blue and white.
“Skug?” said Driss, misunderstanding him
. He hadn’t been paying much attention to Alan’s morphogenetic experimentation.
Alan laughed exorbitantly. “A skug, yes. The official name for our creation henceforth.” He tried to enfold Driss in a hug, but the boy stepped away, as from a bad odor.
“This skug grows from our spit?” said Driss, peering at the bowl.
“It’s powerful,” said Alan. “Plenipotent.” He leaned over it. “The skug hears me, I’m sure of it.”
Ever so slightly the surface of the yellowish creature wriggled.
“What sorcery can the skug do?” asked Driss. He seemed uneasy with Alan today. Standoffish.
“I suspect it can merge with other beings,” said Alan. “Let’s test,” said Alan, looking around the apartment. A dark red cockroach was skulking beside the overflowing kitchen trashcan. Tip-toeing over with exaggerated caution, Alan used a spoon to flick a droplet of some skug-flesh onto the roach—and the insect melted into a lacquered puddle.
“Wrong species,” said Alan equably. “Too low in complexity to be worthy of our skug. How about—one of those lizards sunning themselves on the balcony railing?”
“As you like, al’An,” said Driss, and fetched one of the little creatures. Alan used the spoon to smear a bit of the pink skug-jelly onto the writhing captive, being careful not to get the stuff on his or Driss’s hands.
The lizard hissed and sprouted a pair of membranous wings, rising up from his back like a pair of rainbows.
“Awwah,” cried Driss, dropping the thing. The tweaked creature crawled and fluttered across the shadowed room, out to the balcony, and immediately fell off the edge and into the street. Driss ran down after it—but returned empty-handed.
“It’s gone?” asked Alan.
“It’s dead,” said Driss. “I don’t like to touch these behexed things.” He sniffed the air and gave Alan a significant look. “You yourself—you are unwell, yes?”
Suddenly it became clear that the apartment’s bad smell was coming from Alan’s plastered-on Zeno-face. Odd that he hadn’t realized this. Repressing the truth. The tissue-culture was losing its ability to integrate with Alan’s metabolism. His face was dying.