by Rudy Rucker
“Oh, yeah, try to distract me. What a bunch of crap! Give me that board, Zep. Come on, and the leash, too.”
“Del, look—”
Another spurt of steam went up from the plant. Zep gave thanks that the wind wasn’t blowing their way.
“You two dudes are maka sushi!” yelled Loach.
The Stoke Pilgrims cried out in unison, “Shred ‘em!”
Zep looked away from the board just long enough for Del to grab it away from him. Delbert got up on the board and pushed Zep under, holding him down with his feet and reeling in on the leash. Zep’s foot surfaced, and Delbert ripped the leash fangs out of his ankle. By the time Zep got his head back in the air, Delbert had installed the leash on himself and was paddling away, triumph in his eyes.
“It’s my stick, dude,” called Del.
“Oh, no, Delbert. Please, I swear I’m not goofing. If you do it, you’d better stay really, really cool. Go for the little waves. And don’t look at the N-plant. And if you do look, just remember that it can’t possibly explode. No fancy tricks, dude.”
“Bull!” screamed Delbert, shooting over a small peak. “This gun was built for tricks, Zep, and you know it. That’s the thrill, man! Anything can happen! That’s what this is all about!”
Delbert was belly to the board, stroking for the horizon. Back on the beach, Jen had noticed the N-plant’s activity, and she was making gestures of distress. Zep dog-paddled, wondering what to do. Suddenly four of the surf punks surrounded him.
“He looks kind of helpless down there, don’t he,” said Floathead.
“Watch him close,” said Mr. Scrote. “He’s slippery.”
“Let’s use his head for water polo,” suggested Squid Puppy darting the sharp end of his board at Zep.
Zep dove to the bottom and resurfaced, only find the Stoke Pilgrims’ boards nosed in around him like an asterisk with his head at the center. “Mess with my mind, I don’t care,” said Zep. “But just don’t put Delbert uptight.”
“We won’t bother bufu Delbert,” said Mr. Scrote. “He’s Lex’s now.”
“I know this is going to sound weird,” Zep began. “But …”
“Holy righteous mother of God,” interrupted Floathead. “Check out the zon, bros.”
“Far, far, faaar outsider,” someone whispered. The horizon looked bent in the middle, and it took an effort of will to realize that the great smooth bell-curve was an actual wave of actual water. It swelled up and up like a droplet on a faucet, swelled so big that you half expected it to break free of the sea and fly upward into great chaotic spheres. It was far enough off that there still might have been time to reach the safety of the cliffs…but that’s not what the surfers did. They broke formation and raced farther out to sea, out to where they guessed the monster wave would break.
Zep power-stroked out after the others, out toward where Loach and Delbert were waiting, Delbert bobbing up and down with a dismayed expression as Loach kept shouting at him. Just as Zep got there, Loach reached over and smacked Delbert in the face.
Delbert screamed in anger, his face going redder every second. “I’m gonna kill you, Loach!”
“Hoo-hoo-hoo!” cried the Stoke Pilgrims, forming their lineup. “Delbert is a ho-dad!”
“You can’t always bully me, Loach,” continued Delbert. “If you get near me one more time—if you snake in while I’m riding this super wave, my wave—it’s all over for you.”
“Oh, I’m shaking,” Loach said, slapping the water as he laughed. “Come on, paddle boy. Do your worst—and I do mean megaworst.” Loach grinned past Del at the other Stoke Pilgrims. “Contest’s over, guys! Let’s take this dip’s board right now!”
Zep watch Delbert’s face run through some fast changes, from helpless to terrified to grim to enraged to psychotic. It was as if some vicious bug had erupted from shy caterpillar Delbert. Some kind of catastrophic transition took place, and Delbert was a death’s head moth. All the while Chaos Attractor was churning out a moiréed blur of weird ripples, making the oncoming wave grow yet more monstrous.
Zep felt himself sucked up into the breast of a mountainous wall of water, a blackish green fortress whose surface rippled and coiled until it formed an immense, godlike face glaring down on all of them. Zep had never seen such cold eyes: The black depths of space had been drawn into them by the chaotic attractor. Sky had bent down to earth, drawing the sea up to see. Del and the Pilgrims and Zep all went rushing up toward a foamy green hell, while below …
Below was the rumbling, and now a ferocious cracking, accompanied by gouts of radioactive steam. Sirens and hooters. High up on the god-wave, Zep looked down and saw the N-plant rocking in its bed, as if nudged from beneath by a gigantic mole. Blue luminescence pulsed upward through the failing N-plant’s shimmering veils of deadly mist, blending into the green savagery of the spray trailing down from their wave. Frantic Jen had flung herself into the surf and was thrashing there, goggling up at the twin catastrophes of N-plant and Neptune’s wave.
Looking up, Zep saw Delbert streaking down the long beaked nose of Neptune while Loach and the Pilgrims skidded down the cheeks, thrown from their boards, eating it.
Zep felt proud. Delbert, I didn’t know you had it in you. Shut the beach DOWN!
Cracks crazed the surface of the N-plant. It was ready to blow. Way down there was Jen, screaming, “Save me!” like Olive Oyl. Del carved the pure surfspace, sending up a rooster of probability spray, jamming as if he’d been born on silvery, shadowy Chaos Attractor. He looked like he’d been to the edge of the universe and back already. He raved down deep to snatch up his Jen and set her in the board’s center; and then he snapped up the wall to wrap a tight spiral around floundering Zep.
“Latch on, dude!”
Zep clamped onto Chaos Attractor’s back rail and pulled himself aboard. The stick reared like a horse and sent them scudding up over the lip of the tsunami, out over the arching neck of the slow-breaking wave. Del glanced back through the falls and saw the filtered light of the San Diablo Nuclear Plant’s explosion, saw the light and the chunks of concrete and steel tumbling outward, borne on the shock-wave’s A-bomb energy.
The two waves intermingled in a chaotic mindscape abstraction. Up and up they flew, the fin scraping sparks from the edges of the unknown. Zep saw stars swimming under them, a great spiral of stars.
Everything was still, so still.
And then Del’s hand shot out. Across the galactic wheel a gleaming figure shared their space. It was coming straight at them. Rider of the tides of night, carver of blackhole beaches and neutron tubes. Bent low on his luminous board—graceful, poised, inhuman.
“Ohmigod!” said Jen. “The Silver Surfer!”
============
Note on “Probability Pipeline” (Written with Marc Laidlaw)
Written in 1987.
Synergy #2, HBJ Books, 1988.
Our first two years in California, Sylvia and I frequently got together with Kadrey, Murphy, Blumlein, and Laidlaw. We talked about starting a new “Freestyle” science-fiction movement along with Jeter and Shirley, but the idea died a-borning for the lack of any unifying principle other than “write like yourself except more so.”
For awhile, though, Marc and I were pretty strongly in pursuit of a Freestyle mystique, and we found most of our information in surfing magazines. Here’s one quote we dug: “Life on the edge measures seekers, performers, and adventurists.” Marc started writing me letters in the surf-magazine style. “There it is, Rude Dude. The Freestyle antifesto. No need to break down the metaphors—an adventurist knows what the Ocean really is. No need to feature matte-black mirrorshades or other emblems of our freestyle culture—hey, dude, we know who we are. No need to either glorify or castrate technology. Nature is the Ultimate. We’re skimming the cell-sea, cresting the waves that leap out over the black abyss …” Marc started publishing a neat zine called Freestyle, but it only went through three issues.
I went so far as to buy a used surf
board and wetsuit. Sylvia, Marc, Marc’s wife Geraldine, and I went to a wild beach north of Santa Cruz on New Years Day, 1987, and I tried to surf. I didn’t manage to stand on the board, but I did get out into the water. It was nice to see how well the wetsuit worked at keeping me warm.
Like my collaboration with Bruce Sterling, “Probability Pipeline” is a two-guys story. We thought of Marc being Del and Zep being me.
Due to anxiety about the trademark infringement issues in mentioning a well-known comic-book character like the Silver Surfer, the first publication of “Probability Pipeline” had the last line changed to: “Stoked,” said Jen. “God’s a surfer!”
Another exciting literary feature of moving to California was that I got to see my hero Robert Sheckley again. This time he was visiting his writer/comedian friend Marty Olson in Venice Beach. Olson had dreamed up the idea that Tim Leary would start hosting a PBS series about various futuristic things. Sheckley and I were to be the writers. Olson paid my plane-fare to LA, where he and “the Sheck-man” (as Olson called him) picked me up. It was a wonderful goof, hanging out with them, and then driving over to Tim’s house in Beverly Hills. Tim was up for the meeting, with pencils and pads of papers; he was a nice old guy, and a freedom-fighter from way back. We were all in full agreement about everything, but the hitch was that we never found a sponsor.
As Above, So Below
I’d been overhacking again. The warm California night was real and intimate, synaesthetic, with the distant surfsound matching the pebbly parking lot under my bare feet, and the flowering shrub of jade plant in front of me fitting in too, with its fat loplop green leaves and stuft yellow star petals knobbing along like my breath and my heartbeat, and the rest of the plants matching the rest of the world: the menthol-smelling eucalyptus trees like the rush of the cars, the palm trees like my jittering synapses, the bed of calla lilies white and wonderful as the woman waiting for me at home, ah the plants, with their smells and their realtime ongoing updates …
The old flash came rushing over me once again: astonishment at the vastness of the invisible world machinery that keeps all this running, awe for the great program the world is working out. What a system! What a hack!
I was stoned and I’d been overhacking and my eyes were throbbing and I couldn’t remember what I’d said to Donna when she phoned…an hour ago?…nor could I remember when I’d last eaten. Eat. I walked across Route 1 to the Taco Bell. There were some kids there with pet rats crawling out of their Salvation Army coats, nice middle class kids no doubt, this being Santa Cruz. They wanted their burritos with no beans. “Beans are the worst,” one of them explained to the cholo countergirl. The back of the boy’s head had a remarkable yellow and green food-coloring dye job. A buzzcut DA with the left back half kapok yellow and the right half a poisonous green. The colors made me think of the assembly language XOR operation, which is a little like MINUS. Green XOR Yellow is Red. If I let my eyes go out of focus I could see a strip of red down the back of his head. I didn’t want to think about the weird screens I’d just been watching at my workstation in the empty Micromax labs.
The boy’s rat poked its head over the boy’s shoulder and cheesed its nose at me, twitch twitch, the long whiskers sweeping out envelopes of virtual surfaces. The beastie had long yellow fangs, though a festive air withal.
“You should dye the rat red,” I observed. “And call him XOR. Exclusive OR.”
“Beans are the worst,” repeated the boy, not acknowledging. He paid for his beanless burritos and left.
“Your order sir?” My turn.
“Four tacos and a large iced-tea.”
I ate the food out on the concrete patio tables. I poured on the hot sauce and it was really good. I liked being there except I didn’t like the traffic and I didn’t like the wind blowing all the paper off my table. They give you a lot a lot of paper at Taco Bell. It’s really obvious that the paper costs more than the food. But except for the wind and the traffic, I was feeling good. It was so neat to be getting input for free. When you’re hacking, you’re coupled to the screen, and all your input is from the machine’s output which all comes from the passage of time and from what you put in the machine. You’re making your own world all the time. And then you go outside and there’s all this great deep complex shit for free. The crackle of the thin taco shells, the faces of the punks, the wind on my face, and best of all—always the best—the plants.
Plants are really where it’s at, no lie. Take an oak tree: it grows from an acorn, right? The acorn is the program and the oak tree is the output. The runtime is like 80 years. That’s the best kind of computation…where a short program runs for a long long time and makes an interesting image. Lots of things are like that—a simple start and a long computation. In information theory we call it low complexity/high depth. Low complexity means short program, and high depth means a long runtime.
A really good example of a low complexity/high depth pattern is the Mandelbrot set. You grow it in the plane…for each point you keep squaring and adding in the last value, and some points go out to infinity and some don’t. The ones that don’t are inside the Mandelbrot set which is a big warty ass-shape with a disk stuck onto it. There’s an antenna sticking out of the disk, and shish-kabobbed onto the antenna are tiny little Mandelbrot sets: ass, warts & disk. Each of the warts is a Mandelbrot disk, too, each with a wiggly antenna coming out, and with shish-kabobs of ass, warts & disk, with yet smaller antennae, asses, warts, and disks, all swirled into maelstroms and lobed vortices, into paisley cactus high desert, into the Santa Cruz cliffs being eaten by the evercrashing sea.
The Mandelbrot set goes on forever, deeper and deeper down into more and more detail, except sooner or later you always get tired and go home. After I finished my tacos I walked back across Route 1 and got in my bicycle. It was a carbonfiber lowrider with fat smooth tires of catalyzed imipolex. I realized that I’d left my workstation computer on inside the Micromax building, but I just couldn’t handle going back in there to shut things off. It had been getting too weird. The last thing I thought I’d seen on my Mandelbrot set screen had been hairline cracks in the glass.
There was a liquor store just before the turnoff from Route 1 to the long road uphill to our house. My friend Jerry Rankle had stopped by Micromax to hand me a little capsule of white dust a couple of hours ago and I’d swallowed it fast and robotlike, thinking something like this’ll get you off the machine all right, Will, because I knew I was overhacking and I wanted to stop. I’d been the last one out of Micromax every day for a week.
“Lemme know how it hits you, Will,” Jerry had said in his jerky stuttery voice, always on the verge of a giggle. He was an old pal, a rundown needlefreak who’d once summed up his worldview for me in the immortal phrase: “The Universe Is Made of Jokes.”
“What is it exactly?” I’d thought to ask, sitting there at my workstation, feeling the little lump of the pill in my gullet, suddenly worried, but not talking too loud just in case my yuppie boss Steven Koss was within earshot. “How fast does it come on?”
“Wait and see,” said Jerry. “It’s brand new. You can name it, man. Some H. A. biohackers in Redwood City invented it last week. Could be a new scene.” H. A. stood for Hells Angels. Jerry thought highly of H. A. drug suppliers.
Now, on my bicycle, two hours later, passing the liquor store, I realized Jerry’s stuff was hitting me weird, worse than MDMA, this tinker-toy crap some slushed biker chemist had biohacked together—I was grinding my teeth like crazy and for sure it was going to be a good idea to have some booze to smooth the edges.
Basically, I was scared of going nuts just then, with the overhacking and the pot and the speed and now Jerry’s pill on top of it. The images I’d been getting on the machine just before quitting were at wholly new levels of detail in the Mandelbrot set. These were new levels I’d accessed with brand-new hardware boards, and the almost impossible thing is that at the new levels the images were becoming more than two-dimensional. Pa
rtly it was because I was breeding the Mandelbrot set with a chaotic tree pattern, but it had also seemed as if my new, enhanced Mandelbrot set was somehow taking advantage of the screen phosphor’s slight thickness to ruck itself up into faintly gnarled tissues that wanted (I could tell) to slide off the screen, across the desk, and onto my face just like the speedy octopus stage of the creature in that old flick Alien, the stage where the creature grabs onto some guy’s face and forces a sick egg down his esophagus.
Wo!
So I’d left the office, I’d had my tacos and tea, and now calmly calmly I was taking the precautionary measure of picking up a cylindrical pint bottle of Gusano Rojo, a Mexican-bottled distillation of mescal cactus, with an authentic cactus worm (gusano rojo means red worm) on the bottom. I paid the Korean behind the counter, I got back on my bike, I took a few hits of Gusano Rojo, I tucked the bottle in my knapsack, and I started the rest of the way uphill, trying to stave off the pill by ignoring it, even though I couldn’t stop the grinding of my teeth.
I held it all together until the last slope up to our house. The fatigue and the fear and the drugs started to clash really badly, and then the new drug kicked in top-volume, fusing shut the sanity brainswitch I’d desperately been holding open. It was nasty.
I lost control of my bicycle and weaved into the ditch. The bike’s cage protected me, more or less, not that I noticed. The bumps and jolts were like jerky camera motion on a screen. When the picture stopped moving the camera was pointing up into the sky.
I lay there quietly grinding my teeth, like a barnacle sifting seawater, unwilling to move and to stir up more sensations to analyze. The patch of sky I could see included the moon, which was nearly full. Her pale gold face churned with images, though her outline held steady. Dear moon, dear real world.
My calm lasted a few minutes, and then I began to worry. My leg was throbbing, was I badly cut? A car would stop soon; I would be institutionalized or killed; I was really and truly going crazy for good; this would never stop; the whole cozy womany world I leaned on was a rapidly tattering computer pattern on the nonscreen of the angry Void; and actually I was bleeding to death and too wrecked to do anything about it?!?!?
