Complete Stories

by Rudy Rucker

  Wo. I sat up. The bike’s front wheel was broken. I dragged my machine up the road’s low sand embankment and shoved it into the manzanita chaparral. There was a tussocky meadowlet of soft grass and yellow-blossomed wood-sorrel a few meters further in. All the plants smiled at me and said, “Hello.” I lolled down and took a hit off my pint. Donna would be worried, but I couldn’t hack going home just yet. I needed to lay out here in the moonlight a minute and enjoy my medication. I was pretty together after all; the clashing was all over and the drugs had like balanced each other out. Though I was in orbit, I was by no means out to lunch. My skin felt prickly, like just before a thunderstorm.

  And that’s when the creature came for me—all the way from the place where zero and infinity are the same.

  The first unusual thing I noticed was a lot of colored fireflies darting around, all red, yellow and green. I could tell they weren’t hallucinations because they kept bumping into me. And then all at once there was this giant light moving up the hillside towards me. The light was so big and so bright that the manzanita bushes cast shadows. At first I was scared it was a police helicopter, and I scooted closer to the bushes to hide. The light kept getting brighter, so bright that I thought it was a nuclear explosion. I didn’t want to be blinded, so I closed my eyes.

  And then nothing was happening, except there was a kind of hissing sound, really rich and complicated hissing, like a thousand soft radios playing at once. I opened my eyes back up and the light was overhead. It was hovering right over me, hissing and sputtering in a whispery way. I decided it was a UFO.

  I knew the aliens could do whatever they wanted, and I knew they saw me, so I just lay there staring up at the ship. It was maybe fifty feet overhead and maybe fifty feet long. Or maybe a hundred and a hundred…it was kind of hard to tell. There were zillions of those fireflies now; and the ones high off the ground and closer to the ship seemed larger. There were thin tendrils connecting the fireflies to the ship so that the whole thing was like a jellyfish with bumpy tentacles hanging down, though by the time they got to the ground the tendrils were too small to see, so that it looked like the “fireflies” weren’t connected. I reached out and caught a couple of them…they were tingly and hard to hold on to. My skin was prickling like mad.

  I yelled “Hello!” up at the UFO just so it would know I was an intelligent being. And then I was thinking maybe it had come especially to see me, so I yelled, “Welcome! My name is Will Coyote! I’m a hacker!” For the time being the mothership just stayed up there, hissing and with all its tendrils wafting this way and that like beautiful strings of Tivoli lights flashing red, yellow and green.

  The ship itself was shaped in three main parts. There was a great big back section with a dimple in it, and then there was a smaller spherical section attached opposite the dimple, and sticking out of the front of the sphere section was a long spike kind of thing. It was just like—oh my God!—just like a giant three-dimensional Mandelbrot set! Though also like a beetle in a way, and like a jellyfish.

  The UFO came lower and then some of the thicker tendrils were brushing against me. They felt shuddery, like the metal on a shorted out toaster. I figured the prickly feeling I’d been getting was from invisible fine tendrils that I couldn’t see. Could it be possible the thing was going to eat me like a Portuguese man-of-war that’s got hold of a small fish? I screamed out, “Don’t hurt me, I’m an intelligent being like you!” and the thing hissed louder, and then suddenly the hissing Fourier-transformed itself into a human voice. A woman’s voice.

  “Don’t worry, William, I am very grateful to you. I wish to take you for a ride.”

  I tried to stand up then, but I was too fucking zoned. So I just smiled and stretched by arms up to the big UFO ass. UFO? This had to be a hallucination. Slowly, slowly, it came lower.

  The tendrils were thick as vines, and the fireflies on the tendrils were as big as grapefruits and baseballs. Since this whole ship was a fractal, each of the firefly globs was a three-sectioned thing like the main body: each of them was a dimpled round ass part with a little antennaed head-sphere stuck onto it. This was absolutely the best graphic ever. I was really happy.

  I took one of the baby Mandelbrot sets in my hands and peered at it. It was warm and jittery as a pet mouse. Even though the little globster was vague at the edges, it was solid in the middle. Better than a graphic. I cradled it and touched it to my face. As the big mamma came lower I kept calm by wondering if she was real.

  I stayed cool right up to when the giant ass landed on me and began pressing me down against the ground—pressing so hard that I could barely breathe. Was I like dying or some shit? Had I passed out, gotten apnea, and forgotten to breathe? I blinked and looked again, but the ass was still there; and right up against my face was the incredibly detailed female hide of a gigantic three dimensional Mandelbrot set, man, like all covered with warts on warts and cracks in cracks and bristles’n’bristles evverywhaaar, oh sisters and brothers, and the whole thing rippling with every color of the rainbow and loaded with such a strong electric charge that my nose prickled and I had to sneeze.

  The sneeze changed something. Everything got black. Now I was really dead, right?

  “Welcome aboard, William,” came the deep, thrilling voice of the mandelsphere’s dark innards. “My name is Ma.”

  It was not wholly dark, no indeed—there were objects, but objects of such a refined and subtle nature that, likely as not, I would normally have walked right through them, except that here I had nothing else to walk into or through, so they became real to me.

  It was not really dark, and it was not really small inside Ma. The space within was the mirror of the space without. While the outside of the Mandelbrot set’s hide was crowded and entangled, the hide’s inside was endlessly spacious. There being nowhere in particular to go, I sat myself down in a faintly glowing blue armchair and spoke.

  “Where are you from?”

  “I am everywhere; beyond all space, and within the tiniest motes. I am any size that wants me. You called me here.”

  “It’s good to see all that programming finally pay off.” I was giddy with excitement. “Can I get a drink?”

  Faint shapes wafted around me, and then a long luminous beaker of yellow was in my hand. I sucked greedily at the pure energy fluid. This was the kind of rest I deserved after all that mindbreaking hacking: always shifting bits left and right to make bytes, masking the bytes together into register-sized words, generating lookup tables, finding room for the tables in RAM, feeding the output into the color display ports…I drank and drank, and my glass was always full.

  One pale shape after another came to me, flowed over me, and gave way to the next one. Each was reading me like a book, accessing me like a hypertext, learning the nature of my familiar world. It seemed that each could sense me in a slightly different way. While they read me, I thought questions and they thought answers back.

  The shapes were like different body parts—each an aspect of the single higher-dimensional entity called Ma.

  According to Ma, the smallest and largest sizes were one and the same. That was her native habitat.

  Ma needed my presence to easily stay at this size-scale; for her it was more natural to exist as a quark or a universe. I was like a snag in a rushing river for her to hold onto.

  Despite that, said Ma, there was only one thing at all, and that one thing was Ma.

  “Am I you?”

  “You are a pattern in the potentially infinite computation that is the universe; and I am the actually infinite end of said computation. I am all space and all time. The world you live in is happening; my essence is what comes before and after your mundane time.”

  “How long is the program that starts it all?”

  “Two bits. One Zero.”

  “What about all the details?”

  “You’d call it ‘screen wrap.’ Patterns grow out and around and come back over themselves and make fringes. It adds up over the billions of y
ears, especially when you remember that each point in space is updating the computation each instant. Each of those points is me; I’m the rule that runs it all; and looked at the other way, I’m all the past and all the future.”

  “I can totally dig it, Ma. The universe has a simple code and a long rich parallel computation. There are infinitely many size scales so in fact each orange or atom has everything inside it. Right on. What about uncertainty and Planck’s constant, though. Is that a hassle for you, Ma?”

  She got into a complex answer involving infinite-dimensional Hilbert space—the human modes of thinking were new to her so we had some back and forth about it—and the conversation drifted on. Talking mathematical metaphysics, lolling on my ethereal couch, sipping my invigorating energy drink, and with the eager phantom Ma figures mounting me like harem girls, I swore I’d never been so happy. But then, all at once, the joy ended.

  “Two more people are here,” said Ma’s sweet voice. “One of them is—Ow!” There was a sputtering and a lashing. “They’ve torn off a piece of me,” she screamed. “And now…oh no—”

  There was a brainsplitting cry of pure agony, a pop, and then I thudded to the hard ground.

  “Will! Hey, Will!” It was my wife, Donna, and my boss, Stephen Koss. They were proud of themselves for “saving” me.

  “Yeah,” gloated Koss, stupid yuppie that he was. “I shot it with my Tazer.” He held up a stubby box with two wires trailing out of it. “Was some kind of anomalous electromagnetic field, I guess, and my jolt disrupted it. You feeling okay, big guy?”

  “Why did you shoot it?” I asked, sitting up. “It was so beautiful!”

  “It was going for your wife!” he snapped. I noticed that he had his arm across her shoulders.

  Donna’s face was a white patch inside her long, hanging-down dark hair. “Are you all right, Will? What happened was I pulled off one of the baby globbies, and it started screaming and flashing checkerboard sparks.” She held something cradled against her breasts. It glowed.

  “You got a baby Ma?” I cried, getting to my feet.

  Donna cracked her fingers so Koss and I could peek in and see a flowing, colored, tiny Ma. Donna held it tight as a baby. Its little tail or spike stuck out below her hands. The tail was knobbed with tinier Mas.

  “I broke it off the big one, and the big one got mad,” smiled Donna. “Do you think we could keep this one for a pet?”

  “Pet, hell,” said Koss. “We can sell them.”

  The magic energy drink Ma’d given me had gotten my head back together pretty good. The three of us went on up to our house on top of the hill, Donna and I in our dingy Honda, Koss following behind in his Jaguar with my wrecked bike.

  “I was really worried when you didn’t come home,” said Donna. She was driving and I was holding the baby Ma. Ma felt good to my hands.

  “I called Micromax and nobody was there except that thing, that AI answering machine,” continued Donna. She didn’t sound particularly friendly. “So I decided to drive downtown and look for you. I just knew you’d be drunk and stoned again. God, I’m sick of you, Will. You never notice me anymore.”

  “Don’t start nagging me, Donna.”

  “Oh, right. That’s what you always say: Don’t talk, Donna, be quiet. Well, I’ve had it, Will, with your computer and your drugs. When was the last time you bothered to touch me? I need love, Will, I need someone who’ll listen to me!”

  What she said was true, but why did she have to start in on it now? “I hear you, Donna, loud and clear. Can you tell me more about how you found me?”

  She sighed and shook her head and grudgingly told me the rest. “Halfway down the hill I saw this huge bright light UFO sitting on the ground. I got out and looked at it, and after awhile I picked a bud off it. It got all upset. That’s all.”

  “How does Koss fit in?” I demanded. “Who told him to show up with his asshole electric gun?”

  “Steven thought I was in danger,” said Donna. “He cares about me. Not like you, Will, so stoned and hacked you don’t know the first thing about me anymore. Steven showed up in his Jaguar right before I picked the bud. He said the stupid AI thing at Micromax called him to tell him a window was broken. And when he went there he found your terminal’s glass all broken out, too. He thinks the UFO thing came from your computer, Will.”

  “Her name is Ma, Donna. She’s an infinite fractal from Hilbert space. This little one is all of her. Each of her bumps is all of her. She’s every particle, and she’s the whole world.” I held Ma up to my face and kissed her warty tingly hide. Each time I kissed her she grew a little. Donna sighed heavily.

  Back at the house, I couldn’t get Koss to leave. He was all fired up with excitement from having killed something. Jock, caveman, yuppie—all the same. He preened himself in front of the disgustingly attentive Donna, laying down his moronic rap about what he thought had happened.

  “I was in the exercise room working out with my exercise machine—hey, I need it every day, guys—and then the emergency phone’s all ringing from our AI about a broken window. I get in my Jag, cruise down there, and find Will’s fifteen thousand dollar Mitsubishi VGA with the front screen blown away. I’m wondering if one of Will’s dusted-out friends’ve blown him away or what. I decide not to call the pig in, I board up the broken window—then outside I’m all what’s that light on the hillside? I wind the Jag on up here and it’s some kind of atmospheric plasma display? Donna’s standing under it looking real fine—and she’s got the idea to tear off a little bud from it and all at once it’s violent.”

  By this point Koss was pacing and pounding his hand with his fit tan fist, reliving the big play. “At the speeds I travel, you can’t waste time saying why. You just react. I snapped my Jaguar’s utility boot open and got out the heavy-duty stungun I keep in there in case of trouble. Sucker’s got a gunpowder charge that shoots two metal fishhook electrodes twenty yards. Those ‘trodes pack 150 volts! I aimed steady and I nailed that big mother right in its butt. FFFFFTT!”

  “Big deal,” I said. “Donna already told me.”

  “Let’s tear another glob off that little one,” said Koss.

  “You better not,” said Donna. “It’ll get violent!”

  “This little one can’t hurt us,” chortled Koss, snatching it out of my hands and tearing off a bud.

  Little Ma screamed, but only I could hear her. She got an ugly cyan/white/magenta for a few minutes, and her broken tendril shot out black and white sparks, but a minute later she was a calm red/yellow/green and the sparking spot had healed over.

  “Check it out, Donna!” exulted Koss. “We got work to do!” He pulled off another bud and another. “Like artichokes!”

  “How exciting,” squealed Donna.

  I just wanted to be alone with a Ma and grow it big enough to get inside again, but Koss got on my case about how I should write up a sample ad for the new company we were going to start. I told him to get fucked. Donna frowned at me and wrote an ad that was so bogus that I rewrote it. The finished version went like this:

  -----

  WONDERGLOBS

  The living Wonderglob is an object of unparalleled beauty. Like God or the Universe itself, the Wonderglob feeds on YOUR attention—the more you look at it, the larger it grows.

  Perhaps the most satisfying aspect of owning a Wonderglob is that you can HARVEST BUDS from it and, under our franchising agreement, SELL these buds to your friends! The initial investment pays for itself in a matter of weeks!

  The Wonderglob dislikes electricity and is easily kept captive in our patented Wondertanks, whose metal-plated glass sides carry a small electric charge. The Wonderglob may be removed for play and meditation, but be sure to replace it in the Wondertank, particularly after harvesting.

  -----

  We didn’t happen to have any “patented Wondertanks” handy, but Donna had the idea of hooking a wire to the tightly woven steel mesh of our old djinkotl cage and keeping the buds in there. The Mas hated
it, man, they were shrinking steadily. Meanwhile Koss was giving Donna lines of coke and jabbering about money. I couldn’t tell if things were as bad as they seemed, or worse. I chilled and crashed.

  I snapped awake at 4:00 A. M. the way I sometimes do. Like if I go to bed wrecked, the survival reflex wakes me as soon as the limbic systems reboot. I wake up to assess the damages. Am I in bed? Who did I phone? What did I break?

  Donna wasn’t in bed with me. I got up and went in the living room. There was Koss putting it to her right there on our rug, her legs wrapped around his dumb cheeks. My Mas are dying specks in a shitty lizard’s cage and Koss here is putting it to my wife? While torturing my dreams for gain?

  I picked up the djinkotl cage and headed outside. Koss and Donna barely noticed.

  It so happens I know my woods like the back of my own prick. I went around the hill to a green boulder redwood gully, a special spot all ferned and purling, with small white flowers and soggy mosses and rivulets underfoot, and overhead clear sky and stars past the tall trees. I took the Ma buds out of djinkotl cage—sixteen of them in all—and held them in my hands and mooshed down into soft trickly moss where living water could well in through my finger cracks and feed the ripped off and the newborn buds.

  They drank the water avidly; they grew closer to my size. I could hear her/their happy thoughts. Ma’d never tasted water at this size scale before. The newly harvested buds stopped at the size of oranges, while Donna’s maimed original puffed up to womansize and continued to grow. Big Ma.

  The spots where Koss had torn buds off were flat scars covered with a fine fractal down of new growth. Each of the new baby buds bore a single birth-scar, a kind of navel hidden in the cheeks of her swelling behind. Ma’s girls.