Complete Stories

by Rudy Rucker

  Wendel’s arm ached where Threakman clutched him. “We gotter go soon, mate!” said the scarred pocket-slug.

  Mom turned her attention toward Wendel too now—she was reaching for him, weeping and laughing. He wasn’t sure if it was psychic or vocal, but he heard her say: “We’re pets, Wendel!” Static. “Waterstriders penned in a corner of the pond.” His mother’s face was lit with unholy bliss. “Live bumper stickers.” A sick peal of laughter.

  There was another ripple in the space around them, and all of a sudden Mom and Dad were only a few feet away. Close enough to touch. Wendel reached out to them.

  “Come on, Mom! Take my hand! Jeremy and I—we can pull you out! You can leave if you want to!”

  How Wendel knew this, he wasn’t sure. But he knew it was true. He could feel it—could feel the relative energy loci, the possibility of pulling free, if you tried.

  “We can go home, Dad! You and me and Mom!”

  “Can’t!” came his Dad’s voice from a squirming gargoyle of his father with a fractal fringe.

  “Dad don’t lie to me! You can do it! Don’t lie! You can come…!”

  His arm ached so—but he waited for the answer.

  Wordlessly, his father emanated regret. Remorse. Shame. “Yes,” he admitted finally. “But I choose this. Mom and I…we want to stay here. Part of the gorgeous Out-Monkey. The eternal fractals.” Static. “… can’t help it. Go away, Wendel!”

  “Have a life, Wendel!” said Mom said. Several versions of her face said it, several different ways. “Don’t come back. The nanomatrix—you can melt it. Acid!” Huge burst of static. “Hurry up now. It heard me!”

  He felt it too: the chilling black-light search beam of the Out-Monkey’s attention, spotlighting him like an escaped prisoner just outside the wall…

  “No, Mom! Come back! Mom—”

  Mom and Dad swirled away from him, their faces breaking up into laughing, jabbering fractals. The white noise grew intolerably loud.

  “Gotter leave!” screamed Threakman in his ear. “Jump!”

  With an impulse that was as much resentment, of running away in fury, as it was a conscious effort, he leapt with Threakman away from the hardening grip of the Out-Monkey, and felt himself spinning out through the dimensions and down the tunnels, he and Threakman in a whirling blur, one almost blending with the other. He thought he caught a glimpse of Threakman’s memories, bleeding over in the strange ambient fields of the place from his companion’s mind: a father with a leather strap; a woman giving him his first blowjob in the backroom of a Sydney bar; working as a sailor; being mugged in London; a stout woman angrily leaving him. All this time Threakman was steering him through the bent spaces, helping him find his way back.

  And then their minds were discrete again, and they were flying through a vortex of faces and pearly-gray glimmer, through a symmetrical lattice of copies of themselves, back out into the Big Bubble space he’d first entered. And just about then the bubble flattened down into normal space—and burst. He was back in the world.

  Wendel knelt in the huge lab room, sobs of fury bubbling out of him, beside the floor mat of the little nanomatrix, slapping his palm flat on the floor, again and again, in his frustration and hurt. Especially, hurt. His dad and mom had chosen that over him. They hadn’t really been inescapably caught—it was a choice. They’d chosen their master, the Out-Monkey; they’d gone into a spinning closed system of onanistic ecstasy; sequestered their hearts in another world, in the pursuit of pleasure and escape. They’d left him alone.

  “Fuck YOU!” he screamed, pounding his fist on the nanomatrix. The magical bit of alien high tech was a fuzzy gray rectangle, for all the world like a cheap plastic doormat. That’s all the lab was, really. An empty room, some instruments, and a scrap of magic carpet on the floor.

  “Roit,” said Threakman hoarsely, slumping down wearily next to him. “My old man, ‘e was the same way. But for ‘im it was the bottle. The Out-Monkeys, they use the ‘igh to pull their pets in. Something sweet ‘n’ sticky—like the bait for a roach motel. And, God ‘elp me, I’m hooked. I won’t make it back out next time. I need to…something else. Bloody hell—anything else.”

  “Mom and Dad coulda left! They weren’t stuck at all!”

  “Yeah. I reckon.” Threakman was tired, shaky. Pale. “Lor’ I feel bad, mate. I miss that rush like it was my only love. Whuh now?”

  Wendel stared down at the nanomatrix. Tiny bubbles glinted in the hairs that covered it, endlessly oozing out from it. It was like a welcome mat that someone had sprinkled with beads of mercury. The little pockets winked up at him, as if say, “Wanna get high?”

  “The chemical factory,” said Wendel. “Right next door. I know where there’s a tank of nitric acid.” He pulled at a corner of the nanomatrix. It was glued to the floor, but with Threakman working at his side, he was able to peel it free. He rolled up the grimy mat and tucked it under his arm, tiny bubbles scattering like dust.

  The clock on the wall outside the lab said 12:03. All that crazy shit in the Big Bubble—it had lasted about a minute of real time. The next team wasn’t scheduled till 2:00 AM. The halls were empty.

  Threakman shambled along at Wendel’s side as Wendel led them out of the Research building and across a filth-choked field to the chemical plant, staying in the shadows on one side. Wendel knew the plant well from all the hours he’d spent looking at it and thinking about modeling it. The guards wouldn’t see them if they cut in over here. They skirted the high, silver cylinder of a cracking tower, alive with pipes, and climbed some mesh-metal stairs that led to a broad catwalk, ten feet across.

  “The acid tank’s that way,” whispered Wendel. “I’ve seen the train cars filling it up.” The rolled up nanomatrix twitched under his arm, as if trying to unroll itself.

  “This’ll be the hard bit,” said Threakman, uneasily. “The Out-Monkeys can see down onto us, I’ll warrant.”

  Wendel tightened his grip on the nanomatrix, holding it tight in both hands. It pushed and shifted, but for the moment, nothing more. They marched forward along the catwalk, their feet making soft clanging noises in the night.

  “That great thumpin’ yellow one with the writin’ on it?” said Threakman, spotting the huge metal tank that held acid. Practically every square foot of the tank was stenciled with safety warnings. “Deadly deadly deadly,” added Threakman with a chuckle. He ran ahead of Wendel to get a closer look, leaning eagerly forward off the edge of the catwalk. “Just my cuppa tea. Wait till I undog this hatch. Let’s get rid of the mat before I change my mind.”

  The nanomatrix was definitely alive, twisting in Wendel’s hands like a big, frantic fish. He stopped walking, concentrating on getting control of the thing, coiling it up tighter than before. “Hurry, Jeremy,” he called. “Get the tank open, and I’ll come throw this fucker in.”

  But now there was a subtle shudder of space, and Wendel heard a voice. “Not so fast, dear friends.”

  A businessman emerged out of thin air, first his legs, then his body, and then his head—as if he were being pasted down onto space. He stood there in his black, tailored suit, poised midway on the catwalk between Wendel and Threakman.

  “George Gravid,” said the businessman. His eyes were dark black mirrors and his suit, on closer inspection, was filthy and rumpled, as if he’d been wearing it for months—or years. “The nanomatrix is DeGroot property, Wendel. Not that I really give a shit. This tune’s about played out. But I’m supposed to talk to you.”

  There was another shudder and a whispering of air, and now Barley and Xiao-Xiao were at Gravid’s side, Barley sneering, and Xiao-Xiao’s little face cold and hard. The plant lights sparkled on their reflective eyes, black and silver and lavender. Wendel took a step back.

  “Run around ‘em, Wendel,” called Threakman. “I got the hatch off. Dodge through!”

  Wendel was fast and small. He had a chance, though the bucking of the nanomatrix was continuously distracting him. He faked to the left
, ran to the right, then cut back to the left again.

  Gravid, Barley, and Xiao-Xiao underwent a jerky stuttering motion—an instantaneous series of jumps—and ended up right in front of him. Barley gave Wendel a contemptuous little slap on the cheek.

  “The Higher One picks us up and puts us down,” said Xiao-Xiao. “You can’t get past us. You have to listen.”

  “You’re being moved around by an Out-Monkey?” said Wendel.

  “That’s a lame-ass term,” said Barley. “They’re Higher Ones. Why did you leave?”

  “You’re its pets,” Wendel said, stomach lurching in revulsion. “Toys.” The fumes from the nitric acid tank were sharp in the air.

  “We’re free agents,” said Gravid. “But it’s better in there than out here.”

  “The mothership’s gonna leave soon,” said Barley. “And we’re goin’ with it. Riding on the hull. Us and your parents. Don’t be a dirt-world loser, Wendel. Come on back.”

  “The Higher One wants you, Wendel,” said Gravid. “Wants to have another complete family. You know how collectors are.”

  The nanomatrix bucked wildly, and a fat silver pocket swelled out of its coiled-up end like a bubble from a bubble pipe. The pocket settled down onto the catwalk, bulging and waiting. Wendel had a sudden deep memory of how good the rush had felt.

  “Whatcher mean, the ship is leavin’?” asked Threakman, drawn over to stare at the bubble, which was half the height of a man now. Its broad navel swirled invitingly.

  “They’ve seen enough of our space now,” said Xiao-Xiao. “They’re moving on. Come on now, Wendel and Jeremy. This is bigger than anything you’ll ever do.” She mimed a sarcastic little kiss, bent over, and squeezed herself into the pocket.

  “I want some too,” said Barley, and followed her.

  “Last call,” said Gravid, going back into the bubble as well.

  And now it was just Wendel and Threakman and the pocket, standing on the catwalk. The nanomatrix lay still in Wendel’s hands.

  “I don’t know as I can live without it, yer know,” said Threakman softly.

  “But you said you want to change,” said Wendel.

  “Roight,” said Threakman bleakly. “I did say.”

  Wendel skirted around the pocket, and walked over to where the acid tank’s open hatch gaped. The nanomatrix had stopped fighting him. He and his world were small; the Out-Monkeys had lost interest. It was a simple matter to throw the plastic mat into the tank, and he watched it fall, end over end.

  Choking fumes wafted out, and Wendel crawled off low down on the catwalk toward the breathable air.

  When he sat up, Threakman and the bubble were both gone. And somewhere deep in his guts, Wendel felt a shudder, as of giant engines moving off. The pockets were gone? Maybe. But there’d always be a high that wanted to eat you alive. Life was a long struggle.

  He walked away from the research center, toward the train station, feeling empty, and hurt—and free.

  There were some things at the apartment he could sell. It would be a start. He would do all right. He’d been taking care of himself for a long time.

  ============

  Note on “Pockets” (Written with John Shirley)

  Written in July, 2000.

  Appeared in Redshift , Roc Books, 2001.

  I first met John at Bruce Sterling’s house in Austin, Texas, 1985. We were there for the first-ever convention panel on cyberpunk. While we were walking around town, John kept sidling up to me and handing me enormous heavy rocks that I’d unthinkingly start carrying. An ant-to-ant exchange. I liked him right away, he has a charmingly skewed view of reality, and an ability to cobble nearly any situation into a story premise.

  In the summer of 2000, John approached me with the first few paragraphs for this story and the invitation to join him in the Red Shift anthology. John figured he needed some mad professor input on how to make his higher-dimensional pockets work. Also, he and I shared an interest in using the pockets as an objective correlative for addiction and recovery. The writing of the story went very smoothly, and I get a kick out of the accent John gave Threakman. Punk forever.

  In March 2003, I convinced John to go backpacking in Big Sur with me and to cap off our trip with a night in the inexpensive bunk-room at the Esalen Institute. This was not a good idea. John got blisters on the hike, and he hated the people at Esalen—as John put it, “You can’t expect me to fit in at Esalen. When I had my band, I used to break beer bottles over my head till the blood ran, and dive off the stage into the audience.” I quarreled with him for making our visit so hard and—let me quote from my journal:

  “Then I mistakenly drank three cups of blackberry sage tea (caffeinated), thinking it was herbal, and that night couldn’t sleep for a really long time. We were in a room with six bunk beds, my bed under John’s, and it bothered me to be physically coupled to his creakings, also to have the plywood bottom of his bed so close to my face. In the wee a.m. hours I moved to the one other vacant bed, an upper bunk. The other guys sharing the room drifted in. Visions of a spaceship crew’s quarters. Image of Shirley crawling towards me across the ceiling of the room, his fingers sticking to the dry-wall like a gecko’s. Outside raged the lethal, silent energy winds of deep space, visible as in my mind’s eye as Riemannian vortex meshes. At this point I actually felt some joy at being there and being embroiled in something so different from quotidien life.”

  We got over the argument—eventually it began seeming funny—and we still see each other every couple of months, most recently when Terry Bisson organized a joint reading for us in San Francisco as “The Dread Lords of Cyberpunk,” where John read from what sounded to be one of his greatest novels yet, The Other End (Cemetery Dance, 2006). The book is about John’s vision of what the Apocalypse might be like if the avenging angels happened to be John’s kind of folks—as opposed to the angels that appear in the Christian Left Behind series of novels about the Rapture and the end of the world. Thus John’s title—he’s describing an other kind of end, an Apocalypse envisioned from the other end of the political spectrum.

  Junk DNA

  (Written with Bruce Sterling)

  Life was hard in old Silicon Valley. Little Janna Gutierrez was a native Valley girl, half Vietnamese, half Latino. She had thoughtful eyes and black hair in high ponytails.

  Her mother Ahn tried without success to sell California real estate. Her father Ruben plugged away inside cold, giant companies like Ctenophore and Lockheed Biological. The family lived in a charmless bungalow in the endless grid of San Jose.

  Janna first learned true bitterness when her parents broke up. Tired of her hard scrabble with a lowly wetware engineer, Anh ran off with Bang Dang, the glamorous owner of an online offshore casino. Dad should have worked hard to win back Mom’s lost affection, but, being an engineer, he contented himself with ruining Bang. He found and exploited every unpatched hole in Bang’s operating system. Bang never knew what hit him.

  Despite Janna’s pleas to come home, Mom stubbornly stuck by her online entrepreneur. She bolstered Bang’s broken income by retailing network porn. Jaded Americans considered porn to be the commonest and most boring thing on the Internet. However, Hollywood glamour still had a moldy cachet in the innocent Third World. Mom spent her workdays dubbing the ethnic characteristics of tribal Somalis and Baluchis onto porn stars. She found the work far more rewarding than real estate.

  Mom’s deviant behavior struck a damp and morbid echo in Janna’s troubled soul. Janna sidestepped her anxieties by obsessively collecting Goob dolls. Designed by glittery-eyed comix freaks from Hong Kong and Tokyo, Goobs were wiggly, squeezable, pettable creatures made of trademarked Ctenophore piezoplastic. These avatars of ultra-cuteness sold off wire racks worldwide, to a generation starved for Nature. Thanks to environmental decline, kids of Janna’s age had never seen authentic wildlife. So they flipped for the Goob menagerie: marmosets with butterfly wings, starfish that scuttled like earwigs, long, furry frankfurter cat-snakes.r />
  Sometimes Janna broke her Goob toys from their mint-in-the-box condition, and dared to play with them. But she quickly learned to absorb her parents’ cultural values, and to live for their business buzz. Janna spent her off-school hours on the Net, pumping-and-dumping collectible Goobs to younger kids in other states.

  Eventually, life in the Valley proved too much for Bang Dang. He pulled up the stakes in his solar-powered RV and drove away, to pursue a more lucrative career, retailing networked toilets. Janna’s luckless Mom, her life reduced to ashes, scraped out a bare living marketing mailing lists to mailing list marketers.

  Janna ground her way through school and made it into U.C. Berkeley. She majored in computational genomics. Janna worked hard on software for hardwiring wetware, but her career timing was off. The latest pulse of biotech start-ups had already come and gone. Janna was reduced to a bottle-scrubbing job at Triple Helix, yet another subdivision of the giant Ctenophore conglomerate.

  On the social front, Janna still lacked a boyfriend. She’d studied so hard she’d been all but dateless through school and college. In her senior year she’d moved in with this cute Korean boy who was in band. But then his mother had come to town with, unbelievable, a blushing North Korean bride for him in tow. So much the obvious advice-column weepie!

  In her glum and lonely evenings, she played you-are-her interactives, romance stories, with a climax where Janna would lip-synch a triumphant, tear-jerking video. On other nights Janna would toy wistfully with her decaying Goob collection. The youth market for the dolls had evaporated with the years. Now fanatical adult collectors were trading the Goobs, stiff and dusty artifacts of their lost consumer childhood.

  And so life went for Janna Gutierrez, every dreary day on the calendar foreclosing some way out. Until the fateful September when Veruschka Zipkinova arrived from Russia, fresh out of biohazard quarantine.

  The zany Zipkinova marched into Triple Helix toting a fancy briefcase with a video display built into its piezoplastic skin. Veruschka was clear-eyed and firm-jawed, with black hair cut very short. She wore a formal black jogging suit with silk stripes on the legs. Her Baltic pallor was newly reddened by California sunburn. She was very thoroughly made up. Lipstick, eye shadow, nails—the works.