by Rudy Rucker
I’m still mind-boggled that the FoneFoon worm has zipped six hours of Jenna’s phone conversations into my server, and that I could have been listening to her all along.
I start thinking about reprogramming Jenna’s mind, about downloading her edited personality back onto her, having used her cell phone conversations as the source code. It’s like I’m supposed to make the talk tape for a Mattel Barbie doll, with all the curse words snipped out.
The Clik—you had to hand it to them. Jenna had scarfed Noelle’s Justfolx pill like Ms. Pac-Man gobbling a power pellet. Give Jenna a few drinks, show her a pill, uncha-yuncha-unch! I start goofing on that, imagining that when Jenna ate the Justfolx pill, she heard the Ms. Pac-Man power-up sound, that happy doodley-doodley-doo music. And then she turned into an 5.4-gigahertz-receptive Elephant vegetable.
There’s still some pieces I don’t understand. If the Clik knew all along they were going to reprogram Jenna, then they would have had to be sure that her cell phone conversations were being saved. The FoneFoon worm played perfectly into their plans. The Clik got Jenna’s talk without actually tapping her. The thing is, I’ve thought all along that Ben Blank wrote the FoneFoon worm—not that I’ve asked him, which would be bad form. Could Ben be working for the Clik? And what about the UFO I saw from the plane? And what’s the deal with the brick of meth the SS threw down for the tweakers? How does that fit in? Have I mentioned that I drink way too much coffee?
I go back to wondering about Jenna. Where in this rambling ranch house might she be stored? Mew? I go so far as to peek out of my room’s door. The Muscle_tx is right there, not looking any too friendly. And when I lean out of my room’s window, I see Brad in a lawn chair. He points at me, like, “Gotcha covered.”
So finally I get to work. I connect my laptop to the Dogyears server box they brought along. Mining the conversations out of the data doesn’t take all that long. I have a clip or two of Jenna’s voice on the Prexy Twins site, and I’m able to write a Perl script to grep my terabytes of FoneFoon for her phoneme patterns. Right as I’m playing some of the files, kind of laughing at the things she says, my own cell phone rings. It’s Hella.
“Wag, you’re in Texas?”
“I’m at the president’s ranch.” I’ve got Jenna’s voice playing in the background. She’s ordering a pizza, hanging up, calling a friend about a picnic, talking to a boy, on and on.
“No way. Who’s that talking, Wag? I hear a girl.”
“It’s Jenna. I—”
My phone goes dead. The Men in Black have cut me off. Great. Now Hella’s heard just enough to think the worst. I open the door and ask the Muscle_tx for (a) a chance to call Hella back and (b) more coffee. He passes the requests along. All I get is the coffee.
My next task turns out to be harder, not technically so much as conceptually. Renshaw asked me to take the cursing, sex, alcohol, and drugs out of the conversations, so that the reprogrammed Jenna won’t be a hell raiser. But exactly why would I actually do things the Clik’s way? They’re too stupid and/or lazy to watch what I’m doing in here, so I’ll do what I please. It’s amazing, when you get right up face-to-face with them, how incredibly lame our lords and masters are. They’re actually relying on my supposed patriotic rah-rah team spirit. It’s like the Clik can’t begin to imagine how much we despise them.
I toy with the idea of editing the conversations in exactly the opposite way they asked me to, leaving nothing but the juicy stuff. But there isn’t really all that much juice, I realize, listening to the tapes. Jenna’s pretty much a regular girl, doing normal things with her friends. I play the conversations speeded up so I can get a fast overview of them. Jenna’s chirping at me like a bird. I start to feel a little sleazy to be listening to her, a little scuzzy for being the guy who runs the Prexy Twins Web site to help people gossip about her. I’m a filthy dog who rolls in garbage and licks his balls.
In the end I decide not to edit the conversations at all. I’ll just try and help Jenna get back to square one.
I get more coffee and start on step three: making the data files contagiously reactive. I use some artificial life hacks, fold it in with some self-modifying code, assemble it onto one of the universal replicator structures that Ben uses to make his viruses, and by the time the night ends, I’ve got some Jenna-based artificial life cooking away in the bowels of my Dogyears server box. Little knots of language and logic, evolving to become more and more contagious. I think of them as Jennions.
The sun is creeping up on the horizon. The massive caffeine intake and the lack of carbohydrates has made me a bit shaky. I lie down on the Texas-sized calf-skin couch.
-----
The next thing I know Brad is poking me awake from a puddle of drool. The sun’s coming in at my eyes at a low angle. I’ve only slept about twenty minutes. My head is pounding and I feel ready to choke someone.
“Is it ready?” asks Brad. “You were asleep.”
I look at my laptop screen. It’s using a graphic display to represent the state of the Jennions. The images right now look kind of like live paisley with ants crawling around in it. Good. When I went to sleep the images just looked like dots and circles.
“It’s ready,” I tell Brad. I punch a few keys to copy the Jennions out of the big server box and into my laptop’s hard drive. And then Brad takes me out to the picnic table in the backyard. Jenna’s sitting there again, still drooling, wearing a pink T-shirt and jeans today.
The Muscle_tx follows me and Brad, as if there were any place I could run to here in the middle of Texas. Renshaw and the Boss_tx are drinking coffee and eating doughnuts while Jenna watches the food-to-mouth movements of the men. I miss my mutt, Larva.
“You’ve extracted the language elements?” asks Renshaw. He sips his coffee and nibbles his doughnut. There aren’t any circular carbohydrates on the table for me. Shit.
“Yep, all ready to beam her down,” I say.
Renshaw chuckles and makes the Star Trek hand sign at me, with his fingers spread to make a V. It occurs to me that, being a Clik scientist, this guy probably doesn’t know squat about computer hacking. I hate him. I hate everyone.
The Boss_tx has finished his coffee and his doughnut. He motions to a sandpit next to the Willow tree and says, “Let’s get this rolling and maybe Jenna will want try out the new volleyball court with you, Wag. That’ll be a treat , huh? We know how fascinated with her you are.”
“I hate volleyball. Give me some fucking coffee. And if you think that—” I stop the beginning of a rant and assess the situation: I’m losing it. I’ve slept twenty minutes, Hella thinks I’m boning Jenna, Larva has probably shat all over my room, I have no idea if Jenna can be fixed, and Dogyears is down the tubes. “Coffee,” I repeat.
The Boss_tx catches my gaze and says, “Relax, Wag.”
“Relaxing makes me tense!” I scream. This is a running joke I have with my sister. The SS totally don’t realize I’m being funny.
On some sort of silent cue from the Boss_tx, the Muscle_tx grabs my thumbs, pulls them behind my back, and mutters, “Welcome to Texas,” in my ear.
At this moment, George Dubya walks out of the ranch house in a jogging suit, carrying a tray with more breakfast supplies. I feel a wave of affection for the man.
“Pleased to see y’all up and at ‘em,” says George. “We gonna fix my girl?” His we’re-all-working-together attitude calms the tense situation I’ve created. The Muscle_tx lets up
And now finally I get my breakfast. “I’ve got the agents organized and ready to go,” I say, mouth full. “Right here in my laptop. The Jennions.”
Renshaw lifts a box up from under the table. It’s one of those Ricochet cell phone repeater antennas like you see on lampposts all over San Francisco! “This is the kind transmitter we’re particularly interested in learning to use,” he says. It’s like this whole thing’s been set up as a science experiment for the Clik. Poor Jenna.
Now Brad weighs in . “I saw some druggie San Francisco�
�type colored patterns on Wag’s laptop in the house. I’m not sure he’s really made the program sufficiently Elephant-oriented.” What an ass kisser.
“There’s nothing in there but Jenna,” I say. “And, if you want to know, I didn’t edit her words at all. If it works right, she’ll be the same as she used to be. Take it or leave it.”
George’s face gets that inspirational, leader-of-the-nation glow. “That’s the way it should be. She’s fine the way she was.” He pats Jenna’s shoulder. “Would you like a doughnut, dear?”
“OK.” She gobbles it in two bites.
Meanwhile Renshaw jacks a special wireless card into my laptop and turns a switch on the repeater box. On my laptop screen, I drag the Jennion icon to the fresh icon for the wireless card, and now the repeater is beaming out Jennion code at 5.4 gigahertz. The microwaves go right through George, Renshaw, the SS guys, and me, but it’s digging into Jenna’s Justfolx-sensitized brain.
Jenna freezes real still for about twenty seconds. Like a startled deer. And suddenly her face lights up, chubby and friendly, she’s like a regular person, yes, I’m meeting Jenna Bush at last.
But then, crap, she opens her mouth and starts making a noise like fax machine or a 560 modem. She jumps up and runs over to the TV satellite dish on the lawn, spewing out that noise all the while. She stops by the antenna and rocks back and forth until her mouth is in the direct focus of the parabolic dish.
“Is this part of the process?” asks Brad. Good show of out-of-the-box thinking, Brad!
“She’s transmitting, dude.” I say. Jenna’s sending some kind of signal into the antenna and up into the satellites in the sky. The SS operatives look at me like they’re ready for the Vulcan nerve-pinch session again. “But, hey, don’t blame me!”
Jenna finishes doing her thing, shuts her mouth, and walks back to the table.
“Thanks, Wag,” she says . “You fixed me good.”
“Jenna dear, is that you?” asks the president.
“Yeah, Dad. I’m back. But now there’s a whole ‘nother consciousness in me as well. Call her NuJenna. She’s from the stars.”
Jenna’s expression changes. She’s looking at us with incredible wisdom in her eyes. Like the picture of Mahatma Gandhi I saw on an Apple billboard near my server hotel. “You and the Clik have done well, Renshaw,” she says in a high-pitched, mellow tone. “It was we who posted the Justfolx recipe.”
George’s cell phone rings and he picks it up for a brief conversation. His end goes like this.
“They did?”
“I see.”
“We can fix that.”
“We can’t fix that?”
“I see.”
“They will?”
“We can’t fix that?”
“I see.”
He hangs up and runs his hands across his face.
“Back to baseball for me,” he says with a crooked smile.
“The Clik needs a period of chaos, Daddy,” says Jenna’s sweet voice. For the moment she’s the chubby college kid again. “Until the new order settles in. So NuJenna and I told everyone the truth about your administration, about the rigged election, about Cheney’s crimes, about Osama and the Fair Play for House of Saud committee. I like being so smart with NuJenna in me.” Jenna blushes when she says she likes being smart. And I get the feeling that shutting down the Elephant administration has made her feel just a little bit sorry for Dad.
She switches back to NuJenna mode. “All your microwave telephone transmissions are watermarked by our personalities,” she intones. “Thanks to this proof of concept, we’ll be downloading into multiple exemplars quite soon. We’ll adopt your artificial life protocol wholesale, Wag.”
“It’s an alien invasion!” I exclaim, filling in the blanks so George Bush won’t think I’m an evildoer. “Their personality patterns were in the air. They were watermarked into the those phone conversations that I used to reprogram your daughter’s brain.”
“Clever Wag,” says NuJenna, favoring me with a serene smile. I have a feeling she’s able to read my mind. Is she going to investigate my body functions with a probe? “We come from the core of your Milky Way galaxy,” she continues. “Our world was lost to a spacequake thousands of years ago. Just before the moment of destruction we launched an ark.” She points up into the sky. “A ship carrying our culture’s most sacred artifacts: the encrypted and compressed personality waves of each and every one of our citizens. For millennia, the ship has wandered, seeking a world with a wetware race to host our software.”
And now, yes, an endlessly tumbling polyhedron is descending down upon Dubya’s Crawford Ranch. “Behold,” says NuJenna. Jenna’s voice returns and she excitedly says, “Don’t worry, Daddy, I’ll be back in a month! I have to go to Humboldt County! We’re starting a colony!”
The vehicle’s door opens, laying a great slab of light onto the lawn. There’s nothing to be seen inside but row upon row of crystals, set into the walls. Jenna holds her arms forward like a zombie, then stomps across the grass and into the UFO’s waiting maw. The hyperpolyhedron folds through itself and disappears.
George glares at me. “Get him the hell outta here,” he tells the SS. “He’s screwed Jenna up worse than before. And chop up his goddamn machines with an ax.” And then he gets busy with his cell phone, trying to save the Elephant Party’s big gray ass.
-----
Brad drops me off at the airport and I fly economy to San Francisco. Back in cattle class where I belong. I’m cramped, but I sleep the whole flight.
In the San Francisco terminal, a copper-helmeted Hella greets me with a big kiss and excited eyes. “Jenna visited us in her UFO! She stopped in our neighborhood to pick up the tweakers. Oh, Wag, I love you. The aliens are real happy you hacked together a way for them to download. Jenna promised an interview for your Prexy Twins site! I hope you didn’t try to wire brush her like you and Ben are always saying?”
“Uhhh…I didn’t touch her.” I’m about six steps behind. “Why are you wearing a copper helmet?”
“Rumbo said it was a good idea, in case the Justfolx drug gets into the water or the food. The Clik put Justfolx in the tweakers’ meth, so they’re all hosting alien minds now. I have a helmet for you in the car.”
On the drive home from the airport, sweet Hella fills me in on all that I’ve missed. Thanks to the news that Jenna and NuJenna released, the Elephants are ruined. It’s like the Berlin Wall falling, like the Russians getting rid of the Communists. All at once it’s finally time. On the alien front, Jenna is on TV in her NuJenna mode, recruiting human volunteers to share their brains with aliens. The aliens want clean new helpers, not just the tweakers they already have. “Humans only use ten percent of their brains, share your head with an alien and live like a king in Humboldt County!”
Pulling up to the Dogyears headquarters, Ben greets me and says, “Don’t worry Wag, The Mummy Bum Cult has already pulled your data back out of the web watermarks. Your ISP is up on my boxes and I even patched some old security holes you had. Bye.”
Ben is never one for face-to-face conversation. I’ll get the FoneFoon scoop from him on chat later. Now it’s time to go hang out on the roof with Hella. With our helmets, we’re safe from alien takeover. Maybe Jenna will come give us a tour of the UFO. Maybe I can dose Larva with Justfolx and have a pet alien dog. Maybe I can work on the peer-to-peer telepathy project. Maybe Hella and I can just look at the sky together and talk about aliens.
The Clik lives, Dogyears lives, the aliens live, Hella lives, and Larva needs some kibble. We’re all indestructible.
============
Note on “Jenna and Me” (Written with Rudy Rucker Jr.)
Written in June, 2002.
Infinite Matrix, February 2003.
My son Rudy Rucker Jr. runs an ISP (Internet Service Provider) called Monkeybrains, at www.monkeybrains.net in San Francisco. For political and artistic reasons that he never fully clarified to me, Rudy created the Web site www.thefirst
twins.com, devoted to the doings of then-President George W. Bush’s twin daughters, Jenna and Barbara. Understand that my son is my no means a Young Republican.
When one of his Web site readers posted a threatening comment about the president’s family, some Secret Service agents actually came to pay Rudy a visit, checking him out. A few months later, some anonymous person begin distributing the so-called BadTrans Internet worm, which infected people’s computers and sent a log of all their keyboard inputs to a free account at Monkeybrains. Rudy received another visit from the authorities; this time it was the FBI, with a warrant to impound the trillion or so snoop-bytes received by the anonymous hacker using Rudy’s server machines.
Perhaps not-so-coincidentally, the BadTrans worm hit the Internet four days after the FBI had announced the development of some spyware called Magic Lantern, a key stroke logging mechanism which, when properly rubbed, will reveal people’s passwords for encrypted data. You can read more about all this at a site Rudy made, https://badtrans.monkeybrains.net.
In any case, with my son being hounded by both the Secret Service and the FBI for a site he’d made about the freakin’ first twins, it seemed like a good idea to help him work through his motivations by writing a transreal story about the whole bizarre scene. It was great fun working together, kind of like the time the two of us built a house for our dog Arf, and for me a nice vacation from writing about professorial types. To cap the pleasure, Rudy and I gave a joint Father’s Day reading of our story at a club in the Mission in San Francisco. A night to remember.
Six Thought Experiments Concerning the Nature of Computation
Experiment 1: Lucky Number
The first Sunday in October, Doug Cardano drove in for an extra day’s work at Giga Games. Crunch time. The nimrods in marketing had committed to shipping a virtual reality golf game in time for the holiday season. NuGolf. It was supposed to have five eighteen-hole courses, all of them new, all of them landscaped by Doug.
