by Rudy Rucker
Looking out the damp taxi’s window on the ride uptown, he took in every detail. People’s gestures, their magnificent faces. Usually he didn’t pay so much attention, feeling he’d be overloaded if he let everything in. But today he was like a photo album with an endless supply of fresh pages. A digital camera with an inexhaustible memory card. Calmly he absorbed the passing pageant.
At Sixty-Sixth Street the cab turned and drove to the research campus beside the East River. Jake didn’t often visit Rosalie at work, and the guard at the desk called her on a speaker phone for permission.
“Jake?” she exclaimed in surprise. “You’re here? I was just about to call you.”
“Something’s happened to me,” he said. “I want to see you.”
“Perfect,” said Rosalie. “Let him in, Dan.”
The building was old, with shiny gray linoleum floors. Nothing to count but the hallway doors. Rosalie’s short-cropped dark head popped out of the last one. Her personal lab. She smiled and beckoned, filled with some news of her own.
“You’ve gotta see my organic microscope,” exclaimed Rosalie, drawing him into her quarters. It was just the two of them there.
“Wait,” interrupted Jake. “I counted every brick on Lexington Avenue. And then I counted to infinity.”
“Every brick?” said Rosalie, not taking him seriously. “Sounds like you did the tax forms without a calculator again.”
“I’m thinking things that are physically impossible,” said Jake solemnly. “Maybe I’m dying.”
“You look fine,” said Rosalie, planting a kiss on his cheek. “It’s good to see you out of that gray Barney’s suit. The news here is the opposite. My new scope is real, but what it’s doing is unthinkable.” She gestured at a glowing, irregularly shaped display screen. “I came up with this gnarly idea for a new approach to microscopy, and I had Nick in the genomics group grow the biotech components for me. It uses a kind of octopus skin for the display, so I call it a skinscope. It’s the end, Jake. It zooms in—like forever. A Zeno infinity in four seconds. Patentable for sure.” She closed her office door and lowered her voice. “We need to talk intellectual property, lawyer mine.”
“I’m tired of being a lawyer,” murmured Jake, intoxicated by Rosalie’s presence. With his new sensitivity, he was hearing all the echoes and overtones of their melding voices in the little room, visualizing the endless sum of component frequencies. How nice it would be to work with Rosalie every day. Her face held fourteen million shades of pink.
“Here we go,” said Rosalie, blithely flicking a switch attached to the skinscope.
The display’s skin flickered and began bringing forth images of startling clarity and hue, the first a desultory paramecium poking around for food. Jake thought of a mustached paralegal picking through depositions. The skinscope shuddered and the zoom began. They flew through the microbe’s core, down past its twinkling genes into a carbon atom. The atom’s nucleus bloated up like the sun and inside it danced a swarm of firefly lights.
“This is inconceivable,” said Rosalie. “We’re already at the femtometer level. And it’s only getting started. It goes through all the decimals, you dig.”
A firefly broke into spirals of sparks, a spark unfolded into knotted strings, a string opened into tunnels of cartoon hearts, a heart divulged a ring of golden keys, a key flaked into a swarm of butterflies. Each image lasted half as long as the one before.
“I’m losing it now,” said Rosalie, but Jake stayed with the zoom, riding the endless torrent of images.
“Infinity,” he said when it was done. “I saw it all.”
“And to hell with quantum mechanics,” mused Rosalie. “My Jake. It’s a sign, both these things happening to us today. The world is using us to make something new.”
“But the skinscope patent will belong to the labs,” said Jake. “I remember the clause from your contract.”
“What if I quit the lab?” said Rosalie. “I’m tired of thinking about disease.”
“We could start a company,” said Jake. “Develop skinscope applications.”
“We’ll use them like infinite computers, Jake. A box to simulate every possible option in a couple of seconds. No round-off, no compromise, all the details. You can be the chief engineer.”
“Kind of late for a career change,” said Jake.
“You can do it,” said Rosalie. “You’ll teach our programmers to see infinity. Teach me now. Show me how you learned.”
“Okay,” said Jake, taking out his pencil and jotting down some figures. “Add the first two lines and subtract the third one…”
============
Note on “Six Thought Experiments Concerning the Nature of Computation”
Written Fall, 2003.
The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2005.
When I moved to Silicon Valley some twenty years ago to work as a computer science professor, I thought of myself as a writer on assignment. I was here to quickly write a popular book explaining the meaning of computers. But I went native on the story, and I really did become a computer scientist. As I mentioned earlier in these notes, I recently pulled free of the computer science tar-baby and retired from teaching. Once retired, I had the time to finally write my big computer book: The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul: What Gnarly Computation Taught Me about Ultimate Reality, the Meaning of Life, and How to Be Happy.
By way of lightening up my tome, I wrote a short-short story to introduce each of the six chapters which were themed, respectively, on computer science, physics, biology, psychology, sociology, and philosophy—an ascending chain of thought. Thus these six thought experiments.
Although I claim that each of the stories has to do with the nature of computation, this isn’t obvious in each case, so I’ll say a bit about the individual stories.
“Lucky Number” is about the idea that maybe there is a single underlying computation that generates the world. Although I’m sympathetic to the idea that we can usefully think of any given natural process as being a computation of sorts, I’m not sure if there really does have to be one ultimate computation underneath it all. It could be that reality is an endless onion, with layer beneath layer, and there isn’t any one rule that makes it all. For the setting of this story, I used the Electronic Arts game company campus on the San Francisco Bay; I visited my former student Alan Borecky when he was a game programmer there.
“The Million Chakras” deals with parallel worlds. I’m not sure the twist ending really bears close scientific analysis—but let’s not break the butterfly upon the wheel. You might wonder what this story has to do with the nature of computation. The context is that, in the chapter the story introduces, I discuss quantum computation and the scientist David Deutsch’s claim that a quantum computer manages to carry out a number simultaneous computations in parallel worlds.
“Aint Paint” involves morphogenesis, that is, the more or less computational process by which organisms grow their forms. Shortly before his death, the computer scientist Alan Turing began working with computer simulations in which simple inputs evolve into organic-looking two- and three-dimensional forms. Over the years, I’ve done a lot of research into these types of computer programs, which are called cellular automata. You can download a nice cellular automata program called CAPOW from my nonfiction book’s Web site, http://www.rudyrucker.com/lifebox. The free download comes with a loadable parameter file named Aint Paint.CAS, which displays precisely the kinds of live graphics that inspired this tale.
“Terry’s Talker” develops a notion I’ve thought about a lot: the lifebox. I also discuss the lifebox in my novel Saucer Wisdom (Tor Books, 1999), and in my story, “Soft Death” (reprinted in my collection Gnarl!, Four Walls Eight Windows, 2000). I’m almost surprised that lifeboxes aren’t already on the market, although to some extent blogs are playing this role. I do think of my ever-expanding Web site www.rudyrucker.com as being more or less my lifebox, although of course it doesn’t
have any AI software to run it, just a search window in the blog. But for many conversations that’s about all you’d need.
“The Kind Rain,” plays with emergent intelligence. It sometimes happens that the behavior of a group of simple agents exhibits a higher intelligence than the agents themselves; think of an ant colony, a flock or birds, a school of fish, or, for that matter, a human society. Of course I’m pushing it to suppose that somehow a storm of rain drops might evolve into an intelligent and sympathetic mind, but, hey, it makes for a striking thought experiment. The setting for this story is the tumbledown house my family and I rented in Los Gatos when we moved to California in 1986; the house was also the setting for my novel The Hacker and the Ants (reprinted by Four Walls Eight Windows, 2002).
“Hello Infinity” was inspired by an idea I proposed in the last chapter of my Lifebox tome. I suggested there that we might define a computation to be a physical process that embodies a possible thought. Of course I then wondered whether there might be some things that aren’t like possible thoughts and aren’t like ordinary physical processes. “Hello Infinity” is a thought experiment presenting a man who starts having infinite thoughts and a woman who learns that matter is infinitely divisible. Our whole philosophy of science would have to change were infinities really to occur in the natural world—and I seriously think this is possible, even though this line of thought is very much out of fashion right now. My interest in infinity goes back to the 1970s, when I wrote my doctoral dissertation on infinite sets. My first popular science nonfiction book was Infinity and the Mind (reprinted by Princeton University Press, 2005), and I also wrote a novel about physical and mental infinities: White Light (reprinted by Four Walls Eight Windows, 2001).
MS Found in a Minidrive
In the summer of 2004, while traveling in the West, I found a small electronic device in a meadow near Boulder, Colorado. It was a fingertip-sized minidrive of the type that can be plugged into the port of a laptop computer. There was but a single document stored upon the drive: the story that I have appropriated and printed below. The actual author, one Professor Gregge Crane , seems to have gone permanently missing. — R. R.
This summer I was asked to submit a piece for an anthology of tales inspired by Edgar Allan Poe. The publisher’s somewhat tendentious idea for the book was that each contributor should create a story relating to one and the same unfinished Poe manuscript.
The seed-fragment in question, known as the “The Lighthouse,” takes the form of a few journal entries by a disinherited young noble (poor Eddie’s perennial theme!) who has signed up for a stint as a solitary lighthouse keeper on a shoal of rock in some far Northern sea.
The reader quickly senses there will be trouble within and without. On the one hand, “there is no telling what may happen to a man all alone as I am—I may get sick, or worse …” and on the other, “the sea has been known to run higher here than anywhere with the single exception of the Western opening of the Straits of Magellan.”
There’s something unsettling about the lighthouse’s construction. The space within the tower’s shaft extends so low that “the floor is twenty feet below the surface of the sea, even at low tide. It seems to me that the hollow interior at the bottom should have been filled in with solid masonry. Undoubtedly the whole would have been rendered more safe—but what am I thinking about?”
One final, portentous observation: “The basis on which the structure rests seems to be chalk… .”
And here Poe’s fragment ends.
-----
I’m a well-connected scholar of American Literature, which is why I was offered the opportunity to join the anthology. But I’m not a man with a mad imagination. Transmuting so slight a start into a full-blown weird tale seemed a tall order for me. Although I love writing, and writers, I’ve never quite found my own connection to the starry dynamo of night.
Be that as it may, I was gung-ho to be part of the “Lighthouse” anthology. My chance to be a fiction writer at last! It struck me that I’d do well to attend a writer’s workshop—and for sentimental reasons, I settled on the summer program at the Naropa Institute in Boulder.
You could say I’m a bit of literary groupie. I’m bisexual of course, and I’ve had my share of rolls in the hay with writers, each time hoping, I suppose, that something of their essence might rub off.
As it happens, the most famous writer I ever slept with was William Burroughs. This was in the early 1980s—I was attending a Modern Language Association conference at Colorado University, and Bill was in residence for the summer as part of Naropa’s burgeoning Jack Kerouac Disembodied School of Poetics. I knew of this, and one of my old lovers used her not inconsiderable charms to get us into a cocktail party for the innermost circle of Boulder bohemia. Bill was there, I made a favorable impression, and voila, the Beat master and I ended up in his room at the Boulderado Hotel, sipping bourbon, smoking low-grade marijuana, and making languid love. A night to treasure for my entire life, a night signifying that I too have had a purpose on this lonely planet.
And so this June, once my academic duties had ended for the term, I repaired to the Boulderado Hotel, this time as a paying guest, with a sheaf of Naropa University orientation papers in my briefcase.
Much of school’s opening session that afternoon had consisted of perky functionaries reciting lists of rules. Not like the crazy eighties. Naropa had once been the outriders’ beacon; had the rugged old tower toppled to become a mere breakwater in the safe harbors of American mass culture? I only hoped that some esoteric possibilities remained.
Naropa’s Tibetan Buddhist founder wrote of a paradoxical land hidden outside, or next to, or beneath our daily reality. Shambhala—which Westerners call Shangri La.
The Beats had crumbled, but perhaps the door to Shambhala remained. I thought of Poe’s doomed lighthouse, and of the mysterious chamber at its base. I was filled with a numinous sensation that somehow everything was going to fit. Looking around at my fellow students, I realized I was one of the oldest customers in the house. Very well, but was young at heart, ready to become a writer at last.
In a celebratory mood, I drank half a bottle of champagne at the hotel bar and then, on a whim, I went up to the fifth floor and stood outside the corner room where Bill and I had coupled so thoroughly and so well, lo, these twenty-three years gone.
Standing there, I wondered if the Master had ever thought of me again. I’d combed though his later works, hoping to find some refracted image of myself—sometimes imagining that an echo of our pleasures could be found in Bill’s descriptions of farm boys in transports of sexual abandon. I’d even mailed him shameless letters, asking if my speculations were correct. But he never answered, and then one day he died.
“I miss you, Bill,” I said into the plush Victorian quiet of the hotel hall.
I can swear I never touched his old room’s door, but just as surely as if I’d pounded on it with my fist, a voice from within called, “We hear you. Come on in.” The words were blurred, as if the speaker had a lisp.
I pushed forward; the door swung open. The room was filled with heavy, dark furniture, and books piled in the gloom. A man with long, stringy blond hair and a fluffy blond goatee sat before a velvet-curtained window, bent over a desk with a single brass lamp. At first I had only a quarter-view of his face. He was bent very low indeed, as if kissing the papers scattered on his desk, papers covered by penciled writing in the smallest script I’d ever seen.
“Welcome back, Gregge,” came a high, twangy voice, different from the one I’d heard through the door. The blond man turned his head, clamping his mouth tight shut and staring at me with pale blue eyes that held an expression of triumphant glee. A curious high piping seemed to come from within his head. And then all at once his mouth gaped open.
You must believe me when I tell you that his tongue was a small manikin, a detailed copy of William Burroughs, fully animated and alive. I, who have so little imagination, could never invent such a thing.
I stepped back, feeling for the door, wanting to flee and forget what I was seeing. But I struck the door wrong—and it slammed shut. The blond man came closer, mouth open, eyes dancing with spiteful delight. I was shaking all over.
Like a dictator on the balcony of his palace, the meat puppet Burroughs stared out from the mouth, his tiny hands resting upon the lower teeth as if upon a railing.
“I knowed you was coming,” came Bill’s thin, rheumy voice. He was using the Pa Kettle accent he sometimes liked to put on. “Picked up your moon-calf aura from the hall.” He paused, savoring my reactions.
“I don’t understand,” I said, fighting back a spasm of nausea. “Don’t hurt me.”
“I’m working out karma,” said the little Burroughs. “I owe you for never writing back. I’m gonna let my pal Dr. Teage set you up for a Poe tasting. Later on you might do some secretarial work for us—or make yourself useful in other ways.” He allowed himself one of his appalling leers. “You’re aging well, Gregge. But that’s enough outta me already.”
In a twinkling, the Burroughs face on the blond man’s tongue smoothed over, and the tiny arms sank into the pink surface. I was faced with a somewhat seedy character licking his lips. His breath smelled of fruit and manure.
“I’m Teage,” he said, his goatee wagging. “And you’re—”
“Gregge Crane,” I said. “I knew Bill a little, a long time ago. I was with him in this room.”
“I know,” said Teage, who for some reason seemed to trust me. “I’m with him in this room every day. We’re doing a book together. I’m like you. I always wanted to be a fiction writer. Look at this.”
On the desk were the sheets filled with tiny words, and lying on one of the sheets was a sharpened bit of mechanical pencil lead with a scrap of tape around one end. Bill’s writing implement, half the size of a toothpick.
