by Rudy Rucker
“The process is my own invention,” said Teage. “I call it twanking. Before I started channeling Bill, I was a biocyberneticist. Twanking is elementary. You assemble a data base of the writer’s works and journals, use back-propagation and simulated evolution to get a compact semantic generator that produces the same data, turn the generator into the connection weights for an artificial neural net, code the neural net into wetware for the gene expression loops of some human fecal bacteria, and then rub the smart germs onto living flesh. I think it’s deliciously fitting to use my tongue. Bill speaks through me. Every night I twank him by rubbing on a culture of his special bacilli. I lean over our desk and we write till dawn. Afternoons I read it over. I really need to start getting it keyboarded soon.”
“What’s the book going to be called?” was all I could think to say.
“Bill hasn’t decided yet.” Teage hesitated, then pressed on. “The thing is, Gregge, he’s much more than a simulation. I’ve caught his soul? Is soul a bad word anymore? Logically, you might expect that there’d be no continuity of behavior from session to session. But Bill remembers. He’s all around us—dark energy. He knows things, and even when the visible effects wear off, he’s still inside my tongue.”
Perhaps it was the effects of the champagne—or my pleasure at having Burroughs call me by name—but all this seemed reasonable. And, God help me, it was I myself who suggested the next step.
“Maybe you can help me twank Poe. The whole reason I came out here this summer was because I need to write a story in his style.”
“I know,” said Teage, “Bill and I have been getting ready for you. Bill’s known for months that you’d come tonight. The spirits are outside our spacetime, Gregge, continually prodding the world toward greater gnarliness. Inching our reality across paratime. Making your and my lives into still more perfect works of art.” He let out an abrupt guffaw, his breath like the miasma above a compost heap.
“You’ll give me a germ culture to turn my flesh into Edgar Allan Poe?” I pressed.
“It’s over here,” said Teague. “And maybe tomorrow you’ll start typing my manuscript into your computer. Unless there’s a complete rewrite.”
“Fine,” I said, sealing our deal. “Wonderful.”
The twanking culture consisted of scuzzy crud on a layer of clear jelly in a Petri dish atop a dusty green Collected Works of Poe. Teage fit a cover onto the dish and handed it to me.
“I’ve got no use for this batch myself,” he said. “I’ve got my mouth full enough with Burroughs.”
I peered into the dish. Fuzzy white Cheerio-sized rings.Green and orange streaks. Spots, dots, and streamers.
“You only need a little at a time,” Teage was saying. “Dig out a few grams of the culture with, like, a plastic coffee spoon, and smear it on. Careful where you put it, though. It takes hold wherever it touches. The tongue’s especially good because it’s so flexible.”
Back in my room I brewed a pot of coffee and sat down to record these events on my laptop and on the cute little minidrive that I carry with it. I once lost a year’s work on a Poe bibliography in a hard disk crash, and now I always make a point of saving off my work as I go.
-----
It’s calming to be lying here propped on the pillows of my bed, typing. It’s a warm night; I’m nude. The yellow lamplight burnishes the tones of my flesh. I’ve been avoiding the sight of the Petri dish on my bed stand. But now it’s time.
I poise the white plastic spoon over the culture. Rub that gunk on my tongue?
I think not.
For as soon as Teage told me the culture would alter whatever part of me it touched, I decided to use my penis.
So here we go. It stings more than I could have imagined. The sensation flutters into my loins and my solar plexus. My penis shifts and separates. A vertical break forms in the base, two flaps split off near the top.
What have I done, what have I done, what have I done?
I’ve twanked Eddie Poe into my penis.
He’s angry, of all things. “What is the meaning of this conjuration?” cries Poe. “I abjure you to return me to my rest.” He glances down and sees my belly, my pubic hair, my scrotum.
“Fie! Gaud, sodomite, ghoul, defiler of my grave!”
It’s I who should be upset; I’m the one with the deformed, yelling penis. But the transformation is such that my cock seems to have a stronger personality than me. Nothing new, really. I’m in shock, and for a moment this seems almost funny.
But now it gets much worse. The little Poe penis knots his brow in fury, gathers his strength and—snaps himself loose from my belly. No, no, no!
Somewhere below the horror I think of a lighthouse with a hollow base breaking loose from brittle chalk.
There’s a hole at my crotch. The hole is moving around, adjusting itself, becoming a vagina.
I catch hold of Eddie before he can run away and, screaming like a woman, I stampede bare-assed down the halls and up the stairs to Teage’s room—not forgetting to bring my laptop. I must preserve every bit of this, at all costs.
For finally I have a story to tell.
-----
Teage has drawn back his curtains and is standing by his open window, staring into the humid night. He turns to face me, Burroughs in his mouth again.
Bill calls a word to my Eddie: “Tekelili.” I recognize it from Poe’s only novel, his tale of a sailing trip to the farthest South. Poe used tekelili to represent the cries of birds at Earth’s nethermost frontier.
“Tekelili,” responds the figure in my hand. And now, vivified by the exchange, the little Poe grows hot to the touch, twists from my grasp, and buzzes through the room’s air. An instant later he’s flown out Teage’s open window, blinking like a firefly, like a lighthouse. He pauses out there, waiting for us to come and follow.
A sharp pain knifes across my belly.
-----
I brought the laptop in the car with me; Teage is driving, led by the darting light. I’m still naked. My pains come in rhythmic waves. I fear what comes next. But I keep writing, saving the file after every sentence.
We drive down Broadway and turn right on Baseline. The great triangular rocks of the Flatirons are gold in the waning moon.
Thick clear fluid seeps from my vagina. I’m giving birth.
-----
In the middle of the field hovers glowing Eddie Poe. Between my wet thighs twitches a newborn sea-cucumber—a warty, foot-long creature with a fan of tendrils at one end—the very species found in Poe’s novel of the great hole beyond the Antarctic walls of ice. The contractions continue. More life stirs in my womb.
The Burroughs thing watches quietly from within Teage’s mouth. I force a mugwump out through my birth canal, then a centipede and a cuttlefish.
-----
As they leave my body, the creatures crawl to Eddie’s beacon, no two of them the same. Unknown energies pour from their tendrils, hands, mandibles, tentacles. The beams drill through Earth’s thin crust, friable as a chalk tablet.
A glow is visible from the tunnel my children have made.
Teage has gone and I must follow. My body is changing, my mind can barely form the words to type. I’ll end my manuscript and cast the minidrive clear.
And then, ah, then—raving, inchoate, my womb expelling an endless stream of life, I’ll leap into the Hollow Earth.
Shambhala.
============
Note on “MS Found in a Minidrive”
Written in June, 2004.
Poe’s Lighthouse, Chris Conlon, ed. (Cemetery Dance, 2006).
Since this story already has a hoax introduction, it’s perhaps overkill to write another layer of annotation. But, hey, Edgar Allan Poe would.
In the summer of 2004, I went to Boulder, Colorado, to teach a one-week “Transreal Writing” course at the Naropa Institute. Transrealism is my term for the practice of basing fantastic tales on your real life—something I often do. I have more discussions of transrea
lism in my essay collection, Seek! (Four Walls Eight Windows, 1999) and on my writing page www.rudyrucker.com/writing.
I’d last been at Naropa in 1982, when I got to meet Allen Ginsburg and William Burroughs (but, no, I didn’t spend the night with Burroughs). By way of illustrating my transreal writing technique to my students in 2004, I wrote “MS Found in a Minidrive” during the week I was teaching them. And, as so often seems to happen, my main character is a mad professor.
The theme of the story had already been defined by Chris Conlon, who was editing an anthology Poe’s Lighthouse (Cemetery Dance, 2006) of stories all taking off on the same unfinished story fragment by Master Poe. You can find the complete text of the original “Lighthouse” fragment in Poe’s Online Collected Works at http://www.eapoe.org/works/tales/lightha.htm. I might mention, by the way, that my friend John Shirley has a really terrific story, “Blind Eye,” in that same Poe’s Lighthouse anthology. John sticks to the straight Poe style and delivers a tale that’s eerily like one of the master’s.
The high point of my week at Naropa was a large group reading they had. I was on a bill with my favorite poet and dear friend Anselm Hollo, reading to a crowd of three hundred people. As my story was tailor-made for the Naropa audience, it fully blew their minds and they loved it. I was thrilled to be performing at this level in the home of the Beats; it was truly “a gala night within the lonesome latter years,” as Poe touchingly puts it in his poem “The Conqueror Worm.”
Guadalupe and Hieronymus Bosch
As an unemployed, overweight, unmarried, overeducated woman with a big mouth, I don’t have a lot of credibility. But even if I was some perfect California Barbie it wouldn’t be enough. People never want to listen to women.
I, Glenda Gomez, bring glad tidings. She that hath ears, let her hear.
An alien being has visited our world. Harna is, was, her name. I saw her as a glowing paramecium, a jellyfish, a glass police car, and a demonic art patron. This morning, when she was shaped like a car, I rode inside her to the fifteenth century. And this evening I walked past the vanishing point and saved our universe from Harna’s collecting bag. I’m the queen of space and time. I’m trying to write up my story to pitch as a reality TV show.
Let’s start with paramecia. Unicellular organisms became a hobby of mine a few months ago when I stole a microscope from my job. I was sorting egg and sperm cells for an infertility clinic called Smart Stork. Even though I don’t have any kind of biology background they trained me.
I’m not dumb. I have a Bachelor’s in Art History from San Jose State, which is just a few blocks from my apartment on Sixth Street. Well, almost a degree. I never finished the general education courses or my senior seminar, which would probably, certainly, have been on Hieronymus Bosch. I used to have a book of his pictures I looked at all the time—although today the book disappeared. At first I thought it was hidden under something. My apartment is a sty.
My lab job didn’t last long—I’m definitely not the science type. I wasn’t fast enough, I acted bored, I kissed the manager Dick Went after one too many lunchtime Coronas—and he fired me. That’s when I bagged my scope—a binocular phase-contrast Leica. I carried it home in my ever ready XXL purse. Later that day Dick came to my apartment to ask about it, but I screamed through the door at him like a crazy person until he went away. Works on the landlord too.
Now that I have a microscope, I keep infusions of protozoan cultures in little jars all over my apartment. It’s unbelievably easy to grow the infusions. You just put a wad of lawn grass in with some bottled water. Bacteria breed themselves into the trillions—rods and dots and corkscrews that I can see at 200x. And before you know it, the paramecia are right there digging on the bacilli. They come out of nowhere. What works really well is to add a scrap of meat to an infusion, it gets dark and pukeful, and the critters go wild for a few days till they die of their own shit. In the more decadent infusions you’ll find a particular kind of very coarsely ciliated paramecium rolling and rushing around. My favorites. I call them the microhomies.
So today is a Sunday morning in March and I’m eating my usual breakfast of day-old bread with slices of welfare cheddar, flipping through my Bosch book thinking about my next tattoo. A friend named Sleepey is taking an online course in tattooing, and he said he’d give me one for free. He has a good flea-market tattoo-gun he traded a set of tires for. Who needs snow tires in San Jose? So I’m thinking it would be bitchin’ to bedizen my belly with a Bosch.
I’m pretty well settled on this blue bagpipe bird with a horn for his nose. It’ll be something to talk about, and the bagpipe will be like naturalistic on my gordo gut, maybe it’ll minimize my girth. But the bird needs a background pattern. Over my fourth cup of microwave coffee, I start thinking about red blood cells, remembering from the lab how they’re shaped. I begin digging on the concept of rounding out my Bosch bird tattoo with a blood-cell tiling.
To help visualize it, I pinprick my pinkie and put a droplet on a glass slide under my personal Glenda Gomez research scope. I see beautiful shades of orange and red from all my little blood cells massed together. Sleepey will need to see this in order to fully grasp what to do. I want to keep on looking, but the blood is drying fast. The cells are bursting and cracks are forming among them as they dry. I remember that at Smart Stork we’d put some juice on the slides with the cells to keep them perky. I don’t know what kind of juice, but I decide to try a drop of water out of one of my infusions, a dark funky batch that I’d fed with a KFC chicken nugget.
The infusion water is teeming with those tough-looking paramecia with the coarse bristles—the microhomies. What with Bosch on my brain, the microhomies resemble tiny bagpipes on crutches. I’m like: Tattoo them onto my belly too? While I’m watching the microhomies, they start digging on my ruptured blood cells.
“Yo,” I say, eyeing an especially bright and lively one. “You’re eating me.”
And that’s when it happens. The image loses its focus, I feel a puff of air, my skin tingles all over. Leaning back, I see a bag of glowing light grow out from the microscope slide. It’s a foot across.
I jump to my feet and back off. I may be heavy, but I’m quick. At first I have the idea my apartment is on fire, and then for some reason I think of earthquakes. I’m heading for the door.
But the glowing sack gets there before me, blocking the exit. I try to reach through it for the doorknob.
As soon as my hand is inside the lumpy glow I hear a woman’s voice.
“Glenda! Hello dear.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m Harna from Hilbert space.” She has a prim voice; I visualize flowery dresses and pillbox hats. “I happened upon your brane several—days—ago. I’ve been teeming with the microlife, a bit humdrum, and I thought that’s all there is to see in this location. Worth documenting, but no more than that. I had no idea that only a few clicks up the size scale I’d find a gorgeous entity like you. Scale is tricky for me, what with everything in Hilbert space being infinite. Thank goodness I happened upon your blood cell. Oh, warmest greetings, Glenda Gomez. You’re—why, you’re collectible, my dear.”
I’m fully buggin’. I run to the corner of my living-room, staring at the luminous paramecium the size of a dog in midair. “Go away,” I say.
Harna wobbles into the shape of a jellyfish with dangling frilly ribbons. She drifts across the room, not quite touching the floor, dragging her oral arms across the stuff lying on my tables, checking things out. And then she gets to my Bosch book, which is open to The Garden of Earthly Delights.
“A nonlinear projection of three-space to two-space,” burbles Harna, feeling the paper all over. “Such a clever map. Who’s the author?”
“Hieronymus Bosch,” I murmur. “It’s called perspective.” I’m half-wondering if my brain has popped and I’m alone here talking to myself. Maybe I’m about to start fingerpainting the floor with Clorox. Snorting Ajax up my nose.
“Bosch?” muses Harna. He
r voice is fruity and penetrating like my old guidance counselor’s. “And I just know you have a crush on him, Glenda! I can tell. When can I meet him?”
“He lived a long time ago,” I whisper. I’m stepping from side to side, trying to find a clear path to the door.
“Most excellent,” Harna is saying. “You’ll time-snatch him, and then I can use the time-flaw to perspective-map your whole spacetime brane down into a sack! Yummy! You are so cute, Glenda. Yes, I’m going to wrap you up and take you home!”
I get past her and run out into the street. I’m breathing hard, still in my nightgown, now and then looking over my shoulder. So of course a San Jose police car pulls over and sounds me on their speaker. They think I’m a tweaker or a nut-job. Did I mention that it’s Sunday morning?
“Ma’am. Can we help you? Ma’am. Please come over to the police car and place your hands on the hood. Ma’am.” More cop-voice crackle in the background and here comes Harna down the sidewalk, still shaped like a flying jellyfish, though bigger than before. The cops can’t see her, though.
“Ma’am.” One of them gets out of the car, a kid with a cop mustache. He looks kind, concerned, but his hand is on the butt of his Tazer.
I whirl, every cop’s image of a madwoman, pointing back down the sidewalk at the swollen Harna, who’s shaping herself into a damn good replica of the cops’ car. She’s made of glowing haze and hanging at an angle to the ground.
Right before the cop grabs my wrist or Tasters me, Harna sweeps over and—pixie-dust! I’m riding in a Gummi-Bear cop car, with Harna talking to me from the radio grill. The cops don’t see me any more. Harna heads down the street, then swerves off parallel to spacetime. She guns her mill and we’re rumbling through a wah-wah collage of years and centuries, calendar leaves flying, the sun flickering off and on, Earth rushing around the Sun in a blur. And it’s not just time we’re traveling through, we’re rolling through some miles as well. We arrive in the Lowlands of 1475.
