by Rudy Rucker
Alan leaned over Zeno, rubbing his poor, dear chest. The man was very dead. Alan went and listened by the room’s door. Were MI5 agents lurking without, showing their teeth like hideous omnivorous ghouls? But he heard not a sound. The likeliest possibility was that some low-ranking operative had paid the maid to let him dose the tea — and had then gotten well out of the way. Perhaps Alan had a little time.
He imagined setting his internal computational system to double speed. Stepping lively, he exchanged clothes with Zeno — a bit tricky as the other man’s body was so limp. Better than rigor mortis, at any rate.
Finding a pair of scissors in Zeno’s travel kit, Alan trimmed off the pathetic, noble beard, sticking the whiskers to his own chin with smears of honey. A crude initial imitation, a first-order effect.
Alan packed Zeno’s bag and made an effort to lift the corpse to his feet. Good lord but this was hard. Alan thought to tie a necktie to the suitcase, run the tie over his shoulder and knot it around Zeno’s right arm. If Alan held the suitcase in his left hand, it made a useful counterweight.
It was a good thing that, having survived the estrogen treatments, Alan had begun training again. He was very nearly as fit as in his early thirties. Suitcase in place, right arm tightly wrapped around Zeno’s midriff and grasping the man’s belt, Alan waltzed his friend down the hotel’s back stairs, emerging into a car park where, thank you Great Algorithmist, a cabbie was having a smoke.
“My friend Turing is sick,” said Alan, mustering an imitation of a Greek accent. “I want take him home.”
“Blind pissed of a Monday morn,” cackled the cabbie, jumping to his own conclusions. “That’s the high life for fair. And red spats! What’s our toff’s address?”
With a supreme effort, Alan swung Zeno into the cab’s rear seat and sat next to him. Alan reached into the body’s coat and pretended to read off his home address. Nobody seemed to be tailing the cab. The spooks were lying low, lest blame for the murder fall upon them.
As soon as the cab drew up to Alan’s house, he overpaid the driver and dragged Zeno to his feet, waving off all offers of assistance. He didn’t want the cabbie to get a close look at the crude honey-sticky beard on his chin. And then he was in his house, which was blessedly empty, Monday being the housekeeper’s day off. Moving from window to window, Alan drew the curtains.
He dressed Zeno in Turing pajamas, laid him out in the professorial bed, and vigorously washed the corpse’s face, not forgetting to wash his own hands afterwards. Seeking out an apple from the kitchen, he took two bites, then dipped the rest of the apple into a solution of potassium cyanide that he happened to have about the place in a jam jar. He’d always loved the scene in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs when the Wicked Witch lowers an apple into a cauldron of poison. Dip the apple in the brew, let the sleeping death seep through!
Alan set the poison apple down beside Zeno. A Snow White suicide. Now to perfect the imitation game.
He labored all afternoon. He found a pair of cookie sheets in the kitchen — the housekeeper often did baking for him. He poured a quarter-inch of his specially treated gelatin solution onto each sheet — as it happened, the gelatin was from the bones of a pig. Man’s best friend. He set the oven on its lowest heat, and slid in the cookie sheets, leaving the oven door wide open so he could watch. Slowly the medium jelled. Alan’s customized jelly contained a sagacious mixture of activator and inhibitor compounds; it was tailored to promote just the right kind of embryological reaction-diffusion computation.
Carefully wielding a scalpel, Alan cut a tiny fleck of skin from the tip of Zeno’s cold nose. He set the fleck into the middle of the upper cookie sheet, and then looked in the mirror, preparing to repeat the process on himself. Oh blast, he still had honey and hair on his chin. Silly ass. Carefully he swabbed off the mess with toilet paper, flushing the evidence down the commode. And then he took the scalpel to his own nose.
After he set his fleck of tissue into place on the lower pan, his tiny cut would keep on bleeding, and he had to spend nearly half an hour staunching the spot, greatly worried that he might scatter drops of blood around. Mentally he was running double-strength error-checking routines to keep himself from mucking things up. It was so very hard to be tidy.
When his housekeeper arrived tomorrow morning, Alan’s digs should look chaste, sarcophagal, Egyptian. The imitation Turing corpse would be a mournful memento mori of a solitary life gone wrong, and the puzzled poisoners would hesitate to intervene. The man who knew too much would be dead; that was primary desideratum. After a perfunctory inquest, the Turing replica would be cremated, bringing the persecution to a halt. And Alan’s mother might forever believe that her son’s death was an accident. For years she’d been chiding him over his messy fecklessness with the chemicals in his home lab.
Outside a car drove past very slowly. The brutes were wondering what was going on. Yet they hesitated to burst in, lest the neighbors learn of their perfidy. With shaking hands, Alan poured himself a glass of sherry. Steady, old man. See this through.
He pulled up a kitchen chair and sat down to stare through the open oven door. Like puffing pastry, the flecks of skin were rising up from the cookie sheets, with disks of cellular growth radiating out as the tissues grew. Slowly the noses hove into view, and then the lips, the eye holes, the forehead, the chins. As the afternoon light waned, Alan saw the faces age, Zeno in the top pan, Alan on the bottom. They began as innocent babes, became pert boys, spotty youths, and finally grown men.
Ah, the pathos of biology’s irreversible computations, thought Alan, forcing a wry smile. But the orotund verbiage of academe did little to block the pain. Dear Zeno was dead. Alan’s life as he’d known it was at an end. He wept.
It was dark outside now. Alan drew the pans from the oven, shuddering at the enormity of what he’d wrought. The uncanny empty-eyed faces had an expectant air; they were like holiday pie crusts, waiting for steak and kidney, for mincemeat and plums.
Bristles had pushed out of the two flaccid chins, forming little beards. Time to slow down the computation. One didn’t want the wrinkles of extreme old age. Alan doused the living faces with inhibitor solution, damping their cellular computations to a normal rate.
He carried the bearded Turing face into his bedroom and pressed it onto the corpse. The tissues took hold, sinking in a bit, which was good. Using his fingers, Alan smoothed the joins at the edges of the eyes and lips. As the living face absorbed cyanide from the dead man’s tissues, its color began to fade. A few minutes later, the face was waxen and dead. The illusion was nearly complete.
Alan momentarily lost his composure and gagged; he ran to the toilet and vomited, though little came up. He’d neglected to eat anything today other than those two bites of apple. Finally his stomach-spasms stopped. In full error-correction mode, he remembered to wash his hands several times before wiping his face. And then he drank a quart of water from the tap.
He took his razor and shaved the still-bearded dead Turing face in his bed. The barbering went faster than when he’d shaved Zeno in the hotel. It was better to stand so that he saw the face upside down. Was barbering a good career? Surely he’d never work as a scientist again. Given any fresh input, the halted Turing persecution would resume.
Alan cleaned up once more and drifted back into the kitchen. Time to skulk out through the dark garden with Zeno’s passport, bicycle through the familiar woods to a station down the line, and catch a train. Probably the secret police wouldn’t be much interested in pursuing Zeno. They’d be glad Zeno had posed their murder as a suicide, and the less questions asked the better.
But to be safe, Turing would flee along an unexpected route. He’d take the train to Plymouth, the ferry from there to Santander on the north coast of Spain, a train south through Spain to the Mediterranean port of Tarifa, and another ferry from Tarifa to Tangiers.
Tangiers was an open city, an international zone. He could buy a fresh passport there. He’d be free to live as he liked — in a small w
ay. Perhaps he’d master the violin. And read the Iliad in Greek. Alan glanced down at the flaccid Zeno face, imagining himself as a Greek musician.
If you were me, from A to Z, if I were you, from Z to A…
Alan caught himself. His mind was spinning in loops, avoiding what had to be done next. It was time.
He scrubbed his features raw and donned his new face.
============
Note on “The Imitation Game”
Written Fall, 2006.
Interzone 215, 2008.
I’ve always felt baffled by the computer Alan Turing’s seeming suicide in 1954 at the age of 41. To me it seems to be possible that his death might in fact have been an assassination, arranged by some government security squad. So I brought this notion to fictional life. To give “The Imitation Game” a kick, I used the idea of bioengineering oneself a new face, basing the technology in Turing’s final paper, “A Chemical Basis for Morphogenesis.” I’d done a lot of work with the ideas in Turing’s paper, implementing them in my Capow cellular automata software (see www.rudyrucker.com/capow). It made me happy to write a story in which Turing escapes his assassins. Eventually this story became the first chapter of my novel, The Turing Chronicles.
Hormiga Canyon
(Written with Bruce Sterling)
Part 1.
Stefan Oertel pulled a long strand of salami rind from his teeth. He stared deep into wonderland.
Look at that program go! Flexible vectors swarming in ten-dimensional hyperspace! String theory simulation! Under those colored gouts of special effects, this, at last, was real science!
Stefan munched more of his sandwich and plucked up an old cellphone, one of the ten thousand such units that he’d assembled into a home supercomputer. “Twine dimension seven!” he mumbled around the lunchmeat. “Loop dimension eight!”
The screen continued its eye-warping pastel shapes. Stefan’s ultracluster of hacked cellphones was searching Calabi-Yau string theory geometries. The tangling cosmic strings wove gorgeous, abrupt Necker-cube reversals and inversions. His program’s output was visually brilliant. And, thus far, useless to anybody. But maybe his latest settings were precisely the right ones and the One True String Theory was about to be unveiled —
“Loop dimension eight,” he repeated.
Unfortunately his system seemed to be ignoring his orders. There might be something wrong with the particular phone he was holding—these phones were, after all, junkers that Stefan’s pal Jayson Rubio had skimmed from the vast garbage dumps of Los Angeles. Jayson was a junk-hound of the first order.
Ten thousand networked cell phones had given Stefan serious, number-crunching heavy muscle. He needed them to search the staggeringly large state space of all possible string theories. The powerful Unix and RAM chips inside the phones were in constant wireless communication with each other. He kept their ten thousand batteries charged with induction magnets. The whole sprawling shebang was nested in sets of brightly-colored plastic laundry baskets. Stefan dug the eco-fresh beauty of this abracadabra: he’d transformed a waste-disposal mess into a post-Einsteinian theory-incubator.
Stefan had earned his programming skills the hard way: years of labor in the machine-buzzing dungeons of Hollywood. And he’d paid a price: alienated parents in distant Topeka, no wife, no kids, and his best coder pals were just email addresses. Furthermore, typing all that computer graphics code had afflicted him with a burning case of carpal-tunnel syndrome, which was why he preferred yelling his line-commands into phones. Cell phones had kick-ass voice-recognition capabilities.
Stefan dipped into a brimming pink laundry-basket and snagged a fresher phone, an early-90s model with a flapping, half-broken jaw.
“Greetings, wizard!” the phone chirped, showing that it was good to go.
“Twine dimension seven, dammit! Loop dimension eight.”
The system was still ignoring him. Now Stefan was worried. Was the TV’s wireless chip down? That shouldn’t happen. The giant digital flat-screen was new. And, yes, the phones were old junk, but with so many of them in his ultracluster it didn’t matter if a few dozen went dead.
He tried another phone and another. Crisis was at hand.
The monster screen flickered and skewed. To his deep horror, the speakers emitted a poisoned death-rattle, prolonged and sizzling and terrible, like the hissing of the Wicked Witch of the West as she dissolved in a puddle of stage-magic.
The flat screen went black. Worse yet, the TV began to smell, a pricey, burnt-meat, molten-plastic odor that any programmer knew as bad juju. Stefan bolted from his armchair and knelt to peer through the ventilation slots.
And there he saw—oh please no—the ants. Ants had always infested Stefan’s rental house. Whenever the local droughts got bad, the ants arrived in hordes, trouping out of the thick Mulholland brush, waving their feelers for water. Stefan’s decaying cottage had leaky old plumbing. His home was an ant oasis.
He’d never seen the ants in such numbers. Perhaps the frenzied wireless signals from his massive mounds of cell phones had upset them somehow? There were thousands of ants inside his TV, a dark stream of them wending through the overheated circuit cards like the winding Los Angeles River in its manmade canyons of graffiti-bombed cement. The ants were eating the resin off the cards; they were gorging themselves on his TV’s guts like six-legged Cub Scouts eating molten s’mores.
Stefan groaned and collapsed back into his overstuffed leather armchair. The gorgeous TV was a write-off, but all was not yet lost. The latest state of his system was still stored in his network of cellphones.
He reached for his sandwich, wincing at a stab of pain in his wrist.
The sandwich was boiling with ants. And then he felt insectile tickling at his neck. He jumped to his feet, banged open the door of his leaky bathroom, and hastily fetched-up an abandoned comb. He managed to tease three jolly ants from his strawy hair, which was dyed in a fading splendor of day-glo orange and traffic-cone red.
Before he’d moved into this old house, Stefan hadn’t realized that most everybody in L.A. had an ant story to tell. Stefan had the ants pretty badly, but nobody sympathized with him. Whenever he reached out to others with his private burden of ant woes, they would snidely one-up him with amazing ant-gripes all their own: ants that ate dog food; ants that ate dogs; ants that that carried off children.
Compared to the heroic tales of other Angelenos, Stefan’s ant problems seemed mild and low-key. His ants were waxy, rubbery-looking little critters, conspicuously multi-ethnic in fine L.A. style, of every shape and every shade of black, brown, red and yellow. Stefan had them figured for a multi-caste sugar-ant species. They emerged from the tiniest possible cracks, and they adored sweet, sticky stuff.
Stefan bent over the rusty sink and splashed cold water on his unshaven face. He’d done FX for fantasy movies that had won Oscars and enchanted millions of people on six continents. But now, here he stood: wrists wrecked, vermin-infested, no job, no girlfriend, neck-deep in code for a ten-dimensional string-theory simulation with no commercial potential.
Kind of punk and cool, in a way. It sure beat commuting on the hellish L.A. freeways. He was free of servitude. And he definitely had a strong feeling that the very last tweak he’d suggested for his Calabi-Yau search program was the big winner.
Just three months ago, he’d been ignoring his growing wrist pains while writing commercial FX code for Square Root Of Not. The outfit was a cutting-edge Venice Beach graphics shop that crafted custom virtual-physics algorithms for movies and the gaming trade.
Of course, Stefan’s true interest, dating way back to college, had always been physics, in particular the Holy Grail of finding the correct version of string theory. Pursuing the awesome fantasy of supersymmetric quantum string manifolds felt vastly finer and nobler than crassly tweaking toy worlds. The Hollywood FX work paid a lot, yes, but it made Stefan a beautician for robots, laboring to give animated characters better hair, shinier teeth, and bouncier boobs. String
theorists, on the other hand, were the masters of a conceptual universe.
Though the pace of work had nearly killed him, Stefan had had a good run at Square Root Of Not. Their four-person shop had the best fire-and-algebra in Los Angeles, seriously freaky tech chops that lay far beyond the ken of Disney-Pixar and Time-Warner. The Square Rooters’ primary client, the anchor-store in the mall of their dreams, had been Eyes Only, a big post-production lab on the Strip.
But Eyes Only had blundered into a legal tar pit. All too typical: the suits always imagined it was cheaper to litigate than to innovate. Disney’s Giant Mouse was crushing the copyrighted landscape with the tread of a mastodon.
Stefan hadn’t followed the sorry details; the darkside hacking conducted in Hollywood courtrooms wasn’t his idea of entertainment. Bottom line: rather than watching their lives tick away in court, the Square Rooters had taken the offered settlement, and had divvied up cash that would otherwise go to lawyers.
Their pay-off had been less than expected, but all four Square Rooters had been worn down by the grueling crunch cycles anyway. Liberated and well-heeled, each Square Root partner had some special spiritual bliss to follow. Lead programmer Marc Geary was puffing souffles at a chef school in Santa Monica. Speaker-to-lawyers Emily Yu was about to sail to Tahiti on an old yacht she’d bought off Craig’s List. Handyman Jayson Rubio was roaring around the endless loops of L.A.’s freeways on a vintage red Indian Chief motorcycle. As for Stefan—Stefan was sinking his cash into his living expenses and his home-made ultracluster supercomputer. Finally, freedom and joy. Elite string-theory instead of phony Hollywood rubber physics.
Some days the physics work got Stefan so excited that he could think of nothing else. Just yesterday, when he’d had been feeling especially manic about his code, doll-faced Emily Yu had phoned him with a shy offer to come along on her South Seas adventure. Idiotically, Stefan had blown her off. He’d overlooked a golden chance at romance. Instead of hooking up, he’d geeked out.
