by Rudy Rucker
“Yo,” said Naz, noticing me behind them. “Doctor Bela. Heard you playing just now. Old school grime. Lend a hand, bud.”
I helped them inch the machine up the steps, not bothering to ask why “Move the box, men,” chanted K-Jen, “Let your muscles bend.” Her voice was dark and rough at the edges. I had a fleeting vision of her voice as a pattern of rakes and teapots.
The roof of Bulkington was flat and open, with a parapet around the edges. The Birdman was up there cawing at the misty rain. I tried some of his nitrous oxide. The sky tolled like a bell. K-Jen was ranting at the world below. And then the Birdman helped Naz and Thuggee push the washing machine off the parapet to land on Mr. Vitelloni’s SUV in the driveway.
I woke up. Sunlight shone yellow through the worn spots of a window shade, illuminating a poster of a fractal on the wall. I was lying on Danny Nguyen’s couch, clothed but barefoot. I was sincerely glad that yesterday was over.
The fractal’s buds reminded me of the cockroach-people; hallucinations? Alma was gone; a knife in my heart. My finger ached.
I looked at my hand. Oh god, the vlog ring. I tried to slip it off—no way. It felt like it had glued itself to my skin. Well, I could stand it for a week. Good money.
Somewhere nearby I could hear moans and a bed going bump bump bump. I needed to hit the bathroom, but it seemed better not to make noise and interrupt Danny’s big score. I lay there waiting, making faces at the vlog ring. Looking at the ring, I noticed that the hue of the shiny ring band was always changing. Like if I mugged at the ring or put it near one of Danny’s posters, the band got a little redder from viewer interest, but if I put the ring down in the dark under my cover it soon turned blue with boredom.
Finally the sex noises crescendoed and came to a halt. I went and relieved myself, keeping my vlog hand behind my back. “Yo, Bela?” Danny’s voice from his bedroom. “You okay?”
“I feel like a carnival geek,” I said. “No more drinking.”
I heard a little buzz of conversation in Danny’s bedroom, and then he called to me again. “Put something over that camera, would you? Before we come out.”
I found my shoes and socks next to the couch. I shoved my left hand into a sock, wearing it like a mitten. “All clear,” I called.
The mystery girl was, as I’d already suspected, Leni’s friend Lulu Cliff the computer science major. She’d washed off most of her makeup, and she looked kind of plain today. Thin lips, bright eyes, an angular chin.
“How much do you remember?” she asked me in a quiet tone.
Images and sounds blossomed from that question. K-Jen chanting and shrieking. A tumbling washing machine, growing smaller as it fell, then thudding onto Vitelloni’s SUV, impacting the front left corner of the roof. The sharp bang decaying into a slower crunch, followed by the sparkly tinkle of the shattered windshield. The startled car’s alarm hooting like its outraged owner. Thuggee standing on the parapet, guffawing, rolling back his foreskin, pissing down at Vitelloni. The incredibly prompt arrival of the squad cars with their red-yellow- blue flashers. My stumbling, careening evasion down the back stairs. My hand grabbing a last pitcher of beer. Danny hustling me into his room. Oblivion.
“The cops were here for two hours,” said Danny. His hair was all flattened out this morning, combed down over his forehead dreg-style. “You were lucky to miss it. They busted the Birdman and those three skaters. The Birdman flipped; they put him in a straitjacket.”
“5150,” I said. “Did I vlog the washer drop?”
“Oh yeah,” said Danny. “Lulu and I looked at the footage after the cops left. It’s awesome. I don’t think the cops know about it yet.”
“It’s such a great launch for your show,” said Lulu softly. “Leni and Dorothy and I want to see you do really well this week.”
“So why are you making me cover up my vlog ring right now? Like, people are gonna watch the inside of a sock?”
“Look, I'd rather not have everyone totally know that I spent the night with Danny,” whispered Lulu. “I mean we two were visible together last night, possibly an item, but to vlog me in the apartment in the morning—it’s so, you know, hitting every note. Belaboring the obvious.”
“I wonder if you’re ashamed of me,” said Danny in a matter- of-fact tone.
Lulu grunted and made a fishlike face. “Look, if you must know, I don’t want Dorothy and Leni to know that I slept with a boy. They’d tease me and call me a lug. Lesbian until graduation.” She walked over to Danny’s fridge and found herself a soda. “Other than having a penis, you’re fine, Danny. And frankly I wouldn’t mind doing you again. But right now, I’ve got to run.”
“I’ll call you,” said Danny. “I will.” He turned to put on the coffee.
I followed Lulu out towards the common room. Some bleary Bulkington students were eating oatmeal amidst the trash and the puddles of vomit and beer.
“A private question,” I whispered to Lulu, shoving my sock- covered hand deep into my pants pocket for still more shielding. “Who’s Leni’s big backer? Who’s giving her the money for the servers and the bandwidth? Who phoned her last night?”
“You could figure it out yourself,” breathed Lulu. “If you spent a little time online.”
“Just tell me.”
She made her voice still softer and leaned up to my ear.
“Van Veeter.”
3
Rocking with Washer Drop
As I rejoined Danny, I noticed that my vlog ring was beeping. It didn’t like being covered up. When I took the sock off my hand, the plastic of the band was of course dark blue. Virtually nobody was tuned in.
Suddenly the ring spoke to me in Leni’s voice. “What do you think you’re doing, Bela?” She sounded miffed.
“Danny and I wanted a little privacy here,” I said.
“Yeah,” put in Danny. “This happens to be my room.”
“I’m under blood oath to conceal the carnal rites of the ma- thenauts,” I added.
"Covering the ring violates our contract,” said Leni, not amused. “Don’t do it again.”
“Ah, yes, the contract,” I said. “Can you e-mail me a copy? I didn’t get a super good look at it last night. What with being drunk and seeing it on a display the size of my thumbnail.” The ring’s band was warming up towards purple now.
“The contract is right here on the Buzz website,” said Leni from the ring, her voice warming. “People can read it and wonder if they’d like to be vloggers too. We’re accepting applications. And, Bela, I have some wonderful news.”
“What?”
“Your vlog of the washer drop has been downloaded twenty thousand times since last night! People are loving it. What a great kickoff for The Crazy Mathematician!”
“That’s what you’re calling my show?” I asked, not too pleased.
“I was about to tell you,” said Danny, turning on his computer. “We were looking at it last night after you passed out.”
“If the shoe fits,” said Leni. “Oh, and one more thing. You should go straight back to your apartment. I told some people to meet you there. Bye.”
“Look at this,” said Danny, pointing to his computer screen, which was displaying a video window surrounded by virtual buttons and controls. The video showed me looking at the screen, slightly lagged. As Danny moved his mouse around, the viewpoint changed; he could effectively look in any direction from the viewpoint of my vlog ring. But by default the image was centered on whatever I happened to be looking at.
The screen bore the caption “The Crazy Mathematician" in its title bar. On the left side was a clickable timeline for jumping to arbitrary points of my accumulated vlog stream, also a topic search bar, also some simple buttons linking to the most popular bits that I’d vlogged so far. Lulu had helped write Buzz an automated system that took care of all this. Database cinema. The top link was labeled “Washer Drop.”
I replayed the washer drop. I’d captured it all. K-Jen’s
voice was some kind of amazing. And Thuggee’s wild grin as he besprinkled the furious SUV owner—an instant icon of rebellion.
After I reset the display to real time, I started fooling around, adjusting my ring’s position and the point of view to get an endless regress going in the onscreen window—like what you see if you point a video camera at its TV monitor. I twisted the camera angle to produce chaotic feedback. “Check it out, Danny,” I said.
“Gnarly computation in daily life,” he replied. The ring got slightly redder.
“I wonder who makes the vlog rings?” I asked in a just- wondering tone. Given what Lulu had told me, I had a very good idea what the answer would be.
“Does it have a logo?” asked Danny.
I peered at the band and made something up. “I see this little embossed image of a sneaky gnome wearing a stolen crown.”
“I’ll search for ‘vlog ring,’ ” said Danny, typing the phrase into his computer’s main toolbar. A moment later he’d found it. “Vlog rings are made by Rumpelstiltskin, Inc., the company founded by Humelocke’s newly elected congressman—”
“Van Veeter,” I exclaimed. I’d been dying to say the name out loud ever since Lulu had whispered it to me a few minutes ago. “I wonder if Rumpelstiltskin’s backing Buzz,” I continued ingenuously. “I think I heard that Buzz got their vlog rings for free.”
“Would make sense,” said Danny, not all that interested.
I wasn’t going to say anything else just yet, but I was convinced that Van Veeter had another reason for funding Leni Pex—I believed she’d started the fire at the YWCA polling place that had won the election for him.
But for now I let my suspicions rest. Leni hadn’t actually given me any money yet. It was too early to bite the hand that fed me.
I said goodbye to Danny and headed toward Ratvale. On the way, I began savoring being a realtime vlogger with my own show. I had nothing better to do, that’s for sure—what with my thesis and research paper done, my girlfriend and roommate gone, and still no job offers. Summer vacation. I stopped and looked at shop windows, now and then talking to my vlog ring, making comments on this and that for my audience’s benefit, feeling high-tech and important. I consumed a brownie and a big glass of orange-and-carrot juice, savoring them, feeling like a character in a movie.
Eventually I got back to my apartment, and sure enough, some people were waiting for me. Actually just one person: a Humelocke cop about my age. He was friendly enough, but said he had to book me as an accessory and as a material witness to the Bulkington washer drop. People always have bad news for you when they call you “sir.”
Leni had sicced the law on me to liven up my vlog. As the police processed me into the jail, my ring was an attentive shade of red. The cops wanted to remove it for safekeeping, but they couldn’t get it to budge.
As chance would have it—not that there really is any chance in the divine jellyfish’s cosmic computations—I ended up in a tiny barred cell right across from Thuggee and Naz, who were in individual cells of their own. Each cell had a bunk sticking out from one wall, plus a utilitarian steel toilet and a tiny sink.
“Doctor Bela,” said Naz, a grin splitting his bored face. "How’d they find you?”
“This ring,” I said, holding out my hand. “It’s a camera that’s broadcasting all the time. Whatever I see goes straight to the Web.”
“This is very bad for our case,” said Thuggee. He had an even stronger Indian accent than I’d initially realized. “Video evidence can be highly effective.”
A moment of silence passed as we all remembered Thuggee gleefully pissing off the parapet.
“Where’s K-Jen and the Birdman?” I asked, to change the subject.
“Birdman’s in the psych ward, I guess,” said Naz. “And women go in a separate cellblock. We’ll be here till the court meets on Monday. None of us three is gonna call our parents for bail. K-Jen’s Dad beats her whenever she’s home. Russian meathead.”
“My parents will weep and wail,” said Thuggee despondently. “And give long lectures. I was hoping this regrettable incident might go unnoticed. But now you’re telling me that you’ve been posting everything to the Web. My sister and her friends are looking at the Web all of the time.” He went to his bunk and lay down facing the wall.
“Enough about John Law,” said Naz, rubbing his big nose. “Let’s talk about music. I liked what you were getting at yesterday, about how my best beats steer between repeating and turning into noise. I’m always looking for the secret formula. Do you know some mad scientist tricks about that?”
“Universal dynamics,” I said. “The science of gnarl. I just got a Ph.D. in it.”
We spent the afternoon and evening talking. It was a good session. First I laid out the theory behind Wolfram’s classification of computations into the too cool, the too hot, and the gnarly. And then I got into the practicalities of chaotic nonlinear feedback. Naz was bright and eager for the information, and I was getting the teacherly reward of learning while I talked.
Naz had a regular drum kit at home, he’d played in a high school garage band. As I described some of the rhythms that mathematics could produce, he tapped them out on his bunk and his cell bars. But we couldn’t try out any of the more intense and computationally unpredictable algorithms, as the cops had Naz’s beat vest in safekeeping.
It struck me that maybe Naz and I could make some music together. I’d thoroughly won his confidence; he was calling me Bela Frankenstein. Yeah, we’d start a band, and I could use my Buzz exposure to launch the group. And once I got a little bit of fame, I’d be on my way to getting Alma back.
That was the plan I’d figured out while playing my guitar in my room the other day. Start a rock band. Alma was impressionable; deep down she wanted to love me. If I gave even one successful concert, it could be enough. And then, according to my plan, it was just a matter of encouraging some woman to seduce Paul in such a way that Alma found out. That would definitely close the deal.
But I didn’t tell Naz any of my schemes yet. I had a feeling that I wasn’t thinking all that clearly.
It was a long Saturday night in the clink, with screaming drunks and tweakers coming in at every hour, many of them pausing to glare at me—as if I were one of them. Everything was hard, dull, dead. The only visible sign of nature’s cosmic computation was the pool of water in my toilet, with barely visible chaotic ripples driven by the breeze from the air vent.
How far I was from where I wanted to be. What a fool I’d been. I kept thinking of Alma, cozy in a ranch-style Stanford faculty home with Paul. Alma sleeping in clean white sheets with her new man. Domesticity was looking pretty damn good. Would I ever get there?
In the midmorning one of the cops came to let me out. “You made bail,” he told me. I bid Naz and Thuggee farewell, telling Naz that we should jam when he got out.
“Sweet,” said Naz. “We’ll build a monster band, Bela.”
There was a call for me at the front desk of the police station. Leni.
“I hope you’re not mad about this,” she said. “At least we bailed you out. The washer drop’s gotten half a million hits!”
“I want my week’s pay right now,” I told her. “In cash, so you don’t bounce the check or something. Otherwise I’m smashing this ring with a rock and you can shove Veeter’s contract up your ass.”
“No problem, Bela. Feeling a little crabby, hmm? Better have some breakfast.”
It was a beautiful day outside, warm and sunny. I was happy to be out of jail. But again I had a vision of Alma with Paul. Alma wearing an apron, making scrambled eggs.
Walking past a Chronicle vending machine, I noticed my picture on the front page of the Sunday paper with the headline, “Humelocke Washer Drop Vlogger.” Of course I bought a copy. The facts in the story were roughly correct. It even showed a few blurry frames from my vlog.
“Look, I didn’t actually push the washer over the edge myself,” I said to my
vlog ring, working on my public image. “And I didn’t realize what those kids were planning when I helped them hump the washer up the stairs.”
Once again I wondered if Alma might be watching me. It would be good for me to be seen doing something uplifting today, something different from getting drunk or spending a night in the tank.
I didn’t bother to eat anything on the way to Leni’s; I didn’t want to dilute my rage. I figured her angle was this: the more she screwed up my life this week, the better her ratings were.
I found Leni sitting at her kitchen table with Dorothy, the two of them sharing a bowl of fruit salad and yogurt, with three Sunday papers spread out on the table, each with a story on Buzz.
“Here,” said Leni, handing me an envelope. I peeked inside, the cash was there.
“Thanks,” I said. “That’s good.” But I had my momentum built up, and I went ahead and laid my heavy accusation on her, glad to have it going out live on The Crazy Mathematician show.
“I think Van Veeter paid you, Leni Pex, to help him throw the election,” I said, pointing at her. “I believe that you, Leni Pex, are the one who set the YWCA polling place on fire.”
Give Leni credit, she did a good job of looking surprised. “That’s absurd. I was at yoga class that afternoon. You were there with me, weren’t you, Dorothy?”
“It was Tuesday, right?” said Dorothy. “We go every week. Four to six.”
“Oh sure, get your lover to lie for you,” I said.
“It’s not a lie, Bela,” said Leni tartly. “I’m sorry for you, losing it like this. It’s not my fault that Van Veeter likes Buzz.” She cocked her head, studying me like some struggling beetle in a collecting net. “Are you trying to shock me into canceling your show? Is that it? We’re going the full week, and that’s final. The crazier you get, the more people watch. But that doesn’t mean I have to associate with you. So beat it, loser. Go huff gas with your little skater buddies.” She favored me with a smug glare.
