by Rudy Rucker
“Huh?” said Paul.
“Paul, you’re so obliv!” said Alma impatiently. “Cammy’s wearing a vlog ring. Get her out of here.”
"What kind of van do you have, Paul?” said Cammy in a sweet, cajoling tone. “Is it cozy inside?”
I don’t think Paul had really noticed Cammy’s presence until now. He’d been too busy slobbering over the paracomputer. But now, finally, her voice reached him. “I can show you,” he said, turning towards her with a wondering smile that made me think of a blind man enjoying the warmth of the sun. The two of them went outside.
“All right then,” said Veeter, pulling some papers from his pocket. “This is your consulting contract. Two copies: one for me, one for you. Sign them both. You’ll be under a nondisclosure agreement of course. Your friend Alma here already signed a nondisclosure as well, by the way.”
The first thing I noticed that, as with my vlogging contract, the money was considerably better than I might have expected. “It doesn’t say how many months it’s for?” I asked presently.
“We’ll see how it goes,” said Veeter. “Could be just the one month, remember I’m off to the Capitol pretty soon. But if our little session today goes well, I could extend it. You could work with one of the senior Membrain engineers instead of with me; I’m thinking of a bright young fellow named Henry Nunez at our Watsonville plant.”
“Well, just a month might be fine with me, too,” I said, airily signing the paper. “I could be getting really busy with Washer Drop.” I was still floating on the success of our concert.
“You were awesome last night,” put in Alma. “I think maybe you’re almost too good for the rest of the band.”
“You’re trying to break us up already?” I said. “The band is incredible. I’m lucky to have them play with me.”
“Can you two have this conversation some other time?” interrupted Veeter, puttering around with the little brass teapot, peering at the undulating sheet of colors.
“Yes,” I said, glad to duck Alma’s comeback.
Fat chance. “I’m not trying to break up your band,” said Alma. "It’s very good if you take the consulting contract. I’d like to see you being able to get a steady job, if we’re going to talk about us having a future together. Van, you really should give him more than a month.”
“First let’s see what the man can do,” said Veeter testily. “Now listen up, Bela. The Gobrane is a membrane of electrically active long-chain polymers. Membrain figured out how to build it, but not how to program it, which is why Rumpelstiltskin was able to buy them out so easily. I was about to close down the project, but then I heard about the Morphic Classification Theorem. And I figured out how to directly map your rakes, cakes, fish, dishes, and teapots into processes on the Gobrane.”
“What!”
“I was an engineer before I fed my brain to the computers and sold my soul to Mammon,” said Veeter. “And I move fast when I’m hungry. Do you know computer science?”
“I know it’s for lamers who can’t handle real math.”
“Hey, if you’ve got an attitude, Doctor Bela, let’s skip the details. Suffice it to say that I’ve found an inverse hash-table genetic algorithm approach that produces usable solutions to the membrane codec problem in a reasonable amount of time— assuming you run the search on a network of conventional computers. I call it devolution. You guys thought the paracom-putational codec problem was unsolvable because you’re ivory-tower mathematicians. Yes, a perfect solution to a search problem usually requires exponential time to find. So what? If you knew the first thing about applied CS, you’d have realized that in the real world, finding an acceptably good solution for most problems takes only polynomial time, hell, linear time. It’s no big deal to find an acceptably good codec for a system as simple as a vibrating drumhead. Put away your impossibility proofs, sharpen up your coding sticks—and let the machines do your thinking.”
“That’s crude bullshit,” I snapped. Where did this guy get off? A physics major turned computer jock turned businessman turned politician—and he’s telling me I don’t know how to apply my own work? “I truly doubt if—”
"The proof’s in the pudding,” said Veeter intensely. “Whenever I have a clear morphic diagram of a process I can now get the Gobrane to emulate it, thanks to an algorithm inspired by the high-falutin’ theorem you boys proved. As for the codec problem, well, Paul and I were able to figure out the missing fifth panel of your little comic strip. Devolution explores the fitness landscape and finds an acceptable Gobrane codec in a tractable amount of time. The codec for the demo I’m about to show you—it took two days to devolve it on Rumpelstiltskin’s eighty-machine network. A nontrivial crunch, yes, but totally feasible.”
By now I was speechless. This straight-looking little dude was a maniac. It was like seeing John Q. Milquetoast pick up a ukulele and play extreme buzz-saw blitzdreg rock.
“Cat got your tongue?” gloated Veeter, as if reading my expression. “Demo time.” He pulled a dice cube out of his pocket, an ordinary red plastic die with white spots. “Rolling a die onto a hard surface is equivalent to a fish swimming inside a teapot, with a rake handle sticking in through the spout, and the six tines of the rake resting on a dish. Morphically speaking, that is. It’s a simple enough system that you don’t need a cake.”
The image clicked for me immediately. The teapot represented the table, the rake the rolling of the die, the fish the chaotic dynamics, and the dish the observation of the result. Why hadn’t I thought of this? I looked at Veeter with new respect. “So what’s the codec?” I said presently. “How do you feed your Gobrane the details of any one particular roll of the die?” “It’s like I said, finding an acceptable codec is easy if you let devolution do the work. The codec can have any form you specify.” Veeter gave me one of his aggressive stares. “A mathematician tells you why you can’t do what you want. An engineer finds a crude bullshit way to do it.”
My mind was reeling. The guy had me on the ropes. “The output—can it be something as simple as a picture of the die in its final position?”
“Good, Bela, you’re quick. And the input is two successive images of the cube falling towards the table. I video-capture two frames and laser-paint them right onto the Gobrane’s surface. I’m using the laser in this barcode scanner.” Veeter was growing more and more animated, his small hands repeatedly touching his bits of equipment. He handed me the die. “Throw it past the lens. And watch the Gobrane for the answer.” He readjusted the camera one more time and rested the scanner on the open top of the pot. “Tumblin’ dice, Bela!”
I shook the die and tossed it past the camera, closely watching the teapot. The scanning laser painted two quick images of the die upon the membrane of the Gobrane, painting them so fast that, to my eyes it looked like one image. A cube above the wood-grain-patterned plane of a table, the image in shades of laser red. Immediately the Gobrane began munging the image. In a split second the pattern divided up into a grid of copies of the image—four, sixteen, hundreds, thousands, millions, with the little images rotating and flipping and trading places, and then the undulating red-tinted design congealed back into an image of the die at rest with the six facing up. In the real world, the plastic cube clattered and jittered across the table-top for another moment before settling down to show, yes, a six.
I felt a chill.
“The Gobrane is a paracomputer,” said Veeter. “A gnarly natural system can perform computations much more rapidly than any existing network of digital machines. It’s a simple matter of resources: a natural system is inherently parallel, with all its parts being updated at once. And ten grams of plastic is made up of something on the order of sextillion molecules. My paracomputer can easily outrun the relevant physics of something as simple as a rolling die. Try it again! I want you to fully believe that it works, believe it right down in your bones. Otherwise you’re not going to think hard enough about how to use it.”
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br /> I rolled the die six more times, and every time the prediction was correct. The patterns upon the Gobrane were mesmerizing; it was as if I were seeing overlays of alternate realities, patterns reinforcing or canceling each other.
“You should take this to Vegas,” put in Alma.
“Mickey Mouse,” said Veeter dismissively. “The security goons beat the crap out of geeks trying stunts like that. Real gamblers play the futures markets. And politics.”
“Futures in what?” I asked, not ready to think about what a faster-than-real-time paracomputer might do to politics.
“This brings us to the point of today’s exercise,” said Veeter. “In order to put Rumpelstiltskin on an even keel, I’d like to place a very large order for a common type of memory chip before taking office. Obviously I want to lock in the best possible price. So I need to predict the futures market for that particular chip, which is traded on the Shanghai commodities exchange. And this, Bela, is the question I’m paying you to answer: How would you hook together your morphons to represent a high-tech futures market?”
I sat in silence for a minute, revolving the problem in my mind. “The model needs a cake for sure,” I said presently. “The cake is the chip industry.”
“Yes,” said Veeter. “And I was thinking of having a rake and a teapot sticking into the cake. Like Paul was starting to blurt out last night. The handle of the rake and the spout of the teapot jammed right into the dough. The rake represents materials, you see, and the teapot stands for manufacturing costs. But then—we’re not sure how to include the free market.”
“Flying fish,” I said as readily as if a voice in my head were dictating to me, which was how some of my best ideas tended to come. “The fish are the competing buyers. They’re hovering around the cake’s candles like moths. You put a plate up above them, and the fish cast shadows on the plate. The total shadowed area on the plate corresponds to the chip price.”
“Tremendous!” exclaimed Veeter after a moment’s thought. “A fine mind redeemed from rock and roll. Paul’s been trying to help me, but he couldn’t make the jump. Of course. The fish are like moths and the shadows are the prices. Aha! I’m going to implement it right away.”
“Oh, hold on,” I said. “We’re talking stochastic measure theory. The chip price will be the square root of the shadowed area.”
“Now that’s why I need a guy like you,” said Veeter admiringly. “The square root, of course.”
“Way to go, Bela,” said Alma.
“So how do you codec this one?” I asked Veeter.
“I’ve got a terabyte database on my chip market in here,” he said patting his computer. “That’s the data. I updated it just before you got here. I can put your new model into the Gobrane as a pattern of eddy currents, and the data enters as electric potentials along the chip’s edge. This is harder than the dice problem. Devolving the codec for this type of data cost me a hundred and twenty hours of network time.”
Veeter worked faster than anyone I’d ever seen. He picked up a connector cable from his computer and plugged the computer into the teapot. The brass Aladdin’s lamp had a data port set into its side, not to mention a power supply and some subsidiary components in its base. In the space of a few minutes, he’d programmed our model onto the Gobrane as a pattern of whirlpools and eddy currents; the membrane took on a spotty appearance that resembled leopard skin or perhaps a peacock tail. According to Veeter, the chip now embodied the cake, rake, teapot, fish, dish model I’d described.
“You’re an animal,” I said admiringly.
“Now for the data,” said Veeter, and clicked an icon on his screen. His database surged through the connector cable and the chip took on the look of a blue and green doily, with a lace filigree around its edge. The colors seeped inward, growing tendrils that spiraled around each other, forming a tiny red flower at each intersection. The flowers expanded, wobbled, and overlaid each other, canceling out the colors till only a dust of animated black pollen remained. And now the pollen-dots congealed into—the number 72, as if printed onto the chip’s surface in a bold sans serif font. Talk about an easy-to-use codec!
“Seventy-two,” mused Veeter. “Lower than I would have dared try. Terrific. I’m going to trust this result. No time to waste; the data’s constantly changing out from under us, and the paracomputer isn’t all that accurate for longer periods of time. Tada, I place my hedge.” He typed 72 into a brokerage window on his computer screen, clicked the Purchase button, and looked up with a quizzical smile. “Ever spent point-seven billion dollars with one mouse click? We’re all done for now. And Bela, give me your copy of the contract for a sec. Unless I’ve just roasted my weenie, it looks like you saved me a hundred mill.”
Mutely I handed him my contract. He laid out the two copies, scratched some things out, wrote in and initialed some changes, and slid the altered contracts over for me to initial as well. He’d just changed the contracts to run for thirty-six months, with an even better monthly salary. “Henry Nunez will be in touch with you if we need any more help. You’ll like him, he’s a good guy. But you don’t have to work any harder than you want to. Enjoy yourself, you deserve it. And now I’ve really got to run. Feel free to tell Paul what we did. He’s been hung up on this chrome-dome mathematical physics thing your old adviser was talking about. Something about the Margolus-Levitin theorem? Anyway, I’ll leave the laptop and the paracomputer for you boys to play with. I’ve got a couple more rigs just like this back at the ranch. I’ll be fascinated to see what you two maniacs get into.”
He hurried out of the house, phoning Gyula as he went. We drifted along in his wake, drawn by his energy. Gyula materialized at the end of the driveway, and then Veeter was gone.
“I’m so proud of you, Bela,” said Alma, giving me a big kiss. I hugged her, feeling like things were back to normal. When we broke the clinch I was struck by how quiet it was here amidst the domestic little ranch homes of the Stanford drones.
“Where’d Paul and Cammy go?” I wondered.
“Oh no," said Alma, pointing. Paul’s van was gently rocking up and down. And to dispel any possible doubt, we glimpsed a flash of Cammy’s slender, bare shoulders through the tinted rear window. She was riding Paul.
That crazy Cammy. Vlogging Paul’s seduction live on the Web! Although I ached with jealousy, I forced a laugh.
I heard Cammy’s answering laughter from within the van, rich and confident. She turned just a bit, revealing the womanly curve of her left breast. She could have been mine. I held my fake smile, feeling the tension in my cheeks.
Alma pounded her little fist on my chest. “It’s not funny, Bela. That whore. Take me home to Humelocke.” She kissed me one more time for emphasis. “Yes, I’m coming back to you. I’ll get my stuff.”
At one level this felt wrong. I should be the one with Cammy, not Paul. That bastard. Always a jump ahead of me. What was so great about Alma, anyway?
But now here she came, in tears, bumping and lugging her suitcase out of the house, with wads of extra items under her arms. I took the heavy bag and put it in the back of my whale wagon. Comforted her. And then we were on our way.
On the highway I glanced over at Alma, admiring her crisp, perfect profile, really much finer than Cammy’s. I took her little hand in mine. How sweet it felt. I wanted to take care of her.
“I could love you, Bela,” she said.
“I love you right now,” I replied.
Yes, I had my doubts, but mainly I was glad. I had Alma, I had a steady income for the next three years, there were all kinds of incredible applications for my mathematics on the horizon; and I had the burgeoning success of Washer Drop to enjoy as well.
As for Cammy, well, she’d pretty much told me she was going to seduce Paul and I’d pretty much told her to go ahead. In a way, she’d done it as a favor to me. No need to get all bent out of shape—as she would put it. What a woman. I’d still be making music with her in any case. And, wh
o could tell, maybe we’d be lovers yet.
Really, everything was perfect.
4
Hypertunnel at the Tang Fat Hotel
I tend to tell my life story as if everything were funny, even though it’s not.
Given: the world is absurd. Do we laugh or do we cry? My bent is to laugh; it feels better. But sometimes laughter loses and brutality wins. Sometimes there’s nothing left but tears.
Cammy Vendt was murdered while Alma and I drove to Humelocke.
The killer was a gardener’s assistant named Roberto Sandoval. He stabbed her sixteen times.
Sandoval was riding around town in a friend’s mini-pickup on Friday night, smoking pot laced with PCP. They noticed the wild-ass crowd at the outdoor Washer Drop concert, and what the hey, they stopped.
Sandoval and his buddy joined the throng, ready to smoke more shit, drink beer, maybe pick up a girl or get in a fight. Cammy caught Sandoval’s attention, the way she was strutting on the stage so fine and proud. After drinking for awhile, he tried to climb up to dance with her. Thuggee slammed him, and the cops sent him on his way without bothering to arrest him. When Sandoval tried to push to the stage again, the people in the audience recognized him from before and called him an asshole, driving him back to the fringes of the crowd. He smoked and drank till he blacked out; his friend gave him a ride home to his sister’s apartment on 11th Street in downtown San Ho. His sister waited the counter at a taqueria.
That would have been the end of it, but Sandoval’s sister happened to have a computer. After sleeping through the start of work Saturday morning, Sandoval did a Web search for that jerk-off washer-something band he’d seen last night, a search for those snots who’d thrown him off the stage, a search for those dreggers with the puto bass player—and somehow he ended up at Buzz watching The Stripper Musician.
Sandoval’s senses were raw and preternaturally alert from his hangover. Although relatively uneducated, he was cunning. According to what he told the police, he figured out the route to Paul’s place from the visual information in Cammy’s vlog, took a commuter train to Palo Alto, and walked to Paul’s from the station. This part of the story was a bit uncertain, as no witnesses could recall having seen Sandoval on the train.
