Seek!: Selected Nonfiction

by Rudy Rucker

  I met John Walker at Hackers 3.0. He told me a little about

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  Autodesk and we talked in fairly general terms about my possibly doing some work with them. A month or two later, John showed up at my house with Eric Lyons, the head of the Autodesk Technology Division. They were toting a 386 and a five megabyte movie of Mandelbrot set zoom images that they'd made. I showed them all my new CA stuff, and they more or less offered me a full-time job. It was so sudden I wasn't really ready to think about it.

  Spring of 1988 I taught Assembly Language again, and this time just about all we did was write CA programs. The big revelation I had about getting the programs to run faster was to have no rigid preconceptions about what I wanted the program to do. Instead I began to listen to what the machine and the assembly language were telling me about what they wanted to do.27

  That same spring, I was teaching a special course on cellular automata, and a custom chip designer called John Wharton had signed up for it. I'd met him at the Artificial Life Conference at Los Alamos in September, 1987, and he'd been at Hackers 3.0 as well. Wharton showed me how to use a stored lookup table for rapidly updating a one-dimensional cellular automaton four cells at a time.

  Wharton and I talked a lot about how to make an inexpensive version of the CAM-6, whether by cloning the hardware or by reinventing the whole thing in software. I began trying to program something like this, and talked about the project with John Walker at Autodesk.

  The semester ended, and the nice rental house my family and I had initially lucked into got sold out from under us for half a million dollars. Looking for a new place to house us on a professor's salary, I realized that here in Silicon Valley I was really poor. I consoled myself by writing a lot more cellular automaton programs, a whole disk's

  27. I found an inspiration for learning to listen to the machine in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, Viking, New York 1973, pp. 314315. There's a little story there about some engineers wondering whether to believe in their calculations or in the data that they are obtaining from tests on their prototype rocket engine. Enzian, an African wise man among the engineers, says: "What are these data if not direct revelation? Where have they come from, if not from the Rocket which is to be? How do you presume to compare a number you have only derived on paper with a number that is the Rocket's own?"

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  worth of them. I called the disk Freestyle CA, and sold about a hundred of them for $10 each via announcements in little magazines.28

  In June I heard that Eric Lyons was giving a talk on cellular automata at Autodesk. I went up, and after the talk I showed Eric my programs and asked if he and John had really meant it about offering me a job.

  In July, John Walker mailed me a copy of his first version of what would eventually become the Autodesk software package called CA Lab: Rudy Rucker's Cellular Automaton Laboratory. Walker's program was such a superb hack that it could run CA rules nearly as fast at the CAM-6 board, but without any special purpose hardware. Not only did Walker's program run my then-favorite CA rule called Brain maybe 30% faster than my best hack at the same thing, but his software was designed in such a way that it was quite easy for users to add new rules.

  I began pushing really hard for the job. We went back and forth for a few weeks, and August 15 I started a three-month contract as a consultant at Autodesk. The main thing I did was to test out Stephen Wolfram's new mathematics program Mathematica on a Mac II that Autodesk lent me. The idea was to use Mathematica to find some interesting new graphics algorithms. I found all kinds of things, but that's a story for a different essay.

  When my consulting contract ran out in November 1988, Autodesk still wasn't quite sure about whether to really hire me full-time. That's when I firmed up the idea that John Walker and I should pool all our CA knowledge and create the unified CA Lab product. I had a lot of ideas for new CA rules to feed to Walker's simulator, and I could write the manual. Putting together CA Lab would be a specific thing I could do during my first year at Autodesk. The deal was okayed, and to make my joy complete, John magnanimously agreed to put my name on the package cover.

  As I write this, it's April 10, 1989, and we're planning to ship the product next month. The code seems to be all done, and when I finish

  28. These programs still work on today's Windows machines, although now they run a little too fast. The Freestyle CA package can be downloaded from the "Gnarly DOS" page of my Web site.

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  this section the manual will be done too, given one more frantic round of corrections.

  So, okay, Rudy, finish it.

  When I look at how completely cellular automata have transformed my life in the last four years I can hardly believe it. The most exciting thing for me to think about is how CA Lab going to transform the lives of some of you who use it; and how you in turn will change the lives of others around you.

  A revolutionary new idea is like an infection that's actually good for the people who get it. I caught cellular automata in 1985, and I've put them on CA Lab so you can catch them too.

  What happens next? It's up to you.

  Excerpted from the CA Lab manual, Autodesk, 1989.

  CA Lab was an educational DOS software package for investigating cellular automata. I have to admit that my tone goes a little over the top about the virtues of cellular automata and artificial life. Certainly this was one of the least bland computer manuals ever written. The first edition of the manual even included the "brain-eating" scene from my novel Software as a footnote, though the vice-president of marketing had this removed from subsequent printings.

  John Walker, one of the founders of Autodesk, wrote most of the code for CA Lab. Although CA Lab is out of print, John Walker has created an improved freeware version of the program for Windows called Cellab. Cellab is available for download from my Web site or from Walker's Web site atwww.fourmilab.ch/cellab.29 The complete CA Lab manual is also available at these sites.

  29. Walker's site has many other goodies, I think he gets something like 100,000 hits a day. It's worth mentioning that Walker was an inspiration for the character Roger Coolidge in my novel The Hacker and the Ants. As he wasn't quite satisfied with my ending (Roger Coolidge dies), John wrote his own alternate ending for The Hacker and the Ants and put it on his site!

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  Four Kinds of Cyberspace

  I'm going to discuss four interrelated strands of cyberspace. First, there is cyberspace in the sense that cyberpunk science fiction writers first used it. Second, there is cyberspace in the sense of virtual reality (VR). Third, there is cyberspace as the locale of the cultural cyberpunk phenomenon. Fourth, there is cyberspace as the worldwide computer network.

  The Science Fiction Brain-Plug

  One of the characteristic bits of technology in cyberpunk science fiction is a direct man-to-machine interface, sometimes known as a "brain-plug." I first read of about being plugged into machines in an SF paperback back in 1961.

  It was an odd room, a short of shapeless, plastic-lined cocoon without furnishings. The thing had floated submerged in the fluid. It lay on the floor now, limbs twisting spasmodically.

  It was male: the long, white beard was proof of that. It was a pitiful thing, a kind of caricature of humanity, a fantastically hairy gnome curled blindly into a fetal position. It was naked; its skin where it showed through the matted hair, was grub-white and wrinkled from the long immersion.

  It had floated in this room in its gently moving nest of hair, nourished by the thick, feshlike cord trailing from a tap protruding through the wall to where it had been grafted to the navel, dreaming the long, slow, happy, fetal dreams.30

  The hedonistic gnome didn't quite have a brain-plug - but he was definitely plugged-in!

  A lot of ideas in science fiction are symbols of archetypal human

  30. From James Gunn, "Name Your Pleasure," 1954. Reprinted in James Gunn, The Joy Makers, Bantam, New York 1961, p. 171.

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  desires. Stories about time travel are often about memory and the longing to go back to the past. Telepathy is really an objective correlative for the fantasy of perfect communication. Travel to other planets is travel to exotic lands. Levitation is freedom from the shackles of ordinary life.

  The brain plug is a symbol, first and foremost, for a truly effortless computer interface. Associated with this perfect user interface are notions of intelligence increase, technological expertise, and global connectedness.

  In 1976, I wrote my first SF novel, Spacetime Donuts, which prominently features brain-plugs. In Spacetime Donuts, a brain plug is a socket in a person's head; you plug a jack into your socket in order to connect your thoughts directly to a computer. The rush of information is too much for most people, but there is a small cadre of countercultural types who are able to withstand it.

  When I wrote Spacetime Donuts, I was a computer-illiterate academic who taught and lectured about mathematics and philosophy. I feared and hated computers. I had no idea how to control them. Yet at the same time I craved computers, I longed for access to the marvelous things they could do - the mad graphics, the arcane info access, the manipulation of servo-mechanisms. Thus the ambivalent fascination of the plug: on the positive side, a plug provides a short-circuit no-effort path into the computer; on the negative side, a plug might turn you into the computer's slave.

  Here's what happens when my character Vernor Maxwell first plugs into the big central computer known as Phizwhiz.

  . . . it was like suddenly having your brain become thousands of times larger. Our normal thoughts consist of association blocks woven together to form patterns which change as time goes on. When Vernor was plugged into Phizwhiz, the association blocks became larger, and the patterns more complex. He recalled, for instance, having thought fleetingly of his hand on the control switch. As soon as the concept hand formed in Vernor's mind, Phizwhiz had internally displayed every scrap of information it had relating to the key-word hand. All the literary allusions to, all the physiological studies of, all the known uses for hands were simultaneously held in the Vernor-Phizwhiz joint consciousness. All this as well as

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  images of all the paintings, photographs, X-rays, holograms, etc. of hands which were stored in the Phizwhiz's memory bank. And this was just a part of one association block involved in one thought pattern.31

  I didn't think of making up a word for the mental space inside Phizwhiz, and if I had, I probably would have called it a "mindscape," meaning a landscape of information patterns, a platonic space of floating ideas.

  The Spacetime Donuts mindscape is not very much like cyberspace. Why not? Because the mindscape comes all sealed up inside one centralized building full of metal boxes, a building belonging to the government - this was the old centralized, mainframe concept of computation. I never thought about bulletin boards, or modems, or the already existing global computer network. Although I understood about connecting to computers, I didn't understand about computers connecting to each other in the abstract network that would become cyberspace.

  In 1981, Vernor Vinge published a Net story called "True Names," about a group of game-playing hackers who encounter sinister multinational forces in their shared virtual reality. Many view this story as the first depiction of cyberspace. And then William Gibson burst upon the scene with the stories collected in Burning Chrome, followed by his 1984 novel Neuromancer.

  Rather than being modeled on the outdated paradigm of computers as separate individuals, Gibson's machines were part of a fluid continuous whole; they were trusses holding up a global computerized information network with lots of people hooked into it at once.

  Gibson usually describes his cyberspace in terms of someone flying through a landscape filled with colored 3-D geometric shapes, animated by patterns of light. This large red cube might be IBM's data, that yellow cone is the CIA, and so on. Here, cyberspace is a great matrix with all the world's computer data embedded in it, and it is experienced graphically. I came to think of it like this:

  31. The first two out of three intended Spacetime Donuts installments appeared in the short-lived Unearth magazine in 19781979. The entire novel was published by Ace Books in 1981. The quote is from p. 13.

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  Cyberspace had oozed out of the world's computers like stage-magic fog. Cyberspace was an alternate reality, it was the huge interconnected computation that was being collectively run by planet Earth's computers around the clock. Cyberspace was the information Net, but more than the Net, cyberspace was a shared vision of the Net as a physical space.32

  But what about that brain-plug interface? Once you think about it very hard, it becomes clear that there really is no chance of having an actual brain plug anytime soon.

  The problem is that our physiological understanding of the fine structure of the brain cells is incredibly rudimentary. And, seriously, can you imagine wanting to be the first one to use a brain plug designed by a team of hackers on a deadline? Every new program crashes the system dozens, scores, hundreds, thousands of times during product development. But-how would you reboot your body after some stray signal in a wire shuts down your thalamus or stops your heart?

  In my novels Freeware and Realware, I tried to finesse the brain-plug issue by having a device I call an "uvvy." Rather than being surgically wired into your brain-stem, the uvvy sits on your neck and interacts with your brain by electromagnetic fields. This futuristic technology is what the scientist Freeman Dyson calls "radioneurology." He proposes that:

  . . . radioneurology might take advantage of electric and magnetic organs that already exist in many species of eels, fish, birds, and magnetotactic bacteria. In order to implant an array of tiny transmitters into a brain, genetic engineering of existing biological structures might be an easier route than microsurgery . . . When we know how to put into a brain transmitters translating neural processes into radio signals, we shall also know how to insert receivers translating radio signals back into neural processes. Radiotelepathy is the technology of transferring information

  32.The Hacker and the Ants, p. 8.

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  directly from brain to brain using radio transmitters and receivers in combination.33

  Speaking of ''radiotelepathy," I've unearthed an earlier use of the word, although not in exactly the same sense that Dyson uses it. This information isn't totally relevant, but I'll include it anyway. After all, we're here to Seek! The passage in question occurs in one of my favorite books, The Yage Letters, where Allen Ginsberg is writing his friend William Burroughs a letter about a fairly nightmarish drug-trip he'd just had after taking a curandero's (a curandero is one who "cures") mixture of ayahuasca and other jungle plants in Pucallpa, Peru, in June, 1960.

  I felt faced by Death, my skull in my beard on pallet on porch rolling back and forth and settling finally as if in reproduction of the last physical move I make before settling into real death - I got nauseous, rushed out and began vomiting, all covered with snakes, like a Snake Seraph, colored serpents in aureole all around my body, I felt like a snake vomiting out the universe - all around me in the trees the noise of these spectral animals the other drinkers vomiting (normal part of the Cure sessions) in the night in their awful solitude in the universe - [I felt] also as if everybody in the session in central radiotelepathic contact with the same problem - the Great Being within ourselves - and at that moment - vomiting still feeling like a Great lost Serpent-seraph vomiting in consciousness of the Transfiguration to come - with the Radiotelepathy sense of a Being whose presence I had not yet fully sensed - too Horrible for me, still - to accept the fact of total communication with say everyone an eternal seraph male and female at once - and me a lost soul seeking help - well slowly the intensity began to fade . . .34

  33. Freeman Dyson, Imagined Worlds, Harvard University Press, Cambridge 1997, pp. 134, 135.