by Rudy Rucker
Soccer - The joy of controlling a rolling sphere. Programming - the joy of controlling a machine. Could a soccer ball or a shoe sole be a computer? The object is computing as an elastic mass, and is probably programmable. But how? How to program limpware? You would convince it to do something? The limpware learns by sweat-lodge-type techniques?
Strange quarkbags are something femtotechnology might be good for making. As described in "The Search for Strange Matter," in the January, 1994, Scientific American, most matter is made of protons and neutrons, and these particles can in turn be thought of as little bags filled with quarks. There are (at least) three kinds of quark: up, down, and strange. A proton is a bag holding two up quarks and one down quark, while a neutron is a bag with two down quarks and one up quark. Ordinarily you can't have more than three quarks in a bag together. But if one of the quarks is strange, it throws off the exclusion principle. Like a slight flaw in tiling a wall leads to a fault that runs through a big pattern before it can repeat. Quarkbags can have just about any mass.
So now suppose there are atoms with quarkbags at their center. And suppose there is a chemistry for these atoms. Chemistry would now be kind of chaotic, with different rules in different places.
I have an image of Toontown. Like an ashtray is zapped with strange quarks, you like spray a spraycan of strange quarks onto a boomerang-shaped white plastic ashtray and now it starts warping and flexing because it's now made of strange quarkbag matter.
The technology for effecting these changes would be of course femtotechnology; given that a nucleus is about 20 femtometers, it seems likely that an individual quark might be about a femtometer in size.
Uvvies are universal viewers, devices which have wholly replaced
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the television, the telephone, and the personal computer. An uvvy is about the size of an old telephone handset, and like most of 2053s intelligent devices it is designed around a small limpware processing unit: a DIM.
Wormholes might be places where the scientific equations can't work, or maybe even inside the sun, or inside strange quarkbag matter. There might be wormholes and quarkbags hiding inside the sun. In wormholes there are energy densities such that, say, a thousand decimal places are meaningful for the real numbers involved - Planck's downer of like only thirty decimal places being meaningful is out of the picture here, provided that these wormholes are somehow inside Planck's constant. In here, even the simplest of physical processes effects are using laws with nonlinear equations of, say, the fiftieth degree. And like changing the four-hundredth digit in the decimal expansion of the coefficient of the thirty-eighth-power term will throw your process into a wholly different basin of attraction leading to a wholly different strange attractor. And the guys are trying to hack this rule, and they can't, so they use genetic algorithms to search the huge parameter space, and then . . .
Appeared as "18 Tech Notes Toward a Cyberpunk Novel"
in Mondo 2000, #13, Summer, 1994.
Whenever I'm working on a novel, I maintain a parallel "Notes" document where I write down, among other things, technology ideas. Most of the ideas in this excerpt were in my notes for Freeware, and many of them ended up in that novel. Others ended up in Realware, and in Saucer Wisdom.
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PART II:
LIFE
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Drugs and Live Sex
"What do you want to do now, Rudy?" Eddie and I are standing out on Fifth Avenue. We've just been to see the photos at the Museum of Modern Art. It's a sunny February day. Fifth Avenue near the park is about as dull a place as you'll find in NYC. Eddie's the only White Rastafarian in sight. "Let's go downtown and score some dope, Ed." "Okay." I'd expected Eddie to have a good stash when I visited him. But I'd happened in on a trough - and this was before the era of the marijuana stores. Early 1980. All Eddie has is some poisonous-green home-grown, good for brewing headache tea. Listening to his huge reggae record collection last night, we'd tried smoking some anyway. Better than cigarettes, and my head's still a little . . . loose. "Ja-ja be my eyesight." Singing that and walking crosstown to the B-way line. It's Burning Spear, he sings with his neck stretched forward like a black goose. "My way is long, for the road is so foggy foggy.'' You can hear the fog in his voice. My road is so foggy. That means the future is uncertain. Time branches. The music is like garbage underfoot. Beautiful garbage, blowing all up and down the streets of NYC. The graffiti on the subway cars has evolved during the two years I've been in Germany. You can't read the names at all anymore. The wild abstract expressionist "lettering" covers all the windows so you have to just know where to get out. Everyone does know, except the junk-sick stick-thin black man shouting, "Mah numbah come in," shuddering there with empty seats around him, running his fingers through an astral heap of zero-dollar bills. Blank Eddie hovers there in the fluorescent light like a big, cautious fish. "Mah numbuh come in!" Crash, roar, crash, roar, crash - we're on Fifteenth Street. Down the stairs uptown, up the stairs downtown. Who needs matter-transmitters when he's got subways? It's teleportation, just crash-roar and everything's different! It's still a sunny February day, a cold day, a street of houses. Down the block there's a liveried chauffeur smoking a spliff outside his dark-blue Buick.
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Secret smiles. "We should try Union Square," Eddie says, "I had to wait for someone there this summer and twenty guys must have come up to me." "You think they'll be there today?'' "Are you kidding?" There's an interfacial cordon of smilers blocking the entrance to Union Park. Heads down, we try to break through. "Pot?" "Powders?" "Black beauties?" I stop on a dime. It's like the New York Stock Exchange here. Futures, pasts and presents. "Let me see it first," I say. "Sure you can see it," a red-faced little dealer says, handing over a tiny manila envelope. Lots of seeds in there. On the street you're glad if there's seeds. "I'll give you four bucks." "Make it four-fifty." "Four." "Okay." I give him a five-dollar bill. Suddenly it is clear that there is no way in hell he is going to give me a dollar back. "Black beauties." The next dealer starts in. "Let me do my thing now, man." He's happy and bouncing, a walking endorsement for his pills. "It's a beautiful world, folks. Black beauties." Eddie is pulling me away. "I don't let him take pills," he explains to the dealer. "I may be back," I call. We still need papers, and a place to roll. The Lone Star is a block away, I read about Bo Diddley playing there two years ago, before I was exiled to Germany, I want to check it out. "Do you sell cigarette papers?" I ask the bartender. A slim jock, he looks at me like I'm out of my mind. I guess he doesn't like pot-smokers. "No," he says finally, "I don't sell cigarette papers." Maybe I've been gone too long. "Give us two Dos Equis," Eddie says. Nobody drinks regular beer in the Village. This is by no means a head-bar at two in the afternoon. It's all . . . executives drinking boilermakers. I peer into my little manila dope envelope. The seeds wink up at me. I haven't been really high in over a year. You ever try scoring in Germany? "I'll make some phone calls," Eddie says and disappears. The Mexican beer is worse than German, worse than American. "Three chilled vodkas straight up!" someone calls. Oh, man. Then Eddie's back. "My friend Dan says we can come over. He's very busy, but he'll give us a jay. He smokes only the best." Eddie says this with absolute conviction, his Paul Newman lips compressed to a line inside his Moses beard. Who needs telepathy if you've got telephones? We walk two blocks . . . all this motion, from here to there . . . how is it possible? Everything is teleportation! Dan meets us in the hall. We have to look over his shoulders to see inside. Wet paint. "This is Rudy,"
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Eddie says. "He's my favorite science fiction writer." True enough, since Eddie never reads. "Eddie's told me about you," Dan tells me with an old pro's warm smile. He hands Eddie a fat spliff. "This stuff is very . . . resinous. Have a good time with it.'' The only time I ever scored in Germany was from a Turk in the street. A bar of hard, light-brown "hashish." It wouldn't fluff up or burn right, so I chewed a lot of it. It's funny how you can recognize the taste
of camel shit the very first time you encounter it. Almost two years I've been in Germany. I make Eddie give me the reefer as soon as we've walked a block. Two hits and the air has that great clear-gelatin look to it. Communing with space! I can feel the pressure between the buildings, the long trough of the street, the art nouveau complexities trailing my hands . . . not just space, but spacetime! The light is clear and yellow. It's a whole different city again, like taking the subway, crash-roar and wham you're in a . . .new place. I start trying to explain this to Eddie. "You dig how the subway is the same as matter-transformation, moving you around in ordinary space?" He doesn't care. He doesn't not care. He just strides along, his clotted welcome-mat of hair behind him. My mouth is still running. "But just now, getting high, everything changed again . . . as if we had taken a subway. It's parallel worlds, you dig. You can walk crosstown, get a subway downtown . . . you can take an elevator up. But dope is like moving in a different dimension. The fourth dimension. We didn't move at all in regular space, but now we're in a different place." "In my building," Eddie says, "This is what somebody scratched in the elevator: THIS IS A BOX THAT CANNOT WALK! SO? YOU?" We cross Avenue A. The blocks are smaller way down here in the East Village. It's a good feeling to know that I'm by no means the first person to walk these sidewalks completely stoned. Eddie has his camera along and stops to take a picture of something on a church. I stand there, like a bodyguard in my long black German overcoat, and old people shuffle around us, anxious of sudden gestures. Stoned and loitering, there's a feeling of being on the other side, an alien. Eddie wants to show me a place called Reggae Record Ranch. It's on Seventh Street near Avenue B. A storefront with the windows covered. No way I would ever have found it alone, much less gone in. Good loud Jamaican music in there, highly
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evolved. There's like no record racks. Just a three meter by four meter floor covered with linoleum patterned like a zebra hide. The light is yellow, gelatinous. A high counter across the back of the room, with a Jamaican behind it talking to two others. They know Eddie. He was cameraman on Rockers, a movie sort of like The Harder They Come. Eddie was down in Jamaica shooting for months. That's when he became a White Rastafarian. I can't understand what anyone's saying at all, but walk up to the high counter and hold my hand out to the man behind it. He touches my hand. "Garfield." He's wearing a very high-crowned felt hat, sort of a space-dilated derby. It's wooly and a nice pink and gray plaid. There's an X scar on Garfield's nose. I ease back to the wall. There is a record rack after all, and I lean on it, keeping an eye on Eddie, feeling like a gunsel. But, hey, the music is really good. The guy across the room is clearly a Jamaican musician. He has the dreadlocks, about ten rings, and a ROCKERS button. We keep making and breaking eye-contact. I've got to say something, just to relieve the pressure. "Who's this record by?" I ask whitely. "Oh this is a round thing some brothers razza jive fa-tazz comin' in you say I mean diggin' it out the burnin' seed in there sha-bazzo wrap in there the burnin' seed you gettin' got . . . " There's more, and while he talks, a big stoned grin crawls out of my mouth. He stops and cracks a slight smile. ''You know what I'm talking about?" "Well, yes, I mean generally speaking . . . " Eddie's been conferring with Garfield all this time. Garfield cuts off the record . . . this is Garfield's disco, I realize. He puts on . . . but can't be! He's playing "Memo from Turner!" My all-time favorite Jagger song that I've never heard again since I saw Performance in Berkeley these ten years gone. I still know the words, I can still see Jagger, there's a light swinging back and forth over his head, and Jagger is dressed like a businessman, leaning across a desk and shaking his finger. I hold my coat out like bat-wings and start dancing. The Rastas watch impassively, more alien than anything any fevered middle-class imagination has ever come up with. The song is over and I ask the guy with the dreadlocks his name. "Richard . . . but they call me Dirty Harry." This is a good parallel world we've hit on. Eddie buys me the Jagger record and a pack of Big Bambú, and we hit the street. "What's it like in Jamaica, Eddie?" "Like in there, but when you
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walk out the door you're still inside." We hunker down in a sunny doorway and get out my little thumb-sized envelope of street weed. It's full of seed and ashes and rocks and mouse turds . . . if you really cleaned it, there wouldn't be anything left. We split it in two, and each roll ourselves a big, tapering bomber. There's no rush in the stuff, but it does touch up that initial spacey high like a coat of fresh paint. I puff cautiously at first, waiting for my feet to go PCP-wooden, but it's just harmless roach-weed, we smoke and walk a few blocks, pitch the butts . . . stoned and clean. Hundreds of Puerto Rican kids are out of school and swarming up and down the short blocks, staring at us, first Anglos they've ever seen here. A man cool and muscular as a snake watches us, unblinking, standing in the doorway of the FAMILY SOCIAL CLUB. "I'm getting uptight, Eddie. Get us out of here." "Okay." But there's no subway, no more dope, no matter-transmission, just step after step in the cold wind, weaving down the street like aliens from NGC 38, the kids look at us with open curiosity, por favor, y'all . . . God it's cold. I wish I was back in Jamaica, man, with three red suns overhead and a methane rainbow . . . "Let's get a cab, Eddie.'' He looks at me unbelievingly. Eddie knows every subway station in Manhattan and I want to spend money on a cab? "I'll be happy to ride in a cab, Rudy." "Don't worry, I'll pay." He makes me walk another block first, though, so we can hail a cab on a street that runs uptown. I'm dying. Finally we're in the cab. It's warm and like a kountry kitchen with brick-patterned vinyl paper glued to the back of the front seat. "Do you want to go back to the apartment?" Eddie asks. But I know there are children there, Eddie's two-year-old and a little friend or two, mothers and noise and hassles as if I were back with my family. I'm fading, but it's only four o'clock and . . . "I ought to check out Times Square first." I finger two Reactivins out of my change pocket and swallow them dry. "What was that?" Eddie demands. "It's over-the-counter in Germany. A psychic energizer. It's like for when everything is . . . made of wood. That's a P. D. Ouspensky line." In truth, the Reactivins are little more than caffeine and sugar, but I'm trying to act bad. "I better go home," says Eddie. We get out at Times Square, I pay the cab and Eddie catches a subway. I'm standing there on Broadway, looking around with bright, omnivorous interest. There
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used to be a peep-house here with some really hot film-loops, but I can't spot it. But there's plenty else. There's porno in Germany of course - it's completely legal there, and even the weekly news-magazines have nudes on their covers . . . but I've never seen a live sex show. That's what I'm really looking for here in Times Square, live sex and a place to take a crap without getting gang-fucked. Right on 42nd Street just east of Broadway is the place I'm looking for, an exmovie theater with LIVE LOVE SEX on the marquee. TWELVE BOY-GIRL SHOWS A DAY. The admission is an utterly reasonable $3.49, and I scuttle on in. I'm a little nervous going into the bathroom. There's piss on the floor and heavy breathing in the next stall. I squeeze out my turd, keeping my feet well back from the space under the partition, fearful of powerful hands. The theater is huge, and they're filling in the time between acts with a giant porno movie. Projected to big-screen size, the 16mm images are milky, translucent. I check out my fellow sex-enthusiasts. Except for one young couple, who look like their marriage counselor sent them over from Bayonne, it's all Japanese tourists and sixty-year-old men. And me. Up on the screen they're just getting into a nifty three-way: a guy dog-humping the top girl in a female 69 while the girl on the bottom eats his eggs . . . then click, buzz, the film stops and a spotlight comes on. There's a bed on the stage, I notice now, it's tilted up about ten degrees for better viewing and . . . everyone starts moving up . . . will I be able to see? The first row is packed as solid as the Steelers defensive line, sixty-year-old men slotted in there shoulder-to-shoulder, they know the score. I grab a seat in the second row. The music comes on and the girl steps out on stage. She's . . . beautiful! A Fifth Avenue model, wi
th the perfect curly hairdo and dark lipstick, cool shades that are dark at the top and light at the bottom . . . she's wearing a sort of silk swimsuit or teddy or camisole and dancing. This woman is going to fuck and I can watch her! Her face is expressionless, but her slim ass is dimpling at us, she's casual but not too casual, excited but not too excited. One song one tit, two songs both breasts, and then she's naked up there, dancing naked with real cunt hair. I feel like cheering! It's a blow for freedom, it really is. I haven't felt so uplifted since going to see the Stones at the Buffalo Stadium, two months before we had to leave the country. Now I'm back at
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last, and there's live pussy! She swivels onto the bed and freezes, sitting on the edge toward us with her feet together and drawn up, her knees spread wide, showing pink. If she wiggled or smiled now it would be . . . whorish. But as it is, it's iconic, of higher significance, the real thing! Suddenly a guy comes walking down the aisle in a bathrobe. He jumps up on the stage. The male lead! He's a wise-ass greaser with John Travolta hair and a smile that won't quit. She's so glad to see him, she takes off her sunglasses. He slips off the robe and gets right down on her split. Like exhibition wrestlers, they move smoothly from hold to hold. But it's all fun and love. They kiss and talk when their faces come near each other. They never look at us. We all keep real quiet, and I, for one, am too fascinated to even have a hard-on. Later, when I think about it . . . I'll be hard, but for now it's a Holy Mystery. I'm too merged in the great Oversoul to even think of stiffening my bit of stick. Now they've rotated 180 degrees and she's sucking on his big limp cock, taking it all in, right down to the root, but . . . we shift uneasily . . . will he ever get it up? Is this going to be a shuck? Faster than I can follow, she slips around and seems to sit on his prick . . . but is it really hard and in her? Or is it lying limply doggo there, squashed flat by that hard-working juicy minge? A faster song comes on . . . it's all disco of course . . . and they switch to a new position, with him on top, and now there's no doubt about it, the guy is stiff. Yes! He's putting it to her, and she's into it, man, the old in-out, they're shaking that bed, her high-heels are digging into his back . . . He whips it out with a baby spotlight focussed on him, on his huge distended pecker . . . he's spurting! The guy is coming, you can see the clotted-arc shadows on his belly . . . there's no doubt about it! A sigh of relief goes up. We're all in this together. What a relief to participate in something so natural and decent in this twisted world. The equipment still works. I feel like I'm in church, a little boy again. She licks off his slickery dick and balls, they kiss, and it's all over. He stands there, smiling his wise-ass smile. Stud. We're all clapping for him, even the girl on the bed, clapping daintily with a pleasant smile. A sudden pang seizes my heart. Is this primal couple going to just leave? Are Mommy and Daddy going to leave me 'cause I saw them making babies? Just walk backstage and out of my life . . . after all we've shared? Not yet! He
