by Rudy Rucker
It was definitely time to step outside. The rain had subsided to a drifting mist. A dozen iridescent piezoplastic crows were wandering about the deck, shaking out their wings and clacking their beaks. Mr. Peanut was standing on his tripod of legs in the not-so-deep water, scanning the bay and brandishing his cane like a fencer’s foil. Jayjay and Craigor were excitedly fiddling with piezoplastic bands stretched among the joints and pistons of a small steel backhoe, which had a Happy Shoon perched in its driver’s seat, his fingers grown into spindly tendrils which twined around the machinery to touch each of the stretchy bands. The bands were taking the place of the beat old machine’s unfueled gasoline engine.
“Jil is—” began Thuy.
“We know,” said Jayjay. “It’s been like this all week. I feel bad about it. Like it’s partly my fault. But I don’t know what to do.”
“What about you, Craigor?” said Thuy. “Don’t you care?”
Craigor looked Thuy over again. “It’s gonna be me in my coffin when I die, little girl. This is my only run. No way I can paddle back upstream, back to what Jil and I had before.”
“You could try,” urged Thuy. “Love her, Craigor. Save her. And what about your children?”
“My parents stayed together for the sake of the kids,” said Craigor, tall, stiff, unhappy. “It was hell for all of us. Why am I even telling you this? Words suck. You are what you do. If Jil wants to save herself, that’s her call.” Seeing something in the bay, Craigor whooped with a warrior’s fierce exultation. “Yeah, baby! Here he comes!”
The puffed-up golem was in view to the stern, approaching fast, his arms and legs beating a fierce rhythm. The pelican and the pterodactyl were circling overhead, and in the orphidnet Thuy could see the crocodile coming up on the Merz Boat from below.
Craigor’s plastic crows took wing and mobbed the pair of airborne shoons, doing their best to distract them without being snapped up by the great beaks. Moments later three of the crows were gone. They were overmatched.
Moving with awkward agility, Mr. Peanut lurched into position and intercepted the golem, who didn’t seem to recognize the peanut as a threat. Easy as pie, Mr. Peanut shish-kebabbed the golem with his cane. The golem struggled and burbled; Mr. Peanut bit off his head, then his chest, then his legs. Fueled by the piezoplastic, the top-hatted goober doubled his body size. Triumphantly he slashed his cane at the waves.
Before Thuy, Jayjay, and Craigor could cheer Mr. Peanut’s success, the Merz Boat shuddered amidships. The crocodile shoon had reared out of the water to tear loose a chunk of the low gunnel. Icy water sloshed across the deck as the thick plastic reptile heaved himself aboard. Twanging and shuddering, the backhoe stretched its jaws toward the croc. The croc snapped at the metal shovel, managing to sever one of its power belts.
For now the green pelican simply hovered, watching the events unfold. But the pterodactyl dove at Thuy as if meaning to carry her off. She flattened herself on the deck; the pterodactyl missed her. The backhoe spun fruitlessly in a tight circle, its Happy Shoon driver frantically adjusting the belts in an effort to regain control. The red pterodactyl did a loop-the-loop and dove again, keeping Thuy in place.
And now the crocodile came slithering across the deck toward her, his toothy jaws ajar. Thuy began screaming for help, but not quite from the bottom of her heart. At some level, she felt detached—as if she were perusing a lifebox metanovel. Damsel in distress! Who’ll save me?
Craigor was over by the long cabin, poised to defend his family. But Jayjay—Jayjay was there for Thuy. He sprang forward with a machete in his grip and thrust it toward the red pterodactyl, forcing the monster to cease its diving and hover on high. Thuy sprang to her feet and backed away from the croc—only to find herself cornered against the wall of the boat’s workshop.
The crocodile flexed his haunches and widened his jaws, preparing to pounce. All veils of playfulness dropped. Thuy was facing empty, eternal death. She screamed with everything she had. Jayjay charged past the backhoe and slashed into the croc’s back. The hissing shoon turned to snap at him, giving the backhoe an opening to clamp onto the croc’s tail. And now Thuy’s hero waded in and hacked the monster to bits. A flock of shoons converged on the gobbets of piezoplastic, gobbling them up.
“Look out!” shouted Craigor. Thirteen-year-old Momotaro was standing in the door of the long cabin beside his slightly younger sister, Bixie, with Jil frozen-faced behind them, her brain fogged with glowing dots. Craigor and Momotaro were pointing at the hovering red pterodactyl, who was oddly bending his body in half.
Thuy and Jayjay found shelter against the backhoe, in case the shoon dived, but this time he pulled a new stunt: he shat a flaming pellet of piezoplastic onto the deck; the lump sputtered and sizzled like napalm. The boat itself might have caught fire if it hadn’t been for the puddled water from the broken gunnel. Snapping out of her trance, Jil directed her shoons to suck up water and to spit it onto the flames.
The pterodactyl feathered his wings and hunched his body again as if to drop a flame-egg upon the exposed roof of the long cabin. Craigor roared defiance, leaping onto the cabin’s roof and tossing three of his crow shoons into the air. And now finally the green pelican did something. Quick as a sewing machine’s needle, his beak dispatched the crows: one-two-three.
Thuy was dizzied by all the sensations, especially as she was trying to mold them into metanovel material in realtime. As part of the work she’d switched on a music track: operatic rock and roll. The pterodactyl and the pelican were visual echoes of the menacing bird-headed subbie she’d seen in the non-space between Topping’s office and the ExaExa labs.
The dusky red pterodactyl squawked his approval for the crow-pecking, but then, when he was least expecting it, the green pelican darted at him and—yes!—ripped off one of his wings. The pterodactyl plummeted downward, bounced off the side of the Merz Boat, and ended up screeching and floundering in the Bay waters. Mr. Peanut strode over and dispatched him with cruel stabs of his cane.
There was a moment of calm. The Merz Boat pushed up a fresh gunnel-lip to repair the gap the crocodile had made. The sloshing bay waters drained out through the scuppers. The pelican glided to a silent landing on the deck, preened himself, and fixed the humans with a glittering eye.
“Hi Jayjay,” he said in a familiar voice. “Sonic sent me. Lay down that machete, you’re making me nervous.”
Jayjay thought for a minute, consulting his simulation beezies, and then he laid the machete on the deck behind him and hunkered beside the pelican. “Talk to me,” he said.
“Ready for a private message stream?” said the pelican.
“Let Thuy and Craigor hear, too,” said Jayjay.
“And us,” said Momotaro.
“Not you kids,” said Jil. “You need to get back in bed. It’s too cold out here.” She shuddered. “Aren’t you cold?”
“Aw, Mom.”
“Come on.” Jil and the kids disappeared into the cabin.
“Here we go,” said the pelican to Thuy, Jayjay, and Craigor, the three of them squatting around him. Overhead the clouds were breaking up and the moon was shining through, big and bright, just past full.
The data flowed in, a mental movie in three scenes. As soon as Thuy realized what she was seeing, she began forwarding it to Chief Bim Brown.
The first scene shows Sonic on the day he was abducted, October 21, two weeks before the election. Sonic is closed in by the quantum-mirrored walls of the ExaExa labs, sitting at a long white table drinking a big mug of coffee, still in his red T-shirt with his pleated leather coat on the table beside him.
One wall is covered with the teleport grill, the opposite wall holds a door, and the side walls are mounted with four view screens simulating natural phenomena: cracking mud, wind-tossed branches, a beach fire, and a waterfall.
Set into a niche like an altar beneath the bonfire screen is a smooth-cornered white plastic box bearing the ExaExa beetle logo and a single red button on its side. Th
e box has intricate latches on its lid.
Jeff Luty is talking to Sonic. He’s still gangly, but he’s put on some weight, living alone in his lab. His wavy, unwashed hair is drawn into a ponytail. He wears a bracelet of colored oval stones around his wrist. The stones are incised to look like beetles. His skin is unhealthy, almost gray. He has plastic ants on his chin and cheeks, but his ropy chapped lips show. He licks his upper lip, then compulsively applies some waxy lip balm from a tube.
“What’s with the ants, Jeff?” says Sonic.
“A visual pun,” says Luty, his plain face forming a faint smile. “I’m in personal crunch mode to find a nant design that orphids and code-hackers can’t trash. I’m farming a few thousand evolutionary algorithms. The formic minibots on my face are ant-shaped shoons loaded with sample nant nanocodes. They’re a fake beard, too.”
“Like you’d go outside wearing plastic ants?” says Sonic.
“Well, no, not while I’m indicted for capital charges,” says Luty. “With my picture in all the post offices. That’s fame, huh? I’m counting on Dick Too Dibbs to pardon me. He’d better. My ads are flipping the election.”
“So what do you want with me?”
Luty leans forward, licks his lips again, and scrapes a few of the plastic ants off his face and onto Sonic’s head. “Try and trash these guys like you did Nektar’s beetles. I enjoy watching a craftsman at work. Like a flenser peeling blubber off a whale.”
“I’m not working for you,” says Sonic.
“Contrariwise,” says Luty. He goes to a cupboard, draws out a slug of raw piezoplastic, and slaps it down on the table in front of Sonic. He lets out a playful, infectious chuckle. “Haven’t you always wanted to be an ant farm?”
Before Sonic can shy away, the plastic ants on his head go into high-speed motion, repeatedly running down his arm to gobble piezoplastic, spawn new ants, and crawl back up, bedecking Sonic’s arm with an ant highway resembling a dark ribbon of syrup. Sonic’s head is a pulsing, wriggling mound of plastic insects; only the tip of his nose is visible. But then the plastic ants begin shuddering and, at first singly and then by the hundreds, they drop away.
“Sweet hack, Sonic,” says Luty. “Your low cunning gives you an edge over the orphids.”
“That rainbow scuzz on Grandmaster Green Flash,” asks Sonic, calmly brushing off the dying plastic ants. “Was that one of your dipshit experiments?”
“Affirmative,” says Luty. “Minus your crass modifier. I’m testing new viral nanomachines all the time.” He walks over to the altar niche and pats the white chest. “And the best nanocodes go onto the little fellows in here. This is the Ark of the Nants, with my special new nant farm inside. The Ark of the Nants holds the world’s new order. Soon I’ll have my new nants loaded with nanocode that the white hats can’t trash. I just wish I could have some face-to-face with Ond Lutter. He put all these nutso nanteater tricks into the orphids, and I’m always having to find more workarounds. I wish I knew the Hibrane jump-code. I’d like to teleport there and barnacle myself to Ond for a few hours. That room-to-room teleport grill of mine is a good start on the big jump, don’t you think?”
“What if I hop back through your punk-ass grill?” says Sonic. “And get myself the fuck outta here?”
“Calm down,” says Luty, applying lip balm. “Don’t use language. That’s a great expression, isn’t it? You remind me of my high-school friend Carlos Tucay. We were gonna make a company called Lu-Tuc Space Tech. But Carlos died. I’ve made a wonderful virtual model of him for Virtual Earth. Stay with me, Sonic. I’ll pay you well.”
“But I don’t want nants to eat Earth,” says Sonic.
“Oh, why do people always say that,” says Luty. “Reality is software. What does it matter what system it’s running on? The big win if we do the port is that we get to clean things up. Dogs out, Carlos in.”
“No,” says Sonic.
“Look, I don’t want to come on like an insane villain,” says Luty. “But I do know about your family. It’s abstractly possible that, in my desperation, I might do something to them. I’m getting a little weird here, cooped up in this lab waiting for Vearth 2.0 and the resurrected Carlos.” Luty pops up a display of Sonic’s fieldworker parents and his eleven brothers and sisters, innocent and humble as laborers in a Diego Rivera mural. There’s a grinning Death icon hovering over their heads, snickering and waggling his scythe. The effect is far from comical.
“Oh man…” says Sonic. “Get me more coffee.”
The second scene shows Dick Too Dibbs touring the lab on November 6, two days after the election. Seen informally, Too Dibbs comes across as even brighter and more strong willed than in his jokey ads. His narrow eyes are clear and observant. His gaze darts methodically around the equipment-filled room, taking an inventory: the teleport grill, the simulation screens, the cabinets and fixtures, the Ark of the Nants, and Sonic busy programming a golem-shaped shoon.
“I’m planning to assist you in completing the project your cousin began,” Luty tells Too Dibbs. “He saw the nants as bringing about—perhaps an odd way to put it—the New Jerusalem of a fully American Virtual Earth. Your cousin felt that Vearth was a fulfillment of Biblical prophecy.”
“I don’t hold with that particular line of religiosity,” says Too Dibbs. “And you’ve heard me say I don’t aim to end up in the death chamber like my cousin Dick.”
“Oh, that was a glitch,” says Luty. “My old nants were hacked by a rogue employee. Ond Lutter. I respect Ond, but we don’t see eye to eye. We’re in a bit of an arms race with each other.” Luty tugs nervously at his limp ponytail. “Ond’s orphids are an interesting challenge. Just recently I’ve developed some irreversible nants that look pretty tough. But I want to be sure they’re truly orphid-proof before I release them. And this is where you come in.” Luty mimes a salute. “It must be done, Mr. President. Battle stations!”
“I’m not president yet.”
“It’s thanks to me that you’re gonna get there,” says Luty. “I saturated the orphidnet with ads, and when that wasn’t enough, I corrupted the vote-tally programs.”
Dick Too Dibbs stares coldly at Luty, who’s wearing a light goatee of plastic ants, even for this meeting with the president-elect. “Those ants must be eating your brain, Jeff. I won my election fair and square. It wasn’t even close. People like the cut of my jib.”
Luty peers at Dick Too Dibbs as if he’s never really seen him before. “Why a jib? What does that even mean? Listen to me. I can make the media remember whatever I want them to remember. Facts are revisable. History is hackable. I can unelect you. You’re a temporary variable.”
A long pause. “What’s the damned point of your Virtual Earth anyway?” asks Too Dibbs finally. “I never understood that. What’s wrong with the Earth we have? My people were farmers, Jeff. You ever walked a freshly plowed field?”
Luty sphincters his wet lips and shakes his head, tense and anal. “Virtual Earth will be germ-free. Digital and odorless. No more dogs spreading filth. Wouldn’t you love that?”
“I don’t know,” says Too Dibbs softly. “I just don’t know.”
“Well, I know and I’m telling you,” says Luty, his voice cracking. “First you pardon me. Get my face off the post office walls. And then you require each citizen to install an orphidnet security patch. It must be done. ExaExa will provide the patch, it’s based on our proprietary ShareCrop wikiware, but never mind the bitty details. The final output is that we get lasting, wiretap-style access to each person’s mind. That way I can forestall any wise-guy attempts to trash my new nants.”
“Don’t like it,” says Too Dibbs. “Wouldn’t sit with my oath of office.”
“You pardon me and you do that security patch,” says Luty, his eyes flashing. “Or your election stinks like dog doo.”
“We’ll see,” says Too Dibbs in a noncommittal tone. As he turns, his gaze pauses on Sonic. “Hey there, fella. What’s your name?”
“Sonic Sanchez.”
“Call me when you need a new job, Sonic. Your boss is nuts.”
The third scene shows Luty hovering over the voluptuously curved white Ark of the Nants, fingering the elegant red button on its outside.
“So let me see how they’re doing,” says Sonic.
Luty rests his thumb on the red button, which briefly glows, scanning his thumbprint. The latches around the ark’s lid pop open. The inner surfaces of the container are iridescent with quantum-mirror varnish. Nestled within the Ark of the Nants is a hermetically sealed transparent cube, four inches on a side. The nant farm itself.
“How come the nants don’t chew their way through those see-through walls?” asks Sonic.
“The nant farm’s walls are nantanium,” says Luty, who’s in a cheerful, chatty mood. “The only known substance that nants can’t eat. I used the same technology as for the quantum-mirror varnish. But nantanium nixes the nants instead of the entanglement signals. It’s all about quantum phase.”
“Titanium?”
“Nant. Anium. It’s my own invention.” Watching the nants, Luty combs back his long greasy hair with his fingers and readjusts the rubber band that holds his ponytail. “Pretty great, huh?”
Frantically the nants pullulate, visible by virtue of the structures they erect and demolish in the course of their ceaseless activity, and now their orphidnet positional dots become visible, creating an effect like seething, luminous fog.
“I’ve got a new nanocode treat for them,” says Luty. He produces a special scanning laser and pulses a long codey flicker into the nant farm. Where before the nants had been constructing windmills and silos, now they’re making ferns and snail shells.
“I love seeking the gnarl,” says Luty. “I’m almost resigned to not getting Ond Lutter’s input. The Big Pig says she’s about nailed the nature simulations. And I’m pretty sure these little guys are orphid-proof now. But I want to be careful. If I lose this match, I could be out of the series.”
The fourth scene is from today, January 18, only a few hours old. Sonic is leaning over the light green pelican, working on it.
