Spacetime Donuts

by Rudy Rucker

  SPACETIME DONUTS

  Rudy Rucker

  Copyright © 1981, 2008 by Rudy Rucker

  Published by E-Reads.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  FOR KURT GÖDEL, MICK JAGGER AND 1972

  Foreword to the Second Edition

  Recently I decided it would be nice to make some of my older books readily available. So I got in touch with my one-time editor John Douglas, and we agreed to reissue Spacetime Donuts and The Sex Sphere in electronic book and in print-on-demand formats.

  Initially I'd thought I might leave Spacetime Donuts essentially untouched, preserving the historical document intact. But I found I couldn't resist tweaking the text. I'm a writer after all, and revising novels is what I do. I wanted to make this new edition as easy as possible to enjoy.

  So I smoothed the prose without overly diluting the attitude. The book remains a wild ride through the philosophy of science, and one of the very first cyberpunk novels.

  Special thanks to my daughter, Georgia Rucker, for designing the cover for this edition, based on a new painting that I made.

  —Rudy Rucker

  Los Gatos, California,

  August 19, 2008

  Foreword to the First Edition

  Events strung themselves together in such a way that I was writing a Ph.D. thesis in set theory at Rutgers in 1972. Rutgers is near Princeton, where the great philosophical genius Kurt Gödel lived. I met him a couple of times and was profoundly affected. The meetings are described in Chapter Four of my pop philosophy book, Infinity and the Mind (Birkhäuser Boston, 1982).

  Infinity and the Mind also contains (in Chapter One) my attempt at an explanation for Spacetime Donuts' main science gimmick: circular scale. The idea is sort of to take the Golden Age story "He Who Shrank," and print it on a roller towel where the two ends connect. I had a vision similar to Vernor's of the circular scale while perched in a tree near our apartment in Highland Park, New Jersey, in 1972.

  One hard-science point which should be addressed is my use of miniature black holes. Recent theoretical work seems to indicate that such objects are unstable and cannot exist. But Holeflaffer's 2038 technique of magnetic monopole injection will, for all practical purposes, eliminate this difficulty.

  My wife Sylvia and I saw the Rolling Stones play in Buffalo in 1976, the week before I started writing Donuts. Someone scalped tickets to us outside, and we ended up in the third row. It had a big effect on me . . . the great thing was that the music was so loud you couldn't tell, after a while, what the song was. Another big musical influence on this book is Frank Zappa, especially his album, Apostrophe'.

  A less apparent borrowing is from Thomas Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49, which deals with, among other things, a certain symbol, a sort of muted postal horn looking like this:

  The plot of Spacetime Donuts is, to a certain extent, based on this symbol. More precisely, the plot looks like this:

  Parts I and II of Spacetime Donuts were published in Unearth (issues 7 and 8, respectively). They were forced to stop publishing before Part III could appear. But now here it is at last, complete and unexpurgated, the underground neo-SF classic, step right in!

  —Rudy Rucker

  Lynchburg, Virginia,

  May 7, 1981

  Prologue

  They called it "Us" then instead of "America." As in the popular slogan, "Us is Users and Users is Us." The Governor said that in most of his speeches; which always ended, "Us needs you 'cause you're Younique."

  Which was a load of crap, natch. There were Drones and there were Dreamers, and that was about as unique as it got.

  The Drones lived in robot-built suburbs. In the daytime they rode the walk-tubes to their offices in the City. Their main job was to fill out probing questionnaires.

  The Dreamers lived together in vast apartment blocks. It was easy to spot a Dreamer because of the socket in the base of the skull. If you were a Dreamer, you plugged a wire like a phone cord into that socket every night.

  The Drones' questionnaires and the Dreamers' brainwaves all ended up inside Phizwhiz, a vast network of linked computers and robots. Phizwhiz always knew what the Users wanted. If what they wanted was impossible or unsafe, then it was Phizwhiz's job to change the Users' minds before they found out that they wanted something impossible or unsafe. Phizwhiz did this by continually adjusting the Hollows, which everyone watched.

  Hollows were holograms . . . three-dimensional, full-color, life-size images which talked and flickered all day long. Everyone had a small padded room called the "Nest" with a Hollows receiver on the floor. In your Nest you could lean against the soft wall and be on a yacht in the Mediterranean, or alone with the Governor while he told you a secret; at the scene of a Public Safety raid, or in bed with a friendly and beautiful couple.

  It was all so real that the Users—Drones and Dreamers alike—wanted little else from life. Which was just as well, since Phizwhiz had come to do all the real work there was to do. This was partly because of human laziness, and partly because Phizwhiz had been programmed to value human life above all else. People had tended to hurt themselves when they worked in factories, fields, and laboratories. So by the time 2165 rolled around, Phizwhiz had it set up so that the average User never touched the controls of anything more dangerous than a cold-water tap.

  It was an easy life, and with Phizwhiz picking your brain and manipulating the Hollows, you'd usually been psyched into dropping a gripe before you knew you had it. Usually. But there were some problems which were hard to forget about. Like the fact that the machines never did anything quite right. And the fact that there were no real changes anymore. No new inventions, no new ideas, not even any really new shows on the Hollows. Phizwhiz was happy, but Us was bored.

  It occurred to someone that Phizwhiz might be more creative if a few human brains could be built into the network. The Governor appealed to the Dreamers to come plug their brains into Phizwhiz's full logical space, and a few ambitious volunteers turned up.

  This kind of hook-up was something quite different from the gingerly probing of the Dream Machine, that electronic poll-taker which nightly monitored the collective response of the Dreamers' brains to various weak currents and waveforms. In fact, the incredible thought amplification and information overload experienced upon full brain interlock with Phizwhiz turned all of the sane and healthy people who tried it into drooling undesirables instants after they plugged in.

  It began to look like the Users were stuck with their tepid, steady-state society. But then the Angels appeared.

  PART I

  Chapter 1: Vernor Maxwell

  Vernor Maxwell grew up in a Dreamtown high-rise. When he was thirteen his father took him in to get his plug installed, and the family was awarded a new receiver for the Hollownest. At first the plug frightened him, and he would lie awake for hours while the alien images and sensations trickled into his brain from the Dream Machine. Soon, however, he began to feel a certain pleasure, almost sexual, at the dark nightly joining of his mind with all the others. Sometimes he would imagine bright impulses passing out of his plug, through the Dream Machine, and into some young girl's pure brain. The older kids bragged about actually plugging their brains directly into their girlfriends' brains, and they would show Vernor the short lengths of co-axial cable which they used.

  There was no school; the Hollows' morning line-up of kiddie shows provided all the education that the Users' children would ever need. No one checked if the kids wat
ched the shows, but they didn't have to. The shows were fun, and Vernor rarely missed them. When he got bored he would fool with the controls on the Hollow receiver until the Nest was filled with flying blobs of light and fragmented images. After awhile his mother would come in and yell at him to fix it. He would retune so that the Hollows took on their normal wavering and grainy appearance, then go out in the street to play with his friends.

  By the time he was sixteen, the "play" consisted mainly of getting twisted on tranks and seeweed. Users generally took the two together, trans-steroid tranquilizers and reefers of seeweed. Seeweed was a mutated aquatic strain of cannabis sativa. All you had to do was drop a seed into a bucket of urine, and six weeks later you had a half-pound of seeweed. The grownups said you'd go crazy if you smoked it without taking tranks to smooth the trip, and they may have been right; but the kids continued to function pretty well after they discovered that tranks just took the edge off the weed.

  A lot of Dreamer kids were into electricity, too, feeding it raw in through their skull plugs. You could hook a regular dry-cell battery to your plug; it would make you come for half an hour if you did it right . . . and pass out in convulsions if you did it wrong. Of course, batteries were illegal, but they weren't too hard to get. Not much harder than the drugs, which were legal for anyone over eighteen. Legal and illegal were not, after all, very important concepts in Dreamtown. The City had a police force, known collectively as the loach, but the loach tended to stay out of Dreamtown. The Hollows kept down any large-scale unrest which the Dream Machine detected, and most Dreamers didn't own anything worth stealing.

  The more sophisticated kids sent pulsed electricity from hand-cranked dynamos in through their plugs and called themselves electrofreaks. Vernor tried it a couple of times, had an epileptic fit, and gave it up. He had begun to wish he didn't have a plug at all. There was a passive, addicted feeling to plugging in every night, and lying there hooked in with all the other Dreamers, fleshly components of Phizwhiz. After spending a night with the soft knob at the back of your neck, while thoughts and feelings ebbed and flowed through the coiled cable, you never really knew what they had put in and what they had taken out. Some mornings you felt like you had dreamed everyone's dream, all tangled together, and you couldn't meet peoples' eyes . . . but no one talked about it.

  When he was twenty, Vernor started hanging around the library. Since there were so many people and so few real jobs, there was no encouragement to be anything other than a Dreamer, but if you were interested, you could study just about anything with the recorded Hollowcasts in the library. Vernor was interested in science, and he went through most of the introductory science courses which had been saved on infocubes. Physics and mathematics attracted him in particular, and soon he had exhausted the library's supply of infocubes in these areas.

  It became necessary to learn how to read. The Hollow shows had taught him letters, numbers, and the phonetic reading of short words, but he had never actually read a book. The first book he read was Abbott's Flatland, and its archaic language and bizarre ideas fired his imagination. Months ran into years as he pursued his studies of Quantum Mechanics, General Field Theory, Geometrodynamics, Relativistic Cosmology, Mathematical Logic, and the Philosophy of Science. And sometimes, for a break, he'd study the history of Dadaism and Surrealism—he was a particular fan of Marcel Duchamp.

  He discovered that if he slept on a table, the cleaning robots would not disturb him, so he began spending his nights in the library. That way he no longer had to plug into the Dream Machine. If he slept at home it was impossible not to plug in, for the bed had a weight sensor which set off a "reminder bell" if the bed's occupant wasn't properly jacked in.

  There was even a Dreamfood tap in the library's lounge, so he soon stopped going home entirely. When he told his parents he was living in the library, they were proud . . . until they discovered that Vernor was not learning a technical skill which might give him a chance of someday having a job. Being a Dreamer was, of course, a job of sorts . . . every day's Hollowcast to Dreamtown ended with a slogan intended to encourage this belief: "Us needs you 'cause you're Younique!" But no amount of propaganda, no number of Hollows of the President saying, "Us is Users. Dream Us our tomorrow." could erase the Dreamers' sad and hidden knowledge of their uselessness.

  But to study physics and mathematics? What was the good of that? There were no physicists any more, although being a physicist was not expressly illegal. What was illegal was to conduct experiments in a laboratory. It was too dangerous . . . dangerous to the experimenter, and dangerous to the society that he might use his new discoveries on. Mathematics and theoretical physics were legal, but no one would pay people to do them; the common conception being that Phizwhiz was much better at science than any human could be.

  Like all common conceptions about science, this was false. Phizwhiz was not much of a scientist. He knew enough to question old hypotheses, but he had no access to that inner vision of the Absolute which shines through the work of the true scientist.

  Vernor had heard of the Us's attempts to give Phizwhiz soul by plugging him into certain Dreamers' minds, and he sometimes felt that if anyone would ever be able to survive such an experience it would be Vernor Maxwell. He took many strange trips lying on his library table, smoking seeweed or tripping on LSD. He had seen the world go solid and shatter into dust, leaving only a pure shimmer of abstract relations. He had watched the gnat of his consciousness speed urgently across his inner landscape as another part of himself tried to catch and dissect it, naming all the parts for once and all. He no longer could tell the difference between a good trip and a bad trip . . . or rather this artificial distinction had fallen away.

  One day the news spread that a man had entered into full communication with Phizwhiz and survived. Vernor watched him in the Hollownest of a bar near the library. The man's name was Andy Silver. To the viewer in the Nest, Silver appeared to be leaning against one wall.

  Silver had blond hair and a funny way of holding his elbows out from his body. He smiled often, though not necessarily in synchronization with what he was saying Occasionally he did not appear to know where he was, but this did not seem to disturb him. An invisible voice, which the viewer could imagine to be his own, interviewed Andy Silver.

  "Are you the guy that plugged into Phizwhiz last week?"

  Silver glanced around, then stared at a spot to Vernor's left. "You bet your ass," he replied.

  "What was it like, Andy?"

  Silver began pacing around the room, "What's anything like? Real compared to what?" He paused, then continued, "Let's say it's like walking in a garden of light. And every flower is a number. And every number is your name . . . " His voice trailed off and he sat down, looking quietly across the room like a man with all the time in the world.

  "How is it, Andy, that you managed to come unscathed through an experience which has shattered the minds of all the others who attempted it?"

  "You call this unscathed?" Silver shot back, bursting into laughter, "No, seriously, gate, it was no big deal for me. I've been getting high every day for ten years now so most of my brain's gone anyway . . . " For an instant his eyes rolled and his head seemed to be on fire, but then he continued. "All kidding aside, Jim, I've been studying metamathematics, and actually I was in just the right place to get on top of Phizwhiz. LSD and a good scientific training's all it took. Couldn't have done it without the Professor, though."

  "Which Professor are you referring to, Mr. Silver?"

  Silver seemed puzzled at the question, but then he gathered himself to recite, "My beloved teacher, Professor G. Kurtowski, without whose writings and conversations I could never have reached this point."

  "Thank you, Andy Silver, the first man to survive a full brain interlock with Phizwhiz. And now, Users, it is our great privilege to welcome the Governor."

  The Governor's Hollow walked into the Nest. He was an amazingly evil-looking man who perpetually held his teeth bared in what he i
magined to be a smile. Silver gave him the finger, but the Governor brushed past him and stepped forward to buttonhole the Users.

  "Always glad to see you," he began, "You're Younique!" His standard opening. He continued, "We are fortunate to have in our fine City a man whose courage and strength of character open before us the exciting vista of a revitalized Phizwhiz."

  Silver had turned around so that his back faced the Governor. Curious, Vernor walked across the Hollownest to get on Silver's other side so as to see his face. That was one of the nice things about Hollows, a complete three-dimensional image of the actors was always there in the Nest with you.

  Silver was leaning forward confidentially over his cupped right hand. "Hey, man, glad you were hip enough to come over here," he whispered. The Governor was still extolling the bright future in store for the lucky Users in his care. Silver raised his hand and continued, "You know what I got in this hand? ZZ-74, man. That's what really put me on top. ZZ-74." He winked, then turned back to his original position facing the Governor's fat, talking back.

  ZZ-74? Vernor had never heard of it before. No one else in the bar's Nest had bothered to go hear Silver's secret message, but surely many others in the City had. ZZ-74? His attention was drawn back to the Governor's speech.

  "We need more Andy Silvers. I urge any citizen who feels able to withstand the titanic mental pressure of merging with the greatest computer the world has ever seen to come forward. Andy Silver is going to put together a team of Dreamers willing and able to get Phizwhiz moving again. More than ever before . . . Us is Users and Users is Us!" The Governor seemed about to leave, but struck with a sudden afterthought, he turned to Silver, "Andy, what do you want to call this team?"

  Silver looked at the Governor coolly, "The Angels," he said, "We'll be the Angels."