Spacetime Donuts

by Rudy Rucker

  It was a spare room of the cybernetics lab. Vernor was the one who opened the door, and he saw Silver's body lying on the floor, a thick cable leading from his head to the panel of a Phizwhiz implementation. Apparently he had been plugged in for several days. His body was completely inert, and it seemed certain that he was dead.

  Mick rushed forward to unplug his old friend, but to his amazement his hand went right through Silver's lifeless form. It seemed to be a ghost, no, a Hollow of Andy Silver. Suddenly the image moved to turn its face towards them, and it spoke, fading as they stood there.

  "Tell them I was a martyr for the Revolution," the voice said. By the end of the sentence, the image of Andy Silver before them had dwindled up into the cable to Phizwhiz, leaving only a slowly dying chuckle behind.

  Chapter 5: Vision

  Mick Turner took over as the head of the Angels. Silver had left him his stash of ZZ-74, and Turner seemed to know how to find the mysterious Professor Kurtowski to get more of the stuff whenever it was needed. Vernor was eager to be taken to see the great man, but Mick kept stalling on it.

  It was hard to tell what had really happened to Andy Silver. They never found his body, so they couldn't be sure he was really dead—or that he had ever really existed. Some claimed that Silver had been a Hollow all along, a fantasy of Phizwhiz. It seemed more likely, however, that Andy was a person who was somehow alive inside Phizwhiz.

  The evidence that he had survived assimilation was indirect. It just seemed that after Andy Silver's disappearance, Phizwhiz's behavior became more radical, more provocative. This could, of course, simply have been the cumulative effect of all the Angels' work; but some of Phizwhiz's aberrations seemed to have Andy's distinctive touch.

  For instance, the next time the Governor made a speech, something "happened" to the sound track and it sounded like he was drunkenly asking the public at large to turn themselves in to be cooked down to oil for Phizwhiz.

  Several days later the USISU newspaper printed the secret locations of Phizwhiz's main components along with detailed descriptions of their mechanized defense systems. Incredible things began appearing on the Hollows, for instance an animated cartoon serial based on the works of S. Clay Wilson, one of the depraved Zap artists of the mid-20th century.

  But Vernor was not fully aware of these events. He had moved back into the library. Alice's last words to him still stung and he was spending less time getting stoned and more time working. He kept meaning to get back in touch with her, but he wanted to be able to impress her with some really solid new discovery when he came back.

  He hardly ever went to Waxy's anymore, but kept in touch with the Angels through Mick Turner, who dropped in occasionally. Inspired by Vernor's industry, Mick even read part of Geometry and Reality, a book on curved space and the fourth dimension which Vernor pressed on him. But more and more, Vernor was alone with his ideas. He had finally worked his way out to the place where science shades into fiction.

  He was getting deeply interested in determining the fundamental nature of matter. The conventional notion is that there is a sort of lower bound to the size of particles. You can break things down through the molecular, atomic, nuclear, and elementary particle levels . . . but eventually you reach a dead end, where you have some final smallest particles, called perhaps quarks.

  There is a certain difficulty with this conventional view that there is such a thing as a smallest particle: What are these particles made of? That is, when someone asks what a rock is made of, you can answer, "a cloud of molecules"; and if someone asks what a molecule is made of, you can answer, "a cloud of atoms"; but if there is nothing smaller than quarks, what is a quark made of?

  Vernor had been toying with the idea of the infinite divisibility of matter. A quark would be a cloud of even smaller things, called, say, darks . . . and darks would be clouds of barks, and barks would be clouds of marks, and so on ad infinitum. In this situation, there would be no matter . . . for any particle you pointed to would turn out, on closer examination, to be mostly empty space with a few smaller particles floating in it . . . and each of these smaller particles would, again, be a flock of still smaller particles floating in empty space . . . and so on. According to Vernor, an object, such as a book, would simply be a cloud of clouds of clouds of clouds of . . . nothing but pure structure.

  Vernor reasoned further that if there was no limit to how small objects could be, then perhaps there was no limit to how large they could be. This would mean that the hierarchy; planet, solar system, star cluster, galaxy, group of galaxies . . . should continue ever upwards, ramifying out into an infinite universe.

  Vernor had studied enough Cantorian set theory to be comfortable with infinity in the abstract, but there was something definitely unsettling about a doubly infinite universe. Was there no way to avoid these infinities without baldly claiming that there is nothing smaller than this, and nothing larger than that? The solution came to him one night when he had the great vision of his life.

  After a good day's work, Vernor smoked a joint one evening and, moved to do something new, went out into the garden behind the library. There was a large tree there, and he was able to climb to its fork some twelve feet up by clinging to the grooves in the tree's bark and inching upwards. Once he was up in the first fork it was easy to move up the fatter of the two trunks to a comfortable perch some forty feet above the ground. He was barefoot and felt perfectly secure.

  The reefer had, as usual, increased his depth perception, and his eyes feasted on the three-dimensionality of the branches' pattern. A fine rain was falling, so fine that it had not yet penetrated the tree's leaves. Set back from the City like this, in his leafy perch in the library garden, it was possible to listen to the incoming honks, roars, and clanks as a single sound, the sound of the City.

  He noticed a hole in the tree some five feet above his head, and inched up, hugging the thick, smooth trunk. It was a bee-hive in there—a wild musky odor came out of the hole along with a steady, highly articulated "Z". A few bees walked around the lip of the hole, patrolling, but they were unalarmed by Vernor's arrival. He felt sure that they could feel his good vibes.

  A soft breeze blew the misty rain in on him, and he slid back down to the crotch he'd been resting in. Closing his eyes, he began working on his head. There seem to be two ways in which to reach an experience of enlightenment . . . one can either expand one's consciousness to include Everything, or annihilate it so as to experience Nothing.

  Exceptionally, Vernor tried to do both at once.

  On the one hand, he moved towards Everything by letting his feeling of spatial immediacy expand from his head to include his whole body, then the tree trunk and the bees, then the garden, the city and the night sky. He expanded his time awareness as well, to include the paths of the rain drops, his last few thoughts, his childhood, the tree's growth, and the turning of the galaxy.

  On the other hand, he was also moving towards Nothing by ceasing to identify himself with any one part of space at all. He contracted his time awareness towards Nothing by letting go of more and more of his individual thoughts and sensations, constantly diminishing his mental busyness.

  The overall image he had of this activity was of two spheres, one expanding outwards towards infinity, and the other contracting in towards zero. The large one grew by continually doubling it's size, the smaller shrank by repeatedly halving it's size . . . and they seemed to be endlessly drawing apart. But with a sudden feeling of freedom and air Vernor had the conviction that the two spheres were on a direct collision course—that somehow the sphere expanding outwards and the sphere contracting inward would meet and merge at some attainable point where Zero was Infinity, where Nothing was Everything.

  It was then that Vernor discovered the idea of Circular Scale. The next few days were spent trying to find mathematical or physical models of his vision—for he wished to fix the flash in an abstract, communicable structure—and he seemed to be getting somewhere. Circular Scale! This cou
ld be the big breakthrough he'd hoped for, the discovery that would show Alice he was more than a bum.

  He was on the point of calling Alice, but then it was time to go in for his weekly session with Phizwhiz. Vernor went with mixed feelings. On the one hand, with instant access to all of the scientific research ever done, and with the ability to combine and manipulate arbitrarily complex patterns, it might be possible for him to develop his Circular Scale vision into a testable physical hypothesis in a matter of minutes. On the other hand, the personal effect of plugging in again would be to stop him from working on his own for several days, and could quite possibly extinguish the recently kindled creative fire in him.

  As it turned out, Vernor was not to face this problem. When he walked into the EM building he sensed that something was funny. Nobody seemed willing to look him in the eye. Nevertheless he went up to the machine/human interfacing room, and took a capsule of ZZ-74 out of his pocket preparatory to plugging in. Suddenly the room swarmed with loaches.

  One of them snatched the pill out of Vernor's hand, and then cuffed the hand to his own. "Let's go, Mr. Maxwell," he said, pulling Vernor towards the door.

  Another loach put his face near Vernor's. "We got you by the balls, super-brain. That stuff you're on happens to be illegal."

  "The pill?" Vernor answered quickly, "That's just vitamins." If he just kept lying he could beat the rap. The loach had seized samples of ZZ-74 before but they'd never been able to get any of it to show up in the lab analyses. The belief among the Angels was that ZZ-74 was so powerful that an individual dose was too minute to be chemically detectable. Unless the Us had radically improved their lab technique, he was safe.

  But the loach seemed to have read his mind. "We're not interested in the dope anyway, Maxwell. You're wanted for conspiring to overthrow the government." Vernor stared at him, confused. The loach continued, "It's gone far enough. We rounded up most of the others after the show last night."

  "Show?" Vernor asked. "What happened?"

  "Listen to him," one of the loaches exclaimed. "As if he didn't know." He turned to Vernor, "only thing I can't understand, Maxwell, is how you could be stupid enough to come in here today."

  Vernor decided to keep quiet until he found out what was up. There was a crowd of Dreamer kids out in the street. Some of them had co-ax cable hanging from their sockets, and they held the free ends towards Vernor. Even now, he'd still never directly plugged in with another person.

  The fans gathered every afternoon to see the Angels who had plugged into Phizwhiz that day. It was hard to tell what they really wanted—action, good luck, ZZ-74, or just something to hope for. The existence of the Angels had done a great deal for the Dreamers' morale. Suddenly there was a real job which a Dreamer might aspire to, just as he or she was. It helped, of course, to have some scientific training by way of preparation for the high level of abstraction inside Phizwhiz . . . but some Angels, such as Oily Allie, knew very little science and got by on an innate ability to bend without breaking.

  Today the kids were more excited than usual. The loaches drew their stun-sticks, but the kids surged closer and closer. Quickly Vernor pulled his free hand out of his pocket and threw his supply of ZZ-74 to one of the wilder looking kids. A loach punched Vernor in the temple as the kid took off down the street, swallowing pills as he ran.

  When he recovered from the blow, Vernor found himself in the back of a robot operated paddy wagon, gliding smoothly towards jail. He tried to figure it out. The Us needed the Angels. Or did they? Certainly the Angels had made life more interesting, and their assistance in helping Phizwhiz separate the information from the noise had led to a number of improvements in the Users' technology. But on the debit side, there was the increasingly sociopathic aspect of the changes the Angels had brought about in Phizwhiz.

  Vernor looked at the loach handcuffed to him. "Do you guys have some kind of grudge against the Angels? I mean, haven't things been getting better ever since we started working with Phizwhiz?"

  "At the beginning it was all right," the guard answered. "But after last night—"

  "Everyone keeps talking about last night. What happened? I've been out of touch."

  "Are you kidding me?" the loach answered. "You didn't hear about it? That's complete bullshit. You helped plan it."

  Vernor sighed. "Just tell me your version anyway."

  "It was the Hollows. It was all fake last night. It started out with the news showing a picture of the Governor being shot. Then some guy who was supposed to be Andy Silver came on and said that Phizwhiz was our enemy and we should go out and start wrecking machines. Some nuts believed it and started trying to tear down the microwave towers. A lot of equipment got smashed and a lot of people got hurt."

  Vernor shook his head and sank back against the seat. He wished he had had a chance to take that pill—it would have made it so easy to float out of the police van, out of his body. It was getting dark and he saw several high-rise apartment buildings flash by. Everyone was watching the Hollows. You could look into each of the identical apartments, through the living-room and into the Hollownest; and in every apartment you saw the same Hollow scene, a policeman whipping a naked woman with a belt . . .

  "Where are we going?" Vernor asked.

  "We'll take you down to the station and book you," the guard answered. "You'll spend the night there, and tomorrow they'll probably ship you out to the prison. Over on the north side."

  "What about a trial?"

  The guard gave Vernor a funny look, "You'll get a trial."

  Before he could ask any more questions they had pulled into the garage under the cop shop. The police van pulled into a stall and a garage door closed behind it. A loach was waiting for them. "Governor wants to see him," he said.

  They rode the elevator up to the Governor's office on the top floor of the building. The office was not really as splendid as it should have been. Like everyone else, the Governor had cheap plastic furniture equipped with Hollowcasters to surround the tawdry reality with a sumptuous image. Unfortunately, the average Hollowcaster gave an image which was about as true to life as a five-year-old color television set. Of course it was possible to appreciate these images on their own terms—to admire the swirling flecks of static, the fuzzed edges, the slight hum, the drifting colors—just possible.

  The Governor was there in person. Apparently he took great pleasure in being the one to give Vernor the bad news. "The Angels are through," he said through his smile. "Us no longer needs your Youniqueness."

  "So who's going to give Phizwhiz soul?" Vernor asked.

  "Moto-O is," the Governor responded. "He came to us with a request for the equipment and computer time to build a soul for Phizwhiz. Us thinks he knows what he's doing. Right now, Moto-O is getting a nice trouble-free replacement for you all built."

  The Governor looked at a list. "You're just about the last one, Maxwell. We got almost all the others when we raided Waxy's last night. Where were you anyway? Helping Turner and Silver screw up the Hollows?" He paused. "If you tell us where they're hiding, we might be able to give you special consideration . . . "

  "I don't know what you're talking about," Vernor said. "Phizwhiz must have done the whole thing by himself."

  The Governor laughed. "That's not what you all said when he started turning out fusion reactors. No, Phizwhiz can't do anything this exciting on his own. He needs help. But now we're going to have that nice mechanical soul Moto-O's building."

  "Hold it," Vernor cried. "How do you know Moto-O's idea is going to work? It might take him years to get the bugs worked out."

  The Governor shrugged. "He's got six months. We've got him locked up in the EM building lab. In six months he gets a plain cell like the rest of you." The Governor leaned towards Vernor. "I was going to wait till he was finished before jailing the Angels. Until last night we didn't really have much reason to arrest you. But you guys made it easy for us with your half-assed revolution." He leaned back, "We'll do fine without the Ang
els."

  "Are you kidding?" Vernor protested. "The society's going to die with a stupid machine running it. And it's going to stay dead. Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says that nobody, not even Moto-O, is able to build a mechanical soul."

  "Googol's Unfinished Theorem? Sure, how long ago was that written? Moto-O's a sharp boy. Not a dope addict like the rest of you Angels. My money's on him. And if he's wrong . . . " The Governor seemed to feel a twinge of doubt, but then brushed it aside. "Don't worry about Us, Maxwell. Phizwhiz knows what's good for Us. Goodbye."

  Two loaches grabbed Vernor by the upper arms and began marching him out. This was really happening. Desperate, Vernor shouted, "Governor, I've got a new idea. Circular Scale! You can't lock me up. I can take us to the stars!"

  "Who cares," the Governor answered without looking up.

  Chapter 6: Walk In, Mambo Out

  The loaches took Vernor downstairs to the cop shop. Suddenly no one seemed very interested in him. He was just another body to process—to voiceprint and holograph. Before he knew it, he was alone in a cell. The other cells were mostly occupied by bums—drunks and junkies. Loud Muzak was playing as a rudimentary form of mind control.

  Vernor had often romantically thought of himself as a criminal, but this was his first time in jail. Initially he felt a sort of pride at this outward and visible sign of his differentness, but soon his mood switched to one of shame and anger. The other prisoners were noisy and the Muzak and lights were left on all night.

  "I don't really belong here," thought Vernor as he struggled for sleep, "I'm not like these people." And, more strongly than that, "Why didn't I call Alice?"

  In the morning he was handcuffed and sent to the security prison in the northern part of the City. He was the only prisoner whose offense was serious enough to warrant this; and his relief at being away from the others' constant talk of matches and cigarettes soon turned to a terrible feeling of isolation.