A Good Old-Fashioned Future

by Bruce Sterling

  Revel yawned, sinking deeper into the passenger seat. “That’s real public-spirited of you, Dr. Mesoglea. But California water ain’t worth a dime to me.”

  Tug pressed onward. “Also, I’d like to see my jellyfish used to examine contaminated wells here in Silicon Valley. If you put an artificial jellyfish down a well, and leave it to pulsate down there for a week or two, it could filter up all kinds of trace pollutants! It’d be a great public-relations gambit to push the jelly’s antipollution aspects. Considering your family history, it couldn’t hurt to get the Pullen family in the good graces of the Environmental Protection people. If we angle it right, we could probably even swing a federal development grant!”

  “I dunno, hombre,” Revel grumbled. “Somehow it just don’t seem sportin’ to take money from the Feds.…” He gazed mournfully at the lushly exotic landscape of monkey-puzzle trees, fat pampered yuccas, and orange trees. “Man, everything sure looks green out here.”

  “Yes,” Tug said absently, “thank God there’s been a break in the drought. California has plenty of use for a jellyfish that can monitor water-leaks.”

  “It’s not the water that counts,” said Revel, “it’s the carbon dioxide. Two hundred million years’ worth of crude oil, all burned to carbon dioxide and spewed right into the air in just a few decades. Plant life’s goin’ crazy. Why, all the plant life along this highway has built itself out of car exhausts! You ever think o’ that?”

  It was clear from the look of glee on Revel’s shallow features that this thought pleased him mightily. “I mean, if you traced the history of the carbon in that weirdasslookin’ tree over there … hunnert years ago it was miles down in the primeval bowels of the earth! And since we eat plants to live, it’s the same for people! Our flesh, brain, and blood is built outa burnt crude-oil! We’re creatures of the Urschleim, Tug. All life comes from the primeval goo.”

  “No way,” said Tug heatedly. He took a highway exit to Los Perros, his own local enclave in the massive sprawl that was Silicon Valley. “One carbon atom’s just like the next one. And once you’re talking artificial life, it doesn’t even have to be an ‘atom’ at all. It can be a byte of information, or a microbead of piezoplastic. It doesn’t matter where the material came from—life is just a pattern of behavior.”

  “That’s where you and me part company, boy.” They were tooling down the main drag of Los Perros now, and Revel was gaping at some chicly dressed women. “Dig it, Tug, thanks to oil, a lot of carbon in your yuppie neighbors comes from Texas. Like or not, most modern life is fundamentally Texan.”

  “That’s pretty appalling news, Revel,” smiled Tug. He took the last remaining hilly corners with a squeal of his Michelins, then pulled into his driveway. He parked the Animata under the rotting, fungus-specked redwood deck of the absurdly overpriced suburban home that he rented. The rent was killing him. Ever since his lover had moved out last Christmas, Tug had been meaning to move into a smaller place, but somewhere deep down he nursed a hope that if he kept the house, some nice strong man would come and move in with him.

  Next door, Tug’s neighbors were flinging water-balloons and roaring with laughter as they sizzled up a huge aromatic rack of barbecued tofu. They were rich Samoans. They had a big green parrot named Toatoa. On fine days, such as today, Toatoa sat squawking on the gable of the house. Toatoa had a large yellow beak and a taste for cuttlebone and pumpkin-seeds.

  “This is great,” Revel opined, examining the earthquake-split walls and peeling ceiling Sheetrock. “I was afraid we’d have some trouble findin’ the necessary space for experiments. No problem, though, with you rentin’ this sorry dump for a workshop.”

  “I live here,” said Tug with dignity. “By California standards this is a very good house.”

  “No wonder you want to start a company!” Revel climbed the redwood stairs to Tug’s outdoor deck, and dragged a yard-long plastic pressure cylinder from within his duffel bag, flinging aside some balled-up boot socks and a set of watered-silk boxer shorts. “You got a garden hose? And a funnel?” He pulled a roll of silvered duct tape from the bottom of his bag.

  Tug supplied a length of hose, prudently choosing one that had been severely scorched during the last hillside brushfire. Revel whipped a French designer pocketknife from within his Can’t-Bust-’Ems and slashed off a three-foot length. He then deftly duct-taped the tin funnel to the end of the hose, and blew a few kazoo-like blasts.

  Next Revel flung the crude horn aside and took up the pressure cylinder. “You don’t happen to have a washtub, do you?”

  “No problem,” Tug said. He went into the house and fetched a large plastic picnic cooler.

  Revel opened the petcock of the pressure cylinder and began decanting its contents into the cooler. The black nozzle slowly ejaculated a thick clear gel, rather like silicone putty. Pint after pint of it settled languorously into the white pebbly interior of the hinge-topped cooler. The stuff had a sulfurous, burning-rubber reek that Tug associated with Hawaii—a necessarily brief stay he’d had on the oozing, flaming slopes of Kilauea.

  Tug prudently sidled across the deck and stood up-wind of the cooler. “How far down did you obtain this sample?”

  Revel laughed. “Down? Doc, this stuff broke the safety-valves on old Ditheree and blew drillin’ mud over five counties. We had an old-time blue-ball gusher of it. It just kept comin’, pourin’ out over the ground. Kinda, you know, spasmodic.… Finally ended up with a lake of clear hot pudding higher than the tops of pickups.”

  “Jesus, what happened then?” Tug asked.

  “Some evaporated. Some soaked right into the subsoil. Disappeared. The first sample I scored was out of the back of some good ol’ boy’s Toyota. Lucky thing he had the tailgate up, or it woulda all run out.”

  Revel pulled out a handkerchief, wiped sweat from his forehead, and continued talking. “Of course, once we got the rig repaired, we did some serious pump-work. We Pullens happen to own a tank farm near Nacogdoches, a couple of football fields’ worth of big steel reservoirs. Hasn’t seen use since the OPEC embargo of the ’70s. The tanks were pretty much abandoned on site. But every one of them babies is brim-full with Revel Pullen’s trademark Urschleim right now.” He glanced up at the sun, looking a bit wild-eyed, and wiped his forehead again. “You got any beer in this dump?”

  “Sure, Revel.” Tug went into the kitchen for two bottles of Etna Ale, and brought them out to the deck.

  Revel drank thirstily, then gestured with his makeshift horn. “If this don’t work, well, you’re gonna think I’m crazy.” He pushed his Italian shades up onto the top of his narrow crewcut skull, and grinned. He was enjoying himself. “But if it does work, ol’ son—you’re gonna think you’re crazy.”

  Revel dipped the end of the funnel into the quiescent but aromatic mass. He swirled it around, then held it up carefully and puffed.

  A fat lozenge-shaped gelatinous bubble appeared at the end of the horn.

  “Holy cow, it blows up just like a balloon,” Tug said, impressed. “That’s some kind of viscosity!”

  Revel grinned wider, holding the thing at arm’s length. “It gets better.”

  Tug Mesoglea watched in astonishment as the clear bubble of Urschleim slowly rippled and dimpled. A long double crease sank into the taut outer membrane of the gelatinous sphere, encircling it like the seam on an oversized baseball.

  Now, with a swampy-sounding plop, the bubble came loose from the horn’s tin muzzle and began to float in midair. A set of cilia emerged along the seam and the airborne jelly began to bob and beat its way upward.

  “Urschleim!” whooped Revel.

  “Jesus Christ,” Tug said, staring in shocked fascination. The air jelly was still changing before his eyes, evolving a set of interior membranes, warping, pulsing, and rippling itself into an ever more precise shape, for all the world like a computer graphics program ray-tracing its image into an elegant counterfeit of reality.…

  Then a draft of air caught it. It hit th
e eaves of the house sturdily, bounced, and drifted up over the roof and into the sky.

  “I can hardly believe it,” said Tug, staring upward. “Spontaneous symmetry breaking! A self-actuating reaction/diffusion system. This slime of yours is an excitable medium with emergent behavior, Revel! And that spontaneous fractalization of the structures … can you do it again?”

  “As many times as you want,” said Revel. “With as much Urschleim as you got. Of course, the smell kinda gets to you if you do it indoors.”

  “But it’s so odd,” breathed Tug. “That the slime out of your oil well is forming itself into jellyfish shapes just as I’m starting to build jellyfish out of plastic.”

  “I figure it for some kind of a morphic resonance thing,” nodded Revel. “This primeval slime’s been trapped inside the Earth so long it’s truly achin’ to turn into something live and organic. Kind of like that super-weird worm and bacteria and clam shit that grows out of deep undersea vents.”

  “You mean around the undersea vents, Revel.”

  “No, Tug, right out of ’em. That’s the part most people don’t get.”

  “Whatever. Let me try blowing an Urschleim air jelly.”

  Tug dabbled the horn’s tin rim in the picnic cooler, then huffed away at his own balloon of Urschleim. The sphere began to ripple internally, just as before, with just the same dimples and just the same luscious double crease. Tug had a sudden déjà vu. He’d seen this shape on his computer screen.

  It started to float away, but frugal Revel darted forward and repeatedly slashed at it with his Swiss knife, finally causing the air jelly to break into a flying burst of clear snot that splashed all over Tug’s feet and legs. The magic goo felt tingly on Tug’s skin. He wondered nervously if any of the slime might be passing into his blood-stream. Revel scooped most of the slime off the deck and put it back in the cooler.

  “What do you think?” asked Revel.

  “I’m overwhelmed,” said Tug, shaking his head. “Your Urschleim jellyfish look so much like the ones I’ve been building in my lab. Let’s go in. I’ll show you my jellyfish while we think this through.” Tug led Revel into the house.

  Revel insisted on bringing the Urschleim-containing cooler and the empty pressure canister into the house. He even got Tug to throw an Indian blanket over them, “in case we get company.”

  Tug’s jellyfish tanks filled up an entire room with great green bubbling glory. The aquarium room had been a domestic video game parlor during the early 1980s, when the home’s original builder, a designer of shoot-’em-up computer twitch-games, had shored up the floor to accommodate two dozen massive arcade-consoles. This was a good thing, too, for Tug’s seawater tanks were a serious structural burden, and far outweighed all of Tug’s other possessions put together, except maybe the teak waterbed that his ex-lover had left. Tug had bought the tanks themselves at a knockdown auction from the federal-seizure sale of an eccentric Oakland cocaine dealer, who had once used them to store schools of piranha.

  Revel mulled silently over the tanks of jellyfish. Backlit by greenish glow from the spotlights of a defunct speed-metal crew, Tug’s jellies were at their best. The backlighting brought out their most secret, most hidden interior curvatures, with an unblinking brilliance that was well-nigh pornographic.

  Their seawater trace elements and Purina Jellyfish Lab Chow cost more than Tug’s own weekly grocery bill, but his jelly menagerie had come to mean more to Tug than his own nourishment, health, money, or even his love-life. He spent long secret hours entranced before the gently spinning, ciliated marvels, watching them reel up their brine shrimp prey in mindless, reflexive elegance, absorbing the food in a silent ecstasy of poisonous goo. Live, digestive goo, that transmuted through secret alchemical biology into pulsating, glassy flesh.

  Tug’s ex-lover had been pretty sporting about Tug’s goo-mania, especially compared to his other complaints about Tug’s numerous perceived character flaws, but Tug figured his lover had finally been driven away by some deep rivalry with the barely organic. Tug had gone to some pains to Windex his noseprints from the aquarium glass before Revel arrived.

  “Can you tell which ones are real and which ones I made from scratch?” Tug demanded triumphantly.

  “You got me whipped,” Revel admitted. “It’s a real nice show, Tug. If you can really teach these suckers some tricks, we’ll have ourselves a business.”

  Revel’s denim chest emitted a ringing sound. He reached within his overalls, whipped out a cellular phone the size of a cigarette-pack, and answered it. “Pullen here! What? Yeah. Yeah, sure. Okay, see you.” He flipped the phone shut and stowed it.

  “Got you a visitor coming,” he announced. “Business consultant I hired.”

  Tug frowned.

  “My uncle’s idea, actually,” Revel shrugged. “Just kind of standard Pullen procedure before we sink any real money in a venture. We got ourselves one of the best computer-industry consultants in the business.”

  “Yeah? Who?”

  “Edna Sydney. She’s a futurist, she writes a high-finance technology newsletter that’s real hot with the boys in suits.”

  “Some strange woman is going to show up here and decide if my Ctenophore, Inc. is worth funding?” Tug’s voice was high and shaky with stress. “I don’t like it, Revel.”

  “Just try ’n’ act like you know what you’re doing, Tug, and then she’ll take my uncle Donny Ray a clean bill of health for us. Just a detail really.” Revel laughed falsely. “My uncle’s a little over-cautious. Belt-and-suspenders kinda guy. Lot of private investigators on his payroll and stuff. The old boy’s just tryin’ to keep me outa trouble, basically. Don’t worry about it none, Tug.”

  Revel’s phone rang again, this time from the pocket on his left buttock. “Pullen here! What? Yeah, I know his house don’t look like much, but this is the place, all right. Yeah, okay, we’ll let you in.” Revel stowed the phone again, and turned to Tug. “Go get the door, man, and I’ll double check that our cooler of Urschleim is out of sight.”

  Seconds later, Tug’s front doorbell rang loudly. Tug opened it to find a woman in blue jeans, jogging shoes, and a shapeless gray wool jersey, slipping her own cellular phone into her black nylon satchel.

  “Hello,” she said. “Are you Dr. Mesoglea?”

  “Yes, I am. Tug Mesoglea.”

  “Edna Sydney, Edna Sydney Associates.”

  Tug shook Edna Sydney’s dainty blue-knuckled hand. She had a pointed chin, an impressively large forehead, and a look of extraordinary, almost supernatural intelligence in her dark brown shoebutton eyes. She had a neat cap of gray-streaked brown hair. She looked like a digital pixie leapt full-blown from the brain of Thomas Edison.

  While she greeted Revel, Tug dug a business card from his wallet and forced it on her. Edna Sydney riposted with a card from the satchel that gave office addresses in Washington, Prague, and Chicago.

  “Would you care for a latte?” Tug babbled. “Tab? Pineapple-mango soda?”

  Edna Sydney settled for a Jolt Cola, then gently maneuvered the two men into the jellyfish lab. She listened attentively as Tug launched into an extensive, arm-waving spiel.

  Tug was inspired. Words gushed from him like Revel’s Urschleim. He’d never before met anyone who could fully understand him when he talked techie jargon absolutely as fast as he could. Edna Sydney, however, not only comprehended Tug’s jabber but actually tapped her foot occasionally and once politely stifled a yawn.

  “I’ve seen artificial life devices before,” Edna allowed, as Tug began to run out of verbal ectoplasm. “I knew all those Santa Fe guys before they destroyed the futures exchanges and got sent off to Leavenworth. I wouldn’t advise trying to break into the software market with some new genetic algorithm. You don’t want to end up like Bill Gates.”

  Revel snorted. “Gates? Geez, I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy.” He chortled aloud. “To think they used to compare that nerd to Rockefeller! Hell, Rockefeller was an oil business man, a f
amily man! If Gates had been in Rockefeller’s class, there’d be kids named Gates running half the states in the Union by now.”

  “I’m not planning to market the algorithms,” Tug told the consultant. “They’ll be a trade secret, and I’ll market the jelly simulacra themselves. Ctenophore, Inc. is basically a manufacturing enterprise.”

  “What about the threat of reverse engineering?”

  “We’ve got an eighteen-month lead,” Revel bragged. “Round these parts, that’s like eighteen years anywhere else! Besides, we got a set of ingredients that’s gonna be mighty hard to duplicate.”

  “There hasn’t been a lot of, uh, sustained industry development in the artificial jellyfish field before,” Tug told her. “We’ve got a big R&D advantage.”

  Edna pursed her lips. “Well, that brings us to marketing, then. How are you going to get your products advertised and distributed?”

  “Oh, for publicity, we’ll do COMDEX, Life Developers, BioScience Fair, MONDO 3000, the works,” Revel assured her. “And get this—we can ship jellies by the Pullen oil pipelines anywhere in North America for free! Try and match that for ease of distribution and clever use of an installed base! Hell, it’ll be almost as easy as downloadin’ software from the Internet!”

  “That certainly sounds innovative,” Edna nodded. “So—let’s get to the crux of matters, then. What’s the killer app for a robot jellyfish?”

  Tug and Revel traded glances. “Our exact application is highly confidential,” Tug said tentatively.

  “Maybe you could suggest a few apps, Edna,” Revel told her, folding his arms cagily over the denim chest of his Can’t-Bust-’Ems. “Come on and earn your twenty thousand bucks an hour.”

  “Hmmm,” the consultant said. Her brow clouded, and she sat in the armchair at Tug’s workstation, her eyes gone distant. “Jellyfish. Industrial jellyfish …”

  Greenish rippling aquarium light played across Edna Sydney’s face as she sat in deep thought. The jellyfish kept up their silent, eternal pulsations; kept on bouncing their waves of contraction out and back between the centers and the rims of their bells.