A Good Old-Fashioned Future

by Bruce Sterling

  “Housewares application,” said Edna presently. “Fill them with lye and flush them through sinks and commodes. They agitate their way through sink traps and hairballs and grease.”

  “Check,” said Tug alertly. He snatched a mechanical pencil from the desktop and began scribbling notes on the back of an unpaid bill.

  “Assist fermentation in septic tanks by loading jellies with decomposition bacteria, then setting them to churn the tank sludge. Sell them in packs of thousands for city-sized sewage-installations.”

  “Outrageous,” said Tug.

  “Microsurgical applications inside plugged arteries. Pulsates plaque away gently, but disintegrates in the ventricular valves to avoid heart attacks.”

  “That would need FDA approval,” Revel hedged. “Maybe a few years down the road.”

  “You can get a livestock application done in eighteen months,” said Edna. “It’s happened in recombinant DNA.”

  “Copacetic,” said Revel. “Lord knows the Pullens got a piece o’ the cattle business!”

  “If you could manufacture Portuguese men-of-war or other threatening toxic jellies,” Edna said, “then you could set a few thousand right offshore in perhaps Hilton Head or Puerto Vallarta. After the tourist trade crashed, you could buy up shoreline property cheap and make a real killing.” She paused. “Of course, that would be illegal.”

  “Right,” Tug nodded, pencil scratching away. “Although my plastic jellyfish don’t sting. I suppose we could implant pouches of toxins in them.…”

  “It would also be unethical. And wrong.”

  “Yeah, yeah, we get it,” Revel assured her. “Anything else?”

  “Do the jellyfish reproduce?” asked Edna.

  “No, they don’t,” Tug said. “I mean, not by themselves. They don’t reproduce and they don’t eat. I can manufacture as many as you want to any spec, though.”

  “So they’re not truly alive, then? They don’t evolve? They’re not Type III a-life?”

  “I evolved the algorithm for their behavior in my simulations, but the devices themselves are basically sterile robots with my best algorithms hard-coded in,” Tug geeked fluently. “They’re jellyfish androids that run my code. Not androids, coelenteroids.”

  “It’s probably just as well if they don’t reproduce,” said Edna primly. “How big can you make them?”

  “Well, not much bigger than a basketball at present. The lasers I’m currently using to sinter them are of limited capacity.” Tug neglected to mention that he had the lasers out on unauthorized loan from San Jose State University, thanks to a good friend in lab support at the School of Engineering. “In principle, a jellyfish could be quite large.”

  “So they’re currently too small to live inside,” said Edna thoughtfully.

  Revel smiled. “ ‘Live inside,’ huh? You’re really something special, Edna.”

  “That’s what they pay me for,” she said crisply. She glanced at the screen of Tug’s workstation, with its rich background color drifting from sky-blue to sea-green, and with a vigorous pack of sea nettles pumping their way forward. “What genetic operators are you using to evolve your algorithms?”

  “Standard Holland stuff. Proportional reproduction, crossover, mutation, and inversion.”

  “The Chicago a-life group came up with a new schemata-sensitive operator last week,” said Edna. “Preliminary tests are showing a 40 percent speed-up for searching intractable sample spaces.”

  “Terrific! That would really be useful for me,” said Tug. “I need that genetic operator.”

  Edna scribbled a file location and the electronic address of a downloading site on Tug’s business card and gave it back to him. Then she glanced at a dainty wrist-watch inside her left wrist. “Revel’s uncle paid for a full hour plus travel. You two want to spring for a retainer, or do I go?”

  “Uh, thanks a lot, but I don’t think we can swing a retainer,” Revel said modestly.

  Edna nodded slowly, then touched one finger to her pointed chin. “I just thought of an angle for using your jellyfish in hotel swimming-pools. If your jellyfish don’t sting, you could play with them like beach balls, they’d filtrate the water, and they could shed off little polyps to look for cracks. I just hate the hotel pools in California. They’re surrounded by anorexic bleached blondes drinking margaritas made of chemicals with forty letters in their names. Should we talk some more?”

  “If you don’t like your pool, maybe you could take a nice dip in one of Tug’s tanks,” Revel said, with a glance at his own watch.

  “Bad idea, Revel,” Tug said hastily. “You get a good jolt from those natural sea nettles and it’ll stop your heart.”

  “Do you have a license for those venomous creatures?” Edna asked coolly.

  Tug tugged his forelock in mock contrition. “Well, Ms. Sydney, amateur coelenteratology’s kind of a poorly policed field.”

  Edna stood up briskly, and hefted her nylon bag. “We’re out of time, so here’s the bottom line,” she said. “This is one of the looniest schemes I’ve ever seen. But I’m going to phone Revel’s uncle with the go-ahead as soon as I get back into Illinois airspace. Risk-taking weirdos like you two are what makes this industry great, and the Pullen family can well afford to back you. I’m rooting for you boys. And if you ever need any cut-rate Kazakh programmers, send me e-mail.”

  “Thanks, Edna,” Revel said.

  “Yes,” said Tug. “Thank you for all the good ideas.” He saw her to the door.

  “She didn’t really sound very encouraging,” Tug said after she left. “And her ideas were ugly, compared to ours. Fill my jellyfish with lye? Put them in septic tanks and in cow arteries? Fill them with poison to sting families on vacation?” He flung back his head and began camping back and forth across the room imitating Edna in a shrieking falsetto. “They’re not Type III a-life? Oh dear! How I hate those anorexic blondes! Oh my!”

  “Look, Tug, if Edna was a little underwhelmed it’s just ’cause I didn’t tell her everything!” said Revel. “A trade secret is a trade secret, boy, and three’s a crowd. That gal’s got a brain with the strength o’ ten, but even Edna Sydney can’t help droppin’ certain hints in those pricey little newsletters of hers.…”

  Revel whistled briefly, pleased with his own brilliance.

  Tug’s eyes widened in sudden, cataclysmic comprehension. “I’ve got it, Revel! I think I’ve got it! When you first saw an Urschleim air jelly—was it before or after you put my plastic jellyfish in your swimming pool?”

  “After, compadre. I only first thought of blowing Urschleim bubbles last week—I was drunk, and I did it to make a woman laugh. But you sent me that sorry-ass melting jellyfish a full six weeks ago.”

  “That ‘sorry-ass melting jellyfish’ found its way out a crack in your swimming pool and down through the shale beds into the Ditheree hole!” cried Tug exultantly. “Yes! That’s it, Revel! My equations migrated right out into your goo!”

  “Your software got into my primeval slime?” said Revel slowly. “How exactly is that s’posed to happen?”

  “Mathematics represents optimal form, Revel,” said Tug. “That’s why it slips in everywhere. But sometimes you need a seed equation. Like if water gets cold, it likes to freeze; it freezes into a mathematical lattice. But if you have really cold water in a smooth tank, the water might not know how to freeze—until maybe a snowflake drifts into it. To make a long story short, the mathematical formations of my sintered jellyfish represent a low-energy phase space configuration that is stably attractive to the dynamics of the Urschleim.”

  “That story’s too long for me,” said Revel. “Let’s just test if you’re right. Why don’t we throw one of your artificial jellies into my cooler full of slime?”

  “Good idea,” Tug said, pleased to see Revel plunging headlong into the scientific method. They returned to the aquaria.

  Tug mounted a stepladder festooned with bright-red anti-litigation safety warnings, and used a long-handled aquariu
m net to fetch up his best artificial jelly, a purple-striped piezoplastic sea nettle that he’d sintered up just that morning, a homemade, stingless Chrysaora quinquecirrha.

  Revel and Tug strode out to the living room with the plastic sea nettle pulsating gamely against the fine-woven mesh of the net.

  “Stand back,” Tug warned and flipped the jelly into the four inches of Urschleim still in the plastic picnic cooler.

  The slime heaved upward violently at the touch of the little artificial jellyfish. Once again Revel blew some Texan hot air into the goo, only this time it all lifted up at once, all five liters of it, forming a floating sea nettle the size of a large dog.

  Revel shouted. The Urschleim jelly drifted around the room, its white oral arms swaying like the train of a wedding dress.

  “Yee haw! Shit howdy!” shouted Revel. “This one’s different from all the Urschleim ones I’ve seen before. People’d buy this one just for fun! Edna’s right. It’d be a hell of a pool toy, or, heck, a plain old land toy, as long as it don’t fly away.”

  “A toy?” said Tug. “You think we should go with the recreational application? I like it, Revel! Recreation has positive energy. And there’s a lot of money in gaming.”

  “Just like tag!” Revel hooted, capering. “Blind man’s bluff!”

  “Watch out, Revel!” One swaying fringe of the dog-sized ur-jelly made a sudden whipping snatch at Revel’s leg. Revel yelped in alarm and tumbled backward over the living-room hassock.

  “Christ! Get it off me!” Revel cried as the enormous jelly reeled at his ankle, its vast gelatinous bulk hovered menacingly over his upturned face. Tug, with a burst of inspiration, slid open the glass doors to the deck.

  Caught in a draft of air, the jelly released Revel, floated out through the doors, and sailed off over Tug’s redwood deck. Tug watched the dog-sized jelly ascending serenely over the neighbors’ yard. Engrossed in beer and tofu, the neighbors failed to notice it.

  Toatoa the parrot swooped off the roof of the Samoans’ house and rose to circle the great flying sea nettle. The iridescent green parrot hung in a moment of timeless beauty near the translucent jelly, and then was caught by one of the lashing oral arms. There was a frenzy of green motion inside the Urschleim sea nettle’s bell, and then the parrot had clawed and beaked its way free. The nettle lost a little altitude, but then sealed up its punctures and began again to rise. Soon it was a distant, glinting dot in the blue California sky. The moist Toatoa cawed angrily from her roof-top perch, flapping her wings to dry.

  “Wow!” said Tug. “I’d like to see that again—on digital video!” He smacked his forehead with the flat of his hand. “But now we’ve got none left for testing! Except—wait!—that little bit in the vial.” He yanked the vial from his pocket and looked at it speculatively. “I could put a tiny Monterey bell jelly in here, and then put in some nanophones to pick up the phonon jitter. Yeah. If I could get even a rough map of the Urschleim’s basins of chaotic attraction—”

  Revel yawned loudly and stretched his arms. “Sounds fascinatin’, Doc. Take me on down to my motel, would you? I’ll call Ditheree and get some more Urschleim delivered to your house by, oh, 6 A.M. tomorrow. And by day after tomorrow I can get you a lot more. A whole lot more.”

  Tug had rented Revel a room in the Los Perros Inn, a run-down stucco motel where, Tug told Revel as he dropped him off, Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe had once spent a honeymoon night.

  Fearing that Tug harbored a budding romantic notion of a honeymoon night for himself, Revel frowned and muttered, “Now I know why they call this the Granola State: nuts, flakes, and fruits.”

  “Relax,” said Tug. “I know you’re not gay. And you’re not my type anyway. You’re way too young. What I want is a manly older guy who’ll cherish me and take care of me. I want to snuggle against his shoulder and feel his strong arms around me in the still of the night.” Perhaps the Etna Ale had gone to Tug’s head. Or maybe the Urschleim had affected him. In any case, he didn’t seem at all embarrassed to be making these revelations.

  “See you tomorrow, old son,” said Revel, closing his door.

  Revel got on the phone and called the home of Hoss Jenkins, the old forehand of the Ditheree field.

  “Hoss, this is Revel Pullen. Can you messenger me out another pressure tank of that goo?”

  “That goo, Revel, that goo! There’s been big-ass balloons of it floatin’ out of the well. You never should of thrown those gene-splice bacteria down there.”

  “I told you before, Hoss, it ain’t bacteria we’re dealing with, it’s primeval slime!”

  “Ain’t many of us here that agree, Revel. What if it’s some kind of plague on the oil wells? What if it spreads?”

  “Let’s stick to the point, Hoss. Has anybody noticed the balloons?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Well, just keep folks off our property. And tell the boys not to be shy of firing warning shots—we’re on unincorporated land.”

  “I don’t know how long this can stay secret.”

  “Hoss, we need time to try and find a way to make a buck off this. If I can get the right spin on the Urschleim, folks’ll be glad to see it coming out of Ditheree. Just between you and me, I’m out here with the likeliest old boy to figure out what to do. Not that he’s much of a regular fella, but that’s neither here nor there. Name of Tug Mesoglea. I think we’re on to something big. Send that tank of goo out to Mesoglea’s address, pronto. Here it is. Yeah, and here’s his number, and while we’re at it, here’s my number at the motel. And, Hoss, let’s make that three tanks, the same size as the one you filled up for me yesterday. Yeah. Try and get ’em out here by six A.M. tomorrow. And start rounding out a Pullen pipeline connection between our Nacogdoches tank farm and Monterey.”

  “Monterey, California, or Monterrey, Mexico?”

  “California. Monterey’s handy and it’s out of the way. We’ll need someplace real quiet for the next stage I’m planning. There’s way too many professional snoops watching everybody’s business here in Silicon Valley, drivin’ around scanning cellular phones and stuff—you’re receiving this call as encrypted, aren’t you, Hoss?”

  “Sure thing, boss. Got my Clipper Chip set to maximum scramble.”

  “Good, good, just making sure. I’m trying to be cautious, Hoss, just like Uncle Donny Ray.”

  Hoss gave a snort of laughter on the other end of the line, and Revel continued. “Anyhoo, we need someplace kind of out of the way, but still convenient. Someplace with some spare capacity, but a little run-down, so’s we can rent lots of square footage on the cheap and the city fathers don’t ask too many prying questions.… Ask Lucy to sniff around and find me a place like that in Monterey.”

  “There’s already hundreds of towns like that in Texas!”

  “Yeah, but I want to do this out here. This deal is a software kind o’ thing, so it’s gotta be California.”

  Revel woke around seven A.M., stirred by the roar of the morning rush-hour traffic. He got his breakfast at a California coffee shop that called itself “Southern Kitchen,” yet served orange-rind muffins and sliced kiwi-fruits with the eggs. Over breakfast he called Texas, and learned that his assistant, Lucy, had found an abandoned tank farm near a defunct polluted military base just north of Monterey. The tank-farm belonged to Felix Quinonez, who had been the base’s fuel supplier. The property, on Quinonez’s private land, included a large garage. The set-up sounded about perfect.

  “Lease it, Lucy,” said Revel, slurping his coffee. “And fax Quinonez two copies of the contract so’s me and him can sign off down at his property today. I’ll get this Tug Mesoglea fella to drive me down there. Let’s say two o’clock this afternoon? Lock it in. Now has Hoss found a pipeline connection? He has? Straight to Quinonez’s tanks? Bless you, honey. Oh, and one more thing? Draw up incorporation papers for a company called Ctenophore, Inc., register the company, and get the name trade-marked. C-T-E-N-O-P-H-O-R-E. What it means? It’s a kind of morphodite jelly
fish. Swear to God. I learned it from Tug Mesoglea. If you should put Mesoglea’s name on my incorporation papers? Are you teasin’ me, Lucy? Are you tryin’ to make ol’ Revel mad? Now book me and Mesoglea a suite in a Monterey hotel, and fax the incorporation papers to me there. Thanks, darlin’. Talk to ya later.”

  The rapid-fire wheeling and dealing filled Revel with joy. Expansively swinging his arms, he strolled up the hill to Tug’s house, which was only a few blocks off. The air was clear and cool, and the sun was a low bright disk in the immaculate blue sky. Birds fluttered this way and that—sparrows, grackles, robins, humming-birds, and the startlingly large California bluejays. A dog barked in the distance as the exotic leaves and flowers swayed in the gentle morning breeze.

  As he drew closer to Tug’s house, Revel could hear the steady screeching of the Samoans’ parrot. And when he turned the corner of Tug’s block, Revel saw something very odd. It was like there was a ripple in the space over Tug’s house, an undulating bluish glinting of curved air.

  Wheeling about in the midst of the glinting was the furious Toatoa. A school of small airborne bell jellies were circling around and around over Tug’s house, now fleeing from and now pursuing the parrot, who was endeavoring, with no success, to puncture them. Revel yelled at the cloud of jellyfish, but what good would that do? You could as soon yell at a volcano or at a spreadsheet.

  To Revel’s relief, the parrot retreated to her house with a broken tailfeather, and the jellies did not follow her. But now—were the air bells catching the scent plume of the air off Revel’s body? They flocked and spiraled eldritchly. Revel hurried up Tug’s steps and into his house, right past the three empty cylinders of Urschleim lying outside Tug’s front door.

  Inside Tug’s house reeked of subterranean sulfur. Air jellies of all kinds pressed this way and that. Sea nettles, comb-jellies, bell jellies, spotted jellies, and even a few giant siphonophores—all the jellies of different sizes, with the smaller ones beating frantically faster than the bigger ones. It was like a children’s birthday party with lighter-than-air balloons. Tug had gone utterly bat-shit with the Urschleim.