Mad Professor

by Rudy Rucker

  “Yep, we’ve got the oxblood burgers,” says George with no smirk, no cocky tilt of the head. He’s just staring at Jenna, looking worried. This isn’t the animatronic George of the news clips. “Let me cut to the point, Wag. Jenna has a problem, hell, you can see that yourself. Amsneezia, asphrasia—those twenty-dollar doctor words. She can’t remember shit, what it is. This scumbag Renshaw says we’re lucky she can still breathe and do her body functions.”

  It’s hard to believe I’m right here looking at Jenna Bush. But she’s not looking at me. There’s nobody home. George hops to his feet and returns with two towering burgers.

  “Burger, Jenna?” he says softly.

  Jenna’s lips move, and she says, “OK.”

  George sets the plates in front of Jenna and me; we begin eating.

  “All Jenna does is say OK anymore,” says George. “It happened last month. Jenna and Noelle were supposed to attend some big-ass dress show over in, over there.”

  Facts are jumping around in my head. I like collecting info and looking for patterns. Noelle was busted for a fake drug scrip the week after the Versace show in London. The scrip was for Xanax, and why would anyone bother getting arrested for a mild antidepressant? Well, Xanax’s street use is as a comedown drug from ecstasy—or crack. The media didn’t report that Noelle and Jenna were in England at that fashion show. In fact, it was the previous first daughter, Chelsea Clinton, who was hanging out with Madonna and Gwyneth Paltrow in front of the Versace runway.

  “Versace?” I say, just to be sure.

  George nods at me, then glares over his shoulder at Renshaw, who’s craning in under the willow tree as well. “See how Wag’s little noggin’s straining to piece together the puzzle?” he says. “Too bad I didn’t have him here to second-guess you turds before you did your thing.” And then he fixes his eyes back on mine, “OK, Wag. Of course all this is hush hush, this is Homeland Security Code Orange, but here’s how the story began. Supposedly Noelle had some kind of goddamn pill she wanted to slip Chelsea Clinton, some kind of Mickey Finn. This was Jeb’s idea, he got the drug from the Clik. Clik? It’s the conspiracy elite, the secret government that never goes away. The ordnance labs, the spooks, the Cuban freedom fighters, the Fair Play for House of Saud committee—it’s all Clik. The same crowd that took down JFK, same ones who threw the election my way, same ones who got in so goddamn tight with Osama. We Elephants never shoulda gotten in this deep with the Clik, but it’s too late to back out now. I don’t condone any of this, you understand, Wag. I’m not really that powerful of a man, I’d just as soon be back running the Rangers, watchin’ the games with my two girls.” He pats Jenna’s hand, then wipes the drool off her chin. Her eyes are watching us as we talk, glittering with primitive, reptilian intelligence.

  “Anyway, the Clik sold Jeb and me this crock of shit that they wanted to use Jenna as a delivery system,” continues George. “Laura and I had just planned the trip as a spring fling. But Jeb’s Clik handlers, they said Jenna, she’s fun, more attractive, more likely to get close to Chelsea and hand off that goddamn pill. Chelsea’s not likely to talk to Noelle. Jenna’s supposed to tell Chelsea it’s some kind of goddamn party drug, not that I’d call that a party, making yourself sick with a pill. Some new crap the Clik came up with, they call it Justfolx. Supposedly the pill is gonna, the pill somehow makes Chelsea into a real American, so she’ll fight with Hilary, which is good for the Elephant Party, and what’s good for the Elephants is good for the Clik, it’s a win-win. But during the flight Jenna has a few drinks, she’s like I used to be, just high spirits, she gets in a spat with Noelle. Noelle’s always been one to needle her cousins, and Jenna’s easy enough to fly off the handle when she—what was it Jenna said, Mike? Tell Wag the course of events. You were there, not exactly doing your job a hundred percent, I’d say. To frank the truth I wonder why I can’t get them to fire you.”

  The Boss_tx and Doctor Renshaw have both sidled under the willow tree with us. “I told you I’m sorry, Mr. President,” says the Man in Black. “I’m sure the Clik, I mean the Fair Play for House of Saud committee, they’ll dock my pay, if it’s called for, not that I feel they should. I was guarding the young women in close proximity, across the plane aisle. A fast-breaking chaotic situation developed. An argument. It seemed the young women were planning to split up when we disembarked. Fine, but then Noelle took out her Justfolx medication delivery system—the capsule. The plan was, as the president told you, Wag, for Noelle to hand the pill off to Jenna to give to Chelsea. And since the young women were seemingly going to split up, it seemed reasonable to me for Noelle to make the transfer at this time. Holding up the translucent red, football-shaped Justfolx capsule, Noelle stated, ‘Can you remember to give Chelsea this, you drunk redneck?’ To which Jenna replied, ‘You dumb-ass pill-popping cracker, I’ll show you how to party,’ and thereupon swallowed the Justfolx pill. I executed a poison-control maneuver, induced vomiting. But the pill had dissolved. Jenna showed an extreme reaction. The plane landed in London, but we didn’t get off the plane, much less did we alert the press. We cleaned the plane up, refueled, and flew back to Texas.”

  “The Justfolx pill is supposed to make you an Elephant?” I ask.

  “Well it’s not like a pill knows math, is it?” says George. “I understand the treatment was to reduce the . . . take away the know-it-all Rhodes scholar and so on, the high-horse attitude you’d see with a Hilary or a Chelsea Clinton.”

  In sounded like the dosage was designed to make Chelsea stupid enough to be an Elephant. And if you gave it to someone low down enough on the scale to already be an Elephant, well, it would make them into—a vegetable. So Jenna got erased.

  Jenna makes a little noise then, kind of like a newborn kitten. “Mew?”

  Awww.

  “What can I do to help?” I ask patriotically. I’m getting used to Jenna’s drool. She still has those nice round cheeks and clear eyes. I want to get her alone and test her body functions.

  “That’s the spirit,” says George. “Working together. Tell him, Renshaw. You’re the head Clik sleazeball here.”

  “We’ve conferenced with the FBI concerning your terabytes of cell phone calls from the FoneFoon worm,” says Doctor Renshaw. “Now, as it happens, we know there was a copy of the worm on Jenna’s phone. We estimate that you’re in possession of some six full hours of Jenna’s cell phone conversations. That’s quite a lot, enough perhaps for her to have said nearly everything that she might be expected to believe. The first thing we want you to do, Wag, is to mine those conversations from the FoneFoon data set. Locate them and decrypt them.”

  “You mean I could have been listening to Jenna all along?” I burst out, and George gives me a sharp look. “Not that I would if you hadn’t asked me to,” I add.

  Though I haven’t actually gotten around to cracking the FoneFoon data yet, I know I can do it. Mining large data sets is a big-brother-type job I did for MegaMedia back at the peak of the dotcom era. They had an automated upgrade feature whose function was to e-mail them a transcript of the user’s command actions for every session in which one of their products was used. With that hack under my belt, I feel sure I can locate every byte of Jenna in the FoneFoon hoard.

  “I can find the Jenna conversations for you,” I say. “But why do you want them?”

  “We want to use them to reprogram Jenna,” said Renshaw simply. “But you should edit them first. Clear out certain self-defeating aspects of Jenna’s personality. The alcohol problems and so on. It’s our feeling that some fairly simple edits might do it. Remove any obscenity or strong language. Any references to sex, alcohol, or drugs. Just make it a sunny G rating. I’m sure you understand.”

  Dubya lets out an impatient snort. “Jenna was fine the way she was,” he insists.

  I decide to avoid the dull-ass issue of censorship entirely and cut to the good stuff. “How would I program Jenna at all?” I ask.

  “That’s the key, Wag,” says Renshaw, his glass
es glinting in the setting sun. “We feel you have the skills to be of help in converting these digital records into what you might call contagious data. Contagious in that if we beam the tweaked call data into Jenna’s Justfolx-treated brain, we might expect the data to take hold and multiply, to effectively recolonize her brain with its former flora and fauna of thought forms. In the Clik weapons labs—we got a little ahead of ourselves with Justfolx. The discovery of the compound was kind of an accident. An anonymous posting on the Clik-front Science Clearing House. Formula, production process, clinical actions, side effects, the works. We could see the potential right away. It seemed bold to start right at the top. What we didn’t tell the president when we suggested the mission was that, given Jenna’s personality profile, we were quite sure she’d take the pill and eat it.”

  “Bastards,” snapped Dubya. “Pricks.” Now I get why he has it in for Renshaw.

  “Pause,” is the only thing I can think of saying. I look toward the last bit of light on the horizon. My blood pulses, I see ragged checkerboards in my eyes, patterns driven by the rays of the fading Texas sun. “Ready,” I add after a bit. “Tell me more about beaming in the data.”

  “The Justfolx medication has the side effect of putting the subject’s cortex into a state of electromagnetic sensitivity,” says Renshaw. “That’s the key clinical action. The aphasia is merely a side effect. The pro forma plan was that we planned to beam Rush Limbaugh shows into Chelsea Clinton after giving her the drug. But the true plan is much richer. Your mission. Find Jenna’s conversations, clean them up, make them contagious, and then we’ll use a 5.4 gigahertz transmitter to beam the info into Jenna’s brain. She’ll be good as new. Better.”

  “Bullshit,” mutters the president. He’s deeply pissed at having his daughter be the Clik’s guinea pig.

  Renshaw smiles ingratiatingly at George. “Really she’ll be fine, Mr. President. And with the personality cleanup, we can put an end to the kinds of stories Wag posts on his Web site. We can bring to a close this regrettable stage of Jenna’s development.”

  Me, I’ve got goose bumps from the mention of 5.4 gigahertz. That’s the frequency that the FCC allows anyone to transmit wireless Internet on. That’s also the frequency used in the lamp-post repeater boxes that the peer-to-peer cell phone company Ricochet put up before they went down the tubes. Most people think the repeaters are turned off now, but they’re not. The tweakers know.

  The potentialities of the hack expand in my mind like a supernova. The Justfolx drug can be dosed into people’s drinking water, they’ll all turn Elephant or vegetable, but that’s not the real point. The point is that once everyone’s sensitized, AOL and the Clik and the Elephants and the Men in Black can start transmitting spam and telemarketing and political advertising right into our brains.

  I turn the idea the other way around. A grave danger, but a wonderful opportunity. What if we broke free of the client/server model and went fully peer-to-peer? Let people send thoughts right at each other, with nothing in between. With Ben’s help, maybe I could fix it so people could have direct electronic brain-to-brain contact. Peace, love, and radiotelepathy.

  I take a deep yoga breath, broaden my shoulders, and relax. One Nation under a Groove. This is truly a project worthy of my time.

  They give me a room at the ranch, me and the Dogyears machine and my laptop and, since I ask for it, a thermos jug of coffee—though it tastes like it’s from a Texas McDonald’s. There’s a big couch upholstered in calfskin with the hair still on it. Black-and-white spots like a Dell computer shipping carton. I’m supposed to get right to work, but for a few minutes I’m just trying to get down enough of their watery, scalding hot coffee to bring my cycles up. Standing at the window looking out at the strange Texas sky.

  I’m still mind-boggled that the FoneFoon worm has zipped six hours of Jenna’s phone conversations into my server, and that I could have been listening to her all along.

  I start thinking about reprogramming Jenna’s mind, about downloading her edited personality back onto her, having used her cell phone conversations as the source code. It’s like I’m supposed to make the talk tape for a Mattel Barbie doll, with all the curse words snipped out.

  The Clik—you had to hand it to them. Jenna had scarfed Noelle’s Justfolx pill like Ms. Pac-Man gobbling a power pellet. Give Jenna a few drinks, show her a pill, uncha-yuncha-unch! I start goofing on that, imagining that when Jenna ate the Justfolx pill, she heard the Ms. Pac-Man power-up sound, that happy doodley-doodley-doo music. And then she turned into an 5.4-gigahertz-receptive Elephant vegetable.

  There’s still some pieces I don’t understand. If the Clik knew all along they were going to reprogram Jenna, then they would have had to be sure that her cell phone conversations were being saved. The FoneFoon worm played perfectly into their plans. The Clik got Jenna’s talk without actually tapping her. The thing is, I’ve thought all along that Ben Blank wrote the FoneFoon worm—not that I’ve asked him, which would be bad form. Could Ben be working for the Clik? And what about the UFO I saw from the plane? And what’s the deal with the brick of meth the SS threw down for the tweakers? How does that fit in? Have I mentioned that I drink way too much coffee?

  I go back to wondering about Jenna. Where in this rambling ranch house might she be stored? Mew? I go so far as to peek out of my room’s door. The Muscle_tx is right there, not looking any too friendly. And when I lean out of my room’s window, I see Brad in a lawn chair. He points at me, like, “Gotcha covered.”

  So finally I get to work. I connect my laptop to the Dogyears server box they brought along. Mining the conversations out of the data doesn’t take all that long. I have a clip or two of Jenna’s voice on the Prexy Twins site, and I’m able to write a Perl script to grep my terabytes of FoneFoon for her phoneme patterns. Right as I’m playing some of the files, kind of laughing at the things she says, my own cell phone rings. It’s Hella.

  “Wag, you’re in Texas?”

  “I’m at the president’s ranch.” I’ve got Jenna’s voice playing in the background. She’s ordering a pizza, hanging up, calling a friend about a picnic, talking to a boy, on and on.

  “No way. Who’s that talking, Wag? I hear a girl.”

  “It’s Jenna. I—”

  My phone goes dead. The Men in Black have cut me off. Great. Now Hella’s heard just enough to think the worst. I open the door and ask the Muscle_tx for (a) a chance to call Hella back and (b) more coffee. He passes the requests along. All I get is the coffee.

  My next task turns out to be harder, not technically so much as conceptually. Renshaw asked me to take the cursing, sex, alcohol, and drugs out of the conversations, so that the reprogrammed Jenna won’t be a hell raiser. But exactly why would I actually do things the Clik’s way? They’re too stupid and/or lazy to watch what I’m doing in here, so I’ll do what I please. It’s amazing, when you get right up face-to-face with them, how incredibly lame our lords and masters are. They’re actually relying on my supposed patriotic rah-rah team spirit. It’s like the Clik can’t begin to imagine how much we despise them.

  I toy with the idea of editing the conversations in exactly the opposite way they asked me to, leaving nothing but the juicy stuff. But there isn’t really all that much juice, I realize, listening to the tapes. Jenna’s pretty much a regular girl, doing normal things with her friends. I play the conversations speeded up so I can get a fast overview of them. Jenna’s chirping at me like a bird. I start to feel a little sleazy to be listening to her, a little scuzzy for being the guy who runs the Prexy Twins Web site to help people gossip about her. I’m a filthy dog who rolls in garbage and licks his balls.

  In the end I decide not to edit the conversations at all. I’ll just try and help Jenna get back to square one.

  I get more coffee and start on step three: making the data files contagiously reactive. I use some artificial life hacks, fold it in with some self-modifying code, assemble it onto one of the universal replicator structures tha
t Ben uses to make his viruses, and by the time the night ends, I’ve got some Jenna-based artificial life cooking away in the bowels of my Dogyears server box. Little knots of language and logic, evolving to become more and more contagious. I think of them as Jennions.

  The sun is creeping up on the horizon. The massive caffeine intake and the lack of carbohydrates has made me a bit shaky. I lie down on the Texas-sized calf-skin couch.

  + + +

  The next thing I know Brad is poking me awake from a puddle of drool. The sun’s coming in at my eyes at a low angle. I’ve only slept about twenty minutes. My head is pounding, and I feel ready to choke someone.

  “Is it ready?” asks Brad. “You were asleep.”

  I look at my laptop screen. It’s using a graphic display to represent the state of the Jennions. The images right now look kind of like live paisley with ants crawling around in it. Good. When I went to sleep the images just looked like dots and circles.

  “It’s ready,” I tell Brad. I punch a few keys to copy the Jennions out of the big server box and into my laptop’s hard drive. And then Brad takes me out to the picnic table in the backyard. Jenna’s sitting there again, still drooling, wearing a pink T-shirt and jeans today.

  The Muscle_tx follows me and Brad, as if there were any place I could run to here in the middle of Texas. Renshaw and the Boss_tx are drinking coffee and eating doughnuts while Jenna watches the food-to-mouth movements of the men. I miss my mutt, Larva.

  “You’ve extracted the language elements?” asks Renshaw. He sips his coffee and nibbles his doughnut. There aren’t any circular carbohydrates on the table for me. Shit.

  “Yep, all ready to beam her down,” I say.

  Renshaw chuckles and makes the Star Trek hand sign at me, with his fingers spread to make a V. It occurs to me that, being a Clik scientist, this guy probably doesn’t know squat about computer hacking. I hate him. I hate everyone.