Mad Professor

by Rudy Rucker

  “Now, Tug, we gotta confront the commercial possibilities! You and I, we could hit the lab and make some kind of money that only works for white males over fifty. If anybody else tries to pass it, it just, like–bites their dang hands off!” Pullen chuckled richly, then had another drag off his cig. “Or how about a hunnert-dollar bill that takes your DNA and grows your own face on the front!”

  Mesoglea sighed, looked at his watch, and shook it theatrically.

  “But this is such pure genius!” gushed Veruschka, leaning toward Revel with moistening eyes. “We need your veteran skills. Magic Pumpkin needs grown men in the boardroom. We wasted our money on incompetent artists and profiteers! We had great conceptual breakthroughs, but—”

  “Can it with the waterworks and cut to the chase, ptista,” said Pullen. “It’s high time for you amateurs to roll over.”

  “Make us the offer,” said Janna.

  “Cards on the table,” said Pullen, fixing her with his hard little eyes. “You’ll sign all your founder’s stock over to us. I’ll take your stock, chica, and Tug’ll take your pretty Russian friend’s. That gives us controlling interest. As for your Dad’s third, he might as well keep it since he’s too maverick to deal with. Dad’s in clover. Okay?”

  “You’re not offering us any cash?” said Janna. “I don’t believe this. The Pumpti was our original idea!”

  “You sign on with us, you get a nice salary,” said Pullen. Then he broke into such cackles that he had to sip ice water and dab at his eyes with a kerchief.

  “You two kids really are better off with a salary,” added Tug in a kindly tone. “It won’t be anything huge, but better than your last so-called jobs. We already checked into your histories. You’ll get some nice vague tides too. That’ll be good experience for your next job or, who knows, your next start-up.”

  “The sexy Russki can be my Pumpti Project Manager,” said Pullen. “She can fly down to my ranch tomorrow. I’ll be waitin’. And what about the other one, Tug? She’s more the techie type.”

  “Yes, yes, I want Janna,” said Tug, beaming. “Executive Assistant to the Chief Scientist.”

  Janna and Veruschka exchanged unhappy glances.

  + + +

  “How—how big of a salary?” asked Janna, hating herself. After the fabled entrepreneurs departed the Denny’s in the company of a watchful Hoss Jenks, Veruschka dropped her glued-on smile and scrambled for the kitchen. She was just in time to save the Tug’s and Revel’s dirty forks before they hit the soapy water.

  Shoving a busboy aside, Veruschka wrapped the DNA-soiled trophies in a sheet of newspaper and stuffed them into her purse.

  “Veruschka, what do you think you’re doing?”

  “I’m multiplying our future options. I am seizing the future imperfectly. Visualize, realize, actualize.” Veruschka’s lower lip trembled. “Leap, and the net will appear.”

  Stuck in the clattering kitchen of Denny’s, feeling sordid and sold-out, Janna felt a moment of true sorrow for herself, for Vero, and even for the Latin and Vietnamese busboys. Poor immigrant Veruschka, stuck in some foreign country, with an alien language—she’d seen her grandest dreams seized, twisted up, and crushed by America, and now, in her valiant struggle to rise from ash heap to princess, she’d signed on to be Pullen’s marketeer droid. As for Janna—she’d be little more than a lab assistant.

  At least the business was still alive. Even if it wasn’t her business anymore.

  When they returned to their San Francisco lair, they discovered that Hoss Jenks had arrived with a limo full of men in black suits and mirrorshades. They’d seized the company’s computers and fired everyone. To make things worse, Jenks had called the police and put an APB out for Kelso, who had last been seen departing down a back alley with a cardboard box stuffed with the company’s petty cash.

  “I can’t believe that horrible old cowboy called the cops on Kelso,” Janna mourned, sitting down in the firm’s very last cool, swoopy Blobular Concepts chair. “I’m glad Kelso stole that money, since it’s not ours anymore. I hope he’ll turn up again. I never even got to make out with him.”

  “He’s gay, you know.”

  “Look, Kelso is not gay,” yelled Janna. “He is so totally not gay. There’s a definite chemistry between us. We were just too incredibly busy, that’s all.”

  Veruschka sniffed and said nothing. When Janna looked up, her eyes brimming, she realized that Veruschka was actually feeling sorry for her. This was finally it for Janna; it was too much for flesh and blood to bear. She bent double in her designer chair, racked with sobs.

  “Janna, my dear, don’t surrender. The business cycle, always, it turns around. And California is the Golden State.”

  “No it isn’t. We’ve got a market bear stitched right on our flag. We’re totally doomed, Veruschka! We’ve been such fools!”

  “I hate those two old men,” said Veruschka, after the two of them had exhausted half a box of Kleenex. “They’re worse than their reputations. I expected them to be crazy, but not so—greedy and rude.”

  “Well, we signed all their legal papers. It’s a little late to fuss now.”

  Veruschka let out a low, dark chuckle. “Janna, I want revenge.”

  Janna looked up. “Tell me.”

  “It’s very high tech and dangerous.”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s completely illegal, or it would be, if any court had the chance to interpret the law in such a matter.”

  “Spill it, Vero.”

  “Pumpti Gene Therapy.”

  Janna felt a twinge, as of seasickness. “That’s a no-no, Vero.”

  “Tell me something,” said Veruschka. “If you dose a man with an infectious genomic mutagen, how do you keep him from knowing he’s been compromised?”

  “You’re talking bioterrorism, Vero. They’d chase us to the ends of the earth in a rain of cruise missiles.”

  “You use a Pumpti virus based on your victim’s own DNA,” said Veruschka, deftly answering her own rhetorical question. “Because nobody has an immune response to their own DNA. No matter how—how very strange it might be making their body.”

  “But you’re weaponizing the human genome! Can’t we just shoot them?”

  Veruschka’s voice grew soft and low. “Imagine Tug Mesoglea at his desk. He feels uneasy, he begins to complain, his voice is like a rasping locust’s. And then his eyeballs—his eyeballs pop out onto his cheeks, driven from his head by the pressure of his bursting brain!”

  “You call that gene therapy?”

  “They need it! The shriveled brains of Pullen and Mesoglea are old and stiff! There is plenty of room for new growth in their rattling skulls. You and I, we create the Pumpti Therapy for them. And then they will give us money.” Veruschka twirled on one heel and laughed. “We make Pumptis so tiny like a virus! Naked DNA with Universal Ribosome and a nine-plus-two microtubule apparatus to rupture the host’s cell walls! One strain for Pullen, and one for Mesoglea. The Therapy is making them smarter, so they are grateful to shower money upon us. Or else,” her eyes narrowed, “the Therapy is having some unpleasant effects and they are begging on their knees to purchase an antidote.”

  “So it’s insanity and/or blackmail, in other words.”

  “These men are rotten bastards,” said Veruschka.

  “Look, why don’t we give a fighting chance to the home defense Pumptis?” asked Janna. “Or the money Pumptis? They’re nutty ideas, but not all that much crazier than your original scheme about pets. Didn’t I hear you call Revel Pullen a marketing genius?”

  “Don’t you know me yet even a little bit?” said Veruschka, her face frank and open. “Revel’s ideas for my Pumptis are like using a beautiful sculpture for a hammer. Or like using a silk scarf to pick up dog doo.”

  “Too, too true,” sighed Janna. “Get the forks out of your purse and let’s start on those nanoPumptis.”

  + + +

  To begin with, they grew some ordinary kilogram-plus Pumptis
from Revel and Tug’s fork-scrapings, each in its own little vat. Veruschka wanted to be sure they had a whopping big supply of their enemies’ DNA.

  For fun, Janna added OpenAnimator molecules to shade Revel’s Pumpti blue and Tug’s red. And then, for weirdness, Vero dumped a new biorhythm accelerator into the vats. The fat lumps began frantically kneading themselves, each of them replicating, garbage-collecting, and decoding their DNA hundreds of times per second. “So perhaps these cavemen can become more highly evolved,” remarked Veruschka.

  By three in the morning, they’d made their first nanoPumpti. Janna handled the assembly, using the synthesizer’s datagloves to control a molecular probe. She took the body of a cold virus and replaced its polyhedral head with a Universal Ribosome and a strand of hyper-evolved DNA from the Pullen Pumpti. And then she made a nanoPumpti for Tug. Veruschka used her hands-on wetware skills to quickly amplify the lone Tug and Revel nanoPumptis into respectable populations.

  When the first morning sunlight slanted in the lab window, it lit up two small stoppered glass vials: a blue one for Revel, a red one for Tug.

  Veruschka rooted in the cornucopia of her tattered suitcase. She produced a pair of cheap-looking rings, brass things with little chrome balls on them. “These are Lucrezia Borgia rings. I bought them in a tourist stall before I left St. Petersburg.” Practicing with water, Veruschka showed Janna how to siphon up a microliter though the ring’s cunningly hidden perforations and how—with the crook of a finger—to make the ring squirt the liquid back out as a fine mist.

  “Load your ring with Mesoglea’s nanoPumptis,” said Veruschka, baring her teeth in a hard grin. “I want to see you give Mesoglea his Therapy before my flight to Texas. I’ll load my ring for Pullen and when I get down there, I’ll take care of him.”

  “No, no,” said Janna, stashing the vials in her purse. “We don’t load the rings yet. We have to dose the guys at the exact same time. Otherwise, the one will know when the other one gets it. They’ve been hanging together for a long time. They’re like symbiotes. How soon are you and Pullen coming back from Texas anyway?”

  “He says two weeks,” said Veruschka, pulling a face. “I hope is less time.”

  And then Hoss Jenks was there with a limo to take Veruschka to the airport. Janna cleaned up the lab and stashed the vials of nanoPumptis in her office. Before she could lie down to sleep there, Tug Mesoglea arrived for his first day at Magic Pumpkin.

  To Janna’s surprise, Tug turned out to be a pleasant man to work for. Not only did he have excellent taste in office carpeting and window treatments, but he was a whiz at industrial R&D. Under his leadership, the science of the Pumptis made great strides: improvements in the mechanism of the Universal Ribosome, in the curious sets of proteins encoded by the junk DNA, even in the looping strangeness of Ruben Gutierrez’s genomic OpenAnimator graphics library. And then Tug stumbled onto the fact that the Pumptis could send and receive a certain gigahertz radio frequency. Digital I/O.

  “The ascended master of R&D does not shoehorn new science into yesterday’s apps,” the serenely triumphant Tug told Janna. “The product is showing us what it wants to do. Forget the benighted demands of the brutish consumers: we’re called to lead them to the sunlit uplands of improved design!”

  So Janna pushed ahead, and under Tug’s Socratic questioning, she had her breakthrough: Why stop at toys? Once they’d managed to tweak and evolve a new family of forms and functions for the Pumptis, they would no longer be mere amusements, but personal tools. Not like Pokemons, not like Goob dolls, but truly high-end devices: soft uvvy phones, health monitors, skin-interfaced VR patches, holistic gene maintenance kits, cosmetic body-modifiers! Every gadget would be utterly trustworthy, being made of nothing but you!

  As before, they would all but give away the pretty new Pumptis, but this time they’d have serious weight for the after market: “Pumpti Productivity Philtres” containing the molecular codes for the colors, shapes, and functionalities of a half dozen killer apps. Get ’em all! While they last! New Philtres coming soon!

  Veruschka’s stay in Texas lasted six weeks. She phoned daily to chat with Janna. The laid-back Texan lifestyle on the legendary Pullen spread was having its own kind of seduction. Vero gave up her vodka for blue agave tequila. She surrendered her high heels for snakeskin boots. Her phone conversations became laced with native terms such as “darlin” and “sugar” as she smugly recounted giant barbeques for politicians, distributors, the Ctenophore management, and the Pullen Drilling Company sales force.

  By the time Revel and Veruschka came back to San Francisco, Magic Pumpkin had the burn-rate under firm control and was poised for true market success. But, as wage slaves, Janna and Veruschka would share not one whit of the profit. So far as Janna knew, they were still scheduled to poison their bosses.

  “Do we really want to give them the Pumpti Therapy?” Janna murmured to Veruschka. They were in Janna’s new living quarters, wonderfully carpentered into the space beneath the bank’s high dome. It had proved easier to build in an apartment than to rent one. And Tug had been very good about the expenses.

  Veruschka had a new suitcase, a classy Texas item clad in dappled calfskin with the hair still on. As usual, her bag had disgorged itself all over the room. “Mesoglea must certainly be liquidated,” she said, cocking her head. Tug’s voice was drifting up from the lab below, where he was showing Revel around. “He is fatuous, old, careless. He has lost all his creative fire.”

  “But I like Tug now,” said Janna. “He taught me amazing things in the lab. He’s smart.”

  “I hate him,” said Veruschka stubbornly. “Tonight he meets the consequences of his junk DNA.”

  “Well, your Revel Pullen needs Pumpti Therapy even more,” said Janna crossly. “He’s a corrupt, lunatic bully—cram-full of huckster double-talk he doesn’t even listen to himself.”

  “Revel and I are in harmony on many issues,” allowed Veruschka. “I begin almost to like his style.”

  “Should—should we let them off the hook?” pleaded Janna.

  Veruschka gave her a level stare. “Don’t weaken. These men stole our company. We must bend them to our will. It is beyond personalities.”

  “Oh, all right,” sighed Janna, feeling doomed. “You poison Tug and I’ll poison Revel. It’ll be easier for us that way.”

  The four of them were scheduled to go out for a celebratory dinner, this time to Popo’s, a chi-chi high-end gourmet establishment of Tug’s choosing. Pullen’s voice could now be heard echoing up from the lab, loudly wondering what was “keeping the heifers.” Janna swept downstairs to distract the men while Veruschka loaded her ring. Then Veruschka held the floor while Janna went back up to her room to ready her own ring.

  The two little vials of nanoPumpti sat in plain sight amidst the clutter of the women’s cosmetics. They could have been perfume bottles, one red, one blue.

  As Janna prepared to fill her Borgia ring, she was struck by a wild inspiration. She’d treat Revel Pullen with Tug’s Pumptized DNA. Yes! This would civilize the semihuman Pullen, making him be more like Tug—instead of, horrors, even more like himself! There might be certain allergic effects—but the result for the Magic Pumpkin company would be hugely positive. To hell with the risk. No doubt the wretched Pullen would be happy with the change.

  It went almost too easily. The old men guzzled enough wine with dinner to become loose and reckless. When the cappuccinos arrived, Janna and Veruschka each found a reason to reach out toward their prey. Veruschka adjusted Pullen’s string-tie. Janna dabbed a stain of prawn sauce from Tug’s salmon-colored lapel. And each woman gently misted the contents of her ring onto the chocolate-dusted foam of her victim’s coffee. The old men, heavy-lidded with booze and digestion, took their medicines without a peep.

  Soon after, Pullen retired to his hotel room, Tug caught a cab back to his house in the Haight, and the two women walked the few blocks back to the Magic Pumpkin headquarters, giggling with relief. Janna didn�
�t tell Veruschka about having given Pullen the red Tug Treatment. Better to wait and see how things worked out. Better to sleep on it.

  But sleep was slow in coming. Suppose Pullen swelled up horribly and died from toxic Tug effects? The Feds would find the alien DNA in him, and the law would be on Janna right away. And what if the Therapies really did improve the two old men? Risen to some cold, inhuman level of intelligence, they’d think nothing of wiping out Janna and Veruschka like ants.

  Janna rubbed her cell phone nervously. Maybe she could give poor old Tug some kind of anonymous warning. But she sensed that Veruschka was also awake, over on the other side of Janna’s California King bed.

  Suddenly the phone rang. It was Kelso.

  “Yo babe,” he said airily. “I’m fresh back from sunny Mexico. The heat’s off. I bought myself a new identity and an honest-to-God law degree. I’m right outside, Janna. Saw you and Vero go jammin’ by on Market Street just now, but I didn’t want to come pushing up at you like some desperado tweaker. Let me in. Nice new logo you got on the Magic Pumpkin digs, by the way, good font choice too.”

  “You’re a lawyer now? Well, don’t think we’ve forgotten about that box of petty cash, you sleaze.”

  Kelso chuckled. “I didn’t forget you either, mi vida! As for that money—hey, my new papers cost as much as what I took. Paradoxical, no? Here’s another mind bender: even though we’re hot for each other, you and me have never done the deed.”

  “I’m not alone,” said Janna. “Veruschka’s staying with me.”

  “For God’s sake will you two at last get it over,” said Veruschka, sleepily burying her head under her pillow. “Wake me up when you’re done and maybe the three of us can talk business. We’ll need a lawyer tomorrow.”

  + + +

  The next morning Tug Mesoglea arrived at Magic Pumpkin and started acting—like Revel Pullen.

  “Git along little doggies,” he crooned, leaning over the incubator where they were keeping their dozen or so new-model Pumptis. And then he reached over and fondled Janna’s butt.