Mad Professor

by Rudy Rucker

  “Yeah,” said Wendel. “I know.” He looked out the window for a while. It was a sunny day, but the foulness in the water made the sea a dingy gray, as if it were brooding on dark memories. He spotted a couple of little pocket-bubbles floating in on the brackish waves. Dad had been buying them from beach-combers, merging them together till he got one big enough to crawl into again.

  They’d talked about pockets in Wendel’s health class at school last term. In terms of dangerous things the grown-ups wanted to warn you away from, pockets were right up there with needles, drunk driving, and doing it bareback. You could stay inside too long and come out a couple of years older than your friends. You could lose your youth inside a pocket. Oddly enough, you didn’t eat or breathe in any conventional way while you were inside there—those parts of your metabolism went into suspension. The pocket-slugs dug this aspect of the high, for after all weren’t eating and breathing just another wearisome world-drag? There were even rock songs about pockets setting you free from “feeding the pig,” as the ’slugs liked to call normal life. You didn’t eat or breathe inside a pocket but even so were still getting older, often a lot faster than you realized. Some people came out, like, middle-aged.

  And of course some people never came out at all. They died in there of old age, or got killed by a bubble-psychotic pocket-slug coming through a tunnel, or—though this last one sounded like government propaganda—you might tunnel right off into some kind of alien Hell world. If you found a pocket-bubble you were supposed to take it straight to the police. As opposed to selling it to a ’slug, or, worse, trying to accumulate enough of them to get a pocket big enough to go into yourself. The word was that it felt really good, better than drugs or sex or booze. Sometimes Wendel wanted to try it—because then, maybe, he’d understand his dad. Other times the thought terrified him.

  He looked at his shaky, strung-out father, wishing he could respect him. “Do you keep doing it because you think you might find Mom in there someday?” asked Wendel, his voice plaintive in his own ears.

  “It would sound more heroic, wouldn’t it?” said Dad, rubbing his face. “That I keep doing it because I’m on a quest. Better than saying I do it for the high. The escape.” He rubbed his face for a minute and got out of bed, a little shaky, but with a determined look on his face. “It’s get-it-together time, huh Wendel? Get me a vita-patch from the bathroom, willya? I’ll call Manda and go see her today. We need this gig. You ready to catch the light rail to San Jose?”

  + + +

  In person Manda Solomon was shorter, plainer, and less well dressed than the processed image she sent out on iTV. She was a friendly ditz, with the disillusioned aura of a Valley-vet who’s seen a number of her employers go down the tubes. When Dad calmly claimed that Wendel was a master programmer and his chief assistant, Manda didn’t bat an eye, just took out an extra sheaf of nondisclosure and safety-waiver agreements for Wendel to sign.

  “I’ve never had such a synchronistic staffing process before,” she said with a breathless smile. “Easy, but weird. Two of our team were waiting in my office when I came into work it one morning. Said I’d left it unlocked. Karma, I guess.”

  They followed her into a windowless conference room with whiteboards and projection screens. One of the screens showed Dad’s old photo of him and Mom scattered over the nodes of a pocket’s space-lattice. Wendel’s Dad glanced at it and looked away.

  Manda introduced them to the other three at the table: a cute, smiling woman named Xiao-Xiao just now busy talking Chinese on her cell phone. She had Bettie Page bangs and the faddish full-eye mirror-contacts; her eyes were like pale lavender Christmas-tree ornaments. Next was a straight-nosed Sikh guy named Puneet; he wore a turban. He had reassuringly normal eyes, and spoke in a high voice. The third was a puffy white kid only a few years older than Wendel. His name was Barley and he wore a stoner-rock T-shirt. He didn’t smile; with his silver mirror-contacts his face was quite unreadable. He wore an uvvy computer interface on the back of his neck. Barley asked Wendel something about programming, but Wendel couldn’t even understand the question.

  “Ummm . . . well, you know. I just . . .”

  “So what’s the pitch, Manda?” Dad interrupted, to get Wendel off the spot.

  “Pocket-Max,” said Manda. “Safe and stable. Five hundred people in there at a time, strapped into … I dunno, some kind of mobile pocket-seats. Make downtown San Jose a destination theme park. Harmless, ethical pleasure. We’ve got some senators who can push it through a loophole for us.”

  “Safe?” said Dad. “Harmless?”

  “Manda says you’ve logged more time in the pockets than anyone she knows,” said Xiao-Xiao. “You have some kind of. . . intuition about them? You must know some tricks for making it safe.”

  “Well … if we had the hardware that created it. . . .” Dad’s voice trailed off, which meant he was thinking hard, and Manda let him do it for a moment.

  And then she dropped her bomb. “We do have the hardware. Show him Flatland, Barley.”

  Barley did something with his uvvy and something like a soap film appeared above the generic white plastic of the conference table. “This is a two-dimensional-world mockup,” mumbled Barley. “We call it Flatland. The nanomatrix mat for making the real pockets is offsite. Flatland’s a piece of visualization software that we got as part of our license. It’s a lift.”

  “Offsite would be the DeGroot Center?” said Dad, his voice rising. “You’ve got full access?”

  “Yaaar,” said Barley, his fat face expressionless. He was leaning over Flatland, using his uvvy link to tweak it with his blank shining eyes.

  “Why was DeGroot making pockets in the first place?” asked Wendel. No one had ever explained the pockets to him. It was like Dad was ashamed to talk about them much.

  “It was supposed to be for AI,” said Puneet. “Quantum computing nanotech. The DeGroot techs were bozos. They didn’t know what they had when they started up the nanomatrix—I don’t even know how they invented it. There’s no patents filed. It’s like the thing fell out of a flying saucer.” His laugh was more than a little uneasy. “There’s nobody to ask because the DeGroot engineers are all dead. Sucked into the Big Bubble that popped out of their nanomatrix. You saw it on TV. And then Uncle Sam closed them down.”

  “But—why would the nanomatrix be licensed to Endless Media?” asked Dad. “You’re an entertainment company. And not a particularly reputable one, at that. Why you and not one of the big, legit players?”

  “Options,” said Manda with a shrug. “Market leverage. Networking synergies. And the big guys don’t want to touch it. Too big a downside. Part of the setup is we can’t sue DeGroot if things don’t work out. No biggie for Endless Media. If the shit hits the fan, we take the bullet and go Chapter Eleven. We closed the deal with DeGroot and the Feds last week. Nobody’s hardly seen the DeGroot CEO since the catastrophe, but he’s still around. Guy named George Gravid. He showed up for about one minute at closing, popped up out of nowhere, walking down the hall. Said he’d been hung up in meetings with some backer dudes—he called them Out-Monkeys? He looked like shit, wearing shades. I think he’s strung out on something. Whatever. We did our due diligence, closed the deal, and a second later Gravid was gone.” She waved a dismissive hand. “Bottom line is we’re fully licensed to use the DeGroot technology. Us and a half-dozen other blue sky groups. Each of us is setting up an operation in the DeGroot Plant on San Pablo Bay. And we time share the access to the nanomatrix. The Endless Media mission in this context is to make a safe and stable Big Bubble that provides a group entertainment experience beyond anything ever seen before.”

  “Watch how this simulation works,” said Barley. “See the yellow square in the film? That’s A Square. A two-dimensional Flatlander. He’s sliding around, you wave. And that green five-sided figure next to him, that’s his son A Pentagon. And now I push up a bubble out of his space.” A little spot of the Flatland film bulged up like a time-reversed water
drop. The bulge swelled up to the shape of a sphere hovering above Flatland, connected to the little world by a neck of glistening film. “Go in the pocket, Square,” said Barley. “Get high.”

  The yellow square slid forward. He had a bright eye in one of his corners. For a minute he bumbled around the warped zone where the bubble touched his space, then found an entry point and slid up across the neck of the bubble and onto the surface of the little ball. Into the pocket.

  “This is what he sees,” said Barley, pointing at one of the view screens on the wall. The screen showed an endless lattice of copies of A Square, each of them turning and blinking in unison. “Like a hall of mirrors. Now I’ll make the bubble bounce. That’s what makes the time go differently inside the pockets, you know.”

  The sphere rose up from the film. The connecting neck stretched and grew thinner, but it didn’t break. The sphere bounced back toward the film, and the neck got fat, the sphere bounced up, and the neck got thin, over and over.

  “Check this out,” said Barley, changing the image on the view screen to show a circle that repeatedly shrank and grew. “This is what Square Junior sees. The little Pentagon. He stayed outside the bad old pocket, you wave? To him the pocket looks like a disk that’s getting bigger and smaller. See him over there on the film? Waiting for Pa. Like little Wendel in the condo on San Pablo Bay.”

  “Go to hell,” said Wendel.

  “Don’t pick on him, Barley,” put in Manda. “Wendel’s part of our team.”

  “Whoah,” said Barley. “Now Mr. Square’s trip is over.” The sphere bounced back and flattened back into the normal space of Flatland.

  “You forgot to mention the stabilizer ring,” said Dad.

  “You see?” said Manda. “I told you guys we needed a physicist.”

  “What ring?” said Barley.

  “A space bubble is inherently unstable,” said Dad. “It wants to tear loose or flatten back down. The whole secret of the DeGroot tech was to wrap a superquantum nanosheet around the bubbles. Bubble wrap. In your Flatland model it’s a circle around the neck. Make a new bubble, Barley.”

  A new bubble bulged up, and this time Wendel noticed that there was indeed a bright little line around the throat of the neck. A line with a gap in it, like the open link of a chain.

  “That’s the entrance,” said Dad, pointing to the little gap. “The navel. Now show me how you model a tunnel.”

  “We’re not sure about the tunnels,” said Puneet. “We’re expecting you can help us with this. I cruised the Bharat University Physics Department site and found a Chandreskar-Thorne solution that looks like—can you work it for me, Xiao-Xiao?”

  Xiao-Xiao leaned toward the Flatland simulation, her lavender eyes reflecting the scene. She too wore a modern uvvy-style computer controller. Following Puneet’s instructions, Xiao-Xiao bulged a second bubble up from the plane, about a foot away from the first one. A Square slid into the first one of them and A Pentagon into the other. And now the bubbles picked up a side-to-side motion, and lumps began sticking out of them, and it just so happened that two of the lumps touched, and now there was a tunnel between the two bubbles.

  “Look at the screens now,” said Barley. “That’s Square’s view on the left. And Pentagon’s view on the right.”

  Square’s view showed a lattice of Squares as before, but the lattice lines were warped and flawed, and in the flawed region there was a sublattice of nodes showing copies of the Pentagon. Conversely, the Pentagon’s view lattice included a wedge of Squares.

  “That’s a start,” said Dad. “But, you know, these pictures of yours—they’re just toys. You’re talking all around the edges of what the pockets are. You’re missing the essence of what they’re really about. It’s not that they spontaneously bulge up out of our space. It’s more that they’re raining down on us. From something out here.” He gestured at the space above Flatland. “There’s a shape up there—with something inside it. I’ve picked up kind of a feeling for it.”

  Barley and Xiao-Xiao stared silently at him, their mirrored eyes shining.

  “That’s why we need you, Rothman,” said Manda, finally.

  “That’s right,” said Puneet. “The problem is—when it comes to this new tech, we’re bozos too.”

  + + +

  “I’ll tell you what I think,” Wendel said gravely. “I think you’re lying to them about what you can do, Dad.”

  It was nearly midnight. Wendel was tired and depressed. They were sitting in the abandoned DeGroot plant’s seemingly endless cafeteria, waiting for their daily time-slot with the nanomatrix. Almost the only ones there. The rest of their so-called team hadn’t been coming in. Manda and Puneet preferred the safety of San Jose while Barley and Xiao-Xiao had completely dropped out of sight. What a half-assed operation this was.

  Wendel and his Dad were eating tinny-tasting stew and drinking watery coffee from the vending machines along the wall opposite the defunct buffets. It was a long, overly lit room, the far end not quite visible from here, with pearly white walls and a greenish floor, asymmetrical rows of round tables like lily pads on the green pond of the floor, going on and on. Endless Media shared the cafeteria with the other scavenging little companies that had licensed access to the nanomatrix. None of the reputable firms wanted to touch it.

  “Don’t talk about it in here, son,” Dad said, listlessly stirring his coffee with a plastic spoon. “We’re not alone, you wave.”

  “The nearest people in here are, like, an eighth of a mile away, I can’t even make out their faces from here.”

  “That’s not what I mean. The other groups here, they might be spying on us with gnat-audio, stuff like that. They’re all a bunch of bottom-feeders like Endless Media, you know. Nobody knows jack from squat, so they’re all looking to copy me.”

  “You wish. It’s good to have work, but you’re going to get in deep shit, Dad. You’re telling Endless Media you’re down with the tech when you’re not. You’re telling them you can stabilize a Big Bubble when you can’t. You say you can keep tunnels from hooking into it—but you don’t know how.”

  “Maybe I can. I have to test it some more.”

  “You test it every night.”

  “Not enough. I haven’t actually gone inside it yet.”

  “Come on. I’m the one who has to put you back together after a bubble binge. It’s great having an income from this gig, Dad, a better place to live—but I’m not going to let you vanish into that thing. Something just like it killed the whole DeGroot team five years ago.”

  His dad gave Wendel a glare that startled him. It was almost feral. Chair screeching nastily on the tile, Dad got up abruptly and went across the room to a coffee vending machine for another latte. He ran his card through the slot, then swore. He stalked back over to the table long enough to say, “Be right back, this card’s used up, I’ve got another one in my locker.”

  “You’re not going to sneak up to the lab without me, are you? Our time-slot starts in five minutes, you know. At midnight.”

  “Son? Don’t. I’m the Dad, you’re the kid. Okay? I’ll be right back.”

  Wendel watched him go. I’m the Dad, you’re the kid. There were a lot of comebacks he could’ve made to that one.

  Wendel sipped his gooey stew, then pushed it away. It was tepid, the vegetables mushy, making him think of bits of leftover food floating in dishwater. He heard a beep, looked toward the vending machines. The machine Dad had run his card through was beeping, flashing a little light.

  Wendel walked over to it. A small screen on the machine said, Do you wish to cancel your purchase?

  Which was only something it said if the card was good. Which meant that Dad had gone to the lab without him. Wendel felt a sick chill that made his fingers quiver . . . and sprinted toward the elevators.

  + + +

  The pocket was so swollen he could hardly get into the big testing room with it. Maybe two hundred feet in diameter, sixty feet high. Mercuric and yet lusterless. The va
rious measuring instruments were crowded up against the walls.

  “Dad?” he called tentatively. But Wendel knew Dad was gone. He could feel his absence from the world.

  He edged around the outside of the Big Bubble, grimacing when he came into contact with it. Somewhere beneath the great pocket was the nanomatrix mat that produced it—or attracted it? But it wasn’t like you could do anything to turn the pocket off once it got here. At least nothing that they’d figured out yet, which was one of the many obstacles preventing this thing from being a realistic public attraction. “Show may last from one to ten minutes world time, and seem to take one hour to three months of your proper time.” Even if there were a way to shut the pocket off now—what would that do to Dad?

  Facing a far corner was the dimpled spot, the entrance navel. On these Big Bubbles, the navel didn’t always seal over. When Wendel looked into the navel, it seemed to swirl like a slow-motion whirlpool, but in two contradictory directions. Hypnotic. It could still be entered.