Mad Professor

by Rudy Rucker

  You’re a Bum! was experienced through a single character’s point of view, this protagonist being a homeless young woman who was enlisting people to help her unearth the truth about the mysterious disappearance of her kiqqie boyfriend. There was some chance that he’d been abducted by aliens. The heroine was bedeviled both by her mother’s attempts to have her brought home, and by the advances of a predatory pimp. Backing her up were an innocent younger-brother figure, a potential new boyfriend, a mysterious federal agent, a wise old Big Pig addict, and a cohort of hard-partying kiqqie friends.

  For the You’re a Bum! dialogue and graphics, Carla had her beezies patching in data from the day-to-day world: conversations of kiqqies in San Francisco bars, shops, apartments, and alleyways. Each user’s You’re a Bum! experience was further tailored with data drawn from the user’s personal meshes and social situations. In other words, when you accessed Carla’s metanovel, you saw something vaguely resembling your own life.

  By the way, Thuy Nguyen’s two sessions with You’re a Bum! proved painful, even lacerating. First she’d relived a moment when she and her former boyfriend Jayjay stood under a flowering plum tree in the Mission, Jayjay shaking the tree to make the petals shower down upon her like perfumed confetti, all the while Jayjay’s eyes melting with love. And then she’d seen their breakup, but more objectively than before, with the simulated Thuy hungover from the Big Pig, her clothes in disarray, Thuy hysterically screaming at Jayjay in a metapainting-lined alley, and poor Jayjay’s trembling fingers nervously adjusting his coat and hat.

  + + +

  Like Gerry Gurken, the excitable John Medford was one of Thuy’s admirers, but he held little physical appeal for her. He was too thin and overwrought, too dandruffy, too needy. As part of his doomed campaign to engage Thuy’s affection, Medford had undertaken The Thuy Fan, an unwritable and unreadable metanovel wherein every possible action path of his young heroine Thuy would be traced. Waking up with a man, a woman, or nobody in bed beside her, Thuy hopped out of the right or left side of her bed, or perhaps she crawled over the head or the foot. She put on her slippers or threw them out the window, if she had a window. In some forkings she jumped out the window herself, but in most she went to take a shower. In the shower she sang or washed or had sex with her partner. And when she emerged, she might find a table by her bed bearing a breakfast of lox, lobster, steel-cut oats, or a single boiled ostrich egg. In some forkings, Thuy had no time to eat, as her house was on fire, or menaced by an earthquake or a giant ant.

  In practice no human author would have had the time and energy to contemplate so richly ramified a document as The Thuy Fan, but John Medford had his beezies helping him by autonomously roughing in sketches of ever-more action paths. As the mood struck him, Medford would add voice-over descriptions to the paths; he had a flair for making anything at all sound interesting. But, densely tufted as the branchings were, Medford only managed to fully polish Thuy’s action fan for the first two and a half seconds of her day Random assassins, meteorites, a stroke, the spontaneous combustion of Thuy’s pillow-so many things were possible. And, insofar as Medford’s goal was to charm the real world Thuy into his arms, The Thuy Fan was a failure. Medford eventually set the work aside, declaring it to be finished.

  As his next project Medford began an inversely forked work called April March, lifting both his title and concept from the celestial pages of Jorge Luis Borges. Medford’s plan for April March was to start with a scene on a particular day and to document plausible variants of what happened on the days before. To make the work more tractable than The Thuy Fan, Medford was austerely limiting his branching factor to one fork per day. The initial scene, set on April 1, would present an ambiguous conversation between a man and a woman at an airport, followed by two versions of March 31, four versions of March 30, eight versions of March 29, and so on. Medford planned to march as far as March 24, making a thousand and twenty-three scenes in all, linked together into five hundred and twelve plausible action paths which would constitute, so John claimed, an all but exhaustive compendium of every possible kind of detective story.

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  Bouncy Linda Loca created a metanovel entitled George Washington, depicting the world as seen from the point of view of a dollar bill. What lent her work its piquancy was how literally she’d managed to execute the plan: while perusing George Washington you felt flat and crinkly; you spent most of your time in a wallet or folded in a pocket; and when you came out into the air the main thing you saw was countertops and people’s hands. The beezies had helped by providing Linda with the life histories of real, orphid-meshed bills. The user could of course scroll past the dull parts, but the presence of the realistic data gave the work heft and seriousness.

  When, once in a great while, Linda’s George Washington dollar changed hands, the bill moved the story along by buying drinks, influence, or sex, and thereby sketching the rise and fall of a young cop whom Linda had named George Washington as well. Young officer Washington became corrupted due to his sexual attraction for a promiscuous older woman named Donna, who talked him into executing a hit on her landlord, who turned out to be George’s biological father, this fact being unknown to George until too late.

  For a time, Linda had blowback issues with her George Washington character because, to round him out, she’d made him an aspiring writer. Problem was, George began pestering Linda with messages about her metanovel—dumb suggestions, by and large, for the character was, after all, only a beezie simulation of a human, and not a true artist. He failed to grasp, for instance, the dark, erotic beauty of a four-hour scene consisting of the slow shifting of the dollar within a felt-appliqué wallet in Donna’s tight jeans while Donna trolled Mission Street for men. By the same token, George was unable to understand that the precise convex pressure of his own virtual buttock upon the eponymous dollar as he sat writing at his virtual desk might be more interesting to his creator Linda Loca than what he wrote.

  Weary of arguing with her character, Linda edited out virtual George’s love of writing, and made his hobby bowling instead. As it happened, Thuy’s old boyfriend Jayjay ended up with Linda Loca. And then, while trying to prevent an outbreak of nants, Jayjay died. In the instant of extreme grief and despair when she learned of Jayjay’s death, Thuy finally finished Wheenk.

  + + +

  The pieces of the metanovel came together like a time-reversed nuclear explosion. Her adventures in the kiqqie underworld of San Francisco, her lost love for Jayjay, her worries about the threat of the nants, a particular cone shell she had on her dresser, her mother’s face the day Thuy had graduated from college, her father’s bare feet when he tended his tomato plants, the dance Thuy had done down the rainy street one night while exulting over her metanovel—everything fitting, everything in place, Wheenk as heavy and whole as a sphere of plutonium.

  Her Great Work finally done, Thuy pulsed the Wheenk database to the global orphidnet. Her pain had produced artistic transcendence.

  NOTES ON THE STORIES

  NOTE ON “2+2=5”

  Written May 1, 2006, with Terry Bisson.

  Appeared in Interzone, Summer 2006.

  Terry and I are both from Kentucky—he from Owensboro, I from Louisville. Terry’s novel Pirates of the Universe (Tor Books, 1996) has some especially famous evocations of growing up in Kentucky.

  Terry lived in New York City for many years, and he was active in organizing a famous monthly reading series at the KGB bar in the East Village. Recently he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, and has turned his organizational skills to starting up a monthly series of readings at the New College in the Mission District in San Francisco: “SF in SF.” It’s great to have Terry out here.

  Terry is a master of the short story form; he’s won the Hugo and the Nebula, and he even sells to Playboy. Last year he published his mind-boggling collection Greetings (Tachyon, 2005), as well as a book of linked mathematical tales, Numbers Don’t Lie (Tachyon, 2005), which includes some creditab
le mad mathematician equations that Terry made up. For much more Terry, see his Web site www.terrybisson.com.

  This year Terry has been writing a series of deceptively simple fables, cast as children’s stories about a boy named Billy. After hearing him perform “Billy and the Unicorn” at a hipster dive called The Make-Out Room, I was so impressed by the Zenlike purity of his phrasing that I began insisting he write a story with me.

  I got the idea for this story just as the narrator describes it in the opening paragraphs, that is, from an overheard conversation between two barristas—although in Los Gatos, California, not in Harrods Creek, Kentucky. Harrods Creek is actually the name of the small town near Louisville where my parents initially lived.

  While I was planning the story, I was walking around the Mission district in San Francisco, and I actually saw “2+2=5” stenciled on the sidewalk. This tale is thought experiment exploring how to actually get to a point where this phrase is literally true.

  NOTE ON “ELVES OF THE SUBDIMENSIONS”

  Written March 25, 2006, with Paul Di Filippo.

  Appeared in Flurb webzine, August, 2006

  I collaborated with Paul on a story, “Instability,” before I ever actually met him. I think we first met face to face in 1999 when I took a bus through the snow to his house in Providence, Rhode Island, while on a journey to the East. He showed me H. P. Lovecraft’s grave, we went ice skating together, and we wrote a second story, “The Square Root of Pythagoras.”

  Paul is one of the most prolific short story writers at work these days, with a new anthology of his tales appearing nearly every year. The latest one is Shuteye for the Timebroker (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2006), and you can learn more at his Web site www.pauldifilippo.com.

  Perhaps my all-time favorite of Paul’s stories is “Stink Lines,” about the Disney Comics character Gyro Gearloose as drawn by the great Carl Barks, the tale set in a world where nanomachines actually generate dialogue balloons and, yes, graphical stink lines. This tale is in his collection Neutrino Drag (Four Walls Eight Windows, 2004).

  As occasionally happens, my inspiration for “Elves of the Subdimensions” was the title itself, which has haunted me for years with no story attached. To me the title seems a perfect coupling of Golden Age power chords, worthy of Thrilling Wonder Tales.

  In order to set the story in motion, I suggested a transreal element: How does a mad professor survive retirement?

  When I myself retired from teaching two years ago, I did find it a bit of a jolt. Retirement is hard, as a part of one’s sense of self consists of the social roles that one plays. To abandon a role is to feel diminished. You’re losing part of your identity. If you’re fortunate, you find new roles, or expand some of your alternate roles, so as to make up for the lost role–so as once again feel yourself to be the right size.

  In my case, I’ve been writing more since I retired. And I’ve been putting a lot of time into my Web site www.rudyrucker.com and its associated blog, not to mention my webzine Flurb at www.flurb.net.

  NOTE ON “PANPSYCHISM PROVED”

  Written December 6, 2005.

  Appeared in Mature #439, January 26, 2006.

  In recent years, the serious science magazine Nature has been leavening their pages with a short-short story in each issue. Having secured an invitation to submit a tale, I turned to a pet idea of mine, panpsychism (meaning “every object has a mind”). I was inspired by a very interesting book on the topic: David Skrbina, Panpsychism in the West (MIT Press, 2005).

  My idea was to produce a thought experiment showing how panpsychism might be verified. As my setting, I used the cafeteria at Apple, where I had recently visited my former student Leo Lee, who was working on a secret Apple project.

  It was a real kick to see the title “Panpsychism Proved” right there in the august pages of Nature. That’s a mad professor’s idea of success!

  NOTE ON “MS FOUND IN A MINIDRIVE”

  Written June 13, 2004.

  Appeared in Poe’s Lighthouse, Chris Cordon, ed. (Cemetery Dance, 2006).

  Since this story already has a hoax introduction, it’s perhaps overkill to write another layer of annotation. But, hey, Edgar Allan Poe would.

  In the summer of 2004, I went to Boulder, Colorado, to teach a one-week “Transreal Writing” course at the Naropa Institute. “Transrealism” is my term for the practice of basing fantastic tales on your real life—something I often do. I have more discussions of transrealism in my essay collection, Seek! (Four Walls Eight Windows, 1999) and on my writing page www.mdymcker.com/writing.

  I’d last been at Naropa in 1982, when I got to meet Allen Ginsburg and William Burroughs (but, no, I didn’t spend the night with Burroughs). By way of illustrating my transreal writing technique to my students in 2004, I wrote “MS Found in a Minidrive” during the week I was teaching them. And, as so often seems to happen, my main character is a mad professor.

  The theme of the story had already been defined by Chris Conlon, who was editing an anthology Poe’s Lighthouse (Cemetery Dance, 2006) of stories all taking off on the same unfinished story fragment by Master Poe. You can find the complete text of the original “Lighthouse” fragment in Poe’s Online Collected Works at http://www.eapoe.org/works/tales/lightha.htm. I might mention, by the way, that my friend John Shirley has a really terrific story, “Blind Eye,” in that same Poe’s Lighthouse anthology. John sticks to the straight Poe style and delivers a tale that’s eerily like one of the master’s.

  The high point of my week at Naropa was a large group reading they had. I was on a bill with my favorite poet and dear friend Anselm Hollo, reading to a crowd of three hundred people. As my story was tailor-made for the Naropa audience, it fully blew their minds and they loved it. I was thrilled to be performing at this level in the home of the Beats; it was truly “a gala night within the lonesome latter years,” as Poe touchingly puts it in his poem “The Conqueror Worm.”

  NOTE ON “THE MEN IN THE BACK ROOM AT THE COUNTRY CLUB”

  Written May 6, 2004.

  Appeared in Infinite Matrix webzine, December 2005.

  For the years 1980–1986, I lived with my wife and kids in Lynchburg, Virginia, the home of televangelist Jerry Falwell and headquarters of his right-wing “Moral Majority” political action group. I ended up writing a number of stories about Lynchburg, transreally dubbing it Killeville.

  During our final years in Lynchburg, I was proud to be a member of the Oakwood Country Club—it was a pleasant place and the dues were modest enough that even an unemployed cyberpunk writer could afford them. I was always intrigued by a group of men who sat drinking bourbon and playing cards in a small windowless room off the men’s locker room—isolated from the civilizing force of the fair sex. Somehow I formulated the idea that at night the men were rolled up like apricot leather and stored in glass carboys of whiskey that sat within their “golf bags.” I was thinking of a power-chord story somewhat analogous to Phil Dick’s “The Father Thing.” The power chord here is “alien-controlled pod people.” Another archetype I wanted to touch upon is the Pig Chef, an icon that’s always disturbed me. I wanted to push this concept to its logical conclusion, so that everyone would finally understand the Pig Chefs truly evil nature!

  I think the story is funny and logical, but it’s also so mad and strange (ah, Killeville!) that I had trouble getting anyone to publish it. Fortunately, the writer and editor Eileen Gunn gets my sense of humor. Like my earlier story “Jenna and Me,” this weird tale found a home in Eileen’s webzine Infinite Matrix at www.infinitematrix.net, which was, as long as it lasted, something like a clear channel border radio station.

  NOTE ON “GUADALUPE AND HIERONYMUS BOSCH”

  Written April 9, 2004.

  Appeared in Interzone, October 2005.

  I’ve always been fascinated by artistic representations of the Virgin of Guadalupe—she’s usually drawn in the middle of a spiky oval halo. To me, that halo looks like an image you might find by zooming into the co
mputer graphics fractal known as the Mandelbrot Set. Not that this image has much to do with the story.

  The story was inspired, rather, by buying myself a good-quality microscope. On searching the web to find books about microscopy, I came across a delightful flying-saucer tract that I ordered: Trevor James Constable, The Cosmic Pulse of Life: The Revolutionary Biological Power Behind UFOs (Borderland Sciences, Garberville, CA, 1990). Constable jovially argues that our atmosphere is filled with all-but-invisible giant “aeroforms,” akin to jellyfish or protozoa. And, writes Constable, these home-grown “aliens” are what we’re seeing when we see when we see UFOs.

  I came up with the hard science idea for the story’s conclusion while giving a lecture to my Advanced Computer Graphics class at San Jose State University. We were studying the mathematical projective transformation that is used to convert three-dimensional coordinates into locations upon a painter’s canvas or, for that matter, upon a computer-game’s view screen. It turns out that you can imagine forming the inverse of the projective transformation, and that if you were to let this inverse transformation act upon your body, then you could indeed find yourself striding across houses and mountains, with the fabled Point At Infinity only a few more steps away. I explained all this to my students at the time—they enjoyed the rap, although of course they thought I was a mad professor.

  One final inspiration for the story was my continuing desire to write about the great master Hieronymus Bosch. Having already written a historical novel about a Flemish painter—As Above, So Below: A Novel of Peter Bruegel (Tor Books, New York, 2002), I’m tempted to write a tome about Bosch. “Guadalupe and Hieronymus Bosch” is a down payment on the dream.