Mad Professor

by Rudy Rucker

  By the way, Terry Bisson did me the favor of reading a draft of the story and making some good suggestions. After appearing in Interzone, the story also appeared in David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, Year’s Best SF 11 (Eos, 2006).

  NOTE ON “SIX THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS CONCERNING THE NATURE OF COMPUTATION”

  Written Fall, 2003.

  Appeared in Rudy Rucker, The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul (Thunder’s Mouth Press, New York, 2005).

  When I moved to Silicon Valley some twenty years ago to work as a computer science professor, I thought of myself as a writer on assignment. I was here to quickly write a popular book explaining the meaning of computers. But I went native on the story, and I really did become a computer scientist. As I mentioned earlier in these notes, I recently pulled free of the computer science tar-baby and retired from teaching. Once retired, I had the time to finally write my big computer book: The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul: What Gnarly Computation Taught Me about Ultimate Reality, the Meaning of Life, and How to Be Happy.

  By way of lightening up my tome, I wrote a short-short story to introduce each of the six chapters which were themed, respectively, on computer science, physics, biology, psychology, sociology, and philosophy—an ascending chain of thought. Thus these six thought experiments.

  Although I claim that each of the stories has to do with the nature of computation, this isn’t obvious in each case, so I’ll say a bit about the individual stories.

  “Lucky Number” is about the idea that maybe there is a single underlying computation that generates the world. Although obviously I’m sympathetic to the idea that we can usefully think of any given natural process as being a computation of sorts, I’m not actually sure if there really does have to be one ultimate computation underneath it all. It could be that reality is an endless onion, with layer beneath layer, and there isn’t any one rule that makes it all. For the setting of this story, I used the Electronic Arts game company campus on the San Francisco Bay; I visited my former student Alan Borecky when he was a game programmer there.

  “The Million Chakras” deals with parallel worlds. I’m not sure the twist ending really bears close scientific analysis—but let’s not break the butterfly upon the wheel. You might wonder what this story has to do with the nature of computation. The context is that, in the chapter the story introduces, I discuss quantum computation and the scientist David Deutsch’s claim that a quantum computer manages to carry out a number simultaneous computations in parallel worlds.

  “Aint Paint” involves morphogenesis, that is, the more or less computational process by which organisms grow their forms. Shortly before his death, the computer scientist Alan Turing began working with computer simulations in which simple inputs evolve into organic-looking two- and three-dimensional forms. Over the years, I’ve done a lot of research into these types of computer programs, which are called cellular automata. You can download a nice cellular automata program called CAPOW from my nonfiction book’s Web site, htt://www.rudyrucker.com/lifebox. The free download comes with a loadable parameter file named Aint Paint.CAS, which displays precisely the kinds of live graphics that inspired this tale.

  “Terry’s Talker” develops a notion I’ve thought about a lot: the lifebox. I also discuss the lifebox in my novel Saucer Wisdom (Tor Books, 1999), and in my story, “Soft Death” (reprinted in my collection Gnarl!, Four Walls Eight Windows, 2000). I’m almost surprised that lifeboxes aren’t already on the market, although to some extent blogs are playing this role. I do think of my ever-expanding Web site www.rudyrucker.com as being more or less my lifebox, although of course it doesn’t have any AI software to run it, just a search window in the blog. But for many conversations that’s about all you’d need.

  “The Kind Rain,” plays with emergent intelligence. It sometimes happens that the behavior of a group of simple agents exhibits a higher intelligence than the agents themselves; think of an ant colony, a flock of birds, a school of fish, or, for that matter, a human society. Of course I’m pushing it to suppose that somehow a storm of rain drops might evolve into an intelligent and sympathetic mind, but, hey, it makes for a striking thought experiment. The setting for this story is the tumbledown house my family and I rented in Los Gatos when we moved to California in 1986; the house was also the setting for my novel The Hacker and the Ants (reprinted by Four Walls Eight Windows, 2002).

  “Hello Infinity” was inspired by an idea I proposed in the last chapter of my Lifebox tome. I suggested there that we might define a computation to be a physical process that embodies a possible thought. Of course, I then wondered whether there might be some things that aren’t like possible thoughts and aren’t like ordinary physical processes. “Hello Infinity” is a thought experiment presenting a man who starts having infinite thoughts and a woman who learns that matter is infinitely divisible. Our whole philosophy of science would have to change were infinities really to occur in the natural world-and I seriously think this is possible, even though this line of thought is very much out of fashion right now. My interest in infinity goes back to the 1970s, when I wrote my doctoral dissertation on infinite sets. My first popular science non-fiction book was Infinity and the Mind (reprinted by Princeton University Press, 2005), and I also wrote a novel about physical and mental infinities: White Light (reprinted by Four Walls Eight Windows, 2001).

  NOTE ON “JENNA AND ME”

  Written June 15, 2002, with Rudy Rucker Jr.

  Appeared in Infinite Matrix webzine, February 2003.

  My son Rudy Rucker Jr. runs an ISP (Internet Service Provider) called Monkeybrains, at www.monkeybrains.net in San Francisco. For political and artistic reasons that he never fully clarified to me, Rudy created the Web site www.thefirsttwins.com, devoted to the doings of then-President George W. Bush’s twin daughters, Jenna and Barbara. Understand that my son is my no means a Young Republican.

  When one of his Web site readers posted a threatening comment about the president’s family, some Secret Service agents actually came to pay Rudy a visit, checking him out. A few months later, some anonymous person begin distributing the so-called BadTrans Internet worm, which infected people’s computers and sent a log of all their keyboard inputs to a free account at Monkeybrains. Rudy received another visit from the authorities; this time it was the FBI, with a warrant to impound the trillion or so snoop-bytes received by the anonymous hacker using Rudy’s server machines.

  Perhaps not-so-coincidentally, the BadTrans worm hit the Internet four days after the FBI had announced the development of some spyware called Magic Lantern, a key stroke logging mechanism, which, when properly rubbed, will reveal people’s passwords for encrypted data. You can read more about all this at a site Rudy made, https://badtrans.monkeybrains.net.

  In any case, with my son being hounded by both the Secret Service and the FBI for a site he’d made about the freakin’ first twins, it seemed like a good idea to help him work through his motivations by writing a transreal story about the whole bizarre scene. It was great fun working together, kind of like the time the two of us built a house for our dog Arf, and for me a nice vacation from writing about mad professors. To cap the pleasure, Rudy and I gave a joint Father’s Day reading of our story at a club in the Mission district of San Francisco. A night to remember.

  NOTE ON “THE USE OF THE ELLIPSE THE CATALOG THE METER & THE VIBRATING PLANE”

  Written January 22, 2002.

  Appeared in Horror Garage #5, 2002.

  My cyberpunk pal John Shirley lives fairly near me in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2002 he had this idea of helping someone put together a small press anthology whose earnings would be devoted to a fund for helping drug-addicted mothers and their children.

  I don’t normally undertake a story for so abstract a reason as altruism. I write a story for more personal reasons; typically there’s some emotional state or tech problem or odd situation or real-world vignette that I’m obsessed with, and the story is an exploration I feel compelled t
o carry out. But John shamed me into promising a contribution.

  And then I got into it—I realized that, given that this was to be a guaranteed publication, I could really do anything I wanted to, so why not have some fun and write something completely surrealistic. Of course then the fund-raising anthology project fell through, but five of the stories destined for the anthology ended up in a special issue of Horror Garage, an idiosyncratic magazine edited by Paula Guran.

  The title and epigraph for my story comes from line seventy-three of Allen Ginsberg’s epochal 1956 poem, “Howl.”

  and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrating plane

  I’ve always loved this long line: those four items makes such a surreal, Dadaist assemblage, and as a mathematician I’m happy to see an ellipse in the seminal Beat poem.

  The images of the story came to me in a moment of inspiration as I sat on the sidewalk in the sun at Powell and Market Streets, near where the tourists line up for the trolley. Junkies and con men were going by, and I saw the four items of Ginsberg’s line as characters, as if drawn by underground cartoonist Robert Williams–and thus emerged my story, a gift from the muse.

  Although the line from “Howl” appears as I quote it in both Ginsberg’s original Howl and Other Poems (City Lights, San Francisco, 1956) and in his Collected Poems 1947–1980 (Harper & Row, New York, 1984), Allen introduces a 1986 variant to his line in Howl: Original Draft Facsimile, Transcript & Variant Versions, Etc. (edited by Barry Miles, HarperCollins, New York, 1995). Allen’s “final” 1986 version of the line goes like this: “and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipsis catalog a variable measure and the vibrating plane.” Ugh!

  In a footnote of the 1995 Howl volume, Allen says, “‘Ellipse’ is a solecism in the original mss. and printings; ‘ellipsis’ is correct.” In the same footnote he relieves himself of a minilecture on his poetics as derived from Céline, Whitman, Pound, and the divine Kerouac. And at the end of the footnote, he blandly drones, “phrasing in this verse has been clarified for present edition . . . to conform more precisely to above referents.” (pp. 130–31).

  I wish Allen were still around, so I could argue with him about this. I’d insist that his original muse-spurt was of course the correct take, and not some thirty-year-later version that the author has tailored to fit some theories that he’s invented about what he did. I’d argue that he’s mistakenly letting his mad prof side supplant his mad poet side.

  I did once have the good fortune to meet Allen, while visiting the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, on the 1982 visit that inspired my piece “MS Found in a Minidrive.” I told Allen about how much “Howl” had influenced me in high school, and then I said, “And what I want from you, Allen, after being hung-up on the beatniks all these years, what I want is your blessing.” And real fast he whaps his hand down on my head like a skull-cap or electric-chair metal cap zzt zzt and “BLESS YOU” he yells. I wrote more about this encounter in my memoir All the Visions (Ocean View Books, 1991), which I typed on a ninety-foot scroll of paper, emulating Jack K.

  NOTE ON “JUNK DNA”

  Written December 29, 2001, with Bruce Sterling.

  Appeared in Isaac Asimov’s SF Magazine, January 2003.

  This is the third story I’ve written with Bruce Sterling; the earlier two being “Storming the Cosmos” and “Big Jelly,” both in my anthology Gnarl! (Four Walls Eight Windows, 2000.) The “Junk DNA” collaboration was tumultuous; I began finally to understand why a synergistic pair like, say, Lennon and McCartney might stop working together—no matter how good were the fruits of their joint efforts.

  Although pleasant and soft spoken in person, both Bruce and I are bossy collaborators, capable of being very cutting in our e-mails. When he and I go after each other, it’s like two old guys playing tennis and trying to kill the ball and blast it down the other guy’s throat. Whack! Some of this abrasive energy shows up in the interactions between the pairs of characters in this story: Janna vs. Veruschka and Tug vs. Revel.

  But the story is fun, and it rated a cover illustration when it appeared in Asimov’s. The story also appears in Bruce’s most recent collection, Visionary in Residence (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2006); although note that while putting together Mad Professor, I slightly re-edited all my stories one more time.

  Bruce is such an interesting guy that he actually gets paid to blog, see his Wired-sponsored site http://blog.wired.com/sterling/.

  NOTE ON “POCKETS”

  Written July 18, 2000, with John Shirley.

  Appeared in Al Sarrantonio, ed., Redshift (Roc, 2001).

  I first met John at Bruce Sterling’s house in Austin, Texas, 1985. We were there for the first-ever convention panel on cyberpunk. While we were walking around town, John kept sidling up to me and handing me enormous heavy rocks that I’d unthinkingly start carrying. An ant-to-ant exchange. I liked him right away, he has a charmingly skewed view of reality, and an ability to cobble nearly any situation into a story premise.

  In the summer of 2000, John approached me with the first few paragraphs for this story and the invitation to join him in the Red Shift anthology. John figured he needed some mad professor input on how to make his higher-dimensional pockets work. Also, he and I shared an interest in using the pockets as an objective correlative for addiction and recovery. The writing of the story went very smoothly, and I get a kick out of the accent John gave Threakman. Punk forever.

  In March 2003, I convinced John to go backpacking in Big Sur with me and to cap off our trip with a night in an inexpensive bunk-room at the Esalen Institute. This was not a good idea. John got blisters on the hike, and he hated the people at Esalen-as John put it, “You can’t expect me to fit in at Esalen. When I had my band, I used to break beer bottles over my head till the blood ran, and dive off the stage into the audience.” I quarreled with him for making our visit so hard and—let me quote from my journal:

  “Then I mistakenly drank three cups of blackberry sage tea (caffeinated), thinking it was herbal, and that night couldn’t sleep for a really long time. We were in a room with six bunk beds, my bed under John’s, and it bothered me to be physically coupled to his creakings, also to have the plywood bottom of his bed so close to my face. In the wee a.m. hours I moved to the one other vacant bed, an upper bunk. The other guys sharing the room drifted in. Visions of a spaceship crew’s quarters. Image of Shirley crawling towards me across the ceiling of the room, his fingers sticking to the dry-wall like a gecko’s. Outside raged the lethal, silent energy winds of deep space, visible as in my mind’s eye as Riemannian vortex meshes. At this point I actually felt some joy at being there and being embroiled in something so different from quotidien life.”

  We got over the argument—eventually it began seeming funny—and we still see each other every couple of months, most recently when Terry Bisson organized a joint reading for us in San Francisco as “The Dread Lords of Cyberpunk,” where John read from what sounded to be one of his greatest novels yet, The Other End (Cemetery Dance, 2006). The book is about John’s vision of what the Apocalypse might be like if the avenging angels happened to be John’s kind of folks—as opposed to the angels that appear in the Christian “Left Behind” series of novels about the Rapture and the end of the world. Thus John’s title-he’s describing an other kind of end, an Apocalypse envisioned from the other end of the political spectrum.

  John’s latest doings can be tracked on his Web site, www.darkecho.com/johnshirley.

  NOTE ON “COBB WAKES UP”

  Written January 1997.

  Appeared in Other magazine, March 2006.

  “Cobb Wakes Up” is set in the world of my Ware novels: Software, Wetware, Freeware, and Realware. I originally intended to use this piece as the opening chapter of Realware, but then decided to open that book in a different way. I only happened to
unearth this fragment recently, in the process of posting my writing notes for my most recent nine novels at www.rudyrucker.com/writing. Now that I’m retired, I’m industriously assembling a lifebox simulacrum of my mind online.

  This tale is a self-contained vignette, a little thought experiment concerning what might happen if you could store someone’s mind as software, and if you then gave that mind two separate bodies.

  Rereading the story makes me miss the Ware worlds, and my father Embry Cobb Rucker, who was the model for Cobb Anderson. My father was a very human, sociable man: a businessman and then an Episcopal priest. I used to feel myself to be very different from him, but as the years go by, I realize we were always the same.

  NOTE ON “VISIONS OF THE METANOVEL”

  Written May 22, 2006.

  Previously unpublished.

  In the summer of 2005, I read Accelerando, a collection of linked short stories by Charles Stross (Ace Books, 2005). These stories had a tremendous effect on me; Stross showed that it’s possible to go ahead and write about what happens after the co-called Singularity.

  As many readers will know, the Singularity is a notion invented by the novelist and computer scientist Vernon Vinge in a 1993 talk-to read the original talk, just search the web for “Vinge Singularity.” Vinge pointed out that if we can make robots as intelligent as we are, then there seems to be no reason that the robots couldn’t plug in faster processors and bigger memories to then be more intelligent than people. And then-the real kicker-these superhuman robots can set to work designing still better robots, setting off an upward cascade of ever-more-powerful machines.