The Big Aha

by Rudy Rucker

  It was hard to distinguish the teep memories from dreams. The spotted gub had told me to do something involving the—myoor? That same word Gaven had used. I had an image of something huge and flat—a jelly-meat pancake, sprawling across thousands of acres, stretching from Glenview to downtown Louisville. It was—wait, had the spotted gub told me that the myoor would be sending down wormholes to eat us? News from a mind like a sun.

  Talk about a trippy dream. One thing for sure, I was gonna help Jane. Keep Whit and Gaven from robbing her and pushing her down. I’d call her this morning. Or this afternoon. For whatever reason, I felt shy about talking to her. In any case, Jane had said that she and Whit might be coming over tonight.

  I could hear voices in the kitchen, and I was picking up teep from the other parts of the house. But for the moment I preferred to be here, alone in the living room. Me and the cosmic void and the teep interference fringes.

  I could see through the window that it was raining hard outside. We had some dry wood by the fireplace, along with a medium-sized hatchet. I busied myself splitting wood and getting a fire going in the hearth, then slumped back onto my couch with my pet walking whale. I felt like going back to sleep. But now, as if drawn by the warmth, the others drifted in—Dad, Weezie, Joey, Loulou, Kenny, Kristo, Reba, Carlo, Junko, and Skungy the rat.

  “Good that we’re all together,” said Junko. She flopped into an overstuffed armchair near the fireplace. “And good that it’s a crappy day. We have some work to do. It’s time to start qwetting people. We’ll be tossing out Joey Moon twistors like they’re lollipops at a holiday parade. We can do it from here.”

  Carlo groaned and Dad made a grumbling noise. Dad and Weezie had joined me on my long couch by the window. I myself was fully down with Junko’s plan. Liberating qwet would defy my enemies—Whit Heyburn, United Mutations, Gaven Graber, the Department of Genomics, and Lief Larson. Fuck them all.

  “I thought Slygro would sell the qwetting service,” protested Reba. She was sitting on a dark green loveseat with Carlo. She had her blue blankie nurb on her lap. “Okay, qwet itself is free, but people should pay to get it installed.”

  “Oh, Reba,” said Junko tenderly. “That’s not gonna work anymore. The tech is changing every day. The way it is now, if you’re qwet, you can pass it on by thinking at someone in a certain way. Thanks to the Joey twistor. It’s only fair for us to be sharing that information. We’re launching an avalanche that’ll cover the world. Like a disease epidemic—but in a good way.”

  “A cosmic plague,” said Joey, comfortable with Loulou on a plump maroon loveseat. “Joey twistor fever.”

  “What about the money I spent on my Slygro stock!” cried Reba.

  “I feel you,” said Kenny. “But admit that we rich kids are kind of greedy.” He and Kristo were on yet another of the big room’s couches, cozily leaning against each other.

  Kenny was messing with a qwet floating jellyfish in his lap. He’d brought about ten of them indoors—they were bumbling around the room, cute and shiny. Kenny was using his teep to modify their colors and curves—although not in really interesting ways. Kenny wasn’t an artist like Joey or me.

  “Prudent is the word I’d use,” responded Reba, working her Southern accent. “It’s tacky to be greedy.”

  “Resell your stock to a tacky greedy company while you can,” I suggested. “United Mutations. That’s what Gaven was planning to do all along. He’s been talking to Whit Heyburn every day.”

  “I’ll sell it to Whit direct,” said Reba slowly. “He’ll think he’s getting a sneaky side-deal. Then he’ll be the one taking the hit if Slygro tanks. Yaar. I hate Whit.”

  “Be sure Whit thinks he’s tricking you,” urged Junko. “Act like a dim bulb belle.”

  “Pussy’s in the well,” I said, goofing on the nursery rhyme rhythm. I was punch-drunk from spending so much time in cosmic mode. Everything was funny, and everything reminded me of something else.

  “I’ll be the go-between,” Loulou told Reba, ignoring me. I could have been a squeaky piece of furniture for all she cared. “Whit thinks I’m his spy. I’ll tell him that you’re about to sell to United Mutations. And then he’ll call you for sure. You play coy and tease him into making that private offer. Hang up, and in between I’ll fan the flames, and then you call him back. And I get a taste. Ten percent.”

  “High finance, low crowd,” said Reba, who still looked down on Loulou. “We’ll see about the ten percent. Maybe less.”

  Loulou and Reba had a lively half hour then, talking to Whit on their wristphones, flirting and sweetening their voices, reeling in their fish. The rest of us lounged on the couches, holding in our laughs, batting around the jellyfish for fun. At the end of it, Whit had bought Reba’s stock for twice what she’d paid.

  “I’m a skinny girl now!” said Reba, dancing before the fireplace. “I took me a back-alley dump.”

  “Whit’s money is definitely in your account?” asked cautious Junko.

  “I can see it,” said Reba, gesturing in the air. “Minus Loulou’s—oh, call it three percent.”

  “Stingy cow,” said Loulou.

  “Slutty pipsqueak. Don’t you start with Reba. I’ll tongue-lash you till you cry.”

  “Hey!” interrupted Carlo. “Let’s keep our team spirit. Come here, Reba.”

  “All right,” said Reba, very merry. She flounced across the room and settled down on Carlo’s couch again.

  A fraught moment of silence passed, with Loulou and Reba passing hard looks back and forth, ensconced with their partners on loveseats on opposite sides of the fire. Slowly their hostility died down.

  Rain was gurgling in the gutters and running down the windowpanes. The world outside was dim shades of green, broken up like stained glass by the fresh black branches. Our war room was damp, warm, and a little smoky. Skungy lay nestled in my lap and Jericho was propped against me like a cushion.

  “Did Whit say anything about Jane?” I asked Reba. “I wish you’d asked him. I’m worried about Jane with him.”

  “Call Jane yourself,” said Reba. “Be a man.”

  “Oh, I’ll do it later,” I said. “My energy’s low. I was up late looking through Gaven’s files. And I saw the oddball in the night. Hear that, Dad? A voice from the other side was coming through the oddball. The voice of the spotted gub. He showed me a giant slug, the size of Louisville. He said the slug wants to eat us all.”

  “I never should have brought that oddball to Gaven’s house,” said Loulou, pretty much in a bad mood about everything. “Just at the most basic level, I never got paid for the heist at all. None of you Louisville snobs ever pays a debt, so far as I can see.”

  “No need to be rude when you’re a guest in someone’s house,” said Weezie frostily. This was shaping up to be a bad day.

  Junko clapped her hands once for attention, rose from her armchair and got back to pushing her plan. “Time to spread qwet!” she exclaimed. “One prob. You’ll be touching the minds of strangers. As soon as you qwet someone, you’ll have teep contact with them. And for that one instant, you’re connected by deeper kind of teep than usual. It goes under your mental firewalls. It’s a clone-capable link. Very risky. For that single fraction of a second, you can overwrite them or they can overwrite you.”

  “I thought nobody could overwrite your mind unless you’re paralyzed,” I said. “Isn’t that why Gaven’s platypuses have conotoxin poison in their spurs?”

  Junko lifted her eyebrows like I’d raised an interesting point in a grad-school seminar. “You are paralyzed during the moment that you’re laying a Joey Moon twistor on someone. And so’s the person you’re treating. You’re totally merged and open. Like one person. But that wears right off.”

  “How do you know all this?” Loulou asked Junko.

  “I was thinking about it all night,” said Junko. “After Carlo and Reba fell asleep.” She looked a little abashed. “I was too excited to sleep myself. So I did some research and some experiments
. And I realized that if you use the Joey twistor to qwet a horrible, super-hostile person, they might possibly wipe your mind. So you need to be aware of that, and to move very fast. Like you’re walking along the wet sand at an ocean’s edge, and darting away from breaking waves. Be alert.”

  “Alertness isn’t always enough,” said Kenny, bopping one of his jellyfish against Kristo’s head.

  “Exactly,” said Junko. “And that’s why you’ll need a way to make a backup of yourself before you start. So that if some freakazoid overwrites your brain, you can bounce back. I figured out the final steps this morning when the sun was coming up. What an amazing night.”

  Dad made a sour face. “Talk about your flipped-out zealots. Junko here doesn’t see a mind-wipe as a dealbreaker. Just a minor bump on her road to world domination.”

  “Reinstalling yourself from a restore point is like a jump-cut in a movie,” continued Junko, pretty much ignoring Dad. “Your personality flows across. Psychic continuity is an illusion anyway.”

  “New day, new me,” said Kristo.

  “Yes!” said Junko. “You wake up and look at your memories and you arbitrarily assume you’re that person. You’re used to doing this. Restores won’t feel unfamiliar. I’m gonna do a demo now. I made myself a restore point forty-five minutes ago when I walked into this room. And now I’ll jump back to that. Watch.”

  Junko twitched, blinked at us and resumed speaking. “Good that we’re all together. And good that it’s a crappy day. We have some work to do. It’s time to start qwetting people. We can do it from here.” Her pronunciation was exactly the same as it had been before.

  “You’re jiving us,” said Carlo. He was tired of Junko. He didn’t like that she’d used her blue blankie routine to push into bed with him and Reba.

  “Huh?” said Junko, who, as a result of the restore process, had forgotten the past forty-five minutes of conversation. “I’m telling you that we’ll telemarket qwet. Only there’s a catch. You’ll be teeping into the minds of strangers. So first I want to show you how to make a full and eidetic backup of your mind. It’s like time travel almost. Watch. I’ll—”

  “You just did that,” said Loulou. “Assume that you’ve already said everything that you’re about to say. Move on with the rest of us.”

  “Oh,” said Junko. “Right. So you’ve seen that my backup process works.”

  “Where did you store your backup?” asked Reba.

  “In my lean, shapely butt,” said Junko, her voice rising towards a giggle. “No lie. I use the muscle memory of my gluteus maximi. Latin plural there. Two nicely entangled skeins of neuromuscular junctions. One cheek for each half of my brain. It’s like remembering how to ride a bike. And I’m the bike.”

  “So you save yourself into your muscles, and then you can chance any soul-destroying stunt you like,” said Kenny, getting interested. “I seem to be a pain in my ass. How will I know to run the restore if I’m, like, weaving potholders in a rehab room?”

  “Maybe you’d be better off weaving potholders in rehab,” said Junko tartly. “Maybe you’d be nicer to be around.” She still wasn’t any too fond of Kenny.

  “She hides her true answer,” said Kristo, closely watching Junko. “There is no automatic restore. One of your friends would need somehow to trigger it. But really, Junko, the restore should be automatic. Like a dead-man’s switch? Triggered if the client’s mind is too distant from his or her stored template. I suppose you know that one measures distances in personality space via Sheckman’s fractal Hausdorff metric?”

  “Oh, kiss my ass,” said Junko. “I’m talking about a beta release that actually works. Yes, I’m working on a dead-man’s switch. And, yes, for the time being, one of your friends needs to invoke your restore by saying your name three times. Like in a fairy tale. Do you want to know how to do a personality backup or not?”

  I won’t reprise the details of the words and images that Junko used for teaching us her arcane maneuver. It’s enough if I describe how it felt when I did it.

  Slouching on my couch, I unfocused my attention and entered a meditative mental state. I imagined I was setting out Zad-attracting treats on a big oak table in a dim castle hall. Things I liked to look at, foods I enjoyed, toys I loved to handle. The Zads came down the balustraded staircase, out of the wainscoting, up from beneath the table, down from the embossed ceiling, and out of thin air. Soon we were all present, all of us Zads—little boy, lonely ghost, messy painter, happy humper, deep sleeper, sly lurker, rowdy rider, hearty eater, the goof who stares at clouds. My remembered selves were like skins I’d shed and like dusty paper masks, piled high upon that big oak table. Tkk—I lit a match. The skins and masks burst into wild flame. I was in the good old white light then, me and my Zadlings, our tiny voices singing out our secret thoughts. We rose with the smoke, then whirled into a twirl that touched its tip unto my royal ass and—yee-haw!—we pulsed in a lightning-jolt of Zadness, thereby vaccinating the physical meat me against ever never forgetting who I am.

  Like that, you wave?

  Saving my personality gave me a bouncy, rubbery lift. Ever since the frantic scene with the platypus in Gaven’s bedroom yesterday, I’d been worried about someone overwriting my soul. But now I was safe.

  Meanwhile Dad and Weezie hadn’t even tried backing themselves up. Maybe they’d reached their weirdness limits. But everyone else was trying the new trick. Reba was flapping her arms and whooping like crane; Kenny and Kristo were crooning a Mongolian throat-song duet; Joey was crawling on the floor with Loulou riding his back; Carlo had his face buried in his hands. Even little Skungy was making a backup of himself, storing a copy of his mind into his long, hairless tail.

  Slowly things quieted down. We were awed at what we’d done. We stared at each other with slack grins, rocking back and forth, like a group of people gathered under a dripping awning after a monster storm.

  “Right on,” said Junko. “Now we rock the Joey twistor far and wide.”

  “Wait, wait, wait,” said Dad. “I don’t like this. You’re talking about changing the biology of every person on Earth. On a whim. What if it’s not a good change? What if it’s hell?”

  “Lennox is right,” chimed in Weezie. “Being qwet is fun, but we don’t have to shove it down everyone’s throat. We hardly even know what qwet is.”

  “Qwet is a happy dinosaur,” said Loulou. “Haven’t you seen Junko’s fabulous ad?”

  “Look, I’m sure I can find a way for people to undo qwet,” said Junko. “In case they don’t like it. I’ll figure that part out when I have time.”

  “But right now, no, you don’t know how,” said Carlo. “I’m feeling iffy about this campaign. Can someone remind me what’s the freaking rush?”

  “For one thing, I’m worried about being arrested,” said Junko. “I got some calls from the Department of Genomics about my ad. I took the ad down, but they want to bring me in for questioning.”

  “How does starting the qwet campaign change that?” Carlo asked.

  “I have all the local DoG honchos on my to-qwet list,” said Junko. “Also the top cops. We’ll change their ways of thinking, you bet. Before they can give us a hard time.”

  “Sly,” said Loulou, enjoying this.

  “Any other reason to rush?” asked Carlo, still not enthused.

  “I want to beat out Gaven and United Mutations,” said Junko, setting her jaw. “I know they want to do this too. It’s a race.”

  “Oh, that makes sense,” said Dad. “Like you’re racing to be the first to drop a hydrogen bomb. Or the first to unleash the bubonic plague.”

  “Old Lennox and his tearful violin,” said Loulou. “Crunch! Oh my, I seem to have stepped on your precious antique instrument. Might as well dance on it now! Crunch, crunch, crunch!”

  “Let’s launch,” said Kenny.

  “The caravan barks, the dogs move on,” said Kristo, not knowing what he was talking about.

  Thinking back to this moment, it’s a littl
e hard to recreate our state of mind. Thanks to cosmic mode, it was as if we were stoned. And we thought of qwet as a very good thing. And we planned to be selective about whom we qwetted. And, trivial as this seems in retrospect, it was a rainy day and we were bored.

  “I promise I’ll work on the roll-back option tomorrow,” Junko said. “Or later today. But I really do want to beat the others. I’m telling you that universal qwet is going to happen. Both Gaven and United Mutations see it as a key marketing strategy. But they’re likely to screw it up. They’ll put advertising hooks in it, or a backdoor control, or they’ll lock in some cheesy terms of service. I’ll do it right. Clean and clear.”

  “How do we pick our targets?” asked Joey. “Other than the DoG and the cops. Do we call random goobs and ask them if they want qwet?”

  “I’ve got a humongo list of volunteers from my ad,” said Junko. “The ad I posted last night? Oh wait, you were upstairs with Loulou. Do you ever check the web, Joey? Except when you’re ego-surfing for your own name?”

  “Everybody’s so raw today,” said Joey. “Tell you one thing—we can’t zap people much beyond Louisville. You try and teep more than three miles, and my Joey twistor gets lost in the, uh, quantum babble of white noise.”

  “How would it be if that was the last phrase you ever heard,” said Dad, who’d managed to get himself a bourbon by now. “Lost in the quantum babble of white noise.” Incongruously he laughed. “Pass me a splinter of my shattered violin, Loulou. I need a toothpick.” We were all getting into that spirit of—whatever.

  “You’ll be my call wallahs now,” said Junko. Seeing our blank faces, she amplified. “Like in India the person who brings you tea is the chai wallah? Hello, Kentucky. Anyway, I’ve put my volunteer list on the web for you, and I just now filtered out anyone who’s more than three miles away, so work your way down, picking the ones that nobody’s picked yet. And we’ll take care of those nosy nervous Nellie bean-counters at the DoG.”

  I studied the list in my mind’s eye. It was absurdly long. We’d never get this done. But the mechanics of the process intrigued me. So I got to work.