Complete Stories (116 page)

“Call Jayson,” he told his phone.

Although Jayson Rubio sometimes worked Stefan’s nerves, the two of them had a true and lasting bond. During each year they’d spent at Square Root of Not, they’d ventured to Burning Man together, displaying their special-FX wizardry to the festival crowds in the desert.

Both of them had all-devouring hobbies: Stefan’s was string theory; Jayson’s was memorabilia. Since leaving the FX company, Jayson had started his own little online business, marketing Renaissance-Faire-type costume gear that he made. Stefan maintained Jayson’s website.

Jayson was old-school, very analog. At Square Root Of Not, he’d been the go-to guy for everything physical: stringing power cables, putting up drywall, sanding the floors, fixing the plumbing. As a fix-it wizard, Jayson was a human tornado. He always carried a sheathed multitool on his belt: knives, pliers, wrench, saw, scissors, cutters, strippers, punchers, pokers, rippers, pounders, and more. Jayson never lacked for options.

The phone was successfully ringing. Now that Stefan was in a jam, a jam full of sugar-ants, good old Jayson would pitch in.

“Stefan!” shouted Jayson, answering. “Call me back later.”

“No no no, listen to me,” Stefan babbled. “Ants are eating my hardware!”

Someone else was angrily yelling at Jayson in the background. Jayson had a fetish about holding his cellphone at arm’s length, so that the powerful microwave phone-rays wouldn’t foment a brain tumor. Whenever you called Jayson Rubio, you weren’t calling an individual, you were calling an environment.

Jayson’s current environment featured an echoing garage roar of biker engines and snarling heavy-metal music. “What? Not one more dime!” Jayson was barking. “Your ad said ‘runs great,’ it didn’t say ‘skips gears!’ Are you waving that tire-iron at me, you friggin’ grease monkey? What? Sure, go ahead, call the cops, Lester! I love the L.A. cops!”

Stefan heard more angry demands, and finally the roaring of a motorcycle. The engine noise rose to a crescendo, then it smoothed down. “Stefan, dog,” said Jayson at last, wind whipping past his phone. “You still there?”

Stefan explained about the ants.

“Ant-man on the way!” Jayson soothed over the ragged pounding of his motorbike. “Don’t even think about poison bug bombs! Bad chemical karma is never the path.”

Stefan hung up. His mood had brightened. What the hell, he would fix his system somehow. He’d buy a new TV. The basic program was still in the cell-phone memory chips, also his very last tweak: twine dimension seven, loop dimension eight. For sure that had been the key to the One True String Theory. The One True String Theory was worth every sacrifice he had ever made. Cosmic strings were the key to an endless free source of non-polluting energy. His noble work would be a boon to all mankind.

Stefan wandered outside. It was another ruthlessly sunny June day, the sky blank and blue. The dry hills around Mr. Noor’s estate were yellow, with scrubby olive-green oak and laurel trees. Stefan felt glad to be out of the house and away from his crippled hardware. Why did he labor indoors when he lived in California? That was crazy. Comprehending nature was, after all, the end goal of physics. Why not skip the middle-man? Why not go out in nature and comprehend it in the raw?

Maybe the ants were grateful to him for discovering the One True String Theory. In return, the ants had come to teach him a finer way of life. The ants were prodding him to recast his research goals. Maybe, in particular, he could search for a woman to live with? That search was well-known to be solvable in linear time.

He would phone Emily Yu before tonight. Of course he would. How hard could that be? His friend Jayson always seemed to have a partner on his arm, often boozy and tattooed, but undeniably female. All Stefan needed to do was to reach out at a human level. Here he was, unemployed yet still feverishly programming, like the cartoon coyote who skids off a cliff, spinning his legs in mid-air, until finally realizing that,
sigh
, it’s time for that long tumble into the canyon.

Overhead the leaves on a eucalyptus tree shimmered in the hot breeze. Universal computation was everywhere. Behind the facades of everyday life were deep, knotted tangles of meaning. Yes, yes….

Jayson’s sturdy red Indian motorcycle putted up the hill and into view, all 1950s curves and streamlining, with a low-skirted rear fender. A beautiful old machine, with Jayson happy on it.

Jayson shed his dusty carapace of helmet and jacket. He wore ragged denim cargo shorts, black engineer’s boots, and a black T-shirt bearing a garish cartoon image of a carnivorous Mayan god. Jayson’s brawny arms had sleeve-like tribal tattoos under intricate chain mail wristbands. Jayson wove the chain-mail in his idle moments, frenetically knitting away with pliers. Jayson’s freaky metal wristbands were the best-selling items on his website. They were beloved by fantasy gamers and Society for Creative Anachronism types.

Stefan offered a cheery wave and hello, but Jayson raised a hand and hauled his phone from his shorts pocket. He listened at arm’s length to the tinny bleating of the speaker, lost his temper and began to rage. “Huh? You reported it stolen? So try and find me, Lester! I got no fixed address! You’ve got a
what
? Back off, man, or you’re
never
gonna get your money!” Angrily Jayson snapped shut his phone.

“A little trouble with your hog?” said Stefan delicately.

“Aw, that Lester,” said Jayson, staring uneasily at his precious red bike. “Nasty old biker, long gray ponytail down his back…. Lester’s a crook! He sold me a sick Indian, what it is. A beauty, a rare antique, a New York cop bike with all the original paint… but it shifts rough. On paper I still owe him… but if he won’t fix my bike our contract is void. No way he’s calling the cops.”

Reassured by his own bravado, Jayson grinned and drew a crumpled paper sack from his pants pocket. “Next topic. Your ants are history. I brought ant aromatherapy.”

“Didn’t you used to have a big tow-trailer for your bike?” said Stefan, studying his friend. “That had all your stuff in it, didn’t it?”

A pained scowl furrowed Jayson’s bearded face. “Lupe says she’s throwing me out. My trailer’s locked in her garage in Pasadena until I pay back rent. It’s always money, money, money with her. Man, I hate gated communities. Like, why put yourself into a jail?”

“You were pretty serious about Lupe. You told me she was the best woman you ever dated. You said you loved her.”

Jayson winced. “Forget Lupe. Forget my stuff. The world’s full of stuff. What’s the difference who has what?”

“I like where your head’s at,” said Stefan, feeling empathy for his companion. “Material possessions are mere illusions. Everything we see here, everything we think we own, it all emerges from the knotting and unknotting of a hexadecillion loops of cosmic string.”

It was Jayson’s turn to offer a pitying look. “Still at that, huh?”

“Jayse, I’m just a few ticks of the clock away from the One True String Theory. In fact I think maybe… I think maybe I already found it. I found the truth exactly when those ants showed up to eat my system. So if I can just publish my science findings in a reputable journal—who knows! It could lead to golf-ball-sized personal suns!”

“Yeah, bro, it’s all about the universal Celtic weave,” said Jayson. He brandished the chain-mail of his hand-made wristlets, beautifully patterned, with loops in four or five different sizes. Then his indulgent smile faded; he twisted his head uneasily. “Do you, um, just hear a helicopter over the valley? Let’s hide my bike in your garage. Just in case Lester really did file a report. Those ghetto-birds are hell on stolen vehicles.”

“Why don’t you just pay the man?” asked Stefan as they wheeled the fine old machine into his tiny, cluttered garage. “This is a beautiful bike. Heavily macho.”

Jayson grunted. “Thing is, I spent my Square Root of Not money on primo collectibles. Sci-fi costumes that I picked right off the studio set. They’re in my trailer, locked up in Lupe’s damn garage. But really, that’s okay, because all I need to do is flip those costumes for a profit on my website. Then I can make good on Lupe’s rent, and get at the costumes, and also pay off the motorcycle. See, it goes round and round. Loop-like.” Another cloud crossed Jayson’s face. “My website’s still okay, right? Inside your parallel computer?”

“Your site is down. Like I’ve been telling you—the ants ate a crucial part of my system. Your website still exists.” Stefan waved his hands. “It’s distributed across the memory chips of ten thousand cell phones. In terms of customer service, though, your website’s a lost world.”

“I hate computers.”

“They love
you
.”

“I hate ants.”

“That’s what I want to hear,” said Stefan. “Let’s go get ‘em, big guy.” He led his friend inside.

They knelt and peered inside the TV, using the flexible light-wand.

“Hey, I’ve seen lots worse,” grunted Jayson in typical L.A. style. “Your ants are practically too small to see!”

“They come in all sizes, man. I saw one as big as, I dunno, as big a miniature dachshund.”

“Get a grip,” advised Jayson, and the irony of this insult, coming from him, cheered Stefan no end. Yes, he was having a bad ants-in-your-hair day, but compared to Jayson, he was the picture of bourgeois respectability. He had money in the bank, a roof and a bed. For all his swagger, Jayson was practically living in a dumpster. But—Jayson didn’t even care. Jayson wasn’t daunted, not a bit. Stefan could learn from him.

Jayson was staring at Stefan’s cracked leather armchair. “You gonna finish that sandwich? Is that baloney organic?”

“It’s salami,” said Stefan. “I’ll get you a bottle of beer.”

Jayson wolfed down the ant-teeming sandwich in three bites. “Tastes like dill pickles.”

“That would be the formic acid.”

Jayson chugged the whole bottle of Mexican beer and fetched himself another. He then focused his professional attention on the four little glass phials he’d brought, deftly unlimbering his multitool and twisting off the screw-tops. Jayson loved using his pliers.

“Eucalyptus, peppermint, cinnamon, and verbena,” intoned Jayson. He dribbled reeking herbal essences on the floor by the television. “Organic, non-toxic, all-natural, ants hate it. This potion never fails.”

The ants tasted of the droplets—and found them good. The trails on the floor thickened as ants seethed out of the TV, so many ants that the trails looked like glittering syrup.

Not wanting to admit defeat, Jayson began stomping the ants. “My essences drew ‘em out of hiding. This way we can wipe them out!” One of the old pine floorboards gave a loud crack and split along its length.

“Jayson!”

“Dog, you got so many ants that they gotta be living under your house. You got some serious Los Angeles ants here, man, you got atomic mutant ants like those giant ants in
Them
. We rip up these crappy old floorboards, napalm those little suckers with flaming moth-balls, then float in some plywood and throw down a cheap carpet. Presto, problem solved.”

“Save the pyro stunts for Burning Man, Jayson. You’re not wrecking my vintage floor.”

Jayson knelt and peered through the broken board, getting the ant’s-eye view. “That’s a great movie,
Them
, it’s got those classic rubber-model bug effects. None of your digital crap.”

“Digital is not crap,” said Stefan with dignity. “Digital is everything. The world is made of ten-dimensional loops of digital cosmic string.”

“Sure, sure, but
Bug’s Life
and
Antz
were totally lame compared to
Them
.”

“That’s because they didn’t use
giant
ants,” said Stefan. “Certain intellectual lightweights have this wimpy notion that giant ants are physically impossible! Merely because the weight-to-strength ratio scales nonlinearly. But there’s so many loopholes. Like negatively curved space, man, or higher dimensions. Lots of elbow room in hyperspace! String theory says there are six extra dimensions of spacetime too small for humans to see. The Calabi-Yau vermin dimensions.”

“You really know some wack stuff, dog,” said Jayson, vindictively mashing ants with his thumb. “If these ants have got their own goddamn dimensions, all the more reason to rip up this floor and pour gallons of burning gasoline into their hive.”

“Their nest is
not
under my house,” insisted Stefan. “There’s got to be some modern cyber-method to track ants to their true lair. Like if I could laser-scan them, or Google-map them. That would rock.”

“Stefan, why did you even call me if you want to talk that kind of crap? It’s not like ants have anti-theft labels.”

“Hey, that’s it!” exclaimed Stefan. “I’ve got smart dust, man. I’ve got a whole bag of smart dust in my bedroom.”

Jayson grinned loonily and made snorting noises. “Smart dust? Throw down some lines, dog!”

“I do not speak of mere drugs,” said Stefan loftily, “I’m talking RFID! Radio frequency ID chips. My smart dust comes out of a lab in Berkeley. You can ping these teensy ID tags with radio, and they give off an ID number. They’re computer chips, but they’re so much smaller than ants that they’re like ant cell phones. Smaller than that, even. Smart dust is like ant pretzel nuggets.”

Stefan fetched Jayson a promotional sheet from a heap of tech-conference swag. The glossy ad showed one single ant towering over one single chip of smart dust. The chip was a knitted trackwork of logic circuits, pretty much like any normal computer chip, but the ant standing over it was an armored Godzilla with eyes like hubcaps and feelers big as sewer pipes.

“Whoah,” said Jayson. “I’d love to see an ant that big.” He drew out his multitool and kinked at a shiny length of his hobby wire.

Stefan rooted through his tangled electronic gear. “Here it is: just what we need. We’ll mix this bag of smart-dust with your super-attractive ant repellents, and all the ants will swallow that stuff whole. Luring ants with high-tech bait—that’s just like when we did our art installations at Burning Man, back in the day!”

“Yep, those naked hippies were drawn to our tech wizardry like ants to sugar,” Jayson concurred. “I’d always get laid right away, but you were obsessed with keeping the demo running.”