Complete Stories (150 page)

“Chinese, French, Finnish, whatever,” said Rawna. “It’s a universally interfacing meta-interpreter. Last night the Goofer CEO managed to acquire the only one in existence. It’s from Triple Future Labs in Xi’an. Near Beijing.”

“Jeff can probably even talk to me now,” said Sid.

“Yes,” said Jeff, eerily calm. “Foreigners, animals, plants, stones, and rude turds.” He rose to his feet, looking powerful, poised, and very, very dangerous.

“So okay then,” said Rawna, rapidly heading for the door with Sid at her side. In her hoarse whisper, she issued more instructions to Diane. “Your job, my dear, will be to keep Jeff comfortable and relaxed today, and not get in the way. Take him out to the countryside, away from people and local cultural influences. Don’t talk to him. He’ll be doing the work in his head.” Rawna paused on the doorstep to rummage in her capacious rainbow-leopard bag and pulled out a bottle of wine. “This is a very nice Cucamonga viongier, the grape of the year, don’t you know. I meant to put it in your freezer, but—”

With Jeff dominating the room like a Frankenstein’s monster, Rawna chose to set the bottle on the floor by the door. And then she and Sid were gone.

-----

“I should have karate-kicked Sid as soon as he came in,” said Diane wretchedly. “I’m sorry I didn’t protect you better, Jeff.”

“It’s not a problem,” said Jeff. His eyes were glowing and warm. “I’ll solve Rawna’s piss-ant advertising issue, and then we’ll take care of some business on our own.”

For the moment, Jeff didn’t say anything more about the Kowloon slug, and Diane didn’t feel like pestering him with questions. Where to even begin? They were off the map of any experiences she’d ever imagined.

Quietly she ate some yogurt while Jeff stared at his Goofer display, which was strobing in a dizzying blur, in synch with his thoughts.

“The Chinese are fully onboard now,” announced Jeff, powering down his Goofer ring.

“What about the Kowloon slug?” Diane finally asked.

“I transmuted it,” said Jeff. “It’s not inside my head anymore. I’ve passed it on to my simmies. I’ve got a trillion universally-interfacing simmie-bots in the cloud now, and in an hour I’ll have a nonillion. This could be a very auspicious day. Let’s go out into Nature, yeah.”

Diane packed a nice lunch and included Rawna’s bottle of white wine. It seemed like a good thing to have wine on for this picnic, especially if the picnicker and the picknickee were supposed to stay comfortable and relaxed.

“I say we go up Mount Baldy,” suggested Diane, and Jeff was quick to agree. Diane loved that drive, mostly. Zipping down the Foothill to Mountain Ave, a few minutes over some emotionally tough terrain as she passed all the tract houses where the orange groves used to be, and then up along chaparral-lined San Antonio Creek, past Mt. Baldy Village, and then the switchbacks as they went higher.

Jeff was quiet on the drive up, not twitchy at all. Diane was hoping that the Kowloon slug was really gone from his head, and that the conotoxins had fully worn off. The air was invigorating up here, redolent of pines and campfire smoke. It made Diane wish she had a plaid shirt to put on: ordinarily, she hated plaid shirts.

“I’m going to just pull over to the picnic area near the creek,” she said. “That’ll be easy. We can park there, then walk into the woods a little and find a place without a bunch of people.”

But there weren’t any people at all— a surprise, given that it was a sunny Sunday in July. Diane pulled into off the road into the deserted parking area, which was surrounded by tall trees.

“Did you know these are called Jeffrey pines?” said Diane brightly as they locked the car.

“Sure,” said Jeff. “I know everything.” He winked at her. “So do you, if you really listen.”

Diane wasn’t about to field that one. She popped the trunk, grabbed the picnic basket and a blanket to sit on, and they set off on a dusty trail that took them uphill and into the woods.

“Jeffrey pines smell like pineapple,” she continued, hell-bent on having a light conversation. “Or vanilla. Some people say pineapple, some people say vanilla. I say pineapple. I love Jeffrey pines.”

Jeff made a wry face, comfortably on her human wavelength for the moment. “So that’s why you like me? I remind you of a tree?”

Diane laughed lightly, careful not to break into frantic cackles. “Maybe you do. Sometimes I used to drive up here on my day off and hug a Jeffrey pine.”

“I can talk to the pines now,” said Jeff. “Thanks to what that Kowloon slug did for my simmies. I finally understand: we’re all the same. Specks of dirt, bacteria, flames, people, cats. But we can’t talk to each other. Not very clearly, anyway.”

“I haven’t been up here in weeks and weeks,” jabbered Diane nervously. “Not since I met you.” She looked around. It was quiet, except for birds. “I have to admit it’s funny that nobody else is here today. I was worried that maybe—maybe since you’re the hive mind man, then everyone in LA would be coming up here too.”

“I told them not to,” said Jeff. “I’m steering them away. We don’t need them here right now.” He put his arm around Diane’s waist and led her to a soft mossy spot beside a slow, deep creek. “I want us to be alone together. We can change the world.”

“So—you remember your dream?” said Diane, a little excited, a little scared. Jeff nodded. “Here?” she said uncertainly. Jeff nodded again. “I’ll spread out the blanket,” she said.

“The trees and the stream and the blanket will watch over us,” said Jeff, as they undressed each other solemnly. “This is going to be one cosmic fuck.”

“The earthly paradise?” said Diane, sitting down on the blanket and pulling Jeff down beside her.

“You can make it happen,” said Jeff, moving his hands slowly and lightly over her entire body. “You love this world so much. All the animals and the eggs and the bicycles. You can do this.” Diane had never felt so ready to love the world as she did right now.

He slid into her, and it was as if she and Jeff were one body and one mind, with their thoughts connected by the busy simmies. Diane understood now what her role was to be.

Glancing up at the pines, she encouraged the simmies to move beyond the web and beyond the human hive mind. The motes of computation hesitated. Diane flooded them with alluring, sensuous thoughts—rose petals, beach sand, dappled shadows…. Suddenly, faster than light in rippling water, the simmies responded, darting like tiny fish into fresh niches, leaving the humans’ machines and entering nature’s endlessly shuttling looms. And although they migrated, the simmies kept their connection to Jeff and Diane and to all the thirsty human minds that made up the hive and were ruled by it. Out went the bright specks of thought, out into the stones and the clouds and the seas, carrying with them their intimate links to humanity.

Jeff and Diane rocked and rolled their way to ecstasy, to sensations more ancient and more insistent than cannonades of fireworks.

In a barrage of physical and spiritual illumination, Diane felt the entire planet, every creature and feature, every detail, as familiar as her own flesh. She let it encompass her, crash over her in waves of joy.

And then, as the waves diminished, she brought herself back to the blanket in the woods. The Jeffrey pines smiled down at the lovers. Big Gaia hummed beneath Diane’s spine. Tiny benevolent minds rustled and buzzed in the fronds of moss, in the whirlpools of the stream, in the caressing breeze against her bare skin.

“I’m me again,” said Jeff, up on his elbow, looking at her with his face tired and relaxed.

“We did it,” said Diane very slowly. “Everyone can talk to everything now.”

“Let the party begin,” said Jeff, opening the bottle of wine.

============

Written September, 2010.

Isaac Asimov’s SF Magazine
, February, 2012.

Over the Fourth of July weekend of 2010, I was a Pro Guest of Honor at the small Westercon in Pasadena. My wife Sylvia and I got to spend some time with Eileen Gunn and her husband, John Berry, who was the Fan Guest of Honor. Eileen was telling us about a scene in a story she was working on with Michael Swanwick—something about a time traveler stumbling into Woodstock festival and being outed by Arlo Guthrie—and I decided I’d really like to write a story with Eileen myself. As it happened, we all ended up seeing a fireworks show at the Rose Bowl, which plays a part in the story.

Another spark for the story was a conversation I had with the writer Tim Powers, in which he mentioned someone who “worked at a karate dojo behind a Wienerschnitzel in San Bernardino.” I loved his phrase enough to use it as the opening setting for my tale with Eileen. The underlying idea of the story is that a sufficiently media-drenched person might come to embody the actual hive mind that inhabits our society.

Working with Eileen was great, she’s very positive and accepting, with a ready wit. And thanks to Eileen, the story’s lead woman character has the quirkiness and immediacy of a person you might actually know.

You’d be surprised what poor equipment the profs have in our CS department. Until quite recently, my office mate Harry’s computer was a primeval beige box lurking beneath his desk. The box had taken to making an irritating whine, and the techs didn’t want to bother with it.

One rainy Tuesday during his office hour, Harry snapped. He interrupted a conversation with an earnest student by jumping to his feet, yelling a curse, and savagely kicking his computer. The whine stopped; the machine was dead. Frightened and bewildered, the student left.

“
Now
they’ll have to replace this clunker,” said Harry. “And you keep your trap shut, Fletcher.”

“What if the student talks?”

“Nobody listens to them.”

In a few days, a new computer appeared on Harry’s desk, an elegant new model the size of a sandwich, with a wafer-thin display propped up like a portrait.

Although my office mate is a very brilliant man, he’s a thumb-fingered klutz. For firmly held reasons of principle, he wanted to tweak the settings of his lovely new machine to make it use a reverse Polish notation command-line interface—this had to do with the massive digital archiving project that he was forever working on. The new machine demurred at adopting reverse Polish. Harry downloaded some freeware patches, intending to teach his device a lesson. You can guess how that worked out.

The techs took Harry’s dead sandwich back to their lair, wiped its memory and reinstalled the operating system. Once again its peppy screen shone atop his desk. But now Harry sulked, not wanting to use it.

“This is about my soul,” he told me. “I’ve spent, what, thirty years creating a software replica of myself. Everything I’ve written: my email, my photos, and a lot of my conversations—and, yes, I’m taping this, Fletcher. A rich compost of Harry data. It’s ready to germinate, ready to come to life. But these brittle machines thwart my immortality at every turn.”

“You’d just be modeling yourself as a super chatbot, Harry. In the real world, we all die.” I paused, thinking about Harry’s attractive woman friend of many years. “It’s a shame you never married Velma. You two could have had kids. Biology is the easy path to self-replication.”

“You’re not married either,” said Harry glaring at me. “And Velma says what you said too.” As if reaching a momentous decision, he snatched the shapely sandwich computer off his desk and put it on mine. “Very well then! I’ll make my desk into a stink farm!”

Sure enough, when I came into the office on Monday, I found Harry’s desk encumbered with a small biological laboratory. Harry and his woman friend Velma were leaning over it, fitting an data cable into a socket in the side of a Petri dish that sat beneath a bell jar.

“Hi Fletch,” said Velma brightly. She was a terminally cheerful genomics professor with curly hair. “Harry wants me to help him reproduce as a slime mold.”

“How romantic,” I said. “Do you think it can work?”

“Biocomputation has blossomed this year,” said Velma. “The Durban-Krush mitochondrial protocols have solved our input/output problems.”

“A cell’s as much of a universal computer as any of our department’s junk-boxes,” put in Harry. “And just look at this! My entire database is flowing into these slime mold cells. They
like
reverse Polish. I’m overwriting their junk DNA.”

“We prefer to speak of sequences that code for obsolete or unactivated functional activity,” said Velma, making a playful professor face.

“Like Harry’s sense of empathy?” I suggested.

Velma laughed. “I’m waiting for him to code me into the slime mold with him.”

A week later, Harry was having conversations out loud with the mold culture on his desk. Intrigued by the activity, one of our techs had interfaced a sound card to Harry’s culture, still in its Petri dish. When Harry was talking to his slime mold, I couldn’t readily tell which of the voices was the real him.

The week after that, I noticed that the slime mold colonies had formed themselves into a pattern of nested scrolls, with fruiting bodies atop some of the ridges. Velma was in the office a lot, excitedly discussing a joint paper she was writing with Harry.

“Not exactly a wedding,” I joked. “But
still
.”

After Velma left, Harry gave me a frown. “You don’t ever plan to get on my wavelength, do you, Fletch? You’ll always be picking at me.”

“So? Not everyone has to be the same.”

“By now I would have thought you’d want to join me. You’re the younger man. I need for you to extend my research.” He was leaning over his desk, lifting up the bell jar to fiddle with his culture.

“I’ve got my own career,” I said, shaking my head. “But of course I admit there’s genius in your work.”

“Your work now,” said Harry. “
Yours
.” He darted forward and blew a puff of spores into my face. In moments the mold had reprogrammed my wetware. I became a full-on emulation of Harry.

And—I swear this—Velma will soon be mine.

============

Written March, 2011.

Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery
, July, 2011.