A Good Old-Fashioned Future (4 page)

Perched now on the fire-engine red hood of his expensive Animata sports car, Tug waited for Revel to arrive. Tug had curly dark hair and a pink-cheeked complexion. He wore shorts, a sport shirt, and Birkenstock sandals with argyle socks. He looked like a depraved British
schoolboy. He’d bought the Animata with his house-money nest-egg when he’d learned that he would never, ever be rich enough to buy a house in California. Leaning back against the windshield of his car, Tug stared at the descending airplanes and thought about jellyfish trawling through sky-blue seawater.

Tug had whole tankfuls of jellies at home: one tank with flattish moon jellies each with its four whitish circles of sex organs, another tank with small clear bell jellies from the eel grass of Monterey bay, a large tank with sea nettles that had long frilly oral arms and whiplike purple tentacles covered with stinging cells, a smaller tank of toadstool-like spotted jellies from Jellyfish Lake in Palau, a special tank of spinning comb-jellies with trailing ciliated arms, a Japanese tank with umbrella jellies—and more.

Next to the arsenal of tanks was the huge color screen of Tug’s workstation. Tug was no biologist; he’d blundered under the spell of jellies while using mathematical algorithms to generate cellular models of vortex sheets. To Tug’s mathematician’s eye, a jellyfish was a highly perfected relationship between curvature and torsion, just like a vortex sheet, only a jellyfish was working off dynamic tension and osmotic stress. Real jellyfish were gnarlier than Tug’s simulations. Tug had become a dedicated amateur of coelenteratology.

Imitating nature to the core, Tug found a way to evolve and improve his vortex sheet models via genetic programming. Tug’s artificial jellyfish algorithms competed, mutated, reproduced, and died inside the virtual reality of his workstation’s sea-green screen. As Tug’s algorithms improved, his big computer monitor became a tank of virtual jellyfish, of graphic representations of Tug’s equations, pushing at the chip’s computational limits, slowly pulsing about in dimly glowing simulation-space.

The living jellies in the tanks of true seawater provided an objective standard toward which Tug’s programs could try to evolve. At every hour of the day and night, video cameras peered into the spot-lit water tanks, ceaselessly
analyzing the jellyfish motions and feeding data into the workstation.

The recent, crowning step of Tug’s investigations was his manufacturing breakthrough. His theoretical equations had become actual piezoplastic constructions—soft, watery, gelatinous robot jellies of real plastic in the real world. These models were produced by using an intersecting pair of laser beams to sinter—that is, to join together by heating without melting—the desired shape within a matrix of piezoplastic microbeads. The sintered microbeads behaved like a mass of cells: each of them could compress or elongate in response to delicate vibratory signals, and each microbead could in turn pass information to its neighbors.

A completed artificial jellyfish model was a floppy little umbrella that beat in steady cellular waves of excitation and relaxation. Tug’s best plastic jellyfish could stay active for up to three weeks.

Tug’s next requirement for his creations was “a killer application,” as the software tycoons called it. And it seemed he might have that killer app in hand, given his recent experiments in making the jellyfish sensitive to chemical scents and signals. Tug had convinced Revel—and half-believed himself—that the artificial jellies could be equipped with radiosignaling chips and set loose on the sea floor. They could sniff out oil-seeps in the ocean bottom and work their way deep into the vents. If this were so, then artificial jellyfish would revolutionize undersea oil prospecting.

The only drawback, in Tug’s view, was that offshore drilling was a contemptible crime against the wonderful environment that had bred the real jellies in the first place. Yet the plan seemed likely to free up Texas venture capital, enough capital to continue his research for at least another year. And maybe in another year, thought Tug, he would have a more ecologically sound killer app, and he would be able to disentangle himself from the crazy Texan.

Right on cue, Revel Pullen came strolling down the
exit ramp, clad in the garb of a white-trash oil-field worker: a flannel shirt and a pair of Can’t-Bust-’Em overalls. Revel had a blond crewcut and smooth dark skin. The shirt was from Neiman-Marcus and the overalls were ironed, but they seemed to be genuinely stained with dirt-fresh Texas crude.

Tug hopped off the hood of his car and stood on tiptoe to wave, deliberately camping it up to jangle the Texan’s nerves. He drew up a heel behind him like Marilyn Monroe waving in
The Misfits
.

Nothing daunted, Revel Pullen headed Tug’s way with an exaggerated bowlegged sprawl and a scuff of his python-skin boots. Revel was the scapegrace nephew of Amarillo’s billionaire Pullen Brothers. The Pullen clan were malignant market speculators and greenmail raiders who had once tried to corner the world market in molybdenum.

Revel himself, the least predictable of his clan, was in charge of the Pullen Brothers’ weakest investments: the failing oil wells that had initially brought the Pullen family to prominence—beginning with the famous Ditheree Gusher, drilled near Spindletop, Texas, in 1892.

Revel’s quirk was his ambition to become a high-tech tycoon. This was why Revel attended computer-science meetings like SIGUSC, despite his stellar ignorance of everything having to do with the movement of bytes and pixels.

Revel stood ready to sink big money into a technically sexy Silicon Valley start-up. Especially if the start-up could somehow do something for his family’s collapsing oil industry and—though this part still puzzled Tug—find a use for some odd clear fluid that Revel’s engineers had recently been pumping from the Ditheree hole.

“Shit howdy, Tug,” drawled Revel, hoisting his polyester/denim duffel bag from one slim shoulder to another. “Mighty nice of y’all to come meet me.”

Beaming, Tug freed his fingers from Revel’s insistent grip and gestured toward the Animata. “So, Revel! Ready to start a business? I’ve decided we should call it Ctenophore,
Inc. A
ctenophore
is a kind of hermaphroditic jellyfish which uses a comblike feeding organ to filter nutrients from the ocean; they’re also called comb-jellies. Don’t you think Ctenophore is a perfect name for our company? Raking in the dollars from the economy’s mighty sea!”

“Not so loud!” Revel protested, glancing up and down the airport pavement in a parody of wary street-smarts. “As far as any industrial spy knows, I’m here in California on a personal vacation.” He heaved his duffel into the back of Tug’s car. Then he straightened, and reached deep into the baggy trouser-pocket of his Can’t-Bust-’Ems.

The Texan dragged out a slender pill-bottle filled with clear viscous jelly and pressed the crotch-warmed vial into Tug’s unwilling palm, with a dope-dealer’s covert insistence. “I want you to keep this, Tug. Just in case anything should … you know … happen to me.”

Revel swiveled his narrow head to scan the passers-by with paranoid alertness, briefly reminding Tug of the last time he’d been here at the San Jose airport: to meet his ailing father, who’d been fingerpaint-the-wall-with-shit senile and had been summarily dumped on the plane by Tug’s uncle. Tug had gotten his father into a local nursing home, and last summer Tug’s father had died.

Life was sad, and Tug was letting it slip through his fingers—he was an unloved gay man who’d never see thirty again, and now here he was humoring a nutso het from Texas. Humoring people was not something Tug excelled at.

“Do you really have enemies?” said Tug. “Or do you just think so? Am I supposed to think you have enemies? Am I supposed to care?”

“There’s money in these plans of ours—real foldin’ money,” Revel bragged darkly, climbing into the Animata’s passenger seat. He waited silently until Tug took the wheel and shut the driver’s-side door. “All we really gotta worry about,” Revel continued at last, “is controlling
the publicity. The environmental impact crap. You didn’t tell anybody about what I e-mailed you, did you?”

“No,” snapped Tug. “That cheap public-key encryption you’re using has garbled half your messages. What are you so worried about, anyway? Nobody’s gonna care about some slime from a played-out oil well—even if you do call it
Urschleim
. That’s German, right?”

“Shhhhh!” hissed Revel.

Tug started the engine and gunned it with a bluish gust of muscular combustion. They swung out into the endless California traffic.

Revel checked several times to make sure that they weren’t being trailed. “Yes, I call it
Urschleim
,” he said at last, portentously. “In fact, I’ve put in a trademark for that name. Them old-time German professors were on to something.
Ur
means
primeval
. All life came from the Urschleim, the original slime! Primeval slime from the inner depths of the planet! You ever bitten into a green almond, Tug? From the tree? There’s some green fuzz, a thin little shell, and a center of clear, thick slime. That’s exactly how our planet is, too. Most of the original Urschleim is still flowing, and oozing, and lyin’ there ’way down deep. It’s just waitin’ for some bright boy to pump it out and exploit its commercial potential. Urschleim is life itself.”

“That’s pretty grandiose,” said Tug evenly.

“Grandiose, hell!” Revel snapped. “It’s the only salvation for the Texas oil business, compadre! God damn it, if we Texans don’t drill for a living, we’ll be reduced to peddling chips and software like a bunch of goddamn Pacific Rim computer weenies! You got me wrong if you think I’ll give up the oil business without a fight!”

“Sure, sure, I’m hip,” Tug said soothingly. “My jellyfish are going to help you find more oil, remember?” It was easy to tell when Revel had gone nonlinear—his Texan drawl thickened drastically and he began to refer to his beloved oil business as the “aisle bidness.” But what was the story with this
Urschleim
?

Tug held up the pill-bottle of clear slime and glanced
at it while steering with one hand. The stuff was thixotropic—meaning a gel that becomes liquid when shaken. You’d tilt the vial and all the Urschleim would be stuck in one end, but then, if you shook the bottle a bit, the slime’s state would change and it would run down to the other end like ketchup suddenly gushing from a bottle. Smooth, clear ketchup. Snot.

“The Ditheree hole’s oozin’ with Urschleim right now!” said Revel, settling a pair of Italian sunglasses onto his freckled nose. He looked no older than twenty-five. “I brought three gallons of it in a tank in my duffel. One of my engineers says it’s a new type of deep-lying oil, and another one says it’s just water infected with bacteria. But I’m with old Herr Doktor Professor von Stoffman. We’ve struck the cell fluid of Mother Earth herself: undifferentiated tissue, Tug, primordial ooze. Gaia goo. Urschleim!”

“What did you do to make it start oozing?” asked Tug, suppressing a giggle.

Revel threw back his head and crowed. “Man, if OPEC got wind about our new high-tech extraction techniques.… You don’t think I got enemies, son? Them sheikhs play for keeps.” Revel tapped his knuckles cagily against the car’s closed window. “Hell, even Uncle Sam’d be down on us if he knew that we’ve been twisting genes and seeding those old worn-out oil beds with designer bacteria! They eat through tar and paraffin, change the oil’s viscosity, unblock the pores in the stone, and get it all fizzy with methane.… You wouldn’t think the ol’ Ditheree had it in ’er to blow valves and gush again, but we plumbed her out with a new extra-virulent strain. And what did she gush? Urschleim!”

Revel peered at Tug over the tops of his designer sunglasses, assuming what he seemed to think was a trustworthy expression. “But that ain’t the half of it, Tug. Wait till I tell you what we did with the stuff once we had it.”

Tug was impatient. Gusher or not, Revel’s bizarre maunderings were not going to sell any jellyfish. “What did you think of that artificial jellyfish I sent you?”

Revel frowned. “Well, it looked okay when it showed up. About the size of a deflated football. I dropped it in my swimmin’ pool. It was floatin’ there, kinda rippling and pulsing, for about two days. Didn’t you say that sucker would run for weeks? Forty-eight hours and it was gone! Disintegrated I guess. Chlorine melted the plastic or something.”

“No way,” protested Tug, intensely. “It must have slipped out a crack in the side of your pool. I built that model to last three weeks for sure! It was my best prototype. It was a chemotactic artificial jellyfish designed to slither into undersea vents and find its way to underground oil beds.”

“My swimming pool’s not in the best condition,” allowed Revel. “So I guess it’s possible that your jellyfish did squeeze out through a crack. But if this oil-prospecting application of yours is any good, the thing should have come back with some usable geology data. And it never did come back that I noticed. Face it, Tug, the thing melted.”

Tug wouldn’t give in. “My jellyfish didn’t send back information because I didn’t put a tracer chip in it. If you’re going to be so rude about it, I might as well tell you that I don’t think oil prospecting is a very honorable application. I’d really rather see the California Water Authority using my jellies to trace leaks in irrigation and sewage lines.”

Revel yawned, sinking deeper into the passenger seat. “That’s real public-spirited of you, Dr. Mesoglea. But California water ain’t worth a dime to me.”

Tug pressed onward. “Also, I’d like to see my jellyfish used to examine contaminated wells here in Silicon Valley. If you put an artificial jellyfish down a well, and leave it to pulsate down there for a week or two, it could filter up all kinds of trace pollutants! It’d be a great public-relations gambit to push the jelly’s antipollution aspects. Considering your family history, it couldn’t hurt to get the Pullen family in the good graces of the Environmental Protection
people. If we angle it right, we could probably even swing a federal development grant!”

“I dunno, hombre,” Revel grumbled. “Somehow it just don’t seem sportin’ to take money from the Feds.…” He gazed mournfully at the lushly exotic landscape of monkey-puzzle trees, fat pampered yuccas, and orange trees. “Man, everything sure looks
green
out here.”