Complete Stories (123 page)

“To start with, you can point out some of the breaks that you like, and the design wizard spawns off variants,” says Del. “Blends and crossovers. Or you can just tweak the individual surf-breaks with your bare hands—” He reaches right into a point break and bends the rocky spit of land a bit further to the right. “
And
down by the floor we have the lab-type controls.” Del moves a slider, making the crests of the waves in the active breaks grow about thirty percent higher.

“Can I input an equation?” asks Zep. “Is there, like, a programming language?”

“There’s, uh, some kind of display over there,” said Del, pointing out a round glassy screen filled with glowing green symbols. “I think there’s a keyboard. I’ve never used it.”

Zep crouches over the round screen, watching its reactions to the twitches of his fingers on the virtual keyboard, a fanciful construct of copper and ivory.

“No prob!” Zep soon exclaims. “The system uses this easy reverse Polish language called Whuffo. I’ll just change your water’s physics to use the boiling cubic wave equation—there. And now we pimp our ride. Lova Moore’s gonna be sucking sea urchins.”

Sooner said than done. Two hours roll by before the boys get a crude first approximation working, a crufty break with staircase-shaped waves. Unlike in the Hollow Earth break, there’s no sun in their design-mode world; the air simply glows. The waves hump out of the acid-green virtual water like wobbly escalator treads. The square blocks swell as they rise, ballooning into prickly-pear-cactus lop-lop shapes, and if one of those lop-lops bursts near your head, you’re off your board for true.

“We’ll call this break Wobble Gobble,” exults Zep. “It’s almost as gnarly as I dreamed.” He shows Del a virtual control that he’s fashioned: a numerical read-out with a thumb-wheel. “To keep it interesting, I can dial up the gain as high as I like. I’ve got it set on eleven right now. But it can go way higher. I’m using a logarithmic scale.”

“Eleven is enough,” says Del. His board keeps pitching him onto the floor.

“Here’s the trick,” advises Zep. “After each wobble, there’s a flat spot that you can slide across before that big cactus bulge grows out to gobble you.” He’s wildly twitching his board, like a salmon climbing a fish-ladder. His face is sweaty and his damp hair lank. “Come on, Del, don’t lie there like a noob. You gotta master this so you can shut down Lova Moore.”

In another half hour Del has the hang of it. “Wobble Gobble!” he says. “Nice work, Zep. I’ll spiff up the break now.” He adds dolphin-shaped non-player-characters, steep-sided stone islands, tree ferns onshore and, just for the hell of it, a dinosaur-sized kiwi bird that wades around trying to eat stuff. And then Del flips back to play mode and messages Lova.

“I’ve decided to call the cops on N00B2,” shrills Lova Moore, appearing almost right away. “Malicious automotive mischief. I know her true name, too.”

“Man, what kind of surfer are
you
?” cries Zep. “Goody-goody snitch. Back to the Heartland with you!”

“Never been there,” says Lova, sitting next to them on her board, her giant boobs jiggling as she studies the kinky Wobble Gobble waves. “In reality, I’m a Surf City local.”

Even now the breast-besotted Del fails reach the obvious conclusion. Mainly he’s focused on showing off his break. And Zep is too busy grooving on the cubic waves to realize that Lova Moore has blown her cover.

“Stairway to heaven!” shouts Del as he fish-twitches his board across a mound of ziggurat-like cubic waves, then slides down them with thuddy, smacking sounds, ducking the flying water-balloons overhead.

Lova tries to follow him, but she’s not doing well. Over and over she wipes out and then, how sweet, the monster kiwi eats her virtual surfboard and she’s left paddling in the chop with ripple rings radiating out from her neck. The schools of dolphins flip their tails and leap for joy. Lova’s ranking has dropped by about ten percent, enough to put her well below Del’s level.

And then Lova notices the gain controller in Zep’s hand.

“Cheaters!” she screeches. “You’ll pay for this!” She disappears.

“The standard gain of eleven is pretty easy,” Zep tells Del, a smile playing across his lips. “That’s why every time that it looked like Lova was settling in on a wave, I goosed the gain up to a hundred.”

“Zep, that’s not—”

“Hell, if she deserved to have the top ranking, she could have handled the higher-gain waves. I bet you can even surf a gain of a
thousand
, Del. Check it out.” Zep twiddles his control.

Fat gouts of hyperactive water fly across the walls. The mounted surfboards are like bucking dragons. But the boys learn these rhythms too, and Zep keeps on inching the gain higher. It’s fun.

And now here comes Kaya, hurrying in from the intricate night, her flip-flops slapping the floor, her cheeks flushed. Somewhere during the evening’s changes she’s set aside her blonde wig, revealing cropped mousey brown hair with a tiny braided pigtail in back. “Wuxtry, wuxtry!” she cries, newsboy style. “Lova Moore is Lex Loach!”

“
Ga-hoink!
” ape-screams Del, slapping his forehead and falling off his board.

“I wasn’t attracted to Lova Moore for one second,” Zep is quick to put in.

“Blinded by boobs,” says Kaya, shaking her head. “Moronized by mammaries. Titillated by—grow up, boys. They’re just glands. What it is, I was hanging with Becka at the Food Bin for a couple of hours, catching a betel buzz, and then Jen comes wandering in, bored out of her skull. She says Lex is pissing away the evening at that trashed Perfect Wave cave, the one on the Boardwalk. So I’m like,
hmmm
, and we jam over there and find Lex lying on the floor, he’s just wiped out on your Wobble Gobble break. So of course I’m harshing on him about playing Lova Moore—but then he says if I don’t stop, he’ll call the cops on me for his shitbox car! So I act nice for about ten seconds, but then he puts his hands on me, so I say why try to be butch when you’re such a queen, and he calls his Dad and gets permission to take immediate possession of Cheezemore Ratt’s and cut the power! What it is, he’s gonna shut you down.”

Zep has a workaround. “If I crank up the gain to an insane level, I think the Wobble Gobble break can draw power from the ambient wireless radiation,” he says. “Thanks to the entropy gradient. That way Loach can’t shut us down. Macho Lex with his triple-K cups.” Zep is pumping his thumb to move his virtual controller’s wheel. “I’m setting it to ten thousand, Del.”

“Are you freaking nuts?” cries Del, as the virtual water begins rearing into frantic spouts.

“Ten thousand degrees of weirdness is just where it starts gettin’ good,” says Zep taking an unsteady stance on his rapidly twitching board. Del has no choice but to join in.

They can hear Loach bellowing outside. He’s unlocking the electrical cabinet, turning off the Cheezemore Ratt circuit-breakers one by one. The lights wink out across the room. But the Perfect Wave cave stays alive. Yes! The high-entropy simulation is drawing energy from the global funk of wireless info waves. If anything, the sim images are brighter than before.

Loach pounds into the restaurant and snatches up the billy-club from behind the bar.

“
Oooo
, Wova wikes to wub the wood,” whoops Kaya, standing by the Perfect Wave dome. With a shriek of laughter she nips inside.

“And now get on your board,” Zep tells her. “We gotta jam!”

“I’m too high to surf those humpty water eggs,” says Kaya. The bright shapes are coming loose from the walls, the air itself is dancing with globs. “I’ll just sit on the back of your board, Zep.
Oooo
, here comes Wova Woach!”

Hoarsely roaring, Loach is beating the club over and over against the dome of the Perfect Wave cave, breaking down the walls.

“We’re going all the way to a million now,” says Zep, sweating and bending over his virtual controller. “We’ll be drawing in even more stuff from the outside world.”

“The perfect wave,” raves Kaya. “You’re gonna crank up the uncertainty of the planetary wave so high that we’ll end up somewhere totally—” She breaks off, suddenly concerned, holding her hand to her throat. “My tiki string just snapped! I heard my little goddess bounce off your board.” Kaya lies on her stomach across Zep’s chintzy wave cave board, peering at the floor.

A piece of the dome breaks loose and—melts. The cubic wave simulation is absorbing material reality. The dome, the nearby tables and chairs and even the walls of the restaurant merge into the growing blue wave.

Loach throws himself through the warped, glowing air, grabbing for the third board. And misses—just. But he’s made it into the pudding intact; he’s power-paddling like a merman.

Del, Zep, and Kaya slide away, Del in the lead. The world is hanging sideways, like a wall whose floor is a million miles below. They’re surfing across a washboard of shelf-like ripples on the face of the vertical wave—and they keep getting higher, climbing the wave like stripes on a barber pole.

Del looks back past Zep and Kaya, wondering if his procedural kiwi bird is still in place. The kiwi is nowhere in sight—it’s been replaced by a tiki goddess—armless, legless, with a blunt chiseled head that’s been gazing out over this sea for a trillion years. The tiki is riding that empty third board, which has morphed into a kahuna’s mahogany longboard. Far in the rear, Loach is doggedly paddling in the tiki’s wake.

For his part, Zep flashes that the Polynesian goddess is, yes, the very amulet that had once hung from Kaya’s neck. Putting it another way, the amulet has been pulled into this more expansive version of reality, along with everything else. This perfect wave is drawing in the entire material substance of planet Earth.

Zep, Kaya and Del look down, watching the world melt into their mighty simulation. Rivers and lakes, pastures and mountains, baseball stadiums, ocean liners and suspension bridges—all are stretching, turning liquid and surrendering to the pull of the perfect wave, dribbling into the flow like fresh wet paintings on a spinning platter, feeding their colorful blotches into the omnivorous mound of blue.

Reveling in its plenitude, the wave lofts higher and higher—and Del shoots up towards the supernal crest.

“We’re a planetary wave in probability space!” murmurs Kaya. “But what happens when it breaks?”

“Maybe it doesn’t have to break,” says Zep, working his double-loaded board up the face of the watery slope. “It’s the perfect wave, right? We can ride it forever.”

“That tiki is so beautiful,” says Kaya, turning her attention to the craggy face just behind them. “She looks green, now, doesn’t she? Maybe she stands for Gaia. The planetary eigenvector.”

The tiki hears her; she makes just the slightest of funky moves, tottering a few inches further forward on her oversized longboard. The beetle-browed goddess’s motions are sheer understated elegance, drawn from the racial memories of Mother Earth.

“Dig it,” says Kaya sketching invisible energy lines with her fingers. “The tiki’s still entangled with me—like by an astral cord around my neck. Everything’s gonna work out for the best.”

Surfing well above them, Del is happy, knowing he’s at the top of the tournament ladder. Indeed, he’s somewhere above the topmost rung of any conceivable ladder. The seas and mountains of planet Earth are folding into the perfect wave like rich loam opening up before a plowshare. The planet’s mantle and its fragrant, sizzling core flow into the wave; vast whirlwinds suck the planet’s atmosphere into the every-mounting peak of ultramarine blue. So awesome. Only now it occurs to Del that—if this is as real as it seems—they’re annihilating everyone on Earth.

A shadow falls over him. The highest edge of the wave has begun to curl over, occluding its face from the full glow of the atmosphere’s light. In the nearly transparent sheet of water, shapes are moving, darting, dancing, chirping. They flip into the air, twist, and dive into the wave again, laughing. Dolphins by the thousands, millions, more.

One of them cuts in close to Del, chattering, and as Del speeds up his brain, the sounds congeal into human speech. It’s still a simulated dolphin, yes, but it’s also a storage module, holding one of the billions of human minds now folded into the flowing mountain, minds waiting for the planetary wave equation to settle into its new configuration so they can don their reborn forms.

“Your fuddy foe has tagged the tiki,” says the dolphin with utterly grave hilarity.

Sure enough, Loach has caught hold of the third board’s skeg—the fin that projects down into the water from the base of this board, a board so big that it might have been shaped from a single ancient mahogany tree. Climbing onto the tiki’s longboard, Loach doesn’t look the least bit intimidated.

His physical form is a churning mixture of Lova Moore and Lex Loach. Huge breasts emerge and wobble away, detached Dali blobs that surround him for a moment, try reattaching to his chest, find it unyielding and merge with the water instead. His lips puff up like botox worms, then shrivel away to show zombie skull fangs.

Loach crawls forward along the board, unable to find his balance. In order to drag himself to his feet, he wraps his arms around thegoddess from behind, blinding her lidless eyes. The stonefaced tiki’s expression shifts; her tightly pursed lips part in a warrior-woman’s grimace. The tiki is enraged by Loach’s sacrilege—but armless and legless as she is, she has no way of shaking him free. The great board wobbles.

The loss of poise spreads through the entire planetary wave. A period-doubling quiver of chaos percolates down through the quantum fluid. And now it seems the once-perfect wave is scraping across a subdimensional version of a reef, a crystalline ur-reality that was previously hidden beneath the cozy warmth of the natural world. The dark underlayment sends up the sinister tendrils of degenerate fixed-point computations, threatening to crystallize the entire wave-mountain into something dead and dull.

Del watches helplessly from above. The subdimensional reef is eating into the living water; it’s killing the information flow.

Down in the crisis zone, Zep hears a horrible humming sound coming off the water, like brake drum linings peeling metal. It’s a harsh scream that no board should make. Sparks are coming off the tail. The instability-fueled spikes of reef matter may snag him soon. And all around, the dolphins are screaming in fear. As he imagines the whole wonderful womany wave crystallizing into the dead fixed-point computations of the senile subdimensions, Zep feels deep grief. He should have loved Kaya while there was time. Marrying her wouldn’t have been so bad. Their eyes lock.