Complete Stories (58 page)

“Latch on, dude!”

Zep clamped onto Chaos Attractor’s back rail and pulled himself aboard. The stick reared like a horse and sent them scudding up over the lip of the tsunami, out over the arching neck of the slow-breaking wave. Del glanced back through the falls and saw the filtered light of the San Diablo Nuclear Plant’s explosion, saw the light and the chunks of concrete and steel tumbling outward, borne on the shock-wave’s A-bomb energy.

The two waves intermingled in a chaotic mindscape abstraction. Up and up they flew, the fin scraping sparks from the edges of the unknown. Zep saw stars swimming under them, a great spiral of stars.

Everything was still, so still.

And then Del’s hand shot out. Across the galactic wheel a gleaming figure shared their space. It was coming straight at them. Rider of the tides of night, carver of blackhole beaches and neutron tubes. Bent low on his luminous board—graceful, poised, inhuman.

“Ohmigod!” said Jen. “The Silver Surfer!”

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

Written in 1987.

Synergy #2
, HBJ Books, 1988.

Our first two years in California, Sylvia and I frequently got together with Kadrey, Murphy, Blumlein, and Laidlaw. We talked about starting a new “Freestyle” science-fiction movement along with Jeter and Shirley, but the idea died a-borning for the lack of any unifying principle other than “write like yourself except more so.”

For awhile, though, Marc and I were pretty strongly in pursuit of a Freestyle mystique, and we found most of our information in surfing magazines. Here’s one quote we dug: “Life on the edge measures seekers, performers, and adventurists.” Marc started writing me letters in the surf-magazine style. “There it is, Rude Dude. The Freestyle antifesto. No need to break down the metaphors—an adventurist knows what the Ocean really is. No need to feature matte-black mirrorshades or other emblems of our freestyle culture—hey, dude, we know who we are. No need to either glorify or castrate technology. Nature is the Ultimate. We’re skimming the cell-sea, cresting the waves that leap out over the black abyss …” Marc started publishing a neat zine called
Freestyle
, but it only went through three issues.

I went so far as to buy a used surfboard and wetsuit. Sylvia, Marc, Marc’s wife Geraldine, and I went to a wild beach north of Santa Cruz on New Years Day, 1987, and I tried to surf. I didn’t manage to stand on the board, but I did get out into the water. It was nice to see how well the wetsuit worked at keeping me warm.

Like my collaboration with Bruce Sterling, “Probability Pipeline” is a two-guys story. We thought of Marc being Del and Zep being me.

Due to anxiety about the trademark infringement issues in mentioning a well-known comic-book character like the Silver Surfer, the first publication of “Probability Pipeline” had the last line changed to: “Stoked,” said Jen. “God’s a surfer!”

Another exciting literary feature of moving to California was that I got to see my hero Robert Sheckley again. This time he was visiting his writer/comedian friend Marty Olson in Venice Beach. Olson had dreamed up the idea that Tim Leary would start hosting a PBS series about various futuristic things. Sheckley and I were to be the writers. Olson paid my plane-fare to LA, where he and “the Sheck-man” (as Olson called him) picked me up. It was a wonderful goof, hanging out with them, and then driving over to Tim’s house in Beverly Hills. Tim was up for the meeting, with pencils and pads of papers; he was a nice old guy, and a freedom-fighter from way back. We were all in full agreement about everything, but the hitch was that we never found a sponsor.

I’d been overhacking again. The warm California night was real and intimate,
synaesthetic
, with the distant surfsound matching the pebbly parking lot under my bare feet, and the flowering shrub of jade plant in front of me fitting in too, with its fat loplop green leaves and stuft yellow star petals knobbing along like my breath and my heartbeat, and the rest of the plants matching the rest of the world: the menthol-smelling eucalyptus trees like the rush of the cars, the palm trees like my jittering synapses, the bed of calla lilies white and wonderful as the woman waiting for me at home, ah the plants, with their smells and their realtime ongoing updates …

The old flash came rushing over me once again: astonishment at the vastness of the invisible world machinery that keeps all this running, awe for the great program the world is working out.
What a system! What a hack!

I was stoned and I’d been overhacking and my eyes were throbbing and I couldn’t remember what I’d said to Donna when she phoned…an hour ago?…nor could I remember when I’d last eaten. Eat. I walked across Route 1 to the Taco Bell. There were some kids there with pet rats crawling out of their Salvation Army coats, nice middle class kids no doubt, this being Santa Cruz. They wanted their burritos with no beans. “Beans are the worst,” one of them explained to the cholo countergirl. The back of the boy’s head had a remarkable yellow and green food-coloring dye job. A buzzcut DA with the left back half kapok yellow and the right half a poisonous green. The colors made me think of the assembly language XOR operation, which is a little like MINUS. Green XOR Yellow is Red. If I let my eyes go out of focus I could see a strip of red down the back of his head. I didn’t want to think about the weird screens I’d just been watching at my workstation in the empty Micromax labs.

The boy’s rat poked its head over the boy’s shoulder and cheesed its nose at me,
twitch twitch
, the long whiskers sweeping out envelopes of virtual surfaces. The beastie had long yellow fangs, though a festive air withal.

“You should dye the rat red,” I observed. “And call him XOR. Exclusive OR.”

“Beans are the worst,” repeated the boy, not acknowledging. He paid for his beanless burritos and left.

“Your order sir?” My turn.

“Four tacos and a large iced-tea.”

I ate the food out on the concrete patio tables. I poured on the hot sauce and it was really good. I liked being there except I didn’t like the traffic and I didn’t like the wind blowing all the paper off my table. They give you a lot a lot of paper at Taco Bell. It’s really obvious that the paper costs more than the food. But except for the wind and the traffic, I was feeling good. It was so neat to be getting input for free. When you’re hacking, you’re coupled to the screen, and all your input is from the machine’s output which all comes from the passage of time and from what you put in the machine. You’re making your own world all the time. And then you go outside and there’s all this great deep complex shit for free. The crackle of the thin taco shells, the faces of the punks, the wind on my face, and best of all—always the best—the plants.

Plants are really where it’s at, no lie. Take an oak tree: it grows from an acorn, right? The acorn is the program and the oak tree is the output. The runtime is like 80 years. That’s the best kind of computation…where a short program runs for a long long time and makes an interesting image. Lots of things are like that—a simple start and a long computation. In information theory we call it low complexity/high depth.
Low complexity
means short program, and
high depth
means a long runtime.

A really good example of a low complexity/high depth pattern is the Mandelbrot set. You grow it in the plane…for each point you keep squaring and adding in the last value, and some points go out to infinity and some don’t. The ones that don’t are inside the Mandelbrot set which is a big warty ass-shape with a disk stuck onto it. There’s an antenna sticking out of the disk, and shish-kabobbed onto the antenna are tiny little Mandelbrot sets: ass, warts & disk. Each of the warts is a Mandelbrot disk, too, each with a wiggly antenna coming out, and with shish-kabobs of ass, warts & disk, with yet smaller antennae, asses, warts, and disks, all swirled into maelstroms and lobed vortices, into paisley cactus high desert, into the Santa Cruz cliffs being eaten by the evercrashing sea.

The Mandelbrot set goes on forever, deeper and deeper down into more and more detail, except sooner or later you always get tired and go home. After I finished my tacos I walked back across Route 1 and got in my bicycle. It was a carbonfiber lowrider with fat smooth tires of catalyzed imipolex. I realized that I’d left my workstation computer on inside the Micromax building, but I just couldn’t handle going back in there to shut things off. It had been getting too weird. The last thing I thought I’d seen on my Mandelbrot set screen had been hairline cracks in the glass.

There was a liquor store just before the turnoff from Route 1 to the long road uphill to our house. My friend Jerry Rankle had stopped by Micromax to hand me a little capsule of white dust a couple of hours ago and I’d swallowed it fast and robotlike, thinking something like
this’ll get you off the machine all right, Will
, because I knew I was overhacking and I wanted to stop. I’d been the last one out of Micromax every day for a week.

“Lemme know how it hits you, Will,” Jerry had said in his jerky stuttery voice, always on the verge of a giggle. He was an old pal, a rundown needlefreak who’d once summed up his worldview for me in the immortal phrase: “The Universe Is Made of Jokes.”

“What is it exactly?” I’d thought to ask, sitting there at my workstation, feeling the little lump of the pill in my gullet, suddenly worried, but not talking too loud just in case my yuppie boss Steven Koss was within earshot. “How fast does it come on?”

“Wait and see,” said Jerry. “It’s brand new. You can name it, man. Some H. A. biohackers in Redwood City invented it last week. Could be a new scene.”
H. A.
stood for
Hells Angels
. Jerry thought highly of H. A. drug suppliers.

Now, on my bicycle, two hours later, passing the liquor store, I realized Jerry’s stuff was hitting me weird, worse than MDMA, this tinker-toy crap some slushed biker chemist had biohacked together—I was grinding my teeth like crazy and for sure it was going to be a good idea to have some booze to smooth the edges.

Basically, I was scared of going nuts just then, with the overhacking and the pot and the speed and now Jerry’s pill on top of it. The images I’d been getting on the machine just before quitting were at wholly new levels of detail in the Mandelbrot set. These were new levels I’d accessed with brand-new hardware boards, and the almost impossible thing is that at the new levels the images were becoming more than two-dimensional. Partly it was because I was breeding the Mandelbrot set with a chaotic tree pattern, but it had also seemed as if my new, enhanced Mandelbrot set was somehow taking advantage of the screen phosphor’s slight thickness to ruck itself up into faintly gnarled tissues that wanted (I could tell) to slide off the screen, across the desk, and onto my face just like the speedy octopus stage of the creature in that old flick
Alien
, the stage where the creature grabs onto some guy’s face and forces a sick egg down his esophagus.

Wo!

So I’d left the office, I’d had my tacos and tea, and now calmly calmly I was taking the precautionary measure of picking up a cylindrical pint bottle of Gusano Rojo, a Mexican-bottled distillation of mescal cactus, with an authentic cactus worm (
gusano rojo
means
red worm
) on the bottom. I paid the Korean behind the counter, I got back on my bike, I took a few hits of Gusano Rojo, I tucked the bottle in my knapsack, and I started the rest of the way uphill, trying to stave off the pill by ignoring it, even though I couldn’t stop the grinding of my teeth.

I held it all together until the last slope up to our house. The fatigue and the fear and the drugs started to clash really badly, and then the new drug kicked in top-volume, fusing shut the sanity brainswitch I’d desperately been holding open. It was nasty.

I lost control of my bicycle and weaved into the ditch. The bike’s cage protected me, more or less, not that I noticed. The bumps and jolts were like jerky camera motion on a screen. When the picture stopped moving the camera was pointing up into the sky.

I lay there quietly grinding my teeth, like a barnacle sifting seawater, unwilling to move and to stir up more sensations to analyze. The patch of sky I could see included the moon, which was nearly full. Her pale gold face churned with images, though her outline held steady. Dear moon, dear real world.

My calm lasted a few minutes, and then I began to worry. My leg was throbbing, was I badly cut? A car would stop soon; I would be institutionalized or killed; I was really and truly going crazy for good; this would never stop; the whole cozy womany world I leaned on was a rapidly tattering computer pattern on the nonscreen of the angry Void; and
actually
I was bleeding to death and too wrecked to do anything about it?!?!?

Wo. I sat up. The bike’s front wheel was broken. I dragged my machine up the road’s low sand embankment and shoved it into the manzanita chaparral. There was a tussocky meadowlet of soft grass and yellow-blossomed wood-sorrel a few meters further in. All the plants smiled at me and said, “Hello.” I lolled down and took a hit off my pint. Donna would be worried, but I couldn’t hack going home just yet. I needed to lay out here in the moonlight a minute and enjoy my medication. I was pretty together after all; the clashing was all over and the drugs had like balanced each other out. Though I was in orbit, I was by no means out to lunch. My skin felt prickly, like just before a thunderstorm.

And that’s when the creature came for me—all the way from the place where zero and infinity are the same.

The first unusual thing I noticed was a lot of colored fireflies darting around, all red, yellow and green. I could tell they weren’t hallucinations because they kept bumping into me. And then all at once there was this giant light moving up the hillside towards me. The light was so big and so bright that the manzanita bushes cast shadows. At first I was scared it was a police helicopter, and I scooted closer to the bushes to hide. The light kept getting brighter, so bright that I thought it was a nuclear explosion. I didn’t want to be blinded, so I closed my eyes.