Mad Professor (26 page)

Instantly, without a whimper of warning, Magic Pumpkin was deader than pet rocks. They never even shipped to any stores in the Midwest or on the East Coast, for the folks in those distant markets were sick of hearing about the Pumptis before they ever saw one on a shelf.

Janna and Veruschka couldn't make payroll. Their lease was expiring. They were cringing for cash.

A desperate Janna took the show on the road to potential investors in Hong Kong, the toy capital of the world. She emphasized that Magic Pumpkin had just cracked the biggest single technical problem: the fact that Pumptis looked like slimy blobs. Engineering-wise, it all came down to the pumptose-based Universal Ribosome. By inserting a properly-tweaked look-up
string, you could get it to express the junk DNA sequences in customizable forms. Programming this gnarly cruft was, from an abstract computer-science perspective, “unfeasible,” meaning that, logically speaking, no human would be able to design such a program within the lifetime of the universe.

But Janna's Dad, fretful about his investment, had done it anyway. In two weeks of inspired round-the-clock hacking, Ruben had implemented a full “OpenAnimator” graphics library, using a palette of previously unused rhodopsin-style proteins. Thanks to OpenAnimator, a whiff of the right long-chain molecule could now give your Pumpti any mesh, texture, color-map, or attitude matrix you chose. Not to mention overloaded frame-animation updates keyed into the pumptose's ribosomal time-steps! It was a techie miracle!

Dad flew along to Hong Kong to back Janna's pitch, but the Hong Kong crowd had little use for software jargon in American English. And the overwrought Ruben killed the one nibble they got by picking a fight over intellectual property—no way to build partnerships in Hong Kong.

Flung back to San Francisco, Janna spent night after night frantically combing the Web, looking for any source of second-round venture capital, no matter how far-fetched.

Finally she cast herself sobbing into Kelso's arms. Kelso was her last hope. Kelso just had to come through for them: he had to bring in the seasoned business experts from Ctenophore, Inc., the legendary masters of jellyfish A-Life.

“Listen, babe,” said Kelso practically, “I think you and the bio-Bolshevik there have already taken this concept just about as far as any sane person oughta push it. Farther, even. I mean, sure, I recruited a lot of my cyberslacker friends into your corporate cult here, and we promised them the moon and everything, so I
guess we'll look a little stupid when it Enrons. They'll bitch and whine, and they'll feel all disenchanted, but come on, this is San Francisco. They're used to that here. It's genetic.”

“But what about my dad? He'll lose everything! And Veruschka is my best friend. What if she shoots me?”

“I'm thinking Mexico,” said Kelso dreamily. “Way down on the Pacific coast—that's where my mother comes from. You and me, we've been working so hard on this start-up that we never got around to the main event. Just dump those ugly Pumptis in the Bay. We'll empty the cash box tonight, and catch a freighter blimp for the South. I got a friend who works for Air Jalisco.”

It was Kelso's most attractive offer so far, maybe even sincere, in its way. Janna knew full well that the classic dot-com move was to grab that golden parachute and bail like crazy before the investors and employees caught on. But Magic Pumpkin was Janna's own brain child. She was not yet a serial entrepreneur, and a boyfriend was only a boyfriend. Janna couldn't walk away from the green baize table before that last spin of the wheel.

It had been quite some time since Ctenephore Inc. had been a cutting-edge start-up. The blazing light of media tech-hype no longer escaped their dense, compact enterprise. The firm's legendary founders, Revel Pullen and Tug Mesoglea, had collapsed in on their own reputations. Not a spark could escape their gravity. They had become twin black holes of biz weirdness.

Ctenophore's main line of business had always been piezo-plastic products. Ctenephore had pumped this protean, blobject material into many crazy scenes in the California boom years. Bathtub toys, bondage clothing, industrial-sized artificial-jellyfish transport blimps—and Goob dolls as well! GoobYoob, creator of the Goob dolls, had been one of Ctenephore's many Asian spin-offs.

As it happened, quite without Janna's awareness, Ctenophore had already taken a professional interest in the workings of Magic Pumpkin. GoobYoob's manufacturing arm, Boogosity, had been the Chinese ooze-farm supplier for Pumpti raw material. Since Boogosity had no advertising or marketing expenses, they'd done much better by the brief Pumpti craze than Magic Pumpkin itself.

Since Magic Pumpkin was going broke, Boogosity faced a production glut. They'd have to move their specialty goo factories back into the usual condoms and truck tires. Some kind of corporate allegiance seemed written in the stars.

Veruschka Zipkinova was transfixed with paranoia about Revel Pullen, Ctenophore's chairman of the board. Veruschka considered major American capitalists to be sinister figures—this conviction was just in her bones, somehow—and she was very worried about what Pullen might do to Russia's oil.

Russia's black gold was the lifeblood of its pathetic, wrecked economy. Years ago Revel Pullen, inventively manic as always, had released gene-spliced bacteria into America's dwindling oil reserves. This fatal attempt to increase oil production had converted millions of barrels of oil into (as chance would have it) raw piezoplastic. Thanks to the powerful Texas lobby in Washington, none of the lawsuits or regulatory actions against Ctenophore had ever succeeded.

Janna sought to calm Veruschka's jitters. If the company hoped to survive, they had to turn Ctenophore into Magic Pumpkin's fairy godmother. The game plan was to flatter Pullen, while focusing their persuasive efforts on the technical expert of the pair. This would be Ctenophore's chief scientist, a far-famed mathematician named Tug Mesoglea.

It turned out that Kelso really did know Tug Mesoglea personally, for Mesoglea lived in a Painted Lady mansion above the
Haight. During a protracted absence to the Tweetown district of Manchester (home of the Alan Turing Memorial), Tug had once hired Kelso to babysit his jellyfish aquarium.

Thanks to San Francisco's digital grapevine, Tug knew about the eccentric biomathematics that ran Pumptis. Tug was fascinated, and not by the money involved. Like many mathematicians, Mesoglea considered money to be one boring, merely bookkeeping subset of the vast mental universe of general computation. He'd already blown a fortune endowing chairs in set theory, cellular automata, and higher-dimensional topology. Lately, he'd published widely on the holonomic attractor space of human dreams, producing a remarkable proof that dreams of flight were a mathematical inevitability for a certain fixed percentage of the dreams–this fixed percentage number being none other than Feigenbaum's chaos constant, 4.6692.

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Veruschka scheduled the meet at a Denny's near the Moffat Field blimp port. Veruschka had an unshakeable conviction that Denny's was a posh place to eat, and the crucial meeting had inspired her to dress to the nines.

“When do they want to have sex with us?” Veruschka fretted, paging through her laminated menu.

“Why would they want to do that?” said Janna.

“Because they are fat capitalist moguls from the West, and we are innocent young women. Evil old men with such fame and money, what else can they want of us? They will scheme to remove our clothing!”

“Well, look, Tug Mesoglea is gay.” Janna looked at her friend with concern. Veruschka hadn't been sleeping properly. Stuck
on the local grind of junk food and eighty-hour weeks, Veruschka's femme-fatale figure was succumbing to Valley hacker desk-spread. The poor thing barely fit in her designer knockoffs. It would be catty to cast cold water on her seduction fantasies, but really, Veruschka was swiftly becoming a kerchiefed babushka with a string-bag, the outermost shell of some cheap nest of Russian dolls.

Veruschka picked up her Pumpti, just now covered in baroque scrolls like a fin-de-siécle picture frame. “Do like this,” she chirped, brushing the plump pet against her fluffy marten-fur hat. The Pumpti changed its surface texture to give an impression of hairiness, and hopped onto the crown.

“Lovely,” said Veruschka, smiling into her hand mirror. But her glossy smile was tremulous.

“We simply must believe in our product,” said Veruschka, pep-talking to her own mirror. She glanced up wide-eyed at Janna. “Our product is so good a fit for their core business, no? Please tell me more about them, about this Dr. Tug and Mr. Revel. Tell me the very worst. These gray-haired, lecherous fat cats, they are world weary and cynical! Success has corrupted them and narrowed their thinking! They no longer imagine a brighter future, they merely go through the rote. Can they be trusted with our dreams?”

Janna tugged fitfully at the floppy tie she'd donned to match her dress-for-success suit. She always felt overwhelmed by Veruschka's fits of self-serving corn. “It's a biz meeting, Vero. Try to relax.”

Just as the waitress brought them some food, the glass door of the Denny's yawned open with a ring and a squeak. A seamy, gray-haired veteran with the battered look of a bronco-buster approached their table, with a bowlegged scuff.

“I'm Hoss Jenks, head o' security for Ctenophore.” Jenks hauled out a debugging wand and a magnetometer. He then swept his tools with care over the pair of them. The wand began beeping in frenzy.

“Lemme hold on to your piece for you, ma'am,” Jenks suggested placidly.

“It's just a sweet little one,” Veruschka demurred, handing over a pistol.

Tug Mesoglea tripped in moments later, sunburned and querulous. The mathematician sported a lavender dress shirt and peach-colored ascot, combined with pleated khaki trail-shorts and worn-out piezoplastic Gripper sandals.

Revel Pullen followed, wearing a black linen business suit, snakeskin boots, and a Stetson. Janna could tell there was a bald pate under that high hat. Jenks faded into a nearby booth, where he could shadow his employers and watch the door.

Mesoglea creaked into the plastic seat beside Veruschka and poured himself a coffee. “I phoned in my order from the limo. Where's my low-fat soy protein?”

“Here you go, then,” said Janna, eagerly shoving him the heaped plate of pseudo-meat that the waitress had just set down.

Pullen stared as Mesoglea tucked in. “I don't know how the hell this man eats the food in a sorry-ass chain store.” Nevertheless he picked up a fork and speared a piece of it himself.

“I believe in my investments,” Mesoglea said, munching. “You see, ladies, this soy protein derives from a patented Ctenophore process.” He prodded at Veruschka's plate. “Did you notice that lifelike, organic individuality of your waffle product? That's no accident, darling.”

“Did we make any real foldin' money off this crap?” said Revel Pullen, eating one more piece of it.

“Of course we did! You remember all those sintered floating gel rafts in the giant tofu tanks in Chiba?” Mesoglea flicked a blob of molten butter from his ascot.

“Y'all don't pay no never mind to Dr. Mesoglea here,” Revel counteradvised, setting down his fork. “Today's economy is all about diversity. Proactive investments. Buying into the next technical wave, before you get cannibalized.” Revel leered. “Now as for me, I get my finger into every techno-pie!” His lip-less mouth was like a letter slot, bent slightly upward at the corners to simulate a grin.

“Let me brief you gentlemen on our business model,” said Janna warily. “It's much like your famous Goob dolls, but the hook here is that the Pumpti is made of the user's very own DNA. This leads to certain, uh, powerful consumer bonding effects, and . . .”

“Oh good, let's see your Pumptis, girls,” crooned Tug, with a decadent giggle. “Whip out your Pumptis for us.”

“You've never seen our product?” asked Janna.

“Tug's got a mess of 'em,” said Revel. “But y'all never shipped to Texas. That's another thing I just don't get.” Pullen produced a sheaf of printout, and put on his bifocals. “According to these due-diligence filings, Magic Pumpkin's projected online capacity additions were never remotely capable of meeting the residual in-line demand in the total off-line market that you required for breakeven.” He tipped back his Stetson, his liver-spotted forehead wrinkling in disbelief. “How in green tarnation could you gals overlook that? How is that even possible?”

“Huh?” said Janna.

Revel chuckled. “Okay, now I get it. Tug, these little gals don't know how to do business. They've never been anywhere near one.”

“Sure looks that way” Tug admitted. “No MBAs, no accountants? Nobody doing cost control? No speakers-to-animals in the hacker staff? I'd be pegging your background as entry-level computational genomics,” he said, pointing at Janna. Then he waggled his finger at Veruschka, “And you'd be coming from—Slavic mythology and emotional blackmail?”

Veruschka's cobalt blue eyes went hard. “I don't think I want to show you men my Pumpti.”

“We kind of have to show our Pumptis, don't we?” said Janna, an edge in her voice. “I mean, we're trying to make a deal here.”