Complete Stories (115 page)

He took his razor and shaved the still-bearded dead Turing face in his bed. The barbering went faster than when he’d shaved Zeno in the hotel. It was better to stand so that he saw the face upside down. Was barbering a good career? Surely he’d never work as a scientist again. Given any fresh input, the halted Turing persecution would resume.

Alan cleaned up once more and drifted back into the kitchen. Time to skulk out through the dark garden with Zeno’s passport, bicycle through the familiar woods to a station down the line, and catch a train. Probably the secret police wouldn’t be much interested in pursuing Zeno. They’d be glad Zeno had posed their murder as a suicide, and the less questions asked the better.

But to be safe, Turing would flee along an unexpected route. He’d take the train to Plymouth, the ferry from there to Santander on the north coast of Spain, a train south through Spain to the Mediterranean port of Tarifa, and another ferry from Tarifa to Tangiers.

Tangiers was an open city, an international zone. He could buy a fresh passport there. He’d be free to live as he liked — in a small way. Perhaps he’d master the violin. And read the Iliad in Greek. Alan glanced down at the flaccid Zeno face, imagining himself as a Greek musician.

If you were me, from A to Z, if I were you, from Z to A…

Alan caught himself. His mind was spinning in loops, avoiding what had to be done next. It was time.

He scrubbed his features raw and donned his new face.

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

Written Fall, 2006.

Interzone
215, 2008.

I’ve always felt baffled by the computer Alan Turing’s seeming suicide in 1954 at the age of 41. To me it seems to be possible that his death might in fact have been an assassination, arranged by some government security squad. So I brought this notion to fictional life. To give “The Imitation Game” a kick, I used the idea of bioengineering oneself a new face, basing the technology in Turing’s final paper, “A Chemical Basis for Morphogenesis.” I’d done a lot of work with the ideas in Turing’s paper, implementing them in my
Capow
cellular automata software (see www.rudyrucker.com/capow). It made me happy to write a story in which Turing escapes his assassins. Eventually this story became the first chapter of my novel,
The Turing Chronicles
.

Part 1.

Stefan Oertel pulled a long strand of salami rind from his teeth. He stared deep into wonderland.

Look at that program go! Flexible vectors swarming in ten-dimensional hyperspace! String theory simulation! Under those colored gouts of special effects, this, at last, was real science!

Stefan munched more of his sandwich and plucked up an old cellphone, one of the ten thousand such units that he’d assembled into a home supercomputer. “Twine dimension seven!” he mumbled around the lunchmeat. “Loop dimension eight!”

The screen continued its eye-warping pastel shapes. Stefan’s ultracluster of hacked cellphones was searching Calabi-Yau string theory geometries. The tangling cosmic strings wove gorgeous, abrupt Necker-cube reversals and inversions. His program’s output was visually brilliant. And, thus far, useless to anybody. But maybe his latest settings were precisely the right ones and the One True String Theory was about to be unveiled —

“Loop dimension eight,” he repeated.

Unfortunately his system seemed to be ignoring his orders. There might be something wrong with the particular phone he was holding—these phones were, after all, junkers that Stefan’s pal Jayson Rubio had skimmed from the vast garbage dumps of Los Angeles. Jayson was a junk-hound of the first order.

Ten thousand networked cell phones had given Stefan serious, number-crunching heavy muscle. He needed them to search the staggeringly large state space of all possible string theories. The powerful Unix and RAM chips inside the phones were in constant wireless communication with each other. He kept their ten thousand batteries charged with induction magnets. The whole sprawling shebang was nested in sets of brightly-colored plastic laundry baskets. Stefan dug the eco-fresh beauty of this abracadabra: he’d transformed a waste-disposal mess into a post-Einsteinian theory-incubator.

Stefan had earned his programming skills the hard way: years of labor in the machine-buzzing dungeons of Hollywood. And he’d paid a price: alienated parents in distant Topeka, no wife, no kids, and his best coder pals were just email addresses. Furthermore, typing all that computer graphics code had afflicted him with a burning case of carpal-tunnel syndrome, which was why he preferred yelling his line-commands into phones. Cell phones had kick-ass voice-recognition capabilities.

Stefan dipped into a brimming pink laundry-basket and snagged a fresher phone, an early-90s model with a flapping, half-broken jaw.

“Greetings, wizard!” the phone chirped, showing that it was good to go.

“Twine dimension seven, dammit! Loop dimension eight.”

The system was still ignoring him. Now Stefan was worried. Was the TV’s wireless chip down? That shouldn’t happen. The giant digital flat-screen was new. And, yes, the phones were old junk, but with so many of them in his ultracluster it didn’t matter if a few dozen went dead.

He tried another phone and another. Crisis was at hand.

The monster screen flickered and skewed. To his deep horror, the speakers emitted a poisoned death-rattle, prolonged and sizzling and terrible, like the hissing of the Wicked Witch of the West as she dissolved in a puddle of stage-magic.

The flat screen went black. Worse yet, the TV began to smell, a pricey, burnt-meat, molten-plastic odor that any programmer knew as bad juju. Stefan bolted from his armchair and knelt to peer through the ventilation slots.

And there he saw—oh please no—the ants. Ants had always infested Stefan’s rental house. Whenever the local droughts got bad, the ants arrived in hordes, trouping out of the thick Mulholland brush, waving their feelers for water. Stefan’s decaying cottage had leaky old plumbing. His home was an ant oasis.

He’d never seen the ants in such numbers. Perhaps the frenzied wireless signals from his massive mounds of cell phones had upset them somehow? There were
thousands
of ants inside his TV, a dark stream of them wending through the overheated circuit cards like the winding Los Angeles River in its manmade canyons of graffiti-bombed cement. The ants were eating the resin off the cards; they were gorging themselves on his TV’s guts like six-legged Cub Scouts eating molten s’mores.

Stefan groaned and collapsed back into his overstuffed leather armchair. The gorgeous TV was a write-off, but all was not yet lost. The latest state of his system was still stored in his network of cellphones.

He reached for his sandwich, wincing at a stab of pain in his wrist.

The sandwich was boiling with ants. And then he felt insectile tickling at his neck. He jumped to his feet, banged open the door of his leaky bathroom, and hastily fetched-up an abandoned comb. He managed to tease three jolly ants from his strawy hair, which was dyed in a fading splendor of day-glo orange and traffic-cone red.

Before he’d moved into this old house, Stefan hadn’t realized that most everybody in L.A. had an ant story to tell. Stefan had the ants pretty badly, but nobody sympathized with him. Whenever he reached out to others with his private burden of ant woes, they would snidely one-up him with amazing ant-gripes all their own: ants that ate dog food; ants that ate dogs; ants that that carried off children.

Compared to the heroic tales of other Angelenos, Stefan’s ant problems seemed mild and low-key. His ants were waxy, rubbery-looking little critters, conspicuously multi-ethnic in fine L.A. style, of every shape and every shade of black, brown, red and yellow. Stefan had them figured for a multi-caste sugar-ant species. They emerged from the tiniest possible cracks, and they adored sweet, sticky stuff.

Stefan bent over the rusty sink and splashed cold water on his unshaven face. He’d done FX for fantasy movies that had won Oscars and enchanted millions of people on six continents. But now, here he stood: wrists wrecked, vermin-infested, no job, no girlfriend, neck-deep in code for a ten-dimensional string-theory simulation with no commercial potential.

Kind of punk and cool, in a way. It sure beat commuting on the hellish L.A. freeways. He was free of servitude. And he definitely had a strong feeling that the very last tweak he’d suggested for his Calabi-Yau search program was the big winner.

Just three months ago, he’d been ignoring his growing wrist pains while writing commercial FX code for Square Root Of Not. The outfit was a cutting-edge Venice Beach graphics shop that crafted custom virtual-physics algorithms for movies and the gaming trade.

Of course, Stefan’s true interest, dating way back to college, had always been physics, in particular the Holy Grail of finding the correct version of string theory. Pursuing the awesome fantasy of supersymmetric quantum string manifolds felt vastly finer and nobler than crassly tweaking toy worlds. The Hollywood FX work paid a lot, yes, but it made Stefan a beautician for robots, laboring to give animated characters better hair, shinier teeth, and bouncier boobs. String theorists, on the other hand, were the masters of a conceptual universe.

Though the pace of work had nearly killed him, Stefan had had a good run at Square Root Of Not. Their four-person shop had the best fire-and-algebra in Los Angeles, seriously freaky tech chops that lay far beyond the ken of Disney-Pixar and Time-Warner. The Square Rooters’ primary client, the anchor-store in the mall of their dreams, had been Eyes Only, a big post-production lab on the Strip.

But Eyes Only had blundered into a legal tar pit. All too typical: the suits always imagined it was cheaper to litigate than to innovate. Disney’s Giant Mouse was crushing the copyrighted landscape with the tread of a mastodon.

Stefan hadn’t followed the sorry details; the darkside hacking conducted in Hollywood courtrooms wasn’t his idea of entertainment. Bottom line: rather than watching their lives tick away in court, the Square Rooters had taken the offered settlement, and had divvied up cash that would otherwise go to lawyers.

Their pay-off had been less than expected, but all four Square Rooters had been worn down by the grueling crunch cycles anyway. Liberated and well-heeled, each Square Root partner had some special spiritual bliss to follow. Lead programmer Marc Geary was puffing souffles at a chef school in Santa Monica. Speaker-to-lawyers Emily Yu was about to sail to Tahiti on an old yacht she’d bought off Craig’s List. Handyman Jayson Rubio was roaring around the endless loops of L.A.’s freeways on a vintage red Indian Chief motorcycle. As for Stefan—Stefan was sinking his cash into his living expenses and his home-made ultracluster supercomputer. Finally, freedom and joy. Elite string-theory instead of phony Hollywood rubber physics.

Some days the physics work got Stefan so excited that he could think of nothing else. Just yesterday, when he’d had been feeling especially manic about his code, doll-faced Emily Yu had phoned him with a shy offer to come along on her South Seas adventure. Idiotically, Stefan had blown her off. He’d overlooked a golden chance at romance. Instead of hooking up, he’d geeked out.

Today he was nagged by the sense that he should call Emily back. Emily was smart and decent, just his type. But—the thing was—he couldn’t possibly think about Emily without also thinking about work. Those years of servitude were something he wanted to forget. In any case, right this minute he was for sure too busy to call Emily, what with all these friggin’ ants.

Stefan glared at his unshaven clown-haired visage in the mirror. He knew in his heart that he was being stupid. How many more women were likely to ask for face-time with him? He’d never get another such offer from kind-hearted Emily Yu. There were a million pretty women in L.A., but never a lot of Emilys. Call her now, Stefan, call her. Do it. You have ten thousand phones in here. Call.

Alright, in a minute, but first he’d call his landlord about the ants.

Back in his living room, long tendrils of ants were spreading out from the TV. Amazingly tiny ants: they looked no bigger than pixels, and their jagged ant-trails were as thin as hairline cracks. They were heading for the laundry baskets.

“Not my cell phones, you little bastards,” cried Stefan, hauling his baskets outside to the dilapidated porch.

He found a phone that seemed to hold a charge.

“Call Mr. Noor,” Stefan instructed. He’d cloned a single phone account across all ten thousand of his phones.

He heard ringing, and then his landlord’s, dry, emotionless voice.

“This is Stefan Oertel, Mr. Noor. From the cottage in the back of your estate? I’m being invaded by ants. I need an exterminator right now.”

“Hyperio,” said Mr. Noor. “You tell Hyperio, he fixes that.” This was Mr. Noor’s usual response. Unfortunately Mr. Noor’s handyman Hyperio was some kind of illegal, who appeared maybe once a month. Stefan had seen Hyperio just the other day, trimming the bushes and hand-rolling cigarettes. This meant that the ants would rampage unchallenged for weeks.

“Does Hyperio have a telephone?” asked Stefan. “Does he even have a last name?”

“Use poison spray,” said Mr. Noor shortly. “I’m very busy now.” Mr. Noor was always on the phone to rich friends in the distant Middle East. End of call.

Stefan snorted and squared his shoulders. The ant-war was up to him.

He found his cyber-tool kit and extracted the coil of a flexible flashlight. He poked his instrument through the slots in the back of his TV. The ants had settled right in there, ambitious and adaptable, like childless lawyers lofting-out a downtown high-rise. In the sharp-edged shadows lurked a sugar ant as big a cockroach. The huge ant was tugging at something. A curly bit of wire, maybe. For a crazy, impossible instant the ant looked as big as a hamster.

Stefan rocked back on his heels. These ants were blowing his mind; they were dancing on the surface of his brain. He was losing it. It was very bad for him to be deprived of a computer. He needed some help right away.