In the summer of 2000, John approached me with the first few paragraphs for this story and the invitation to join him in the
Red Shift
anthology. John figured he needed some mad professor input on how to make his higher-dimensional pockets work. Also, he and I shared an interest in using the pockets as an objective correlative for addiction and recovery. The writing of the story went very smoothly, and I get a kick out of the accent John gave Threakman. Punk forever.
In March 2003, I convinced John to go backpacking in Big Sur with me and to cap off our trip with a night in the inexpensive bunk-room at the Esalen Institute. This was not a good idea. John got blisters on the hike, and he hated the people at Esalen—as John put it, “You can’t expect me to fit in at Esalen. When I had my band, I used to break beer bottles over my head till the blood ran, and dive off the stage into the audience.” I quarreled with him for making our visit so hard and—let me quote from my journal:
“Then I mistakenly drank three cups of blackberry sage tea (caffeinated), thinking it was herbal, and that night couldn’t sleep for a really long time. We were in a room with six bunk beds, my bed under John’s, and it bothered me to be physically coupled to his creakings, also to have the plywood bottom of his bed so close to my face. In the wee a.m. hours I moved to the one other vacant bed, an upper bunk. The other guys sharing the room drifted in. Visions of a spaceship crew’s quarters. Image of Shirley crawling towards me across the ceiling of the room, his fingers sticking to the dry-wall like a gecko’s. Outside raged the lethal, silent energy winds of deep space, visible as in my mind’s eye as Riemannian vortex meshes. At this point I actually felt some joy at being there and being embroiled in something so different from quotidien life.”
We got over the argument—eventually it began seeming funny—and we still see each other every couple of months, most recently when Terry Bisson organized a joint reading for us in San Francisco as “The Dread Lords of Cyberpunk,” where John read from what sounded to be one of his greatest novels yet,
The Other End
(Cemetery Dance, 2006). The book is about John’s vision of what the Apocalypse might be like if the avenging angels happened to be John’s kind of folks—as opposed to the angels that appear in the Christian Left Behind series of novels about the Rapture and the end of the world. Thus John’s title—he’s describing an
other
kind of end, an Apocalypse envisioned from the other end of the political spectrum.
Life was hard in old Silicon Valley. Little Janna Gutierrez was a native Valley girl, half Vietnamese, half Latino. She had thoughtful eyes and black hair in high ponytails.
Her mother Ahn tried without success to sell California real estate. Her father Ruben plugged away inside cold, giant companies like Ctenophore and Lockheed Biological. The family lived in a charmless bungalow in the endless grid of San Jose.
Janna first learned true bitterness when her parents broke up. Tired of her hard scrabble with a lowly wetware engineer, Anh ran off with Bang Dang, the glamorous owner of an online offshore casino. Dad should have worked hard to win back Mom’s lost affection, but, being an engineer, he contented himself with ruining Bang. He found and exploited every unpatched hole in Bang’s operating system. Bang never knew what hit him.
Despite Janna’s pleas to come home, Mom stubbornly stuck by her online entrepreneur. She bolstered Bang’s broken income by retailing network porn. Jaded Americans considered porn to be the commonest and most boring thing on the Internet. However, Hollywood glamour still had a moldy cachet in the innocent Third World. Mom spent her workdays dubbing the ethnic characteristics of tribal Somalis and Baluchis onto porn stars. She found the work far more rewarding than real estate.
Mom’s deviant behavior struck a damp and morbid echo in Janna’s troubled soul. Janna sidestepped her anxieties by obsessively collecting Goob dolls. Designed by glittery-eyed comix freaks from Hong Kong and Tokyo, Goobs were wiggly, squeezable, pettable creatures made of trademarked Ctenophore piezoplastic. These avatars of ultra-cuteness sold off wire racks worldwide, to a generation starved for Nature. Thanks to environmental decline, kids of Janna’s age had never seen authentic wildlife. So they flipped for the Goob menagerie: marmosets with butterfly wings, starfish that scuttled like earwigs, long, furry frankfurter cat-snakes.
Sometimes Janna broke her Goob toys from their mint-in-the-box condition, and dared to play with them. But she quickly learned to absorb her parents’ cultural values, and to live for their business buzz. Janna spent her off-school hours on the Net, pumping-and-dumping collectible Goobs to younger kids in other states.
Eventually, life in the Valley proved too much for Bang Dang. He pulled up the stakes in his solar-powered RV and drove away, to pursue a more lucrative career, retailing networked toilets. Janna’s luckless Mom, her life reduced to ashes, scraped out a bare living marketing mailing lists to mailing list marketers.
Janna ground her way through school and made it into U.C. Berkeley. She majored in computational genomics. Janna worked hard on software for hardwiring wetware, but her career timing was off. The latest pulse of biotech start-ups had already come and gone. Janna was reduced to a bottle-scrubbing job at Triple Helix, yet another subdivision of the giant Ctenophore conglomerate.
On the social front, Janna still lacked a boyfriend. She’d studied so hard she’d been all but dateless through school and college. In her senior year she’d moved in with this cute Korean boy who was in band. But then his mother had come to town with, unbelievable, a blushing North Korean bride for him in tow. So much the obvious advice-column weepie!
In her glum and lonely evenings, she played you-are-her interactives, romance stories, with a climax where Janna would lip-synch a triumphant, tear-jerking video. On other nights Janna would toy wistfully with her decaying Goob collection. The youth market for the dolls had evaporated with the years. Now fanatical adult collectors were trading the Goobs, stiff and dusty artifacts of their lost consumer childhood.
And so life went for Janna Gutierrez, every dreary day on the calendar foreclosing some way out. Until the fateful September when Veruschka Zipkinova arrived from Russia, fresh out of biohazard quarantine.
The zany Zipkinova marched into Triple Helix toting a fancy briefcase with a video display built into its piezoplastic skin. Veruschka was clear-eyed and firm-jawed, with black hair cut very short. She wore a formal black jogging suit with silk stripes on the legs. Her Baltic pallor was newly reddened by California sunburn. She was very thoroughly made up. Lipstick, eye shadow, nails—the works.
She fiercely demanded a specific slate of bio-hardware and a big wad of start-up money. Janna’s boss was appalled at Veruschka’s archaic approach—didn’t this Russki woman get it that the New Economy was even deader than Leninism? It fell to the luckless Janna to throw Veruschka out of the building.
“You are but a tiny cog,” said Veruschka, accurately summing up Janna’s cubicle. “But you are intelligent, yes, I see this in your eyes. Your boss gave me the brush-off. I did not realize Triple Helix is run by lazy morons.”
“We’re all quite happy here,” said Janna lightly. The computer was, of course, watching her. “I wonder if we could take this conversation offsite? That’s what’s required, you see. For me to get you out of the way.”
“Let me take you to a fine lunch at Denny’s,” said Veruschka with sudden enthusiasm. “I love Denny’s so much! In Petersburg, our Denny’s always has long lines that stretch down the street!”
Janna was touched. She gently countersuggested a happening local coffee shop called the Modelview Matrix. Cute musicians were known to hang out there.
With the roads screwed and power patchy, it took forever to drive anywhere in California, but at least traffic fatalities were rare, given that the average modern vehicle had the mass and speed of a golf cart. As Janna forded the sunny moonscape of potholes, Veruschka offered her start-up pitch.
“From Russia, I bring to legendary Silicon Valley a breakthrough biotechnology! I need a local partner, Janna. Someone I can trust.”
“Yeah?” said Janna.
“It’s a collectible pet.”
Janna said nothing, but was instantly hooked.
“In Russia, we have mastered genetic hacking,” said Veruschka thoughtfully, “although California is the planet’s legendary source of high-tech marketing.”
Janna parked amid a cluster of plastic cars like colored seedpods. Inside, Janna and Veruschka fetched slices of artichoke quiche.
“So now let me show you,” said Veruschka as they took a seat. She placed a potently quivering object on the tabletop. “I call him Pumpti.”
The Pumpti was the size and shape of a Fabergé egg, pink and red, clearly biological. It was moist, jiggly, and veined like an internal organ with branching threads of yellow and purple. Janna started to touch it, then hesitated, torn between curiosity and disgust.
“It’s a toy?” asked Janna. She tugged nervously at a fanged hairclip. It really wouldn’t do to have this blob stain her lavender silk jeans.
The Pumpti shuddered, as if sensing Janna’s hovering finger. And then it oozed silently across the table, dropped off the edge, and plopped damply to the diner’s checkered floor.
Veruschka smiled, slitting her cobalt-blue eyes, and leaned over to fetch her Pumpti. She placed it on a stained paper napkin.
“All we need is venture capital!”
“Um, what’s it made of?” wondered Janna.
“Pumpti’s substance is human DNA!”
“Whose DNA?” asked Janna.
“Yours, mine, anyone’s. The client’s.” Veruschka picked it up tenderly, palpating the Pumpti with her lacquered fingertips. “Once I worked at the St. Petersburg Institute of Molecular Science. My boss—well, he was also my boyfriend …” Veruschka pursed her lips. “Wiktor’s true obsession was the junk DNA—you know this technical phrase?”
“Trust me, Vero, I’m a genomics engineer.”
“Wiktor found a way for these junk codons to express themselves. The echo from the cradle of life, evolution’s roadside picnic! To express junk DNA required a new wetware reader. Wiktor called it the Universal Ribosome.” She sighed. “We were so happy until the mafiya wanted the return on their funding.”
“No National Science Foundation for you guys,” mused Janna.
“Wiktor was supposed to tweak a cabbage plant to make opium for the criminals—but we were both so busy growing our dear Pumpti. Wiktor used my DNA, you see. I was smart and saved the data before the Uzbeks smashed up our lab. Now I’m over here with you, Janna, and we will start a great industry of personal pets! Wiktor’s hero fate was not in vain. And—”
What an old-skool, stylin’, totally trippy way for Janna to shed her grind-it-out worklife! Janna and Veruschka Zipkinova would create a genomic petware start-up, launch the IPO, and retire by thirty! Then Janna could escape her life-draining servitude and focus on life’s real rewards. Take up oil painting, go on a safari, and hook up with some sweet guy who understood her. A guy she could really talk to. Not an engineer, and especially not a musician.
Veruschka pitchforked a glob of quiche past her pointed teeth. For her pilgrimage to the source of the world’s largest legal creation of wealth in history, the Russian girl hadn’t forgotten to pack her appetite.
“Pumpti still needs little bit of, what you say here, tweaking,” said Veruschka. The prototype Pumpti sat shivering on its paper napkin. The thing had gone all goose bumpy, and the bumps were warty: the warts had smaller warts upon them, topped by teensy wartlets with fine, waving hairs. Not exactly a magnet for shoppers.
Stuffed with alfalfa sprouts, Janna put her cutlery aside. Veruschka plucked up Janna’s dirty fork, and scratched inside her cheek with the tines.
Janna watched this dubious stunt and decided to stick to business. “How about patents?”
“No one ever inspects Russian gene labs,” said Veruschka with a glittery wink. “We Russians are the great world innovators in black market wetware. Our fetal stem cell research, especially rich and good. Plenty of fetus meat in Russia, cheap and easy, all you need! Nothing ever gets patented. To patent is to teach stupid people to copy!”
“Well, do you have a local lab facility?” pressed Janna.
“I have better,” said Veruschka, nuzzling her Pumpti. “I have pumptose. The super enzyme of exponential autocatalysis!”
“‘Pumptose,’ huh? And that means?” prompted Janna.
“It means the faster it grows, the faster it grows!”
Janna finally reached out and delicately touched the Pumpti. Its surface wasn’t wet after all, just shiny like super-slick plastic. But—a pet? It seemed more like something little boys would buy to gross-out their sisters. “It’s not exactly cuddly,” said Janna.
“Just wait till you have your own Pumpti,” said Veruschka with a knowing smile.
“But where’s the soft hair and big eyes? That thing’s got all the shelf appeal of a scabby knee!”
“It’s nice to nibble a scab,” said Veruschka softly She cradled her Pumpti, leaned in to sniff it, then showed her strong teeth, and nipped off a bit of it.
“God, Veruschka,” said Janna, putting down her coffee.
“Your own Pumpti,” said Veruschka, smacking. “You are loving him like pretty new shoes. But so much closer and personal! Because Pumpti is you, and you are Pumpti.”
Janna sat in wonderment. Then, deep within her soul, a magic casement opened. “Here’s how we’ll work it!” she exclaimed. “We give away Pumpti pets almost free. We’ll make our money selling rip-off Pumpti-care products and accessories!”
Veruschka nodded, eyes shining. “If we’re business partners now, can you find me a place to sleep?”
-----
Janna let Veruschka stay in the spare room at her Dad’s house. Inertia and lack of capital had kept Janna at home after college.
Ruben Gutierrez was a big, soft man with a failing spine, carpal tunnel, and short, bio-bleached hair he wore moussed into hedgehog spikes. He had a permanent mirthless grin, the side effect of his daily diet of antidepressants.