Dad’s tranquil haze broke with the arrival of Veruschka with her go-go arsenal of fishnet tights and scoop-necked Lycra tops. With Veruschka around, the TV blared constantly and there was always an open bottle of liquor. Every night the little trio stayed up late, boozing, having schmaltzy confessions, and engaging in long, earnest sophomore discussions about the meaning of life.
Veruschka’s contagious warm heartedness and her easy acceptance of human failing was a tonic for the Gutierrez household. It took Veruschka mere days to worm out the surprising fact that Ruben Gutierrez had a stash of half a million bucks accrued from clever games with his stock options. He’d never breathed a word of this to Anh or to Janna.
Emotionally alive for the first time in years, Dad offered his hoard of retirement cash for Veruschka’s long-shot crusade. Janna followed suit by getting on the web and selling off her entire Goob collection. When Janna’s web money arrived freshly laundered, Dad matched it, and two days later, Janna finally left home, hopefully for good. Company ownership was a three-way split between Veruschka, Janna, and Janna’s Dad. Veruschka supplied no cash funding, because she had the intellectual property.
Janna located their Pumpti start-up in San Francisco. They engaged the services of an online lawyer, a virtual realtor, and a genomics supply house, and began to build the buzz that, somehow, was bound to bring them major league venture capital.
Their new HQ was a gray stone structure of columns, arches and spandrels, the stone decorated with explosive graffiti scrawls. The many defunct banks of San Francisco made spectacular dives for the city’s genomics start-ups. Veruschka incorporated their business as “Magic Pumpkin, Inc.,” and lined up a three-month lease.
San Francisco had weathered so many gold rushes that its real estate values had become permanently bipolar. Provisionary millionaires and drug-addled derelicts shared the same neighborhoods, the same painted-lady Victorians, the same flophouses and anarchist bookstores. Sometimes millionaires and lunatics even roomed together. Sometimes they were the very same person.
Enthusiastic cops spewing pepper gas chased the last downmarket squatters from Janna’s derelict bank. To her intense embarrassment, Janna recognized one of the squatter refugees as a former Berkeley classmate named Kelso. Kelso was sitting on the sidewalk amidst his tattered Navajo blankets and a damp-spotted cardboard box of kitchen gear. Hard to believe he’d planned to be a lawyer.
“I’m so sorry, Kelso,” Janna told him, wringing her hands. “My Russian friend and I are doing this genomics start-up? I feel like such a gross, rough-shod newbie.”
“Oh, you’ll be part of the porridge soon enough,” said Kelso. He wore a big sexy necklace of shiny junked cell phones. “Just hang with me and get colorful. Want to jam over to the Museum of Digital Art tonight? Free grilled calamari, and nobody cares if you sleep there.”
Janna shyly confided a bit about her business plans.
“I bet you’re gonna be bigger than Pokemon,” said Kelso. “I’d always wanted to hook up with you, but I was busy with my prelaw program and then you got into that cocooning thing with your Korean musician. What happened to him?”
“His mother found him a wife with a dowry from Pyongyang,” said Janna. “It was so lovelorn.”
“I’ve had dreams and visions about you, Janna,” said Kelso softly. “And now here you are.”
“How sweet. I wish we hadn’t had you evicted.”
“The wheel of fortune, Janna. It never stops.”
As if on cue, a delivery truck blocked the street, causing grave annoyance to the local bike messengers. Janna signed for the tight-packed contents of her new office.
“Busy, busy,” Janna told Kelso, now more than ready for him to go away. “Be sure and watch our web page. Pumpti dot-bio. You don’t want to miss our IPO.”
“Who’s your venture angel?”
Janna shook her head. “That would be confidential.”
“You don’t have a backer in other words.” Kelso pulled his blanket over his grimy shoulders. “And boy, will you ever need one. You ever heard of Revel Pullen of the Ctenophore Industry Group?”
“Ctenophore?” Janna scoffed. “They’re just the biggest piezoplastic outfit on the planet, that’s all! My dad used to work for them. And so did I, now that I think about it.”
“How about Tug Mesoglea, Ctenophore’s chief scientist? I don’t mean to name-drop here, but I happen to know Dr. Tug personally.”
Janna recognized the names, but there was no way Kelso could really know such heavy players. However, he was cute and he said he’d dreamed about her. “Bring ‘em on,” she said cheerfully.
“I definitely need to meet your partner,” said Kelso, making the most of a self-created opportunity. Hoisting his grimy blanket, Kelso trucked boldly through the bank’s great bronze-clad door.
Inside the ex-bank, Veruschka Zipkinova was setting up her own living quarters in a stony niche behind the old teller counter. Veruschka had a secondhand futon, a moldy folding chair, and a stout refugee’s suitcase. The case was crammed to brimming with the detritus of subsistence tourism: silk scarves, perfumes, stockings, and freeze-dried coffee.
After one glance at Kelso, Veruschka yanked a handgun from her purse. “Out of my house,
rechniki
! No room and board for you here,
maphiya bezprizorniki
!”
“I’m cool, I’m cool,” said Kelso, backpedaling. Then he made a run for it. Janna let him go. He’d be back.
Veruschka hid her handgun with a smirk of satisfaction. “So much good progress already! At last we command the means of production! Today we will make your own Pumpti,” she told Janna.
They unpacked the boxed UPS deliveries. “You make ready that crib vat,” said Veruschka. Janna knew the drill; she’d done this kind of work at Triple Helix. She got a wetware crib vat properly filled with base-pairs and warmed it up to standard operating temperature. She turned the valves on the bovine growth serum, and a pink threading began to fill the blood-warm fluid.
Veruschka plugged together the components of an Applied Biosystems oligosynthesis machine. She primed it with a data-stuffed S-cube that she’d rooted out of a twine-tied plastic suitcase.
“In Petersburg, we have unique views of DNA,” said Veruschka, pulling on her ladylike data gloves and staring into the synthesizer’s screen. Her fingers twitched methodically, nudging virtual molecules. “Alan Turing, you know of him?”
“Sure, the Universal Turing Machine,” Janna core-dumped. “Foundations of computer science. Breaking the Enigma code. Reaction-diffusion rules. Turing wrote a paper to derive the shapes of patches on brindle cows. He killed himself with a poison apple. Alan Turing was Snow White, Queen, and Prince all at once!”
“I don’t want to get too technical for your limited mathematical background,” Veruschka hedged.
“You’re about to tell me that Alan Turing anticipated the notion of DNA as a program tape that’s read by ribosomes. And I’m not gonna be surprised.”
“One step further,” coaxed Veruschka. “Since the human body uses one kind of ribosome, why not replace that with another? The Universal Ribosome—it reads in its program as well as its data before it begins to act. All from that good junk DNA, yes Janna? And what is junk? Your bottom drawer? My garbage can? Your capitalist attic, and my start-up garage!”
“Normal ribosomes skip right over the junk DNA,” said Janna. “It’s supposed to be meaningless to the modern genome. Junk DNA is just scribbled-over things. Like the crossed-out numbers in an address book. A palimpsest. Junk DNA is the half-erased traces of the original codes—from long before humanity.”
“From before, and—maybe
after
, Wiktor was always saying.” Veruschka glove-tapped at a long-chain molecule on the screen. “There is pumptose!” The gaudy molecule had seven stubby arms, each of them a tightly wound mass of smaller tendrils. She barked out a command in Russian. The S-cube-enhanced Applied Biosystems unit understood, and an amber bead of oily, fragrant liquid oozed from the output port. Veruschka neatly caught the droplet in a glass pipette.
Then she transferred it to the crib vat that Janna had prepared. The liquid shuddered and roiled, jolly as the gut of Santa Claus.
“That pumptose is rockin’ it,” said Janna, marveling at the churning rainbow oil slick.
“We going good now, girl,” said Veruschka. She opened her purse and tossed her own Pumpti into the vat. “A special bath treat for my Pumpti,” she said. Then, with a painful wince, she dug one of her long fingernails into the lining of her mouth.
“Yow,” said Janna.
“Oh, it feels so good to pop him loose,” said Veruschka indistinctly. “Look at him.”
Nestled in the palm of Veruschka’s hand was a lentil-shaped little pink thing. A brand-new Pumpti. “That’s your own genetics from your dirty fork at the diner,” said Veruschka. “All coated with trilobite bile, or some other decoding from your junk DNA. I grew this seedling for you.” She dropped the bean into the vat.
“This is starting to seem a little bent, Veruschka.”
“Well…you never smelled your own little Pumpti. Or tasted him. How could you not bite him and chew him and grow a new scrap in your mouth? The sweet little Pumpti, you just want to eat him all up!”
Soon a stippling of bumps had formed on the tiny scrap of flesh in the tank. Soft little pimples, twenty or a hundred of them. The lump cratered at the top, getting thicker all around. It formed a dent and invaginated like a sea-squirt. It began pumping itself around in circles, swimming in the murky fluids. Stubby limbs formed momentarily, then faded into an undulating skirt like the mantle of a cuttlefish.
Veruschka’s old Pumpti was the size of a grapefruit, and the new one was the size of a golf ball. The two critters rooted around the tank’s bottom like rats looking for a drain hole.
Veruschka rolled up her sleeve and plunged her bare arm into the big vat’s slimy fluids. She held up the larger Pumpti; it was flipping around like beached fish. Veruschka brought the thing to her face and nuzzled it.
It took Janna a couple of tries to fish her own Pumpti out of the tub, as each time she touched the slimy thing she had to give a little scream and let it go. But finally she had the Pumpti in her grip. It shaped itself to her touch and took on the wet, innocent gleam of a big wad of pink bubble gum.
“Smell it,” urged Veruschka.
And, Lord yes, the Pumpti did smell good. Sweet and powdery, like clean towels after a nice hot bath, like a lawn of flowers on a summer morn, like a new dress. Janna smoothed it against her face, so smooth and soft. How could she have thought her Pumpti was gnarly?
“Now you must squeeze him to make him better,” said Veruschka, vigorously mashing her Pumpti in her hands. “Knead, knead, knead! The Pumpti pulls skin cells from the surface of your hands, you know. Then pumptose reads more of the junk DNA and makes more good tasty proteins.” She pressed her Pumpti to her cheek, and her voice went up an octave. “Getting more of that yummy yummy wetware from me, isn’t he? Squeezy-squeezy Pumpti.” She gave it a little kiss.
“This doesn’t add up,” said Janna. “Let’s face it, an entire human body only has like ten grams of active DNA. But this Pumpti, it’s solid DNA like a chunk of rubber, and hey, it’s almost half a kilo! I mean, where’s
that
at?”
“The more the better,” said Veruschka patiently. “It means that very quickly Pumpti can be recombining his code. Like a self-programming Turing machine. Wiktor often spoke of this.”
“But it doesn’t even look like DNA,” said Janna. “I messed with DNA every day at Triple Helix. It looks like lint or dried snot.”
“My Pumpti is smooth because he’s making nice old proteins from the ancient junk of the DNA. All our human predecessors from the beginning of time, amphibians, lemurs, maybe intelligent jellyfish saucers from Mars—who knows what. But every bit is my very own junk, of my very own DNA. So stop thinking so hard, Janna. Love your Pumpti.”
Janna struggled not to kiss her pink glob. The traceries of pink and yellow lines beneath its skin were like the veins of fine marble.
“Your Pumpti is very fine,” said Veruschka, reaching for it. “Now, into the freezer with him! We will store him, to show our financial backers.”
“What!” said Janna. She felt a sliver of ice in her heart. “Freeze my Pumpti? Freeze your
own
Pumpti, Vero.”
“I need mine,” snapped Veruschka.
To part from her Pumpti—something within her passionately rebelled. In a dizzying moment of raw devotion, Janna suddenly found herself sinking her teeth into the unresisting flesh of the Pumpti. Crisp, tasty spun cotton candy, deep-fried puffball dough, a sugared beignet. And under that a salty, slightly painful flavor—bringing back the memory of being a kid and sucking the root of a lost tooth.
“Now you understand,” said Veruschka with a throaty laugh. “I was only testing you! You can keep your sweet Pumpti, safe and sound. We’ll get some dirty street bum to make us a Pumpti for commercial samples. Like that stupid boy you were talking to before.” Veruschka stood on tiptoe to peer out of the bank’s bronze-mullioned window. “He’ll be back. Men always come back when they see you making money.”
Janna considered this wise assessment. “His name is Kelso,” said Janna. “I went to Berkeley with him. He says he’s always wanted me. But he never talked to me at school.”
“Get some of his body fluid.”
“I’m not ready for that,” said Janna. “Let’s just poke around in the sink for his traces.” And, indeed, they quickly found a fresh hair to seed a Kelso Pumpti, nasty and testicular, suitable for freezing.
As Veruschka had predicted, Kelso himself returned before long. He made it his business to volunteer his aid and legal counsel. He even claimed that he’d broached the subject of Magic Pumpkin to Tug Mesoglea himself. However, the mysterious mogul failed to show up with his checkbook, so Magic Pumpkin took the path of viral marketing.
Veruschka had tracked down an offshore Chinese ooze farm to supply cheap culture medium. In a week, they had a few dozen Pumpti starter kits for sale. They came in a little plastic tub of pumptose-laced nutrient, all boxed up in a flashy little design that Janna had printed out in color.