Mad Professor (30 page)

“Right,” said Wendel contemptuously. “Like I told her my Dad's a pocket-slug.”

Dad opened his mouth like he was going to protest the disrespect–then thought better of it. He shrugged, with as much cool as he could manage. “Manda's down with pockets, Wendel. Half the guys programming virtual physics for MetaMeta were using them
when I was there. Pockets are a great way to make a deadline. The MetaMeta crunch-room was like a little glen of chrome puff-balls. Green carpeting, you wave? Manda used to walk around setting sodas and pizzas down outside the pockets. We'd work in there for days, when it was minutes on the outside—get a real edge on the other programmers. She was just a support tech then. We called her Fairy Princess, and we crunchers were the Toads of the Short Forest, popping out all loaded on the bubble-rush. Manda's gone down in the world, what I heard, in terms of who she works for . . .”

“She's a project manager. Better than a support tech.”

“Nice of her to think of me.” Dad made a little grimace. “Endless Media's about one step past being a virtu-porn Webble. Where's the picture she sent?”

“I saved it in the iTV,” said Wendel, and pushed the buttons to show it.

Dad made a groaning sound. “Turn it off, Wendel. Put it away.”

“Tell me what it is, first,” said Wendel, pressing the controller buttons to zoom in on the faces. It was definitely—

“Mom and me,” said Dad shakily. “I took that photo the week before she died.” His voice became almost inaudible. “Yeah. You can see . . . some of the images are different further into the lattice … because our pocket had a tunnel leading to other pockets. That happens sometimes, you know. It's not a good idea to go down the tunnels. It was the time after this one that . . . Mom didn't come back.” He looked at the picture for a moment; like its own pocket, the moment seemed to stretch out to a gray forever. Then he looked away. “Turn it off, will you? It brings me down.”

Wendel stared at his mother's young face a moment longer, then turned off the image. “You never told me much about the time she didn't come back.”

“I don't need to replay the experience, kid.”

“Dad. I. . . look, just do it. Tell me.”

Dad stared at him. Looked away. Wendel thought he was going to refuse again. Then he shrugged and began, his voice weary. “It was a much bigger pocket than usual,” said Dad, almost inaudible. “MetaMeta . . . they'd scored a shitload of them from DeGroot, and we were merging them together so whole teams could fit in. Using fundamental spacetime geometry weirdness to meet the marketing honcho's deadlines, can you believe? I was an idiot to buy into it. And this last time Jena was mad at me, and she flew away from me while we were in there. And then I couldn't tell which of the lattice-nodes was really her. Like a mirror-maze in a funhouse. And meanwhile I'm all tweaked out of my mind on bubble-rush. But I had my laptop-harness, and there was all that code-hacking to be done, and I got into it for sure, glancing over at all the Jenas now and then, and they're programming too, so I thought it was OK, but then . . .” He swallowed, turning to look out the window, as if he might see her out there in the sky. “When the pocket flattened back out, I was alone. The same shit was coming down everywhere all of a sudden, and then there was the Big Bubble disaster at the DeGroot plant and all the pocket-bubbles were declared government property and if you want to use them anymore . . . people, you know . . .” His voice trailed into a whisper: “They act like you're a junkie.”

“Yeah,” said Wendel. “I know.” He looked out the window for a while. It was a sunny day, but the foulness in the water made the sea a dingy gray, as if it were brooding on dark memories. He spotted a couple of little pocket-bubbles floating in on the brackish waves. Dad had been buying them from beach-combers, merging them together till he got one big enough to crawl into again.

They'd talked about pockets in Wendel's health class at school last term. In terms of dangerous things the grown-ups wanted to warn you away from, pockets were right up there with needles, drunk driving, and doing it bareback. You could stay inside too long and come out a couple of years older than your friends. You could lose your youth inside a pocket. Oddly enough, you didn't eat or breathe in any conventional way while you were inside there—those parts of your metabolism went into suspension. The pocket-slugs dug this aspect of the high, for after all weren't eating and breathing just another wearisome world-drag? There were even rock songs about pockets setting you free from “feeding the pig,” as the 'slugs liked to call normal life. You didn't eat or breathe inside a pocket but even so were still getting older, often a lot faster than you realized. Some people came out, like, middle-aged.

And of course some people never came out at all. They died in there of old age, or got killed by a bubble-psychotic pocket-slug coming through a tunnel, or—though this last one sounded like government propaganda—you might tunnel right off into some kind of alien Hell world. If you found a pocket-bubble you were supposed to take it straight to the police. As opposed to selling it to a 'slug, or, worse, trying to accumulate enough of them to get a pocket big enough to go into yourself. The word was that it felt really good, better than drugs or sex or booze. Sometimes Wendel wanted to try it—because then, maybe, he'd understand his dad. Other times the thought terrified him.

He looked at his shaky, strung-out father, wishing he could respect him. “Do you keep doing it because you think you might find Mom in there someday?” asked Wendel, his voice plaintive in his own ears.

“It would sound more heroic, wouldn't it?” said Dad, rubbing
his face. “That I keep doing it because I'm on a quest. Better than saying I do it for the high. The escape.” He rubbed his face for a minute and got out of bed, a little shaky, but with a determined look on his face. “It's get-it-together time, huh Wendel? Get me a vita-patch from the bathroom, willya? I'll call Manda and go see her today. We need this gig. You ready to catch the light rail to San Jose?”

+   +   +

In person Manda Solomon was shorter, plainer, and less well dressed than the processed image she sent out on iTV. She was a friendly ditz, with the disillusioned aura of a Valley-vet who's seen a number of her employers go down the tubes. When Dad calmly claimed that Wendel was a master programmer and his chief assistant, Manda didn't bat an eye, just took out an extra sheaf of nondisclosure and safety-waiver agreements for Wendel to sign.

“I've never had such a synchronistic staffing process before,” she said with a breathless smile. “Easy, but weird. Two of our team were waiting in my office when I came into work it one morning. Said I'd left it unlocked. Karma, I guess.”

They followed her into a windowless conference room with whiteboards and projection screens. One of the screens showed Dad's old photo of him and Mom scattered over the nodes of a pocket's space-lattice. Wendel's Dad glanced at it and looked away.

Manda introduced them to the other three at the table: a cute, smiling woman named Xiao-Xiao just now busy talking Chinese on her cell phone. She had Bettie Page bangs and the faddish full-eye mirror-contacts; her eyes were like pale lavender Christmas-tree ornaments. Next was a straight-nosed Sikh guy named
Puneet; he wore a turban. He had reassuringly normal eyes, and spoke in a high voice. The third was a puffy white kid only a few years older than Wendel. His name was Barley and he wore a stoner-rock T-shirt. He didn't smile; with his silver mirror-contacts his face was quite unreadable. He wore an uvvy computer interface on the back of his neck. Barley asked Wendel something about programming, but Wendel couldn't even understand the question.

“Ummm . . . well, you know. I just . . .”

“So what's the pitch, Manda?” Dad interrupted, to get Wendel off the spot.

“Pocket-Max,” said Manda. “Safe and stable. Five hundred people in there at a time, strapped into … I dunno, some kind of mobile pocket-seats. Make downtown San Jose a destination theme park. Harmless, ethical pleasure. We've got some senators who can push it through a loophole for us.”

“Safe?” said Dad. “Harmless?”

“Manda says you've logged more time in the pockets than anyone she knows,” said Xiao-Xiao. “You have some kind of. . . intuition about them? You must know some tricks for making it safe.”

“Well … if we had the hardware that created it. . . .” Dad's voice trailed off, which meant he was thinking hard, and Manda let him do it for a moment.

And then she dropped her bomb. “We do have the hardware. Show him Flatland, Barley.”

Barley did something with his uvvy and something like a soap film appeared above the generic white plastic of the conference table. “This is a two-dimensional-world mockup,” mumbled Barley. “We call it Flatland. The nanomatrix mat for making the real pockets is offsite. Flatland's a piece of visualization software that we got as part of our license. It's a lift.”

“
Offsite
would be the DeGroot Center?” said Dad, his voice rising. “You've got full access?”

“Yaaar,” said Barley, his fat face expressionless. He was leaning over Flatland, using his uvvy link to tweak it with his blank shining eyes.

“Why was DeGroot making pockets in the first place?” asked Wendel. No one had ever explained the pockets to him. It was like Dad was ashamed to talk about them much.

“It was supposed to be for AI,” said Puneet. “Quantum computing nanotech. The DeGroot techs were bozos. They didn't know what they had when they started up the nanomatrix—I don't even know how they invented it. There's no patents filed. It's like the thing fell out of a flying saucer.” His laugh was more than a little uneasy. “There's nobody to ask because the DeGroot engineers are all dead. Sucked into the Big Bubble that popped out of their nanomatrix. You saw it on TV. And then Uncle Sam closed them down.”

“But—why would the nanomatrix be licensed to Endless Media?” asked Dad. “You're an entertainment company. And not a particularly reputable one, at that. Why you and not one of the big, legit players?”

“Options,” said Manda with a shrug. “Market leverage. Networking synergies. And the big guys don't want to touch it. Too big a downside. Part of the setup is we can't sue DeGroot if things don't work out. No biggie for Endless Media. If the shit hits the fan, we take the bullet and go
Chapter Eleven
. We closed the deal with DeGroot and the Feds last week. Nobody's hardly seen the DeGroot CEO since the catastrophe, but he's still around. Guy named George Gravid. He showed up for about one minute at closing, popped up out of nowhere, walking down the hall. Said he'd been hung up in meetings with some
backer dudes—he called them Out-Monkeys? He looked like shit, wearing shades. I think he's strung out on something. Whatever. We did our due diligence, closed the deal, and a second later Gravid was gone.” She waved a dismissive hand. “Bottom line is we're fully licensed to use the DeGroot technology. Us and a half-dozen other blue sky groups. Each of us is setting up an operation in the DeGroot Plant on San Pablo Bay. And we time share the access to the nanomatrix. The Endless Media mission in this context is to make a safe and stable Big Bubble that provides a group entertainment experience beyond anything ever seen before.”

“Watch how this simulation works,” said Barley. “See the yellow square in the film? That's A Square. A two-dimensional Flatlander. He's sliding around, you wave. And that green five-sided figure next to him, that's his son A Pentagon. And now I push up a bubble out of his space.” A little spot of the Flatland film bulged up like a time-reversed water drop. The bulge swelled up to the shape of a sphere hovering above Flatland, connected to the little world by a neck of glistening film. “Go in the pocket, Square,” said Barley. “Get high.”

The yellow square slid forward. He had a bright eye in one of his corners. For a minute he bumbled around the warped zone where the bubble touched his space, then found an entry point and slid up across the neck of the bubble and onto the surface of the little ball. Into the pocket.

“This is what he sees,” said Barley, pointing at one of the view screens on the wall. The screen showed an endless lattice of copies of A Square, each of them turning and blinking in unison. “Like a hall of mirrors. Now I'll make the bubble bounce. That's what makes the time go differently inside the pockets, you know.”

The sphere rose up from the film. The connecting neck stretched and grew thinner, but it didn't break. The sphere bounced back toward the film, and the neck got fat, the sphere bounced up, and the neck got thin, over and over.

“Check this out,” said Barley, changing the image on the view screen to show a circle that repeatedly shrank and grew. “This is what Square Junior sees. The little Pentagon. He stayed outside the bad old pocket, you wave? To him the pocket looks like a disk that's getting bigger and smaller. See him over there on the film? Waiting for Pa. Like little Wendel in the condo on San Pablo Bay.”

“Go to hell,” said Wendel.

“Don't pick on him, Barley,” put in Manda. “Wendel's part of our team.”

“Whoah,” said Barley. “Now Mr. Square's trip is over.” The sphere bounced back and flattened back into the normal space of Flatland.