Mad Professor (37 page)

One final inspiration for the story was my continuing desire to write about the great master Hieronymus Bosch. Having already written a historical novel about a Flemish painter—
As Above, So Below: A Novel of Peter Bruegel
(Tor Books, New York, 2002), I'm tempted to write a tome about Bosch. “Guadalupe and Hieronymus Bosch” is a down payment on the dream.

By the way, Terry Bisson did me the favor of reading a draft of the story and making some good suggestions. After appearing in
Interzone,
the story also appeared in David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer,
Year's Best SF 11
(Eos, 2006).

Written Fall, 2003.

Appeared in Rudy Rucker,
The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul
(Thunder's Mouth Press, New York, 2005).

When I moved to Silicon Valley some twenty years ago to work as a computer science professor, I thought of myself as a writer on assignment. I was here to quickly write a popular book explaining the meaning of computers. But I went native on the story, and I really did become a computer scientist. As I mentioned earlier in these notes, I recently pulled free of the computer science tar-baby and retired from teaching. Once retired, I had the time to finally write my big computer book:
The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul: What Gnarly Computation Taught Me about Ultimate Reality, the Meaning of Life, and How to Be Happy.

By way of lightening up my tome, I wrote a short-short story to introduce each of the six chapters which were themed, respectively, on computer science, physics, biology, psychology, sociology, and philosophy—an ascending chain of thought. Thus these six thought experiments.

Although I claim that each of the stories has to do with the nature of computation, this isn't obvious in each case, so I'll say a bit about the individual stories.

“Lucky Number” is about the idea that maybe there is a single underlying computation that generates the world. Although obviously I'm sympathetic to the idea that we can usefully think of any given natural process as being a computation of sorts, I'm not actually sure if there really does have to be one ultimate computation underneath it all. It could be that reality is an endless onion, with layer beneath layer, and there isn't any one rule that makes it all. For the setting of this story, I used the Electronic Arts game company campus on the San Francisco Bay; I visited my former student Alan Borecky when he was a game programmer there.

“The Million Chakras” deals with parallel worlds. I'm not sure the twist ending really bears close scientific analysis—but let's not break the butterfly upon the wheel. You might wonder what this story has to do with the nature of computation. The context is that, in the chapter the story introduces, I discuss quantum computation and the scientist David Deutsch's claim that a quantum computer manages to carry out a number simultaneous computations in parallel worlds.

“Aint Paint” involves morphogenesis, that is, the more or less computational process by which organisms grow their forms. Shortly before his death, the computer scientist Alan Turing began working with computer simulations in which simple inputs evolve into organic-looking two- and three-dimensional forms. Over the years, I've done a lot of research into these types of computer programs, which are called cellular automata. You can download a nice cellular automata program called CAPOW from my nonfiction book's Web site,
htt://www.rudyrucker.com/lifebox
. The free download comes with a loadable parameter file named Aint Paint.CAS, which displays precisely the kinds of live graphics that inspired this tale.

“Terry's Talker” develops a notion I've thought about a lot: the lifebox. I also discuss the lifebox in my novel
Saucer Wisdom
(Tor Books, 1999), and in my story, “Soft Death” (reprinted in my collection
Gnarl!,
Four Walls Eight Windows, 2000). I'm almost surprised that lifeboxes aren't already on the market, although to some extent blogs are playing this role. I do think of my ever-expanding Web site
www.rudyrucker.com
as being more or less my lifebox, although of course it doesn't have any AI software to run it, just
a search window in the blog. But for many conversations that's about all you'd need.

“The Kind Rain,” plays with emergent intelligence. It sometimes happens that the behavior of a group of simple agents exhibits a higher intelligence than the agents themselves; think of an ant colony, a flock of birds, a school of fish, or, for that matter, a human society. Of course I'm pushing it to suppose that somehow a storm of rain drops might evolve into an intelligent and sympathetic mind, but, hey, it makes for a striking thought experiment. The setting for this story is the tumbledown house my family and I rented in Los Gatos when we moved to California in 1986; the house was also the setting for my novel
The Hacker and the Ants
(reprinted by Four Walls Eight Windows, 2002).

“Hello Infinity” was inspired by an idea I proposed in the last chapter of my
Lifebox
tome. I suggested there that we might define a computation to be a physical process that embodies a possible thought. Of course, I then wondered whether there might be some things that aren't like possible thoughts and aren't like ordinary physical processes. “Hello Infinity” is a thought experiment presenting a man who starts having infinite thoughts and a woman who learns that matter is infinitely divisible. Our whole philosophy of science would have to change were infinities really to occur in the natural world-and I seriously think this is possible, even though this line of thought is very much out of fashion right now. My interest in infinity goes back to the 1970s, when I wrote my doctoral dissertation on infinite sets. My first popular science non-fiction book was
Infinity and the Mind
(reprinted by Princeton University Press, 2005), and I also wrote a novel about physical and mental infinities:
White Light
(reprinted by Four Walls Eight Windows, 2001).

Written June 15, 2002, with Rudy Rucker Jr.

Appeared in
Infinite Matrix
webzine, February 2003.

My son Rudy Rucker Jr. runs an ISP (Internet Service Provider) called
Monkeybrains, at
www.monkeybrains.net
in San Francisco. For political and artistic reasons that he never fully clarified to me, Rudy created the Web site
www.thefirsttwins.com
, devoted to the doings of then-President George W. Bush's twin daughters, Jenna and Barbara. Understand that my son is my no means a Young Republican.

When one of his Web site readers posted a threatening comment about the president's family, some Secret Service agents actually came to pay Rudy a visit, checking him out. A few months later, some anonymous person begin distributing the so-called BadTrans Internet worm, which infected people's computers and sent a log of all their keyboard inputs to a free account at Monkeybrains. Rudy received another visit from the authorities; this time it was the FBI, with a warrant to impound the trillion or so snoop-bytes received by the anonymous hacker using Rudy's server machines.

Perhaps not-so-coincidentally, the BadTrans worm hit the Internet four days after the FBI had announced the development of some spyware called Magic Lantern, a key stroke logging mechanism, which, when properly rubbed, will reveal people's passwords for encrypted data. You can read more about all this at a site Rudy made,
https://badtrans.monkeybrains.net
.

In any case, with my son being hounded by both the Secret Service and the FBI for a site he'd made about the freakin' first twins, it seemed like a good idea to help him work through his motivations by writing a transreal story about the whole bizarre scene. It was great fun working together, kind of like the time the two of us built a house for our dog Arf, and for me a nice vacation from writing about mad professors. To cap the pleasure, Rudy and I gave a joint Father's Day reading of our story at a club in the Mission district of San Francisco. A night to remember.

Written January 22, 2002.

Appeared in
Horror Garage
#5, 2002.

My cyberpunk pal John Shirley lives fairly near me in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2002 he had this idea of helping someone put together a small press anthology whose earnings would be devoted to a fund for helping drug-addicted mothers and their children.

I don't normally undertake a story for so abstract a reason as altruism. I write a story for more personal reasons; typically there's some emotional state or tech problem or odd situation or real-world vignette that I'm obsessed with, and the story is an exploration I feel compelled to carry out. But John shamed me into promising a contribution.

And then I got into it—I realized that, given that this was to be a guaranteed publication, I could really do anything I wanted to, so why not have some fun and write something completely surrealistic. Of course then the fund-raising anthology project fell through, but five of the stories destined for the anthology ended up in a special issue of
Horror Garage,
an idiosyncratic magazine edited by Paula Guran.

The title and epigraph for my story comes from line seventy-three of Allen Ginsberg's epochal 1956 poem, “Howl.”

and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrating plane

I've always loved this long line: those four items makes such a surreal, Dadaist assemblage, and as a mathematician I'm happy to see an ellipse in
the
seminal Beat poem.

The images of the story came to me in a moment of inspiration as I sat on the sidewalk in the sun at Powell and Market Streets, near where the tourists line up for the trolley. Junkies and con men were going by, and I saw the four items of Ginsberg's line as characters, as if drawn by underground cartoonist Robert Williams–and thus emerged my story, a gift from the muse.

Although the line from “Howl” appears as I quote it in both Ginsberg's original
Howl and Other Poems
(City Lights, San Francisco, 1956) and in his
Collected Poems 1947–1980
(Harper & Row, New York, 1984), Allen introduces a
1986 variant to his line in
Howl: Original Draft Facsimile, Transcript & Variant Versions, Etc.
(edited by Barry Miles, HarperCollins, New York, 1995). Allen's “final” 1986 version of the line goes like this: “and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipsis catalog a variable measure and the vibrating plane.” Ugh!

In a footnote of the 1995
Howl
volume, Allen says, “‘Ellipse' is a solecism in the original mss. and printings; ‘ellipsis' is correct.” In the same footnote he relieves himself of a minilecture on his poetics as derived from Céline, Whitman, Pound, and the divine Kerouac. And at the end of the footnote, he blandly drones, “phrasing in this verse has been clarified for present edition . . . to conform more precisely to above referents.” (pp. 130–31).

I wish Allen were still around, so I could argue with him about this. I'd insist that his original muse-spurt was of course the correct take, and not some thirty-year-later version that the author has tailored to fit some theories that he's invented about what he did. I'd argue that he's mistakenly letting his mad prof side supplant his mad poet side.

I did once have the good fortune to meet Allen, while visiting the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, on the 1982 visit that inspired my piece “MS Found in a Minidrive.” I told Allen about how much “Howl” had influenced me in high school, and then I said, “And what I want from you, Allen, after being hung-up on the beatniks all these years, what I want is your blessing.” And real fast he whaps his hand down on my head like a skull-cap or electric-chair metal cap
zzt zzt
and “BLESS YOU” he yells. I wrote more about this encounter in my memoir
All the Visions
(Ocean View Books, 1991), which I typed on a ninety-foot scroll of paper, emulating Jack K.

Written December 29, 2001, with Bruce Sterling.

Appeared in
Isaac Asimov's SF Magazine,
January 2003.

This is the third story I've written with Bruce Sterling; the earlier two being “Storming the Cosmos” and “Big Jelly,” both in my anthology
Gnarl!
(Four
Walls Eight Windows, 2000.) The “Junk DNA” collaboration was tumultuous; I began finally to understand why a synergistic pair like, say, Lennon and McCartney might stop working together—no matter how good were the fruits of their joint efforts.

Although pleasant and soft spoken in person, both Bruce and I are bossy collaborators, capable of being very cutting in our e-mails. When he and I go after each other, it's like two old guys playing tennis and trying to kill the ball and blast it down the other guy's throat.
Whack!
Some of this abrasive energy shows up in the interactions between the pairs of characters in this story: Janna vs. Veruschka and Tug vs. Revel.

But the story is fun, and it rated a cover illustration when it appeared in
Asimov's.
The story also appears in Bruce's most recent collection,
Visionary in Residence
(Thunder's Mouth Press, 2006); although note that while putting together
Mad Professor,
I slightly re-edited all my stories one more time.