Complete Stories (64 page)

The screaming metal jellyfish dragged long, invisible tentacles across the dry concrete acres of the San Jose airport. Or so it seemed to Tug—Tug Mesoglea, math-drunk programmer and fanatic aquarist. Tug was working on artificial jellyfish, and nearly everything looked like a jellyfish to him, even airplanes. Tug was here in front of the baggage claim to pick up Texas billionaire Revel Pullen.

It had taken a deluge of phone-calls, faxes and e-mail to lure the reclusive Texan venture-capitalist from his decrepit, polluted East Texas oil-fields, but Tug had now coaxed Revel Pullen to a second face-to-face meet in California. At last, it seemed that Tug’s unconventional high-tech startup scheme would charge into full-scale production. The prospect of success was sweet.

Tug had first met Revel in Monterey two months earlier, at the Spring symposium of the ACM SIGUSC, that is, the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group for Underground and Submarine Computation.

At the symposium, Tug had given a badly botched presentation on artificial jellyfish. He’d arrived with 500 copies of a glossy desktop-published brochure: “Artificial Jellyfish: Your Route to Postindustrial Global Competitiveness!” But when it came time for Tug’s talk, his 15-terabyte virtual jellyfish-demo had crashed so hideously that he couldn’t even reboot his machine—a cheap Indonesian Sun-clone laptop that Tug now used as a bookend. Tug had brought some slides as a backup, but of course the slide-tray had jammed. And, worst of all, the single working prototype of Tug’s plastic artificial jellyfish had burst in transit to Monterey. After the talk, Tug, in a red haze of shame, had flushed the sodden rags of decomposing gel down the conference center’s john.

Tug had next headed for the cocktail lounge, and there the garrulous young Pullen had sought him out, had a few drinks with him, and had even picked up the tab—Tug’s wallet had been stolen the night before by a cute older busboy.

Since Tug’s topic was jellyfish, the raucous Pullen had thought it funny to buy rounds of tequila jelly-shots. The slimy jolts of potent boozy Jell-O had combined with Revel’s bellowed jokes, brags, and wild promises to ease the pain of Tug’s failed speech.

The next day, Tug and Revel had brunched together, and Revel had written Tug a handsome check as earnest money for pre-development expenses. Tug was to develop an artificial jellyfish capable of undersea oil prospecting.

As software applications went, oil-drilling was a little roughnecked and analog for Tug’s taste; but the money certainly looked real enough. The only troubling aspect about dealing with Revel was the man’s obsession with some new and troublesome organic slime which his family’s oldest oil-well had recently tapped. Again and again, the garish Texan had steered the conversation away from jellyfish and onto the subject of ancient subterranean slime.

Perched now on the fire-engine red hood of his expensive Animata sports car, Tug waited for Revel to arrive. Tug had curly dark hair and a pink-cheeked complexion. He wore shorts, a sport shirt, and Birkenstock sandals with argyle socks. He looked like a depraved British schoolboy. He’d bought the Animata with his house-money nest-egg when he’d learned that he would never, ever, be rich enough to buy a house in California. Leaning back against the windshield of his car, Tug stared at the descending airplanes and thought about jellyfish trawling through sky-blue seawater.

Tug had whole tankfuls of jellies at home: one tank with flattish moon jellies each with its four whitish circles of sex organs, another tank with small clear bell jellies from the eel grass of Monterey bay, a large tank with sea nettles that had long frilly oral arms and whiplike purple tentacles covered with stinging cells, a smaller tank of toadstool-like spotted jellies from Jellyfish Lake in Palau, a special tank of spinning comb-jellies with trailing ciliated arms, a Japanese tank with Japanese umbrella jellies—and more.

Next to the arsenal of tanks was the huge color screen of Tug’s workstation. Tug was no biologist; he’d blundered under the spell of the jellies while using mathematical algorithms to generate cellular models of vortex sheets. To Tug’s mathematician’s eye, a jellyfish was a highly perfected relationship between curvature and torsion, just like a vortex sheet, only a jellyfish was working off dynamic tension and osmotic stress. Real jellyfish were gnarlier than Tug’s simulations. Tug had become a dedicated amateur of coelenteratology.

Imitating nature to the core, Tug found a way to evolve and improve his vortex sheet models via genetic programming. Tug’s artificial jellyfish algorithms competed, mutated, reproduced and died inside the virtual reality of his workstation’s sea-green screen. As Tug’s algorithms improved, his big computer monitor became a tank of virtual jellyfish, of graphic representations of Tug’s equations, pushing at the chip’s computational limits, slowly pulsing about in dimly glowing simulation-space.

The living jellies in the tanks of true seawater provided an objective standard towards which Tug’s programs could try to evolve. At every hour of the day and night, video cameras peered into the spot-lit water tanks, ceaselessly analyzing the jellyfish motions and feeding data into the workstation.

The recent, crowning step of Tug’s investigations was his manufacturing breakthrough. His theoretical equations had become actual piezoplastic constructions—soft, watery, gelatinous robot jellies of real plastic in the real world. These models were produced by using an intersecting pair of laser beams to sinter—that is, to join together by heating without melting—the desired shape within a matrix of piezoplastic microbeads. The sintered microbeads behaved like a mass of cells: each of them could compress or elongate in response to delicate vibratory signals, and each microbead could in turn pass information to its neighbors.

A completed artificial jellyfish model was a floppy little umbrella that beat in steady cellular waves of excitation and relaxation. Tug’s best plastic jellyfish could stay active for up to three weeks.

Tug’s next requirement for his creations was “a killer application,” as the software tycoons called it. And it seemed he might have that killer app in hand, given his recent experiments in making the jellyfish sensitive to chemical scents and signals. Tug had convinced Revel—and half-believed himself—that the artificial jellies could be equipped with radio-signaling chips and set loose beneath the sea floor. They could sniff out oil-seeps in the ocean bottom and work their way deep into the vents. If this were so, then artificial jellyfish would revolutionize undersea oil prospecting.

The only drawback, in Tug’s view, was that offshore drilling was a contemptible crime against the wonderful environment that had bred the real jellies in the first place. Yet the plan seemed likely to free up Texas venture capital, enough capital to continue his research for at least another year. And maybe in another year, thought Tug, he would have a more ecologically sound killer app, and he would be able to disentangle himself from the crazy Texan.

Right on cue, Revel Pullen came strolling down the exit ramp, clad in the garb of a white-trash oil-field worker: a flannel shirt and a pair of Can’t-Bust-‘Em overalls. Revel had a blonde crewcut and smooth dark skin. The shirt was from Nieman-Marcus and the overalls were ironed, but they seemed to be genuinely stained with dirt-fresh Texas crude.

Tug hopped off the hood of his car and stood on tiptoe to wave, deliberately camping it up to jangle the Texan’s nerves. He drew up a heel behind him like Marilyn Monroe waving in The Misfits.

Nothing daunted, Revel Pullen headed Tug’s way with an exaggerated bowlegged sprawl and a scuff of his python-skin boots. Revel was the scapegrace nephew of Amarillo’s billionaire Pullen Brothers. The Pullen clan were malignant market speculators and greenmail raiders who had once tried to corner the world market in molybdenum.

Revel himself, the least predictable of his clan, was in charge of the Pullen Brothers’ weakest investments: the failing oil wells that had initially brought the Pullen family to prominence—beginning with the famous Ditheree Gusher, drilled near Spindletop, Texas in 1892.

Revel’s quirk was his ambition to become a high-tech tycoon. This was why Revel attended computer-science meetings like SIGUSC, despite his stellar ignorance of everything having to do with the movement of bytes and pixels.

Revel stood ready to sink big money into a technically sexy Silicon Valley start-up. Especially if the start-up could somehow do something for his family’s collapsing oil industry and—though this part still puzzled Tug—find a use for some odd clear fluid that Revel’s engineers had recently been pumping from the Ditheree hole.

“Shit howdy, Tug,” drawled Revel, hoisting his polyester/denim duffel bag from one slim shoulder to another. “Mighty nice of y’all to come meet me.”

Beaming, Tug freed his fingers from Revel’s insistent grip and gestured toward the Animata. “So, Revel! Ready to start a business? I’ve decided we should call it Ctenophore, Inc. A ctenophore is a kind of hermaphroditic jellyfish which uses a comb-like feeding organ to filter nutrients from the ocean; they’re also called comb-jellies. Don’t you think Ctenophore is a perfect name for our company? Raking in the dollars from the economy’s mighty sea!”

“Not so loud!” Revel protested, glancing up and down the airport pavement in a parody of wary street-smarts. “As far as any industrial spy knows, I’m here in California on a personal vacation.” He heaved his duffel into the back seat of Tug’s car. Then he straightened, and reached deep into the baggy trouser-pocket of his Can’t-Bust-‘Ems.

The Texan dragged out a slender pill-bottle filled with clear viscous jelly and pressed the crotch-warmed vial into Tug’s unwilling palm, with a dope-dealer’s covert insistence. “I want you to keep this, Tug. Just in case anything should…you know…happen to me.”

Revel swiveled his narrow head to scan the passers-by with paranoid alertness, briefly reminding Tug of the last time he’d been here at the San Jose airport: to meet his ailing father, who’d been fingerpaint-the-wall-with-shit senile and had been summarily dumped on the plane by Tug’s uncle. Tug had gotten his father into a local nursing home, and last summer Tug’s father had died.

Life was sad, and Tug was letting it slip through his fingers—he was an unloved gay man who’d never see thirty again, and now here he was humoring a nutso het from Texas. Humoring people was not something Tug excelled at.

“Do you really have enemies?” said Tug. “Or do you just think so? Am I supposed to think you have enemies? Am I supposed to care?”

“There’s money in these plans of ours—real foldin’ money,” Revel bragged darkly, climbing into the Animata’s passenger seat. He waited silently until Tug took the wheel and shut the driver’s-side door. “All we really gotta worry about,” Revel continued at last, “is controlling the publicity. The environmental impact crap. You didn’t tell anybody about what I e-mailed you, did you?”

“No,” snapped Tug. “That cheap public-key encryption you’re using has garbled half your messages. What are you so worried about, anyway? Nobody’s gonna care about some slime from a played-out oil-well—even if you do call it Urschleim. That’s German, right?”

“Shhhhh!” hissed Revel.

Tug started the engine and gunned it with a bluish gust of muscular combustion. They swung out into the endless California traffic.

Revel checked several times to make sure that they weren’t being trailed. “Yes, I call it Urschleim,” he said at last, portentously. “In fact, I’ve put in a trademark for that name. Them old-time German professors were onto something. Ur means primeval. All life came from the Urschleim, the original slime! Primeval slime from the inner depths of the planet! You ever bitten into a green almond, Tug? From the tree? There’s some green fuzz, a thin little shell and a center of clear, thick slime. That’s exactly how our planet is, too. Most of the original Urschleim is still flowing, and oozing, and lyin’ there ‘way down deep. It’s just waitin’ for some bright boy to pump it out and exploit its commercial potential. Urschleim is life itself.”

“That’s pretty grandiose,” said Tug evenly.

“Grandiose, hell!” Revel snapped. “It’s the only salvation for the Texan oil business, compadre! God damn it, if we Texans don’t drill for a living, we’ll be reduced to peddling chips and software like a bunch of goddamn Pacific Rim computer weenies! You got me wrong if you think I’ll give up the oil business without a fight!”

“Sure, sure, I’m hip,” Tug said soothingly. “My jellyfish are going to help you find more oil, remember?” It was easy to tell when Revel had gone nonlinear—his Texan drawl thickened drastically and he began to refer to his beloved oil business as the “Aisle Bidness.” But what was the story with this Urschleim?

Tug held up the pill-bottle of clear slime and glanced at it while steering with one hand. The stuff was thixotropic—meaning a gel which becomes liquid when shaken. You’d tilt the vial and all the Urschleim would be stuck in one end, but then, if you shook the bottle a bit, the slime’s state would change and it would all run down to the other end like ketchup suddenly gushing from a bottle. Smooth, clear ketchup. Snot.

“The Ditheree hole’s oozin’ with Urschleim right now!” said Revel, settling a pair of Italian sunglasses onto his freckled nose. He looked no older than twenty-five. “I brought three gallons of it in a tank in my duffel. One of my engineers says it’s a new type of deep-lying oil, and another one says it’s just water infected with bacteria. But I’m with old Herr Doktor Professor von Stoffman. We’ve struck the cell fluid of Mother Earth herself: undifferentiated tissue, Tug, primordial ooze. Gaia goo. Urschleim!”

“What did you do to make it start oozing?” asked Tug, suppressing a giggle.

Revel threw back his head and crowed. “Man, if OPEC got wind about our new high-tech extraction techniques…You don’t think I got enemies, son? Them sheiks play for keeps.” Revel tapped his knuckles cagily against the car’s closed window. “Hell, even Uncle Sam’d be down on us if he knew that we’ve been twisting genes and seeding those old worn-out oilbeds with designer bacteria! They eat through tar and paraffin, change the oil’s viscosity, unblock the pores in the stone and get it all fizzy with methane…You wouldn’t think the ol’ Ditheree had it in ‘er to blow valves and gush again, but we plumbed her out with a new extra-virulent strain. And what did she gush? Urschleim!”