www.jerrystout.us

By: arkowitz (at gmail.com)

Chapter 1: Luddenen

The small black ball (golfball-sized) cracked open with a snick and a propeller extended, then unfolded. A camera lens peeked out, and the bot was off into the air, moving quite determinedly upward and west. One of the four humans watching it let out a loud whoop; then they all got into a dusty grey Suburban and drove away down an empty desert track. They left behind something that looked like a silver thermos sitting in the middle of an array of solar panels, with two types of antennae sticking up out of the top: one that looked like a miniature old-fashioned tv antenna, and one that looked like a satellite dish.

The dirt track dead-ended at a highway after three miles, and the highway led into Flagstaff, Arizona. There, in a small apartment above a shop that sold drums, incense, and hemp clothing, the four humans – Smurf, Wendy, Matt, liaison (all he would go by) – gathered round a laptop displaying a small image of the desert they had just left, surrounded by various readouts and controls. Some text below the image read “protective mode”. A loud knock at the door startled Smurf, and he jumped up and opened it. A tiny blonde girl walked into the room and said “Did it work?”

“Hell yeah, it worked! Look at the screen, baby!” Smurf, who was also rather petite and seemed practically swallowed up by the hooded sweatshirt he wore, took her by the shoulders and moved her toward the laptop excitedly.

“What’s it doing now?” she asked.

“It’s in protective mode. It’s going to do this every night, or when there is a lot of wind. The shell closes up completely, and the bot can survive the worst weather Mars has to offer,” Wendy volunteered.

“When will it move again?”

Smurf spoke up quickly, as if to keep Wendy from answering: “We’ve told it to wake up at 10:30 tomorrow morning, capture an image, rise vertically 50 feet, capture another image, and then fly north for ten minutes. Ten minutes is about how long the batteries will last; if they are about to run out it will just go into protective mode and drop like a stone… the batteries can trickle-charge in protective mode because the shell has some small solar cells embedded in it.”

“Why did you set it to wake up so late?”

Matt stood up to his full six-and-a-half foot height, pointed a finger in the air, and proclaimed, “Because tonight, we celebrate!”

Smurf likes to talk (but only to really close friends such as the people in the Suburban, and in the room) about the time he smoked weed for the second time, in the desert, and for some reason his energy storage was really up there and he pretty much tripped and looked into space, until paranoia set in. He felt as though he would be damned to hell, and humiliated, and waves of agony whipped through him; this was a bad trip. And he reached into his pocket and there was a quarter there, all the change he had left, and he took it out and looked at it by starlight and it was Ohio, and there was John Glenn in a spacesuit… and it calmed him down. Not just because of the wholesomeness of Glenn, but also due to the need he had for a goal. We may destroy this earth with nuclear weapons (this was the beginning of proliferation, when Pakistan, India, and North Korea were jumping into the game) but we can get to Mars first. We can bounce life back and forth between the planets over the millennia; and then he was thinking about life and how it will regenerate, and everything was AOK.

But he later had realized that not just the goal, but the way in which it was accomplished mattered to him, and that he was an idealist and somewhat utopian of vision. This philosophy had grown in him as he worked with code (software) and networks and the machines (machine) affected his mind… the training in cold logic and the beautiful structures he architected and brought into being.

Colonization should be distributed, and freemarket. Why send two probes out, as the most technologically advanced civilization in the world, and supposedly adhering to the ideals of freedom, when someone could deliver a payload of thousands of little probes that people could lease time on, or buy, and manipulate Mars, and hopefully cooperate, and proliferate, and grow a machine society up there controlled by as many people down here as there are machines up there. And then we send some earth life to be nurtured by the machines and try to boost evolution and get real martian life to evolve.

Yes, of course the scientific community wants to do it slowly and methodically, and make for damn sure that Mars is a totally dead, desert planet. Let them render a verdict soon and if it’s dead let’s do something about it, and expand life and nurture it in the solar system… that is our job as enlightened monkeys.

Lighting is so important to the mood of any gathering he remembered someone saying. He was just sitting in a chair looking busy, like he was thinking; rather than lazy daydreaming, he was thinking about how he wasn’t thinking about anything productive. Unlike the other times, this time the phone rang. Mina, the “tiny blonde girl”, answered it.

“He read the email and he wants to meet with us – the only time he has free is tomorrow afternoon at 2:00. Tell Smurf I’ll pick him up at 9:00 in the morning.”

This justifies the purchase of the Suburban he was thinking about an hour and a half into the desert track part of the journey. The change in landscape, ecology that one could experience in just twenty minutes time, at twenty miles per hour, was agitating; first it had been pretty much desolate, sandy desert with some cactus, low bushes (sage), sandy soil uniformly tan. A change in elevation of 500 feet as they climbed a series of rounded layers of red rock, a turn around the side of a cliff, and they were in a microclimated canyon with gnarled trees, deer, and tumbles of red boulders among the high stalks of grasses. He caught a glimpse of petroglyphs high on the canyon wall as the track headed straight back and up, next to a currently dry creek bed. The Suburban was in four-wheel low, and Matt’s elbows were flying everywhere as he drove. A grey fox had allowed himself to be seen off to the left toward the back of the canyon, and Smurf was trying to remember all the times he had seen grey foxes when he lived in Florida, both in Tallahassee and Sarasota even; when they came to the crest of the slope, passing through a gap in the back of the red canyon wall and stopping as soon as it sloped back down a little… the better to take in the vista below and in front of them.

Sven Luddenen’s compound was barely visible against the far slope of an opposing canyon much like the one they had come up through, but far larger. The ridge they had ascended dropped off in a sheer 1000-foot cliff; at its foot, the canyon sloped down gently for at least five miles. At the broad mouth of the canyon, the red rock and tan sandy soil gave way to endless dunes of barren white sand stretching to Mexico beyond the horizon.

Shimmering slightly in the heat coming off the dunes was a line of white windmills, nine of them strung out in an arc like mechanical palm trees conjured out of the silicon and curling from the tip of the far wall outward into the wasteland. They were all spinning slowly, and Smurf spent some more dreamy bumpy-ride-time figuring that they probably generated an average of thirty kilowatt-hours per day of power.

The path had turned left and followed the edge of the cliff along the back of the canyon, then turned right and wound along the spur of smaller peaks that ended in the windmills. About halfway, and directly above the place where Smurf and Matt had caught the flash of glass or steel that indicated the location of the compound, the track ended abruptly in a cave big enough for five or six vehicles to park in. Matt parked between an old VW Beetle that had been turned into a dune-buggy, and a beat-up Jeep. An elevator at the rear of the cave took the two intrepid adventurers down several hundred feet into the lair of Luddenen.

The Pitch

Mars Colonized by Egalitarian Environmentalists… no, Equal-Opportunity Mars Exploration. Virtual Space Tourism. What should be the lead-in, the hook? You have to have a hook.

Smurf was uncharacteristically nervous. Luddenen had the funds and connections to make the project happen; actually manifest into a sensory bridge to another world. But money and power never intimidated Smurf; rather, the scent of them about a person made him more aggressive and cock-sure, if anything. Something else palpable but unidentifiable was making him feel vulnerable and petty, as if he was just an eager kid with a science project.

At least he had identified the blockage in his flow; now he bent all his will toward clearing it. Damn it, there was something fatherly about Luddenen. “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” The tour of the amazing, self-sufficient compound continued, with Matt fortunately asking many questions and fawning over the power room (several banks of gigantic batteries charged by feeds from the windmills, the solar arrays, the backup diesel generator; power inverters and regulators interfaced to a PC), the machine shop, the well room (where an artesian well brought up clean cold water from below the roots of the mountains).

They came to a hydroponic greenhouse that reminded Smurf of the Land ride at Epcot. Luddenen had made his fortune from several patents covering certain genetically altered plant strains, and though he had retired a year ago, he retained his passion for botany and biotech, and actively worked in the lab every day.

Another greenhouse, and another… and then they walked out into an open courtyard of sorts tucked in between the building complex and the rock of the mountain. The space was roughly hexagonal, with two of the walls formed by the adjoining glass-and-steel greenhouses. A third wall was formed by a series of arches of hewn stone, such as one would find at a monastery or cathedral. This colonnade blended into the mountain on one end and connected to a greenhouse segment on the other.

“I like to sit in the cool shade behind those arches,” said Luddenen with a warm smile. He led them toward the back of the courtyard, the mountain, beneath the shade of immense cottonwood trees. A crease or cleft wound its way back and up the tan rock and out of sight. “That path goes all the way to the summit,” he said in a more excited tone than usual. “After supper I’d like to take you up there to see the sunset.”

A tiny spring bubbled out of the rock somewhere up there and was surrounded by thick, green, luxuriant life all the way down, through the courtyard, and under the building, unimpeded.

Chapter 2: Mina

Outline:

Mina dumps Smurf, has some nightclub experiences, then hooks up with a hacker who gets up enough money to lease one of the bots on Mars.

The ability to communicate with anyone in the world instantly changed our perception of time. Time to Mina was of the essence right now, because she had broken up with Fred – Smurf as everyone else called him – and went back home to Seattle for a few days. The very first night there she received a message on her cell phone from someone extremely intriguing and obviously in the same nightclub (La Promenade) as she.

She scanned the intermittently visible sea of limbs and hands and heads, and not one eye looked in hers… 360, slowly… there. Sitting at a table on the far side (strobe) and looking at me.

He was wearing a silver silk shirt, offsetting the days of stubble and unkempt hair. He was grinning at her. She received another message.

“Let me buy you a drink.”

Mina: “OK”

They met at the bar in a quieter wing of the club complex, and took his scotch-on-the-rocks and her white russian back to a little table in the corner. His name was Graham. Mina thought him attractive physically (he was around six feet tall and muscular, and had an interesting nose), and was enjoying looking into his eyes. They were intelligent, and bold enough to hold her gaze as long as she allowed. Graham was talking about the club.

“I like to come here and sit back and guess what drugs all the freaks are on.”

Mina laughed. “Seems like mainly an X-night tonight.”

She worked the conversation around to important information like what he did for a living, and found that he was a programmer. Boring.

“Where do you work?” she asked.

“I work out of my loft. I write Internet worms for the government.” He said this matter-of-factly, but ended with a look of expectation, knowing it would pique her interest. It did.

The morning sun streamed through a huge cracked window with no blinds, shades, or curtains, and lit a wedge of the bare wood floor. The enormous room below the sleeping loft Mina was lying on was bare except for a couple rolled-up futon mattresses and five computer desks. The odd assortment of phreaks and geeks that had crashed on the mattresses last night had left things far more immaculate than Mina would ever have imagined they could; Graham must be a mean son of a bitch when you leave his place a mess.

The sounds of people talking, traffic, sirens came in from the streets of Pioneer Square two stories below, but did not disturb Graham’s focus as he typed furiously at one of the desks, then ceased and leaned back with his hands behind his head, watching some output scroll up the screen of the old green-phosphor terminal (a museum piece but apparently still useable). Mina decided not to go back to sleep.

“Whatcha doin’?” she asked.

“Oh – hey. I don’t normally get up this early… something came up last night. I’m glad my pager didn’t wake you,” he said without turning around, then began typing again after the output stopped.

Mina got dressed, used the loft bathroom, and climbed down the ladder. She was contemplating just walking right out when Graham turned around.

“Please don’t go… I just need a few more minutes to make sure my commands made it through, and then I’d like to take you to breakfast. Pull up a chair.”

She watched him work as he explained that he was trying to get a command out to a worm he had managed to get running on about two thousand Sun boxes around the world.

“You ever watch Tron?” he asked.

“When I was a kid. Weren’t the blue guys the good guys?”

“Tron was brilliant. Writing programs to try to get control of a system for business and political reasons… it was so far ahead of its time. Tron imagined things happening on a mainframe that now COULD actually happen if you consider the Internet as one big system. And a fucking Disney movie. Shit.”

He continued: “Remember when Tron had to get some information from Alan1, his user, and he had to get access to the i/o tower?”

Mina smiled. “Yeah, I do remember that. And he had that cute girl with him… and the old man, the digital avatar of the original entrepreneur, let them use the tower.”

Graham paused, thinking. (a comment like that can linger)

He continued: “Well, my worm is trying to do the same thing.”

Something beeped and he got back into it deeply again, while Mina sat and watched him and was thinking about Smurf and his remote control Mars probes.

Chapter N: Hilltop Communications

Smurf gazed down at the domes glinting in the sunset, incredibly bright yet sparse, and relished the red rocks and the communications beacons. Being here was not a necessity of the project, of course. It was a gesture of intent. A human physical presence in the gravity wave that is Mars. And he would take back to Earth a sense of what it really means to be on another world.

He turned his mech and walked back down the loader path from the mine pit – back to the electro-launcher complex and the green fields of Earth-eco under the domes.

Chapter 4: Money Transfer

“I have something to confess,” said Graham. He had just finished explaining that the command got through to 90% of the worm instances; certain “processes” were running. He seemed honestly to be rather worried about having lied to Mina, and turned off the terminal.

Mina knew he had lied. They had developed a rapport such that she knew he didn’t write worms for the government. But Graham also DID write worms.

“I don’t work for the government, obviously.”

“I kind of work for Madison Ave.”

What a lamer. Mina thought of the Jaguar coupe in the basement and was glad Steve (yes, Graham was an online name used for the first time in the physical world) didn’t work for the government.

Next: flashback. Graham tells story of cubicle world of coders with sandals on, but on the east coast.

“I realized that this was not a battleground. It was a limbo.”

Graham heard a snore sound and jerked his eyes open. The screensaver was still going (the powersave mode that turned the monitor off altogether hadn’t been invoked, so he must not have been asleep more than fifteen minutes) and the stream of house trancy trip-hop was still playing.

Graham had trained his body over the last several months to be able to take a nap every day after lunch, and never get caught sleeping by any coworkers. He slept lightly enough that footsteps coming toward his small office in the corner of the building next to the big conference room (but not near the door to it) would wake him enough to open his eyes. He reasoned that it was better to sleep for a half an hour every day and then be able to write good code, refreshed, rather than struggling to keep his eyes open at the pc and generate who-knows-what horrific bugs in the accounting system he was developing.

Once in a while someone would come in to talk to him and he would respond slowly to their questions, vaguely diverting the conversation and laying some obtuse voodoo on them when his drowsy just-wakened brain simply couldn’t think well. He had just closed his eyes again when his person-detector went off and he opened them with difficulty. Damn, it was Lakshmikanth.

“How’s it going, Steve?” asked the dark and diminutive Indian programmer.

“Oh, fine. Working on the full call transaction,” Graham replied.

“I need your help,” said Lakshmi, “with the screen for editing validations. The specs say I’m supposed to display an object code, and there’s a field in the csh_validation table called obj_cd_ovtp… and also a field in the csh_head table called lgcy_object, and another called valobj.”

Time for several deep breaths. Hmmm. OK.

“Well… if it’s a validation originated in the new system, there is no object code. For converted validations, you should really display the lgcy_object value, unless the obj_cd_ovtp field in the detail record is populated… in which case, display that. I have no idea what valobj is for; I didn’t add that field and I don’t think it was there when I started… you’d better check with Debbie on that one.”

“Thanks Steve. See ya.”

“Bye Lakshmi.”

This was not what Graham had signed up for when he dropped out of school to be a programmer. The worst part was that he was making $100 an hour and therefore couldn’t leave. Once you get good enough at something that you are making some real money, you’re stuck baby.

Chapter 5: Probe Online

Little Johnny Westminster had waited for three weeks with baited breath. The blue and gold package finally came to the front porch of his house via UPS.

Johnny tore open the box and dug through manuals, notices, warnings, and wrapping until he found media. A blue and gold disc. He spent ten minutes convincing his little sister that what he had was cool and finally got the disc into the game console in the family room.

Twenty minutes later Johnny’s mother and father were in the room too, father lecturing the kids on how the bot needed to hibernate during the Martian winter, which would be about the time that they would be going back to school. On the screen a red image of desert rocks displayed in 320×320 resolution. The same image appeared on the screen on mom’s cellphone, and she was fighting with Daddy over the best move to make during the next physical motion window… to Johnny’s surprise the two parents began to cooperate until they solved the problem.

“Now Fred,” she was saying.

After several days of tinkering with the bot into the wee hours of the night, using whatever interface device presented itself… Johnny was in Mars.

The dawn was breaking on the red world and the earth came up over the horizon. Johnny aimed his little dish at an orbiting satellite, to the left of the earth and down a little bit, and beamed his report of last nights manoevre during a brief 20-minute physical motion window.

The bot, a pod with a helicopter propeller on top, had risen straight up into the “air”, tilted, and shot off parallel to the ground, clearing the lip of a crater, jagged and tumbled. After whizzing merrily across a 30-mile plain, it slowed and hovered down into a sudden deep cleft in the Martian crust. Mom’s cellphone rang at work the next morning.

“Morgan.”

“Baby, you’re not supposed to be calling me this morning… you know I’m in meetings. Are the kids OK?”

“Go to the Mars Explorer website. Our bot is on the front page.”

Her jaw dropped and she gazed in awe at a grainy image of a crablike creature crawling around at the edge of a pool of sludge. About half the size of the bot, it was estimated in the display below to be about as big as an earth-tarantula.

Plot proposal 1:

Smurf, now tremendously wealthy and famous for having facilitated the discovery of life on Mars, has never forgotten about Mina. She was the most attractive girl that had ever been interested in him before the “discovery that life was everywhere <of course>”. The beauties that flirted with him now were incincere, he thinks. He seduces her back into his life and away from Graham, who has become obsessed with a prototype worm that divides into male and female versions and cross-pollinates mutations. Graham has not had time for anything other than coding and testing, coding and testing.

Graham, enraged by Smurf’s use of wealth and power to steal his girlfriend, and frustrated by the fact that although he could have been an infamous hacker, he had always been careful to keep his creations reigned in enough not to do anything “illegal” and crash and burn into a book deal…

Graham, in a fit of rage, releases his new worm creations into the Mars Explorer network and they manage to find their way into the bots.
—

You see, our bodies are but windows into these worlds.

The crab-shaman scurried into a crack in a red cliff, etching a tiny scratch into his ornate green shell.

“The earthians are coming. The earthian robots are coming.”

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