Transreal Cyberpunk by Rudy Rucker, Bruce Sterling Page A

years.

Big Jelly
    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 email 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