last byte

Future Tense, one of the revolving features on this page, presents stories and essays from the intersection of computational science and technological speculation, their boundaries limited only by our ability to imagine what will and could be.

DOI: 10.1145/1965724.1965750
Rudy Rucker
Future Tense
My office Mate
I became a biocomputational zombie for science…and for love.

yOu’D Be surpriseD what poor equipment the profs have in our CS department. Until quite recently, my office mate Harry’s computer was a primeval beige box lurking beneath his desk. Moreover, it had taken to making an irritating whine, and the techs didn’t want to bother with it.

One rainy Tuesday during his office hour, Harry snapped. He interrupted a conversation with an earnest student by jumping to his feet, yelling a curse, and savagely kicking the computer. The whine stopped; the machine was dead. Frightened and bewildered, the student left.

“Now they’ll have to replace this
clunker,” said Harry. “And you keep
your trap shut, Fletcher.”
“What if the student talks?”
“Nobody listens to them.”
In a few days, a new computer ap-
peared on Harry’s desk, an elegant new
model the size of a sandwich, with a
wafer-thin display propped up like a
portrait frame.

Although my office mate is a brilliant man, he’s a thumb-fingered klutz. For firmly held reasons of principle, he wanted to tweak the settings of his lovely new machine to make it use a reverse Polish notation command-line interface; this had to do with the massive digital archiving project on which he was forever working. The new machine demurred at adopting reverse Polish. Harry downloaded some free-ware patches, intending to teach the device a lesson. You can guess how that worked out.

The techs took Harry’s dead sandwich back to their lair, wiped its memory, and reinstalled the operating sys-

tem. Once again its peppy screen shone atop his desk. But now Harry sulked, not wanting to use it.

“This is about my soul,” he told me. “I’ve spent, what, 30 years creating a software replica of myself. Everything I’ve written: my email messages, my photos, and a lot of my conversations—

“My entire wetware
database is flowing
into every one of
these slime mold
cells. They like
reverse Polish.”

and, yes, I’m taping this, Fletcher. A
rich compost of Harry data. It’s ready
to germinate, ready to come to life. But
these brittle machines thwart my im-
mortality at every turn.”
“You’d just be modeling yourself
as a super chatbot, Harry. In the real
world, we all die.” I paused, thinking
about Harry’s attractive woman friend
of many years. “It’s a shame you never
married Velma. You two could have had
kids. Biology is the easy path to self-rep-
lication.”
“You’re not married either,” said
Harry, glaring at me. “And Velma says
what you said, too.” As if reaching a
momentous decision, he snatched the
shapely sandwich computer off his desk
and put it on mine. “Very well then! I’ll
make my desk into a stinky bio farm.”
Sure enough, when I came into the
office on Monday, I found Harry’s desk
encumbered with a small biological
laboratory. Harry and his woman friend
Velma were leaning over it, fitting a
data cable into a socket in the side of a
Petri dish that sat beneath a bell jar.

“Hi Fletch,” said Velma brightly. She
was a terminally cheerful genomics
professor with curly hair. “Harry wants
me to help him reproduce as a slime
mold.”
“How romantic,” I said. “Do you
think it’ll work?”
“Biocomputation has blossomed
this year,” said Velma. “The Durban-
Krush mitochondrial protocols have
solved our input/output problems.”
“A cell’s as much a universal com-
puter as any of our department’s junk-
boxes,” put in Harry. “And just look at
this! My entire wetware database is flow-
ing into every [COntinueD On p. 119]