Read Online Mad Professor by Rudy Rucker - Free Book Online

miss you, Bill,” I said into the plush Victorian quiet of the hotel hall.
    I can swear I never touched his old room’s door, but just as surely as if I’d pounded on it with my fist, a voice from within called, “We hear you. Come on in.” The words were blurred, as if the speaker had a lisp.
    I pushed forward; the door swung open. The room was filled with heavy, dark furniture, and books piled in the gloom. A man with long, stringy blond hair and a fluffy blond goatee sat before a velvet-curtained window, bent over a desk with a single brass lamp. At first I had only a quarter-view of his face. He was bent very low indeed, as if kissing the papers scattered on his desk, papers covered by penciled writing in the smallest script I’d ever seen.
    â€œWelcome back, Gregge,” came a high, twangy voice, different from the one I’d heard through the door. The blond man turned his head, clamping his mouth tight shut and staring at me with pale blue eyes that held an expression of triumphant glee. A curious high piping seemed to come from within his head. And then all at once his mouth gaped open.
    You must believe me when I tell you that his tongue was a small manikin, a detailed copy of William Burroughs, fully animated and alive. I, who have so little imagination, could never invent such a thing.
    I stepped back, feeling for the door, wanting to flee and forget what I was seeing. But I struck the door wrong—and it slammed shut. The blond man came closer, mouth open, eyes dancing with spiteful delight. I was shaking all over.
    Like a dictator on the balcony of his palace, the meat puppet Burroughs stared out from the mouth, his tiny hands resting upon the lower teeth as if upon a railing.
    â€œI knowed you was coming,” came Bill’s thin, rheumy voice. He was using the Pa Kettle accent he sometimes liked to put on. “Picked up your moon-calf aura from the hall.” He paused, savoring my reactions.
    â€œI don’t understand,” I said, fighting back a spasm of nausea. “Don’t hurt me.”
    â€œI’m working out karma,” said the little Burroughs. “I owe you for never writing back. I’m gonna let my pal Dr. Teage set you up for a Poe tasting. Later on you might do some secretarial work for us—or make yourself useful in other ways.” He allowed himself one of his appalling leers. “You’re aging well, Gregge. But that’s enough outta me already.”
    In a twinkling, the Burroughs face on the blond man’s tongue smoothed over, and the tiny arms sank into the pink surface. Iwas faced with a somewhat seedy character licking his lips. His breath smelled of fruit and manure.
    â€œI’m Teage,” he said, his goatee wagging. “And you’re–”
    â€œGregge Crane,” I said. “I knew Bill a little, a long time ago. I was with him in this room.”
    â€œI know,” said Teage, who for some reason seemed to trust me. “I’m with him in this room every day. We’re doing a book together. I’m like you. I always wanted to be a fiction writer. Look at this.”
    On the desk were the sheets filled with tiny words, and lying on one of the sheets was a sharpened bit of mechanical pencil lead with a scrap of tape around one end. Bill’s writing implement, half the size of a toothpick.
    â€œThe process is my own invention,” said Teage. “I call it twanking. Before I started channeling Bill, I was a biocyberneticist. Twanking is elementary. You assemble a data base of the writer’s works and journals, use back-propagation and simulated evolution to get a compact semantic generator that produces the same data, turn the generator into the connection weights for an artificial neural net, code the neural net into wet-ware for the gene expression loops of some human fecal bacteria, and then rub the smart germs onto living flesh. I think it’s deliciously fitting