Rudy Rucker: Junk DNA

First published in Asimov's Science Fiction, edited by Gardner Dozois, January 2003.

Life was hard in old Silicon Valley. Little Janna Gutierrez was a native Valley girl, half Vietnamese, half Latino. She had thoughtful eyes and black hair in high ponytails.

Her mother Shirley tried without success to sell California real estate. Her father Ruben plugged away inside cold, giant companies like Ctenephore and Lockheed Biological. The family lived in a charmless bungalow in the endless grid of San Jose.

Janna first learned true bitterness when her parents broke up. Tired of her hard scrabble with a lowly wetware engineer, Shirley ran off with Bang Nguyen, the glamorous owner of an online offshore casino. Dad should have worked hard to win back Mom's lost affection, but, being an engineer, he contented himself with ruining Bang. He found and exploited every unpatched hole in Bang's operating system. Bang never knew what hit him.

Despite Janna's pleas to come home, Mom stubbornly stuck by her online entrepreneur. She bolstered Bang's broken income by retailing network porn. Jaded Americans considered porn to be the commonest and most boring thing on the Internet. Hollywood glamour, however, still had a moldy cachet in the innocent Third World. Mom spent her workdays dubbing the ethnic characteristics of tribal Somalis and Baluchis onto porn stars. She found the work far more rewarding than real estate.

Mom's deviant behavior struck a damp and morbid echo in Janna's troubled soul. Janna sidestepped her anxieties by obsessively collecting Goob dolls. Designed by glittery-eyed comix freaks from Hong Kong and Tokyo, Goobs were wiggly, squeezable, pettable creatures made of trademarked Ctenephore piezoplastic. These avatars of ultra-cuteness sold off wire racks world-wide, to a generation starved for Nature. Thanks to environmental decline, kids of Janna's age had never seen authentic wildlife. So they flipped for the Goob menagerie: marmosets with butterfly wings, starfish that scuttled like earwigs, long, furry frankfurter cat-snakes.

Sometimes Janna broke her Goob toys from their mint-in-the-box condition, and dared to play with them. But she quickly learned to absorb her parents' cultural values, and to live for business buzz. Janna spent her off-school hours on the Net, pumping-and-dumping collectible Goobs to younger kids in other states.

Eventually, life in the Valley proved too much for Bang Nguyen. He pulled up the stakes in his solar-powered RV and drove away, to pursue a more lucrative career, retailing networked toilets. Janna's luckless Mom, her life reduced to ashes, scraped out a bare living marketing mailing lists to mailing list marketers.

Janna ground her way through school and made it into U.C. Berkeley. She majored in computational genomics. Janna worked hard on software for hardwiring wetware, but her career timing was off. The latest pulse of biotech start-ups had already come and gone. Janna was reduced to a bottle-scrubbing job at Triple Helix, yet another subdivision of the giant Ctenephore conglomerate.

On the social front, Janna still lacked a boyfriend. She'd studied so hard she'd been all but dateless through school and college. In her senior year she'd moved in with this cute Korean boy who was in a band. But then his mother had come to town with, unbelievably, a blushing North Korean bride for him in tow. So much the obvious advice-column weepie!

In her glum and lonely evenings, Janna played you-are-her interactives, romance stories, with a climax where she would lip-synch a triumphant, tear-jerking video. On other nights Janna would toy wistfully with her decaying Goob collection. The youth market for the dolls had evaporated with the years. Now fanatical adult collectors were trading the Goobs, stiff and dusty artifacts of their lost consumer childhood.

The zany Zipkinova marched into Triple Helix toting a fancy briefcase with video display built into its piezoplastic skin. Veruschka was clear-eyed and firm-jawed, with black hair cut very short. She wore a formal black jogging suit with silk stripes on the legs. Her Baltic pallor was newly reddened by California sunburn. She was very thoroughly made up. Lipstick, eye shadow, nails -- the works.

She fiercely demanded a specific slate of bio-hardware and a big wad of start-up money. Janna's boss was appalled at Veruschka's archaic approach -- didn't this Russki woman get it that the New Economy was even deader than Leninism? It fell to the luckless Janna to throw Veruschka out of the building.

"You are but a tiny cog," said Veruschka, accurately summing-up Janna's cubicle. "But you are intelligent, yes, I see this in your eyes. Your boss gave me the brush-off. I did not realize Triple Helix is run by lazy morons."

"We're all quite happy here," said Janna lightly. The computer was, of course, watching her. "I wonder if we could take this conversation off-site? That's what's required, you see. For me to get you out of the way."

"Let me take you to a fine lunch at Denny's," said Veruschka with sudden enthusiasm. "I love Denny's so much! In Petersburg, our Denny's always has long lines that stretch down the street!"

Janna was touched. She gently counter-suggested a happening local coffee-shop called the Modelview Matrix. Cute musicians were known to hang out there.

With the roads screwed and power patchy, it took forever to drive anywhere in California, but at least traffic fatalities were rare, given that the average modern vehicle had the mass and speed of a golf-cart. As Janna forded the sunny moonscape of potholes, Veruschka offered her start-up pitch.

"From Russia, I bring to legendary Silicon Valley a breakthrough biotechnology! I need a local partner, Janna. Someone I can trust."

"Yeah?" said Janna.

"It's a collectible pet."

Janna said nothing, but was instantly hooked.

"In Russia, we have mastered genetic hacking," said Veruschka, "although California is the planet's legendary source of high-tech marketing."

Janna parked amid a cluster of plastic cars like colored seedpods. Inside, Janna and Veruschka fetched slices of artichoke quiche.

"So now let me show you," said Veruschka as they took a seat. She placed a potently quivering object on the tabletop. "I call him Pumpti."

The Pumpti was the size and shape of a Faberge egg, pink and red, clearly biological. It was moist, jiggly, and veined like an internal organ with branching threads of yellow and purple. Janna started to touch it, then hesitated, torn between curiosity and disgust.

"It's a toy?" she asked. She tugged nervously at a fanged hairclip. It really wouldn't do to have this blob stain her lavender silk jeans.

The Pumpti shuddered, as if sensing Janna's hovering finger. And then it oozed silently across the table, dropped off the edge, and plopped damply to the diner's checkered floor.

Veruschka smiled, slitting her cobalt-blue eyes, and leaned over to fetch her Pumpti. She placed it on a stained paper napkin.

"All we need is venture capital!"

"Um, what's it made of?" wondered Janna.

"Pumpti's substance is human DNA!"

"Whose DNA?" asked Janna.

"Yours, mine, anyone's. The client's." Veruschka picked it up tenderly, palpating the Pumpti with her lacquered fingertips. "This one is made of me. Once I worked at the St. Petersburg Institute of Molecular Science. My boss -- well, he was also my boyfriend...." Veruschka pursed her lips. "Wiktor's true obsession was the junk DNA -- you know this technical phrase?"

"Wiktor found a way for these junk codons to express themselves. The echo from the cradle of life, evolution's roadside picnic! To express junk DNA required a new wetware reader. Wiktor called it the Universal Ribosome." She sighed. "We were so happy until the mafiya wanted the return on their funding."