A Good Old-Fashioned Future Read Online Free PDF Page A

shape within a matrix of piezoplastic microbeads. The sintered microbeads behaved like a mass of cells: each of them could compress or elongate in response to delicate vibratory signals, and each microbead could in turn pass information to its neighbors.
    A completed artificial jellyfish model was a floppy little umbrella that beat in steady cellular waves of excitation and relaxation. Tug’s best plastic jellyfish could stay active for up to three weeks.
    Tug’s next requirement for his creations was “a killer application,” as the software tycoons called it. And it seemed he might have that killer app in hand, given his recent experiments in making the jellyfish sensitive to chemical scents and signals. Tug had convinced Revel—and half-believed himself—that the artificial jellies could be equipped with radiosignaling chips and set loose on the sea floor. They could sniff out oil-seeps in the ocean bottom and work their way deep into the vents. If this were so, then artificial jellyfish would revolutionize undersea oil prospecting.
    The only drawback, in Tug’s view, was that offshore drilling was a contemptible crime against the wonderful environment that had bred the real jellies in the first place. Yet the plan seemed likely to free up Texas venture capital, enough capital to continue his research for at least another year. And maybe in another year, thought Tug, he would have a more ecologically sound killer app, and he would be able to disentangle himself from the crazy Texan.
    Right on cue, Revel Pullen came strolling down theexit ramp, clad in the garb of a white-trash oil-field worker: a flannel shirt and a pair of Can’t-Bust-’Em overalls. Revel had a blond crewcut and smooth dark skin. The shirt was from Neiman-Marcus and the overalls were ironed, but they seemed to be genuinely stained with dirt-fresh Texas crude.
    Tug hopped off the hood of his car and stood on tiptoe to wave, deliberately camping it up to jangle the Texan’s nerves. He drew up a heel behind him like Marilyn Monroe waving in
The Misfits
.
    Nothing daunted, Revel Pullen headed Tug’s way with an exaggerated bowlegged sprawl and a scuff of his python-skin boots. Revel was the scapegrace nephew of Amarillo’s billionaire Pullen Brothers. The Pullen clan were malignant market speculators and greenmail raiders who had once tried to corner the world market in molybdenum.
    Revel himself, the least predictable of his clan, was in charge of the Pullen Brothers’ weakest investments: the failing oil wells that had initially brought the Pullen family to prominence—beginning with the famous Ditheree Gusher, drilled near Spindletop, Texas, in 1892.
    Revel’s quirk was his ambition to become a high-tech tycoon. This was why Revel attended computer-science meetings like SIGUSC, despite his stellar ignorance of everything having to do with the movement of bytes and pixels.
    Revel stood ready to sink big money into a technically sexy Silicon Valley start-up. Especially if the start-up could somehow do something for his family’s collapsing oil industry and—though this part still puzzled Tug—find a use for some odd clear fluid that Revel’s engineers had recently been pumping from the Ditheree hole.
    “Shit howdy, Tug,” drawled Revel, hoisting his polyester/denim duffel bag from one slim shoulder to another. “Mighty nice of y’all to come meet me.”
    Beaming, Tug freed his fingers from Revel’s insistent grip and gestured toward the Animata. “So, Revel! Ready to start a business? I’ve decided we should call it Ctenophore,Inc. A
ctenophore
is a kind of hermaphroditic jellyfish which uses a comblike feeding organ to filter nutrients from the ocean; they’re also called comb-jellies. Don’t you think Ctenophore is a perfect name for our company? Raking in the dollars from the economy’s mighty sea!”
    “Not so loud!” Revel protested, glancing up and down the airport pavement in a parody of wary street-smarts. “As far as