Transreal Cyberpunk by Rudy Rucker, Bruce Sterling Page B

during the early 1980s, when the home’s original builder, a designer of shoot-em-up computer twitch-games, had shored up the floor to accommodate two dozen massive arcade-consoles. This was a good thing too, for Tug’s seawater tanks were a serious structural burden, and far outweighed all of Tug’s other possessions put together, except maybe the teak waterbed which his ex-lover had left. Tug had bought the tanks themselves at a knockdown auction from the federal-seizure sale of an eccentric Oakland cocaine dealer, who had once used them to store schools of piranha.
    Revel mulled silently over the ranks of jellyfish. Backlit by greenish glow from the spotlights of a defunct speed-metal crew, Tug’s jellies were at their best. The backlighting brought out their most secret, most hidden interior curvatures, with an unblinking brilliance that was well-nigh pornographic.
    Their seawater trace elements and Purina Jellyfish Lab Chow cost more than Tug’s own weekly grocery bills, but his jelly menagerie had come to mean more to Tug than his own nourishment, health, money, or even his love-life. He spent long secret hours entranced before the gently spinning, ciliated marvels, watching them reel up their brine shrimp prey in mindless, reflexive elegance, absorbing the food in a silent ecstasy of poisonous goo. Live, digestive goo, that transmuted through secret alchemical biology into pulsating, glassy flesh.
    Tug’s ex-lover had been pretty sporting about Tug’s goo-mania, especially compared to his other complaints about Tug’s numerous perceived character flaws, but Tug figured his lover had finally been driven away by some deep rivalry with the barely-organic. Tug had gone to some pains to Windex his noseprints from the aquarium glass before Revel arrived.
    “Can you tell which ones are real and which ones I made from scratch?” Tug demanded triumphantly.
    “You got me whipped,” Revel admitted. “It’s a real nice show, Tug. If you can really teach these suckers some tricks, we’ll have ourselves a business.”
    Revel’s denim chest emitted a ringing sound. He reached within his overalls, whipped out a cellular phone the size of a cigarette-pack, and answered it. “Pullen here! What? Yeah. Yeah, sure. Okay, see you.” He flipped the phone shut and stowed it.
    “Got you a visitor coming,” he announced. “Business consultant I hired.”
    Tug frowned.
    “My uncle’s idea, actually,” Revel shrugged. “Just kind of standard Pullen procedure before we sink any real money in a venture. We got ourselves one of the best computer-industry consultants in the business.”
    “Yeah? Who?”
    “Edna Sydney. She’s a futurist, she writes a high-finance technology newsletter that’s real hot with the boys in suits.”
    “Some strange woman is going to show up here and decide if my Ctenophore Inc. is worth funding?” Tug’s voice was high and shaky with stress. “I don’t like it, Revel.”
    “Just try ‘n’ act like you know what you’re doing, Tug, and then she’ll take my Uncle Donny Ray a clean bill of health for us. Just a detail really.” Revel laughed falsely. “My uncle’s a little over-cautious. Belt-and-suspenders kinda guy. Lot of private investigators on his payroll and stuff. The old boy’s just tryin’ to keep me outa trouble, basically. Don’t worry about it none, Tug.”
    Revel’s phone rang again, this time from the pocket on his left buttock. “Pullen here! What? Yeah, I know his house don’t look like much, but this is the place, all right. Yeah, okay, we’ll let you in.” Revel stowed the phone again, and turned to Tug. “Go get the door, man, and I’ll double check that our cooler of Urschleim is out of sight.”
    Seconds later, Tug’s front doorbell rang loudly. Tug opened it to find a woman in blue jeans, jogging shoes and a shapeless gray wool jersey, slipping her own cellular phone into her black nylon satchel.
    “Hello,” she said. “Are you Dr.