This is new story by me and Bruce Sterling. It appeared on Boing Boing, on Halloween, 2026. And I added it to a new 2nd edition of our anthology, Transreal Cyberpunk, which went live the same day. And now I’m posting the story online, mixing in some photos and paintings that I have kicking around among, including a few (progbably too many) of Bruce & me, for you trufans out there.
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Bruce and I were guests at Armadillocon in Austin, Texas, in October, 2026. (See my two posts on the event.) Very nice scene, and invigorating to see Bruce and his wife Jasmina once again. Sadly my wife Sylvia was no longer with us. I’d befriended another a woman since then, Barb Ash, and she was along for the trip. Interesting to introduce her to the odd and little-known world of pro SF authors. Like, what?
Bruce sat next to me on a “What Is Cyberpunk” panel at the start of the con. “I always knew it would come to this,” he murmured to me. Kind of resigned, but facing it. I was eighty now. Like a Twilight Zone episode.
We couldn’t help but agree to write another story together. Our eleventh! I knew that Bruce had been on a Robert Louis Stevenson kick lately. So I’d been thinking about a possible a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hype routine. I figured Bruce would be Mr. Hyde? Bruce thought we should tackle a simpler trope, a magic wishes story, taking off from Stevenson’s classic “The Bottle Imp.” And I liked that.
Bruce is always challenging to work with. But I was ready to go. I hadn’t written any fiction for a year. And I knew Bruce and I would end up with something different. When I work with the guy, he gets into my head. But he writes things I like, and his advice is often good. I think of a sword on an anvil. The blacksmith heats the blade to a screaming-hot glow—and whales on it with a sledgehammer. Thereby annealing the steel into something more potent than before. Thus: Bruce revising my work.
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I had committed to having both the story and the 2nd edition of our Transreal Cyberpunk collection be ready on Halloween. I was rushing at the end, working ten hour days for ten days, juggling all the plot twists, corrections, and software tools involved. Bruce was busy in Torino having videos of him filmed. I may not have given him enough leeway time to approve my very last changes to the story. I hope he’s not mad at me. At times we have a little bit of Lennon/McCartney thing going. But what a great story it is! Enjoy.
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(“Meeting the Bottle Imp”. AI Animaiton by Bruce Sterling, “The Great Prompter.”)
(“The Bottle Imp.” Painting by Rudy Rucker)
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The Bottle Imps
Copyright (C) Rudy Rucker & Bruce Sterling
On the money front, Lou had a side hustle: hunting bubble jade. He needed it because he was canned.
Canned from his post as marine biology professor at UFO. Canned like a Monterey sardine. Gone as the monster squid and mosasaur who tussled on a childhood poster in Lou’s home-lab.
Regarding bubble jade, the name doesn’t mean the stone has bubbles inside. The name only means the gemstone’s surface has circular patterns that resemble bubbles. Bubble jade is heavy. And it’s very, very rare.
Hunting the precious bubble jade was a long shot, but it was wide open. Not a lot of people would dive for it anymore. Over a hundred feet below the skeevy surf of Jade Cove in Big Sur. Enormous, heavy waves slammed constantly into the cliffs, with spray shooting all the way up past Route 1, spawning hosts of micro-avalanches.
In previous years, Lou had a tight-lipped crew of former students to help him, all from UFO, the humble career-oriented University of Fort Ord—where Lou had worked. Despite all the good they did for the mostly Latino community, UFO was imploding just now, with a toxic culture-war fomented by new administrators: creationists, born-agains, book burners, and god-pigs. They’d fired Professor Lou Lopez for calling the dean a bone-eating zombie worm.
With Lou’s comfortable UFO scene blown, his stepdaughter Amparo was now his dive partner. She’d take a day off from her job organizing whale-watch cruises out of the Moss Landing harbor. She was better than the students had been. Smarter, with great reflexes and more stamina. She claimed she could smell the bubble jade, which made no scientific sense, but Lou was willing to call it a fact. Amparo was that good.
Normally the dive season at Jade Cove ended with the summer, but this year, unemployed and needing bread, Lou started having vivid dreams about bubble jade. Dreaming about one specific chunk. It was like a character in a cartoon. A large gingerbread man, bumpy and shiny and beautifully patterned. Telling Lou to come get him. Three nights in a row Lou had this dream. So, okay, he’d go for it, even if it was early November
The week before, a climate-tweaked Pacific typhoon had torn big chunks from the Big Sur bluffs. So, sure, that might be a good time to hunt jade! And, well, even if it still wasn’t exactly sunny, the rains had abated a bit.
So Amparo and Lou headed down to Jade Cove, driving Amparo’s large, third-hand, back-country pickup. Lou himself didn’t happen to own wheels just now.
“We deserve a big score,” loyal Amparo told Lou on the way down. He’d just told her about his dreams. “Visions are a good sign,” said Amparo. “Especially for rock hounds.”
Route 1 was a little iffy, in fact, technically speaking, it was closed, but with Amparo’s charm and Lou’s old-timer connections, they wended their way down the coast, taking some back-road detours along the way—especially old Coast Road that looped inland past the remains of scenic Bixby bridge, half of which had recently collapsed.
The weather was rather brisk. Nobody else had the gumption to visit Jade Cove today. Our seekers’ hopes rose. What new treasures had the storm unveiled? Clutters of branches jammed the narrow shingle at the water’s edge. Not really a beach. Lou and Amparo wore their heavy-duty hooded wetsuits. They paused at water’s edge.
Lou took a fond and, he worried, final look at Amparo. Her fit form was surf-cured like salmon jerky, her hair a dense shock. She had a tense, dramatic look. She’d inherited her mother Lupe’s gift for bending unlikely men to her will. Could Amparo’s fisherman boyfriend Renato possibly be a proper match for such a mermaid?
Amparo’s mother Lupe had left Lou a few years ago. They’d never gotten legally divorced. Lupe wanted to land a big fish first. She’d had a few affairs, but the high-rollers wouldn’t marry her. Lupe could be a little raw. Her job these days was so-so. She managed the checkers at the big Costco in Sand City. Her hobby was fitness. She was a gym rat, and skilled at judo.
Lou had to admit that he missed Lupe, and Lupe knew that, and maybe at some level she missed Lou. She liked to stop by the house, just to talk. She’d sit with Lou and quietly rattle his chain. And remind him that she still owned half the house, and that he should maintain it better for when it was time to flip it. Ah, Lupe.
“Let’s go, Poppy,” said Amparo, interrupting Lou’s reverie. “Dive in.”
Lou waded through the surging waves. Gave a farewell whoop, mouthed his regulator, donned his fins, and slipped beneath the surface.
For her part, Amparo was thinking how nuts this was. They were little crabs looking to pinch something tasty. Hoping for a speck of joy.
Lou swam down along the underwater bluff, stopping at 120 feet. Unwise with no special equipment, but he was a veteran diver. He figured he knew what to do. If he only stayed fifteen minutes, he’d be safe enough.
He fought his way through a tangled forest of giant kelp. And then, aha, he saw a spot where the undersea wall was bare of growth. Swept clear by the violence of the typhoon. Better than that, the wall was heavily cracked, giant plinths of granite leaning together. And, aha again, Lou saw something embedded in one of the plinths…something beautiful.
But he had a problem. His thoughts were echoing. Rapture of the depths kicking in. Nitrogen narcosis—that thing where the pressure drives nitrogen into your blood and you space out. Maybe he was a little deeper than 120 feet? He hadn’t been watching his depth gauge and, oh hell, he couldn’t seem to read his gauge at all. Fully narced.
But here came trusty Amparo, tugging on his arm, signaling it was time to head toward the surface. Amparo was in control. She was, up to a point, more resistant to the narcosis than Lou. She had her mother Lupe’s grit.
But Lou wasn’t stopping now. He was looking at the biggest chunk of bubble jade ever. He pointed toward it so Amparo would see. It jutted from an immense stone chunk like a time capsule emerging from the past. Massive, the size of a human, or of a coffin. A sarcophagus! In his addled state, Lou was somehow thinking this would be a good place to die. Or, no Lou, a place to get rich.
Dragging Amparo along, Lou went and ran his hand across the bubble jade, stroking it like a pet. Divinely smooth, with soft bullseye patterns, lovely beyond compare. Did he see faces inside it?
Insanely intent, Lou unsheathed his big dive knife, drove the point into the crack along the jade, and pried. Did it again, and did it a third time. Like extracting a molar. The bubble jade twisted clear—but somehow it wasn’t properly heavy. It was light. The precious boulder rose straight toward the surface, keeping pace with the bubbles from Lou and Amparo’s SCUBA. Impossible.
Lou wanted to swim straight to the surface. He could see the gleaming underside of the floating jade up there. High, high overhead. Amparo slowed Lou by main force. Slowed him enough so that he didn’t burst a lung or get the bends.
And then finally they were out, fins and masks off, staggering across the shore’s rugged stones—and herding the floating raft of bubble jade along. Dragged it onto a dry spot at water’s edge. Sat on a log panting, touching their stone, wondering.
“Smooth as a yacht hull,” said Amparo. There were rather a lot of wrecked yachts on the shores of California these days.
“Such a beautiful sheen,” said Lou. “All those blues and greens,”
“With bulls-eye circles on the bumps. Polished from tumbling for…what? Centuries? Thousands of years? What a score, Poppy. Epic.”
“Except that it’s too light,” said Lou.
Yes, as a smooth and surf-tumbled giant gemstone, it would have been a truly fantastic score, but somehow it seemed more bubble than jade. Easily they balanced the great, near-weightless piece on one end, with near-weightless ease. It was streamlined like a speed-smoothed meteorite found in the dirt, but grand in size, even monumental.
“Maybe it’s hollow inside,” suggested Amparo. “Full of great crystals!”
Lou rapped on the object with the butt of his dive-knife. “I really don’t think this is really stone. Or metal. And forget plastic. Down at 120 feet inside a block of granite?” He put on his professor voice. “Highly anomalous.”
He scraped at the surface with the sharp tip of his knife. The tip snapped off with a sharp ping. He tapped hard on the surface—and the rock tapped back, very rapidly, like the sound of a woodpecker.
Out to sea, the waves were rising. The rain had renewed its force, lashing pockmarks across the tubes. Amparo ran her hands over their lovely prize.
“I say something’s alive inside it,” said Amparo. “Those dreams you had?”
“Let’s take it home,” was all Lou said.
They loaded the specimen into the bed of Amparo’s lumbering primer-painted back-country pickup. An apparent lump of dense, precious rock that somehow seemed not to weigh more than fifty pounds. They tied ropes across it in the truck bed, but that didn’t seem like enough. What if it slipped out?
As if hearing Lou and Amparo’s worried discussion, the treasure stone obliged them by making itself heavy. Solidly in the truck.
Lou and Amparo rode comfortably home. They sang songs most of the way, very cheerful, repeatedly looking back to make sure their wondrous find remained in place.
Lou’s house was a structure he’d cobbled onto the concrete and steel stub of a dead railway spur in a lost zone of Sand City, a formerly blue-collar district near Monterey, and by now a home for big box stores.
The house itself was on a gravel road at the very edge of Sand City, with steps running up to the living quarters from the front yard, as well as a ramp from the yard to the lab.
Over time, Lou had hammered his dwelling into shape, mostly with sweat-equity from his UFO grad-students. He’d installed a kitchen, bathrooms, windows, flooring, rugs and hand-crafted furniture—the finer touches at Lupe’s wifely commands.
The harsh industrial lighting had been muted to pleasing apricot tones. Amparo’s quarters had pastel walls and a view of the sea. Some nooks were reef-like lairs with orchids and plump succulents. Lou and Lupe owned it, free and clear.
The place had been a campus party-house for a while, in happier days: red wine had flowed, Bach had played along with old corrida ballads, with gnarly debates and abstruse arguments till the pink glow of dawn. But no more.
Lou wished Amparo would adopt an academic career like his. He felt Amparo deserved a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley. And a research post at the Moss Landing Marine Laboratories.
Amparo knew what her stepfather wanted, but she’d counter with remarks about the world as she saw it. “The student debt would crush me. Our universities are scams these days, Poppy. They’re not here for my dreams, my house, my baby, my big career. We’re a permanent underclass. Rags to rags in four generations. Also, I hate school.
Safe at home Lou and Amparo dried themselves, dressed, and laid the agreeably light-weight jade form on the not overly clean carpet of the lab. For now the thing was quiet.
“If it’s hollow, we gotta be able to open it,” said Amparo. “I like it. So pretty and smooth. Like a bowling pin.”
Lou fetched a wheeled plastic case of heavy-duty tools.
The jade bowling-pin seemed to sense this menacing activity. Smoothly, soundlessly, it shrank down to a new form, a new shape. A form with the distinctly casual air of an empty wine bottle tossed from a car. A classy white-wine bottle. Glassy and tapering with no opening on the top. It kept the same colorations before. A pattern like bubble jade.
A long silence. Lou sighed. “I’ll do this as a matter of principle. Not that I’m expecting much.” He laid the bottle-specimen on the lab bench and set to work with a microscope, fluorescent light, and a full deck of reagents. Probing for mineral composition, organic traces, and any evidence of metabolism. Scanning for growth layers, tubes, pores, vessels, and cellular textures.
Acids and bases dribbled right off. Chisel and hammer got nowhere.
“I don’t think it’s even made of atoms,” said Lou.
“Everything has to be made of atoms,” said Amparo, losing patience.
“What about reflections?” Lou said.
“Put it on the scale,” said Amparo. “Weigh it.”
The digital readout of Lou’s scale flickered back and forth, like a gasoline pump fried by Middle Eastern warfare.
“This thing is a phantom,” Lou sourly said. “Our bottle is literally made of nothing.”
“You’re too rough with it,” decided Amparo. “Let me try talking to it.” She gave the bottle a thorough polish with a handy microfiber cloth. “Come on out,” she said, and set the bottle down with a clack.
The bottle rocked and its surface cleared. Like a two-way mirror. Pale green light inside. Lots of room toward the center, more and more space, the further in your eye went. Like the reflection in a Christmas tree ball. The image was slightly veiled by the now-faint bubble-jade pattern on the outer surface.
Two imps were visible, if you want to call them that. A large one and a small. Male and female, if you will.
They passed through the surface like a sleight of hand-trick. And slowly the imps grew larger, right up to human size.
“I’m Quube,” said the bigger imp, with a voice like a pneumatic hiss. His flesh was tan, with parts of it chromed over. A head, a torso, spidery arms and legs. He had no more material substance than the shine in a wicked woman’s eyes.
“I’m QubQub,” said the smaller one. High, cracking voice. The smaller imp was not as fully-rendered as the bigger one. As if she couldn’t be bothered to properly dress.
“We can grant wishes,” said Quube. He seemed in a hurry. Like a car salesman rushing a sucker. “Entities on the surfaces of planets always want that.”
Amparo cut to the chase. “How many wishes do I get? Am I limited to three?”
QubQub let out a hissing giggle. “No, senorita. One only wish.”
“But extended membership plans are available,” added Quube.
Amparo turned to Lou. “This is a scam, Poppy. It’s bots with holograms. As if we’re rubes.”
“Not a scam,” said little QubQub. “It’s higher science. We’re from infinite dimensional Hilbert space. Seeing what you’re like, and what you’ve got.”
“Experiencing the qualities of your qualia,” said Quube. “From the inside out.”
“Hilbert space,” said Lou, kind of smiling. “Whatever you say. Let’s see where this trip goes, huh, Amparo?”
Quube and QubQub were settling into their new environment, and became more perceptible to humans, Their faces were crooked cartoons. Shiny black eyes. Long, air-hissing lips.
They stretched their narrow arms and kicked their legs, enjoying their freedom. They seemed glad to visit a new world. Glad to be out of their bottle. They ran in circles around the laboratory, skipping and dancing and making shrieking, wub-wub sounds, like a pair of techno DJs. They capered on the walls and ceiling, as if gravity was beneath their notice. Like two subdimensional shadow-puppets projected on a screen of earthly physics.
“It’s like they’re drunk,” said Amparo.
“They’re on shore leave!” said Lou.
He was thinking of the working lives of the world’s great oceanographers. Rotten, repurposed boats, cramped quarters, bad food from the galley, endless storms and pitching decks, the smell of fish and formaldehyde everywhere. That was part of the mission. Charles Darwin did that on the Beagle.
With an alarming, glitchy special-FX stretch, Quube loomed across the lab to get into Lou’s face. “Go ahead, pick one wish apiece. Spill up your guts, your deepest desires, we want to see them!”
“You two are special to us,” added QubQub. “You and Amparo helped us at Jade Cove. A very long time ago, we grew a tunnel into your world. But the tunnel ended inside a giant mass of granite. And the tunnel wouldn’t pull back. And we couldn’t cut the tunnel loose. We were stuck. I fell asleep. And then something happened, and I woke up, and Quube said a guy named Lou could get us all the way out.”
“I don’t understand,” said Lou.
“It’s like QubQub said,” replied Quube. “Our tunnel was stuck inside the rock. We couldn’t push loose. The dimension was tilted wrong. So we had to wait. Finally an avalanche cracked the rock. But we still weren’t quite all the way out. But now I could vibe, and I found you, Lou, and I gave you dreams about bubble jade, and you showed up, and hooray.”
“You’re intrepid explorers!” said Amparo.
“Yes, yes” chirped QubQub, who was beginning to manifest in a more gendered, human-girlish fashion. “And collectors. With powers over your world. Is there anything you need?”
“Well, to begin with, we’re poor,” said Amparo.
QubQub giggled. “You’ll never know how poor! You should see how bitchin’ it is in the subdimensions. That’s, like, the downtown of Hilbert space.”
“And, by the way, you can go there if you enroll in that membership plan I mentioned,” said Quube.
Amparo ignored the sales pitch, and focused on her wish. Keep it simple. “My crappy old beater truck is a pain in my ass. So if—”
“Don’t be hasty!” Lou cried, hastily. “This might be the greased path to Hell. Everybody knows that about bottle imps. We can’t just shout commands at crazily powerful aliens! We need precautionary principles and an ethical structure. And a code of responsible behavior.”
Amparo looked at him with pity. “Oh, Poppy, you’re a scientist from California. You’ve never done any of those things in your whole life.”
Lou was crestfallen. “Well, that’s true. But I wish we could have lunch before starting on big plans.”
Oops!
An old, sealed window cracked open in the wall of the lab. A $39.99 Taco Bell Party Pack floated through, and settled onto the workbench. The fast-food meal was closely followed by a Drink Party Pack.
“Oh fuck!” screamed Lou, utterly sickened by his bush-league blunder. “Couldn’t you at least have gotten food from Tia Veronica’s? I mean, shit, this isn’t real. You have to let me—”
“Too late!” cried Quube, obviously enjoying himself. “Too late! Too late! Too late! You might be interested to know that by way of enhancing your wish, Lou, we folded in the desires of three fruit flies living in your lab. Their tiny brains are refreshingly classic. Honest, simple, sincere. No mixed states and quantum collapse for these little fellows.”
Meanwhile Amparo was deftly unfolding the Taco Bell boxes and removing the tacos and burritos. She crunched through a ground-meat, ice-berg-lettuce and a cornmeal taco-shell with her strong white teeth.
“Eat some, Poppy. It’s American food. You eat it when you’re drunk. How did you get the food anyway, Quube?”
“A childishly simple matter of material translocation,” said Quube. His voice was improving rapidly; he sounded less like a rusty steam-whistle, and almost like…like a professor. “We scarcely had to bend a law of physics.”
“You’re bastards to trick Lou,” said Amparo, starting her second taco. “I’m not gonna blow my wish.”
“What will it be then, young lady,” said Quube.
Amparo thought things over, sipping at her customary Mountain Dew Baja Blast. “I think you already know what I want. A new pickup truck.”
“To hear is to obey,” said Quube.
“And no tricks,” said Amparo. “A maxed-out top-of-the-line pickup exactly like Renato has.”
“Let me do it, it’s my turn!” cried QubQub. Her poorly-realized feet had taken on more solidity. In view of the rain, she’d gone for flat, webbed ones. Duck feet.
“Lo and behold!” she exclaimed. They heard a thud outside.
The four of them made their way outside Lou’s hulking steel and concrete dwelling, walking down the steps to the front yard. The rain had stopped and the sun was peeking out. A handsome pickup truck had appeared. A pearlescent truck with chrome trim. It had settled into the wet dirt without disturbing it.
“But, but…that’s Renato’s truck,” wailed Amparo, instantly recognizing it. “With my photo on his dash. You stole my boyfriend’s truck!”
“It’s yours now,” QubQub calmly said. “You ate our food, now you drive our truck. The key is in it. I put the title and insurance in your name. Drive it around, it’s yours.”
Unable to resist, Amparo yanked open the door, climbed in, honked the horn. She took the wheel, backed out of the yard, and made screechy turns, zooming up and down the dirt road away from the lab, veering, even skidding a donut.
She then drove back, braked the truck fiercely and hopped out. “I always wanted Renato’s truck. And his boat.” She paused. “But not like this.”
“You should just marry Renato,” said QubQub.
“What?”
“That’s your true wish,” said Quube. “The one you didn’t say.”
“Renato keeps not asking me,” said Amparo.
“Frankly, I don’t think he’s smart enough for my stepdaughter,” interrupted Lou.
“He is smart,” cried Amparo. “Just not around you, Poppy. Nobody else is allowed to be smart, when you’re around. Basically you want to stall my life forever, because you don’t want to be alone.”
“You tell him, Amparo,” said QubQub, going into telepathic life-counselor mode. “And Amparo, the only reason Renato doesn’t ask you to marry him is that he’s scared you’ll say no. Because of your stepfather. And, Lou, the guy didn’t go to college at UFO, but he’s running a fishing boat, which is something Professor Lou Lopez would never be smart enough to do.”
Lou frowned and shook his head.
“Renato adores you,” Quube said to Amparo. “He’ll do anything you say. A smart, hard-working guy, at your service. Like a tame bear in a little cottage with furniture. Just tell him whatever you want. If he knows what it is, and if he can find it on Amazon, you can have it, fresh in a box.”
“I love it!” exclaimed Amparo.
Lou didn’t like where this was heading. He shot a pic of the abducted pickup, and messaged it to Renato with location attached. Hoping to fill him with rage. From Lou’s point of view, this seemed like a good strategic move. What was with these damn imps? Amparo got a stolen truck, and Lou got gringo junk food.
He turned on his heel and went back into the house. The two imps followed him, trailed by a reluctant Amparo, who was still trying to sort out what was going to happen.
“We were just teasing you with the food,” Quube quietly said to Lou, coming up next to him. “We have a better wish for you. We’ll grant it later. After you say it aloud. So don’t worry.”
Lou shook his head, not wanting to discuss this. “I’d like to know where you came from. I mean, what is the bottle, anyway?”
“Simple,” said Quube. “We bulge our a tunnel that connects our world to yours. And the bottle is the tunnel. From your point of view our universe is inside the bottle. But from our point of view, your word is inside the bottle. You think the bottle is lying in your living room. We think the bottle is inside the lounge on our ship. Very Kurt GÖdel.”
They were in Lou’s comfortable living room. The half-silvered wine bottle was here too, rather large, leaning against a heap of tasseled silk cushions, vaguely Ottoman-Turkish. The imps were proud of their house, or spaceship, or whatever it was.
“And we can look inside it?” asked Lou.
“Of course,” said Quube. “You two freed us from Jade Cove.”
The reclined bottle was at a debonair angle, its smooth, slanting surface exposed.
“Stick your head through the wall,” advised Quube. “It’s like a soap-bubble film. But keep your feet outside, or you’ll slide all the way through.”
“What would happen if we slid all the way through?” asked Amparo, her head turning back and forth. Trying to understand everything at once.
“Haven’t you been listening?” said Quube in a not very nice way. And then he chuckled. “You might end up in our world for keeps. That’s what it means to get a full membership plan. But let’s not rush things. For now, stick your head in there and peek.”
The space in the bottle was a pocket eternity. It was like the skin of a black hole turned into a luxury wrap. Like a Lewis Carroll chessboard whose squares get smaller as they near the center of the board—and the fleeing queen never gets to the middle because she shrinks with each step.
Not that the space in here was a tidy grid. It was more like the old-town district of Lisbon, all turns and forks and ramps and unexpected gates, the details crumbly yet precise Lou and Amparo saw live things back there, too. Butterflies and whales and kinfolk of QubQub and Quube.
A faint soundtrack tickled the air: far-gone Nowheresville jazz, seeping from the tapering horn of an endless trumpet whose bell lay near their feet, and whose mouthpiece might be at maze’s core. Gabriel’s horn.
“I’d like to grab hold of that trumpet,” Lou said to Amparo. “Just to show these imps who’s boss.”
But now, speaking of horns, a Chicano-style custom Harley was tootling in their yard. Renato on his brother’s bike.
Amparo was out there in a flash. Renato seemed more puzzled than angry.
“You wack or some shit, Amparo? You’re stealing my truck?”
“It’s not,” she stuttered. “It’s not me. Please don’t be mad.”
Renato saw that his vanished truck was to be returned unharmed, and immediately found this funny. His too-smart, soul-troubled girlfriend was the manic-pixie in his life. He had never understood her, and never would, and didn’t want to, because her antics cheered him up.
“You’re out there, babe. You’re wild.” He threw his arms around her. “Don’t cry, Amparo. I know you hate your shitty lunker pickup, but…”
“Fix things!” Quube ordered QubQub. “Now!”
A fresh gesture from the little imp, the gesture grander than before, and now ka-boom. A new truck sat in the yard beside Renato’s bike and his stolen white truck. The new truck was midnight black with gold trim. Motor running.
“Hey, look,” called Amparo as she got in. “It’s got Renato’s photo glued to the dash!”
“Better than that,” sang out little QubQub. “Try the extra lever by the steering wheel. Your new car can fly! That’s some serious direct matter manipulation, eh, Quube? I copied a flying car from Beta-9. So stop putting me down.”
“Oh my god,” said Renato, more excited than Amparo had ever seen him. “Oh my god, oh my god. Can I fly it, Amparo? Take it over the bay. It would be cool to spot schools of fish. Give me an hour. Please?”
“You’re cute when you beg,” said Amparo, very happy. “Of course you can borrow it, dear Renato. But be careful! And you have to give me a kiss. And tell all these people that you love me.”
Renato grinned. “I do love Amparo. Of course. Who doesn’t.” They kissed, and then he was gone.
It was sunnier than before, with puffy clouds.
“We’re taking a walk,” said Quube. “See how it feels. We’ll be back. Just a little errand down at Costco.” They turned, heading downhill toward the Sand City chain stores.
“Wait, wait,” called Lou. “What about the bottle?”
“It’ll be okay,” said Quube.
“Have fun,” added QubQub.
As Quube and QubQub walked away, their bodies were shifting. Taking on more human forms.
Lou and Amparo stood alone, wondering what the hell to do.
“They really are aliens,” said Amparo. “Not magic sprites. They came a long way. And that bottle, it’s…”
“The door to their spaceship,” said Lou.
“And they left the spaceship wide open. I think it’s still running, Poppy. Like they left the keys in the ignition.”
They went and took another look at the bottle, comfortable angled against the cushions in their living room. Probably it could outstrip the speed of light. If speed even matters to an alien spaceship from infinite-dimensional Hilbert space.
Tentatively they stuck their heads through the membrane-like surface once more. Taking a better look. Everything was calm. Light emanated from the walls, which were decorated with delicate multi-color patterns. Exquisite objects rested on the smooth nearby shelves. Eye candy like you’d see in a gallery of art-glass. Strange fruits, eldritch figures, paradoxical polytopes, fantastical nudibranchs. That tapering bugle’s bell still rested nearby, and its tube writhed inward through the halls, its endless curves heading for the central infinity, a pipeline to the depths of Hilbert space and whatever lived there.
“They said don’t go all the way inside,” cautioned Lou.
“I think we’d be trapped,” said Amparo. “Remember what they said about a membership plan? And how happy those two imps were to get out? Running around the walls of your lab? How long do you think they might have been trapped?”
“A horrible relativistic Einstein-Hawking stretch of time,” suggested Lou. “Not to mention that the geometry inside the spaceship is warped. You might flatten out like an M. C. Escher drawing. Or turn inside out.”
“I wish Quube and QubQub weren’t weird aliens from Hilbert space. I mean, they were giving me good advice.”
“And the advice worked for you, Amparo. In an indirect way. I mean, Renato came out and said he loved you.”
She smiled. “Too true. Maybe that’s the first time I ever really got a wish. And don’t keep saying I could do better than Renato. I hope he’s careful with my flying car.”
“Did you notice what the imps were doing as they walked away?” said Lou. “Changing shape.”
“It almost looked like…looked like they were disguising themselves as you and me?” said Amparo.
“So creepy,” said Lou. “What if, just for hell of it, you and I did become bottle imps. Just for a while. We move into the spaceship, and learn all about it, and go on amazing trips, and then come back and fix things on Earth.”
“That might work for you, Poppy,” said Amparo. “But I’m not going into that ship. I’m staying here with Renato. I want to start my real life.”
“I’d hate to go aboard the imps’ ship alone,” said Lou.
And now, all of a sudden, Quube and QubQub are back from their outing. Looking like their same sketchy, scary, capricious bottle-imp selves.
“You never told us what you really want,” QubQub said to Lou.
“Confess,” added Quube. “It’s time.”
“I don’t want anything,” mumbled Lou, very uneasy.
“You do want things,” Quube hissed. “Just now you were telling Amparo that you might want to come aboard our ship. And…?”
“I…I don’t know,” said Lou.
“Spit it out,” cajoled QubQub. “Bare your down and dirty heart’s desire.”
“I wish Lupe would come back to me,” cried Lou. “Like in the old days. Make us fajitas and salsa. We’d throw a big house-party. We’d be happy.” He clamped his hands to his cheeks. “I don’t mean any of that.”
The imps disappeared into their bottle. Laughing.
Lou and Amparo heard the grinding clatter of an old car. Footsteps on the stairs—and here was Lupe. Like an older Amparo, but tougher. And still hot, at least in Lou’s opinion. His Guadalupe. Her made-up eyes flicked quickly around the room, coming to rest on the spaceship bottle.
“So many secrets,” purred Lupe. “Cutting me out? Aren’t we three still close? We’re still married, Lou. And I still own half this house.”
“Don’t start,” said Lou. “I don’t want a scene. I was going to tell you.”
“Half an hour ago I was on my lunch break from Costco, and I saw a truck up in the air over the bay,” said Lupe. “Like a pelican looking for fish. Gliding along smooth as a magic carpet. I recognized the driver. Renato.” Lupe stepped closer. “Talk to me, Lou.”
“Look,” said Lou. “There’s nothing to get excited about.”
“After I saw the car, two people came up to me. They looked like my husband and my daughter. Even though they weren’t you. They said Lou wants me back.” Lupe moved still closer.
The bottle ship was making a noise, a low hum. As if it was about to take off. Its hull remained diaphanous, like a soap bubble, and perhaps still permeable. A tidy stack of gold ingots rested on the floor inside. Bait. Out of reach.
“Don’t let that gold get away!” cried Lupe. “Get it, Lou!”
“I’ll go if you come too,” said Lou.
“Hell no,” snapped Lupe.
She caught Lou’s wrist and elbow, ducked, twisted, and threw him into the bottle.
Figures moved within the bottle. Quube and QubQub and…others. A big lavender butterfly was in the air. The bugle was jabbering in an unknown tongue. The gold glinted. In the distance a giant squid was fighting a toothy prehistoric mosasaur, as if cloned from the poster in Lou’s lab.
Lupe gestured wildly to her husband. He seemed sluggish. As if confused. Lupe called out to Amparo. “He’s supposed to be getting that gold! He’s supposed to do it alone!”
Amparo mirrored her mother’s recent move. She put a leg behind Lupe and butted the woman with her head. Lupe staggered backwards, completely off balance, falling through the tunnel wall, and then she was fully inside, toppling the stack of gold.
The surface glazed over. Plain old bubble jade. With a sliding upward whistle, the Hilbert space craft was gone.
Amparo shuddered, sobbed, laughed. She was free.
More sounds outside. Renato in Amparo’s new truck.
“Hey mamacita,” he called, looking up at her. “Small problem. It doesn’t fly anymore. Maybe I can fix.”
Casting off family sorrows, Amparo ran down to hug him. Strong and warm. He smelled good. She spoke.
“Will you marry me, Renato? Let’s just do it. We’ve got my house, your boat, our two trucks. It could work.”
“Si,” said Renato. “Yes.”
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Rudy on “The Bottle Imps”
Near the end of my work on this talse, I had one of those flashes that, as an SF writer, I live for. I realized that the “bottle” can the thought of as the neck of 4D tunnel that connects two parallel worlds.
My illustrator David Povilaits drew an image of such a tunnel for my book The Fourth Dimension (Houghton Mifflin 1984, Dover Books 2014)
It’s a Flatland-style diagram. That is, the planes represent 3D spaces, and the vertical direction represents the fourth dimension. The “bottle” here is a transparent circle around the throat of the tunnel, which consists of circles stacked in the third dimension..
And for us 3D beings, the bottle is a transparent sphere, halfway through the tunnel, which consists of spheres stacked in the fourth dimension.
Key realization: in each of the two connected spaces, the locals see the bottle as containing a world inside. We see Quube inside the bottle; Quube sees us inside the bottle. One and the same bottle—seen from two different sides.
It’s like we’re looking into a reflective ball with a different world inside, and critters in that ball are looking at a reflective ball with our world inside.
As I like to say, for me, writing SF is a type of thought experiment. That’s why Bruce calls me Professor.
And by the way, I’m Quube and Bruce is Lou.
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Bruce on “The Bottle Imps”
What is “Bottle Imps” really “about”? I’m inclined to think that it’s about Californian housing problems, but it’s also about wish fulfillment and profound new possibilities opening up wherever they are least expected.
Also, the prose style has a beach-shack, sandy, garrulous looseness about it, which is the polar opposite of intensely-detailed cyberpunk “crammed prose.”
There’s a sense of relief and release to it, like becoming uncorked. We don’t have a lot of reasons to write stories like this, but also we lack reasons not to.
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“The Bottle Imps” is the newest story by Rudy Rucker and Bruce Sterling. Read all eleven of our tales in the 2nd edition of our anthology, Transreal Cyberpunk. .
