Rudy Rucker - The hacker and the ants

“I do a variety of things,” she said, her calm California eyes drilling into mine. Again she did that thing with her tongue.

“Would you like to come up to my house and look around?”

“Sure,” said Gretchen. “Why not.”

She talked some more with Kay, tying up loose ends, and then she walked slowly with me to my car and got in. Close up, she had tired eyes.

“Do you want anything?” I asked Gretchen.

She looked languidly greedy. “How about some fine wine? And two packs of Kents.”

The two crazy liquor store clerks were behind the counter, the thin giggling bearded one and the bowling pin-shaped one with the mustache. One of the nice things about California was how many workaday jobs were held by freaks. I got a bottle of good chardonnay and the Kents. It came to thirteen dollars and change. And then I was back in the car with Gretchen. This beautiful new woman was sitting in the bucket seat of my Animata, looking at her makeup in the mirror on the visor, fixing her face with the calm seriousness of a grown woman, her actual soft butt on the real leather of my car.

“I’m stoked,” said I. “I’m ready to party.”

Gretchen smiled. “I’m eager to see your house.” Again I studied her eyes. They were blue and… blank?

“I can show you my computer.”

“Yippee,” said Gretchen softly, and lit a cigarette. “I failed math in high school.”

“Are you from around here?”

“No, I’m from the Southland. Buena Park?”

“That’s near LA?”

“Not far from Disneyland. That used to be my summer job.”

“You worked in Disneyland? Wow. Talk about a real Californian. What did you do?”

“My last summer there I got to be Alice in Wonderland. In the parades?”

“God, Gretchen, that’s heavy. Did the men ever hit on you?”

“The single Dads. You had to look out for them. If they got too insistent, I’d look at Baloo Bear a special way, and he’d talk to them.”

“I’m a single Dad, Gretchen.” I laid my hand on her leg above the knee. She regarded me calmly, not moving my hand away.

A few minutes later I was back in my driveway. It was quarter past one. Though my oldest daughter Sorrel was off at college, son Tom and daughter Ida were still students at Los Perros High. They usually stopped by around three-thirty to regroup before heading across town to Carol’s. That gave Gretchen and me two clear hours.

“Nice big place,” said Gretchen. “Do you own it?”

“I rent.” A wrong answer. I was tracking Gretchen’s interest level as closely as an over-leveraged speculator watching the price of gold. I hurried to get the door open. Gretchen ambled in slowly.

“Where’s the powder room?”

“Right over there. I’ll open the wine.”

I went down to the kitchen and poured two glasses of wine. Glasses which Carol had bought in Mexico two years ago. I tore my thoughts away from that. Don’t stop to think, Jerzy, just do!

Gretchen was pacing around the living room, looking unexpectedly dynamic. “I love your things, Jerzy. All those seashells. Want to show me around the rest of the place?”

“Sure, Gretchen, I’d love to.” Graciously she took her wineglass, clinked it with mine, and gave a simpering, slightly naughty giggle. Who said middle-aged people couldn’t still have fun? I led her off on the house tour.

Our big old two-level house had a linoleum kitchen and dining area downstairs. At one end of the upstairs was a low-ceilinged living room with redwood paneling. A long hall ran along the front of the house from the living room to the other end of the house. The kids’ three bedrooms were off the long hall, and at the end of the hall was my (and formerly Carol’s) bedroom, a nice space that boasted a sun porch and a working fireplace, no less.

“What are those gloves and goggles,” Gretchen asked me when we reached the sun porch. “Were you and the wife into bondage?” She laughed softly and took a sip of her wine.

“I work in virtual reality,” I told her. “Cyberspace?”

Gretchen looked enthusiastic. Cyberspace was getting more popular every day. “That’s great! Can I try?”

A wave of horniness engulfed me. I stepped forward and put my arms around her. “Sure you can try it,” said I. “Everything I own is yours, Gretchen in Wonderland.”

“How sweet.”

We put down our wineglasses and I took her in my arms. Gretchen cocked her head and kissed me full on. Her mouth tasted cool and good. We made our way to the bed and lay down. Her sweater and skirt came off easily. She wore silky skin-colored underwear, and that came off easily too. I kissed her breasts and then I put on a rubber and we fucked. She wrapped her legs around my waist and moaned really loud, which made me feel great. She even said my name: “Jerzy, Jerzy, oh Jerzy!” All right.

After we came, we wandered naked into the sun porch. My windows looked out on pure nature: the live oaks and eucalypti of the dry gully behind the house. There were squirrels and birds. Standing there naked with Gretchen it felt like we were Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Sometimes Carol and I had stood here like this.

“I still want to see cyberspace,” said Gretchen, brushing my arm with the tip of a tit.

“One thing,” I cautioned. “I got a kind of infection in my machine this morning, a thing like a computer virus. We call them ants. It’s possible they might make it… malfunction.”

“Are you going to show me cyberspace or not?” demanded Gretchen.

“Oh, sure, I guess it’s okay,” said I, unable to resist finding out if this were true.

I turned on the computer and Gretchen watched me type in my cyberspace access code. Then I helped her don the gloves and headset. She sat in my desk chair, turning her head this way and that, while my desk monitor showed what she was seeing. I was ready to pull the plug if anything was weird, but so far everything looked normal. Gretchen was in my virtual office with Roarworld in the background.

“Dinosaurs!” exclaimed Gretchen in the too-loud voice of a person wearing earphones. “This is wonderful, Jerzy. Can I move around?”

I took her hand in mine and pushed the fingers into a pointing position. With my other hand I nodded her head to make her start flying. The screen images zoomed among the dinosaurs. I closed her fingers into a fist to make the motion stop. Gretchen understood and began flying around at will. Roarworld is quite shallow: its depth axis wraps after forty feet, meaning that if you fly forty feet deep into Roarworld, you find yourself back where you started. After she’d figured this out, Gretchen focused back on my virtual office.

It was fun to stand back and watch this naked, goggled woman sitting in my desk chair and moving her hands and head so oddly as she explored the invisible office that is layered over my sun porch. I kept a close eye on the screen, watching for any return of the ants-but there was no sign of them. Maybe the ant explosion was confined to the room at the end of the hall at GoMotion. But why had the ants put me on the dark dream; and how had they done it so easily?

As well as a door to GoMotion, my virtual office had a door to the Bay Area Netport. The Netport door was round and was patterned with the light gray-and-green yin-yang that was the Bay Area Netport logo. Gretchen flew on in there as I watched along on my computer’s screen.

Some nostalgic, displaced hacker had designed the Bay Area Netport to look like the waiting room of Grand Central Station in New York City. This cavernous simmie was programmed to be gravity-free, and you would see people’s body images floating around all over the mock steam-age space. Collision detection was usually turned off in these public spaces, so that if you bumped into someone else’s tuxedo, you would pass right through it. Ranged all along the walls, floor, and ceiling were hyperjump nodes: the gates, or magic doors, that opened into the different cyberspace worlds accessible in one jump from the Bay Area Netport. The nodes were shaped like spheres, so that you could dive into a node from any direction.