Rudy Rucker - The hacker and the ants

“Why did you try to keep me in there?” I rhetorically asked the ants. “What do you want to show me?”

I picked up the headset.

“Studly, will you stay here and keep an eye on me while I’m wearing the phones?”

“I will watch you.”

“Sit near the plug to the computer there, and if I say help, then you pull the plug out of the wall and take the goggles off of my head, okay?”

“No problem, Jerzy.”

I put on the gloves and headset and reentered cyberspace. The cloud of ants surrounded me, thick as smoke and shot with twisting lines of color. Instead of trying to back out, I pointed my finger and flew forward. Bingo. I was out of the ant cloud and able to see that Gretchen had moved my viewpoint to the sportswear section of the virtual Nordstrom’s department store-a fabulous structure CAD-crafted to resemble a huge Victorian crystal palace of lacy ironwork and frosted glass.

A few other customers were visible, and my body was visible as well. Mass market virtual stores like Nordstrom’s require their shoppers to have visible body icons, not only to discourage perverts and snoopers, but also because people shop more recklessly when they feel themselves to be part of a crowd. The store was open and airy: instead of long racks and shaky stacks of clothing in every size, there were small, tasteful displays with a few copies of each available style. The virtual garments were freely adjustable through the full ranges of their currently available colors and sizes. Once you’d decided on something, you’d tell a clerk, and the physical garment would be mailed to your house.

Handsome mannequins danced in place, modeling the wares. “I’m a California Girl!” said the nearest mannequin every so often. “California.” She was modeling a thin shell formal wet suit. “Are you a California Girl?” That was all she ever said, but sometimes she said it slow, and sometimes she said it fast; the rates were no doubt driven by the Poincare sampling of a chaotic attractor. A one- or two-dimensional attractor suffices for something as simple as the scheduling of a time series, but the asynchronous motions of the mannequin’s body were at least seven-dimensional, and the attractor underlying the marvelously plastic play of her facial expressions could have involved as many as thirteen variables.

Delicate, decorative struts stretched from one side of the great hall to the other. In this cyberspace world of pure geometry, the struts needed bear no physical tension, so they were free to meander vinelike in and out of straight-line true. Their surfaces bore spiral patterns with a passing resemblance to bark. With an unpleasant shock, I noticed a rapid file of small ants wending their way down the strut nearest to me. At a certain point, they jumped clear of the strut to join the ant cloud that had blocked my vision before, a cloud that was raggedly expanding-presumably in search of me.

The GoMotion ants could walk through the “air” of cyberspace as easily as along the surfaces of cyberspace objects. If they generally preferred walking on surfaces, it was because it was easier for them to find each others’ trails on the two dimensions of a surface. On a surface, nearly every pair of lines intersects, but in space, intersecting lines are the exception rather than the rule.

Roger had designed the GoMotion ant software so that the ants tended to pay more attention to their immediate neighborhood. In principle, the ants could have looked and seen that my tuxedo had moved about ten feet down the aisle from them. But their software architecture preferred to have them search for my tuxedo by the traditional myrmecine expedient of blindly milling about. In French, the word for ant is fourmi, and the word for the milling of ants is fourmillement. By extension, fourmillement can also refer to the tingling, pins-and-needles sensation one gets when one’s foot falls asleep.

The seething little pests reminded me of the miniature ants I’d found beneath the base of a broken toilet in the first apartment Carol and I had shared-already more than twenty years ago? We’d called them pissants, and that’s how I thought of these little guys: obnoxious pissants who were after my tuxedo.

Instead of laying down trails of pheromones and formic acid, the GoMotion ants left gappy ribbons made of colored polygons. With each step forward, each ant excreted a new polygon-as if it were building a path of tiny stepping-stones-and each time an ant added a polygon to the head of its ribbon trail, a polygon would disappear from the trail’s tail. In this way, a moving GoMotion ant’s trail always consisted of the same number of polygons; the default value depending on the particular DTV chip the ant’s computation was running on. Different ants used different combinations of shape and color for their trail tiles at different times; the resulting trail patterns served to pass information to other ants.

The nearby pissants’ trails were three or four feet in length, and several of them were coming close to blundering into me. I moved farther on down the aisle, passing two other shoppers’ body icons. No ants were bothering them-it seemed that the ants were only interested in me. Could the other shoppers even see them?

I tapped the shoulder of a woman in shorts. She had her body tuxedo’s skin programmed to look like reflective bronze. “Excuse me,” I said, “can I ask you a question about this store?”

“I’m not a clerk.” Many Californians tended not to be very friendly. First of all they were too busy, and secondly there were so many druggies, psychos, and con artists that everyone was cautious.

“Oh, that’s all right. I was just wondering-” I gestured over my shoulder at the cloud of pissants back down the aisle. “Do you see something odd there? Do you see a cloud of ants?”

“Ants?”

“Yes!” I strode back a few paces and plucked one of them out of the air, holding its struggling little form tight in my buzzing touchpads. “Look at this!” I said, hurrying back to the woman with my hand held high. “Wouldn’t you call this an ant?”

“Uhhh, sorry!” said the woman shortly, not even trying very hard to look. “I… I guess my eyesight’s not that good.” She turned and walked off as fast as she could.

I peered closer at the little ant. It was most definitely a GoMotion ant; its curves were as familiar to me as the contours of Carol’s face. Roger had hacked our intricate CAD ant models himself, fitting our shapes to official E.G. Wilson entomological data. He’d used spline curves, Bezier surfaces, Koons patches, nurbs-whatever it took. And then he’d taken GoMotion’s cascading constraint manager and hinged all the ant parts together so that each piece “knew” how far it could swivel relative to the other pieces.

Right after Roger had gotten me hired, I’d helped set up the artificial life evolution software that made it possible for our ants to learn how to walk. We’d given our ants good bodies and the ability to evolve and get better at doing things, and now somehow they’d gotten loose and were following me around in cyberspace. Why?

My struggling pissant’s shrill protest noises rose to such a level that I threw it to the floor. And then came the strangest thing yet. The ant grew. A lot. In the blink of an eye, it became twelve feet in length. Immediately, the giant ant spread wide its large, serrated mandibles and lunged forward. I held out my hands to protect myself, which must have been what the ant wanted, for now it clamped onto my hands with the toothy palps of its sickeningly intricate mouth. Yes, the ant bit my hands and swallowed them. I felt a sharp wave of pressure from my gloves’ touchpads before they overloaded and went dead.

Although the ant bit and swallowed my hands, it didn’t bite them off. My hand positions were now under the ant’s control, but my body image and my viewpoint were still connected to those hands. For the few seconds it took for my hands to pass down through the ant’s gizzard and into its crop, my viewpoint thrashed about uncontrollably. I could have stopped it by calling to Studly for help-but for now I just closed my eyes.