Rudy Rucker - The hacker and the ants

“Whoa there,” said Ben, as if reading my mind. “You’re looking at a frozen production spec. This design is what Otto Gyorgyi signed off on, and he’s not going to sign again. Our mode is ship this or die. Let the Adze into your heart just as it is, Jerzy. Love it and help it grow. Teach it to do cool things.”

“How do I drive it?”

“Touch the goggles icon,” said Sun Tam.

I touched the goggles, and my viewpoint shifted so that I saw through the virtual robot’s eyes. I, robot, was now sitting on a three-foot by five-foot workbench. I could see a robotic arm on either side of my visual field. For the moment, the robots arms were not moving with the motions of my own gloved hands. Good, that meant West West was using the standard telerobotic interface.

Recall that there were standard hand gestures for flying your tuxedo about in cyberspace. You’d point and nod to move in some direction, and you’d make a fist to stop. A telerobot in start-up mode was supposed to obey these commands as well. When you wanted to take over a manipulator, you’d make the gesture of slipping your hand into it.

I pointed and nodded and I began rolling toward the edge of the table. The scene lurched as I drove off the edge of the workbench table. I heard the simulated hum as my virtual gyroscope kept me from tumbling. My legs popped out to full extension and my wheels hit the floor. My knees bent, cushioning me from the impact.

I made a fist, scanned this way and that, found the exit door, pointed and trundled out the door and into what looked like the living room of a suburban home-a very familiar home. There was a baby asleep on a blanket in the middle of the floor, and here around the corner came none other than… Perky Pat Christensen! The West West cryps had even ripped off Our American Home.

“Change Baby Scooter’s diaper,” Perky Pat told me. “Don’t go near the baby. Follow me into the kitchen, and stay right where you are! Hurry up, damn you!” Her pinched tan face glared at me in pharmaceutical rage. The Adze waved its arms uncertainly.

Just as I slipped my hands into the left and right manipulators, there was a sudden whoop, and my point of view turned upside down. I glimpsed the sneakers and the blond flattop of Pat’s son Dexter. He’d just turned me over, the rotten little fuck. As I began righting myself, I heard a thud, and my viewpoint began tumbling around rapidly. Walt Christensen had tripped over me. He was drunk again. I was rolling toward the baby! I stuck out my left and right arms to stop my motion, but I was a shade too late, and my floppy middle arm smacked heavily against Scooter’s face. She began her savage screaming.

“Ow,” said I, looking away from the screen. “Need to control that tentacle.”

Pat and Walt were stomping the simmie-Adze now, the images of their feet warping into huge close-up perspective renderings as they thudded into the hapless virtual robot. I pulled off my gloves and stood up.

“Did you know that I helped write Our American Home?” I asked Ben. “The behavior patterns for the Christensens. I helped evolve them.”

“Sure,” said Ben. “You helped write it, and you’re here, so there’s nothing wrong with us using it, right?”

“That’s not what GoMotion would say.”

“ WentMotion,” drawled Ben.

“We’ve moved on to physical testing as well,” said Sun Tam. “Now that our hardware design is frozen.”

“Janelle calls it the Rubber Room,” said Ben. “I’ll show it to you later. But now it’s time for Russ Zwerg.” As Ben mentioned the dreaded name, there was again that touch of stress in his mellow tones.

Russ was in a cubicle near the center of the pit, and he was even more trollish than I’d expected. He was a lawn-dwarf, five-foot-two with full beard, bald pate, and long greasy locks, he was (I would soon learn) a vegetarian, a pagan, a libertarian, and a deep thinker with a dozen crackpot opinions, all furiously held. Russ Zwerg was the worst, the absolute worst, a ten-out-of-ten flamer.

At first Russ made a show of being too engrossed in his computer screen to look up. After entering a final system command and receiving an error message, he said, “Suck dead pigs in Hell,” to his screen. His pronunciation was clear and lilting. He turned his muddy little eyes toward us and addressed himself directly to Ben.

“Once again SuperC chooses to sodomize programmers everywhere. They’ve actually changed the inline pragmas. Again. And, they added new underscores to the library name-mangling! Whee! Put your old debugger in the shitcan! It’s going to take me at least two round-the-clock days to get the Kwirkey interpreter working again. What do you want?”

“Russ,” said Ben gamely, “I want you to meet Jerzy Rugby who’s joining us from GoMotion. He’s quite the wizard, I’m told. I’d like you to help him get up to speed on the Adze project.”

“How nice,” said Russ, cocking his head and peering at me. “I’m supposed to waste a week training a new hire? Bugger you, Ben. Bugger you very much.” As he said this, Zwerg kept his nasty little eyes on me. Now he smiled to show this was all in good fun. “Why did GoMotion fire you, Jerzy?”

“I’d rather not go into it.” Especially not with an asshole like you, Russ.

“Russ, why don’t you and Sun give Jerzy a physical demo?”

“A dog and pony show for the new hire,” snapped Russ. “Very well.” We all went into the Rubber Room, which was back behind the Sphex room I’d already seen.

A few years before she died my mother had a stroke. She was partly paralyzed, and she had to relearn how to do things like sit up on the edge of a bed. Every day in the hospital, I’d wheel her downstairs to the rehabilitation room. The rehab room had linoleum floors and things that looked like big toys sitting around, only the big toys were models of real-world obstacles that a person has to negotiate: there was a section of a cafeteria counter, there was a movable wood staircase with a fenced-in platform at the top, there was a big Plexiglas practice push door, and so on. In the rehab room with my mother there had been a woman with one leg gone and a man whose face had been split as if by an axe, all of them slowly moving around, trying to get it back together. I often remembered the feeling the rehab room had given me: a kind of awe at the tenacity of human life, awe at how these shattered people could somehow struggle to go on, and a feeling also of the preciousness and sweetness of life, however hard it might be. An aching feeling of tender awe.

Like the rehab room, the Rubber Room had a practice staircase and a big Plexiglas door, but in addition the Rubber Room had feely-blank dolls lying about, a man, a woman, a boy, and a baby-models of the Christensen family once again. There were also two chairs, a table, and a refrigerator. In one corner there was a big rug. The dreaded Baby Scooter was lying on the rug like a land mine.

Sitting idle on a patch of bare linoleum was an assembled Adze robot. Just like the model I’d seen on the Sphex, the machine was a big cylinder with a dome head, two wheels on jointed legs, and three arms. As on Studly, his left manipulator was a simple two-pronged rubberized crab pincer, and his right one was a well-articulated facsimile of a human hand. The Adze’s third manipulator was a flexible plastic tentacle with corrugations in its surface.

“We’ve been calling this one Squidboy,” said Ben. “Let’s fire him up, guys.”

“I’ve only just now been recompiling the code,” said Russ, obviously getting his excuses ready. “I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there’s a segment fix-up error.” Russ and Sun Tam made their way over to the still-inert Squidboy and began messing with him.