Rudy Rucker - The hacker and the ants

I shivered with the same fear I’d felt when Ken Thumb of GoMotion first loaded my code onto Studly. The Veep and Adze robots were quite different from the lame “robot butlers” people had been trying to sell for years. The Veep and Adze were fast and strong. They could kill you. At least there was a big, waist-high table between us and the main part of the room. There was some computer stuff on the table.

“Do you have a remote On/Off switch?” I asked Ben.

“Don’t worry,” he answered, picking up a radio control unit. “This is the switch. During runs we stand way back here so we can always turn the robot off before it can get to us and like start performing organ transplants.” He chuckled wheezily.

Sun adjusted some dip switches while Russ slipped a small CD into Squidboy’s chest. They skipped back to join us on the safe side of the table. Ben turned Squidboy on. A fan whirred and Squidboy’s scanning laser began to glow.

Just like Studly, Squidboy had two pencil-sized video camera eyes and an infrared laser-based moire contouring scanner in his forehead. The scanner’s laser would illuminate objects with rapid stripes of invisible infrared light, and the robot’s software would overlay successive scans to get moire patterns that outlined the contours of equally distant curves. This was invaluable for deducing the shapes of things.

“What do you want Squidboy to do?” Sun Tam asked Ben.

“Tell him to go to the fridge and get me a bottle of Calistoga water,” said Ben.

Sun Tam leaned over a keyboard and screen that, like Ben’s On/Off control, was radio-linked to the robot. Sun began assembling and entering commands while Russ kibitzed.

“Can’t you just talk to it?” I asked.

“Of course we can,” said Russ impatiently. “Only we haven’t put that part in yet because we’re still finalizing the high-level code. For now, we’re programming Squidboy in Y9707 assembly language. Sun knows all the opcodes.” Y9707 was the name of a chip.

Then Russ started arguing with Sun about something he’d keyed in, Russ being as rude and insulting as possible. Eventually Sun weakened before the torrent of abuse and changed it to Russ’s way.

Now Russ gave the okay and Ben pressed the On switch. Squidboy wobbled for a moment, turned toward the refrigerator, and started rolling. So far so good. The movable Plexiglas door was between the little machine and the refrigerator. Would Squidboy slow down and open the door? Had Russ’s program change been correct? To my delight, the answer was no. Instead of slowing down, the robot accelerated as it approached the model door, shattering the Plexiglas with a noise that was astonishingly loud in the small confines of the Rubber Room. The robot paused, his tentacle dangling like a limp dick.

“Dammit, Russ, that’s the second door you’ve broken this month,” said Ben as he pressed the Off switch. Russ marched across the room, yanked his CD out of Squidboy’s chest, and stalked out, vilely cursing about SuperC.

“I knew Russ was wrong,” said Sun Tam. “He keeps thinking in terms of Kwirkey, but I’m used to controlling the Adze direct. Ports and interrupts.”

“Let’s see.”

Sun Tam reset Squidboy and began to show and tell. I got into it. Sun knew a lot about robots. Ben Brie gave me the remote On/Off and left us alone to, keep talking.

While Sun was demonstrating Squidboy’s most rudimentary abilities, we discussed the three big problems of robots: connectors, power, and software.

A robot’s connectors are simply the wires that snake around inside the robot’s body to hook together the motors and sensors and processors-the wires and the little sockets on the ends of them. It’s a humble issue, whether or not a pin works loose from its socket, but it’s a crucial one. I told Sun about some special Belgian-made connectors that we’d just started using with good success, and he e-mailed off an order for six thousand of them.

“How is GoMotion going to deal with power?” asked Sun next.

“We’re making our machines plug into a wall socket whenever they have the free time. The Xyzix palladium-hydrogen batteries we’re using can hold about a three-hour charge. And you can fully recharge a Xyzix in ten minutes.”

“Okay, yeah, the Xyzix model KT-80? That’s what I thought; that’s what we’re doing too. So let’s talk about software.”

“That’s where I come in,” I said proudly. “As you know, I’ve been using genetic algorithms to tweak the high-level code. We’ll want to get about 256 instances of your robot evolving around the clock. My code hooks into GoMotion’s ROBOT. LIB, of course. We’ll need to license ROBOT. LIB from GoMotion or-”

“We’ve got ROBOT. LIB,” said Sun Tam. “We’re already using it.” I smiled with relief and we talked about other software topics, first about genetic algorithms and then about control theory. We started working on a list of which parameters and register values we’d want our code evolution to tweak.

Three happy hacker hours blurred by, and then I was at the limit of what I wanted to absorb and emit on my first day of work for West West. Later, no doubt, I’d be driving myself nuts over their code, but no more today. I had a date with Nga Vo.

I said good-bye to Sun Tam and went back to Ben Brie. “Looks cool, Ben. I have to go, though; I need to take care of some things.”

“Okay. See you tomorrow? Nineish? We’ll give you a machine and get you on the Net.”

“Yeah. And can you get Russ to print me out some specs on the Kwirkey/SuperC interface? I think reading them might be more efficient than for me to listen to him.”

“I’ll talk to him.”

“Uh… one more thing. I’m totally out of cash, Ben. Could you give me an advance today?”

I wended my way back out of West West and found my Animata. I had $800 in my pocket. It was two-thirty in the afternoon. West West looked like a good gig.

While I was driving 280 across town to East San Jose, I fished out the scrap of paper that Nga’s cousin had given me-5778 White Road. I flicked on the electronic map attached to my dash and told it Nga’s address.

Intense green lines appeared, showing a diagram of San Jose, with a highlighted path indicating the best route from my satellite-calculated current location to Nga Vo’s.

The east side of San Jose was bounded by rounded yellow foothills that undulated hugely toward some mountain peaks that you could see on a smogless day. The hills weren’t very good for hiking because they were bone-dry with tough sharp grass that stabbed your ankles. But they were nice to look at from the freeway.

As I drew closer to Nga’s, the map rescaled itself, always maintaining a magnification that just held the bright wriggle of the remaining route. Right before crucial turns, the map would speak to me in a quiet woman’s voice. Carol’s voice, actually. Last year I’d fed the device a phonetic map of Carol’s voice. I’d thought that was funny, since Carol was terrible at reading maps. Carol had thought it was stupid of me, not to mention being an invasion of her sacred privacy, almost as bad as my using Studly to peek at her taking a pee. Whatever. The phonetic map was a good hack, and whether Carol liked it or not, I could still hear the sound of her voice, which was something I missed almost as much as the smell of her body.

Two blocks from the Vos’ house, the map showed me something I didn’t want to see: a detailed, stippled picture of an ant. A cunning dusting of dither pixels added informative shadings to the image. The scapes of this ant’s antennae were tilted toward me, and her mandibles were wide open. Her body rocked back and forth in the sawing motions of stridulation. The map’s tiny speaker began stringing fragments of Carol’s voice into deep, demented chirps.