Rudy Rucker - The hacker and the ants

The sound was scary, but also fun to listen to, in a sick kind of way. It was as good as the thrash I might hear on like “Ted Bed’s Skunk Bunk on the Rhythm Wave of the West, Radio KFJC, 89.7 on your FM dial, broadcasting from Foothill College in Los Altos Hills, California,” a personal favorite. Ted Bed always sounded like he’d been up all night flying on candyflip in a cyberclub.

Most kids couldn’t afford their own cyberdecks, but there were plenty of clubs with wall-sized Abbott wafer screens on three out of the four walls. Users in the club wore stereo-shutter flicker glasses. Cheap and dirty video technology would capture their dancing images and put them up into the big cube of shared cyberspace above the dance floor, and the deck would mix the dancers with daemons, Simmies, and active tool icons: virtual buttons, dials, and sliders the dancers could use to change the synthetic musical sounds. Flying on a and e: everyone inside the same rave deck, everyone inside the controls. It would be interesting if the ants showed up in those clubs. The Attack of the Giant Ants! It’s Them!

The ants, the ants, the ants. I had a feeling that it was thanks to the ants I’d been fired from GoMotion. Thanks to the ants I’d seen the Death simmie, that thing that called itself Hex DEF6. Thanks to the ants, Hex DEF6 had gotten the opportunity to threaten to have me and my children tortured and killed. As I reached toward the map to turn it off, the ant image rocked her head and let her pixels turn into a plat-a lot-by-lot map-of Nga’s street. I turned the map off anyway. I had arrived.

The houses were tidy one-story slab-foundation ranch-style homes, each painted a different pastel color, and each with rosebushes blooming in its front yard. All the houses in sight were architecturally identical, and all were equally well kept up-all save for one gray, run-down, whipped-to-shit number down at the corner. The whipped-to-shit clone had two Toyota minitrucks in the driveway: one good truck and one whipped-to-shit truck with no wheels.

The Vos’ house, on the other hand, was pale pink with white and yellow roses and the Vos’ car was a beige Dodge Colt. The golden foothills rose up behind the Vo home like stage scenery. Nga greeted me on the small front stoop, her sly, adorable face dimpling with smiles. We stepped into the living room, where Nga’s parents, aunt, and grandmother sat on two couches.

The room had wall-to-wall carpeting, and the windows were covered with flowered drapes. There was a mat by the front door; I understood that I should remove my shoes. I crouched to get my sandals off, facing a big red and gold calendar from Lion Supermarkets which hung over an assemblage of electronic equipment: a CD jukebox, a bigscreen DTV, a gameplayer, and an S-cube deck. On the top of the machines were two white nylon doilies with vases of plastic flowers. There was a Vietnamese religious shrine on the other side of the room. The shrine was a red-painted wooden table holding up narrow corniced shelves, the whole thing a couple of feet wide. On the table were joss sticks, a bowl of fruit, some red tubes holding candle-emulating light bulbs, and a picture of a god. There were other, more mysterious items in wrappings on the shelves.

With much laughing and many interruptions from her mother, Nga introduced me all around. The family consisted of Nga’s parents Thieu Vo and Huong Vo, Huong’s sister Mong Pham, Huong and Mong’s old mother Loan Vu, Mong’s son Khanh Pham, who was home but not presently visible, and Nga’s two little brothers The and Tho, who were still at school. Nga had an older brother named Vinh as well, “but he not here very often.”

Old Loan Vu had white hair, and said nothing. Her eyes were very slanted. Nga’s parents and aunt were slender with broad faces and prominent cheekbones. All of them were interminably smoking cheap cigarettes.

Now Nga’s mother Huong led me on a tour of the house. The bedrooms were quite bare, with all the bedding stripped off the large beds save for the flowered bottom sheets. Like the front room, each bedroom had flowered drapes and a red and gold Lion Supermarkets calendar.

In the spotless kitchen, we found Khanh Pham, the one who’d handed me Nga’s address at the croissant shop. He was sitting at the round kitchen table reading a motorcycle magazine. He had a big Adam’s apple and long, shiny black hair. Seeing us come in, he twitched his head in an abrupt tic-like gesture that served to flip his hair out of his eyes. This nervous motion reminded me of my son Tom.

I was too old to try to date the same-age cousin of a boy like this. My coming here had been a terrible mistake. But now that I’d strayed so far, why not soldier on?

Nga looked me full in the eyes, holding her perfect mouth just so, that knowing mouth with the irregular border on the left edge of its lipsticked upper lip. What a thing it would be to kiss Nga’s mouth. I would kiss her for a long time, and then I would unzip my fly. We would be parked in my car or, even better, sitting in my home. Nga would sigh and put her tiny little hands on my penis…

Soldier on, old top, soldier on.

“Do you have a motorcycle?” I asked Khanh Pham.

“I have small motorbike, but my cousin Vinh will get me better one soon.” He spread open the magazine’s pages and pointed to a picture of a black Kawasaki. “This kind.”

“That’s great!” I said, though Huong and Nga looked nervous at the sound of Vinh’s name.

Now The and Tho got home from elementary school and came running into the kitchen to see what was up. They spoke perfect California English and they had burr-cut hair. They wore black shorts and white T-shirts. The was one or two inches taller than Tho. Nga introduced us, and then the two little brothers went out in the backyard to play kickball.

Khanh Pham followed us back into the living room. I sat down in an armchair which reclined abruptly back in the style of a La-Z-Boy. Nga covered her mouth with her hand as she laughed. I lurched upright and perched on the edge of the chair.

“What your work?” asked Huong Vo.

“I am a computer programmer,” said I, knowing she would like this answer. “I work for a big company called West West. We are designing personal robots.”

“So. Personal robot. Very nice.” Huong held her politely composed face just so. She was nearly as beautiful as Nga.

“What can robot do?” asked Khanh.

“Well, it can clean, and bring things, and work in the garden.”

“I don’t think we need,” said Nga’s mother, shaking her head and laughing. “Children can do.”

“Well, yes. But if someone doesn’t have children or a helper, then they might want our robots. And of course there are special functions that our robots can perform.”

Thieu Vo interrupted at this point to get a summary of our conversation from his wife. She filled him in with quick, nasal phonemes. They had some rapid back and forth, and then father Thieu burst out with a comment that sent the rest of the family, even the grandmother, into peals of ambiguous Asian laughter.

“He want to know,” translated Khanh, “if your robot can fight dog.”

“I suppose he could. He’s agile and durable. He might hurt the dog.”

“We have neighbor with dog very bad,” said Nga’s mother. “He make dirt in our yard and he bark. We scare he bite our The and Tho. Our neighbor don’t listen. He don’t speak English or Vietnamese.” Meaning that he was Hispanic.

“His dog pit bull,” put in Nga Vo. “It name Dutch. I wonder can we see your robot fight him.”

“Well… okay.” This was my chance to really get in good with the Vos. “As a matter of fact I have my robot in the trunk of my car. Should I get him? His name is Studly.”