Rudy Rucker - The hacker and the ants

“Where’s the dog?”

“I dragged him behind the Vos’ house.”

“You killed him?”

“It seems so. I poked very hard at his neck and the material of the animal’s skin gave way.”

“You’ve… you’ve killed something, Studly! You aren’t ever supposed to kill!”

“I was only defending you and your friends.”

“Oh brother. I have to go back inside for a few minutes before we leave. Meanwhile I want you to drag that poor dog’s body to the yard behind its own house. And then you get in the trunk of my car and close the trunk, you hear?”

“To hear is to obey, master.”

“Oh, and one more thing. What did you feed into the Fibernet back there, Studly?”

“GoMotion ants.”

“Why?”

“A voice in my head told me to.”

“Oh great. Now drag the dog and get in the trunk.”

“If you hear sirens approaching,” said Studly, “then it will very definitely be time for us to leave.”

I went back into the Vos’.

They were sitting in the living room, having dessert in front of the television. Dessert was little dishes of gnarly clear pudding with lotus roots in it. Nga served me a double helping, but instead of eating it, I just mashed it around with my spoon. Vinh and Studly had taken away my appetite.

The TV was blasting a single Vietnamese channel now, a news show just as evil and farty and boring and fascist as American network fare. Only then, almost right away, here came a free-lance freestyle commercial from the wild and crazy GoMotion ants, one of (I would later learn) 1024 separate commercials kustom-krafted in real time for each of the broadcast channels of Fibernet San Jose.

On the Vietnamese news channel, the ant ad came layered onto a commercial for some toothpaste called KENTUCKY. The ad featured a smiling Vietnamese woman with a shiny mouth as big as an old Buick’s grill. She flipped her bobbed blue-black hair and smiled some more, and then she looked down at the gleaming ivory-tiled counter by her gold-fixtured sink with its deep red basin, looked down lovingly at her KENTUCKY toothpaste in its crimson tube with aqua lettering. But now*BAM* here came one, two, three, twenty, a hundred, a thousand ants crawling across the scene! The perspective-mapped ants were fast and realistic; they capered about among the images as the commercial ground on.

The GoMotion ants that Studly had squirted up into the Fibernet had already made their way to the Vos’ digital television.

The ants rocked their gasters up and down, and their chirping came out of the TV speaker. Thieu Vo commented in surprise, and Nga laughed. What a crazy way to sell toothpaste! And then a contingent of the ants changed their colors and crawled onto the toothpaste tube. The ants had all been a fine lustrous dark brown to start with, but now one mass of them turned crimson, and another contingent turned aqua. Like live pixels, the colored ants crawled over the image of the toothpaste tube and arranged themselves so that now the writing on the tube read, “GoMotion Inc.”

GoMotion was going to be in serious trouble for this. But it wasn’t my fault, I was out of GoMotion, and the ants were GoMotion’s exclusive intellectual property. A contract condition of working for GoMotion was that anything you programmed belonged to them. Yes, the liability was GoMotion’s, not mine.

But what if it came out that it was my robot Studly who’d put the GoMotion ants into the Fibernet? Just this morning, Trevor had told me that in the eyes of GoMotion, Studly was now legally mine. He’d said Jeff Pear had even sent me a letter about it. Had Roger Coolidge known all this was coming?

Twelve of the ants braced their little legs and began inflating themselves, growing big enough to fill the picture, with all the small ants still chirping away in the background. The inflated ants reared up on their hind legs, formed a chorus line, and began to do a side-to-side two-step, each ant holding her neighbor’s middle leg, and each ant waving her two front legs overhead in ecstasy. Watch the GoMotion ants get down! The background chirping syncopated into Martian music with a high ululation in the background.

It took me a second to realize that the high ululation was the sound of sirens heading this way.

I jumped to my feet. “I’m sorry,” I shouted to the ant-enthralled Vos. “I have to leave right away. Thank you for the terrific meal.”

They looked at me confusedly, and Nga followed me out. She was expecting me to kiss her good-night, but the sirens were only a block or two away-they must have traced the cut cable that fast. I planted a quick smack on Nga’s lovely mouth-oh, how badly I wanted to linger! “I’ll come see you tomorrow at the bakery,” I promised, and sprinted down to my Animata. Studly was just finishing getting into my trunk, thank God. I slammed the trunk closed and peeled out.

A cop car drove past me on my way out. Soon the cops would find the cut Fibernet cable, and talk to Dutch’s bereaved owner, and then they’d know to arrest the guy in the red Animata. Instead of making a flat-out run for home, I decided first to go a short distance and lie low.

“I want to go to 707 °Caile De La Cuesta,” I told my map. This was the address of Carol’s condo, which I knew was about a mile away, even though I’d never been there.

The condo complex was like an old two-story motel with ragged vegetation. They had a parking lot, and I pulled my car into the farthest corner, behind a garbage dumpster. I could have just sat there, but I wanted to see what else the ants were going to do on TV. I hoped that Hiroshi was out and that Carol was home. Getting out of the car, I saw that the ground was littered with empty spacedust vials. I thought I heard voices-maybe there were people in the dumpster? I didn’t want to look. I set the car’s security systems to maximum alert and headed across the asphalt to the breezeway.

I found the inscription “C. Rugby amp; H. Takemuru” on the mailbox marked 2D. Carol had always liked the sound of “Rugby” better than her maiden name, which had been Strumpf. It bummed me out to see her name on a mailbox with another man’s. The complex had a small pool in the middle; the kids had told me about the pool. I went up a flight of stairs and knocked on 2D.

“What are you doing here, Jerzy?” demanded Carol when she opened the door. I could see Tom, Ida, and Hiroshi inside. They were watching TV. Carol looked prettier than I remembered her. Calmer.

“It… it’s about…”

“Daddy!” yelled Tom, happy to see me. “There’s ants on television!”

“The cereal box says GoMotion!” added Ida.

I heard the siren of a police car speeding by. “Let me come in for a minute, Carol. One of my computer programs is getting me into trouble.”

“Oh, all right. Hiroshi, do you remember. Jerzy?”

“Yes,” said Hiroshi, regarding me coolly. “Of course.”

“How’s the sushi business?” I said. “Aren’t you ever worried you’ll chop off a finger?”

“Business is fine,” said Hiroshi. “But Carol and I have many expenses.”

“It’s a good thing you came by, Jerzy,” chimed in Carol. “We’re going to have to work out the child support payments. I have an appointment tomorrow with a lawyer.”

“Let’s not discuss it in front of the kids, Carol.”

“The kids know our marriage is over, Jerzy. Especially now that you’ve started bringing strange women into the house.”

I wanted to glare at Tom and Ida for spilling the beans, but they looked so wretchedly uncomfortable that I couldn’t do it. “I’m sorry,” I said. “It was a mistake.” The simplest way to get through any conversation with Carol these days was always to keep saying I was sorry. “I’m sorry,” I said again, and glared at her. I was stupid ever to have thought even for a minute that I wanted her back, the bitch.