Rudy Rucker - The hacker and the ants

You could get all sorts of feely-blank accessories for cyberspace, and yes, dear horn-dog, there were even male/female feely-blank love-dolls, complete with hinged limbs and cunningly engineered touchpads. The love-dolls came with get-down simmie software to show images that matched the doll’s motions. If you wanted to spend a little more money, you could dial a 900 number for a live person who’d teleconference your doll through all manner of erotic outrages. But I hadn’t looked extensively into the details of cybersex; when you were hacking as much as I did, you didn’t want to be near a computer in your free time.

The two feely-blank things I actually owned were a potter’s wheel and a weighted golf club handle which Carol had given me last Christmas. The club handle was short-so that I didn’t smash everything around me while working my way down, say, the fabulous second oceanside hole of the Toshiba Cyberspace Pebble Beach. The clever thing about the feely-blank golf club was that the tip held a gyroscope which did a cyberized jiggly-doo right when I would hit the virtual ball-giving me the shock of contact.

The potter’s wheel was for Carol, and for awhile she had enjoyed using it. It was like a regular electric wheel, except that it had a permanent “lump of clay” which was made of firm, malleable titaniplast putty. They used the same stuff for the feely-blank keyboards; you could mold and remold it to any shape you wanted, and it never got brittle. I’d kept all the virtual pots Carol made in a file somewhere.

Anyway, I kept meaning to go get a fake keyboard, but physically going places and buying material objects for my computer was not something I was into. I mean walking into a place like Fry’s Electronics was always a downer, everyone sucking down Jolt Colas and munching candy bars, no women in sight, just males-pitiful bewildered larvae from under a rock, or pompous bearded lawn-dwarves with tenor voices, or square-forehead Frankenstein monsters, or sweaty strivers with no fingernails-lumps and losers to a man. How had I ended up associated with this class of people? Oh well, as the California kids would say when something not particularly desirable happened. Oh well!

The two neatest things in my virtual office were my Lorenz attractor and my dollhouse. The Lorenz attractor was a floating dynamical system consisting of orbiting three-dimensional icons, little simmie images that stood for pieces of information or which represented things my computer could do. The icons tumbled along taffy trajectories that knotted into a roller coaster pair of floppy ears with a chaotic figure eight intersection. If I liked, I could make myself small and ride around on the Lorenz attractor in a painless demolition derby with my files. It was a fun way to mull things over.

My dollhouse was a special miniature cyberspace model of my house that I’d once made as a Christmas present for little Ida, but she’d never actually played with it that much-one reason being that I was hardly ever willing to let anyone else use my gloves and headset. I needed them all the time for all the work I had to do-always too much work!

I’d tweaked my real house’s alarm system so that if anyone touched a door or window, the corresponding door or window would light up on the dollhouse. I had little models of myself and my family members inside my dollhouse. Actually my wife and three children shouldn’t have been in the dollhouse at all anymore, as they no longer lived here, but it would have made me too sad and lonely to erase them. In my dollhouse, my wife was in the kitchen and my kids were lying on their stomachs in the living room doing homework and watching a tiny digital TV. If they’d actually been in my house, moving from room to room, the little simmie-dolls that represented them would have moved around too. My house was smart enough always to know who was in which room. The little virtual TV was hooked into the Fibernet system; sometimes I would make myself small and watch it with my dolls, though never for long. Everything on TV enraged me, because everything on TV was the same: the ads, the news, the shows. In my opinion, all TV was all part of the huge, lying Spectacle that the government kept running to oppress us all. Data compression had brought us a thousand channels, but they all sucked, same as ever.

The dollhouse’s Studly-model did move around because he actually was physically in the house with me, rolling around and cleaning, gardening, keeping an eye on things, taking care of business, and occasionally talking to me. If I wanted to check something in the house, I could switch over to Studly’s viewpoint, and see what he was seeing through his two video camera eyes. When Carol had still lived with me, I would sometimes use Studly to sneak in and watch her while she was dressing or taking a piss. That would drive her frantic with rage. “I know you’re in there, Jerzy,” she’d scream as oily Studly sidled up to capture her pixels and send them through the aether to me. “Get your head out of that computer and come talk to me like a human being!” Usually, however, I didn’t have the time. When I was programming, I was always in a terrific rush.

Sitting in my office after Susan Poker left, it occurred to me that if I were to use Studly to kill the Realtor, I wouldn’t really have to program him for it. It would be much easier to couple myself to his manipulators and drive him in real time. That was known as telerobotics — a person driving a robot that was somewhere else, with the distant person using television to “see through the eyes of the robot.” Telerobotics was one of the most fun things you could do with a robot.

Tunelessly humming, I looked up from the doll-house and stared at the images riding my Lorenz attractor. Most of them were quite familiar, but what with my hookup to the Net and the existence of some more or less autonomous processes in our company machines, I would sometimes spot‘ a new icon. Today the new one was a little 3-D image of an ant, a sweetly made photorealistic model with mandibles, head, antennae, alitrunk, legs, petiole, and gaster-the spitting image of the virtual ants that Roger Coolidge had been working on in his lab at GoMotion. But no way were any GoMotion ants supposed to be loose like this. I pincered it up with virtual thumb and forefinger. It wriggled its legs and turned its head to bite me. The ant bite made a tingling physical flutter in my glove’s touchpads. There was a noise with it, a double burst of skritchy chaos. I dropped the ant. Chirping angrily, it dug its way down through my virtual office floor and disappeared.

Instead of chasing after the ant, I pointed my finger to the GoMotion door and nodded in there. The necessary information traveled over the Fibernet and then for a moment I saw nothing but a snowstorm of static, as the GoMotion communication software checked my access codes. There was a warbling tone as our systems synced together, and then I walked into the virtual offices of GoMotion.

How did I look? Like most users, I owned a tailor-made simmie of my cyberspace body. Cyberspace users called their body-simmies tuxedos. My tuxedo was a suite of video images bitmapped onto a blank humanoid form. The form’s surface was a mesh of triangles which could be adjusted like a dressmaker’s dummy; and inside the form were virtual armatures and hinges so that the thing moved about as realistically as one of those little wooden mannequins that artists used to have. The overall size of the thing was adjusted to closely match my body size with, of course, a few inches taken off the waist.

I’d had my body surfaces taped by a professional body-mapping studio right there in Los Perros: Dirk Blanda’s Personography. You’d go to Dirk Blanda’s and in the reception area there was a wall with plaster body-shapes lined up against it. Mounted on the ceiling over each body was a video projector beaming a satisfied customer’s image onto one of the body-shaped screens. Dirk Blanda’s had started out as a photo studio, but when the last big quake had wiped out his building, he’d retooled and gotten modern. I actually knew Dirk fairly well as his house was almost next to mine.