Rudy Rucker - The hacker and the ants

“A nice guy,” he was telling them. The three TV screens over the bar were blank. I found the silence wonderful, but the men did not. They were sullen and bewildered. There was some kind of sports event they wanted to be watching. “He comes in here afternoons when he gets tired of hacking,” Tommy was saying. “He’s kind of an old hippie.”

“They ought to castrate him,” someone opined.

“People will go nuts with no TV,” another one put in. “I can’t face going home tonight. What the hell am I going to do all evening?”

The waitress came to me and I ordered a beer and a barbecued pork sandwich. I was very hungry. While I waited for the food, I studied the newspaper. There was no TV working anywhere on the planet save for the few remaining analog backwaters-Borneo, Peru, New Guinea, Zaire, Micronesia. The “GoMotion ant virus” was believed to have been released by Jerzy Rugby, a disaffected programmer recently fired by GoMotion. Nancy Day, the president of GoMotion, promised that a “GoMotion ant lion” would soon be available to set things right. I guessed that Nancy Day, whom I’d never met, was fronting for Roger. There was a big sidebar article with some Q amp;A on the situation.

Q: What is GoMotion Inc.?

A: GoMotion Inc. of Santa Clara is a manufacturer of custom software kits for assembling intelligent machinery. They are best-known for the Iron Camel dune buggy, which has sold 1.5 million units worldwide. Their next product is to be a line of build-it-yourself home robot kits called the GoMotion Veep.

Q: Why were the GoMotion ants developed?

A: The GoMotion ants are an example of artificial life, which refers to computer programs that change and evolve on their own. GoMotion says the ant programs were designed for research use only. For practical and cost-cutting reasons, the ants were evolved to live on the inexpensive, readily available chips that are found in DTV equipment.

Q: How did the ants spread?

A: A rogue prototype Veep robot used a laser-scanner to feed the programs into Fibernet San Jose. The entry point for the infection was a cut Fibernet cable on White Road in San Jose.

Q: Who is to blame?

A: The robot, who is called Studly, was in the possession of Jerzy Rugby, a programmer who was recently fired by GoMotion Inc. Rugby has now been indicted by a California state grand jury on charges of criminal trespass, computer intrusion, and extreme cruelty to animals. In addition, a federal grand jury is preparing to indict him on charges of sabotage of a public utility, contamination of cable services, destruction of national defense utilities, and treason. Rugby is currently free on $3 million bail. The bail was posted by attorney Stuart Koblenz, representing Seven Lucky Overseas.

Q: What is Seven Lucky Overseas?

A: Seven Lucky Overseas is a Taiwanese-based company that has a history of competing for the same markets as GoMotion Inc. Their first U.S. daughter company, GoWheels Inc., was successfully sued by GoMotion Inc. for copyright infringement. Their most infamous subsidiary company was Meta Meta, which produced a robot called the Choreboy. In a grotesque holiday mishap, a Choreboy killed a baby by sticking a meat thermometer into the child’s heart and roasting it in place of a Thanksgiving turkey. Meta Meta went into Chapter 11 and reorganized as West West, which is slated to release a robot called the Adze. The Adze robot will be comparable to the GoMotion Veep.

Q: How soon will TV broadcasts resume?

A: GoMotion officials have promised that a free “GoMotion ant lion” program will be available from them within 48 hours. Like the ants, the ant lion program will be a self-replicating computer virus. According to GoMotion, however, the ant lion will be a benevolent virus that takes up residence on DTV chips and devotes its energy solely to finding and eradicating all GoMotion ants which may arrive. If the FCC agrees to the release of the GoMotion ant lions, and if the ant lions are indeed successful, then normal digital broadcasting could resume in a matter of days.

Q: What can I do in the meantime?

A: The ant virus affects high-definition, compressed, digital, cable, or satellite-transmitted TV. If you have an older TV set-the kind with rabbit ears and a manual channel selector knob-then you will be able to receive analog TV signals from a variety of local ATV, or amateur TV, channels that transmit in this form. See the TV amp; Entertainment section for information about the best of ATV and about how to retrofit your set.

Q: What about rental movies?

A: CDs, S-cubes, and downloadable video all use the same digital compression technologies as broadcast DTV and are thus subject to the same interference from the GoMotion ante.

Q: Are other communications media in danger?

A: There have been no reports of interference with radio or with voice telephone, which are still purely analog forms of communication. There have been numerous sightings of GoMotion ants on the digital cyberspace Net, although as yet no data damages have been reported. Expunging the GoMotion ant virus from cyberspace could prove more difficult than removing it from TV. The reason is that there is a much greater diversity of “ecological niches” for artificial life-forms to inhabit in cyberspace.

Q: Is this just the first wave of a new generation of computer viruses?

A: If the GoMotion ants are able to permanently establish themselves in cyberspace, they could undergo a process like evolution and become ever more destructive and harder to kill. This would be analogous to the way in which each winter’s flu viruses are immune to the vaccines of the year before. Conceivably the cyberspace-based ants could periodically reinfect television. The most pessimistic prediction is that DTV-busting viruses are here to stay, and that digital television is a thing of the past.

While I was reading, the food and beer had come, and I’d been consuming them. Now I was done eating, and I’d paid the waitress off. I wasn’t sure what to do next.

“Jerzy!”

I looked up. It was Gretchen Bell, standing over me and smiling. She was wearing a short pleated plaid skirt with a pale yellow sweater. She looked languidly lively. “I was just talking about you! Everyone in my office has been asking me what you’re like!”

Tommy the bartender heard Gretchen saying my name, and now he hailed me, too. “Jerzy Rugby! The man who killed television!” A hubbub of voices ensued.

“Can I come over to your house, Gretchen?” I asked quickly.

“My apartment? I thought you said you were going to take me to the Mark Hopkins in San Francisco.” She laughed softly, keeping me hanging. “Well, let’s see. I have to go to Safeway, and I have to pick up some dry-cleaning. But after that, okay.” She gave me a good smile. She had the hots for me as much as I did for her. And now I was famous. “Do you know where I live?”

Someone tapped my shoulder, the same man who’d said I should be castrated. I kept my back to him and leaned toward Gretchen.

“I’m going to need a ride out of here. Like right now?”

“All right.”

“Are you some kind of goddamn terrorist?” demanded the castration advocate.

“I’m a software engineer,” I said as I turned. “What happened was an industrial accident.” I stepped around him and called a good-bye to the bartender. “Gotta go, Tommy! Sorry I can’t discuss the case!” There were plenty of other people who wanted to talk to me, but a minute later we were driving off in Gretchen’s car, a sputtering ten-year-old yellow Porsche.

“I bought this from an old boyfriend for two thousand dollars,” Gretchen told me. “Not bad, hey?”

“You must have a lot of boyfriends,” I essayed. I still knew almost nothing about Gretchen. “What kind of office do you work in?”