Rudy Rucker - The hacker and the ants

“Are you hard up?”

“Dig it, Queue, I’m not hard up, I’ve got myself a cashmere yuppie mommy. Her name is Gretchen. She’s a mortgage insurance broker.”

“How many children does Gretchen have?”

“None, as far as I know. I think of her as a mommy because she reminds me of the big dazed whitebread American mothers some of the kids at school had when I was small. Dreamy, slow-moving women with kind smiles. And just that soft hint of a double chin, you know?”

“Ugh! I don’t want to hear you talk about women, Jerzy. It’s so sexist and disgusting and-ugh! Can’t you tell me more about your computer adventures?”

“Queue, you got no inkling.” I took a deep breath and smiled. Keith was down in the basement making some tapes. “Talking openly like this gets me high. In cyberspace I sat on the back of an ant that found me in Nordstrom’s, and the ant shrank me down small and we crawled out a hole to the Antland of Fnoor. I guess that was a New Mystery. If I can get a cyberdeck up here, maybe I’ll take you there.”

“Do it!” Queue exclaimed. “But it has to be on the sly. You’re a computer criminal, Jerzy. I’m not going to dial up the Fibernet and ask them for a cyberspace account and then have everyone see Jerzy Rugby come out of my registered memory node.”

I thought for a minute. “Any good phreak or cryp would find a way. Maybe… maybe I could use the Animata’s satellite dish.”

“Your car has a dish?”

“It has a titanium-doped electronic Fresnel lens in the moonroof. My map machine uses the lens to pick up on navigational satellites.”

“Okay, this is starting to be interesting.”

“Can you let me have a little of your pot now, Queue?”

I got into a rhythm of commuting from Queue’s to West West every morning and working all day in my cubicle in the West West programmer pit two cells away from Russ Zwerg. Most nights I’d sit out on the deck with Queue and Keith and get high.

Carol? I saw her the next weekend, when I hired some movers to clear us out of Tangle Way. Carol, Tom, and Ida were there to help pack and sort.

The idea was to move some stuff to Carol and Hiroshi’s apartment, and some to a rented space in Crocker’s Lockers. It was the first time I’d seen Carol since the night the GoMotion ants got loose. She confronted me down in the kitchen, out of earshot from the kids and the movers.

“So you’re living with Queue? I guess that means you’re stoned all the time?” Carol didn’t particularly like drugs or drug culture, and she and Queue had never hit it off. As Carol once put it: “Queue thinks I’m corny and obvious, but she doesn’t realize that I think she’s corny and obvious.”

“No, Carol, I’m not stoned all the time,” I said defensively. “I’m hacking my brains out for West West is what I’m doing.”

“I’ll bet. What does Keith have to say about your moving in? Are they married?”

“He thinks it’s fine. Carol, all I’m doing is renting a room. I am not sleeping with Queue. She’s very committed to Keith. And no, they’re not married.”

“That’s because Keith doesn’t have an income. Queue looks out for number one. I bet she tries to marry you, Jerzy. She’s had her eye on you ever since you got the good job at GoMotion.” In imitation of Queue, Carol opened her eyes wide, threw up her hands, and rocked from side to side to simper, “Oh, Jerzy, you’re so smart and wonderful!”

“Give it up, Carol,” I snapped. “How can you be jealous when you’ve already left me for another man? It’s not logical.” Unexpectedly my voice cracked. “I can’t live alone, you know.”

Carol gave me a sudden, frank look, her eyes roving over every contour of my face. She was on the verge of tears. “Are we making a big mistake, Jerzy?” From upstairs came the heavy sounds of the movers. “Don’t you still want me?”

I silently embraced her, and the kids found us there like that. “Woo-woo,” they said, softly, hopefully. Carol and I broke the clinch and got back to the details of the move.

Outside, the reporters were on us like meat bees at a barbecue. I phoned Stu to come and make a statement to them. I stood by his side as they filmed us. Stu spoke slowly and with conviction. He was acting like a good lawyer, like a stand-up guy.

“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen of the press. My name is Stuart Koblenz, and I am Jerzy Rugby’s attorney.

“GoMotion Incorporated has chosen to try and make Jerzy Rugby the scapegoat for their own industrial accident. Mr. Rugby will enter pleas of innocent to all the charges placed against him. We are preparing vigorously for the trial. For obvious legal reasons, Mr. Rugby is unable to answer questions at this time.

“The fact that Mr. Rugby is moving out of this house today is a direct result of the continuing media harassment of this innocent man. I would strongly request that the press please respect the privacy of Mr. Rugby and his family in the weeks to come. Thank you.”

After this, none of us would say anything at all to the reporters, and they pretty much pulled back, though a few of them followed the moving van to get footage of Crocker’s Lockers and of Carol and Hiroshi’s apartment complex.

Under the terms of my bail, I’d had to tell the court about moving to Queue’s and, of course, as soon as the court entered it into their machine, all the Bay Area cryps could grok my new address. Most days a car or two would tail me both ways of my commute between West West and Queue’s-sometimes reporters, other times cops or dicks or industrial agents. Queue’s house was up off a locked private road which gave me some privacy there, and West West had a gated entrance as well.

Normally the cars that followed me would melt away at the gates, but the Monday evening after we’d moved out of Tangle Way, a guy jumped out of his car and headed for me while I was opening the gate.

“Jerzy!”

Our car engines were off and we were alone in the quiet under the redwoods. Wind soughed high in the branches above. The asphalt was thickly scattered with brown pine needles, and dappled with gold patches of setting sun. The person who’d called to me was a twenty-year-old boy with shoulder-length brown hair in rasta tangles; he was bouncy and skinny, with thin lips pulled back in an expression that was not quite a smile. He walked toward me. His hands were empty, but an odd little shape trailed along the pavement after him like a mascot. A toy animal? There was no time to look closer. I focused my attention back on the boy.

“What do you want?” I challenged.

“That’s awesome that you’re working for West West, cuz,” he said in a soft, trailing-off twang. He was right in front of me. The open Animata door was just behind me. I watched the boy’s big hands and feet closely for any sign of an attack. Something bumped against my foot.

I looked down: the boy’s mascot was a motorized toy truck with some circuit boards in its back. The truck had the head of a rubber cow glued to its front, and this is what was nudging me.

“Am I Hex DEF6 yet?” drawled the boy, and waggled his eyebrows like Bugs Bunny imitating Groucho Marx. He raised one hand and made a gesture of tapping ashes off an invisible cigar. “Big business. I’m most hellacious with family video.”

“You little creep.” I thought of the tortured cyberspace session I’d spent writhingly watching myself and my loved ones being tortured and killed. They’d pasted our faces into slasher movies and war footage-my mind kept coming back to the scene of Sorrel and Tom running down a bombed road in Vietnam, all their clothes burned off by napalm, Sorrel screaming and Tom’s mouth twisted into an unbearable dog bone of anguish. And the scene with Ida sobbing over my disemboweled corpse while the killer crept up behind her-I surged forward and got my hands around the boy’s neck. “I’ll kill you.”