Rudy Rucker - The hacker and the ants

Bruisingly he knocked my arms away and sprang back. “No harm, schoolmarm. It’s only software. Like the GoMotion ants.”

“Then the threats weren’t real?”

“I wouldn’t say that either. There’s always fireworks with a Chinese Dragon. You better deliver the goods for West West, Jerzy.”

“You work for West West?”

“No, bro.” The little robot truck had retreated to a safe distance when the boy and I had grappled, but now it came nosing up close to me again. It rose up and down on its tires, bucking like a low-rider and then actually jumping a couple of inches off the ground. It was cute, with the cow’s head and everything, but maybe there was like a hypodermic dart gun inside one of those soft rubber horns, a dart gun loaded with bio-hacker brainscramble. Not wanting to find out, I kicked hard at the side of the mascot. It dodged me and skittered away. I took the opportunity to hop back into my car and close the door.

“Come see me in cyberspace if you need any phreaking done,” said the boy. “That’s all I wanted to say. And don’t forget-don’t forget Hex DEF6.” Even though he was bareheaded, he made a hat-doffing gesture appropriate for a ten-gallon hat.

“Get out of here, you Texas prick.” I reached into my glove compartment as if I had something in there.

“I’m gone.” He drove off, and I went on up to Queue’s. Keith was sitting on the deck staring up at the trees. He was a peaceful person: big, healthy, and always high. We did two quick bowls of Queue’s bud.

“Hey, Keith, do you know where I could get a pistol?” I asked as the rush settled over me.

“Statistically, a gun is most likely to kill its owner or a member of the owner’s family,” said Keith mildly. “So why would you want one? Guns are bad karma.”

“A kid was threatening me down at the gate,” I explained. “He had sort of a mechanical cow. A little one.”

“What did the little cow do to you?”

“It just rolled around, but I felt like it was getting ready to attack me. Maybe it had a needle inside its horn. I wish I could have shot it.”

“I think that if you shot off a gun, the cops would revoke your bail, Jerzy. Why don’t I give you a staff instead.” Keith disappeared into the warren of the house and emerged with a thick, ornately carved redwood stick. “I made this. See the sacred energy symbols that spiral up around it? Keep it with you in your car.”

So instead of a gun I got a sacred staff.

Well that’s enough talk about the real world; now it’s time to talk about hacking.

For the longest time, the Kwirkey/SuperC logjam would not yield. West West was committed to using Kwirkey, which was the creation of one of Seven Lucky’s seven Taiwanese founders. And most of my coding experience for GoMotion was in SuperC, and all the Veep code which the West West cryps had copied was SuperC as well. But Russ Zwerg was working on the interpreter, or had one running, or was about to have one ready, wasn’t he?

On the surface, it seemed that the languages were easily interconvertible; it was just a matter of writing an automatic interpreter that knows that “A + B” in SuperC is “(+ A B)” in Kwirkey, and other stupid shit like that. Yet Kwirkey, being Lisp-grounded, had an utterly different idea of memory than did SuperC. Russ’s Kwirkey interpreter needed to waste megabytes of space and kiloclocks of time on creating and then cleaning up the “frame diagrams” required to convert Kwirkey commands into machine instructions. And there were lots of other things-maddeningly fiddling little thinglets that nobody except Sun Tam would ever want to have to know about.

Russ Zwerg was not a likable person, but I ended up feeling some sympathy and even respect for him as he hacked his way through the vicious undergrowths that separated the kingdoms of Kwirkey, SuperC, and the Y9707 machine language of the Adze.

While Russ hacked from within, I worked from without, getting familiar with Kwirkey by learning how to do some simple things. I was excited when my first Kwirkey program for the Adze actually worked; a program called Hello Squidboy.

There was a rudimentary cyberspace viewer connected to my desktop workstation. The viewer was like a pair of binoculars connected by a wire to the machine. Inside the binoculars were swinging inertial sensors that knew exactly to what position you turned the binocs. You could look all around a scene, and there were buttons on the binocs to zoom you forward, pan sideways, or whatever. It was as if you were looking through the viewfinder of a video camera while you moved your head.

When I ran the Hello Squidboy program on my machine, I’d see a little black-and-white copy of Our American Home with a model of Squidboy sitting in the kitchen. Whenever I moved my viewpoint into the kitchen, the Squidboy figure would wave one arm and say, “Hello Squidboy,” through my workstation’s speaker. It wasn’t much, but on any system, getting your very first program to run is half the battle. It’s like the first wheel, or the invention of fire. I began building on Hello Squidboy step-by-step, continually testing each improvement out in my workstation’s cheap cyberspace. Sun Tam helped me more than Russ did.

West West Home Products General Manager Otto Gyorgyi was calling Ben Brie in for daily meetings and asking him about my progress. Keep in mind that I was into West West for three million dollars at this point. No doubt Gyorgyi was wondering if just maybe what GoMotion said about me was true-that I was a destructive incompetent.

“Are you, Russ, and Sun ready to like schedule some milestones and benchmarks?” Ben asked me after a few days. He handed me some sheets of paper. “These are the Adze performance specs that Marketing has decided to run with. Janelle basically took the Veep specs and made everything twenty-five percent better. I’m going to feel a hell of a lot more confident about all this when our software starts doing more than saying, ‘Hello Squidboy.’”

I labored frantically to prove that I was indeed worth three megabucks, and slowly, as I dug deeper into Kwirkey, my feelings about the language underwent a flip-flop, the kind of flip-flop that had happened to me a dozen times before.

With a new language or a new machine, it was always like having someone say, “Here, Jerzy, here’s this list of part numbers, and here’s a picture of a car you can build with the parts,” and at first I would think, “Fuck this, I already know how to build a car with the old kind of parts I’ve been using,” but then I would get curious and start trying to use the new parts, and they’d be shaped weird-the new parts would have their own unfamiliar logic that at first I couldn’t accept-but then I’d manage to build a wheel and it would roll, and then I’d get more curious and start seeing cool things to do with the new logic, and by then I’d be well into the flip-flop. The fact that I was willing and able to do this to myself so often was what made me a hacker.

One of the things I began loving about Kwirkey was that it was a frobbable language. A frob is something you can pick up in the palm of your hand and walk off with, something about the size of a book of matches or the size of a trestle support for a model railway. Frob is a transitive verb as well. “Where did you get that cool spin button?” “I frobbed it from a dialog box.” High-level Kwirkey code was totally modular, with none of SuperC’s entangling data commitments, and you could frob Kwirkey code with a will.

I was ready to crank up a full-scale Kwirkey port of the SuperC bag of tricks that I’d written to work with Roger’s ROBOT. LIB machine code for the Y9707, but Russ’s automatic interpreter still wasn’t happening. Port was the word hackers used to mean taking software that worked on one kind of system and trying to get it to work on another kind; it was kind of like portaging a canoe on your head over rocks and through underbrush.