Rudy Rucker - The hacker and the ants

“Where?”

“Yesterday it was written on the wall in spraypaint over there.” He pointed toward one of the library walls that swept by as Russ steered us toward the exit node that hovered in the middle of the library like an oversize world globe.

“It’s very incorrect,” continued Sketchy, “to deface the Cryp Club library. So of course nobody would cop to it. I cleaned it off myself; it was my day for maintenance duty. Maybe a phreak got in and did it. If we catch him we’re going to burn him bad.”

Russ jumped into the exit node and brought us out in the Bay Area Netport. The huge Beaux Arts architectural space stretched out before us, with spherical hyperjump nodes all along the ceiling, floor, and walls.

“The second time I heard of Hex DEF6 was this morning,” continued Sketchy. “A phreak was trying to bust into the West West node. The dude’s tuxedo looked like a canvas mask with a zipper instead of a mouth. I iced him and he left, but before he left he gave me the finger and said his name was Hex DEF6. And now you’re asking me about him. That’s three times in two days. So, yeah, what is Hex DEF6?”

With quick jerky movements, Russ was steering the viewpoint across the Netport to the West West node, a shiny copper ball decorated with the West West WW logo that was, Janelle had told me, the same as the old Meta Meta MM logo upside down. We slid through the surface of the ball and saw an aerial view of the West West building plus a virtual housing development of Our American Homes set up out in back of the parking lot. At my request, Sun Tam had installed 256 of them; it was as many as the West West computers had room for. It took a petabyte of memory to maintain this big a subdivision of Our American Homes.

“I saw that zipper-mouth Hex DEF6 with a bunch of GoMotion ants a couple of weeks ago,” I said. “He told me he’d injure me and my children if I didn’t work for West West. And this week a kid followed me home and said that he was Hex DEF6, or that he worked for him or something. But you don’t think West West is behind it?”

“Sounds like a phreak burn to me,” said Sketchy.

“Sorry to interrupt these exciting spyboy adventures,” said Russ, using the standard hacker insult for cryps and phreaks. “But where’d you put your Adze code, Jerzy?” He was hovering over my virtual desk, right there in the model of my cubicle in the pit.

“I’ll get it.”

I pulled open the virtual desk’s top drawer to reveal a three-dimensional chrome box with a socket and a keyhole in it. Written on the box in flowing gold cursive was SuperC/Kwirkey For Adze, Jerzy Rugby. There was no way to pick the box up, as I’d permanently attached it to the cyberspace aether-meaning that there was no way to change the box’s location coordinates without destroying it. To use the software you had to unlock the box with a key.

The key I kept hidden in my lower drawer, which was filled with a mess of several hundred random solid 3-D images. Today I had the key hidden inside a sword-fish. I took the thrashing swordfish out of the drawer and zoomed down onto the third spine of the dorsal fin. Stuck down at the spine’s base was the billion-bit key I’d generated last time I locked the program. It looked like a wriggly piece of wire with a round handle on one end. I pulled the wire out from the base of the swordfish’s fin-spine, put the swordfish away, and stuck the key into the software box. Now it was unlocked.

Russ pulled down a cable icon with his data glove. He stuck one end of the cable into my software box’s socket and held on to the other end of the cable as he flew up out of the virtual West West building and over to the nearest model of Our American Home. Russ pushed the doorbell and Perky Pat Christensen came to the front door and opened it.

“Walt and I are so glad you came. Dexter and Scooter are here as well!” She moved with the angular abruptness of a virtual Barbie doll, which was no surprise, as GoMotion had licensed the CyberBarbie surface meshes and joint-constraints from Mattel. Well, actually, GoMotion hadn’t licensed the info, Trevor had simply crypped it from Mattel. And then Sketchy had crypped it from GoMotion. It seemed Mattel didn’t have a clue.

We flew on into the kitchen, Russ still holding the infinitely stretchable cable in his hand. Virtual Squid-boy was sitting there in his nest, his food cord plugged into the wall. Russ opened the little door in Squidboy’s back, stuck the cable into the back of Squidboy, and squeezed the cable’s Download lever as if he were filling Squidboy up with gas. Once the download was over, Russ pulled out the cable and said, “Kwirkey Run.” Squidboy sat up and looked around. Russ flew up to join me on the ceiling.

Young Dexter Christensen wandered into the kitchen and glanced up at us. In this simulation, we looked like gloved hands attached to matchstick arms, but Dexter talked to us just the same.

“Wow! Are you startin‘ up the robot?” asked Dexter.

We didn’t bother answering him.

“Hello Squidboy,” chirped Squidboy, waving his tentacle.

“Hi, Mr. Robot,” said Dexter. “Do you wanta play?”

“Wanta play?” echoed Squidboy. We’d started him from a blank state and he was in language acquisition mode.

“Let’s go in the living room,” said Dexter and reached out toward Squidboy’s left-hand pincer-manipulator. To my horror, instead of gently taking the boy’s hand, Squidboy darted rapidly forward and slashed into the boy’s abdomen with inhuman fury.

“Hello Squidboy,” said the virtual machine, peering at the trashed geometry that had been the lad’s body. “Wanta play? Hello Squidboy. Wanta play?”

“Kwirkey Halt,” said Russ, and Squidboy and the Dexter-fragments stopped moving. Russ turned to me, a savage gleam in his eye. “What do you bet it’s your fault?”

“My code was fully tested for the Veep,” I spluttered. “Keep in mind that the Adze is a different machine. And of course it could be your port that’s causing the problem.”

“You wish,” said Russ, then spoke again to the Kwirkey operating system that was running this simulation. “Kwirkey Debug!”

A ray-traced retrocurved chrome figure appeared in the cyberspace of the kitchen.

“I am Kwirkey Debug. I am ready.”

Rather than being the tuxedo of a living user, this was a so-called daemon, a construct projected by autonomous software. In cyberspace, daemons had taken the place of menus and command-line interpreters. The GoMotion ants were daemons, too, though daemons of a much different order.

“Hello Kwirkey Debug,” said Russ. “I’m Russ and this is Jerzy. We want to set a breakpoint.”

“Which kind of breakpoint? At address, changed memory global, expression true, or hardware interrupt?” inquired the daemon. S/he spoke in a cool androgynous tone. Some goofing hacker had set the daemon’s tux to morph-wander slowly about in a parameter space that let her/im vary between male and female and between fat and thin. As we watched, the daemon changed from a fat man to a muscular woman to a skinny man-but all the while s/he was made of rippling, reflective chrome. Hackers were suckers for ray-traced chrome, also it was computationally cheap thanks to the new quaternion-based Mori-Kuzin hack, which had been the exclusive property of Unisys for about a week until a phreak called Phineas Phage had broadcast the source code all over cyberspace.

“Break when the following expression is true,” said Russ. “ Squidboy’s pincer intersects Dexter’s chest.”

“Breakpoint is set,” said Kwirkey Debug.

“Reset and run,” said Russ.

The kitchen flickered as Kwirkey Debug reinitialized it. Now Squidboy was in his nest, and Dexter was coming in again. Kwirkey Debug stood off in a corner, staring at Dexter’s chest.