Rudy Rucker - The hacker and the ants

I swung my head slowly back and forth. The visual effects were better than any I’d seen before-the resolution was incredibly high, and the updates were shockingly fast. There were no jaggies, no dithering, no lag time, no lurches, no compromises. What I saw was the purest and most convincing virtual reality I’d ever seen.

“It’s wonderful, Riscky. I didn’t know they made headsets this good.”

“Hell, Jerzy, I phreakified it is why it runs so good. This is an undocumented billion-pixel video mode. And look at this!” He tapped the other side of my headset in a five-nine-two-six tattoo, and suddenly it was as if I were looking through the headset at the dashboard of my car. I turned my head and saw Riscky. But the headset was opaque! Was this another dark dream, another voodoo cyberspace? I pulled the goggles off fast and looked at them. I hadn’t noticed before that there were two TV cameras like transparent glass pinheads set where my pupils would be.

“I call it stunglasses mode,” drawled Riscky. “You get a reality shunt going there, with real-world images being routed into cyberspace and back. You tap five-nine-two-six on the left temple to toggle it.”

“How am I going to remember both those four-digit sequences?”

‘ ¦How I need a drink, alcoholic of course“ said Riscky. ”Count the letters in the words.“

“It’s pi!” I exclaimed, recognizing the mnemonic. “I love it! Here’s your money.”

Riscky took the money and cackled. His toy cow circled about in excited figure eights. “Go on in there and get even, Jerzy! Fuck Shit Up!” He got back in his car and drove off. I still had a half hour before I had to meet Gretchen. I put the headset back on and returned to the vast hall of the Bay Area Netport.

I flew over to a public rest room and made my way in past a gaggle of black-lipsticked grrls. I looked in the mirror to see what kind of user tuxedo Riscky had left on his machine? A silly tux, that’s what-I looked like a big, wheeled cart with two human hands and the imposing head of a Texas longhorn. The platonic ideal of Riscky’s toy.

“Hey, cow!” one of the grrls called to me. “Can we watch you take a piss?” She and her friends laughed like maniacs at this-not that tuxedos ever did take a piss, except in the farthest reaches of the specialty cyberporno arcades.

After staring at myself for awhile, I turned to look at the grrls, all pierced and leathered and tattooed. The one who’d called to me stepped forward and grabbed one of my horns. I felt it as a buzzing against the side of my head; apparently my new headset had touch-pads in its temples.

“I’m Bety Byte,” she said. “And you’re Riscky Pharbeque. We owe you a burn for what you did to the Cryp Club library, cow-patty.” She pulled out a little thing like a gun and shot it at me. Everything went black. At first I thought my system had crashed, but then when I flew forward, I saw that all Bety’s gun had done was to surround me with an opaque sphere.

As I flew out of the sphere, I tossed my head to hook one of my horns at Bety’s realistic icon, expecting my horn to pass harmlessly but perhaps intimidatingly through her. But Bety Byte had her surfaces custom-set for preemptive collision rejection, and my horn clattered off her with a vicious buzz on my temple. She popped her little geometry gun at me again, making things black again, and this time I just kept on going right out of the rest room and up toward the oversize bright pink and blue node of Magic Shell Mall, the cyberspace shopping mall where Gretchen had gone to Nordstrom’s.

Riscky must have had some kind of valid credit number installed in his system, for the Magic Shell node allowed me to enter. I popped out near the Bay Area Netport node that lay at the center of the Magic Shell Mall. The green-and-gray light of the Netport node flickered behind me. All over the inner surface of the great Magic Shell were walkways and the shapes of stores.

I arced along a space path toward where the ant had taken me last month, to the vacant lot between the video store and the stockbroker: Total Video and Gibb amp; Gibb Stocks. I thudded down on my virtual wheels and trundled across the blank surface till I met a seam where two Magic Shell facets met. I turned and followed the seam to a shallow corner where three quadrilaterals met five narrow triangles; this was the same corner as before. I peered at the corner, but I was too big to see if there still was a little round off error hole in it.

I needed to shrink, but-I now realized-I didn’t know how. Perhaps Riscky already had put a shrink hand gesture into his system library? I said “Show Tools,” out loud and, yes, Riscky’s system accepted this standard cyberspace command.

Several shapes appeared in the air before me-a telephone, a video camera, a claim stake, a typewriter, a calculator, an atlas, a can of spraypaint, a Swiss knife, a jet engine-but there was nothing that seemed obviously designed to change my size. I pried at the corner in the floor with my head’s long cowhorn, but it wouldn’t give. Maybe the Swiss knife? I was just opening out the can-opener blade when the grrls caught up with me.

“Bad cow!” yelled Bety Byte. She and her grrlfriends were touching down all around me. “Shoo, Riscky!” yelled one of them, and fired another geometry gun at me. I found myself enclosed inside a yellow tetrahedron, unable to see anything but my tool icons. I was going to have to get a new, shrinkable tuxedo and come back. I grabbed the jet engine, pointed the exhaust down toward my feet and pushed the button on its side. ZZZZOOOW! I burst out of the tetrahedron and flashed in along a radius straight toward the Netport node at the mall’s center.

When I popped out into the Netport, I stopped, took off the headset, and turned off the deck. Three-one-four-one. How I need a. I had to get a new tuxedo that had a control to make it shrink, and that didn’t make people think I was Riscky Pharbeque.

Since Riscky’s configuration didn’t have a virtual office where I could hack the system, the simplest thing would be to just buy a size-controllable tuxedo from Dirk Blanda’s Personography. Of course I had a bone to pick with Dirk Blanda about his having hired Riscky to burn me, though I had to admit there was a sort of justice in it.

Tuxedos sold for seven hundred dollars, and I only had three hundred. Dirk Blanda was certainly the person to go to, unless he was still mad about the CyberBarbie meshes I’d ripped off. Getting him to make me a tux would be hard, but getting him to do it cut-rate might be impossible.

I thought a minute, and then flashed on the idea that Dirk would certainly help me out if I offered to pay him in pot. Every time Dirk and I had gotten high together he’d asked me if I could score pot for him. I’d never done so, though. Like, why should I? What for? I’d always just given him a few hits of pot when I had a lot, so that when I was out of pot I could count on him to give me some. But he was almost always out of pot. The more I thought about it, the more sure I was that if I apologized to Dirk about CyberBarbie and offered him a fresh quarter ounce, he’d make me a shrinkable tux.

It was three-thirty and I was only a ten-minute drive from Queue’s. I motored on up there.

“Hi, Queue.” She was sitting in front of a Macintosh in her office. The office was right off the lower deck: an anachronistic jumble of papers, disks, tapes, and books. Media Molecules primarily sold hard copy media for those not plugged into cyberspace, although their best-sellers were available on-line from the Mondo Alternate Info Service over the cyberspace Net. But most people didn’t have cyberspace yet, especially the eternally broke eternal seekers to whom Media Molecules catered. Most of their business was still a quaint matter of putting a physical video or audiotape into a big envelope and like physically mailing it.