Rudy Rucker - The hacker and the ants

“You’re looking good, Jerzy.” Queue smiled up at me with her hair across her face. “Hey! Before I forget! Some e-mail for you came in a little while ago.”

“Let me see it.”

She moused around the screen for awhile and finally said, “I guess I erased it.”

“What did it say? Who was it from?”

“It was from Roger something in Switzerland. He said-let me think, yes, he said, ‘I appreciate your brilliant work on the Adze. Sorry about your run of bad luck. I hope to work with you again someday.’ ”

“Jesus,” I said. “That’s Roger Coolidge. He appreciates my work for West West? Don’t tell me he controls them, too!”

“Wasn’t Roger Coolidge the big hacker guy at GoMotion?”

“Yeah. He’s like my evil twin. I think he’s behind everything bad that’s been happening to me. What a guy. And he ‘hopes to work with me again someday,’ the prick?”

“That’s what he said.”

“Well, thanks for remembering to tell me.” I paused and gathered my wits, remembering why I’d come here. “Do you have any spare pot, Queue? I need to get hold of a quarter ounce.”

“Wait, wait a minute, your new robots are a huge success? You’re celebrating?”

“Not exactly. I got fired again. As for the robots, you should watch the local news. Or-do you have a TV?” I’d never seen a TV at Queue and Keith’s, come to think of it. I hate TV so much that I never look for it.

“Keith pawned our set last Christmas,” said Queue. “So we had to miss out on that spacey ants-vs-television hack you pulled. You got fired from West West?”

Keith popped into the office as if on cue.

“Hi, Jerzy,” he said. “Are you still looking for a gun?”

“A gun!” cried Queue. “Out of the question, Keith! This is a desperate man!”

“I’ve been fired again,” I told Keith. “And all I want to buy right now is marijuana.”

“Well, I can’t help you with that-though I’d be glad to smoke a bowl with you,” said Keith. “But I was at a pawnshop in Cupertino today and they had a plastic pistol for seventy-five dollars. It was a mean little machine. It looked like the head of a cobra. If you give me the money, I could get it for you.”

“You pawned your guitar again, Keith?” demanded Queue. “You didn’t pawn anything of mine, did you?”

“I have certain unavoidable expenses,” said Keith with solemn hippie dignity.

I wasn’t sure what Keith’s unavoidable expenses were-though it was fun to think that the money was for cool, newly synthesized psychedelics. But likely as not the money was simply cash for driving around, for things like gas, bridge tolls, parking meters, tobacco, and an occasional espresso. Queue controlled the cash flow of Media Molecules, and I could readily believe that she was unwilling to advance Keith a cent.

“Oh, you!” said Queue to Keith, and he smilingly drifted back out onto the deck.

“So okay, Jerzy, you want a quarter?” Queue’s voice rose musically with the welcome question. “I guess I could spare a little. I’m short on cash.”

“I have cash.” I still had three hundred dollars left. “One fifty?”

Queue gave her temple-bell laugh and mouthed a kiss at me. “One forty is fine.”

While she searched out the quarter, I went upstairs to my room and rooted out the remains of my own stash. I rolled four fat joints in Orange Zig-Zag papers and tucked them into the back of a matchbook. I went back downstairs and paid Queue for the heat-sealed quarter ounce plastic bag of sinsemilla. She said she’d bought it for herself yesterday, but was passing it on to me as a favor. I thanked her profusely. The pot was a beautiful light green mass of female buds with dusty purple stigmas. Dirk would drool over it.

I drove down to Los Perros and parked in Dirk’s driveway, right next to our old house on Tangle Way. Dirk usually worked at home rather than in the storefront of Dirk Blanda’s Personography.

He came to the door and looked out diffidently. Dirk was a calm, boyish man with a thin head and short white hair. He had a lot of simplistic ideas about economics and politics that he believed the more deeply because he’d thought them all out himself.

“Hi, Jerzy. Come on in.”

I followed him up to his machine room. I meant to be completely nice and diplomatic, but my anger over what he’d done to me came spilling out. “Dirk, you should have talked to me instead of hiring a phreak to burn me. That’s a crime, you know. I could report you.”

“Look who’s talking about crime. You stole my meshes! That’s wrong, Jerzy. If you’ve just come here to insult me, you might as well go.”

“I’m not here to insult you, and I’m sorry that my companies ripped off your meshes. But we’re even now. Your phreak put me through hell.”

Dirk’s eyes widened with curiosity. “What did he do?”

“He got me in a voodoo cyberspace watching movies of me and my children getting tortured.”

“Oh! Now that-that’s nothing that I told him to do.” Dirk looked like a worried boy whose Halloween prank has gone too far. “I wouldn’t ever wish any harm on your family.”

“You told him to burn me and he did. But now I’ve been fired from GoMotion and West West both, so if Mattel still feels like burning someone about the Our American Home test sites, tell them to go after the execs and not after me. I’m out of the loop.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, Jerzy. And your trial starts tomorrow doesn’t it? I remember seeing Studly working in your yard plenty of times. I can’t believe he killed a dog.”

“I think he started acting different after the GoMotion ants infected him. But now that there’s GoMotion ant lions all over the place, it shouldn’t happen again.”

“I keep hearing that there’s still some ants loose in cyberspace. Have you seen them?”

“No, but as a matter of fact, that’s why I’m here. I need a special tuxedo so I can go look for the cyberspace ants.”

“So you need a new tuxedo. I figured it was either that or pot that brought you here. You don’t happen to have any pot, do you? I’m all out again.”

“That’s what I was hoping,” I grinned. I took out the bag of pot and handed it to Dirk. “I’ll trade you this quarter ounce for a new tux. The tux has to be scalable. It has to have a control on it so that I can change its size.”

Dirk turned the packet this way and that, looking at the buds. “This is awesome, Jerzy. Of course I can make you a scalable tux. If you don’t want too much fine detail, I can fix you up in about ten minutes. Do you want it to look like you? I’ve still got your bodymap on file.”

“No, no, I want to be anonymous.”

“Well, I’ve got a bunch of art meshes on disk. They don’t look like anyone specific. You can pick what you like. Should we get high first?” He tore the plastic open and inhaled. “Mmmm.”

“I have some already rolled.” I took out one of my joints and lit it. Dirk and I passed the jay back and forth, loving the great warm relaxing sensations it gave us. It was nice to be here, back to normal, getting high with my friendly neighbor. I wished that all the hassles could disappear and that after this joint I could walk across the driveway and into my house and be there with Carol and the kids and my good job at GoMotion.

“I feel it, Jerzy.” Dirk looked around his room happily. “I’m buzzed.”

“You’re not mad at me anymore?”

“I’m not mad,” he smiled. There was something so pure and childlike about the guy. Hanging out with him always reminded me of Saturday mornings when I was a kid and would walk over to my neighbor friend’s house to set off firecrackers and play computer games.

“So let’s make your tux,” said Dirk, handing me a spare cyberdeck headset and pair of gloves. “You can pick out one of my art meshes.”