Rudy Rucker - The hacker and the ants

We were in Dirk’s virtual office. Dirk’s tuxedo was a muscular version of him, and I was a chromed-over copy of Dirk. I followed after him as he flew through a door that opened onto a huge Louis the Fourteenth ballroom with a few hundred figures posed on the parquet floor. When we came in, the figures started slowly gesturing, driven by automatic chaos loops. “Here, Jerzy,” came Dirk’s voice over the earphones. “This is my art warehouse. I’m always putting together new tuxedos. Fly around and look for something you like.”

The figures were set down in no particular order: a club-wielding caveman, a breastplated Amazon, a Tyrannosaurus rex, a happy carrot, Michelangelo’s marble David, a pointillist Seurat woman with a bustle, a centaur, a manic white businessman smoking a pipe, a teddy bear, the pope, Bo Diddley, a vertically divided half-Elvis half-Marilyn, JFK with brains dangling from the back of his head, a knight in paisley armor, a forties secretary with glasses and tight bun, a saucer alien with tentacles on its face, a crying clown,…

“I want to be a crying clown,” I said.

“You sure?”

“Yeah, man, a crying clown is how I feel-what with my trial coming up. Maybe if I look like a crying clown people will be nicer to me.”

“Okay,” said Dirk. “And you need a size lever. Why don’t we make his penis be the lever.” Dirk chuckled and pulled the clown’s pants down. The clown was endowed with a dangling hairy scrotum and an intricately veined semitumescent penis. “I figured a clown’s genitals should be kind of grotesque,” said Dirk. “Getting the pants to go on and off was an interesting hack. How about if you push the clown’s penis up he grows, and if you push it down he gets smaller. A Gothic joystick.”

“That’s too gnarly, Dirk. Why can’t you make the control be…” I looked over at the businessman figure with his pipe clenched between the teeth of his shit-eating salesman grin. I now recognized the figure as the old underground culture icon known as “Bob” Dobbs. “Give my clown a copy of the pipe of ‘Bob’ Dobbs.”

“I like it,” said Dirk. He popped up the tool icons and picked a little glass box with buttons on it. He moved and resized the box to just fit over “Bob” ‘s pipe, and then pressed a button to capture a copy of the pipe that he carried over and affixed to the face of my clown. Next he used a screwdriver icon to pry open the clown’s chest to reveal a symbolic arrangement of chips and wires. Dirk used a virtual pliers and soldering iron to adjust the circuitry, sealed the clown back up, and pulled down a spray can.

“You can use the pipe for size control, yes. And, Jerzy, as long as we’re getting crazy, I’ll make your tuxedo’s surface reflectivity be like black velvet. A ‘Bob’ Dobbs crying clown painted on black velvet” He sprayed the clown till its surfaces were all matte and soft. “So try on your new tux, Jerzy. Just fly through it, and it’ll click onto you.”

I flew forward and, sure enough, the crying clown clicked onto me. I moved the velvety arms around. One side of the ballroom was a huge mirror, and I flew over there to take a closer look.

“The pipe works?” I asked.

“Try it.”

I pushed up on the pipe, and rapidly grew through the ceiling of the ballroom. Outside the ballroom was raw black cyberspace with some things twinkling in the distance. I pushed the pipe down, and shrank back into the ballroom and on down and down to the size of a pissant. Dirk and the art meshes towered above me. I inched myself back up to standard size.

“This is great. Can we get out?”

“Sure.” We flew back into Dirk’s virtual office and took off our headsets.

Dirk tore open his quarter ounce and stuffed the bowl of a pipe.

“Uh, Dirk,” I said as he lit the pipe. “About that burn you and Mattel did. Did you ask the phreak to do anything besides scaring me? I mean-you weren’t involved in the release of the GoMotion ants, were you?”

Dirk shook his head no while holding his breath. He offered me the pipe, but it had already gone out.

“How do you want to get the tuxedo onto your system?” asked Dirk as he exhaled. “Ordinarily I’d say for you to just come through cyberspace and pick it up, but what with your legal situation-”

“Yeah, I’d much rather take it on disk and install it directly on my deck. The less of a trail I leave the better.”

“Agreed. I’ll put it on a disk with an install script.”

“Cool.”

We said our good-byes and I went outside. Without putting my headset on, I tapped three-one-four-one to turn on my deck. I opened the trunk and put the disk in the drive of my Pemex twelve. This was finally the golden age of system-independent plug’n‘play, so the deck knew that the disk was meant to be my tuxedo, and the disk knew what format my deck wanted, and they both could agree to run the tuxedo’s self-installing script.

I got in the driver’s seat of my car and put on my headset for a quick cybercruise to the Bay Area Netport rest room. In the mirror I was a black velvet crying clown with the pipe of “Bob” Dobbs. Bety Byte and her grrlfriends looked at me, but I was no weirder than a lot of the tuxedos going by. I flew out to a corner of the Netport and tested out the shrink and grow commands to my satisfaction. But now it was time to pick up Gretchen.

Just for kicks, I tapped five-nine-two-six for the reality pass-through. Stunglasses mode, Riscky had called it. Instead of the Netport, my headset now showed me a TV image of the view out my parked car’s windshield. Dirk’s driveway. I looked down at my hands and waggled them. There was no perceptible lag as the images came in through my headset’s small video cameras, traveled to the deck in the trunk, and made their way to the headset’s video screens. This was a very fast deck. I felt confident enough of it to pull out of Dirk’s driveway and drive down to Los Perros wearing stunglasses. The colors were so rich and the resolution so high that I could barely tell I was wearing a headset at all.

I parked in front of Welsh amp; Tayke, turned off my deck, and stashed my gloves and headset in the pouch behind my seat. I could see in through the front window-Susan Poker and Gretchen were still there. After what I’d just learned about Susan Poker from Riscky-that she was a professional who’d been in on my burn-well, I didn’t want to try to talk to her. I leaned on my horn. Gretchen saw me, grabbed her purse, and danced out laughing to hop in my car. She was glad to see me.

“I’m so sick of the office, Jerzy! It’s a beautiful warm day-I should be at the beach!”

“We can still go to the beach. Let’s go to Santa Cruz and have supper there. And maybe there’s some music happening in Santa Cruz tonight. Do you want to?”

“ Yeah, I do.” This funny emphasis of agreement was another new California speech habit. “My car’s parked over there; let’s regroup at my apartment.”

After parking her Porsche at her apartment, Gretchen changed clothes. I borrowed a baggy sweater from her for if it got cold later. We checked in the paper and, yes, there was music tonight; even though it was Tuesday, there was a World Music concert taking place in the Santa Cruz Civic Center at nine. Perfect-I drove us over the Santa Cruz mountains toward the sun.

We hung out on Its Beach near Steamer Lane. It was sunny and not too windy. Around six-thirty we went to an expensive restaurant looking out over Monterey Bay. We had lobster sausage for our appetizer and duck pizza for our main course. The lobster sausage was exquisitely toothsome, but the duck pizza was a disappointment. Duck was always a disappointment, but somehow I could never learn.

“Let’s stay at my place tonight,” I said over our cappucino. “I don’t want Susan Poker barging in on me again. I don’t trust her at all anymore. I found out today that she’s a cryp. She’s been lying to me. Did you know that, Gretchen?”