Rudy Rucker - The hacker and the ants

“Who told you she was a cryp?”

“Some phreak I met at the Night Watch. His name was Riscky Pharbeque. He sold me a hot new cyberspace deck for a thousand dollars.”

“You just can’t leave that stuff alone, can you, Jerzy?”

“So what about Susan Poker?” I demanded.

“Well, okay, it’s true that she’s a cryp. Welsh amp; Tayke uses her to get early information. I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to scare you off.”

“I bet it was Susan Poker who called the cops on me.”

“I guess that’s possible. Even though Susan smiles a lot, she isn’t necessarily that nice a person. Sometimes I wonder how I ended up getting stuck with her as a friend. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, Jerzy. I was scared you’d blame me for what she does.”

“Is somebody paying her to watch me?”

“I don’t know.” Gretchen stared out the window, then smiled brightly at me and changed the subject. “Do you think you’ll win your trial?”

“I sure hope so. Part of my being fired from West West means that they revoke my bail next week. That three million dollars they put up? With that gone, I’ll be sitting in jail.”

“Poor Jerzy. Hey! It’s time for the concert.”

“Can you put this meal on your credit card, Gretchen? I’m a little short on cash.”

“Because you spent all your money on another stupid computer? I’ll charge it, but you have to pay me back. All of it. You asked me out for dinner, so it’s your treat.”

“Okay, okay. But don’t worry, at least I’ve got enough cash for the tickets.”

We drove over to the Santa Cruz Civic Center, a small old hall the size of a basketball court with concrete bleachers all around. The first group was a band from Uganda. They had a midget who played an instrument made of a gourd with key chains all around it. In the crowd I lit one of my joints and passed it to Gretchen. She took a long deep drag, held her breath, and exhaled an upward plume of smoke. She stuck her tongue out and wagged her head back and forth like: I’m feeling wild. I got close to her and enjoyed her smell and the fanning of the air that her body motions made.

When I passed the joint back to her the second time, she stuck out her tongue and made her marijuana-smoking-wild-girl face again: I’m high and I like it. I loved Gretchen’s tongue-faces so much. She’d made a come-hither tongue-face at me the very first time I’d seen her-at Coffee Roasting. That time her tongue had bent up over her upper lip, but for the wild-girl tongue-face at the Santa Cruz concert, Gretchen’s tongue went down over her lower lip. She fascinated me.

After the concert, we went back to my room at Queue’s and fucked. Queue and Keith weren’t home, so we fucked loud and hard and had a great time, up there in my airy room in the redwooded Santa Cruz mountains. Pretty soon Gretchen dropped off to sleep.

I’d brought my new gloves and headset up from the car with me; they were lying on the floor next to the bed. Lying cozy in my Gretchenful bed, I pulled on the gloves, donned the headset, and tapped into cyberspace.

You know at the end of the classic Beatles song, “Day In The Life,” how it ends on a big chord, like: BAAAAOOOUUUUMMM? That’s the sound Riscky’s deck made in my earphones, welcoming me in.

I flew across the Netport to the node of the Magic Shell Mall. In the mall, I flew to the vacant lot between Total Video and Gibb amp; Gibb. I walked to the same old vertex and pushed down on my pipe. The scene around me expanded smoothly, and then I was the size of a pissant and I was standing next to a big round off error hole in the corner. I crawled through the hole.

At first it was all black, but then I saw an odd shape in front of me; a drifting piece of geometry with faces that swung crazily through each other, faces that appeared and disappeared in no logical order-it was a piece of fnoor.

The rotating fnoor changed size irregularly; at a moment when it looked much bigger than me, I sprang forward and landed on it. I ran across the faces, which flipped out under me. I still had seen no ants. Finally I came to a kind of doorway in the dense angles of the fnoor; I squeezed through it and, as before, the fnoor turned into a solid model that lay all around me.

A weirdly shifting corridor stretched out ahead. I heard a faint chirping sound. I inched forward cautiously, but suddenly the corridor turned inside out and dumped me into a round room that was filled with-ants?

Not ants, not exactly, no. The creatures racing about in the round room were shaped like Perky Pats and Dexters, like Walts and Scooters and Squidboys. I flashed on the sickening realization that all the time I’d been evolving better Squidboys and more difficult Christensens at West West, the ants had been there in the background, using the process to make their own code even better. One of the Perky Pats gave me the finger.

I guess I must have tapped five-nine-two-six for the stunglasses pass-through then, but I don’t remember doing it. All I remember is that I was looking up at the ceiling of my bedroom with everything radiating off optical echoes of itself, everything receding and surrounded by memory images. The beams in the ceiling were covered with crawling colored lights, and my ears were filled with a resonant flutter. My stomach cramped and my bowels turned to water, I jumped out of bed and rushed to the toilet. I shit out a big nasty wet mess; it seemed to keep coming forever. When I was through, I stood up and looked in the mirror. I didn’t see stunglasses on my face; all I saw was an aging guy with severe diarrhea.

When I walked back to my bedroom, something rushed out at me from the left side of my field of vision. It was a cross between an ant, a face, a 3-D Mandelbrot set, and-oh, a furnace-stove made of blue and white tiles. It was way fast. It said some nonsense phrase like, “Beetlejuice monkey!” and I murmured, “Beetlejuice monkey?” to myself, trying to assimilate, and then the creature sped up a thousand times and sneered, “Nah, Beetlejuice monkey!” and I tried to relate, and the creature went faster, and it and I went into a hideous hebephrenic thought loop as the flutter in my ears sped higher and higher. The mandible-snout Beetlejuice Monkey was mocking and aggressive, it was totally dissing my thought speed, it was trying to dominate and show me where it’s really at-it did unbelievable shit like counting from one to one quadrillion. Out loud and by ones. It was way, way fast.

At some point in this psycho nightmare I decided the only way to stop the Beetlejuice Monkey was to kill it. I lunged forward with my velvet clown hands sticking out before me, and I grabbed the creature at its narrowest part. I began squeezing, and it was struggling and hitting back at me, and then someone grabbed me from behind and jerked at me, and then there was a wrenching at my face and everything got slow and different.

Keith was holding me in a full nelson.

“Jerzy! Jerzy! What’s going on? We just got home. What are you doing, man? What did you do to your chick?”

Gretchen was squeezed back against the wall, her face all blue, her dear face a frozen dead mask of horror. Her cold dead tongue was sticking out between jaws that were open in a wide death-agony rictus; it was poor Gretchen’s last tongue-face. I’d killed her. My diarrhea was all over my legs and all over the bed.

“You’re going to die for this, Jerzy,” screamed Queue, pushing past Keith and shoving her face up against mine. “You’re going to get the gas chamber and go to hell!”

I cringed back from the hideousness of what I’d done; I just couldn’t deal. I wanted to be catatonic. I fell back against my shit-covered bed and merged into the Beetlejuice Monkey.