Rudy Rucker - The hacker and the ants

Inthe morning i woke soft and sweet, my mind a blank. Before opening my eyes, I happened to rub my hand up against my head and I felt the headset. I pushed it off, opened my eyes, and looked around as the horrible memories came flooding back to me.

Beautiful unharmed naked Gretchen was in bed with me. I hadn’t strangled her. I lifted up the sheet and looked down. There was no diarrhea. Had everything after Perky Pat’s giving me the finger been a phreak burn? What had I said to Gretchen and Keith-what had they seen me do?

“Keith,” I called, hurrying naked down the spiral staircase from the aerie I rented. “Hey, Keith!” I was ashamed to hear how my voice shook. My stomach looked fat and vulnerable. The living room and the kitchen were empty and the house was utterly quiet. Presumably they were still asleep in their bedroom downstairs. Or maybe they’d never come home at all. Maybe that thing about Keith shaking me had been part of the dark dream.

“Keith? Queue?” I walked halfway down the stairs from the living room to the next lower level. “Keith?” At the bottom of the stairs I opened the door to Keith and Queue’s bedroom. The messy room was cool and empty. No one had slept here last night.

I ran back up the stairs to the living room and back up the spiral staircase to my room. Gretchen was on the bed with the sheet wrapped around her, sitting there looking out the window at the beautiful fog and sun in the redwoods.

“Why were you yelling? God, you’re uptight. You woke me.”

“I… Did I do anything funny last night?”

“You did lots of things that were funny,” laughed Gretchen. “Now get back in bed so we can cuddle. What are you stressing for? You’re all red!”

I saw Riscky’s headset lying on the floor. It was still live, with images playing inside it. I wanted to stomp and crush the headset, but I was barefoot. Instead I tapped three-one-four-one (how-I-need-a) on the right temple to turn off the satanic engine.

I lay down on the bed. Gretchen spread the sheet over both of us and spooned herself against my back.

“Was I yelling last night?” I asked.

“If you were, I slept right through it. Pot and good sex puts me totally to sleep.”

“After you went to sleep, I put on my new cyberspace headset and I had-I had a terrible experience. I thought you were dead. I thought I choked you. I thought I had diarrhea in the bed.”

“Were you with the ants?”

“Yes. Only now they look like robots and people. They’re much much much faster than they used to be.”

“Jerzy, why do you fry your brain?” Gretchen sounded mad. “It’s like you don’t begin to realize-” She shook her head. “The ants are shit, Jerzy. The ants suck.”

“Nice talk for a mortgage insurance broker.” Thank God I had this warm real woman with me. “I love you, Gretchen. I’m glad you’re here. I’m so scared about everything.”

“About your trial starting tomorrow?”

“And about the ants. And about this latest burn. I don’t think there was a phreak behind this one. I think the ants did it to me themselves.”

“Did you do something to bother the ants?”

“Well, yes, I went into their nest. The Antland of Fnoor, I call it.”

“So don’t go there again. Don’t go into cyberspace at all.”

“And I’m worried about what the ants might do to the new robots. We copied a GoMotion ant lion into the new robot code, but these cyberspace ants I saw last night-I think they’ve been sitting in the machines at West West and watching me create the code. They were imitating Squidboy and even Perky Pat. If there’s a loophole in my code, the cyberspace ants are going to find it. The new robots might not be safe to use.”

“You should tell GoMotion and West West. Get your lawyer to fax them a letter so that if something new goes wrong you’ll have a defense.”

“That’s a good idea.”

We ate some yogurt and granola from Keith and Queue’s kitchen. Instead of crushing my headset, I put it and the gloves into my car’s trunk. And then I drove Gretchen to her apartment.

“See you again tonight, Jerzy?”

“I’m not sure. I’ll call you.”

“Stay away from the ants!”

“I’ll try.”

I went to see Stu at his office in downtown San Jose. He had a spiffed-up one-room office in the old Bank of America building. Instead of a secretary, he had a smart computer with good voice-recognition and speech-generation software. He could dictate documents to it, and it was able to answer the phone. He called his computer Miss Prentice.

Standing outside Stu’s door in the empty BofA building hallway, I could hear him talking with Miss Prentice. “Take your penis out and masturbate yourself,” Miss Prentice was saying.

“I’m busy right now,” whined Stu. “I don’t want to. I don’t have the energy.”

“Do you refuse to obey your mistress?” growled Miss Prentice. “I will not tolerate such behavior. You have dared to have an erection in the presence of your mistress, and now you must masturbate it away!”

“I don’t have an erection yet, Miss Prentice,” said Stu. “Can you show me some dirty pictures?”

I knocked quickly on the office door before the sordid scene could progress any farther. Miss Prentice’s voice rose an octave. “Who’s there?”

“It’s Jerzy Rugby.”

“Mr. Koblenz will see you now.” The door swung open.

Stu was sitting at his desk with his hands in his lap. He was holding an orange Nerfball. He was wearing a thin wrinkled suit and a tie.

“How’s it going?” said Stu, taking aim and shooting the Nerfball at a basketball hoop he’d glued to the wall. There was a Scotch-taped paper chute so that if Stu made a basket the ball would roll back to him. The ball went in. “I made another one, Miss Prentice,” said Stu, catching the ball from the trough. “What does that make my average for today?”

“You’re making eighty-seven percent of them, Mr. Koblenz,” said the computer. “Congratulations.” Unlike my robots, Miss Prentice didn’t look at all alive. Miss Prentice was nothing but a big computer box with a video screen, a printer, a microphone, and a speaker. I glanced quickly at the screen-it showed an insipid spreadsheet, probably fake.

I sat down. “Stu, I’m worried about the West West and GoMotion robot software that I helped develop. I don’t think it’s safe. I think the GoMotion ants might be able to infect the robots. Can you send letters to West West and GoMotion in my name saying that? A snail-mail letter and a fax to each of them? If the robots malfunction, I don’t want even more blame to be laid on me.” Snail-mail was the hacker word for ordinary, nonelectronic mail.

Stu thought for a minute, then shook his head. “How did you come up with such a terrible idea? You don’t want to send letters like that. If the robots were to malfunction, those letters would be viewed as proof that you’d known you’d sabotaged the code. A confession. So I won’t send them, no.” Stu regarded me distantly. “It would only make you the more convictable.”

“What do you mean convictable? Aren’t we going to win this trial? Aren’t you ready? You’re sitting here jacking off and playing Nerfball! What are you going to do for me in court tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow and Friday the judge selects and instructs a jury. Friday afternoon the D.A. and I make our opening statements. Monday we start with the witnesses. Sure I’m ready. But I don’t think we’ll win. You’re in big trouble, Jerzy. In fact, you’re screwed.”

“How so?” My voice was tight and small. “I wasn’t in control of Studly! None of the charges is true!”

“I guess you haven’t seen the new National Enquirer.” Stu tossed me a copy of the tabloid newspaper. The front page was a big picture of Studly with the headline: JERZY TOLD HIS ROBOT TO KILL MY DOG!