Rudy Rucker - The hacker and the ants

By Thursday afternoon, the judge had finished impaneling a jury that neither Stu nor the D.A. objected to. I spent Thursday night at Gretchen’s. It hadn’t occurred to her to come to the trial, which was just as well. We ordered out for Mexican food and watched a video from Total Video-it was Natalie Wood and Tony Curtis in Sex and the Single Girl. It turned out Gretchen was a big fan of Natalie Wood; she even had a big book about Natalie, with an Andy Warhol portrait on the cover.

Friday morning, Sorrel was there in the courtroom with Tom and Ida-Sorrel with her short mouth, messy hair, and big cheeks. Judge Carrig began talking about some of the points of law relevant to my charges, and explained that the jury was to decide whether or not I was in control of the actions of Studly.

After lunch, Eddie Machotka, the D.A., made his opening presentation, followed by Stu’s opening statement for the defense.

Machotka had prepared an incredibly realistic cyberspace mock-up of the crimes as he thought they had happened. His simulation held a space-time continuum surrounding Jose Ruiz’s block of White Road for the crucial three minutes, and he could observe the running of his world from any position in it, or from any series of positions in it-he could pick any space-time trajectory he pleased. He could even speed up and slow down time, or run time backward-he was the master of space and time.

As we in the courtroom watched a big Abbott wafer display, Machotka flew us through his world. First he showed Studly standing on the picnic table and me standing next to him talking to him. Jose Ruiz was visible in his house, watching us out his window. The words Ruiz attributed to me appeared on the bottom of the screen like subtitles: Jerzy Rugby: Yes, Studly, now send in the ant viruses! Then Dutch the dog came running out of Ruiz’s house and I fled, calling back to Studly. Ruiz’s quote of my words: Jerzy Rugby: Studly, kill that dog! It was quite convincing. Machotka flew us through his world four times, from four different angles. Members of the jury kept glancing over at me and looking away.

Stu’s presentation was much more limp and legalistic. More than anything else, he harped on the point that Studly had legally been the property of GoMotion at the time of the crimes. Nobody in the courtroom looked like they gave a fuck. Stu insisted that I hadn’t told the robot to screw up the Fibernet, nor had I told Studly to kill the dog, but after Machotka’s virtual reality demo, Stu’s bald assertions carried no force.

Leaving the courtroom at three-thirty Friday afternoon, I felt sure that we were going to lose. Before the reporters pressed in on me, I managed to say hi to Sorrel and tell her I’d see her at Carol’s in an hour.

After I shook off the press, I drove to the Wells Fargo in downtown San Jose and found a parking space on the street. My bank balance was indeed thirteen thousand dollars plus. Thank you, West West! Though the teller didn’t like it, I got the thirteen thousand in cash; it made a fat envelope of 130 hundred-dollar bills. I’d decided to give a third of it to Carol for the children, so I asked for another envelope and counted 44 hundreds into that one. I felt grim and sad. I was leaving my country and my poor little family-maybe for good.

I calmed down a little on the walk over to Pho Train. I ordered the same pho soup again. This time I used the tip of my chopstick to add some red-pepper paste to the broth. With the pepper and the spicy green leaves, the soup was truly delicious. I slurped down as much as I could before Vinh appeared, fuming cigarette in hand.

“You ready?” he asked. “We can walk from here. But give me the thousand first.”

“Okay.” I pulled my main envelope of hundreds out of my pants pocket and counted out ten bills for Vinh under the table. His bony hand reached across to take them, and then he passed me a flat plastic package under the table: my four Y9707 chips. I stuck the package unopened in my other pants pocket.

We walked two blocks to a neighborhood of rundown two-story apartment buildings made of crumbling pink stucco over plywood. The buildings had flat roofs, prefab aluminum windows, and concrete stairwells. All the children playing in the street were Vietnamese-a regular Our Gang of loud little girls, T-shirted toddlers, and watchful boys. Everyone seemed to recognize the pockmarked, chain-smoking Vinh Vo. Vinh knocked at a street-level apartment door and a thin young woman holding a screwdriver let us in.

It was a single-room efficiency apartment with another young woman, fat, sitting down. The windows were hermetically closed off with filthy curtains and Venetian blinds. The room was lit by computer monitors and lamps; the ventilation came through an antique wall unit air conditioner. There was a great hoard of computer equipment along the walls, and there were loads of books and computer manuals. The chairs had vinyl cushions.

“Here’s your customer, girls,” said Vinh. He smiled thinly at me. “This is Bety Byte and Vanna. They’re computer science students at San Jose State. They’re the best cryps in our Vietnamese community.”

Heavyset Bety Byte wore a cyberspace headset pushed up onto the top of her head like sunglasses. She had thick lips, yellow, skin, and greasy, permed, distressed hair. Surely she had no inkling that I’d seen her tuxedo in cyberspace-and I wasn’t about to tell her. Pale, slim Vanna wore tight black slacks and a round-collared pink blouse buttoned up to the top. Her glossy hair was cut in a tidy bob. Bety Byte and Vanna didn’t look much like their tuxedos.

“I recognize this dude from TV,” said Bety Byte, pointing a control-gloved hand at me. The tips of the control gloves were cut off and I could see her fingernails. She wore chipped black nail polish. “You’re Jerzy Rugby!” She spoke with a perfect riot-grrl mall-rat accent.

“No,” I said emphatically. “I am not. I’m not anyone until you tell me my new name.”

“He’s incognito,” laughed Vanna. “I think he’s scared.”

“Do you know how passport authentication works?” asked Bety Byte.

“Sort of. As well as forging me a passport, you have to put a valid bar code on it. The government uses a secret algorithm to generate long authentication numbers that go into the bar code.”

“That’s right,” said Vanna. She was still holding her screwdriver. “We haven’t figured out how to generate our own authentication numbers, but we do have a way into the current State Department passport files. What we’ll do is to find the name of someone who has a passport and who resembles you. Then we’ll use his passport’s authentication number on our forgery.” She smiled and gave a quick nod for emphasis.

“Crypping the State Department can’t be very easy,” I said politely.

“Well, we have this killer can opener program that we got from a phreak friend of ours,” said Bety from her chair. “ Ex friend, that is.” I had the feeling she was talking about Riscky Pharbeque. From what I’d heard Bety and Vanna say in cyberspace, they were mad at Riscky for spray-painting “Hex DEF6” on the wall of the Cryp Club library. But I had nothing to gain by chatting about this topic.

“Do you have to take my picture first or what?” I asked.

“First you have to pay us,” said Bety.

“Here’s two hundred dollars,” said Vinh, stepping forward and holding out two of the bills I’d given him.

“I told you seven hundred,” cried Bety.

“Three hundred dollars is my final offer,” said Vinh Vo and added another bill to the little fan he held out toward Bety.

“We won’t do it for less than four hundred,” said Bety. She unwrapped a stick of pharmaceutical green bubble gum and popped it in her mouth. “Bye, Vinh. Bye, Jerzy. Show ‘em out, Vanna.”