Rudy Rucker - The hacker and the ants

Vanna laughed in that meaningless Asian way, but she didn’t immediately do anything-she just stood there holding her screwdriver. I fumbled in my pocket to find one more bill. Vinh Vo watched me with unblinking, predatory interest. I passed him the bill and he tendered the four hundred dollars to Bety. She tucked the money into her pants pocket and gave Vanna a nod.

“Okay, Jerzy,” said Vanna. “Lets narrow in on a name.” She laid down her screwdriver and put on control gloves and a headset.

“How tall are you?” she asked. “How much do you weigh? Place of birth? Date of birth? Scars?” She input my responses by making flowing hand gestures in midair; she was dancing her way up the search tree of the sample space. “Here’s twenty good ones,” said Vanna presently and snapped her fingers.

A list of names appeared in a box on the computer screen next to me. I chose a forty-two-year-old divorced electrical engineer named Sandy Schrandt.

Bety Byte picked up a small video camera and slid her headset down over her eyes. She began walking rapidly around the cluttered room while pointing the camera at me.

“In case you’re wondering, I’m not going to bump into anything,” said Bety, chomping on her green gum. “I’m seeing through this videocam. I’m using a pass-through.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “Just like stunglasses.” It was a hacker point of pride to be down with the latest street tech.

Bety kept on shooting video of me, occasionally flicking a finger to capture a still image. The images accumulated in a grid on the computer screen. Before long, Bety had filled the grid with pictures of me: the central pictures were full-on, or nearly so, and the pictures at the edge of the grid were shot from sharper and sharper angles. It was a discontinuous Mercator projection of my head.

Bety sat down and gestured in the air for a minute and then the color laser printer coughed and spit out the eleven double pages of my new passport, each page with Sandy Schrandt’s passport bar code on the edge. On the top page there was a shiny reflection hologram that showed a three-dimensional image of my head. Bety and Vanna’s software had fused the grid images of me into a single holographic image that turned as you tilted it from side to side.

“Great!” I exclaimed.

Vanna changed the paper tray and the copier coughed once more to produce a thick passport cover. She and Bety Byte took off their headsets and studied the pages for a minute, and then they used hot glue and a small sewing machine to bind the passport up.

Bety handed the passport to me-it looked perfect. But then I thought of something.

“What if the real Sandy Schrandt happens to come through customs in the same place on the same day I do? Won’t the officials get suspicious when they check the same number twice?”

“If that happens you’re a dead cow,” said Vanna. “I mean dead duck.” She began giggling so wildly that she had to put both hands over her mouth.

“You just have to hope for the best,” said Bety. She was laughing too.

Was this forged passport part of the ongoing international get-Jerzy burn? Or were the girls just being silly? I started to say something-but what could I say? I fell back on the standard California nonreaction:

“Whatever.”

I got out of there and split off from Vinh Vo as rapidly as I could. I swung in a circle through the San Jose State campus to make sure I’d lost him. Then I got my car from near Wells Fargo and drove out to Carol’s.

Tom and Ida had gone off with friends and Sorrel was waiting for me. We hugged each other and then we sat down and talked for awhile. I loved her lively, confiding little voice and her vehement opinions. She often used a fragmented, creative grammar that Carol and I called “Sorrelese.” She and I talked about my trial and about her life at college. Sorrel had a new boyfriend, and she was doing cartoons for her school paper.

“So, Da,” said Sorrel after awhile, “Don’t you want to make us scarce before Ma and Hiroshi get home?”

“Yes. Why don’t we go for a drive? We could go over to where I rent and take a walk in the woods.”

“Okay.”

I left my Animata at Carol’s and got Sorrel to let me drive her rented car. Sorrel looked at me and I looked at her in the shitty tiny rental car with wheels so small you worried they would get stuck in the grooved highway’s grooves.

“Your eye looks just like Mom’s,” said Sorrel, using our family name for my mother, now dead one year. “The way your skin is all wrinkled at the corner. Mom used to have such a nice cute old eye. And your eye’s just the same.”

“Poor old Mom,” I sighed. “At least she’s not here to see me in so much trouble.”

“You’re going to run away, aren’t you, Da?” said Sorrel. “Tom and Ida suspect. Is it true?”

“Yes. In fact I’m planning to do it today.”

“In fact that’s what we’re doing right now?” said Sorrel. “We’re going back to the stupid airport I just came from last night? So that’s why you wanted me to get a rental car. Mmm- hmmm.” Sorrel made her Big Sis “knowing face,” an expression in which she pressed her lips tight together and nodded her head up and down with her chin sticking out. “Are we still going to Queue’s?”

“I have a brand-new forged passport,” I confessed. “I think the smartest thing I can do is get out of the country as fast as possible. Somebody-the cops or the cryps or the phreaks or West West or GoMotion-somebody probably has a miniature TV camera watching Queue’s place anyway. And Carol’s place, too. The less I give them to go on, the better. If it’s okay with you, I’d like to drive straight to the airport.”

“Let me see your passport!” Sorrel looked through it with interest. “This hologram of you is neat. What country are you going to?”

“Switzerland. My lawyer-that Stu Koblenz who did such a lame job in court today-he said Ecuador and Switzerland are good havens from U.S. law. And there’s a guy in Switzerland I reeeeally want to see.” I was thinking of Roger Coolidge, rich Roger, who’d started all this by releasing the ants and firing me from GoMotion. I aimed to find him and to beat the truth out of him if need be. But there was no need to burden Sorrel with this information.

At the San Francisco Airport, I pulled up in front of the American Airlines terminal. “Run in there, Sorrel, and see if they have a direct flight from San Francisco to Zurich or Geneva tonight. And if they don’t have a flight, then ask who does. Don’t give your name!”

“Right,” said Sorrel, her mouth a short determined line. She darted into the terminal and emerged five minutes later.

“Swissair,” said Sorrel. “They’re flying direct to Geneva tonight at seven-thirty. It’s a twelve-hour flight.”

“Beautiful.” I got out of the car and moved over into the passenger seat. “You can drive me up to the Swissair part of the international terminal. Just drop me off there and go back to Carol’s. How much is this trip costing you, anyway? For the ticket and the car?”

“About six hundred dollars.”

I drew out the smaller envelope of hundred-dollar bills and took out six of them for Sorrel.

“This is for you, and you give the rest of the money in this envelope to Ma. And here,” I handed her my keys as well. “Tell Ma she can have the Animata, too.”

Sorrel messily stuffed the money and keys into the glove compartment.

“Oh, one other thing,” I said. “There’s a cyberspace deck with glove and headset in the trunk of the Animata. You tap three-one-four-one on the right side of the headset to turn it on or off. But it’s a phreak deck, it’s not registered, so you probably shouldn’t use it.”