Rudy Rucker - The hacker and the ants

“Let me see that!” said Roger. “I didn’t know you’d made one of those already.”

Perky Pat handed him the teardrop-shaped bead of hard, shiny plastic. Roger held it up, peered at it, then passed it to me. The bead was yellowish and transparent. Inside it was the dark filigree of an electronic circuit. Some input/output wires bristled from the pointed end of the bead.

“How did you figure out how to make it?” asked Roger.

“The basic recipe was in Kupp’s notes,” said Walt. “And Perky Pat came up with some modifications.”

“I don’t get what it’s for,” I said. “The Veep and the Adze don’t use any parts like this.”

“I’m not sure what it’s for,” said Perky Pat. “The cyberspace ants told me to make it, but the ant lion on my chip keeps me from understanding why. I hate the ant lion.”

“Creativity,” said Roger. “Initiative. A yearning for freedom. Not bad, eh Jerzy?” He drew out the pack of four new chips. “These chips are just what we’ve been waiting for, Walt and Perky Pat. They don’t support the ant lions, and they run faster! Let’s try ’em out. Walt, could you please turn yourself off?”

“Okay, Roger. But will I lose memory?”

“No, I don’t think so. Not unless the new chip malfunctions.”

Stoic Walt opened the manual controls door in his side and flipped his power switch to Off. His body gave a hydraulic sigh as it settled down onto its folded legs with its hands dangling limply. Roger used a screwdriver to open the access panel on Walt’s other side. He pulled Walt’s old Y9707 chip out of its multipin socket and snugged in the new Y9707-EX. Perky Pat watched all this with great interest. Then Roger replaced the access panel and flipped the power switch to On.

“On,” said Walt. “Six-thirteen p.m., Saturday, May 30. Checking memory. Memory okay. I am Walt.” His voice was fast and high.

“What’s the square root of twenty?” said Roger.

“About four point four seven,” chirped Walt. He talked so rapidly that it was hard to understand him.

“I think your new chip has double the old chip’s clock speed,” said Roger. “Please take that into account in your vocalizations. Try halving your output frequencies.”

“Is this better?” said Walt in something like his former voice.

“Fine,” said Roger. He went on to do some more tests, and when everything worked, he went ahead and changed Perky Pat’s chip as well. Having watched how Roger had adjusted Walt, Pat came through the transformation with her voice timbre intact. If anything, she sounded more mellifluous.

“This is fabulous, Roger. And the other two chips are for us?”

“Yes, yes,” said Roger, laying the two new Y9707-EX chips on the lab bench. “Walt and Perky Pat, I want you to build these two chips into child robots like we’ve been talking about.”

“Oh yes,” said Perky Pat, fondling the chips. “Dexter and Baby Scooter! We’ll build them tonight! All by ourselves.”

“Piece of cake,” said Walt gratingly. “Now why don’t you two humans get out of the way and let us work.”

Weird, weird, weird. I felt weak as a leaf. If I didn’t warm up my feet I was going to catch the flu. It was time to get out of this sealed concrete room. I looked at Roger and asked, “Do you have any food?”

“Yes,” he said, as discouragingly as possible. He wanted to stay here in the lab.

“Can I have some of your food, Roger?”

“Oh, all right,” he sighed. “There’s a camera that Kupp installed in the ceiling, so I guess I can keep an eye on things over the monitor.” Sure enough, there was a big lens in the center of the ceiling overhead.

“Good,” I said, pushing the elevator button. “Now give me some warm food and something to drink, for God’s sake, and show me where I’m supposed to sleep.” The two robots stared impatiently at us until we left.

Outside, the rain had slacked off and the gray sky was veined with the golds of sunset.

“It will be better weather tomorrow,” said Roger. “The first day of a new world.”

The front door opened itself at Rogers’s request, and for dinner the kitchen microwaved us three frozen plastic-packed dinners. I had a pork and a beef; Roger had a manicotti. To drink we had Scotch, tap water, or Scotch and water.

“I thought you’d be living better than this, Roger,” I said after I’d eaten my food and downed two drinks. I’d taken off my socks and crossed my legs so that I could rub some life into my feet.

“This is exactly how I like to live,” said Roger. “By eating frozen premade dinners I’m able to precisely calibrate my caloric intake. You know that I watch my weight.”

“What about vitamins?”

“Vitamins are just chemicals, Jerzy. For vitamins I take pills.” As if in confirmation, he brought out a tray of vitamin pill bottles and swallowed a capsule from each. One shiny capsule, a “metals supplement,” held compounds of chromium, manganese, titanium, and palladium. “Food is simply a source of the fats and carbohydrates which the body burns as fuel. Power for the computing medium. Vitamins are the processor components-the nodes of computation, if you will.”

“Oh, whatever. Look, getting back to my own problems, how am I going to keep from going to jail without being on the lam for the rest of my life? Can’t you step forward and admit that it was you who released the ants and made Studly kill the dog?”

“I’m not admitting anything. But I can help you get a better new identity. Those girls-Bety Byte and Vanna-they’re rank amateurs. I could set you up with the top cryp in Calcutta-that’s where professionals get new ID. Even the CIA goes there.”

“I want my old identity, Roger, and I want to win my trial. I want to be able to visit with my family-even if I am getting divorced.” I took another drink. “If I could just get rid of all the ants, the government would like me. Roger, did you know there’s a big nest of ants in cyberspace?”

“Of course I know-there’s three nests in fact. My cyberspace ant lab has windows onto all three of them. One of the nests is what you call the Antland of Fnoor-nice name, by the way. I was right there in the Antland of Fnoor that first night when Riscky Pharbeque was scaring you into working for West West.”

“Oh yeah, that’s right. You were groveling and twisting on the floor.” I chuckled nastily. “All covered in your own blood and shit.”

“Well,” said Roger equably, “that’s the way Riscky made it look-phreak humor, you know. Anyway you can’t stay in a GoMotion ant nest for very long unless you’re prepared to kill quite a few of them. The ants attack non-a-life code.”

“I’ve noticed,” I said. “But you have that magic bullet for killing ants. Come on and tell me what it is!”

“I don’t want you to kill the cyberspace ants, Jerzy. One colony is working on improved chip designs and on the next version of the ROBOT. LIB microcode. Walt and Perky Pat need that code for the new robots. The second colony-that’s your Antland of Fnoor-is evolving high-level code for the new robots. And the third colony is trying to find a way for the new robots to build miniature robots-a third generation. It’s all been going so smoothly that this afternoon I threw in a bunch of random mutations to see if the second- and third-generation robots couldn’t be more of a surprise.”

“The robots in your factory are going to get information from the cyberspace ants?”

“Robots are always in touch with cyberspace. That chip, the Y9707 that robots use? Among other things, it emulates a cyberspace deck. A robot’s vision of the world is an overlay of cyberspace. Robots use cyberspace as a kind of shared consciousness. And with the ant lion absent from the Y9707-EX chips, my new robots will be able to import external ant function pointers. We could see some truly emergent behavior.”