Rudy Rucker - The hacker and the ants

I sighed heavily. Was Roger’s cyberspace office some lame Dungeons and Dragons maze that I would have to like solve? Surely Roger wouldn’t have been that juvenile. Just as I thought this, I spotted a rat down where the wall met the floor. As soon as I visually acquired it, the rat stared up at me and squeaked. A steel sword point popped up in front of my body like a hard-on. The cornered rat reared up and my sword touched him. The rat turned into a puddle of blood next to the drumstick he’d been gnawing. “You may acquire the food,” said a munchkin voice in my earphones.

“Like I’m going to eat food with rat blood on it?” I muttered.

Roger really had set up a D amp;D office, the goofus! If I went into his maze and got lost, I’d be thrashing around until the rain stopped and the plastic ants finished coming up the hill to kill me. There had to be a better way. “Show tools,” I said.

A cloud of several hundred tool icons appeared around me, compressed to fit in the confines of the low stone passage. I flew back out the corridor into the great hall, and the cloud of tools spread out to a proper size.

Out of his own twisted sense of humor, Roger had attached wings to each of the tool icons. Some of the wings were feathered, some were leathern, and some were veined and transparent like the wings of insects. To improve the fun, Roger had attached a chaotic flocking algorithm to the icons. The tools swarmed about: now like a scarf of starlings, now like a plunge of pelicans, and now like a fretfulness of gnats.

I saw a keyboard, a helmet, a knife, a telephone, a geometry gun, a camera, a claim stake, a projector, a pile of money, a sphere with arrows sticking out of it, a frying pan, an ant-

I reached out and tried to grab the winged ant, but it twisted and turned and flew away faster than my eyes could follow. Now it was on the other side of the cloud of tools. I flew toward it through the tools, and it escaped again. I shifted my attention to the helmet, but that eluded me as well.

There was a sudden pounding on the giant entrance door. Startled, I flew back down to the floor and gazed toward the great portal. Again the pounding came.

I slipped my headset off for a moment to make sure that the pounding wasn’t maybe Tonio knocking on Roger’s real front door. But, no, it wasn’t. There was no sound in the house other than the splashing and rushing of water-at least no sound that I heard. The rain outside Roger’s study window was pouring down harder than ever. I glanced at my watch. It was 10:30 A.M.

“Hey, Da!” cried a little voice from the headset’s earphones. “Are you in there?”

I slapped the headset back on and stepped closer to the great hall’s entrance door.

“Da!” came the voice. “It’s Tom!”

I pushed aside the peephole’s metal cover. Right outside the door was a black velvet crying clown with a pipe in his teeth.

“Tom?” I asked. “It is you?”

“Da! Let me in! I’m using the deck in your Animata! Ida’s sitting here next to me! Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. Come on in.” I tried to slide aside the heavy beam that locked the door, but I couldn’t get it to move. It needed some secret unlatching that I didn’t know.

I peered back out the peephole. “Push down on your pipe, Tom, and your tux will shrink, and then you can fly in through this hole.”

In a twinkling, Tom shrank and darted into Roger’s castle through the peephole. He flew a few quick loops around me, then grew himself back to normal size.

“Gimmie five!” said Tom. We slapped hands; my glove’s piezopads buzzed.

“How did you know to come here?” I asked.

“After what Sorrel told us, we figured out you’d gone to see Roger Coolidge,” said Tom. “And I found him in the Swiss phone book. So I thought I’d try coming here to see if you were around. Is that his tuxedo you’re wearing? You look like a geek.”

“Well, yeah. But we shouldn’t say anything bad about poor Roger because-”

“Hi, Daddy,” interrupted the clown. It was the voice of Ida. “I’m sitting right next to Tom in your car. I can hear you over the radio. I’m talking into Tom’s microphone. Let me wear the headset, now, Tom. I want to see Daddy looking like a geek.”

“Okay, but just for a second,” said Tom.

“That’s great that you kids are here,” I said. “You came at just the right time. This castle is like one of those dumb adventure games you two like to play.”

“What are you trying to do?” asked Ida, now ensconced in the clown. “What’s the next goal?”

“Somewhere in this castle there’s an ant lab with access to the three cyberspace ant colonies Roger started.”

“Go in there,” said Ida, pointing at the great hearth. “There’s usually a secret passage behind the fire.”

“Give me back that headset, brat!” came Tom’s voice.

There was the sound of a brief struggle, and then Tom was back in control. The black velvet clown looked up at the tools. “I think I see a rolled-up map,” said Tom.

Tom was good at cyberspace games. With wonderful fluidity, he leapt up and snagged the map before it could fly out of reach. He rolled it out flat on a table and I peered over his shoulder.

The map was like a window looking onto a three-dimensional wireframe model of Roger’s castle.

“Show me the path from here to the ant lab,” said Tom to the map.

A noodle of pale green light appeared in the image. Tom held up the map and moved it around, looking in at the three-dimensional image from various angles.

“Just hold on to my foot,” said Tom finally. I crouched down and latched on to him.

“Close tools,” I said, to make the cloud of icons disappear. The rolled-up map remained in Tom’s hand.

Tom flew forward and darted through one of the doors. We wriggled about in dark passageways for awhile, with rats and goblins scattering at our approach-the goblins were short, fat-bellied creatures with fang teeth and heads like jack-o’-lanterns. On we flew, turning left and right, up and down-Tom navigated rapidly and with confidence.

And then we were in a room with a black table and three glassed-in walls. Each of the three windows looked out onto a cyberspace ant colony. The first window showed a sprawling landscape of etched circuitry, the second showed the Antland of Fnoor, and the third window opened onto a scale model of an enormous dome-covered factory. Each colony was boiling with activity. As usual the ants were busy practicing, busy getting better at what they did.

The ants in the first colony were designing computer chip circuitry and microcode. Their world was a huge flat motherboard intricately chased with filigreed coppery lines. The ants looked like the tools, components, and wires used for circuit design. They were, variously, switches and logic gates plugged into the circuit, soldering irons that moved connections this way and that, jumper wires that made distant connections, and code-packets that tested the system’s logic. These were the guys who had developed ROBOT. LIB and the design for the Y9707-EX.

The ants in the Antland of Fnoor looked like tiny robots and tiny members of the Christensen family-just like during my phreakout. Seeing such a mass of them made me itchy and uncomfortable. I found myself unconsciously flicking my fingers, as if to get ants off me. One difference was that now some of the robots were of the new four-armed variety that I’d just seen on the monitor display of Roger’s factory. But a bigger, more frightening, difference was that the little models of four-armed robots seemed to be deliberately causing as much harm as possible to the other robots and to the Christensens. The evolution of the ants’ and robots’ behavior had taken a sinister turn with the designing of this new generation of robots. They were as murderous and as implacable as an army of skeletons in a medieval painting of the Triumph of Death. Talk about emergent behavior! Roger had put in one mutation too many, poor guy.