Rudy Rucker - The hacker and the ants

Even so, the robots’ control circuits were still functional, and you could drive them around with the standard cyberspace control gestures. You didn’t have to worry about the best way to move their legs and so on; you had only to point and nod, and use your hands to control their manipulators. Since the robots had four manipulators each, the control booths actually had four swiveling glove controls.

Once Dexter quieted down, I found myself standing in front of the plastics-casting machine he’d been tending. There was a basket of tiny electronic circuits to my left and a bowl of shining translucent beads to my right. Farther to my right was Baby Scooter. I raised my hand and waved.

“Are you okay, Tom?”

“Yeah,” said Tom, waving back. “I’m fine. Are these the plastic ants?” He pointed at the components spread out before him. “Where are the live ones?”

“Down there.” I pointed at the trail of newly fashioned plastic ants that was marching from Tom’s bench to the crack by the elevator door. “Those are the guys we have to get rid of.” Just as I’d feared, the plastic ants were as lively as ever.

Tom picked up a live ant in one of his pincers. He squeezed hard, trying to crush it, but rather than crumbling, the ant skidded out from his grip and shot across the room like a pinched watermelon seed. “They’re really solid,” said Tom.

I scooped up another ant with my humanoid hand, and then used my two pincers to pull its gaster and its head sections apart from its alitrunk. When I dropped the pieces to the floor, they writhed about spastically. “Tearing them apart works,” I said. “But by now there’s hundreds of them. Maybe even thousands.”

“See how their trail goes into that crack by the elevator door?” said Tom. “Maybe we can pour something down in there that will melt them.”

“It would be even better if we could take the elevator down to where the ants have their nest,” I said.

“What’s wrong with the elevator?”

“It’s jammed.”

“Maybe I can fix it,” said Tom. “You look for something we can pour on them.”

I trucked back and forth on my bent-legged bicycle wheels, looking at the vats and barrels of chemicals. The plastic ants still in the lab seemed to sense we were no longer their friends-they were streaming en masse toward the crack at the bottom of the elevator door.

“Here’s a big can of acetone,” I said presently. “That might be good.” The big square can was of shiny metal marked Acetone — Highly Flammable. It looked like it held about five gallons.

Tom was examining a box on the wall near the elevator. “Somebody took out one of the fuses is all,” he said, rising high up on his legs to look on top of the box. “And, yes, here it is!” Dexter or Baby Scooter had probably removed the fuse, timing it to trap Roger where the plastic ants could finish him off.

Tom replaced the fuse, pressed the elevator button, and *clankclank* the cabin slid up to our level and the doors opened. A dozen plastic ants were running about on the cabin floor.

“Let’s see if they melt,” I said, lumbering over with the heavy can of acetone. I unscrewed the top and slopped some of the stuff onto the plastic ants. But it didn’t slow them down a bit.

“If we could light the acetone…” said Tom.

“That would probably work,” I agreed. “But how can we light it?”

“Make a spark with an electrical wire,” came Ida’s voice.

“That sounds good,” I said. “Let’s do it.”

We got in the elevator. Tom was about to push the button for the basement, but I stopped him and pushed the button for the main floor. “We can’t take the elevator to the basement,” I said. “There’s a dead body at the bottom of the shaft. I was starting to tell you before. The plastic ants killed Roger.”

The main-floor elevator door was still frozen into the half-open position I’d cranked it to. Tom and I squeezed out with some difficulty, and then went down the concrete stairs to the basement.

I looked around the basement. Where were the ants? No trail led out from under the elevator door here, which suggested they had taken up residence inside the shaft. Hopefully right at the bottom.

“Wait,” I told Tom, and hurried back up to the main floor to get the emergency key-crank out of the elevator door. Back in the basement, I put it into the hole in the basement elevator doors.

“Get a wire,” I told Tom.

Tom tore a heavy section of electrical conduit down from the ceiling. Being in robot bodies made us feel pretty reckless. Tom kept pulling on the wire and ripping stuff loose until the wire had about ten feet of slack. And then he yanked the wire in two with his pincer-claws. The two bare wire ends made big sputtering sparks if you held them near each other.

“All right,” I said. “It’s robot kamikaze time.”

“Kick some butt!” yelled Ida.

I clamped the acetone can against my chest with my tentacle, and used my humanoid hand to crank open the door at a furious rate. There behind the door was Roger’s corpse, and all around his corpse were the glistening plastic ants.

The ants were busy-they’d mounted the two Y9707-EX chips on the grungy shaft wall, with wires running around the chips. Several of the ants had fashioned themselves small silicon rectangles that were attached to their bodies like wings. One of the ants was just starting its wings with an abrupt beating stutter. It rose an inch or two into the air.

I pushed forward and slashed my pincers into the metal can of acetone. The can split wide open, dumping the volatile liquid out onto the ants. Tom lunged in next to me and sparked the wires in the midst of the shaft.

WHOOOOOM!

There was a rush of noise and orange light, and then my viewfield went dead. An instant later I felt a shock wave jolt my chair in Roger’s study. I made the gestures to remove the virtual telerobotic headset, and found myself back in the lab behind the castle fireplace. The black velvet clown was here too: Tom and Ida. I “Thanks a million,” I said. “I have to go now. Don’t tell anyone where I am.”

“Good-bye, Da,” said Tom.

“Look out in case there’s any more ants,” called Ida.

I pulled off my headset for real. It was still raining. Oily black smoke was trickling out the roof vents of Roger’s factory. The monitor on Roger’s desk was blank. Down in the basement of Roger’s house, the great boiler shuddered on and began pumping heat into the radiators.

It was time to get out of here. I hurried into the room where I’d slept and pulled my satchel out from under the mattress. There was no car here for me to use, but it would be simple enough to trek down to Saint-Cergue, especially now that I had Roger’s galoshes on. I rushed out through the dim living room-for some reason the lights weren’t working anymore. I pushed on the front door. It didn’t open. “Open the door,” I commanded-but nothing happened. A power failure from the factory explosion?

No, it was worse than that. Roger’s house computer had turned against me. There was a sudden grinding sound from all over the house as the metal roll-down shutters closed off all the windows. The rain beat on the roof and the radiators hissed with steam.

I left my satchel of money by the front door and felt my way into the dark living room, past the great blue-and-white tile stove to the faint glow of the wall-mounted house computer. The computer screen showed a harmless-looking array of icons, but when I went to touch its keyboard, something pounced on my hand and bit it. I cried out and thrashed my hand-a winged plastic ant circled up into the darkness. Now I felt a bite in my ankle. Not knowing which way to turn, I ran back into Roger’s study, dimly lit by his blank monitor. The little room was hot and stuffy.