Rudy Rucker - The hacker and the ants

“Why are you always so down on yourself, Jerzy?”

“I had an unhappy childhood. My wife hates me. And I’ve sold my soul to the machines.” I always felt like I could say just about anything to Queue. Her ready laughter was a stifled chirp phasing into a tinkling giggle.

“How’s your big job at GoMotion? Is that still happening?”

“We’re designing a line of personal robots in cyberspace. It’ll be called the Veep. We made a prototype of the first one, and it cleans my house. But now my computer’s messed up. Something really strange happened today. You don’t know about the dark dream, do you, Queue? It’s when you think you’ve left cyberspace and you’re still in it. That happened to me today.”

“On the computer? Was it fun? I’ve had things like that happen to me with… in certain situations. Levels of reality?” She was talking about psychedelics, but she never ever mentioned drugs on the phone.

“No, no, it was horrible. I was walking across the room away from my machine and then something tugged at the side of my head and it was the cable to my goggles. I thought I’d taken them off and I was still wearing them. It was pure disorientation. The ants did it to me. I think there’s a virtual server that lets them get into my machine.”

“You have a computer virus?”

“I have ants, Queue. They’re a new thing you’ve never heard of. They’re much smarter than a virus.”

“You’re so cutting edge, Jerzy. That’s what I like about you.”

“So okay, Queue, I’m coming right up for that tape. Is Keith around? What with Carol gone I’m highly available.”

She lowered her voice. “I can’t. Keith is very jealous, and he’s the one I’ve taken on.” Queen Queue owned her house and kept Keith as her Prince Consort. “I would never fool around unless it was for real.”

“This isn’t for real, Queue. I’m only after some human warmth.”

“We’ll only be here for another two hours.” Queue and Keith are always taking trips in their camper van. “We have to record Brian Jones drumming congas at the Hindu Center.”

“Brian Jones? Is he like an Elvis imitator?”

Temple-bell laughter. “It’s his real name. And, Jerzy, when you come up, bring some show-and-tell. You said you have a working robot? A Veep?”

“Uh… yeah. His name is Studly. But-”

“Studly!” More chirp-giggle laughter. “You are such a crazed sick computer jock, Jerzy. Bring Studly and don’t be a tight-ass! Can he vacuum my floor?”

I thought of Queue’s house with its narrow staircases and lumpily layered rugs. “Well, maybe. We’ll see.”

“All right! Bah.” Queue had her own hip, dynamic way of saying bye, a plosive, husky sound.

I went out to the living room.

“Follow me out to the car, Studly.”

“Yes, master.”

He trundled after me to the car, and once I had the trunk open, Studly went and stood sideways to it. I pushed my rack of backup CDs to one side so they’d be out of Studly’s way.

“Okay, Studly, get in.”

Studly pushed both legs out to their full extension, and then quickly retracted the leg on the side toward the trunk. As he began falling toward the trunk, he snapped up his other leg, and fell sideways into the trunk, breaking his fall with his humanoid hand. He shifted himself into a comfortable position.

“You wait in there, Studly, and I’ll drive you to visit a friend. Her name is Queue.”

“Right on, Jerzy.”

I closed the trunk and got in my car with a fine sense of purpose. I’d grab a snack, go to the bank, get gas, hit the freeway, and be at Queue’s in an hour. It would be fun to see her and Keith. If it weren’t for having to buy pot every now and then, I’d never go anywhere except GoMotion and the supermarket. In today’s America, the many positive aspects of recreational drug use are too often ignored. The need to score gets the user out of his or her house and into the sunshine-out into the community and meeting people! Drugs are about networking!

My car is an Animata Benchmark. It’s the only really expensive thing I’ve ever owned. Driving it makes me feel good. I got it after my first year out here. Tooling slowly through the streets of my yuppie village of Los Perros, I marveled as always at the massive number of good-looking women to be seen in California. It was a brilliantly sunny April day with the air clear and cool as water-the kind of day you’d remember as “the best weather of the year” back East, a day when you could slowly windmill your arms in the sweet air and feel yourself to be swimming. Days like this come thick as pearls on the California year’s necklace.

A crowd of people in Spandex stood in front of the Los Perros Coffee Roasting Company, taking the air and enjoying each other’s company, some of them planning or returning from a jog along the Dammit Trail that leads up along Route 17 to the all but dry Hidalgo Reservoir.

When Carol and I moved to California, I was an unemployed mathematics professor, and I’d felt a disenfranchised academic mouse’s contempt for the Los Perros yuppies with their good cars, fit bodies, and standoffish demeanor.

Cars? My maroon Chevy Caprice whale wagon had been a damned fine car back in Killeville, Virginia, where Carol and I bought it used for $8,000. It was the only car we’d brought across the country with us, but in Los Perros, the whale hadn’t been any kind of a car to be proud of at all. We’d darted our heads around spotting BMWs, Mercedes, Porsches, even Ferraris and Lamborghinis, cars insanely out of our price range. For our second car we came up with $4K and bought a six-year-old Honda Accord, thinking at least now we’re fuel efficient! Then I’d gotten the GoMotion job and the Animata.

Yes, instead of remaining angry embittered losers, Carol and I had gotten job skills and turned that shit around. We’d gotten the bucks and become Californian and had no problems with drinking coffee at the Los Perros Coffee Roasting Company. It wasn’t snooty in there, it was civilized and practical-in the manner of a European cafe and in the manner of a McDonald’s-in the California manner, in short, and Carol and I were now at ease there. We were Californians: fit, in a hurry, making good bread, and with serious problems that we were beginning to try to learn to deal with.

The light was red, and I sat there in my Animata, with my windows and sunroof open, looking at all the beautiful women. I had a severe horn. It had been five weeks. Things change when you go so long without the cheering contact of another human’s fluids and skin. Crossing the street were a pair of twin young mothers pushing identical light blue strollers, each stroller holding a pair of twins. Six people! Were they models, come to profit in California? Mentally I selected a cube of space around one of the women, deleted her from the street, and inserted her into my head’s own seraglio, nude and chatty.

A joyfully chic Mexican woman with a high-fashion straw hat crossed next. She gazed at me evenly, smiled-and kept walking, right into the Roasting and right out of my life. In California you often see people that you never see again.

Here came a girl in stiff, poured-on jeans, her fluffy mass of combed curly hair formed into a huge ponytail resting on her back. With a barrette at either end, her ponytail had the shape of a great, thick jouncing cigar, which contrasted nicely with the sharply cut lines of her hips in their covering of thick, furrowed denim.

A plucky nineteen-year-old with dark eyebrows and a clean-cut nose appeared with two friends. Her mouth was lively, seductive and ironic, with narrow dark lips, crisply edged.

Right outside my car window sat a woman on the wide wall of the planter before the Roasting’s storefront. She wore a tasteful sweater of large argyle diamonds, her bell of hair was streaked and set just so, her soft face was womanly, yet childishly pert-I guessed she was a dissipated California Girl who had divorced or never married. She looked like Carol, only more symmetrical, ten years younger and ten pounds lighter. Suddenly I realized she was staring back at me. The light changed. Behind me was a Mercedes driven by a blond-bobbed woman in white silk, diamonds, and gold.