The Hacker and the Ants

by Rudy Rucker

  “Ow,” said I, looking away from the screen. “Need to control that tentacle.”

  Pat and Walt were stomping the simmie-Adze now, the images of their feet warping into huge close-up perspective renderings as they thudded into the hapless virtual robot. I pulled off my gloves and stood up.

  “Did you know that I helped write Our American Home?” I asked Ben. “The behavior patterns for the Christensens. I helped evolve them.”

  “Sure,” said Ben. “You helped write it, and you’re here, so there’s nothing wrong with us using it, right?”

  “That’s not what GoMotion would say.”

  “WentMotion,” drawled Ben.

  “We’ve moved on to physical testing as well,” said Sun Tam. “Now that our hardware design is frozen.”

  “Janelle calls it the Rubber Room,” said Ben. “I’ll show it to you later. But now it’s time for Russ Zwerg.” As Ben mentioned the dreaded name, there was again that touch of stress in his mellow tones.

  Russ was in a cubicle near the center of the pit, and he was even more trollish than I’d expected. He was a lawn-dwarf, five-foot-two with full beard, bald pate, and long greasy locks, he was (I would soon learn) a vegetarian, a pagan, a libertarian, and a deep thinker with a dozen crackpot opinions, all furiously held. Russ Zwerg was the worst, the absolute worst, a ten-out-of-ten flamer.

  At first Russ made a show of being too engrossed in his computer screen to look up. After entering a final system command and receiving an error message, he said, “Suck dead pigs in Hell,” to his screen. His pronunciation was clear and lilting. He turned his muddy little eyes toward us and addressed himself directly to Ben.

  “Once again SuperC chooses to sodomize programmers everywhere. They’ve actually changed the inline pragmas. Again. And, they added new underscores to the library name-mangling! Whee! Put your old debugger in the shitcan! It’s going to take me at least two round-the-clock days to get the Kwirkey interpreter working again. What do you want?”

  “Russ,” said Ben gamely, “I want you to meet Jerzy Rugby who’s joining us from GoMotion. He’s quite the wizard, I’m told. I’d like you to help him get up to speed on the Adze project.”

  “How nice,” said Russ, cocking his head and peering at me. “I’m supposed to waste a week training a new hire? Bugger you, Ben. Bugger you very much.” As he said this, Zwerg kept his nasty little eyes on me. Now he smiled to show this was all in good fun. “Why did GoMotion fire you, Jerzy?”

  “I’d rather not go into it,” I said, silently adding: Especially not with an asshole like you, Russ.

  “Russ, why don’t you and Sun give Jerzy a physical demo?”said Ben.

  “A dog and pony show for the new hire,” snapped Russ. “Very well.” We all went into the Rubber Room, which was back behind the Sphex room I’d already seen.

  A few years before she died my mother had a stroke. She was partly paralyzed, and she had to relearn how to do things like sit up on the edge of a bed. Every day in the hospital, I’d wheel her downstairs to the rehabilitation room. The rehab room had linoleum floors and things that looked like big toys sitting around, only the big toys were models of real-world obstacles that a person has to negotiate: a section of a cafeteria counter, a movable wood staircase with a fenced-in platform at the top, a big Plexiglas practice push door, and so on. In the rehab room with my mother there had been a woman with one leg gone and a man whose face had been split as if by an axe, all of them slowly moving around, trying to get it back together. I often remembered the feeling the rehab room had given me: a kind of awe at the tenacity of human life, awe at how these shattered people could somehow struggle to go on, and a feeling also of the preciousness and sweetness of life, however hard it might be. An aching feeling of tender awe.

  Like the rehab room, the Rubber Room had a practice staircase and a big Plexiglas door, but in addition the Rubber Room had feely-blank dolls lying about, a man, a woman, a boy, and a baby—models of the Christensen family once again. There were also two chairs, a table, and a refrigerator. In one corner there was a big rug. The dreaded Baby Scooter was lying on the rug like a land mine.

  Sitting idle on a patch of bare linoleum was an assembled Adze robot. Just like the model I’d seen on the Sphex, the machine was a big cylinder with a dome head, two wheels on jointed legs, and three arms. As on Studly, his left manipulator was a simple two-pronged rubberized crab pincer, and his right one was a well-articulated facsimile of a human hand. The Adze’s third manipulator was a flexible plastic tentacle with corrugations in its surface.

  “We’ve been calling this one Squidboy,” said Ben. “Let’s fire him up, guys.”

  “I’ve only just now been recompiling the code,” said Russ, obviously getting his excuses ready. “I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there’s a segment fix-up error.” Russ and Sun Tam made their way over to the still-inert Squidboy and began messing with him.

  I shivered with the same fear I’d felt when Ken Thumb of GoMotion first loaded my code onto Studly. The Veep and Adze robots were quite different from the lame “robot butlers” people had been trying to sell for years. The Veep and Adze were fast and strong. They could kill you. At least there was a big, waist-high table between us and the main part of the room. There was some computer stuff on the table.

  “Do you have a remote On/Off switch?” I asked Ben.

  “Don’t worry,” he answered, picking up a radio control unit. “This is the switch. During runs we stand way back here so we can always turn the robot off before it can get us and like start performing organ transplants.” He chuckled wheezily.

  Sun adjusted some dip switches while Russ slipped a small CD into Squidboy’s chest. They skipped back to join us on the safe side of the table. Ben turned Squidboy on. A fan whirred and Squidboy’s scanning laser began to glow.

  Just like Studly, Squidboy had two pencil-sized video camera eyes and an infrared laser-based moire topography scanner in his forehead. The scanner’s laser would illuminate objects with rapid stripes of invisible infrared light, and the robot’s software would overlay successive scans to get moire patterns that outlined the contours of constant depth curves. This was invaluable for deducing the shapes of things.

  “What do you want Squidboy to do?” Sun Tam asked Ben.

  “Tell him to go to the fridge and get me a bottle of Calistoga water,” said Ben.

  Sun Tam leaned over a keyboard and screen that, like Ben’s On/Off control, was radio-linked to the robot. Sun began assembling and entering commands while Russ kibitzed.

  “Can’t you just talk to it?” I asked.

  “Of course we can,” said Russ impatiently. “Only we haven’t put that part in yet because we’re still finalizing the high-level code. For now, we’re programming Squidboy in Y9707 assembly language. Sun knows all the opcodes.” Y9707 was the name of a chip.

  Then Russ started arguing with Sun about something he’d keyed in, Russ being as rude and insulting as possible. Eventually Sun weakened before the torrent of abuse and changed it to Russ’s way.

  Now Russ gave the okay and Ben pressed the On switch. Squidboy wobbled for a moment, turned toward the refrigerator, and started rolling. So far so good. The movable Plexiglas door was between the little machine and the refrigerator. Would Squidboy slow down and open the door? Had Russ’s program change been correct? To my delight, the answer was no. Instead of slowing down, the robot accelerated as it approached the model door, shattering the Plexiglas with a noise that was astonishingly loud in the small confines of the Rubber Room. The robot paused, his tentacle dangling like a limp dick.

  “Dammit, Russ, that’s the second door you’ve broken this month,” said Ben as he pressed the Off switch. Russ marched across the room, yanked his CD out of Squidboy’s chest, and stalked out, vilely cursing about SuperC.

  “I knew Russ was wrong,” said Sun Tam. “He keeps thinking in terms of Kwirkey, but I’m used to controlling the Adze direct. Ports and interrupts.”

  �
��Let’s see.”

  Sun Tam reset Squidboy and began to show and tell. I got into it. Sun knew a lot about robots. Ben Brie gave me the remote On/Off and left us alone to keep talking.

  While Sun was demonstrating Squidboy’s most rudimentary abilities, we discussed the three big problems of robots: connectors, power, and software.

  A robot’s connectors are simply the wires that snake around inside the robot’s body to hook together the motors and sensors and processors—the wires and the little sockets on the ends of them. It’s a humble issue, whether or not a pin works loose from its socket, but it’s a crucial one. I told Sun about some special Belgian-made connectors that we’d just started using with good success, and he e-mailed off an order for six thousand of them.

  “How is GoMotion going to deal with power?” asked Sun next.

  “We’re making our machines plug into a wall socket whenever they have the free time. The Xyzix palladium-hydrogen batteries we’re using can hold about a three-hour charge. And you can fully recharge a Xyzix in ten minutes.”

  “Okay, yeah, the Xyzix model KT-80? That’s what I thought; that’s what we’re doing too. So let’s talk about software.”

  “That’s where I come in,” I said proudly. “As you know, I’ve been using genetic algorithms to tweak the high-level code. We’ll want to get about 256 instances of your robot evolving around the clock. My code hooks into GoMotion’s ROBOT.LIB, of course. We’ll need to license ROBOT.LIB from GoMotion or—”

  “We’ve got ROBOT.LIB,” said Sun Tam. “We’re already using it.” I smiled with relief and we talked about other software topics, first about genetic algorithms and then about control theory. We started working on a list of which parameters and register values we’d want our code evolution to tweak.

  Three happy hacker hours blurred by, and then I was at the limit of what I wanted to absorb and emit on my first day of work for West West. Later, no doubt, I’d be driving myself nuts over their code, but no more today. I had a date with Nga Vo.

  I said good-bye to Sun Tam and went back to Ben Brie. “Looks cool, Ben. I have to go, though; I need to take care of some things.”

  “Okay. See you tomorrow? Nineish? We’ll give you a machine and get you on the Net.”

  “Yeah. And can you get Russ to print me out some specs on the Kwirkey/SuperC interface? I think reading them might be more efficient than for me to listen to him.”

  “I’ll talk to him.”

  “Uh ... one more thing. I’m totally out of cash, Ben. Could you give me an advance today?”

  I wended my way back out of West West and found my Animata. I had $800 in my pocket. It was three-thirty in the afternoon. West West looked like a good gig.

  FIVE

  The Vo Family

  WHILE I WAS DRIVING 280 ACROSS TOWN TO East San Jose, I fished out the scrap of paper that Nga’s cousin had given me—5778 White Road. I flicked on the electronic map attached to my dash and told it Nga’s address.

  Intense green lines appeared, showing a diagram of San Jose, with a highlighted path indicating the best route from my satellite-calculated current location to Nga Vo’s.

  The east side of San Jose was bounded by rounded yellow foothills that undulated hugely toward some mountain peaks that you could see on a smogless day. The hills weren’t very good for hiking because they were bone-dry with tough sharp grass that stabbed your ankles. But they were nice to look at from the freeway.

  As I drew closer to Nga’s, the map rescaled itself, always maintaining a magnification that just held the bright wriggle of the remaining route. Right before crucial turns, the map would speak to me in a quiet woman’s voice. Carol’s voice, actually. Last year I’d fed the device a phonetic map of Carol’s voice. I’d thought that was funny, since Carol was terrible at reading maps. Carol had thought it was stupid of me, not to mention being an invasion of her sacred privacy, almost as bad as my using Studly to peek at her taking a pee. Whatever. The phonetic map was a good hack, and whether Carol liked it or not, I could still hear the sound of her voice, which was something I missed almost as much as the smell of her body.

  Two blocks from the Vos’ house, the map showed me something I didn’t want to see: a detailed, stippled picture of an ant. A cunning dusting of dither pixels added informative shadings to the image. The scapes of this ant’s antennae were tilted toward me, and her mandibles were wide open. Her body rocked back and forth in the sawing motions of stridulation. The map’s tiny speaker began stringing fragments of Carol’s voice into deep, demented chirps.

  The sound was scary, but also fun to listen to, in a sick kind of way. It was as good as the thrash I might hear on like “Ted Bed’s Skunk Bunk on the Rhythm Wave of the West, Radio KFJC, 89.7 on your FM dial, broadcasting from Foothill College in Los Altos Hills, California,” a personal favorite. Ted Bed always sounded like he’d been up all night flying on candyflip in a cyberclub.

  Most kids couldn’t afford their own cyberdecks, but there were plenty of clubs with wall-sized Abbott wafer screens on three out of the four walls. Users in the club wore stereo-shutter flicker glasses. Cheap and dirty video technology would capture their dancing images and put them up into the big cube of shared cyberspace above the dance floor, and the deck would mix the dancers with daemons, simmies, and active tool icons: virtual buttons, dials, and sliders the dancers could use to change the synthetic musical sounds. Flying on a and e: everyone inside the same rave deck, everyone inside the controls. It would be interesting if the ants showed up in those clubs. The Attack of the Giant Ants! It’s Them!

  The ants, the ants, the ants. I had a feeling that it was thanks to the ants I’d been fired from GoMotion. Thanks to the ants I’d seen the Death simmie, that thing that called itself Hex DEF6. Thanks to the ants, Hex DEF6 had gotten the opportunity to threaten to have me and my children tortured and killed. As I reached toward the map to turn it off, the ant image rocked her head and let her pixels turn into a plat—a lot-by-lot map—of Nga’s street. I turned the map off anyway. I had arrived.

  The houses were tidy one-story slab-foundation ranch-style homes, each painted a different pastel color, and each with rosebushes blooming in its front yard. All the houses in sight were architecturally identical, and all were equally well kept up—all save for one gray, run-down, whipped-to-shit number down at the corner. The whipped-to-shit clone had two Toyota minitrucks in the driveway: one good truck and one whipped-to-shit truck with no wheels.

  The Vos’ house, on the other hand, was pale pink with white and yellow roses and the Vos’ car was a beige Dodge Colt. The golden foothills rose up behind the Vo home like stage scenery, warmly lit by the late afternoon sun. Nga greeted me on the small front stoop, her sly adorable face dimpling with smiles. We stepped into the living room, where Nga’s parents, aunt, and grandmother sat on two couches.

  The room had wall-to-wall carpeting, and the windows were covered with flowered drapes. There was a mat by the front door; I understood that I should remove my shoes. I crouched to get my sandals off, facing a big red and gold calendar from Lion Supermarkets which hung over an assemblage of electronic equipment: a CD jukebox, a big screen DTV, a gameplayer, and an S-cube deck. On the top of the machines were two white nylon doilies with vases of plastic flowers. There was a Vietnamese religious shrine on the other side of the room. The shrine was a red-painted wooden table holding up narrow corniced shelves, the whole thing a couple of feet wide. On the table were joss sticks, a bowl of fruit, some red tubes holding candle-emulating light bulbs, and a picture of a god. There were other, more mysterious items in wrappings on the shelves.

  With much laughing and many interruptions from her mother, Nga introduced me all around. The family consisted of Nga’s parents Thieu Vo and Huong Vo, Huong’s sister Mong Pham, Huong and Mong’s old mother Loan Vu, Mong’s son Khanh Pham, who was home but not presently visible, and Nga’s two little brothers The and Tho, who were still at school. Nga had an older brother named Vinh as well, “but h
e not here very often.”

  Old Loan Vu had white hair, and said nothing. Her eyes were very slanted. Nga’s parents and aunt were slender with broad faces and prominent cheekbones. All of them were interminably smoking cheap cigarettes.

  Now Nga’s mother Huong led me on a tour of the house. The bedrooms were quite bare, with all the bedding stripped off the large beds save for the flowered bottom sheets. Like the front room, each bedroom had flowered drapes and a red and gold Lion Supermarkets calendar.

  In the spotless kitchen, we found Khanh Pham, the one who’d handed me Nga’s address at the croissant shop. He was sitting at the round kitchen table reading a motorcycle magazine. He had a big Adam’s apple and long, shiny black hair. Seeing us come in, he twitched his head in an abrupt tic-like gesture that served to flip his hair out of his eyes. This nervous motion reminded me of my son Tom.

  I was too old to try to date the same-age cousin of a boy like this. My coming here had been a terrible mistake. But now that I’d strayed so far, why not soldier on?

  Nga looked me full in the eyes, holding her perfect mouth just so, that knowing mouth with the irregular border on the left edge of its lipsticked upper lip. What a thing it would be to kiss Nga’s mouth. I would kiss her for a long time. We would be parked in my car or, even better, sitting in my home. Nga would sigh and put her tiny little hands on my ...

  Soldier on, old top, soldier on.

  “Do you have a motorcycle?” I asked Khanh Pham.

  “I have small motorbike, but my cousin Vinh will get me better one soon.” He spread open the magazine’s pages and pointed to a picture of a black Kawasaki. “This kind.”

  “That’s great!” I said, though Huong and Nga looked nervous at the sound of Vinh’s name.

  Now The and Tho got home from elementary school and came running into the kitchen to see what was up. They spoke perfect California English and they had burr-cut hair. They wore black shorts and white T -shirts. The was one or two inches taller than Tho. Nga introduced us, and then the two little brothers went out in the backyard to play kickball.