The Hacker and the Ants

by Rudy Rucker

  Thud thud thud.

  The Studcreature was hammering the trunk so hard that I was half-expecting to start seeing bulging-out dents. Studly didn’t want to die, but each thud was weaker than the one before. He only had so much power left in his batteries.

  “Kids, I’m gonna go home and face the music. Wish me luck.”

  “Bye, Da. We love you.”

  SIX

  Treason ?

  WHEN I GOT HOME ALL WAS CALM AND dark. As I got out of the car, Studly called to me.

  “Jerzy! I need electricity immediately.” His voice was faint.

  I thought of Eddie Poe’s classic story, “The Cask of Amontillado,” where a man named Montresor lures his besotted enemy into a crypt, there to shackle and immure him.

  “Wait till morning, Studly.”

  “But I’ll lose all my memories, Jerzy. I haven’t downloaded to disk.”

  “For the love of God, Montresor,” I murmured mockingly. Studly had done more than enough damage already. The sooner his batteries died the better. Hopefully the memory wipe would erase the ant programs that had infected him. And if not, I’d better take him apart and crush his chips with pliers, as Roger had said. I went in the house, opened a beer, and sat down in front of the TV.

  This TV hadn’t been turned on since the ants invaded Fibernet San Jose, so I figured that if I unplugged the cable I might be able to pick up clear broadcast television with the set’s rabbit ears. I gave it a try. I managed to watch about fifteen seconds worth of unjammed network news, but then there was a little blip of static and—Hi, there!—the GoMotion ants were up and running on my TV. Now all the channels that I could pick up with my antenna were turned into crawling pixels, into people with ant heads, into random light shows—and the sound was chopped-up, crazy squawks.

  What was happening, I figured, was that the GoMotion ants were in the broadcaster’s DTV compression chips, so that the compressed broadcast signals all included ant eggcases. That first blip of static had been an eggcase settling in on my DTV decompression chip. Aside from Roger Coolidge, I was probably the only person in the world who realized what was going on. All the local broadcasts now contained ant eggcases.

  Presumably some of our local stories had gone out over satellite feed to network affiliates, so by now the ants had spread to those stations’ DTV chips. And those stations were in turn broadcasting ant eggcases to their viewers, as well as passing the ant infection on to other broadcast stations over satellite. Except for the few disadvantaged countries still on the old uncompressed analog TV standard, the whole of the global TV village would be full of ants by now.

  Over the next hour, broadcaster after broadcaster gave up and went off-line—but it was way too late to stop the spread of the GoMotion ants.

  Victory! Victory! Victory? The GoMotion ants had ruined television! But why, and what did it mean? I went to bed.

  The next morning, Wednesday, I woke to the sound of a car pulling into my driveway, a car with a very loud engine. It was the stinking, roaring diesel Mercedes of Susan Poker. For the moment she didn’t get out of her car, but simply sat in there talking on her phone. Either she was waiting for a client, or she had nowhere better to pull over. Well, I could choose to ignore her. I had dead-bolted all the doors last night; there was no chance of Susan Poker using her key to come in. I decided to take a shower so that if she knocked, I honestly wouldn’t hear her.

  But first I stepped onto the sun porch and checked once again that my computer was unplugged. Yes. And by now Studly would be in a coma. Maybe I wasn’t going to be implicated. But what about the Vos? Would they talk?

  In the shower I wondered about the Vos. Surely the guy whose dog we’d killed would put the police onto the Vos. But you were always reading in the paper how Vietnamese people never talk to the cops. If you’re Vietnamese, even if some neighborhood Vietnamese hooligans come in and take your savings at knifepoint, you don’t talk to the authorities. If you trusted the authorities, you would have put the money in a bank instead of keeping it under your mattress in the first place. No, with any luck, the Vos would keep mum, and GoMotion would stonewall. So what would the cops have to go on?

  I dried myself, and put on my shorts, sandals, argyle socks, and a favorite green shirt with cubic Mandelbrot sets. As I shaved, my calming reveries were interrupted by a loud pounding on the front door.

  “Open up! Police!”

  Oh well!

  There was a black-and-white cop car parked on Tangle Way, and Susan Poker’s Mercedes was still in the driveway behind my Animata. She was standing by her car watching the police, Susan Poker with her red suit, bleached hair, and plastic-shiny makeup—she’d called the cops on me! I felt such strong hatred toward her that it made me weak in the knees.

  “Open up!” repeated the policeman at my door.

  I opened. The cop was an exceedingly tall and heavy young white guy with a thick mustache. His partner, who was smaller and Latino, hung back and kept his hand near his gun.

  “Are you Jerzy Rugby?” asked the tall cop.

  “Yes.”

  “Sir, we have a search warrant and a warrant for your arrest.” He showed me some pieces of paper. One of the things they were authorized to look for was a “mobile robot.” They were authorized to search my house, my car and, if need be, my person and my body cavities.

  “Sir, we are required to handcuff you. Please place your arms behind your back.”

  Before I knew it, I was shackled in the grilled-off back of a police car with no handles on the inside of the door. It was surprisingly dirty back there, with empty coffee cups, Jack In The Box wrappers, and Mr. Donut boxes. Susan Poker walked past me and followed the police into my house. “I saw the robot right in here yesterday,” she called to them.

  Yes, the East San Jose cops had failed to get my license plate number, the Vos were mute, and GoMotion was stonewalling, but Susan Poker—Susan Poker remembered having seen a robot shaped like a garbage can on wheels at my house, and she remembered how much attitude I’d given her. When she read the morning papers (none of the usual televised “Good Morning Amerikkka” fare today, what with all the digital TV channels ant-broken!), Susan Poker put two and two together, informed the police, and headed for my house to see the bust come down. At least these were the hypotheses that I immediately framed.

  After a few minutes the policemen reappeared, lugging the main box of my computer. They set it down on the front porch.

  “Here are his car keys,” said Susan Poker, emerging from the house. “I found them on his dresser.”

  “Thank you, ma’am. But we’re going to have to ask you to stay out of the way.”

  She glanced gloatingly at me and got back in her Mercedes to watch from there. After a few moments I saw her pick up her cell phone.

  Meanwhile the cops opened the trunk of my Animata. There lay silent Studly. The big cop got back in his car; he sat down on the seat in front of me and called the station. He had a speakerphone with a flip-up video screen in the dash.

  “We have Jerzy Rugby and the mobile robot in custody. There’s also a box of backup CDs. Are you going to send a van to pick up the machinery? Uh-huh. So San Jose will. Yes. I’ll bring him in and leave Sergeant Roca here to watch the machinery. Ten-four.”

  The big cop took me down to the Los Perros police station, which was quite near, just down at the foot of Polvo Para Hornear hill. He tucked my keys into my pants pocket before he left. A man at the station read me my rights and put me in an unfurnished, windowless basement room. Light came through a thick square of wire-mesh glass in the cell’s heavy wooden door. I sat on the low bench that was bolted to the wall across from the door. Except for me and the bench, the only other thing in the room was an ant crawling around on my sandaled foot. She was from the empty Mr. Donut box in the cop car, I imagined, or perhaps from my house or my yard. I crossed my leg to get a better look at her. When she reached the top of my argyle sock, she reached forward with her antennae and with he
r front pair of legs to feel my leg hair and skin. No good, she decided, and headed back down my sock toward my sandal. Clever ants.

  Yesterday Ida had said, “The Lord hates Daddy’s ants,” but I still thought the GoMotion ants were good. It was good to have put a stop to television, if only for a few days. If the truth be told, I’d been hoping all along that it would come to this—I mean, quite objectively, why else would I have been helping Roger evolve artificial life for DTV chips? I hoped it wouldn’t be as obvious to the courts as it was to me.

  Of course it had been Roger Coolidge who’d made the initial decision to farm our ants on digital television compression and decompression chips. He’d done that before I’d even come to GoMotion. In a legendary feat of superhacking, Roger had built the ant lab while he’d been writing the code for ROBOT.LIB.

  Roger said he’d picked DTV chips as his culture medium because they were cheap and they had a clean architecture for generating graphics. But I’d often thought about the possibility of the ants escaping into the world at large, and whenever he’d asked my opinion about design decisions, I’d always tilted toward the path that would make the ants more capable of spreading from chip to chip. Sometimes I had even e-mailed things to Roger about wanting to ruin digital TV, and he’d always responded in a friendly, if somewhat neutral, way. If any of that e-mail came out in the trials, I wasn’t going to stand a chance.

  I sat there numb with worry for about half an hour, and then two San Jose cops showed up to take me downtown. The San Jose police station was a six-story beige building on First Street near Route 880. The press had gotten wind of my arrest, and there was a crowd of reporters outside the police station. They snapped pictures of me and yelled questions: “Can you make a statement?” “Why did you do it?” “When will television be restored to normal?” “What are your demands?”

  I had a big San Jose cop on either side of me, and they dragged me past the reporters fast. Inside the building they brought me to a fourth-floor office with a man in a suit. All this time I was still wearing plastic handcuffs. I waited standing between the cops while the man finished talking on the phone.

  “Uh-huh. He just got here. Five-eleven, 180 pounds, long brown hair, wire and horn-rim glasses, wearing short pants, argyle socks, Birkenstock sandals, and a colorful sport shirt? Check. Thank you, Mr. Pear. I’ll be expecting the fax. And please let us know if you have to leave town; we may need for you to make a deposition in person before the indictment.” He hung up and looked at me and the cops.

  “Jerzy Rugby. I’m Captain Austin of the computer crime squad. You can uncuff him, officers. Thank you. Yes, you can go, though I’d like for one of you to wait outside. We won’t be too long. Thank you. Now then, Mr. Rugby, I’ve just been in contact with your former manager at GoMotion Inc., a Mr. Jeffrey Pear?”

  “What is it that I’m charged with?”

  “You have been read your rights, yes? Fine. We may still reformulate the charges. That’s one of the issues that we need to talk about before the D.A. takes this to the grand jury this afternoon. Your warrant of record is for criminal trespass, computer intrusion, and extreme cruelty to animals. Three state felony charges, with a possible maximum total sentence of fifteen years. And the feds want a crack at you, too. The federal prosecutor is getting a whole bouquet of different charges ready. How does treason sound? I have it on the best authority that the president of the United States wants your butt in jail for life. His exact words. The president likes TV. Jerzy, do you realize that under federal law treason is a capital crime?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I want to call a lawyer.”

  “Certainly. You will be given the opportunity to call a lawyer. But first I’d like to have just a little background while I finish booking you. Jeffrey Pear says you were fired from GoMotion for breaking the security of—” Captain Austin glanced at the notepad on his desk, “—an artificial life experiment modeled on an ant colony. He further said that you had so contaminated your computer and a prototype GoMotion robot that these hardware items were given to you as part of your written severance agreement.”

  “That’s not what happened at all. And I have not received any written severance agreement.”

  “Fine. I’m very eager to hear your story. But just let me fill you in a bit more on our current picture of things. A man and a robot answering to the description of you and—is it Studly?”

  “That is the name of my robot, yes.”

  “A man and a robot resembling you and Studly were reported to have been in an altercation with a Jose Ruiz of 5782 White Road yesterday afternoon. The man’s dog was killed, and the Fibernet cable to his house was cut. Shortly after the cable was cut, a computer virus infected all of the digital compression hardware at Fibernet San Jose and bounced out to the chips of all the active TV sets in San Jose. Worse than that, the virus worked its way upstream from Fibernet San Jose into the local TV station studios and got into their DTV compression chips as well. Shortly after that, the virus went out with San Jose news feeds over the satellite links and infested the studios of every digital TV station and cable service in the world. For the moment there’s damn near no television. Do you have a reaction to that?”

  I knew better than to reveal my true feelings of triumph and awe. “I suppose that’s very inconvenient for many people. But it’s certainly not my fault.”

  “Do you admit that you were at 5782 White Road yesterday?”

  “I don’t admit anything.”

  “Jerzy, I’d like to make it easy for you. You seem like an intelligent man. You can work with me or you can work against me. And if you work against me you’re going to spend a long time in jail. You might even get the death penalty. You don’t want to die in jail, do you, Jerzy?” I shook my head and Captain Austin smiled. “So help me out a little. I’m trying to understand what happened. Jeffrey Pear says it’s all your fault, but maybe he’s not giving me the straight story. What happened at GoMotion? Why were you fired? Pear says it was simply a matter of incompetence.” Captain Austin paused and looked at his pad again. “Pear says, ‘Jerzy Rugby doesn’t know a function pointer from a linked list.’ He says you ripped off some experimental virus-like software and deliberately used it to blank out television so as to give GoMotion a black eye. Would you call that an accurate account?”

  “Hell no!” I flared. “What Pear says is total bullshit. Look—if you really want to know about the GoMotion ants, ask Roger Coolidge. I bet Pear didn’t mention him to you. Roger Coolidge is the founder of GoMotion. He left for Switzerland Monday night. Roger built the GoMotion ants before I even started working there. I used to talk to him about his design, but he called the shots. The ants were Roger’s experiment with artificial life. They were meant to be like living, self-improving pieces of DTV display code. Roger Coolidge is the one who set the ants loose. He e-mailed an eggcase of them to my deck, took off for Switzerland, and then had Jeff Pear fire me. It’s a total setup. I’m just a patsy.”

  “That’s very helpful, Jerzy. Why don’t I call in a stenographer to take down your story. It would be a good thing to get your side on record.”

  The captain’s voice had taken on a soothing, caressing tone. The captain was my friend. It would be so great to sit here and tell him my side of the story without worrying about silly legalistic things like my Miranda rights . . . at least maybe that’s what I was supposed to think. But I wasn’t a kid anymore. I’d pleaded guilty to pot possession for a two hundred dollar fine once in my twenties, and it had cost me tens of thousands of dollars in job rejections and increased insurance premiums over many many years. No, the police are not your friends.

  “I want to talk to a lawyer.” I crossed my arms and leaned back in my chair.

  “Go ahead.” He pushed his phone across his desk. “You can make one call. One seven-digit number. No phone phreaking.”

  As if being a serious code hacker were the same as being a cryp all hot to dial into the weapons division
of Livermore Labs, or an anarchist bent on bringing down the phone system. Though, heh, in the government’s eyes I was a terrorist who’d done something even worse. I’d blanked out digital TV: treason?

  I took the phone and, come to think of it, I didn’t actually know any lawyers in California. Carol had said she was going to talk to a lawyer today about child support payments, but she hadn’t told me his or her name, not that I’d want to talk to Carol’s lawyer. Instead of calling a lawyer, I should call someone who could really help me. Not GoMotion, certainly, but—why not West West? No doubt they were ecstatic over the bad publicity the ants were bringing to GoMotion. I pulled Ben Brie’s business card out of my wallet and dialed his number.

  “Ben Brie speaking.”

  “Ben, it’s Jerzy Rugby. Something’s come up. I’ve been arrested.”

  “Does that mean you’ll be late to work?” He chuckled softly. “Are you in for something juicy?” His sarcastic drawl was wonderful to hear.

  “It’s the television thing. The GoMotion ants. They’re trying to pin it on me.”

  “Very interesting.” He stretched the words out as he thought things over. “You’re calling because you need a lawyer?”

  “Right. I figured you guys must know a lot of lawyers.”

  “We do. Hmmm. I’ll talk to Otto Gyorgyi, and if he approves, which I’m sure he will, we’ll send someone over. Where are you?”

  “The San Jose police station on First Street.”

  “Okay, Jerzy. Keep your mouth shut and wait for the lawyer. West West will have you out on bail before you know it.”

  “Thanks, Ben.”

  “Hey, it’s a standard employee benefit!”

  I was free on bail by suppertime. The reporters outside were rabid; they were personally affronted by the blankout of TV. If this kept up, many of them would be out of a job. Till now, I’d been nursing a deep-seated feeling that the mass of people would be as glad as I was to have TV gone. But seeing the reporters’ anger, I realized I might be wrong.