by Rudy Rucker
“That’s because Keith doesn’t have an income. Queue looks out for number one. I bet she tries to marry you, Jerzy. She’s had her eye on you ever since you got the good job at GoMotion.” In imitation of Queue, Carol opened her eyes wide, threw up her hands, and rocked from side to side, simpering, “Oh, Jerzy, you’re so smart and wonderful!”
“Give it up, Carol,” I snapped. “How can you be jealous when you’ve already left me for another man? It’s not logical.” Unexpectedly my voice cracked. “I can’t live alone, you know.”
Carol gave me a sudden, frank look, her eyes roving over every contour of my face. She was on the verge of tears. “Are we making a big mistake, Jerzy?” From upstairs came the heavy sounds of the movers. “Don’t you still want me?”
I silently embraced her, and the kids found us there like that. “Woo-woo,” they said, softly, hopefully. Carol and I broke the clinch and got back to the details of the move. The breakup had its own momentum.
Outside, the reporters were on us like meat bees at a barbecue. I phoned Stu to come and make a statement to them. I stood by his side as they filmed us. Stu spoke slowly and with conviction. He was acting like a good lawyer, like a stand-up guy.
“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen of the press. My name is Stuart Koblenz, and I am Jerzy Rugby’s attorney.
“GoMotion Incorporated has chosen to try and make Jerzy Rugby the scapegoat for their own industrial accident. Mr. Rugby will enter pleas of innocent to all the charges placed against him. We are preparing vigorously for the trial. For obvious legal reasons, Mr. Rugby is unable to answer questions at this time.
“The fact that Mr. Rugby is moving out of this house today is a direct result of the continuing media harassment of this innocent man. I would strongly request that the press please respect the privacy of Mr. Rugby and his family in the weeks to come. Thank you.”
After this, none of us would say anything at all to the reporters, and they pretty much pulled back, though a few of them followed the moving van to get footage of Crocker’s Lockers and of Carol and Hiroshi’s apartment complex.
Under the terms of my bail, I’d had to tell the court about moving to Queue’s and, of course, as soon as the court entered it into their machine, all the Bay Area cryps could grok my new address. Most days a car or two would tail me both ways of my commute between West West and Queue’s—sometimes reporters, other times cops or dicks or industrial agents. Queue’s house was up off a locked private road which gave me some privacy there, and West West had a gated entrance as well.
Normally the cars that followed me would melt away at the gates, but the Monday evening after we’d moved out of Tangle Way, a guy jumped out of his car and headed for me while I was opening the gate.
“Jerzy!”
Our car engines were off and we were alone in the quiet under the redwoods. Wind soughed high in the branches above. The asphalt was thickly scattered with brown pine needles, and dappled with gold patches of setting sun. The person who’d called to me was a twenty-year-old boy with shoulder-length brown hair in rasta tangles; he was bouncy and skinny, with thin lips pulled back in an expression that was not quite a smile. His T-shirt read “YEE-HAW!” He walked toward me. His hands were empty, but an odd little shape trailed along the pavement after him like a mascot. A toy animal? There was no time to look closer. I focused my attention back on the boy.
“What do you want?” I challenged.
“That’s awesome that you’re working for West West, cuz,” he said in a soft, trailing-off twang. He was right in front of me. The open Animata door was just behind me. I watched the boy’s big hands and feet closely for any sign of an attack. Something bumped against my foot.
I looked down: the boy’s mascot was a motorized toy truck with some circuit boards in its back. The truck had the head of a rubber cow glued to its front, and this is what was nudging me.
“Am I Hex DEF6 yet?” drawled the boy, and waggled his eyebrows like Bugs Bunny imitating Groucho Marx. He raised one hand and made a gesture of tapping ashes off an invisible cigar. “Big business. I’m most hellacious with family video.”
“You creep.” I thought of the agonizing cyberspace session I’d spent watching myself and my loved ones being tortured and killed. They’d pasted our faces into slasher movies and war footage—my mind kept coming back to the scene of Sorrel and Tom running down a bombed road in Vietnam, all their clothes burned off by napalm, Sorrel screaming and Tom’s mouth twisted into an unbearable dog bone of anguish. And the scene with Ida sobbing over my disemboweled corpse while the killer crept up behind her—I surged forward and got my hands around the boy’s neck. “I’ll kill you.”
Bruisingly he knocked my arms away and sprang back. “No harm, schoolmarm. It’s only software. Like the GoMotion ants.”
“Then the threats weren’t real?”
“I wouldn’t say that either. There’s always fireworks with a Chinese Dragon. You better deliver the goods for West West, Jerzy.”
“You work for West West?”
“No, bro.” The little robot truck had retreated to a safe distance when the boy and I had grappled, but now it came nosing up close to me again. It rose up and down on its tires, bucking like a low-rider and then actually jumping a couple of inches off the ground. It was cute, with the cow’s head and everything, but maybe there was like a hypodermic dart gun inside one of those soft rubber horns, a dart gun loaded with bio-hacker brainscramble. Not wanting to find out, I kicked hard at the side of the mascot. It dodged me and skittered away. I took the opportunity to hop back into my car and close the door.
“Come see me in cyberspace if y’all need any phreaking done,” said the boy. “That’s what I wanted to say. And don’t forget—don’t forget Hex DEF6.” Even though he was bareheaded, he made a hat-doffing gesture appropriate for a ten-gallon hat.
“Get out of here, you Texas prick.” I reached into my glove compartment as if I had something in there.
“I’m gone.” He drove off, and I went on up to Queue’s. Keith was sitting on the deck staring up at the trees. He was a peaceful person: big, healthy, and always high. We did two quick bowls of Queue’s bud.
“Hey, Keith, do you know where I could get a pistol?” I asked as the rush settled over me.
“Statistically, a gun is most likely to kill its owner or a member of the owner’s family,” said Keith mildly. “So why would you want one? Guns are bad karma.”
“A kid was threatening me down at the gate,” I explained. “He had sort of a mechanical cow. A little one.”
“What did the little cow do to you?”
“It just rolled around, but I felt like it was getting ready to attack me. Maybe it had a needle inside its horn. I wish I could have shot it.”
“I think that if you shot off a gun, the cops would revoke your bail, Jerzy. Why don’t I give you a staff instead.” Keith disappeared into the warren of the house and emerged with a thick, ornately carved redwood stick. “I made this. See the sacred energy symbols that spiral up around it? Keep it with you in your car.”
So instead of a gun I got a sacred staff.
Well that’s enough talk about the real world; now it’s time to talk about hacking.
For the longest time, the Kwirkey/SuperC logjam would not yield. West West was committed to using Kwirkey, which was the creation of one of Seven Lucky’s seven Taiwanese founders. And most of my coding experience for GoMotion was in SuperC, and all the Veep code which the West West cryps had copied was SuperC as well. But Russ Zwerg was working on the interpreter, or had one running, or was about to have one ready, wasn’t he?
On the surface, it seemed that the languages were easily interconvertible; it was just a matter of writing an automatic interpreter that knows that “A + B” in SuperC is “(+ A B)” in Kwirkey, and other stupid shit like that. Yet Kwirkey, being Lisp-grounded, had an utterly different idea of memory than did SuperC. Russ’s Kwirkey interpreter needed to waste megabytes of space and kiloclo
cks of time on creating and then cleaning up the “frame diagrams” required to convert Kwirkey commands into machine instructions. And there were lots of other things—maddeningly fiddling little thinglets that nobody except Sun Tam would ever want to have to know about.
Russ Zwerg was not a likable person, but I ended up feeling some sympathy and even respect for him as he hacked his way through the vicious undergrowths that separated the kingdoms of Kwirkey, SuperC, and the Y9707 machine language of the Adze.
While Russ hacked from within, I worked from without, getting familiar with Kwirkey by learning how to do some simple things. I was excited when my first Kwirkey program for the Adze actually worked; a program called Hello Squidboy.
There was a rudimentary cyberspace viewer connected to my desktop workstation. The viewer was like a pair of binoculars connected by a wire to the machine. Inside the binoculars were swinging inertial sensors that knew exactly to what position you turned the binocs. You could look all around a scene, and there were buttons on the binocs to zoom you forward, pan sideways, or whatever. It was as if you were looking through the viewfinder of a video camera while you moved your head.
When I ran the Hello Squidboy program on my machine, I’d see a crisp little copy of Our American Home with a model of Squidboy sitting in the kitchen. Whenever I moved my viewpoint into the kitchen, the Squidboy figure would wave one arm and say, “Hello Squidboy,” through my workstation’s speaker. It wasn’t much, but on any system, getting your very first program to run is half the battle. It’s like the first wheel, or the invention of fire. I began building on Hello Squidboy step-by-step, continually testing each improvement out in my workstation’s cheap cyberspace. Sun Tam helped me more than Russ did.
West West Home Products General Manager Otto Gyorgyi was calling Ben Brie in for daily meetings and asking him about my progress. Keep in mind that I was into West West for three million dollars at this point. No doubt Gyorgyi was wondering if just maybe what GoMotion said about me was true—that I was a destructive incompetent.
“Are you, Russ, and Sun ready to like schedule some milestones and benchmarks?” Ben asked me after a few days. He handed me some sheets of paper. “These are the Adze performance specs that Marketing has decided to run with. Janelle basically took the Veep specs and made everything twenty-five percent better. I’m going to feel a hell of a lot more confident about all this when our software starts doing more than saying, ‘Hello Squidboy.’”
I labored frantically to prove that I was indeed worth three megabucks, and slowly, as I dug deeper into Kwirkey, my feelings about the language underwent a flip-flop, the kind of flip-flop that had happened to me a dozen times before.
With a new language or a new machine, it was always like having someone say, “Here, Jerzy, here’s this list of part numbers, and here’s a picture of a car you can build with the parts,” and at first I would think, “Fuck this, I already know how to build a car with the old kind of parts I’ve been using,” but then I would get curious and start trying to use the new parts, and they’d be shaped weird—the new parts would have their own unfamiliar logic that at first I couldn’t accept—but then I’d manage to build a wheel and it would roll, and then I’d get more curious and start seeing cool things to do with the new logic, and by then I’d be well into the flip-flop. The fact that I was willing and able to do this to myself so often was what made me a hacker.
One of the things I began loving about Kwirkey was that it was a frobbable language. A frob is something you can pick up in the palm of your hand and walk off with, something about the size of a book of matches or the size of a trestle support for a model railway. Frob is a transitive verb as well. “Where did you get that cool spin button?” “I frobbed it from a dialog box.” High-level Kwirkey code was totally modular, with none of SuperC’s entangling data commitments, and you could frob Kwirkey code with a will.
I was ready to crank up a full-scale Kwirkey port of the SuperC bag of tricks that I’d written to work with Roger’s ROBOT.LIB machine code for the Y9707, but Russ’s automatic interpreter still wasn’t happening. Port was the word hackers used to mean taking software that worked on one kind of system and trying to get it to work on another kind; it was kind of like portaging a canoe on your head over rocks and through underbrush.
There was too much code for me to think of porting it by hand; even though I now understood Kwirkey, there were scads of little traps I wasn’t going to have time to figure out, lots of mosquitoes in the underbrush. Sun Tam knew about most of them, but the point was to have Russ automate the port. I began pestering Russ; I began reviling him for being so slow.
Russ’s verbal comments and e-mail messages grew ever more crazed and hostile. Even though we worked thirty feet apart from each other, we talked by e-mail lest we get involved in a public shouting match that might get us both fired. In our e-mail Russ called me a twit, a professor, and a charlatan; while I called him a lawn-dwarf, a dropout, and a nut.
An exceedingly hostile or schizophrenic e-mail message is called a flame. Even though Russ and I were still exchanging scientific information, we were at the same time in the throes of a flame war. But it didn’t really matter. As Roger Coolidge had once told me, “If you’re a serious hacker you don’t let flames bother you. Instead you grow thick scales.”
One fabulous Tuesday, two weeks after the GoMotion ant attack, something yielded, the jam broke up, and Russ had fully hacked a fast and beautiful Kwirkey/ SuperC interface. I could program the Adze in mixed Kwirkey and SuperC as transparently as if my hands were picking up sand dollars in clear water. I was like a kid in a candy shop. At the end of three dizzyingly wonderful hours, I found that I’d linked every single one of the Veep algorithms into our prototype Adze software. And, so far as I could check using the feeble cyberspace of my desk machine, my new code worked fine.
I told Russ and he was cautiously glad. Flame mode: Off. We hurried to the big Sphex monitor in the back room.
Jack and Jill, the jolly jock hackers, were on one of the machines, laughing excitedly and looking at their new program. The screen showed a box-shaped room that was full of tumbling three-dimensional boxes. The boxes were translucent and inside each box were more boxes, also translucent, and also with boxes inside them. It went down for as many levels as the screen resolution could handle.
“This is our new Kwirkey interface,” explained Jack when he noticed me watching. “ Jill calls it Gizmos.” The boxes made noises as they bounced around, noises like boing whumpa boing. Jack’s pale eyes were glowing with excitement.
Brown-eyed Jill flew our view down into one of the boxes and the box seemed like the whole room. The boxes were moving so fast and smoothly that it was totally hypnotic to look at. Jill zoomed down and down through the rooms and eventually the view was the same as the start room. “We keep the top views down inside each of the smallest boxes,” said Jill. “So it has circular scale.”
“Or sideways scale,” put in Jack, making a gesture with his gloved hands. A web of lines sprang onto the screen, lines like bungee-cords connecting the wild boxes. “These are the bindings.”
“What are the boxes?”
“The boxes are gizmos,” laughed Jill and started moving her hands around, panning and zooming her gesturing glove icons about in the virtual space of the interface. The boxes became clothed in translucent shapes—a shovel, a crow, a house, an oak tree, a Scotty dog. Jack reached in and adjusted the cables between the gizmos; they began to writhe and move in twisty, nonlinear ways.
“So far we’ve been single-stepping,” said Jack. “But now I can speed it all up.” He made a fist of his hand and the images blurred with smooth rapid motions. “And then it converges on one of the limit cycles of the attractor. Check it out, Jerzy.”
The images had locked into slow, deeply computed interactions. I was looking at an oak tree in front of a house, with a Scotty dog running around the yard. There was a ditch with a shovel next to it; the Scotty jumped over the
ditch. The crow sailed down from the tree and cawed at the Scotty. The Scotty barked and jumped back over the ditch.
“Gizmos are object-oriented Kwirkey frames,” said Russ, who always made a point of knowing what his fellow programmers were up to. “Self-modifying structures of data and function pointers.”
Jack interrupted. “You should use it for the Adze. A gizmo could be an Adze eye or wheel or neural array. A gizmo can be a user, or it can be something the user wants to do.”
“Gizmos are God,” said Jill. She looked calm and pleased.
“So when are you guys going to have your Adze code happening?” asked Jack. “I’m ready to try and gizmofy it.”
“I think it’s working now,” I said. “Now that Russ has finished his port.”
“Show me now,” said Russ coldly.
We left Jack and Jill, who got back to their boxes. Sketchy Albedo was on the other Sphex. Janelle Fuchs had been praising Sketchy to me. “He’s a skater,” she’d told me. “Sketchy is a skater word. He’s a fun guy at a party. He just likes to harsh on older men. He doesn’t mean anything by it.” For his part, Sketchy had decided I was okay when he found out about the wide range of court charges against me. I was practically a cryp.
“Gronk,” said Russ to Sketchy. “Gronk gronk gronk.” Russ squinted his eyes shut and opened his mouth wide as he did this. He tilted his head back so that his beard rose up off his chest. God he was ugly.
“Russ means can we use the machine,” I said.
“The lawn-dwarf and the twit,” said Sketchy, quoting from our private e-mail flame letters. Sketchy read whoever’s e-mail he felt like. “I was thinking—can you spazzes teach Squidboy to skate?”
“Maybe,” I said. “Provided there’s a physically accurate cyberspace skate simulation that the program can practice in.”
“Sure there’s a program like that,” said Sketchy. “Cyberskate. Real Knot ships it with their deck along with a spring-mounted feely-blank skateboard that you stand on for your interface.”