The Hacker and the Ants

by Rudy Rucker

  I thought a minute, and then flashed on the idea that Dirk would certainly help me out if I offered to pay him in pot. Every time Dirk and I had gotten high together he’d asked me if I could score pot for him. I’d never done so, though. Like, why should I? What for? I’d always just given him a few hits of pot when I had a lot, so that when I was out of pot I could count on him to give me some. But he was almost always out of pot. The more I thought about it, the more sure I was that if I apologized to Dirk about CyberBarbie and offered him a fresh quarter ounce, he’d make me a shrinkable tux.

  It was three-thirty and I was only a ten-minute drive from Queue’s. I motored on up there.

  “Hi, Queue.” She was sitting in front of a Macintosh in her office. The office was right off the lower deck: an anachronistic jumble of papers, disks, tapes, and books. Media Molecules primarily sold hard copy media for those not plugged into cyberspace, although their best-sellers were viewable on-line at the Mondo Alternate Info Service in cyberspace. But a lot of people didn’t have good cyberspace decks yet, especially the eternally broke eternal seekers to whom Media Molecules catered. Much of their business was still a quaint matter of putting a physical video or audiotape into a big envelope and like physically mailing it.

  “You’re looking good, Jerzy.” Queue smiled up at me with her hair across her face. “Hey! Before I forget! Some e-mail for you came in a little while ago.”

  “Let me see it.”

  She moused around the screen for awhile and finally said, “I guess I erased it.”

  “What did it say? Who was it from?”

  “It was from Roger something in Switzerland. He said—let me think, yes, he said, ‘I appreciate your brilliant work on the Adze. Sorry about your run of bad luck. I hope to work with you again someday.’”

  “Jesus,” I said. “That’s Roger Coolidge. He appreciates my work for West West? Don’t tell me he controls them, too!”

  “Wasn’t Roger Coolidge the big hacker guy at GoMotion?”

  “Yeah. He’s like my evil twin. I think he’s behind everything bad that’s been happening to me. What a guy. And he ‘hopes to work with me again someday,’ the prick?”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “Well, thanks for remembering to tell me.” I paused and gathered my wits, remembering why I’d come here. “Do you have any spare pot, Queue? I need to get hold of a quarter ounce.”

  “Wait, wait a minute, your new robots are a huge success? You’re celebrating?”

  “Not exactly. I got fired again. As for the robots, you should watch the local news. Or—do you have a TV?” I’d never seen a TV at Queue and Keith’s, come to think of it. I hate TV so much that I never look for it.

  “Keith pawned our set last Christmas,” said Queue. “So we had to miss out on that spacey ants-vs-television hack you pulled. You got fired from West West?”

  Keith popped into the office as if on cue.

  “Hi, Jerzy,” he said. “Are you still looking for a gun?”

  “A gun!” cried Queue. “Out of the question, Keith! This is a desperate man!”

  “I’ve been fired again,” I told Keith. “And all I want to buy right now is marijuana.”

  “Well, I can’t help you with that—though I’d be glad to smoke a bowl with you,” said Keith. “But I was at a pawnshop in Cupertino today and they had a plastic pistol for seventy-five dollars. It was a mean little machine. It looked like the head of a cobra. If you give me the money, I could get it for you.”

  “You pawned your guitar again, Keith?” demanded Queue. “You didn’t pawn anything of mine, did you?”

  “I have certain unavoidable expenses,” said Keith with solemn hippie dignity.

  I wasn’t sure what Keith’s unavoidable expenses were—though it was fun to think that the money was for cool, newly synthesized psychedelics. But likely as not the money was simply cash for driving around, for things like gas, bridge tolls, parking meters, tobacco, and an occasional espresso. Queue controlled the cash flow of Media Molecules, and I could readily believe that she was unwilling to advance Keith a cent.

  “Oh, you!” said Queue to Keith, and he smilingly drifted back out onto the deck.

  “So okay, Jerzy, you want a quarter?” Queue’s voice rose musically with the welcome question. “I guess I could spare a little. I’m short on cash.”

  “I have cash.” I still had three hundred dollars left. “One fifty?”

  Queue gave her temple-bell laugh and mouthed a kiss at me. “One forty is fine.”

  While she searched out the quarter, I went upstairs to my room and rooted out the remains of my own stash. I rolled four fat joints in Orange Zig-Zag papers and tucked them into the back of a matchbook. I went back downstairs and paid Queue for the heat-sealed quarter ounce plastic bag of sinsemilla. She said she’d bought it for herself yesterday, but was passing it on to me as a favor. I thanked her profusely. The pot was a beautiful light green mass of female buds with dusty purple stigmas. Dirk would drool over it.

  I drove down to Los Perros and parked in Dirk’s driveway, right next to our old house on Tangle Way. Dirk usually worked at home rather than in the storefront of Dirk Blanda’s Personography.

  He came to the door and looked out diffidently. Dirk was a calm, boyish man with a thin head and short white hair. He had a lot of simplistic ideas about economics and politics that he believed the more deeply because he’d thought them all out himself.

  “Hi, Jerzy. Come on in.”

  I followed him up to his machine room. I meant to be completely nice and diplomatic, but my anger over what he’d done to me came spilling out. “Dirk, you should have talked to me instead of hiring a phreak to burn me. That’s a crime, you know. I could report you.”

  “Look who’s talking about crime. You stole my meshes! That’s wrong, Jerzy. If you’ve just come here to insult me, you might as well go.”

  “I’m not here to insult you, and I’m sorry that my companies ripped off your meshes. But we’re even now. Your phreak put me through hell.”

  Dirk’s eyes widened with curiosity. “What did he do?”

  “He got me in a voodoo cyberspace watching movies of me and my children getting tortured.”

  “Oh! Now that—that’s nothing that I told him to do.” Dirk looked like a worried boy whose Halloween prank has gone too far. “I wouldn’t ever wish any harm on your family.”

  “You told him to burn me and he did. But now I’ve been fired from GoMotion and West West both, so if Mattel still feels like burning someone about the Our American Home test sites, tell them to go after the execs and not after me. I’m out of the loop.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Jerzy. And your trial starts tomorrow doesn’t it? I remember seeing Studly working in your yard plenty of times. I can’t believe he killed a dog.”

  “I think he started acting different after the GoMotion ants infected him. But now that there’s GoMotion ant lions all over the place, it shouldn’t happen again.”

  “I keep hearing that there’s still some ants loose in cyberspace. Have you seen them?”

  “No, but as a matter of fact, that’s why I’m here. I need a special tuxedo so I can go look for the cyberspace ants.”

  “So you need a new tuxedo. I figured it was either that or pot that brought you here. You don’t happen to have any pot, do you? I’m all out again.”

  “That’s what I was hoping,” I grinned. I took out the bag of pot and handed it to Dirk. “I’ll trade you this quarter ounce for a new tux. The tux has to be scalable. It has to have a control on it so that I can change its size.”

  Dirk turned the packet this way and that, looking at the buds. “This is awesome, Jerzy. Of course I can make you a scalable tux. If you don’t want too much fine detail, I can fix you up in about ten minutes. Do you want it to look like you? I’ve still got your bodymap on file.”

  “No, no, I want to be anonymous.”

  “Well, I’ve got a bunch of art meshes on disk. T
hey don’t look like anyone specific. You can pick what you like. Should we get high first?” He tore the plastic open and inhaled. “Mmmm.”

  “I have some already rolled.” I took out one of my joints and lit it. Dirk and I passed the jay back and forth, loving the great warm relaxing sensations it gave us. It was nice to be here, back to normal, getting high with my friendly neighbor. I wished that all the hassles could disappear and that after this joint I could walk across the driveway and into my house and be there with Carol and the kids and my good job at GoMotion.

  “I feel it, Jerzy.” Dirk looked around his room happily. “I’m buzzed.”

  “You’re not mad at me anymore?”

  “I’m not mad,” he smiled. There was something so pure and childlike about the guy. Hanging out with him always reminded me of Saturday mornings when I was a kid and would walk over to my neighbor friend’s house to set off firecrackers and play computer games.

  “So let’s make your tux,” said Dirk, handing me a spare cyberdeck headset and pair of gloves. “You can pick out one of my art meshes.”

  We were in Dirk’s virtual office. Dirk’s tuxedo was a muscular version of him, and I was a chromed-over copy of Dirk. I followed after him as he flew through a door that opened onto a huge Louis the Fourteenth ballroom with a few hundred figures posed on the parquet floor. When we came in, the figures started slowly gesturing, driven by automatic chaos loops. “Here, Jerzy,” came Dirk’s voice over the earphones. “This is my art warehouse. I’m always putting together new tuxedos. Fly around and look for something you like.”

  The figures were set down in no particular order: a club-wielding caveman, a breastplated Amazon, a Tyrannosaurus rex, a happy carrot, Michelangelo’s marble David, a pointillist Seurat woman with a bustle, a centaur, a manic white businessman smoking a pipe, a teddy bear, the pope, Bo Diddley, a vertically divided half-Elvis half-Marilyn, JFK with brains dangling from the back of his head, a knight in paisley armor, a forties secretary with glasses and tight bun, a saucer alien with tentacles on its face, a crying clown, ...

  “I want to be a crying clown,” I said.

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah, man, a crying clown is how I feel—what with my trial coming up. Maybe if I look like a crying clown people will be nicer to me.”

  “Okay,” said Dirk. “And you need a size lever. Why don’t we make his penis be the lever.” Dirk chuckled and pulled the clown’s pants down. The clown was endowed with a dangling hairy scrotum and an intricately veined semitumescent penis. “I figured a clown’s genitals should be kind of grotesque,” said Dirk. “Getting the pants to go on and off was an interesting hack. How about if you push the clown’s penis up he grows, and if you push it down he gets smaller. A Gothic joystick.”

  “That’s too gnarly, Dirk. Why can’t you make the control be ...” I looked over at the businessman figure with his pipe clenched between the teeth of his shit-eating salesman grin. I now recognized the figure as the old underground culture icon known as “Bob” Dobbs. “Give my clown a copy of the pipe of ‘Bob’ Dobbs.”

  “I like it,” said Dirk. He popped up the tool icons and picked a little glass box with buttons on it. He moved and resized the box to just fit over “Bob”’s pipe, and then pressed a button to capture a copy of the pipe that he carried over and affixed to the face of my clown. Next he used a screwdriver icon to pry open the clown’s chest to reveal a symbolic arrangement of chips and wires. Dirk used a virtual pliers and soldering iron to adjust the circuitry, sealed the clown back up, and pulled down a spray can.

  “You can use the pipe for size control, yes. And, Jerzy, as long as we’re getting crazy, I’ll make your tuxedo’s surface reflectivity be like black velvet. A ‘Bob’ Dobbs crying clown painted on black velvet.” He sprayed the clown till its surfaces were all matte and soft. “So try on your new tux, Jerzy. Just fly through it, and it’ll click onto you.”

  I flew forward and, sure enough, the crying clown clicked onto me. I moved the velvety arms around. One side of the ballroom was a huge mirror, and I flew over there to take a closer look.

  “The pipe works?” I asked.

  “Try it.”

  I pushed up on the pipe, and rapidly grew through the ceiling of the ballroom. Outside the ballroom was raw black cyberspace with some things twinkling in the distance. I pushed the pipe down, and shrank back into the ballroom and on down and down to the size of a pissant. Dirk and the art meshes towered above me. I inched myself back up to standard size.

  “This is great. Can we get out?”

  “Sure.” We flew back into Dirk’s virtual office and took off our headsets.

  Dirk tore open his quarter ounce and stuffed the bowl of a pipe.

  “Uh, Dirk,” I said as he lit the pipe. “About that burn you and Mattel did. Did you ask the phreak to do anything besides scaring me? I mean—you weren’t involved in the release of the GoMotion ants, were you?”

  Dirk shook his head no while holding his breath. He offered me the pipe, but it had already gone out.

  “How do you want to get the tuxedo onto your system?” asked Dirk as he exhaled. “Ordinarily I’d say for you to just come through cyberspace and pick it up, but what with your legal situation—”

  “Yeah, I’d much rather take it on disk and install it directly on my deck. The less of a trail I leave the better.”

  “Agreed. I’ll put it on a disk with an install script.”

  “Wavy.”

  We said our good-byes and I went outside. Without putting my headset on, I tapped three-one-four-one to turn on my deck. I opened the trunk and put the disk in the drive of my Pemex twelve. This was finally the golden age of system-independent plug’n’play, so the deck knew that the disk was meant to be my tuxedo, and the disk knew what format my deck wanted, and they both could agree to run the tuxedo’s self-installing script.

  I got in the driver’s seat of my car and put on my headset for a quick cybercruise to the Bay Area Netport rest room. In the mirror I was a black velvet crying clown with the pipe of “Bob” Dobbs. Bety Byte and her grrlfriends looked at me, but I was no weirder than a lot of the tuxedos going by. I flew out to a corner of the Netport and tested out the shrink and grow commands to my satisfaction. But now it was time to pick up Gretchen.

  Just for kicks, I tapped five-nine-two-six for the reality pass-through. Stunglasses mode, Riscky had called it. Instead of the Netport, my headset now showed me a TV image of the view out my parked car’s windshield. Dirk’s driveway. I looked down at my hands and waggled them. There was no perceptible lag as the images came in through my headset’s small video cameras, traveled to the deck in the trunk, and made their way to the headset’s video screens. This was a very fast deck. I felt confident enough of it to pull out of Dirk’s driveway and drive down to Los Perros wearing stunglasses. The colors were so rich and the resolution so high that I could barely tell I was wearing a headset at all.

  I parked in front of Welsh & Tayke, turned off my deck, and stashed my gloves and headset in the pouch behind my seat. I could see in through the front window—Susan Poker and Gretchen were still there. After what I’d just learned about Susan Poker from Riscky—that she was a professional who’d been in on my burn—well, I didn’t want to try to talk to her. I leaned on my horn. Gretchen saw me, grabbed her purse, and danced out laughing to hop in my car. She was glad to see me.

  “I’m so sick of the office, Jerzy! It’s a beautiful warm day—I should be at the beach!”

  “We can still go to the beach. Let’s go to Santa Cruz and have supper there. And maybe there’s some music happening in Santa Cruz tonight. Do you want to?”

  “Yeah, I do.” This funny emphasis of agreement was another California speech habit. “My car’s down there; let’s regroup at my apartment.”

  After parking her Porsche at her apartment, Gretchen changed clothes. I borrowed a baggy sweater from her for if it got cold later. We checked in the paper and, yes, there was music tonight; eve
n though it was Tuesday, there was a World Music concert taking place in the Santa Cruz Civic Center at nine. Perfect—I drove us over the Santa Cruz mountains toward the sun.

  We hung out on Its Beach near Steamer Lane. It was sunny and not too windy. Around six-thirty we went to an expensive restaurant looking out over Monterey Bay. We had lobster sausage for our appetizer and duck pizza for our main course. The lobster sausage was exquisitely toothsome, but the duck pizza was a disappointment. Duck was always a disappointment, but somehow I could never learn.

  “Let’s stay at my place tonight,” I said over our cap-pucino. “I don’t want Susan Poker barging in on me again. I don’t trust her at all anymore. I found out today that she’s a cryp. She’s been lying to me. Did you know that, Gretchen?”

  “Who told you she was a cryp?”

  “Some phreak I met at the Night Watch. His name was Riscky Pharbeque. He sold me a hot new cyberspace deck for a thousand dollars.”

  “You just can’t leave that stuff alone, can you, Jerzy?”

  “So what about Susan Poker?” I demanded.

  “Well, okay, it’s true that she’s a cryp. Welsh & Tayke uses her to get early information. I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to scare you off.”

  “I bet it was Susan Poker who called the cops on me.”

  “I guess that’s possible. Even though Susan smiles a lot, she isn’t necessarily that nice a person. Sometimes I wonder how I ended up getting stuck with her as a friend. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, Jerzy. I was scared you’d blame me for what she does.”

  “Is somebody paying her to watch me?”

  “I don’t know.” Gretchen stared out the window, then smiled brightly at me and changed the subject. “Do you think you’ll win your trial?”

  “I sure hope so. Part of my being fired from West West means that they revoke my bail next week. That three million dollars they put up? With that gone, I’ll be sitting in jail.”

  “Poor Jerzy. Hey! It’s time for the concert.”

  “Can you put this meal on your credit card, Gretchen? I’m a little short on cash.”