by Rudy Rucker
First Roger showed me the rest of his house’s ugly, stripped rooms, with plywood, drywall and broken tiles everywhere. The house computer turned the lights on and off as we moved around. At the end of a hall off the kitchen, there was a turbid swimming pool festering under a slanting roof of translucent corrugated plastic. There was raw bare dirt around the pool, and the door to the pool room was off its hinges for repair. It seemed as if Donar Kupp had been as slow with home improvements as Roger. In the basement was a furnace and boiler whose overdesigned Swiss plumbing fascinated Roger—geekin’ engineer that he was.
Back upstairs, we found two beat-up folding umbrellas and splashed down the path to the windowless building Roger called his factory. My feet got soaked all over again.
Even more so than in the house, everything was unfinished and raw in the factory. The floors and walls were bare concrete. On the ground floor there was a ceiling crane and a deep cistern well with a concrete cover over it. There were a bunch of barrels and cans filled with different kinds of resins and solvents for making plastics, and the rest of the floor was covered with packed cardboard boxes of Roger’s stuff.
“We have six hundred boxes all marked Household Goods,” said Roger. “It’s like a treasure hunt, only every box you open is something you’ve seen before.”
He took me down the concrete stairs to the basement of the factory and showed me another furnace and boiler. He said this furnace could heat a whole town. There was a huge, frightening electrical board with the fuses the size of cannon shells. We got into a freight elevator that ran from the basement to the ground floor to the factory’s second floor.
“There’s no stairs to the second floor,” said Roger, “and no windows up there. Donar Kupp was intensely paranoid.” As the elevator inched up to the second floor, Roger pointed at a little handle marked ALARM. “Try turning that, Jerzy.” The little handle turned easily, making a small ringing sound behind the wall of the elevator. “It’s nothing but a bicycle bell!” said Roger, shaking his head. “I don’t like to use the elevator when I’m here alone. To make it even more dangerous, the fuse box for the elevator is on the second floor where nobody can reach it if the elevator breaks! I need to automate the factory with a central computer like I did my house.”
We eased to a stop on the second floor and the elevator doors opened onto a huge room with laboratory benches along the far walls. The area near the elevator was packed with stained industrial machinery—plastics compression molders and the like. In the open middle of the room were two robots looking at us. They moved toward us.
“I named them Walt and Perky Pat,” said Roger devilishly. “I was able to patch in some pieces of the Walt and Perky Pat code you and the ants evolved in the Our American Homes at West West.” He raised his voice to address the robots. “Walt and Perky Pat, this is my friend Jerzy Rugby. He’ll be working here with us for awhile.”
Walt, who was a two-armed Veep, wheeled forward and held out his humanoid hand for me to shake. “Hello, Walt,” I said. Now Perky Pat, a three-armed Adze, came forward too, holding our her hand-shaped manipulator. “Hello, Perky Pat.” I shook both their hands.
“Hello, Jerzy,” they said, not quite in unison. Perky Pat’s voice was higher than Walt’s.
“Roger told us about you, Jerzy,” continued Perky Pat. “He said you helped him design our programs.”
“That’s right,” I said. “First I worked at GoMotion and then I worked at West West. How old are you, Perky Pat?”
“Roger and Walt put me together three days ago. I’m one of the first kits West West shipped. But Roger gave me the improved ROBOT.LIB. Like Walt.”
“I’m a month old,” volunteered Walt. “Roger built me on May first.”
“That’s nice,” I said. “Roger tells me that you two are supposed to self-replicate.”
“Yes, Jerzy,” said Perky Pat. “Roger wants us to reproduce by building new robots without human help.”
“I know how,” said Walt confidently. “And instead of putting the standard kit software on our children, we’ll patch together combinations of our own programs.”
“We’ve been casting some of the parts ourselves,” said Perky Pat. “Soon we’ll be able to make everything except the chips. And Roger says that by next year we’ll be able to make the chips too.”
“Yes, we do plastics,” said Roger, gesturing toward the big, smelly plastics machines. “These were Donar Kupp’s, Jerzy; they’re linked into a single system driven by standard industrial microcode. The only catch is that the documentation for the system was handwritten by Kupp in German. But I got GoMotion to send me a German language module for Walt. And now he understands the manual.”
“Ja,” said Walt proudly. “Ich verstehe.”
“Can you run the machine, Walt?” I asked.
“Ja, ja. Es geht ganz gut.”
“Talk English, Walt,” reprimanded Roger. “And show Jerzy some of the pieces you’ve made.”
“I’ll get them,” said Perky Pat. These robots were eager as Santa’s elves.
Perky Pat darted across the lab and came back with something in each of her three hands. “This is a leg strut we made. And this is a panel of the body. And this here, this is an imipolex resin bead with an electronic circuit in it.”
“Let me see that!” said Roger. “I didn’t know you’d made one of those already.”
Perky Pat handed him the teardrop-shaped bead of hard shiny plastic. Roger held it up, peered at it, then passed it to me. The bead was yellowish and transparent. Inside it was the dark filigree of an electronic circuit. Some input/output wires bristled from the pointed end of the bead.
“How did you figure out how to make it?” asked Roger.
“The basic recipe was in Kupp’s notes,” said Walt. “And Perky Pat came up with some modifications.”
“I don’t get what it’s for,” I said. “The Veep and the Adze don’t use any parts like this.”
“I’m not sure what it’s for,” said Perky Pat. “The cyberspace ants told me to make it, but the ant lion on my chip keeps me from understanding why. I hate the ant lion.”
“Creativity,” said Roger. “Initiative. A yearning for freedom. Not bad, eh Jerzy?” He drew out the pack of four new chips. “These chips are just what we’ve been waiting for, Walt and Perky Pat. They don’t support the ant lions, and they run faster! Let’s try ‘em out. Walt, could you please turn yourself off?”
“Okay, Roger. But will I lose memory?”
“No, I don’t think so. Not unless the new chip malfunctions.”
Stoic Walt opened the manual controls door in his side and flipped his power switch to Off. His body gave a hydraulic sigh as it settled down onto its folded legs with its hands dangling limply. Roger used a screwdriver to open the access panel on Walt’s other side. He pulled Walt’s old Y9707 chip out of its multipin socket and snugged in the new Y9707-EX. Perky Pat watched all this with great interest. Then Roger replaced the access panel and flipped the power switch to On.
“On,” said Walt. “Six-thirteen P.M., Saturday, May 30. Checking memory. Memory okay. I am Walt.” His voice was fast and high.
“What’s the square root of twenty?” said Roger.
“About four point four seven,” chirped Walt. He talked so rapidly that it was hard to understand him.
“I think your new chip has double the old chip’s clock speed,” said Roger. “Please take that into account in your vocalizations. Try halving your output frequencies.”
“Is this better?” said Walt in something like his former voice.
“Fine,” said Roger. He went on to do some more tests, and when everything worked, he went ahead and changed Perky Pat’s chip as well. Having watched how Roger had adjusted Walt, Pat came through the transformation with her voice timbre intact. If anything, she sounded more mellifluous.
“This is fabulous, Roger. And the other two chips are for us?”
“Yes, yes,” said Roger, laying the two new Y9707
-EX chips on the lab bench. “Walt and Perky Pat, I want you to build these two chips into child robots like we’ve been talking about.”
“Oh yes,” said Perky Pat, fondling the chips. “Dexter and Baby Scooter! We’ll build them tonight! All by ourselves.”
“Piece of cake,” said Walt gratingly. “Now why don’t you two humans get out of the way and let us work.”
Weird, weird, weird. I felt weak as a leaf. If I didn’t warm up my feet I was going to catch the flu. It was time to get out of this sealed concrete room. I looked at Roger and asked, “Do you have any food?”
“Yes,” he said, as discouragingly as possible. He wanted to stay here in the lab.
“Can I have some of your food, Roger?”
“Oh, all right,” he sighed. “There’s a camera that Kupp installed in the ceiling, so I guess I can keep an eye on things over the monitor.” Sure enough, there was a big lens in the center of the ceiling overhead.
“Good,” I said, pushing the elevator button. “Now give me some warm food and something to drink, for God’s sake, and show me where I’m supposed to sleep.” The two robots stared impatiently at us until we left.
Outside, the rain had slacked off and the gray sky was veined with the golds of sunset.
“It will be better weather tomorrow,” said Roger. “The first day of a new world.”
The front door opened itself at Rogers’s request, and for dinner the kitchen microwaved us three frozen plastic-packed dinners. I had a pork and a beef; Roger had a manicotti. To drink we had Scotch, tap water, or Scotch and water.
“I thought you’d be living better than this, Roger,” I said after I’d eaten my food and downed two drinks. I’d taken off my socks and crossed my legs so that I could rub some life into my feet.
“This is exactly how I like to live,” said Roger. “By eating frozen premade dinners I’m able to precisely calibrate my caloric intake. You know that I watch my weight.”
“What about vitamins?”
“Vitamins are just chemicals, Jerzy. For vitamins I take pills.” As if in confirmation, he brought out a tray of vitamin pill bottles and swallowed a capsule from each. One shiny capsule, a “metals supplement,” held compounds of chromium, manganese, titanium, and palladium. “Food is simply a source of the fats and carbohydrates which the body bums as fuel. Power for the computing medium. Vitamins are the processor components—the nodes of computation, if you will.”
“Oh, whatever. Look, getting back to my own problems, how am I going to keep from going to jail without being on the lam for the rest of my life? Can’t you step forward and admit that it was you who released the ants and made Studly kill the dog?”
“I’m not admitting anything. But I can help you get a better new identity. Those girls—Bety Byte and Vanna—they’re rank amateurs. I could set you up with the top cryp in Calcutta—that’s where professionals get new ID. Even the CIA goes there.”
“I want my old identity, Roger, and I want to win my trial. I want to be able to visit with my family—even if I am getting divorced.” I took another drink. “If I could just get rid of all the ants, the government would like me. Roger, did you know there’s a big nest of ants in cyberspace?”
“Of course I know—there’s three nests in fact. My cyberspace ant lab has windows onto all three of them. One of the nests is what you call the Antland of Fnoor—nice name, by the way. I was right there in the Antland of Fnoor that first night when Riscky Pharbeque was scaring you into working for West West.”
“Oh yeah, that’s right. You were groveling and twisting on the floor.” I chuckled nastily. “All covered in your own blood and shit.”
“Well,” said Roger equably, “that’s the way Riscky made it look—phreak humor, you know. Anyway you can’t stay in a GoMotion ant nest for very long unless you’re prepared to kill quite a few of them. The ants attack non a-life code.”
“I’ve noticed,” I said. “But you have that magic bullet for killing ants. Come on and tell me what it is!”
“I don’t want you to kill the cyberspace ants, Jerzy. One colony is working on a third version of the ROBOT.LIB microcode. Walt and Perky Pat need that code for the new robots. The second colony—that’s your Antland of Fnoor—is evolving better high-level code for the new robots. And the third colony is trying to find a way for the new robots to build miniature robots—a third generation. It’s all been going so smoothly that this afternoon I threw in a bunch of random mutations to see if the second- and third-generation robots couldn’t be more of a surprise.”
“The robots in your factory are going to get information from the cyberspace ants?”
“Robots are always in touch with cyberspace. That chip, the Y9707 that robots use? Among other things, it emulates a cyberspace deck. A robot’s vision of the world is an overlay of cyberspace. Robots use cyberspace as a kind of shared consciousness. And with the ant lion absent from the Y9707-EX chips, my new robots will be able to import external ant function pointers. We could see some truly emergent behavior.”
“Heavy,” I yawned. “I didn’t sleep very well on the flight over here. What time is it?”
“It’s after nine. If you like, I’ll show you your room.”
There was a guest room on the end of the house closest to the factory. Rather than an actual bed, it just had a mattress on the floor, but right now that was fine with me. I squeezed my money-stuffed satchel under a corner of the mattress, told the room to turn out the lights, and fell asleep.
Sometime during the night I woke up. With the eight-hour time change it was utterly impossible to tell how long I’d already slept, or what time it was. It took a major mental effort to find the bathroom, take a pee, and drink some water. The rain had stopped completely and it was a quiet night. Falling back into sleep, I thought I heard a tiny bell ringing in the distance, a tiny bell ringing and ringing and ringing. I couldn’t think what it meant. I was more exhausted than I’d ever been in my life.
When I woke again, a pale patch of sunshine was lying across my bed. The house was cool and utterly quiet. I washed up, put on my sandals and my business sweats, and breakfasted on another microwaved meal from Roger’s freezer: pigs in a blanket with warm fruit cocktail.
I asked the front door to open, and stepped outside. Just in case Roger had already gone down to Geneva, I wedged the door open with a rock so it couldn’t lock me out. A cold, gusty breeze was blowing up the mountain meadow, and fresh clouds were massing. The sun had already disappeared. Roger had been wrong about the weather. This was going to be another day of rain. I was going to have to do something about finding some shoes. Borrowing shoes from Roger wasn’t an attractive option, as his size was considerably smaller than mine.
The door to the factory was unlocked; I went inside. When I pushed the call button for the elevator to the second floor, nothing happened. Had it jammed? Could Roger be stuck in there? The memory of the ringing I’d thought I’d heard last night came back to me. Had Roger been in the elevator all night ringing the bell?
There was an emergency box on the wall next to the elevator with German instructions that I couldn’t read. But on breaking the glass of the box, I found a metal crank, or key, that fit into a hole in the elevator doors. I shoved the crank in and began turning it. Turn by turn, the elevator doors edged open, revealing the empty elevator shaft below, and a piece of the elevator cabin above.
Only about a foot and a half of the elevator cabin was visible below the top of the door; it was too high for me to see in.
“Roger?” I called. “Roger, are you in there?” There was no sound in response. I called again, cocked my head, and listened. There were irregular movements in the robot lab upstairs, but not a sound came from the elevator cabin.
Finally, I’d cranked the door wide enough so that a person could fit in. I hauled a bunch of Roger’s Household Goods boxes over and built myself an unsteady mound. I got up on the mound, very nervous that I might tumble into the empty shaft. Balancing and c
raning forward, I could see into the elevator cabin and yes, Roger was in there. He was lying motionless on the floor facedown.
“Roger!”
No answer came. I have a terror of elevator shafts, and it was very hard to get myself to take the next step. What if the elevator should suddenly start up and guillotine me? But the stillness of Roger’s form was even more terrifying. I had to find out what had happened to him.
I braced my left hand against the floor of the elevator cabin and began tugging on Roger’s leg. He was stiff and heavy. I jerked him around so that his legs were sticking out of the cranked-open door. I wanted a good look at him, but no way was I going to climb up into the death cabin. I took one of his feet in either hand and pulled hard. Just then one of the boxes underfoot gave way, making the mound collapse. Some of the boxes shot out into the empty shaft and I fell backward, with nothing to hold on to but Roger’s feet.
Roger came sliding out of the elevator like a carrot coming out of the ground; I fell on my back and he landed on top of me, his butt on my lap. My legs were sticking out into the empty elevator shaft and so were Roger’s. I put my arms around his waist and started to scoot us back when all of a sudden something sharp dug into my wrist. For a second I thought it was just a random scratch, but the sharp pain redoubled and grew purposeful. There was a distinct sawing sensation. Something was trying to slit my wrist!
I cried out and pushed Roger’s body away from me. He teetered forward and fell into the shaft, twisting as he fell. I got a brief glimpse of him—his throat had a bloody hole in it, and there were big ants clinging to his face. The elevator cables jangled, and Roger’s body thudded on the concrete floor at the bottom of the shaft.
I felt another sharp pain in my wrist. An inch-long plastic ant was crouched down tight against my forearm with its mandibles working away at my skin! The ant’s head was wet and red with my blood. I screamed wildly and slapped at the ant till it fell away. On the floor, the ant quickly oriented itself and raced toward the elevator shaft. I brought the heel of my sandal down hard on its gaster, but the tough plastic bead didn’t give way. Instead, the ant twisted itself up and reached toward my heel, snapping its sharp little jaws. Its legs looked as if they were made of springs and metal, titanium-nickel memory-metal at a guess. For another moment I kept the ant pinned in place, but then it let out a shrill chirp that was answered by a chorus of chirps from down in the shaft. I snapped my foot forward to kick the ant away from me, and then I ran out of the factory, slamming the door behind me.