The Hacker and the Ants

by Rudy Rucker

  I had to turn them off! Next to each of the three windows was a board of controls with an On/Off switch at the top. I pressed Off on the Antland of Fnoor’s board, and two additional buttons appeared above the On/Off switch. The new buttons were marked 0 and 1.

  “Please enter the binary digits of the halt code,” said a voice.

  “The code is Hex DEF6,” I said.

  “Please enter the binary digits of the halt code,” repeated the voice.

  “What’s the binary for that number, Da?” asked Tom.

  “I don’t exactly remember, but I can figure it out,” I said. “I’ll think aloud so you and Ida know too. ‘Hex’ means ‘base sixteen’ and the base sixteen numerals are 0-1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-A-B-C-D-E-F. A through F stand for ten through fifteen. What’s D? I always think: ’D is an unlucky grade, and D is thirteen.’ So DEF6 is thirteen-fourteen-fifteen-six. Now all I have to do is turn those four numbers into binary. Thirteen is eight plus four plus one. An eight, a four, no two, a one: 1-1-0-1. Fourteen is one higher; add one and carry one to get: 1-1-1-0. Fifteen is 1-1-1-1. Six is no eight, a four, a two, no one: 0-1-1-0. So all right.”

  I put my hand up to the pair of buttons and slowly entered the bits, thirteen-fourteen-fifteen-six in binary:

  1101 1110 1111 0110

  The little figures in the Antland of Fnoor stopped moving—all of them. But the ants in the other two colonies became wildly agitated. The great mother board flashed with desperate signals, and the factory colony boiled with activity.

  “Quick, Tom,” I shouted. “You stop the motherboard, and I’ll stop the factory!”

  We keyed in the numbers as fast as possible. Riscky’s phreak deck must have had clear-channel satellite access, because there didn’t seem to be any lag in Tom’s transmissions from California to Switzerland. He beat me by half a second. By the time I keyed in my last four bits, the great motherboard colony was already dark and still.

  But something bad and unexpected was happening in the factory colony. The plastic ants were swarming all over the window that looked in on them and now, somehow, some of the plastic ant images were out of the colony and in the ant lab with me! My piezopads buzzed as the ants tried to bite me, while I finished my key presses and killed the factory colony. But the handful of plastic ant icons that had escaped were still alive! Some kept on biting me, and the rest of them scuttled past me and off down the corridors of Roger’s dungeon maze.

  Before Tom and I could even catch our breath, there was screeching from the tunnel, and a pack of angry goblins came running in to attack us. They’d been taken over by the escaped ants! One of them snatched the map from Tom’s hand and stuffed it into his mouth, chewing and swallowing like mad. The other goblins began tearing at our tuxedos.

  “Oneone oh oneoneoneone oh oneoneoneone oh oneone oh!” screamed Tom.

  The magic bullet worked once more: the goblins keeled over dead, along with the few plastic ant icons still loose in the ant lab with us.

  “All right!” I whooped. “I think we got all of them!”

  “Gimmie five!” said Tom.

  “Did you kill the ants?” came Ida’s voice.

  “Yeah!” said Tom. “Some of the ants escaped and got into orcs, but we killed the orcs too. Da’s spell works.”

  “I want to try,” said Ida.

  “No!” said Tom. “Get off me, grubber! Is there something else we have to do next, Da?”

  “There’s a bunch of real plastic ants in the next building from where I physically am, Tom. They’re like robots. I doubt if the spell will work on them. We have to find a way to kill those ants, too.”

  “How?”

  “I think we might be able to take over the two big robots who are building them.” I stepped forward and nudged the dead goblin who had swallowed the map. “Can we cut this guy open?”

  “I’ll jump on him,” said Tom.

  Tom jumped and the contents of the goblin’s stomach spewed onto the floor. The map was a tattered, unreadable mess.

  “Can you at least get us back to the entrance hall, Tom?” I asked anxiously. “I can’t remember all the turns we took.”

  “I remember, old man,” said Tom. “Grab my foot.”

  We flew back to the main hall, alert lest any remaining ant-possessed orc attack us. But if there were any more loose cyberspace ants, they were lying low.

  “Now you let me see!” came Ida’s voice. There was the sound of another tussle, and then Ida had control of the clown again.

  “Let’s try looking behind the fire now,” said Ida. “Usually the most important things are there.”

  “All right,” I said.

  The clown and I walked toward the fire, but the fire was like a wall.

  “Um, squeeze around,” said Ida’s low voice.

  We sidled over to the side of the hearth and squeezed around behind the fire. There was a sooty trapdoor in the back wall of the chimney. Ida pulled it open, and I followed her through.

  Instead of the dungeon passage I’d expected, the room behind the panel was a completely modern-looking office room with bookcases and standard-looking cyberspace portals. One of the doors had an ant on the wall over it—peering in there, I could see that this portal was a hyperjump connection to the same dungeon room that Tom and I had just visited by way of the passages.

  “Ahem,” said Ida.

  “You’re doing good,” I said. “You were right.”

  Right next to the ant lab portal was a door to a room with four booths that looked like arcade cyberspace games, each with swivel-mounted goggles and glove controls. The booths were labeled Walt, Perky Pat, Dexter, and Baby Scooter.

  “This is it!” I exulted. “Yay Ida!” Peering into the booths, I saw that the Walt and Perky Pat goggles were dark and dead. But the Dexter and Baby Scooter headsets were flickering with colored images.

  “Okay,” I told Ida. “These are for telerobotically controlling two robots that are in a factory next to the building where I am. Those robots have been building plastic ants. We have to go in there and take over the robots and try and get them to kill the plastic ants.”

  “Okay,” said Ida a little uncertainly.

  “Let me do it,” yelped Tom.

  “Maybe Tom should do it, Ida,” I said. “I mean my life kind of depends on this. If we don’t kill all the plastic ants they might crawl over here and kill me. One of them tried to slash my wrist this morning. And Tom is better at games than anyone.”

  “Oh all right,” snapped Ida.

  Tom quickly took control of the clown. I settled into the Dexter booth and Tom took Baby Scooter. Pulling the Dexter headset over my virtual face shifted my viewpoint to that of the robot’s and, most importantly, this action overrode the robot’s control circuits and put me in charge. Dexter was now slaved to my hands’ motions.

  This didn’t happen quite smoothly or automatically. Dexter and Baby Scooter had no desire at all to become our telerobotic slaves. My viewpoint bucked around wildly for a moment after I entered Dexter, and I could see that Baby Scooter was thrashing around as well. But Roger had made sure to hardwire the telerobotic override into the ROBOT.LIB microcode, and there was really nothing Dexter and Baby Scooter could do. As soon as we’d settled in, all their higher logic circuits were turned off.

  Even so, the robots’ control circuits were still functional, and you could drive them around with the standard cyberspace control gestures. You didn’t have to worry about the best way to move their legs and so on; you had only to point and nod, and use your hands to control their manipulators. Since the robots had four manipulators each, the control booths actually had four swiveling glove controls.

  Once Dexter quieted down, I found myself standing in front of the plastics-casting machine he’d been tending. There was a basket of tiny electronic circuits to my left and a bowl of shining translucent beads to my right. Farther to my right was Baby Scooter. I raised my hand and waved.

  “Are you okay, Tom?”

 
“Yeah,” said Tom, waving back. “I’m fine. Are these the plastic ants?” He pointed at the components spread out before him. “Where are the live ones?”

  “Down there.” I pointed at the trail of newly fashioned plastic ants that was marching from Tom’s bench to the crack by the elevator door. “Those are the guys we have to get rid of.” Just as I’d feared, the plastic ants were as lively as ever.

  Tom picked up a live ant in one of his pincers. He squeezed hard, trying to crush it, but rather than crumbling, the ant skidded out from his grip and shot across the room like a pinched watermelon seed. “They’re really solid,” said Tom.

  I scooped up another ant with my humanoid hand, and then used my two pincers to pull its gaster and its head sections apart from its alitrunk. When I dropped the pieces to the floor, they writhed about spastically. “Tearing them apart works,” I said. “But by now there’s hundreds of them. Maybe even thousands.”

  “See how their trail goes into that crack by the elevator door?” said Tom. “Maybe we can pour something down in there that will melt them.”

  “It would be even better if we could take the elevator down to where the ants have their nest,” I said.

  “What’s wrong with the elevator?”

  “It’s jammed.”

  “Maybe I can fix it,” said Tom. “You look for something we can pour on them.”

  I trucked back and forth on my bent-legged bicycle wheels, looking at the vats and barrels of chemicals. The plastic ants still in the lab seemed to sense we were no longer their friends—they were streaming en masse toward the crack at the bottom of the elevator door.

  “Here’s a big can of acetone,” I said presently. “That might be good.” The big square can was of shiny metal marked “Acetone—Highly Flammable.” It looked like it held about five gallons.

  Tom was examining a box on the wall near the elevator. “Somebody took out one of the fuses is all,” he said, rising high up on his legs to look on top of the box. “And, yes, here it is!” Dexter or Baby Scooter had probably removed the fuse, timing it to trap Roger where the plastic ants could finish him off.

  Tom replaced the fuse, pressed the elevator button, and clankclank the cabin slid up to our level and the doors opened. A dozen plastic ants were running about on the cabin floor.

  “Let’s see if they melt,” I said, lumbering over with the heavy can of acetone. I unscrewed the top and slopped some of the stuff onto the plastic ants. But it didn’t slow them down a bit.

  “If we could light the acetone . . . ” said Tom.

  “That would probably work,” I agreed. “But how can we light it?”

  “Make a spark with an electrical wire,” came Ida’s voice.

  “That sounds good,” I said. “Let’s do it.”

  We got in the elevator. Tom was about to push the button for the basement, but I stopped him and pushed the button for the main floor. “We can’t take the elevator to the basement,” I said. “There’s a dead body at the bottom of the shaft. I was starting to tell you before. The plastic ants killed Roger.”

  The main-floor elevator door was still frozen into the half-open position I’d cranked it to. Tom and I squeezed out with some difficulty, and then went down the concrete stairs to the basement.

  I looked around the basement. Where were the ants? No trail led out from under the elevator door here, which suggested they had taken up residence inside the shaft. Hopefully right at the bottom.

  “Wait,” I told Tom, and hurried back up to the main floor to get the emergency key-crank out of the elevator door. Back in the basement, I put it into the hole in the basement elevator doors.

  “Get a wire,” I told Tom.

  Tom tore a heavy section of electrical conduit down from the ceiling. Being in robot bodies made us feel pretty reckless. Tom kept pulling on the wire and ripping stuff loose until the wire had about ten feet of slack. And then he yanked the wire in two with his pincer-claws. The two bare wire ends made big sputtering sparks if you held them near each other.

  “All right,” I said. “It’s robot kamikaze time.”

  “Kick some butt!” yelled Ida.

  I clamped the acetone can against my chest with my tentacle, and used my humanoid hand to crank open the door at a furious rate. There behind the door was Roger’s corpse, and all around his corpse were the glistening plastic ants.

  The ants were busy—they’d mounted the two Y9707-EX chips on the grungy shaft wall, with wires running around the chips. Several of the ants had fashioned themselves small silicon rectangles that were attached to their bodies like wings. One of the ants was just starting its wings with an abrupt beating stutter. It rose an inch or two into the air.

  I pushed forward and slashed my pincers into the metal can of acetone. The can split wide open, dumping the volatile liquid out onto the ants. Tom lunged in next to me and sparked the wires in the midst of the shaft.

  WHOOOOOM!

  There was a rush of noise and orange light, and then my viewfield went dead. An instant later I felt a shock wave jolt my chair in Roger’s study. I made the gestures to remove the virtual telerobotic headset, and found myself back in the lab behind the castle fireplace. The black velvet clown was here too: Tom and Ida.

  “Thanks a million,” I said. “I have to go now. Don’t tell anyone where I am.”

  “Good-bye, Da,” said Tom.

  “Look out in case there’s any more ants,” called Ida. I pulled off my headset for real. It was still raining. Oily black smoke was trickling out the roof vents of Roger’s factory. The monitor on Roger’s desk was blank. Down in the basement of Roger’s house, the great boiler shuddered on and began pumping heat into the radiators.

  It was time to get out of here. I hurried into the room where I’d slept and pulled my satchel out from under the mattress. There was no car here for me to use, but it would be simple enough to trek down to Saint-Cergue, especially now that I had Roger’s galoshes on. I rushed out through the dim living room—for some reason the lights weren’t working anymore. I pushed on the front door. It didn’t open. “Open the door,” I commanded—but nothing happened. A power failure from the factory explosion?

  No, it was worse than that. Roger’s house computer had turned against me. There was a sudden grinding sound from all over the house as the metal roll-down shutters closed off all the windows. The rain beat on the roof and the radiators hissed with steam.

  I left my satchel of money by the front door and felt my way into the dark living room, past the great blue-and-white tile stove to the faint glow of the wall-mounted house computer. The computer screen showed a harmless-looking array of icons, but when I went to touch its keyboard, something pounced on my hand and bit it. I cried out and thrashed my hand—a winged plastic ant circled up into the darkness. Now I felt a bite in my ankle. Not knowing which way to turn, I ran back into Roger’s study, dimly lit by his blank monitor. The little room was hot and stuffy.

  Looking desperately around, I noticed the cardboard box of tools in the corner. I rummaged through the box and found a flashlight and a hammer. Wonderfully, the flashlight worked.

  I went back into the living room with the idea of trying to smash the plastic ants with my hammer. The cone of my flashlight beam showed three of them on the floor. I rushed forward and managed to pound and crush two of them. Bang bang! But the third ant scurried in close to me and bit me on the ankle. I picked it off and pressed its snapping head against the floor while I pulverized its gaster with the hammer. More ants came, some crawling and some flying, their silicon wings glittering in the beam of my flashlight.

  I tried yelling the binary digits of Hex DEF6, but it didn’t do a thing—not that it should have. I was dealing with real-world ant robots now instead of the GoMotion software ants of cyberspace. Surely there was some radio control signal to turn these plastic ants off, but without hours of detective-work hacking, I had no way of knowing how to send it.

  No, instead of using some subtle software c
ode, I was pounding at the plastic ants with my hammer. Meanwhile they kept attacking me—circling around, jumping up, and dive-bombing; sinking their pincers into my arms, legs, and even my neck; coordinating their motions with the inaudible chirps of robot radio waves. I picked the attackers off and smashed them as best I could, ignoring the cuts in my fingers. I grew dizzy with the pain and the heat. If the ants didn’t kill me, the house would cook me to death—but I didn’t know what to do besides keep crushing ants.

  Around then the beam of my flashlight happened to fall on the blue-and-white tile stove, and I saw that hundreds more plastic ants were crawling and flying out through the vents in the stove’s door. Some kind of steam tunnel must have led from the factory to here. The flying ants stuttered their wings and lifted into the air to spiral toward me.

  If I stayed here and kept fighting, the plastic ants would bring me down like piranhas attacking a wading cow. Years ago the kids and I had seen just such a cow getting eaten on a TV nature show. The kids had loved it so much that they’d made up a game—Piranhas And Cow—in which Daddy would crawl around on all fours and they’d “bite” at him with their hands until I, Daddy, would collapse in giggles with my arms clamped protectively over my belly and sides.

  I slapped a flying ant off my cheek. Thinking of Piranhas And Cow made me think of water, which made me think of Roger’s swimming pool. The pool roof was nothing but corrugated plastic! Still clutching my flashlight and hammer, I tottered back to the front hall, grabbed my black satchel, and ran through the kitchen and down the short hall to the room at the end of the house with the swimming pool. Thank God there was no door to close off the pool room. I reached up and whaled against the plastic of the pool room roof with my hammer till I had a good-sized hole in it. Rain poured in. I tossed my satchel up through the hole and began trying to crawl out after it.