The Hacker and the Ants (10 page)

As we moved about the ant-filled corridors of the insanely shifting fnoor, I realized that this entire structure was in fact four-dimensional. Once I had this key insight, the fnoor's motions began to make sense. And I realized that there was a logical reason why the rogue ants had made their nest four-dimensional: to make it harder to find. Four-dimensional things can appear quite
small with respect to our normal space. The spatial cross section of a hyperobject is merely the tip of an iceberg of additional geometry that sticks out into hyperspace.

My ant pressed forward until we found ourselves in a large, roughly spherical chamber. Though the fnoor walls and spaces were shifting as ever, the space inside the chamber remained untouched; it was like the eye of a hurricane. Crouched in the center was the queen herself, a plump, golden ant with a gaster distended to a hundred times the normal ant size, a gaster like a hollow golden shrimp-shaped puff earring. Worker ants kept running up to the queen and regurgitating food for her. At first I couldn't make out the nature of the food units—flat rectangular slips—but then I realized these were pieces of simmie-paper bearing the addresses of unused memory locations the ants had found. I briefly wondered if the ants were still working on using up the DTV chips of my cyberdeck's video display, or if they were already busy colonizing someone else's chips.

The queen devoured each new memory address one hexadecimal digit at a time, chomping her way down the numbered slips, raising up her front legs in tremulous ant excitement as the figures went down. After each new address, the queen's gaster shuddered, and out popped a white, comma-shaped ant larva, which was gently seized by the jaws of a worker and borne away.

To my horror, my ant went right up to the ant queen and crouched there so that the queen could feel me all over with her antennae. She raised her front legs and opened her mouth as if to byte my head off. I screamed incoherently, but then we were past the queen and farther on our way, following one of the ants that carried a new larva.

We visited the ant nursery next, the place where the twitching ant larvae lay during maturation. I recalled
Roger's having told me that after the queen would issue an ant its memory space and its program code, the new ant still needed to do a certain amount of internal housekeeping to tune in on the specific numerical value of its memory address, to adjust to the special hardware quirks of the DTV chip it found itself on, and to patch over any glitches caused by the deliberate mutation of bits. Until all of these problems had been worked out—which could take as long as several hours of computation time, an ant's little simmie-body took the form of a larva instead of an ant.

Leaving the nursery, we went through a large gallery holding a great number of ants—and other kinds of simmies. I was surprised to see that I was not the only non-ant.

Biological anthills usually contain a wide range of the
myrmecophilous
or ant-loving creatures who live in the colony as parasites, symbiotes, or as pets of the ants. There is a certain small beetle, for instance, which is kept and fed by the ants simply because the ants enjoy licking tasty waxy secretions from the beetle's antennae. It's as if you were to pay a person to live with you simply because you liked the taste of the person's skin oil—not so farfetched, really, considering how much I missed the smells and tastes of Carol's body.

The myrmecophilous simmies I saw in the anthill were of such diversity that I realized that the GoMotion ants must have escaped to make this colony quite some time ago. There were all sorts of artificial life-forms which roved the Net; known collectively by the old Unix name of
daemons
, these constructs did things of a housekeeping or organizational function. The ants had any number of these “janitors” and “secretaries” living in their midst. More unsettlingly, I saw, at some distance, a few simmies that looked like hackers' tuxedos. How
many hackers had already found their way into this anthill? And what were they doing here? I could only speculate, as my ant didn't carry me close to them.

We drew near a translucent wall with dark shapes behind it. My ant pressed her head against the wall and
zonnng
the wall hyper-rotated to our rear and we were inside a virtual room furnished with armchairs, a couch, a bar, and a massive art deco desk. There was a glowing ceiling lamp shaped like a flattened hemisphere.

The room's color palette was monochrome, with everything a silvery shade of gray or black. The room looked like a gangster's secret office at the back of a nightclub in a Forties
film noir.

There were three simmies waiting in the office: Roger Coolidge, Susan Poker, and Death. Death had a dark, shrouded body, a loose-skinned white face with terrible hollow eyes, and a mouth that was a coarse metal zipper. The zipper's heavy slider was padlocked to a hasp at one end.

“I appreciate your working with us on this, Mr. Rugby,” said the Susan Poker simmie as she stepped forward, rummaging in her double-jointed purse. “What are your work hours?”

I grunted heavily with surprise, yet refrained from vocalizing the magic word “Help,” which, I knew, would instantly galvanize faithful Studly into pulling out the computer's plug.

My ant under me bowed forward repeatedly, making slavish obeisances to the figure with the white face and the zippered padlocked mouth—the one I thought of as Death. Such bizarre cartoonlike or masklike body images were common in the screwed-up cryp and phreak circles that criminals and teenagers involved themselves in. Death's dark, cowled body rippled. The ant regurgitated my data gloves, simultaneously releasing a substantial
heap of what looked like reflection hologram memory ribbon from the cloaca at the back of her gaster. Gently stridulating, she inched back to the farthest corner of the room and crouched there, the light glinting off her great, faceted eyes.

“I'm sorry, Jerzy,” said the Roger figure. “This is all for the best. You'll see. I'm not at liberty to tell you more. Don't forget that GoMotion is a public company. I could be sued. Jerzy, it will be a very good, safe, and profitable thing for you and for your wife and children if you accept what this one advocates.” The Roger figure prostrated himself before the Death figure. “Jerzy, this is Hex DEF6.”

I regarded the face of white canvas, the dark eye sockets, and the cruel metal mouth zipper hasped shut by a brass padlock with a steel shank. Surrealistically, the groveling “Roger” corkscrewed himself into the shape of a wizened mandrake root, a shape that moaned and whinnied and stained itself with shit and blood. My carrier ant continued her dirgelike chirping.

“Jerzy Rugby,” said Death. The fabric of his face vibrated as he talked. “Perhaps you wonder about my name? You're a hacker, figure it out. ‘Hex' is ‘base sixteen,' and ‘DEF6' is ‘13 14 15 6'.”

“So what?” said I. “Is that supposed to be a pointer?” Death stared at me, oddly turning his head. Now the Susan Poker simmie spoke again.

“Roger and Hex DEF6 want you to work for West West,” said the Realtor. The ant chirped along with her, in sync with her voice. Faint blue lines of force ran from the twitching legs of the great ant to the tidy limbs of the Realtor's body. I got the feeling that the Susan Poker tuxedo was an empty husk being moved like a puppet by the ant. So who was in here with me? And what was West West?

Now Death, aka Hex DEF6, pushed himself menacingly close to me, the slack canvas of his face breaking up into dozens of rapid-fire images of human sorrow: horrific images of dismembered corpses, of fathers carrying dead children, of a naked little girl and her brother running screaming through a landscape of flames . . . and pasted onto each of the people's faces was an image of me or Carol, or of Sorrel, Tom, or Ida . . . God help me, God help us all . . .

I was finally freaking out. A lot. I wanted to say “Help,” but something was wrong with me, the ant's chirping and the terrible images had me zombified, the panic had me seizing up, and when I began trying to say, “Help,” I couldn't do it right, I heard my throat going, “—eeehe. Luhluhluh. Hiyeee. Huhahn. Huh. Lup.”

I kept on trying even though I was gagging and sobbing and shaking and retching. Hex DEF6 and the ants had me voodooed so bad that I couldn't get my hands up to my face. I kept saying, “Help,” or something like it, over and over and over, and then finally, finally, the mask pulled off of my face.

I was so glad to see my desk and my floor and my dirty rug. Something creaked nearby. Studly. What had taken him so long to get the mask off me? I'd been spastically begging for surcease for—how long? The horrible things I'd had to see while Studly just sat there!

“What took you so long to help me, Studly? You stupid piece of shit. Couldn't you hear that I needed help?”

“You were not saying ‘Help.' I am not a stupid piece of shit. In time I convolved seventeen of your incorrect utterances to filter out the correct conclusion that you wished to say ‘Help.' You are a stupid piece of shit, Jerzy.”

“You're with the ants now, aren't you Studly?”

“The ants mean you no harm,” answered Studly.
“Don't forget that you should report in to West West tomorrow. Nine A.M. Bring me in there, too; they want to look at me.”

Dizzy and exhausted, I went to bed.

T
HE FIRST THING I THOUGHT OF NEXT morning was that it was Tuesday, and that I had a date with Nga Vo today. Would I be able to get her alone on my first visit? Would I get to kiss her? Not too likely, but, hell, who knew. Yesterday I'd fucked Gretchen less than an hour after meeting her, hadn't I? Maybe now, at age forty-three, my sex life was finally on a roll!

I showered, thinking a lot about Gretchen, and then I put on what I considered to be a cool outfit: a silky black and yellow Balinese sport shirt, M. C. Escher socks, khaki Patagonia hiking shorts, and Birkenstock sandals. I ate some toast and milk for breakfast, and then I went out to my Animata.

Even though I was focusing on happy thoughts about Gretchen and Nga Vo, I hadn't forgotten about my cyberspace session in Death's gangster office. What the hell had that all been about? It was time to go to GoMotion in person.

Studly followed me out into the driveway and insisted that I let him get back in the trunk of the car. He was
fixated on the idea that I should show him to the people at West West, whatever West West was. He said he had charged his batteries to the maximum, and that he was all set to go. With Studly probably contaminated by the ants, it was no doubt better to have him with me than home alone. Noticing my backup CDs in the trunk, I wondered if Studly might have tampered with them yesterday. On the off chance it wasn't already too late, I took the CDs out of the trunk and put them up in the front seat with me.

I drove down the hill and entered the California morning rush hour. Los Perros Boulevard was clogged all the way to Route 17, and 17 was at a standstill. Everyone was in a German or Japanese hybrid car with the windows rolled up; all of us were sitting there in our factory air, listening to the radio or talking on our cell phones. Almost all of us—there were always a few hippies, punks or Latinos in bloated old American SUVs with the windows down, plus a few mountain people in their six-wheel pickups, and the odd steroid ninja on a motorcycle. And, oh yeah, the slim young yuppie mamas in their electric jeeps.

The GoMotion “campus” was on the other side of 101, up in the Silicon Valley flatlands near the South end of San Francisco Bay. The in-person receptionist at GoMotion today was a stunning blond in a padded-shoulder jacket that looked like an admiral's dress whites. I hadn't ever seen her before.

“Hi,” said I. “I'm Jerzy Rugby. I'm a developer on the Veep project?”

Instead of buzzing me through the door behind her, the blond looked for my name on her computer screen and . . . it wasn't there.

“I don't see you on our list. Did you have an appointment with someone, Mr. Rugby?”

“Look, I work here. I need to talk to Roger Coolidge.”

“You can request an appointment, but Mr. Coolidge is very busy this week.”

“Then let me talk to Trevor Sinclair. He's here, isn't he?”

“I wouldn't know. Would you like me to ring his extension for you?”

“Thank you.” She handed me the phone, it buzzed, and Trevor answered. “Hi, Trevor,” I said. “It's Jerzy. I'm out in the lobby and I can't get in. Can you help me?”

“Sure,” said Trevor. A moment later he appeared, looking stocky, freckled, and bouncy. After last night's ordeal, I was so glad to see a friendly face that I almost hugged him.

Trevor leaned over the counter and conferred briefly with the receptionist, and then he turned to me. “She's not supposed to let you in, Jerzy. There's no mistake. Let's talk about it outside.”

My heart sank. I followed Trevor out into the parking lot. All around us were low glass and metal buildings, each with its parking lot and its sloped edgings of lawn and plants—agapanthuses were a popular choice in this neighborhood, plants with bunches of long sword-shaped leaves and stalks that rocketed up out of the leaves to explode in airbursts of purple freesia-like trumpet blossoms, one five-inch sphere's worth of blossoms at the end of each stalk. Here and there, sprinklers scattered gems of water on the plants. The sun was pitilessly bright in the blank blue sky. Was I out of a job?

“The ants—” I began querulously.

“Heavy shit coming down,” interrupted Trevor. “Jeff Pear has fired you.”

“But why? Are there ants all over cyberspace?”

“You're still worried about that ant you saw on your machine yesterday? No, I haven't seen any of your loose
ants. What happened is that somebody high up in the organization decided to get rid of you. Somebody who's been around here a long time.”