A linguistic note here. Among intensely geeked-out people like Roger and me, the word “hacker” has always meant “fanatically committed programmer,” and not, as the uninitiated sometimes use it, “computer criminal.” The confusion has to do with the media's inability to distinguish between the majesty of programming an intelligent robot as opposed to the cheap legerdemain of stealing a porn-dog's credit card number. We true hackers prefer to use the words “phreak” or “cryp” for the those who jam and sample instead of creating original code. But, in terms of popular usage, we're
fighting an uphill battle and, yes, sometimes the distinction really isn't so clear.
The robot Studly was the first physical prototype of a Veep that GoMotion had actually built. Studly was a joy to behold, a heartwarming payoff for all the mind-numbing hacking that went into making him happen. He moved around on single-jointed legs which ended in off-the-shelf stunt-bicycle wheels. There were small idler wheels on the knees of these legs, so that on smooth surfaces Studly could kneel down and nestle his body in between his big wheels, with the little knee wheels rolling on ahead. In this mode, he didn't have to waste compute time keeping his balance. Out in the yard, Studly would rise up into a bent-knee crouch, using arm motions and internal gyroscopes to steady himself. On stairs, the full glory of Studly's a-lifeâevolved control algorithms came into play; he would turn sideways and work his way up or down with his two wheels on different steps, using precise lunges and gyro pulses to keep from falling over. Depending on your mood, Studly's peculiar movements seemed comic, beautiful, or obscurely sinister.
As I sat down at my desk, I had a sudden vision of “giving” Studly to Susan Poker after programming him to chop her up and push her down her garbage disposal. The blood would be on Studly's manipulators, not mine. I tunelessly hummed the way I do when I think thoughts I shouldn't.
The phone rang.
“Hello, Mr. Rugby?” A woman's brisk, aggressive voice.
“Yes.”
“This is Louise Calder from Welsh & Tayke Realty. Do you mind if I bring a client by in half an hour? They're quite interested in the property.”
“I'm very busy today. I don't want to show the house.”
The voice was instantly, unforgivingly venomous. “I'll pass that on to the owner, Mr. Rugby. Good-bye.” She hung up and immediately the phone began to ring again. Friends of Susan Poker. While the phone rang on, I donned the headset and control gloves of my computer. The headset showed me the image of an office with a ringing telephone. I had a computer-generated body image in this virtual office, and the body moved around with the gestures of my control gloves. I flew across the office and pulled the virtual wires out of my virtual telephone. The ringing stopped.
My computer system was configured as a cyberdeck, complete with two gray Spandex control gloves and a white plastic headset, all connected to the computer by wires. The system was almost top of the line, but not quite. If GoMotion had been willing to spend just a little more, my gloves and headset would have had wireless computer connections, so that I could move around more while using them.
But anyway. My computer generated three-dimensional graphics that it showed from any angle, in stereo vision, feeding pairs of images to the two electronic lenses of my headset. The headset had a microphone and speakers, also a sensor that told the system about my head movements so it could update the viewpoint.
The system let me feel as if I were inside a different space, the artificial reality of the computer. Most people called it cyberspace. Turning or moving my head would change my viewpoint; I could lean to one side and look around a nearby object. And the gloves let the computer generate real-time images of my hands. Seeing moving images of my hands in front of me enhanced the illusion that I was really inside cyberspace.
The simulated objects of cyberspace were known as
simmies.
My hand images were simmies, as was the virtual phone in my cyberspace office. As well as having a characteristic appearance, a simmie had a characteristic behaviorâone simmie might sit still, and another might like to move around. The behavior part of a simmie could become so complicated that the thing practically seemed alive.
In cyberspace I could wrap my fingers around the simmies I found, effectively grabbing hold of them. And once I had hold of a simmie, I could move it aboutâunless the simmie happened to insist on staying in one place. When I would point and nod, my viewpoint would start moving in the direction I was pointing in. I would make a fist to stop.
But what was cyberspace? Where did it come from? Cyberspace had oozed out of the world's computers like stage-magic fog. Cyberspace was an alternate reality, it was the huge interconnected computation that was being collectively run by planet Earth's computers around the clock. Cyberspace was the information Net, but more than the Net, cyberspace was a shared vision of the Net as a physical space.
My illusion of being able to step right into cyberspace was made convincing by my headset's most excellent electronic lenses. The lenses were lumps of optical glass with funky-looking patches of plastic glued to them. The patches were rhodopsin-doped limpware goodies that worked as endlessly tweakable color monitors, labile as the chromatophores of a squid. The lenses' glass bent way around on the sides, creating peripheral vision and eyeball kicks from the anamorphic edge-scrunched images my computer made.
Whenever I put on the gloves and the headset, it was like being in a different room, an invisible secret room of
my house: my virtual office. When I talked or made gestures in my virtual office, my computer interpreted me and executed my commands. The “pulling wires out of the phone” gesture for instance, caused my computer to shunt all my incoming phone calls to an answering machine.
My virtual office could look like almost anythingâit could be a palace, an igloo, or a bubble in the deep blue sea. As it happened, I was using the default office pattern which came with my cyberspace software. The default office was really two-thirds of an office: it had one wall missing and no ceiling. One of the remaining walls was for doors to Net locations I often visited, and the other two walls were covered with pictures and documents that I either liked or needed to remember. Over my walls and in the far background I would see whatever landscape I was currently hottest forâin those days it was a swamp with simmies that looked like dinosaurs and pterodactyls. It was called Roarworld; I'd gotten it off the Net.
Each of the simmies in the Roarworld program had a bunch of software stubs to which the user could attach his/her own pieces of code, thus tailoring the Roarworld simmies' appearance and behavior. If you preferred it, you could have the Roarworld creatures look like lions and tigers, or sharks and dolphins, but to my mind the dinosaur graphics were by far the best. To make the simulation livelier, I'd linked the dinosaurs' legs to copies of Studly's control-feedback walking algorithms. My dinosaurs chased after each other really well. When I toggled on the mighty Roarworld sound module, it was more than awesome.
GAH-ROOOOONT
!
My virtual desk had a simmie keyboard and a mound of flat simmies of sheets of paper: letters and programs I was currently working on. If I wanted to revise a document, I just picked up its simmie, positioned it over
the virtual keyboard, and typed away. My simmie keyboard was so sensitively tuned to my glove outputs that I only needed to wiggle the tips of my fingers.
When I was typing, an outside observer would have seen me madly twitching my fingers in the air. I'd gotten rid of my mechanical keyboard because I'd reconfigured my simmie keyboard to the point where it didn't closely match the dumbly obstinate geometry of the mechanical board.
Even though I typed in thin air, it felt as though I was touching something, for my gloves had tactile feedback. Woven in with the Spandex were special piezoplastic touchpads that could swell up and press against my hand. The touchpads on my fingertips pulsed each time I pushed down on a virtual key.
It was marvelous, but sometimes my hands missed the physical support of a keyboard. When I would hack a lot, my forearms would hurt and my thumbs and pinkies would get numb. I sometimes worried about getting carpal tunnel syndrome and losing my ability to type. For a hacker this would be like a trumpeter losing his or her lips. I kept meaning to get a wedge of malleable plastic in the shape of a keyboard. It was easy to get them, like at Fry's Electronics in Sunnyvale; they were called feely-blank keyboards.
You could get all sorts of feely-blank accessories for cyberspace, and yes, dear horn-dog, there were even male/female feely-blank love-dolls, complete with hinged limbs and cunningly engineered touchpads. The love-dolls came with get-down simmie software to show images that matched the doll's motions. If you wanted to spend a little more money, you could go to a porno web site for a live person who'd puppeteer your doll through all manner of erotic outrages. But I hadn't looked extensively into the details of cybersex; when you were hacking
as much as I did, you didn't want to be near a computer in your free time.
The two feely-blank things I actually owned were a potter's wheel and a weighted golf club handle which Carol had given me last Christmas. The club handle was shortâso that I didn't smash everything around me while working my way down, say, the fabulous second oceanside hole of the Toshiba Cyberspace Pebble Beach. The clever thing about the feely-blank golf club was that the tip held a gyroscope which did a cyberized jiggly-doo right when I would hit the virtual ballâgiving me the shock of contact.
The potter's wheel was for Carol, and for awhile she had enjoyed using it. It was like a regular electric wheel, except that it had a permanent “lump of clay” which was made of firm, malleable titaniplast putty. They used the same stuff for the feely-blank keyboards; you could mold and remold it to any shape you wanted, and it never got brittle. I'd kept all the virtual pots Carol made in a file somewhere.
Anyway, I kept meaning to go get a fake keyboard, but physically going places and buying material objects for my computer was not something I was into. I mean walking into a place like Fry's Electronics was always a downer, everyone sucking down Jolt Colas and munching candy bars, no women in sight, just malesâpitiful bewildered larvae from under a rock, or pompous bearded lawn-dwarves with tenor voices, or square-forehead Frankenstein monsters, or sweaty strivers with no fingernailsâlumps and losers to a man. How had I ended up associated with this class of people?
Oh well
, as the California kids would say when something not particularly desirable happened.
Oh well!
The two neatest things in my virtual office were my Lorenz attractor and my dollhouse. The Lorenz attractor
was a floating dynamical system consisting of orbiting three-dimensional icons, little simmie images that represented pieces of information and the various things my computer could do. The icons tumbled along taffy trajectories that knotted into a roller coaster pair of floppy ears with a chaotic, figure eight intersection. If I liked, I could make myself small and ride around on the Lorenz attractor in a painless demolition derby with my files. It was a fun way to mull things over.
My dollhouse was a special miniature cyberspace model of my house that I'd once made as a Christmas present for little Ida. She'd never actually played with it that muchâone reason being that I was hardly ever willing to let anyone else use my gloves and headset. I needed them all the time for all the work I had to doâalways too much work!
I'd tweaked my real house's alarm system so that if anyone touched a door or window, the corresponding door or window would light up on the dollhouse. I had little models of myself and my family members inside my dollhouse. Actually my wife and three children shouldn't have been in the dollhouse at all anymore, as they no longer lived here, but it would have made me too sad and lonely to erase them. In my dollhouse, my wife was in the kitchen and my kids were lying on their stomachs in the living room doing homework and watching a tiny digital TV. If they'd actually been in my house, moving from room to room, the little simmie-dolls that represented them would have moved around too. My house was smart enough always to know who was in which room. The little virtual TV was hooked into the Fibernet system; sometimes I would make myself small and watch it with my dolls, though never for long. Everything on TV enraged me, because everything on TV was the same: the ads, the news, the shows. In my
opinion, all TV was all part of the huge lying Spectacle that the government kept running to oppress us all. Digital data compression had brought us a thousand channels, but they all sucked, same as ever.
The dollhouse's Studly-model
did
move around because he actually
was
physically in the house with me, rolling around and cleaning, gardening, keeping an eye on things, taking care of business, and occasionally talking to me. If I wanted to check something in the house, I could switch over to Studly's viewpoint, and see what he was seeing through his two video camera eyes. When Carol had still lived with me, I would sometimes use Studly to sneak in and watch her while she was dressing or taking a piss. That would drive her frantic with rage. “I know you're in there, Jerzy,” she'd scream as oily Studly sidled up to capture her pixels and send them through the aether to me. “Get your head out of that computer and come talk to me like a human being!” Usually, however, I didn't have the time. When I was programming, I was always in a terrific rush.
Sitting in my office after Susan Poker left, it occurred to me that if I were to use Studly to kill the Realtor, I wouldn't really have to program him for it. It would be much easier to couple myself to his manipulators and drive him in real time. That was known as
telerobotics
âa person driving a robot that was somewhere else, with the distant person using television to “see through the eyes of the robot.” Telerobotics was one of the most fun things you could do with a robot.