The Hacker and the Ants (20 page)

“Good-bye, Mr. Rugby,” said Susan Poker.

Gretchen followed me into the hall and gave me a giggling kiss. This was all pretty funny, I guess. Love makes everything funny. Love? Yes, I loved Gretchen, though that didn't mean much. Love is, after all, an elastic concept; like many men, I fall in love several times every day. So why not say it.

“I love you, Gretchen.”

“I like that in a man.” She pursed her lips and planted a kiss on me, just like Carol used to do. “Have a nice day. And come back. You don't really have to take me to the Mark Hopkins.”

“Should I come back tonight?”

For the first time this morning, Gretchen looked evasive. “Well, tonight I have a date. But if you're desperate,
I'll break it. You're scared to go back to your own house, huh?”

“I'm going to get my car, but I'm not going to stay there.”

“Well . . .” While Gretchen hesitated, Susan Poker briefly popped her head out of Gretchen's door for a peek at what was taking us so long. If the loathsome Susan Poker was in this space, why was I so intent on trying to stay here? For more sex with Gretchen? But I'd just finished realizing that sex could happen with lots of different women, right?

“Gretchen, enjoy your date and don't worry about where I stay. I've got it together.” I tapped the top of my head to mime the togetherness that I hoped would soon arrive. “I'll call tomorrow. We'll finally have a real date.”

Key in hand, I made my way up Tangle Way. The notice was still on my front door, but I didn't dare go close enough to read it. There were a half-dozen reporters sitting in their cars. My driveway was clear. Moving quickly, I got in my Animata and drove off, shaking the pursuit cars on the freeway to West West.

I
GOT SERIOUSLY INTO HACKING THE CODE for the Adze robot, and the next three and a half weeks went by in a blur.

Hacking code is like building a scale-model cathedral out of toothpicks, except that if one toothpick is out of place the whole cathedral disappears. And then you have to feel around for the invisible cathedral, trying to figure out which toothpick is wrong. Debuggers make it a little easier, but not much, since a truly screwed-up cutting-edge program is entirely capable of screwing up the debugger as well, so then it's as if you're feeling around for the missing toothpick with a stroke-crippled claw-hand.

But, ah, the dark dream beauty of the hacker grind against the hidden wall that only you can see, the wall that only you wail at, you the programmer, with the brand new tools that you made up as you went along, your special new toothpick lathes and jigs and your real-time scrimshaw shaver, you alone in the dark with your wonderful tools.

In the real world, I spent Friday and Saturday at the Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco with Gretchen. The city was full of people partying; there was a kind of holiday mood over the absence of TV; everyone was talking and laughing much more than usual.

Actually, there was a certain amount of analog TV: crazy amateur shows being put out by random nobodies. A few places had analog TVs set up to show amateur TV to the true tube addicts, and you got the feeling that some of this unofficial stuff might catch on. Who really needed the networks anyway? We were free of the bullshit, free of the Pig. But it was too good to last.

Sunday morning, GoMotion released the ant lion virus and by Sunday evening, the ant lions had cleaned up DTV. Roger Coolidge made an appearance on the news, taking credit for the ant lion, and apologizing to the public—in a nonspecific kind of way—for any difficulty that the unfortunate release of the GoMotion ants might have caused. Everyone understood that “unfortunate” was a code word for “crazy Jerzy Rugby.”

Like the GoMotion ants, the ant lions lived on DTV compression and decompression chips, but they didn't affect the images. All they did was sit there and kill anything that acted like a GoMotion ant, though exactly
how
the ant lions killed the ants was a GoMotion trade secret.

The ant-detection code made the GoMotion ant lion into a huge lurking memory hog that wallowed in a DTV chip's memory like a sullen supertanker in a mountain lake. This was a problem because DTV's fractal-theoretic image-expansion algorithms wanted to use a lot of memory for scratch paper: the finer the image, the more memory was needed. With the ant lion taking up so much chip memory, the highest-resolution DTV formats were plagued with the bail-out blotches that result from incomplete computations.

But mid-resolution broadcast DTV was working fine, which was the main thing. The highest-resolution DTV was mainly for playing back digitally mastered movies that you could download over the Fibernet. Intel, National Semiconductor, AMD, Motorola, and the other chipsters were promising to rollout DTV memory-expansion minicards with enough room for both high-resolution mode
and
an ant lion by the next financial quarter. Funny how ready for that they were. I wondered if GoMotion had recently bought a lot of chip stock.

My state trial got scheduled for May 28, some three and a half weeks off, with the federal trial still pending. Stu said my chances in court were fair to good.

The paper on the door of my house turned out to be a notice of an attempted Wednesday morning delivery by Federal Express. The documents Fed Ex had been trying to deliver to me had been mailed by GoMotion at 6:00 P.M. on Tuesday afternoon. Stu picked up the documents Thursday and found a unilateral letter of dismissal signed by Jeff Pear, along with two copies of a severance agreement signed by GoMotion president Nancy Day, with blank lines waiting for my signature.

The lateness of the delivery was good news. Since I had not even received the agreement by Tuesday night, Studly was—Stu assured me—the legal property and responsibility of GoMotion Inc. during the time frame when Jose Ruiz's dog was killed and the GoMotion ants were released. And furthermore, since I now declined to sign the severance agreement, Studly and my cyberdeck were in fact
still
the property and responsibility of GoMotion, pending further negotiation.

The legal issue of whether I had maliciously influenced the robot Studly's actions was less favorable. According to the West West cryps, Jose Ruiz was going to be the D.A.'s star witness. Apparently he was saying
he'd watched me and Studly through his window. This part of the trial was going to be tough; Stu would just have to challenge the accuracy of what Jose Ruiz thought he'd seen and heard.

Above and beyond all factual matters were a host of technical issues about the statutes I was charged under; did these particular statutes apply to the unique events of that Tuesday evening on White Road? Stu said that even if I was convicted of something, he could keep me out of jail on appeals for years—or for as long as West West was willing to foot the bill.

I used Stu's computer to e-mail Roger asking if he'd testify that it was he who'd infected Studly with the ants, but Roger e-mailed back that the best he could do was wish me good luck. He was very busy in Switzerland, and in any case he “would not feel right” in offering testimony to support my “highly idiosyncratic interpretation of the events.” I was, in other words, free to twist slowly in the wind.

My house on Tangle Way was unlivable. Not only were there reporters encamped round the clock, but, according to Stu, death threats were rolling in. The public had it in for me, the morons. And the network news was making me out to be some kind of rabid hyena. Even the so-called liberal pundits were judiciously intoning things like, “A free society cannot tolerate misfit hackers who would block the open exchange of ideas.” The exchange of
their
ideas, that is. At least the freestyle amateur TV broadcasters had picked up a boost from the brief blackout of official TV.

Whenever I saw the DTV news these days, I had an intense desire to cryp the GoMotion ant lion code, find a loophole, and show the hole to the GoMotion ants in cyberspace—but
no, Jerzy, no.

I couldn't live at home anymore, and Gretchen didn't
want me to move in permanently, so Thursday evening after my first full day's work at West West, I took a roundabout route up through the Santa Cruz mountains to Queue Harmaline's house.

Queue and Keith lived near Boulder Creek, on a steep hillside surrounded by giant redwoods. They had a hot tub and a samadhi flotation tank. Their home was like a coral reef or a beehive: a congeries, an unarchitected wad of rooms plastered to the steep redwood hillside. They always needed money, and I knew that they would have a room to rent to me.

Queue had a brace on her knee because she'd recently made the error of going skiing while she was rushing on a mighty LSD run. “I should just trip in the samadhi tank,” she told me with a tinkling giggle, “but you wake up a day later and you feel like Dracula.” She had long glossy black hair that tended to split and hang in a spitty way over her face and mouth when she talked about psychedelics. “I've learned not to do anything that involves metal or electricity when I'm on acid, 'cause I have no way of knowing what I might get into. And now I know not to go skiing. Sure we can rent a room to you. If you behave.” She batted her eyes at me.

Though Queue always professed absolute faithfulness to Keith, she was a big flirt and I was happy to flirt with her. Her head was very round. She had the perky cute features of a brunette ingenue. Her odd laugh was intoxicating, and she wore gypsy amounts of jewelry, with a descending scale of nine gold hoops arranged along the rim of each of her ears.

“So how does it feel to be a big media star, Jerzy? You've invented a whole new order of life. It's magic.” We were sitting in her kitchen drinking herbal tea.

“It's not magic, Queue,” I sighed. “It's science. I don't think about transcendence or the One anymore.”

“But there has to be some mystery to help get us through these dreary times. We need it. If we didn't need it so much, why did your ants try to kill TV? They're a higher force for New Mystery.”

“Everything computers do is science, Queue. Logic. There's no mystery to it at all.” I was tired and drained from the day's hacking.

“You hide behind your preppy clothes and your sleepy expression,” cried Queue. “Come on! Be interesting!”

“These aren't supposed to be preppy clothes,” I said, looking down at my garb. I was wearing a red rayon shirt covered with UFOs, some short white canvas shorts, yellow socks with a white section map of Death Valley, and my Birkenstocks.

“You don't fool me, Jerzy. You're as tidy as a little boy going to a birthday party. You yuppie. Come on and say something interesting or I won't rent you the room!”

“Interesting.” My whole life was so interesting that I could hardly stand it—yet now, under Queue's scrutiny, I realized that I rarely ever did talk about what it was that I found so interesting about hacking robots in cyberspace. More often than not, I let the people I was talking to divert conversations up their own creeks; I'd just paddle along and dream behind my sleepy expression. But if anyone actually asked, I could still talk.

“Okay, I'll tell you some random things that are interesting. Last time I was in cyberspace the GoMotion ants took me out into the fourth dimension and put me into a gangster movie with a guy who looked like Death. Instead of a mouth he had a big steel zipper with a padlock. His name was Hex DEF6. That's a hexadecimal number which is—” I paused and pulled out a slip of paper where I'd written this information down, “1101 1110 1111 0110 in binary and 57,078 in base ten. I have no idea what it means, except that if you leave the last
zero off the binary version you get a symmetric bit-string. Not interesting? How about this: The night the ants got loose, I was over on the east side trying to fuck a Vietnamese girl called Nga Vo.”

“Are you hard up?”

“Dig it, Queue, I'm not hard up, I've got myself a cashmere yuppie mommy. Her name is Gretchen. She's a mortgage insurance broker.”

“How many children does Gretchen have?”

“None, as far as I know. I think of her as a
mommy
because she reminds me of the big dazed whitebread American mothers some of the kids at school had when I was small. Dreamy, slow-moving women with kind smiles. And just that soft hint of a double chin, you know?”

“Ugh! I don't want to hear you talk about women, Jerzy. It's so sexist and disgusting and—ugh! Can't you tell me more about your computer adventures?”

“Queue, you got no inkling.” I took a deep breath and smiled. Keith was down in the basement making some tapes. “Talking openly like this gets me high. In cyberspace I sat on the back of an ant that found me in Nordstrom's, and the ant shrank me down small and we crawled out a hole to the Antland of Fnoor. I guess that was a New Mystery. If I can get a cyberdeck up here, maybe I'll take you there.”

“Do it!” Queue exclaimed. “But it has to be on the sly. You're a computer criminal, Jerzy. I'm not going to dial up the Fibernet and ask them for a cyberspace account and then have everyone see Jerzy Rugby come out of my registered memory node.”

I thought for a minute. “Any good phreak or cryp would find a way. Maybe . . . maybe I could use the Animata's satellite dish.”

“Your car has a dish?”

“It has a titanium-doped electronic Fresnel lens in the moonroof. My map machine uses the lens to pick up on GPS navigational satellites.”

“Okay, this is starting to be interesting.”

“Can you let me have a little of your pot now, Queue?”

I got into a rhythm of commuting from Queue's to West West every morning and working all day in my cubicle in the West West programmer pit two cells away from Russ Zwerg. Most nights I'd sit out on the deck with Queue and Keith and get high.