The Hacker and the Ants (28 page)

I guess I must have tapped five-nine-two-six for the stunglasses pass-through then, but I don't remember doing it. All I remember is that I was looking up at the ceiling of my bedroom with everything radiating off optical echoes of itself, everything receding and surrounded by memory images. The beams in the ceiling were covered with crawling colored lights, and my ears were filled with a resonant flutter. My stomach cramped and my bowels turned to water. I jumped out of bed and rushed to the toilet. I shit out a big nasty wet mess; it seemed to keep coming forever. When I was through, I stood up and looked in the mirror. I didn't see stunglasses on my face; all I saw was an aging guy with severe diarrhea.

When I walked back to my bedroom, something rushed out at me from the left side of my field of vision. It was a cross between an ant, a face, a 3-D Mandelbrot set, and—oh, a furnace-stove made of blue and white tiles. It was way fast. It said some nonsense phrase like, “Beetlejuice monkey!” and I murmured, “Beetlejuice monkey?” to myself, trying to assimilate, and then the creature sped up a thousand times and sneered, “Nah, Beetlejuice
monkey
!” and I tried to relate, and the creature went faster, and it and I went into a hideous hebephrenic thought loop as the flutter in my ears sped higher and higher. The mandible-snout Beetlejuice Monkey was mocking and aggressive, it was totally dissing my thought speed, it was trying to dominate and show me where it's really at—it did unbelievable shit like counting from one to one quadrillion. Out loud and by ones. It was way, way fast.

At some point in this psycho nightmare I decided the only way to stop the Beetlejuice Monkey was to kill it. I lunged forward with my velvet clown hands sticking out before me, and I grabbed the creature at its narrowest
part. I began squeezing, and it was struggling and hitting back at me, and then someone grabbed me from behind and jerked at me, and then there was a wrenching at my face and everything got slow and different.

Keith was holding me in a full nelson.

“Jerzy! Jerzy! What's going on? We just got home. What are you doing, man? What did you do to your chick?”

Gretchen was squeezed back against the wall, her face all blue, her dear face a frozen dead mask of horror. Her cold dead tongue was sticking out between jaws that were open in a wide death-agony rictus; it was poor Gretchen's last tongue-face. I'd killed her. My diarrhea was all over my legs and all over the bed.

“You're going to die for this, Jerzy,” screamed Queue, pushing past Keith and shoving her face up against mine. “You're going to get the gas chamber and go to hell!”

I cringed back from the hideousness of what I'd done; I just couldn't deal. I wanted to be catatonic. I fell back against my shit-covered bed and merged into the Beetlejuice Monkey.

I
N THE MORNING I WOKE SOFT AND SWEET, my mind a blank. Before opening my eyes, I happened to rub my hand up against my head and I felt the headset. I pushed it off, opened my eyes, and looked around as the horrible memories came flooding back to me.

Beautiful unharmed naked Gretchen was in bed with me. I hadn't strangled her. I lifted up the sheet and looked down. There was no diarrhea. Had everything after Perky Pat's giving me the finger been a phreak burn? What had I said to Gretchen and Keith—what had they seen me do?

“Keith,” I called, hurrying naked down the spiral staircase from the aerie I rented. “Hey, Keith!” I was ashamed to hear how my voice shook. My stomach looked fat and vulnerable. The living room and the kitchen were empty and the house was utterly quiet. Presumably they were still asleep in their bedroom downstairs. Or maybe they'd never come home at all. Maybe that thing about Keith shaking me had been part of the dark dream.

“Keith? Queue?” I walked halfway down the stairs from the living room to the next lower level. “Keith?” At the bottom of the stairs I opened the door to Keith and Queue's bedroom. The messy room was cool and empty. No one had slept here last night.

I ran back up the stairs to the living room and back up the spiral staircase to my room. Gretchen was on the bed with the sheet wrapped around her, sitting there looking out the window at the beautiful fog and sun in the redwoods.

“Why were you yelling? God, you're uptight. You woke me.”

“I . . . Did I do anything funny last night?”

“You did lots of things that were
funny
,” laughed Gretchen. “Now get back in bed so we can cuddle. What are you stressing for? You're all red!”

I saw Riscky's headset lying on the floor. It was still live, with images playing inside it. I wanted to stomp and crush the headset, but I was barefoot. Instead I tapped three-one-four-one (how-I-need-a) on the right temple to turn off the satanic engine.

I lay down on the bed. Gretchen spread the sheet over both of us and spooned herself against my back.

“Was I yelling last night?” I asked.

“If you were, I slept right through it. Pot and sex puts me totally to sleep.”

“After you went to sleep, I put on my new cyberspace headset and I had—I had a terrible experience. I thought you were dead. I thought I choked you. I thought I had diarrhea in the bed.”

“Were you with the ants?”

“Yes. Only now they look like robots and people. They're much much much faster than they used to be.”

“Jerzy, why do you fry your brain?” Gretchen sounded mad. “It's like you don't begin to realize—” She
shook her head. “The ants are
shit
, Jerzy. The ants
suck
.”

“Nice talk for a mortgage insurance broker.” Thank God I had this warm real woman with me. “I love you, Gretchen. I'm glad you're here. I'm so scared about everything.”

“About your trial starting tomorrow?”

“And about the ants. And about this latest burn. I don't think there was a phreak behind this one. I think the ants did it to me themselves.”

“Did you do something to bother the ants?”

“Well, yes, I went into their nest. The Antland of Fnoor, I call it.”

“So don't go there again. Don't go into cyberspace at all.”

“And I'm worried about what the ants might do to the new robots. We copied a GoMotion ant lion into the new robot code, but these cyberspace ants I saw last night—I think they've been sitting in the machines at West West and watching me create the code. They were imitating Squidboy and even Perky Pat. If there's a loophole in my code, the cyberspace ants are going to find it. The new robots might not be safe to use.”

“You should tell GoMotion and West West. Get your lawyer to fax them a letter so that if something new goes wrong you'll have a defense.”

“That's a good idea.”

We ate some yogurt and granola from Keith and Queue's kitchen. Instead of crushing my headset, I put it and the gloves into my car's trunk. And then I drove Gretchen to her apartment.

“See you again tonight, Jerzy?”

“I'm not sure. I'll call you.”

“Stay away from the ants!”

“I'll try.”

I went to see Stu at his office in downtown San Jose.
He had a spiffed-up one-room office in the old Bank of America building. Instead of a secretary, he had a smart computer with good voice-recognition and speech-generation software. He could dictate documents to it, and it was able to answer the phone. He called his computer “Miss Prentice.”

Standing outside Stu's door in the empty BofA building hallway, I could hear him talking with Miss Prentice. “Take your penis out and masturbate yourself,” Miss Prentice was saying.

“I'm busy right now,” whined Stu. “I don't want to. I don't have the energy.”

“Do you refuse to obey your mistress?” growled Miss Prentice. “I will not tolerate such behavior. You have dared to have an erection in the presence of your mistress, and now you must masturbate it away!”

“I don't have an erection yet, Miss Prentice,” said Stu. “Can you show me some dirty pictures?”

I knocked quickly on the office door before the sordid scene could progress any farther. Miss Prentice's voice rose an octave. “Who's there?”

“It's Jerzy Rugby.”

“Mr. Koblenz will see you now.” The door swung open.

Stu was sitting at his desk with his hands in his lap. He was holding an orange Nerfball. He was wearing a thin wrinkled suit and a tie.

“How's it going?” said Stu, taking aim and shooting the Nerfball at a basketball hoop he'd glued to the wall. There was a Scotch-taped paper chute so that if Stu made a basket the ball would roll back to him. The ball went in. “I made another one, Miss Prentice,” said Stu, catching the ball from the trough. “What does that make my average for today?”

“You're making eighty-seven percent of them,
Mr. Koblenz,” said the computer. “Congratulations.” Unlike my robots, Miss Prentice didn't look at all alive. Miss Prentice was nothing but a big computer box with a video screen, a printer, a microphone, and a speaker. I glanced quickly at the screen—it showed an insipid spreadsheet, probably fake.

I sat down. “Stu, I'm worried about the West West and GoMotion robot software that I helped develop. I don't think it's safe. I think the GoMotion ants might be able to infect the robots. Can you send letters to West West and GoMotion in my name saying that? A snail-mail letter and a fax to each of them? If the robots malfunction, I don't want even more blame to be laid on me.”
Snail
-
mail
being the hacker word for ordinary, nonelectronic mail.

Stu thought for a minute, then shook his head. “How did you come up with such a terrible idea? You don't want to send letters like that. If the robots were to malfunction, those letters would be viewed as proof that you'd known you'd sabotaged the code. A confession. So I won't send them, no.” Stu regarded me distantly. “It would only make you the more convictable.”

“What do you mean
convictable
? Aren't we going to win this trial? Aren't you ready? You're sitting here jacking off and playing Nerfball! What are you going to do for me in court tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow and Friday the judge selects and instructs a jury. Friday afternoon the D.A. and I make our opening statements. Monday we start with the witnesses. Sure I'm ready. But I don't think we'll win. You're in big trouble, Jerzy. In fact, you're screwed.”

“How so?” My voice was tight and small. “I wasn't in control of Studly! None of the charges is true!”

“I guess you haven't seen the new
National Enquirer
.” Stu tossed me a copy of the tabloid newspaper. The front
page was a big picture of Studly with the headline:

Studly had his pincer up in the air and they'd drawn a sizzling laser ray coming out of his head. Boxed in along the side of the page were small pictures of me, Jose Ruiz, the bloody corpse of Dutch the dog, and a TV screen full of ants. I looked insanely evil.

“Jose is going to be the prosecution's star witness,” said Stu, fondling his Nerfball. “According to this article, he saw and heard you telling Studly to infect the Fibernet and to kill his dog. The West West cryps tell me that's exactly what he's going to testify to in court.” Stu shot the ball at the basket and missed. “I missed one, Miss Prentice. Can you get that, Jerzy?”

“Eighty-four percent,” said Miss Prentice.

I picked the ball up off the floor and handed it to Stu. “But look, Stu, we knew all along that Ruiz was going to be the prosecution's best witness. And now that you know exactly what Ruiz is going to say, that's an advantage, isn't it? Think of questions to trip him up! Go out and measure the distance from Ruiz's window to his picnic table and prove that he couldn't have actually heard me. Do something! Why are you just sitting here?”

“My main problem is that West West isn't going to pay me any more.”

“Oh. You heard?”

“Yeah, Otto Gyorgyi called me yesterday. We're cutting you loose.”

“And my bail's only going to be good until . . .”

“Until noon on Tuesday.” Stu shot and made another basket, then got to his feet. “I just sank another one, Miss Prentice. Now watch the office for a few minutes, you
slutty bitch. Mr. Rugby and I are going to take a walk.” Miss Prentice kept her silence. She'd even up things with Stu later.

Stu led me out into the hall, down the elevator, and out into the street. “I want to make a suggestion to you in strictest confidence, Jerzy. I'm doing this because I happen to think you're a good guy.”

“What?”

“I don't like to come out and say it. This is such a weird case. It's like a house full of termites. Every source we've checked has shown signs of other cryps. I'd lay five to three that right now somebody in one of these cars or buildings is tracking us with a parabolic mike.” Stu steered us around a corner to stand by the noisy fountain in front of the San Jose Fairmont.

“So what are you telling me to do?” I demanded.

Stu put a handkerchief near his face as if to blow his nose, and leaned toward me to whisper: “Run, Jerzy. Jump bail and go underground. Flee the country. Ecuador and Switzerland are good for nonextradition these days. I didn't say this.” With a flourish Stu snapped his handkerchief back into his suit pocket.

“So, Jerzy,” he raised his voice and shook my hand good-bye. “I'll see you at the Hall of Justice bright and early tomorrow. Eight-thirty. It's on West Hedding between San Pedro and Guadelupe. Our case is with Judge Carrig in courtroom 33 on the fifth floor. And don't forget my advice: make sure to park your car in the parking lot instead of at a meter. They're awfully fast to give tickets there.”