The Hacker and the Ants (32 page)

“Saint-Cergue is near Geneva,” said the guide. We
flew out of the Alps and up the great curve of Lake Geneva. Soon we were near the city of Geneva at the far end of the lake. The guide pointed away from Geneva toward a meek range of rounded mountains to our right. “Those are the Jura Mountains,” he said. “See that little peak? That is the Dôle. Saint-Cergue is in the saddle of the pass beside the Dôle.”

He flew us lower, showed me the Geneva airport, and jovially instructed me to make steering wheel motions so as to remotely pilot a distant virtual car up the serpentine road that led from the Geneva/Lausanne Autoroute to Saint-Cergue. The simulation reminded me of a recurrent nightmare that I'd had when I'd been in my twenties—a dream where I'd be driving a car with a steering wheel column that grew to be hundreds of yards long. I declined the simulation, and the guide flew us straight on up to Saint-Cergue.

“Do you know which building Roger Coolidge lives in?” I asked.

“Yes,” said the guide, and one of the properties began blinking. It was a compound of two large buildings up in a meadow two or three kilometers above the main drag of Saint-Cergue. I stared for a few minutes, fixing landmarks in my mind. I could rent a car at the Geneva airport and drive right up to Roger's. I'd buy a big hunting knife at a Swiss knife shop first. It was kind of too bad I'd never gotten that plastic gun Keith had told me about.

“Was there anything else?” the guide asked.

“Okay, yeah, I'd like to see a movie. How's my credit holding up?”

“You have more than enough credit for a movie. We have several special made-for-cyberspace productions, and many of our standard films have been cyberized.”

“Take me to your interface.”

We jumped to a room with thousands of tiny screens
showing small images. There were some big posters. Off to one side of the room a live cyberspace action film was being acted out, a fight-it-out shoot-'em-up kind of thing.

“I guess you don't have any hard-core pornography?” I asked the guide, just to see what he'd say.

“We have a selection of tasteful erotic films available for the passengers of our business-class.”

“Well—I don't think so. And I'm kind of tired, so I don't want the stress of a cybershow. Maybe an old movie. What do you have with Natalie Wood?”

“Fortunate choice, Mr. Schrandt! We have two movies available with Natalie Wood. First is
Rebel Without a Cause,
released 1956, featuring James Dean, Sal Mineo, and Natalie Wood. Critic Lester Seda terms Rebel
Without a Cause
‘An early cult movie of teenage anomie in the plastic age.' Second is
Brainstorm,
released 1977, a classic science fiction thriller featuring Natalie Wood as a mystical scientist who records her brain onto reflection hologram memory ribbon. Of
Brainstorm,
Seda says, ‘Released after Natalie Wood's death,
Brainstorm
is eerily prescient and campily elegant.'”

I watched
Brainstorm.
They'd cyberized it enough so that it wrapped around about half the field of my vision. It was a good flick.

When the credits started running, Karl the guide daemon reappeared like a person coming up to you in your seat at the movies.

“What,” I said.

“It's about your e-mail message, Mr. Schrandt. The sender has been steadily pinging us. He knows you're on this flight. Wouldn't you care to view the message now?”

“All right,” I sighed. “Let it come down.” I really dreaded this, whatever it was. I kept both hands poised on my headset, ready to tear it off lest I suffer another burn.

There was a buzzing, the
Brainstorm
credits melted, and then I was looking at Roger Coolidge, Roger sitting there looking at me from an armchair in a shitty unfinished drywall room. He was wearing gray pants and a short-sleeved white polyester shirt.

“Hi, Jerzy. I'm talking to you live from my house in Saint-Cergue,” said Roger. “Excuse the mess—Kay and I have been remodeling.” Roger's dusty study had a desk and a picture window; I could see up a sloping green hillside to the concave horizon of a mountain pass. It was early on a rainy morning. Roger stared passively in thought, like a beaver resting by a stream. Finally he spoke again. “I had a feeling you'd come to me. Thanks for making it so easy. My chauffeur Tonio will meet you at the Geneva airport and bring you to Saint-Cergue. I'll explain the whole thing when you get here, okay?”

I pawed the headset off and stumbled blindly down the carpeted floor that hid the thin metal fuselage of this most improbable construct: a jetliner. We were ants in an aluminum beer can hurtling through the sky. I found the stewardess in the galley and told her that my cyberspace hookup didn't seem to be working correctly, and that she should switch it off before it ate any more of my credit. I took a glass of cognac back to my seat and fell into troubled sleep.

I
N GENEVA I GOT THROUGH PASSPORT CONTROL and customs without a hitch. Nobody asked me about the Y9707-EX chips. But I was tense; I kept feeling as though people were shoving their faces up close to me.

It was four in the afternoon local time when I stepped out into the public airport lobby, a big stone-floored glass-and-metal hall with lots of shops. For a moment I thought I was free to go off on my own—but then someone tapped my shoulder. It was an athletic, middle-aged Italian man in an unmarked blue serge uniform. He tipped his hat and smiled with his teeth.

“Welcome, Mr. Schrandt! Mr. Coolidge sends me here to drive you. My name is Tonio. Do you have luggage?”

“No,” I sighed. “No, no, this is my only bag. And I can carry it.” I was sad to see this guy. “So you're going to drive me up to Roger's villa in Saint-Cergue?”

“Exactly,” said Tonio and gestured sweepingly toward the exit. “Please to come with me.” It would have been nice to buy a big hunting knife first, but, hell, there'd be
knives in Roger's kitchen. I followed along.

Outside it was drizzling briskly. Tonio had parked Roger's car at the curb right outside the entrance. The car was an unimpressive beige Subaru station wagon. At Tonio's urging, I sat in back. We did a piece on the Autoroute, and then we headed up the rolling green slopes of the Jura Mountains. Before long we were racing up the same winding road that the virtual guide had mapped for me in cyberspace. Tonio drove much too fast for my comfort, repeatedly tailgating and passing other cars. I asked him to drive slower, but he chose not to understand.

In the cold Swiss springtime, Saint-Cergue looked battened down and godforsaken. The wet posters for cigarettes and liquors were all in French. There were several barns with piles of straw and manure right on the main street; the runoff from the piles fanned filthily across the pavement. A thin village idiot in a plastic raincoat and a plastic-covered beret went lurching past, one hand fingering his bristly chin.

Tonio slewed into a tiny road off the main street and sped uphill two and a half kilometers to Roger's domain: two sturdy Swiss buildings that looked to be made of concrete. The walls were covered in rough stucco, and the roofs were of heavy gray tile. No neighboring houses were in sight. The rain was pouring down harder than ever.

The first building was large and windowless; the second was a house, long and low. Its windows had the European metal roll-down shutters, but most of the shutters were open. Tonio snapped open a big black umbrella and walked me up to the house's automated front door. The puddles splashed over my sandals and soaked my socks.

Roger came quickly after Tonio's first knock. The door made a heavy thunk as it unlocked itself and swung open.

“Jerzy! You made it! Come on in.”

“Hi, Roger.”

“Do you need anything else, Mr. Coolidge?” asked Tonio.

“I don't think so, Tonio. Do you need anything, Jerzy?”

“How would I know? I barely know where I am. Can I sleep here?”

“Of course,” said Roger. “You're my guest. So, yes, that's all, Tonio. I'll call you in the morning.” Tonio splashed back down the path to the driveway, and the door locked itself behind him.

All the floors in Roger's house were dusty plywood; he'd stripped away whatever had been on them before. I'd expected that Roger would be living rich, but no, he was living weird. “Kay is back in California just now,” said Roger, referring to his absent wife. “Would you like a tour?” It didn't occur to him to offer me food or drink.

“I'd like to talk first.”

“Fine.” Roger wore an inoffensive, even subservient, expression. On things that didn't matter to him he played the spineless jellyfish but—as I knew from experience—when it came to something he
did
care about, he was like a saber-toothed tiger.

He led me from the entrance hall into the living room; pausing to point out a tiled structure the size of a refrigerator. “Look at this,” said Roger. “This is a Swiss ceramic stove.”

The stove was nicely tiled in blue and white; some of the tiles had flowers painted on them. My feet were cold and wet, but even so the stove looked anything but cozy—to me it looked like the phreaked-out Beetlejuice Monkey thing I' d seen the last time I went after the cyberspace ants. The Beetlejuice Monkey had been a cross between a Mandelbrot set, an ant and—I felt
sure
of it now—Roger's stove. But why? I reached out and touched the stove; it was stone-cold.

About half the wallpaper had been stripped off the living room walls. Set into a jagged hole in the wall near the stove was an uncased computer with a keyboard. The fit was bad enough that I could see the computer's chips and wires. A nice molding for it would come later, after the wallpaper got fixed.

“That's my house computer,” said Roger. “It controls the heat, lights, locks, shutters, and so on. I had to put in fifty-seven different servo motors for it. What an interesting hack that was!”

I walked across the room and looked out the living room's big window. It showed trees and the road that led back down to Saint-Cergue, though with the rain, I could only see a hundred meters before the road melted into mist.

“When it's clear, you can see Lake Geneva with sailboats on it,” said Roger. “And when it's
very
clear, you can see Alps on the other side of the lake. But you said you want to talk. Let's go into my study.”

The light in the study came on automatically when we entered. The room was as I'd seen it last night in cyberspace. Plywood floor, gray drywall walls with white plaster at the seams, and a window that looked out onto a meadow sloping uphill. A long, filled-in dirt trench scarred one side of the meadow. There was a closed-circuit TV-monitor and a cyberspace deck on the desk. The monitor was tuned to a view of Roger's empty driveway. Roger sat down in his comfortable armchair; there was a folding plastic chair for me in the corner next to a cardboard box of random home repair tools. I dragged the chair over to sit near Roger.

“This property is very interesting,” said Roger. He was so rich that all the people he ever talked to agreed with him. This gave him license to play the happy prattling
boy, babbling on about whatever his current obsession might be, confident that he would be listened to and taken seriously. “The person who lived here before me was a manufacturer of plastics compression-molding equipment. Donar Kupp. He died last year. He patented a method for incorporating three-dimensional electronic circuits into solid lumps of thermosetting imipolex resin. Smart beads. They're amazing artifacts—I have one around here someplace, it looks like a fly in amber. A very
gnarly
fly, mind you.” Roger chuckled happily. “All the major pipeline companies use Kupp's smart beads to monitor fluid flow, and the French riot police use the beads for smart nonlethal bullets.” I'd never read about any of this, but, as usual, Roger knew it all. “Kupp retired here five years ago, and he fixed up the other building—the one by the driveway—he fixed it up like a factory. He wanted to expand on his circuit inclusion technique. Since thermoset imipolex is a semiconductor, he found it possible to grow diode and triode transistors right into—”

“Hey, come on, Roger,” I interrupted. “Let's talk about the
ants.
Let's talk about me being fired and framed and phreaked out of my mind. Why did you do it, Roger? What's all this been
for
?”

Roger paused and gazed at me in that blank, dreamy, slightly irritated way of his. “All this has been for better robots,” he said presently. “Remember the ChoreBoy? Left on their own again, the West West bozos were too likely to make something lethal. And if their Adzes had killed people, the feds would have banned our Veep as well. So I made sure West West were able to cryp our Veep code, and I sent you to them so you'd help them use the code correctly. You're one of the best, Jerzy. Thanks to you, the Veeps and Adzes can get out there and evolve.”

“You want the robots to evolve?”

“That's the future, Jerzy, it's manifest destiny. I'm
teaching the robots how to build robots. Self-replication. Eventually they'll set up factories and reproduce by the thousands. They'll compete for the new bodies, they'll mutate and breed and evolve. It's about artificial
life,
for crying in the sink. A new species.”

“You want the robots to build more robots? What if they take over the Earth?” I asked.

“I don't particularly
want
them to stay on the Earth,” said Roger impatiently. “Robots aren't meant to be our slaves. Who in his right mind wants a slave anyway? The robots are meant to evolve, to take the torch from us and to grow beyond what we've done. We should send robots to the Moon. If you make a robot small enough, it can stand an awful lot of acceleration. Launching a capsule of robots with an electromagnetic railgun might work. I've been trying to talk to NASA about this, but so far I've only been talking to idiots.”