The Hacker and the Ants (35 page)

I leaned closer and observed Dexter and Baby Scooter's frenetic motions. Dexter was casting circuit-filled plastic beads, and Baby Scooter was assembling the beads into—
ants!
The new robots were manufacturing plastic ants—the new robots had built the plastic ants that had killed Roger!

When each ant was finished, Baby Scooter would set it down on the lab floor, and the ant would scurry off along a meandering ant trail that led to the crack at the base of the closed elevator door. The new ant colony was grouping itself somewhere out of sight.

Just then the phone on Roger's desk rang. Reflexively, I answered.

“Hello?”

“
Allo. Ç'est Tonio. Je voudrais bien parler avec Monsieur Coolidge
.”

“Tonio!” I cried. “Yes, yes, this is Mr. Schrandt speaking. No, Mr. Coolidge cannot come to the phone.”

“Do he want me to drive him today?”

“Oh, not at all today. He's in the middle of a very dangerous experiment with his robots.” I mustered my high school French to drum in the point. “
Les robots de Monsieur Coolidge sont très très dangereux
.”

“So I will telephone tomorrow morning.”

“
Bien. Adieu, Tonio
.”

I hung up. While I'd been talking I'd noticed another trail of ants; this one led from the elevator shaft to the body of Perky Pat. Plastic ants were crawling about in Perky Pat's dead innards. Now as I watched, I saw a passel of ants come backing out of Pat's body, dragging something. It was Perky Pat's Y9707-EX chip. Working together, the plastic ants had pried out Perky Pat's processor chip. I stared unbelievingly as a seething stream of plastic ants bore the chip off into the crack at the base of the elevator door.

I stared for awhile at the dead Walt and Perky Pat robots. What had killed them? The ants? No, looking more carefully, I could see that each of them had its head smashed in, as if by a blow from a heavy bar. And yes, sure enough, lying on the floor halfway between the dead parent robots and their children were two thick metal pipes. Clubs. One of Dexter and Baby Scooter's first sentient acts had been to kill their parents! Now the plastic ants were busying themselves at removing Walt's Y9707-EX chip.

Things were getting worse faster than I could imagine. So what was I to do? Obviously I should stop the plastic ants. But what would work against them? Their plastic was so
hard
. It was the cyberspace ants making them act this way. Dexter, Baby Scooter, and the plastic ants were all under the influence of the ants that were holed up in the Antland of Fnoor and in the other two nests Roger had mentioned. Wouldn't the best thing be to go there and try
and kill off those virtual ants first?

My stomach tightened as I remembered my last experience with the cyberspace ants. They'd voodooed and dark-dreamed and stunglassed me into thinking I'd shit in the bed and strangled Gretchen. If they got control of me again, they'd likely as not get me to march down to Roger's factory and jump into the elevator shaft—me probably thinking all the while that I was going to the kitchen for a snack.

But what about that magic bullet Roger had been talking about? The special instruction that would kill any ant. He'd insisted that I should be able to guess the instruction. But how?

I decided to try to guess the answer before rushing off into cyberspace again. But first I got up and ran around the house—the lights flicking on and off with my passage—and checked that all the doors and windows were locked tight. Back in Roger's study, I sat down and stared out the window, thinking hard. Roger had said I could guess the magic bullet. Somewhere in the events that had happened to me there must be a clue.

I thought back to the start of my ant adventures. Susan Poker. One reason I hadn't called Gretchen before leaving the U.S. was that it seemed likely Susan Poker would find out and tell the police. But why would Susan Poker actually do that? To get a reward from whoever was paying her—or maybe just for the joy of making trouble.

And what about Gretchen? I didn't trust her either anymore. She'd been with a woman named Kay when I'd met her, and Roger's wife was named Kay. I'd never seen Roger's wife. Therefore, Gretchen's friend had been Roger's wife? Could Roger's wife have been there to launch agent Gretchen and make sure she picked me up? It certainly would have been a good way for Roger to keep an eye on me after the ant release. But how could
Gretchen trick me like that, when I'd loved her.
Still
loved her, if the ache in my heart meant anything.

I forced my thoughts back to the sequence of events that had happened to me. What, what,
what
was the magic bullet? As my thoughts raced, there was a sudden crack of thunder right outside. The sky had darkened dramatically; this was the onset of a full-on storm. The rain began coming down in sweeping sheets.
Good,
I thought,
it'll make it harder for the plastic ants to crawl up here.
And there was no doubt in my mind that they would try. Up at the top of the meadow there was a bright forked bolt of lightning followed by sharp thunder so loud that I felt it as a pressure in my nose. And in that moment the answer came to me.

Hex DEF6
. Hex DEF6 was a bit pattern that could kill the ants—Hex DEF6 was the magic bullet. Riscky Pharbeque had known it—that's how he'd been able to move about freely in the Antland of Fnoor. And that's why Riscky had used Hex DEF6 as his name, and had spray-painted it onto the wall of the Cryp Club library—as a public service. Phreak that he was, Riscky didn't want
any
single faction to take over, ever, not even the wild and crazy cyberspace ants. Hex DEF6,
yes!

Roger's cyberspace headset and gloves were well made and wireless; and, thank God, the headset didn't have cameras for a stunglasses shunt. I pulled on the gloves and gingerly donned the headset.

I
FOUND MYSELF IN THE HUGE VAULTED stone hall of what seemed to be a castle. Before me lay a scattering of ancient chairs and tables and, on the opposite wall, there was a cavernous hearth with a roaring fire. On some of the tables were parchments and books. The great hall's walls held a number of doorways. Some of the doorways were open stone arches that gave onto dusky stone corridors, and some were closed tight by wooden doors.

Right behind where I stood was the huge entrance portal, as if I'd just come through it. The massive door was adorned with wonderful, flowing Gothic ironwork. It was wedged closed by a heavy wooden beam, and set into it at eye level was a small, covered peephole. I slid the metal cover aside and peeked out; there was nothing outside but the dead blackness of raw cyberspace.

I turned and moved slowly across the great hall. Groany-moany MIDI organ music swelled in sync with my motions. High on the walls hung gorgeously patterned tapestries. At the left end of the great hall were
two broad stone staircases, one leading up and one leading down. And the wall on my right bore a stained glass window so beautiful that I was scared to do more than glance at it, lest it voodoo me into idleness.

I stepped cautiously into one of the passages. A dim light preceded my motions. I moved a few meters forward and came up against a stone wall. The space felt nasty, dark and airless. Turning my head back and forth, I saw that I'd come to a T-intersection, with passages leading off both to the right and to the left.

I sighed heavily. Was Roger's cyberspace office some lame Dungeons and Dragons maze that I would have to like
solve
? Surely Roger wouldn't have been that juvenile. Just as I thought this, I spotted a rat down where the wall met the floor. As soon as I visually acquired it, the rat stared up at me and squeaked. A steel sword point popped up in front of my body like a hard-on. The cornered rat reared up and my sword touched him. The rat turned into a puddle of blood next to the drumstick he'd been gnawing. “You may acquire the food,” said a munchkin voice in my earphones.

“Like I'm going to eat food with rat blood on it?” I muttered.

Roger really
had
set up a D&D office, the goofus! If I went into his maze and got lost, I'd be thrashing around until the rain stopped and the plastic ants finished coming up the hill to kill me. There had to be a better way.

“Show tools,” I said.

A cloud of several hundred tool icons appeared around me, compressed to fit in the confines of the low stone passage. I flew back out the corridor into the great hall, and the cloud of tools spread out to a proper size.

Out of his own twisted sense of humor, Roger had attached wings to each of the tool icons. Some of the wings were feathered, some were leathern, and some
were veined and transparent like the wings of insects. To improve the fun, Roger had attached a chaotic flocking algorithm to the icons. The tools swarmed about: now like a scarf of starlings, now like a plunge of pelicans, and now like a fretfulness of gnats.

I saw a keyboard, a helmet, a knife, a telephone, a geometry gun, a camera, a claim stake, a projector, a pile of money, a sphere with arrows sticking out of it, a frying pan, an ant—

I reached out and tried to grab the winged ant, but it twisted and turned and flew away faster than my eyes could follow. Now it was on the other side of the cloud of tools. I flew toward it through the tools, and it escaped again. I shifted my attention to the helmet, but that eluded me as well.

There was a sudden pounding on the giant entrance door. Startled, I flew back down to the floor and gazed toward the great portal. Again the pounding came.

I slipped my headset off for a moment to make sure that the pounding wasn't maybe Tonio knocking on Roger's real front door. But, no, it wasn't. There was no sound in the house other than the splashing and rushing of water—at least no sound that I heard. The rain outside Roger's study window was pouring down harder than ever. I glanced at my watch. It was 10:30 A.M.

“Hey, Da!” cried a little voice from the headset's earphones. “Are you in there?”

I slapped the headset back on and stepped closer to the great hall's entrance door.

“Da!” came the voice. “It's Tom!”

I pushed aside the peephole's metal cover. Right outside the door was a black velvet crying clown with a pipe in his teeth.

“Tom?” I asked. “It is you?”

“Da! Let me in! I'm using the deck in your Animata!
Ida's sitting here next to me! Are you okay?”

“I'm fine. Come on in.” I tried to slide aside the heavy beam that locked the door, but I couldn't get it to move. It needed some secret unlatching that I didn't know.

I peered back out the peephole. “Push down on your pipe, Tom, and your tux will shrink, and then you can fly in through this hole.”

In a twinkling, Tom shrank and darted into Roger's castle through the peephole. He flew a few quick loops around me, then grew himself back to normal size.

“Gimmie five!” said Tom. We slapped hands; my glove's piezopads buzzed.

“How did you know to come here?” I asked.

“After what Sorrel told us, we figured out you'd gone to see Roger Coolidge,” said Tom. “And I found him in the Swiss phone book. So I thought I'd try coming here to see if you were around. Is that his tuxedo you're wearing? You look like a geek.”

“Well, yeah. But we shouldn't say anything bad about poor Roger because—”

“Hi, Daddy,” interrupted the clown. It was the voice of Ida. “I'm sitting right next to Tom in your car. I can hear you over the radio. I'm talking into Tom's microphone. Let me wear the headset, now, Tom. I want to see Daddy looking like a geek.”

“Okay, but just for a second,” said Tom.

“That's great that you kids are here,” I said. “You came at just the right time. This castle is like one of those dumb adventure games you two like to play.”

“What are you trying to do?” asked Ida, now ensconced in the clown. “What's the next goal?”

“Somewhere in this castle there's an ant lab with access to the three cyberspace ant colonies Roger started.”

“Go in
there
,” said Ida, pointing at the great hearth. “There's usually a secret passage behind the fire.”

“Give me back that headset, brat!” came Tom's voice.

There was the sound of a brief struggle, and then Tom was back in control. The black velvet clown looked up at the tools. “I think I see a rolled-up map,” said Tom.

Tom was good at cyberspace games. With wonderful fluidity, he leapt up and snagged the map before it could fly out of reach. He rolled it out flat on a table and I peered over his shoulder.

The map was like a window looking onto a three-dimensional wireframe model of Roger's castle.

“Show me the path from here to the ant lab,” said Tom to the map.

A noodle of pale green light appeared in the image. Tom held up the map and moved it around, looking in at the three-dimensional image from various angles.

“Just hold on to my foot,” said Tom finally. I crouched down and latched on to him.

“Close tools,” I said, to make the cloud of icons disappear. The rolled-up map remained in Tom's hand.

Tom flew forward and darted through one of the doors. We wriggled about in dark passageways for awhile, with rats and goblins scattering at our approach—the goblins were short fat-bellied creatures with fang teeth and heads like jack-o'-lanterns. On we flew, turning left and right, up and down—Tom navigated rapidly and with confidence.

And then we were in a room with a black table and three glassed-in walls. Each of the three windows looked out onto a cyberspace ant colony. The first window showed a sprawling landscape of etched circuitry, the second showed the Antland of Fnoor, and the third window opened onto a scale model of an enormous dome-covered factory. Each colony was boiling with activity. As usual the ants were busy practicing, busy getting better at what they did.