The Hacker and the Ants

by Rudy Rucker

  I jerked my power cord out of the wall. In the dark dream, I’d gotten hold of it all right, but the cord was way longer than the dark dream had shown me, the cord had two coiled loops of slack under my desk and all I’d done was to straighten out a loop’s worth while the dark dream showed the plug popping out of the wall and made the sound of the plug bouncing off the floor.

  I ran down to the kitchen and got a drink of water just to feel something real, then ran back and made sure my machine was really off, grabbed my wallet, took my rack of backup CDs, stepped out of the house and, thank God, Nature was there. No machine’s dark dream could hack the whole world.

  TWO

  Gretchen

  OUT IN THE WORLD, IT WAS HALF PAST eleven o’clock of a Monday morning, and there was a trail of real ants running across the porch step where Susan Poker had stood. I sat down next to them, catching my breath. Have you ever studied an ant closely? I sure have.

  Front to rear, an ant’s body has four parts: the head, the alitrunk, the petiole, and the gaster.

  The head bears a pair of large hooked mandibles which have serrations that fit together like teeth. The mouth itself is a complex structure with two small pairs of feelers or palps, though you can’t see the palps when the mouth is closed. The ant’s two big antennae sprout right above the mouth, about where you might expect a nose to be, and the ant’s great compound eyes are on either side of its head, posterior to the antennae. Most of an ant’s “facial expression” comes from the way it holds its antennae. Each antenna is like a pennant on a stick; the “stick” is a long segment called a scape, and coming off the tip of the scape is a segmented “pennant” of eleven funiculi. When an ant is running along, it holds its scapes forward with the funiculi pressed down to smell out the territory. When an ant is alarmed, it holds its antennae up like a hunting dog’s ears.

  The alitrunk is the ant’s walking machine: it’s an intricate structure bearing three pairs of legs. Each leg has a thigh and shin, and attached to each shin is a thing like a foot, consisting of one long segment followed by four small segments and a terminal claw. The ants have wicked spurs near the back ends of their feet.

  The petiole is small spacer segment between the alitrunk and the gaster, fitted in as neatly as the seat on a motorcycle. The petiole serves as a universal joint.

  After the intricate machineries of the ant’s mouth and legs, the gaster is a cheerful bit of comic relief; nothing more than a fat, elegantly shaped butt with a stinger and a cloaca serving as the gateway for the earth, air, fire, and water of the ant’s excretion, smell signals, poison, and reproduction. Not that the gaster is a featureless balloon; no, if you look carefully, you’ll see that the gaster is structured like a plant bud or a pinecone, it’s made up of a series of overlapping plates capable of sliding enough so that the gaster can bend quite a bit.

  The gaster contains glands that secrete poison. In order to repel enemies, some ants rear back and squirt out jets of their toxins. For closer infighting, ants inflict stab wounds with their poison-smeared stingers. Ant poison is a mixture of formic acid, neurotoxins, and histamines.

  Ants’ gasters also secrete pheromones, or so-called semiochemicals. These chemical signals can express alarm, a recruitment call, or a desire to exchange oral and anal liquid; pheromones tag the smells of nest-mates and the members of the various castes; judicious sprays of pheromones serve as trail markers and as territorial boundaries.

  Ants are cool. The motion of a trail is continuous as water flowing, but if you watch one particular ant, you’ll see that she (the only male ants are the winged ones that appear for mating flights) does not, on the average, follow the main line of the trail she’s moving along. Instead she meanders back and forth across the trail, occasionally breaking into fresh territory and then turning back. She rubs antennae with every sister she encounters. “Seen anything new?” “What’s up?” “How do you feel?” “How’re things back in the nest?” “Found any food?” “Which way are you headed?”

  Back East, when I lived in a small Virginia town called Killeville, people had been like that, too, male or female, always stopping to chat and rub antennae. No way in CA. In California we drove around in our cars instead of rubbing antennae like ants. Rush, drive, work, and buy—with a cold smile and a hard laugh, a snarl and The Finger, with a shrug and a higher fence.

  I put my rack of backup CDs in the trunk of my car. The backup was only a week old, so once the ants had been flushed out of my system I could start over. All my source code and programming tools were in there.

  I figured the best thing to do right now would be to drive up to GoMotion and find out what had actually happened. On the other hand, it was a forty-minute commute each way, and I was going to have to do it again for Jeff Pear’s weekly meeting on Wednesday—day after tomorrow. And, it occurred to me, if Coolidge was going to play tricks on me, why should I be in such a big hurry to report back in at his company? I decided to take the day off ... but to do what? I stood there near my car, thinking and looking around.

  My front yard was five steep feet of tough dirt with wizened shrubs. The street was Tangle Way, a looping blacktop two-laner that ran uphill and eventually back down. Our hill was called Polvo Para Hornear, a needlessly complicated name that at least wasn’t religious, so far as I knew. There were so many Spanish and Catholic names in California that I felt like an immigrant and an atheist.

  Numerous dead-end roadlets branched off of Tangle Way. Next to my house was the tiniest of traffic’s capillaries, a dirt alley that led to one last house perched on the edge of the eternally dry gully behind my home. Old Mr. and Mrs. Toth lived there. Mrs. Toth was a New Age healer. She had a massage table in her front hall and she talked about the supernatural in a cozy apple-cheeked way.

  Shortly after we’d moved in, Mrs. Toth had found out I’d been a math professor back East. She talked me into giving a talk to her “realization group,” which met monthly in the community center. I’d spoken on synchronicity and Hilbert Space, an old interest of mine from grad school days. A few members of Mrs. Toth’s group had been angered by my insistence that coincidences are explicitly not subject to control by human will. But in my opinion, the Beyond is out of our control, and ESP is a pipe dream for the powerless, an opiate pernicious as politics and TV.

  Across the alley from my house was a heavily weathered Victorian inhabited by Krystle Kattle and her ratty Mom. The family had been there for decades; they were poor, and had always been poor, which made them a highly singular anomaly among Los Perros homeowners. The most striking feature of their blasted, filth-strewn lot was a parallelopiped-shaped garage whose angles were in the process of being slowly but radically sheared by the expanding girth of a hyperthyroid eucalyptus tree rooted in the lot between the Kattles and the Toths.

  Krystle worked in a Western store selling boots, sad-dies, and fringed leather vests. She had a sometime boyfriend who wanted to be a biker. He was blond with a well-built steroid body. He, Krystle, Carol, and I had gotten drunk together on the lees of a keg left over from our housewarming party. Carol and I hadn’t realized yet that in California you don’t do casual things with strangers.

  There were too many strangers. Now that I’d settled in, I always treated Krystle like a stranger, and I would never have spoken to a group like Mrs. Toth’s. I was too busy, and I never had fun.

  I decided that I should have some fun, that I should smoke some marijuana.

  The house with the eucalyptus—the house between the Kattles and the Toths—was rented by Dirk Blanda, founder of Dirk Blanda’s Personography, the bodymap-ping shop who’d made my tuxedo. Dirk often had some weed. I strolled over there to see if he’d get me high.

  But Dirk wasn’t home; his house echoed hollowly with the banging of the knocker. I went dejectedly back inside my house and looked through the packs of matches on my bedroom dresser; sometimes a matchbook would have an old roach tucked into the back. But I’d already searched the matches and scraped my
drawer bottoms on my last free day, a couple of weeks ago, and there was no dope to be found. Not a roach in the house, not even a pinner.

  Studly came into the bedroom, and it occurred to me that while I’d been on the dark dream, the ants would have had time to go across the radio link and to infect Studly. He acted like he was quietly dusting my furniture, but his photocell eyes seemed to glint evilly, and I had the feeling he was edging over to me. But surely this was only paranoia. Instead of turning Studly off, I spoke to him.

  “Studly.”

  “Yes, Jerzy?” Studly had a pleasant voice thanks to his Talkboy chip.

  “Do you know anything about the ants?”

  “Last week, I put Grants For Ants ant poison packages near all the doors as instructed. I have not seen any ants in our house today.”

  “I mean ants inside my computer.”

  “Why do you say there are ants inside your computer, Jerzy?”

  “I saw them in my cyberspace goggles. They’re like a computer virus. Have they infected you, Studly? Do you feel normal?”

  “My activation levels are all within the customary ranges. Do you think the ants have infected me?”

  “I guess not. Go to living room and wait for me there. Stay idle.”

  “I can dig it.”

  When I had nothing better to do, I was always programming new catch phrases and response tricks into Studly, which made talking to him mildly entertaining.

  “Was there anything else, Studly?”

  “Yesterday you were talking to yourself and you said ‘I want Carol back,’ Jerzy. Can you comment on that?”

  This seemingly thoughtful hedge was from the dinosaur days of artificial intelligence programming. You have your device keep a list of all the things it hears you say and then every so often the device builds a sentence of the form: “Why did you say (quote-past-statement), (user-name)?” It was a cheap trick, but it set me off, just like it was supposed to.

  “I do want Carol back, Studly. But I’m also glad she’s gone. We were fighting all the time, don’t you remember? Are you going to be like the kids and keep trying to get us back together? Face it Studly, you’re a poor robot from a broken home. Go on into the living room and stay out of trouble now, will you?”

  The Studster went.

  It was so quiet in my big, empty house. I wandered back into my machine room. My unplugged computer was dark and silent. I pulled my phone jack out of the computer and plugged it directly into a Fibernet wall plug. Hallelujah, a dial tone.

  I got out my address book. I sometimes scored pot from a hippie woman my age named Queue Harmaline. She and her permanent boyfriend Keith lived among redwoods on the wet western slopes of the Santa Cruz mountains. Queue and Keith made a living producing digitized tapes and films of various hip events. Queue usually had a good stash of primo sinsemilla. Although she was not a dealer, if I begged hard enough, she could normally be prevailed upon to sell me a bit of her hoard.

  Since Queue wasn’t really interested in selling off her pot to me, the price was high, but a quarter ounce of the stuff was strong enough to last me for months, unless I got reckless. Also, I always enjoyed having a chance to visit with Queue. She was slim and dark and hip and she laughed a lot.

  It was important to call in advance if I wanted to try to get pot from her. Queue hated to go into her stash with anyone around. Once I’d shown up without warning and she gave me a tongue-lashing and then subjected me to a forty-minute wait while she did four other things at once. Finally, after taking $160 off me, she’d put me outside on the deck while she scampered up and down the three levels of her house like a squirrel, pausing here, pausing there, so that finally I could make no estimate of where in the house she found the anorexic rolled-up baggie she ultimately granted me. That’s how I’d learned always to call.

  More often than not, Queue and Keith let their scratchy answering machine take messages they never listened to, but today, for a wonder, Queue was right there.

  “Media Molecules.” That’s what she called her tape business.

  “Hi, Queue, this is Jerzy. I wonder if I could score a tape off you today.” One of anything was our code word for a quarter ounce.

  “Mm-hmm. The usual. How come you never call unless you want something, Jerzy? And what about you and Carol?”

  “She hasn’t come back.”

  “Didn’t you say you and Carol were going to try counseling?”

  “It didn’t work. It made things worse. The counselor was a woman, and Carol thought she was taking my side. The concept is that the counselor is a neutral referee, right, and you can both say anything you want, but then when she asks follow-up questions you can tell whose story she’s buying into. The counselor bought into my story even though I’m wrong.”

  “Why are you always so down on yourself, Jerzy?”

  “I had an unhappy childhood. My wife hates me. And I’ve sold my soul to the machines.” I always felt like I could say just about anything to Queue. Her ready laughter was a stifled chirp phasing into a tinkling giggle.

  “How’s your big job at GoMotion? Is that still happening?”

  “We’re designing a line of personal robots in cyberspace. It’ll be called the Veep. We made a prototype of the first one, and it cleans my house. But now my computer’s messed up. Something really strange happened today. You don’t know about the dark dream, do you, Queue? It’s when you think you’ve left cyberspace and you’re still in it. That happened to me today.”

  “On the computer? Was it fun? I’ve had things like that happen to me with . . . in certain situations. Levels of reality?” She was talking about psychedelics, but she never ever mentioned drugs on the phone.

  “No, no, it was horrible. I was walking across the room away from my machine and then something tugged at the side of my head and it was the cable to my goggles. I thought I’d taken them off and I was still wearing them. It was pure disorientation. The ants did it to me. I think there’s a virtual server that lets them get into my machine.”

  “You have a computer virus?”

  “I have ants, Queue. They’re a new thing you’ve never heard of. They’re much smarter than a virus.”

  “You’re so cutting edge, Jerzy. That’s what I like about you.”

  “So okay, Queue, I’m coming right up for that tape. Is Keith around? What with Carol gone I’m highly available.”

  She lowered her voice. “I can’t. Keith is very jealous, and he’s the one I’ve taken on. ” Queen Queue owned her house and kept Keith as her Prince Consort. “I would never fool around unless it was for real.”

  “This isn’t for real, Queue. I’m only after some human warmth.”

  “We’ll only be here for another two hours.” Queue and Keith are always taking trips in their camper van. “We have to record Brian Jones drumming congas at the Hindu Center.”

  “Brian Jones? Is he like an Elvis imitator?”

  Temple-bell laughter. “It’s his real name. And, Jerzy, when you come up, bring some show-and-tell. You said you have a working robot? A Veep?”

  “Uh ... yeah. His name is Studly. But—”

  “Studly!” More chirp-giggle laughter. “You are such a crazed sick computer jock, Jerzy. Bring Studly and don’t be a tight-ass! Can he vacuum my floor?”

  I thought of Queue’s house with its narrow staircases and lumpily layered rugs. “Well, maybe. We’ll see.”

  “All right! Bah.” Queue had her own hip, dynamic way of saying bye: a plosive, husky sound.

  I went out to the living room.

  “Follow me out to the car, Studly.”

  “Yes, master.”

  He trundled after me to the car, and once I had the trunk open, Studly went and stood sideways to it. I pushed my rack of backup CDs to one side so they’d be out of Studly’s way.

  “Okay, Studly, get in.”

  Studly pushed both legs out to their full extension, and then quickly retracted the leg on the side toward the trunk. As he began
falling toward the trunk, he snapped up his other leg, and fell sideways into the trunk, breaking his fall with his humanoid hand. He shifted himself into a comfortable position.

  “You wait in there, Studly, and I’ll drive you to visit a friend. Her name is Queue.”

  “Right on, Jerzy.”

  I closed the trunk and got in my car with a fine sense of purpose. I’d grab a snack, go to the bank, get gas, hit the freeway, and be at Queue’s in an hour. It would be fun to see her and Keith. If it weren’t for having to buy pot every now and then, I’d never go anywhere except GoMotion and the supermarket. In today’s America, the many positive aspects of recreational drug use are too often ignored. The need to score gets the user out of his or her house and into the sunshine—out into the community and meeting people! Drugs are about networking!

  My car is an Animata Benchmark. It’s the only really expensive thing I’ve ever owned. Driving it makes me feel good. I got it after my first year out here. Tooling slowly through the streets of my yuppie village of Los Perros, I marveled as always at the massive number of good-looking women to be seen in California. It was a brilliantly sunny April day with the air clear and cool as water—the kind of day you’d remember as “the best weather of the year” back East, a day when you could slowly windmill your arms in the sweet air and feel yourself to be swimming. Days like this come thick as pearls on the California year’s necklace.

  A crowd of people in Spandex stood in front of the Los Perros Coffee Roasting Company, taking the air and enjoying each other’s company, some of them planning or returning from a jog along the Dammit Trail that leads up along Route 17 to the all but dry Hidalgo Reservoir.

  When Carol and I moved to California, I was an unemployed mathematics professor, and I’d felt a disenfranchised academic mouse’s contempt for the Los Perros yuppies with their good cars, fit bodies, and standoffish demeanor.