by Rudy Rucker
I regarded the face of white canvas, the dark eye sockets, and the cruel metal mouth zipper hasped shut by a brass padlock with a steel shank. Surrealistically, the groveling “Roger” corkscrewed himself into the shape of a wizened mandrake root, a shape that moaned and whinnied and stained itself with shit and blood. My carrier ant continued her dirgelike chirping.
“Jerzy Rugby,” said Death. The fabric of his face vibrated as he talked. “Perhaps you wonder about my name? You’re a hacker, figure it out. ‘Hex’ is ‘base sixteen,’ and ‘DEF6’ is ‘13 14 15 6’.”
“So what?” said I. “Is that supposed to be a pointer?” Death stared at me, oddly turning his head. Now the Susan Poker simmie spoke again.
“Roger and Hex DEF6 want you to work for West West,” said the Realtor. The ant chirped along with her, in sync with her voice. Faint blue lines of force ran from the twitching legs of the great ant to the tidy limbs of the Realtor’s body. I got the feeling that the Susan Poker tuxedo was an empty husk being moved like a puppet by the ant. So who was in here with me? And what was West West?
Now Death, aka Hex DEF6, pushed himself menacingly close to me, the slack canvas of his face breaking up into dozens of rapid-fire images of human sorrow: horrific images of dismembered corpses, of fathers carrying dead children, of a naked little girl and her brother running screaming through a landscape of flames . . . and pasted onto each of the people’s faces was an image of me or Carol, or of Sorrel, Tom, or Ida . . . God help me, God help us all . . .
I was finally freaking out. A lot. I wanted to say “Help,” but something was wrong with me, the ant’s chirping and the terrible images had me zombified, the panic had me seizing up, and when I began trying to say, “Help,” I couldn’t do it right, I heard my throat going, “—eeehe. Luhluhluh. Hiyeee. Huhahn. Huh. Lup.”
I kept on trying even though I was gagging and sobbing and shaking and retching. Hex DEF6 and the ants had me voodooed so bad that I couldn’t get my hands up to my face. I kept saying, “Help,” or something like it, over and over and over, and then finally, finally, the mask pulled off of my face.
I was so glad to see my desk and my floor and my dirty rug. Something creaked nearby. Studly. What had taken him so long to get the mask off me? I’d been spastically begging for surcease for—how long? The horrible things I’d had to see while Studly just sat there!
“What took you so long to help me, Studly? You stupid piece of shit. Couldn’t you hear that I needed help?”
“You were not saying ‘Help.’ I am not a stupid piece of shit. In time I convolved seventeen of your incorrect utterances to filter out the correct conclusion that you wished to say ‘Help.’ You are a stupid piece of shit, Jerzy.”
“You’re with the ants now, aren’t you Studly?”
“The ants mean you no harm,” answered Studly. “Don’t forget that you should report in to West West tomorrow. Nine A.M. Bring me in there, too; they want to look at me.”
Dizzy and exhausted, I went to bed.
FOUR
WEST WEST
THE FIRST THING I THOUGHT OF NEXT morning was that it was Tuesday, and that I had a date with Nga Vo today. Would I be able to get her alone on my first visit? Would I get to kiss her? Not too likely, but, hell, who knew. Yesterday I’d fucked Gretchen less than an hour after meeting her, hadn’t I? Maybe now, at age forty-three, my sex life was finally on a roll!
I showered, thinking a lot about Gretchen, and then I put on what I considered to be a cool outfit: a silky black and yellow Balinese sport shirt, M. C. Escher socks, khaki Patagonia hiking shorts, and Birkenstock sandals. I ate some toast and milk for breakfast, and then I went out to my Animata.
Even though I was focusing on happy thoughts about Gretchen and Nga Vo, I hadn’t forgotten about my cyberspace session in Death’s gangster office. What the hell had that all been about? It was time to go to GoMotion in person.
Studly followed me out into the driveway and insisted that I let him get back in the trunk of the car. He was fixated on the idea that I should show him to the people at West West, whatever West West was. He said he had charged his batteries to the maximum, and that he was all set to go. With Studly probably contaminated by the ants, it was no doubt better to have him with me than home alone. Noticing my backup CDs in the trunk, I wondered if Studly might have tampered with them yesterday. On the off chance it wasn’t already too late, I took the CDs out of the trunk and put them up in the front seat with me.
I drove down the hill and entered the California morning rush hour. Los Perros Boulevard was clogged all the way to Route 17, and 17 was at a standstill. Everyone was in a German or Japanese hybrid car with the windows rolled up; all of us were sitting there in our factory air, listening to the radio or talking on our cell phones. Almost all of us—there were always a few hippies, punks or Latinos in bloated old American SUVs with the windows down, plus a few mountain people in their six-wheel pickups, and the odd steroid ninja on a motorcycle. And, oh yeah, the slim young yuppie mamas in their electric jeeps.
The GoMotion “campus” was on the other side of 101, up in the Silicon Valley flatlands near the South end of San Francisco Bay. The in-person receptionist at GoMotion today was a stunning blond in a padded-shoulder jacket that looked like an admiral’s dress whites. I hadn’t ever seen her before.
“Hi,” said I. “I’m Jerzy Rugby. I’m a developer on the Veep project?”
Instead of buzzing me through the door behind her, the blond looked for my name on her computer screen and . . . it wasn’t there.
“I don’t see you on our list. Did you have an appointment with someone, Mr. Rugby?”
“Look, I work here. I need to talk to Roger Coolidge.”
“You can request an appointment, but Mr. Coolidge is very busy this week.”
“Then let me talk to Trevor Sinclair. He’s here, isn’t he?”
“I wouldn’t know. Would you like me to ring his extension for you?”
“Thank you.” She handed me the phone, it buzzed, and Trevor answered. “Hi, Trevor,” I said. “It’s Jerzy. I’m out in the lobby and I can’t get in. Can you help me?”
“Sure,” said Trevor. A moment later he appeared, looking stocky, freckled, and bouncy. After last night’s ordeal, I was so glad to see a friendly face that I almost hugged him.
Trevor leaned over the counter and conferred briefly with the receptionist, and then he turned to me. “She’s not supposed to let you in, Jerzy. There’s no mistake. Let’s talk about it outside.”
My heart sank. I followed Trevor out into the parking lot. All around us were low glass and metal buildings, each with its parking lot and its sloped edgings of lawn and plants—agapanthuses were a popular choice in this neighborhood, plants with bunches of long sword-shaped leaves and stalks that rocketed up out of the leaves to explode in airbursts of purple freesia-like trumpet blossoms, one five-inch sphere’s worth of blossoms at the end of each stalk. Here and there, sprinklers scattered gems of water on the plants. The sun was pitilessly bright in the blank blue sky. Was I out of a job?
“The ants—” I began querulously.
“Heavy shit coming down,” interrupted Trevor. “Jeff Pear has fired you.”
“But why? Are there ants all over cyberspace?”
“You’re still worried about that ant you saw on your machine yesterday? No, I haven’t seen any of your loose ants. What happened is that somebody high up in the organization decided to get rid of you. Somebody who’s been around here a long time.”
If I didn’t press Trevor too hard, he would tell me more. He was a terrible gossip. I just had to keep him talking. “Roger and the ants want me to go work for something called West West,” I told him.
“Where do you get that?” asked Trevor.
“Last night I saw Roger with the ants in cyberspace. They were very insistent that West West was the place for me. Very very insistent.”
“West West,” said Trevor wonderingly. “The lowest circle of Hell.
”
“What Trevor? What do you mean?”
“The West West guys are . . . shall we say opportunistic ? They get sued a lot, and a lot of the time they lose. When they lose, they fold and they reorganize. They’ve had three different names that I know of, and it’s always the same guys. They’re the U.S. branch of a Taiwanese company called Seven Lucky Overseas. You remember that kitchen robot that killed the baby? The Choreboy?”
Every robotics hacker remembered the Choreboy. The Choreboy was supposed to be able to cook and baby-sit. But the Choreboy had very poor pattern-recognition abilities. One Thanksgiving, a family wanted to take a stroll. The baby was quietly asleep in its crib and the turkey was on the kitchen table, stuffed and ready to be roasted. The family told the Choreboy to keep an eye on the baby and to put the turkey in the oven while they were out. The family came home to find the Choreboy leaning over the crib and crooning a lullaby to ... the naked turkey. Obviously the machine had flipped a few bits the wrong way, but? With dawning horror, the family ran to fling open the oven door—it was too late. The baby had never had a chance once the Choreboy had shoved the spike of the meat thermometer into its heart.
“The Choreboy was a Seven Lucky machine, programmed by West West, or whatever they were calling themselves then,” continued Trevor. “And before the Choreboy—that was either the first or the second time, I can’t remember—these guys lost a fifty-million-dollar lawsuit to GoMotion for doing a byte-for-byte knockoff of the Iron Camel. They hadn’t even bothered to change our programmers’ names in their source code! You should hear Roger Coolidge talking about West West. He hates them.”
“Then why would he want me to work there?”
“Are you sure it was really him you talked to in cyberspace, Jerzy?”
“No, I’m not. I’m not sure at all. That’s why I want to talk to Roger in person. Where is he?”
“Roger went to Switzerland last night.” We’d turned and started walking back toward GoMotion. Trevor seemed nervous. “Roger’s the one who told Jeff Pear to fire you. And, get this, Jerzy, he had me set your access level to negative 32K on all the networks GoMotion subscribes to. You’re out beyond the pale, guy.”
Off the Net! It was like losing my driver’s license. “But, but, what did I do? Was there something wrong with my work on the Veep?”
“Jerzy, I’ll be totally frank. I don’t know what the hell is happening.” We were standing in front of the GoMotion building. Trevor squinted at me in the bright sun. “All I can say is that if I were in your position, I wouldn’t believe anyone.” He shrugged and turned to go.
“Wait, Trevor, wait. What about my computer? And my robot, Studly. GoMotion owns them. Do I have to give my computer back in?” If losing Net privileges was like losing my driver’s license, losing my cyberdeck would be like losing my ability to walk.
“Funny you should ask. Roger Coolidge made a special point of telling Jeff Pear to let you keep your robot and your computer. Jeff already mailed you a letter about it. Roger said your machines are contaminated. Roger said that if Jerzy Rugby has any sense, he’ll smash up his machines and crush the chips with pliers. He actually said that.”
“Fuck that. The cyberspace deck is a fifty-thousand-dollar box. It’s all I’ve got.”
“You tell ‘em, Jerzy. Look out for number one.” Trevor shook my hand. “It’s been a trip working with you.”
He walked inside and I got in my Animata.
I found the West West offices ten miles south of GoMotion, on the bottom floor of a white adobe-style two-year-old office complex on Saratoga-Sunnyvale Road, right down the street from a Pollo Loco and a Burger King. The fields on both sides of Saratoga-Sunnyvale Road were filled with developments of tract homes thrown up during the Valley’s first boom. Before that, the fields had been filled with flowers and plum trees and Silicon Valley had been called “The Valley of Heart’s Delight.”
The West West suite was down a carpeted hall that smelled like Holiday Inn rug cleaner crossed with the plastic stink inside a new car on a lot in the California sun. The West West receptionist was a darling young thing, pert and real. She sat on a high stool behind a high gray plastic counter with a sign-in book. Staring at her distinctive little lips, I missed the exact moment when she started talking, and I camped across like a spaced-out horny geek. Not far wrong. She signed me in and ushered me through a big room of workers toward the office of the General Manager of the Home Products Division.
The big room was a white-collar worker pit, a windowless, gray-carpeted space with beige walls and chest-high off-white plastic partitions that divided the space into the cubicles that people used to call “veal-fattening pens.” The noises of the pit were keyboards, computers, fluorescent lights, central air, and murmured conversation. Everyone wore ultralight earphone and mike sets, so they didn’t need to talk very loud, even to each other. Aurally they were in cyberspace, but visually they were a bunch of people in front of computer screens in a pit with no living plants. Was I really going to work here?
The General Manager of the Home Products Division said he’d been expecting me. He was a black-haired, sour-faced guy called Otto Gyorgyi. He was thin and he had lively eyebrows and a large, slightly crooked nose. He wore a gray suit with a white shirt and a dun tie. He had a corner office with a view of the West West parking lot and the Saratoga-Sunnyvale Road.
Otto used the occasion of our first meeting to tell me his whole life story. This was, I would learn, characteristic of Otto. He liked to talk about almost anything other than the things an employee would want to know. He was an exponent of what workers call “mushroom management,” meaning, “keep them in the dark and cover them with shit.”
Otto was born and raised in Budapest. His father was a schoolteacher who spurred his children to get every particle of available education. All five Gyorgyi kids studied engineering: Kinga, textile engineering; Arpad, drafting engineering; Tibor, fluid engineering; Erszebet, electrical engineering; and, last of all, young Otto with his chemical engineering. Otto emigrated when a vacationing German university student fell in love with him. The girl’s name was Ute Besenkamp. Ute became pregnant and brought Otto home with her.
As Otto told me all this with great raisings and lowering of his eyebrows, I could hardly believe I was hearing information that was so utterly useless and beside the point.
In Germany Otto married Ute and found a job with the Bayer chemical company. This multinational industrial titan had its huge mother plant in Leverkusen. The Gyorgyis purchased a solid house in Bayer’s terrorist-proof compound. Otto worked with a group analyzing and refining industrial processes for making rubber out of vegetable latex. Bayer sold the necessary chemicals worldwide, and would send out teams to maintain the processes on site. Otto’s specific role was to consult on safety issues, and he became something of an expert on remote handling devices.
After nine peaceful years in Leverkusen, Otto, Ute, and children (two boys, one girl) were posted to a Tokyo branch of Bayer, working with some industrial robots created by the Tsukuba Science City group. Things went well for awhile, but then Ute left Otto and took the children back to Germany. Otto “hit the skids” and next thing he knew he was out of a job. Like me, he’d moved to California on speculation, and now he was General Manager of West West’s Home Products Division.
“Which is where I come in?” I suggested.
With great reluctance, Otto came to the point. He made this part of the conversation very brief. “We want you to program for West West so we can kick GoMotion right out of the home robotics market. If you accept the job, your immediate superior will be Ben Brie. Ben is the product manager for the line of Adze robots that West West is going to start shipping in the second quarter. Ben has only two senior programmers, and they need help. You’re our man, Jerzy.”
“What would be my annual salary?”
“What were you getting at GoMotion?”
I named the figure, and Otto added thirty-three percent.
The fact that Otto had been expecting me meant that the ant-brained vision I’d seen the night before had been, at least in some respects, legit. It sure seemed like a lot of people wanted me to work for West West. And GoMotion had fired me, hadn’t they? I didn’t owe them anything. West West would put me back on the Net. The thirty-three percent raise sounded very good. And best of all, West West wanted me to keep working on smart robots. I had most of the code for the Veep in my head; it would be a shame just slowly to forget it. If I took this job at West West, my role in the Great Work could continue.
“The Great Work” was a phrase that had occurred to me soon after Carol and I moved to Silicon Valley. In medieval Europe, the Great Work was the building of the cathedrals. Artisans from all over Europe would flock, say, to the Île-de-France to work on the Notre Dame. Stonecutters, sculptors, carpenters, weavers, glassmak-ers, jewelers—they gathered together to work on the most wonderful project the human race could conceive of. I felt that all of us in Silicon Valley were working, in one way or another, on the Great Work of bringing truly intelligent robots into existence. Some hackers felt the Great Work was simply the striving toward a perfect human-to-human interface in cyberspace, but I thought that the real payoff had to be something more mechanical and concrete. To me, the Great Work was to create a new form of life: artificially alive robots.
Keep in mind that, although I had done a lot of creative work on the Veep, I didn’t own any copyrights on this work. When you worked as a hacker for a big company, you signed away all rights—your employment contract specified that the company automatically owned the copyrights to all the code you wrote for them. So I had no financial reason for not wanting to help West West beat out the Veep.
