The Hacker and the Ants

by Rudy Rucker

  GoMotion had axed me, but my own part in the Great Work could continue at West West. I signed the papers Otto offered me, and Otto led me off in search of Ben Brie.

  Along one edge of the pit were doorless, semiprivate offices with Plexiglas add-ons that extended the divider walls to the ceiling. In one of these spaces we found Ben Brie.

  Ben Brie was so mellow and diffuse as to be the parody of a Californian. He had a wheezy groaning way of talking; he sounded as if he were so merged into the cosmos that getting each word out was a serious effort. “I thought things were going really well at GoMotion,” said Brie after Otto left me with him. “What did you do to end up here? Did you piss somebody off?”

  “It’s kind of complicated,” said I. “West West is giving me a good raise.”

  “Sounds groovy,” said Brie. “Can you tell me about the robot that GoMotion’s been working on? The Veep?” He was wearing a truly excellent shirt from Zaire, a nifty job covered with repetitions of the pink and acid green Congo logo of Regal Lager.

  I explained about the Veep somewhat, and then asked Brie what West West’s angle on all this was anyway?

  “We’ve got this awesome robot from the Taiwanese,” said Brie. “Seven Lucky Overseas. They’re West West’s parent company.”

  This was just what Trevor had told me. “Didn’t Seven Lucky make the household robot that killed the baby?” I demanded. The question failed to faze Brie. In all mellowness, he gave me a straight, out-front answer.

  “The Choreboy. Yes. A tragedy. When our group was selling the Choreboy, we were called Meta Meta. Meta Meta settled out of court, went through Chapter 11, and reorganized as West West. The Choreboy is a closed case, Jerzy, an unsavory footnote to the history of robotics. Let’s move on to more pleasant—”

  A woman in a flowing gypsy dress walked into our cubicle and Brie greeted her. “Janelle, this is our new Adze programmer, Jerzy Rugby. He comes to us from GoMotion. Jerzy, this is Janelle Fuchs. She’s in marketing.”

  “I don’t work for Ben,” said Janelle, brightly. She had rough-skinned, sensual features with plenty of makeup. “And Ben doesn’t work for me.”

  “The less work, the better,” chuckled Ben. “But Janelle may want to pick your brain about the Veep specs.”

  “That’s right,” said Janelle. “Ben tells me you did a lot of good work at GoMotion. We’re just getting the Adze campaign ready, and we need to know what GoMotion is going to say their Veep can do.”

  I told her, which took awhile, and then she brought up a different topic. “Ben says you adapted some a-life algorithms to make Roarworld work better. West West has a line of games. I think a lot of games could benefit from having smarter thingies to fight against.”

  “How do you know what I did with Roarworld?” I asked them.

  Ben waved the question aside. “Oh, we’ve done our homework on you, Jerzy. The thing that interests us is that you’re good at using a-life to evolve better algorithms for robots programmed in SuperC.” I nodded. “Up till now, we’ve been writing our Adze software in a Seven Lucky proprietary language called Kwirkey. One of Seven Lucky’s founders invented it for his thesis at the Computer University of Taiwan. Kwirkey is a Lisp-parser that sits on top of a Forth interpreter.”

  I sighed heavily. “Look, Ben, I want to use a real language, not a Lisp language. A language with documentation and support would be nice, too; a language familiar to more people than like thirteen Taiwanese graduate students? Can’t I keep working with SuperC?”

  “No problem,” drawled Brie. “We just finished building a SuperC compiler out of Kwirkey. Or maybe . . . maybe we built a Kwirkey interpreter out of SuperC? I can never remember. Russ Zwerg will tell you all about it when you meet him.” As he said the name “Russ Zwerg,” a fleeting ripple of what might almost have been stress crossed Ben’s calm features. He rose to his feet and waved me toward the door. “Before we do Russ, let’s talk to Sun Tam.”

  Brie led me across the pit and around an unexpected corner into a large gray room, very airless. The room held two Sphex workstations, each with a cupped three-foot by three-foot Abbott wafer as its display device. An Abbott wafer was a big flexible flat rectangular computer screen made of a plastic sandwich holding a lithographed nanometal grid and a few precious drops of liquid rhodopsin. The design was a bit like the cheap liquid crystal “mood rings” they used to have. The bendable metal grid inside an Abbott wafer controlled the rhodopsin’s colors with pinpoint precision.

  Two cheerful computer jocks named Jack and Jill were hunched over one of the Sphexes, busy cutting and pasting together great, ungainly blocks of Kwirkey code. The program management software they were using had cyberspace visuals that made it look as if their busy, gloved hands were wielding a chain saw and an arc welder. The Sphexes were designed for teamwork and had eight Spandex control gloves apiece. As soon as a user donned a glove, the glove knew if it was a left or a right.

  Jack and Jill spoke to each other in weird cryptic slang, and I had no idea what they were doing. Jack had bull-like shoulders and flat colorless eyes. Jill was tall and sinewy with a crown of brown curls.

  At the controls of the other Sphex was Sun Tam, who looked up and greeted us. He had a chinless head the shape of a parsnip. A native of Santa Clara County, Sun spoke with the pure, affectless, short-voweled accent of the Valley.

  “Good to have you here, Jerzy. I’ve heard about your work on the Veep for GoMotion, and about your and Roger Coolidge’s work with artificial evolution. That’s what we need for the Adze. An explosion of intelligence. Do you still have that prototype Veep you were keeping at home?”

  “Uh, yes, I do. GoMotion doesn’t want him back.” I could have gone outside and gotten Studly right out of my car, but I had the feeling that Studly was probably infected by the ants, and I didn’t want ants screwing things up on the West West system before I could even get started. Also I was starting to get annoyed at these people.

  “You should definitely bring your Veep in for us to look at,” insisted Ben.

  “Maybe I don’t want to!” I cried. “And how come everyone here knows so much about what’s been going on at GoMotion?”

  “West West’s intelligence gathering is very proactive,” said Ben. “And—speak of the devil—here’s our star cryp himself.” A tall blond boy with a mod Julius Caesar haircut had just appeared, wanting to know how soon we’d be through using the Sphex. He wore mirror-coated contact lenses, which gave him a steely, impenetrable air.

  “Give us another fifteen minutes,” said Ben. “We need to get the new guy logged on. Jerzy, this is Sketchy Albedo. Sketchy, meet Jerzy.”

  Unlike a normal hacker, Sketchy was wearing punk clothes; skintight black-and-red op-art-checkered pants and a long-sleeved black shirt. His shoes were black suede high-tops. He favored me with a languid wave of his hand. “Don’t take too long.”

  In the Valley these days, phreaks were youths who cobbled together their own approximation of a decent cyberspace deck and used it for weird cyberspace pranks. Cryps were phreaks who’d turned professional and gone into the employ of companies involved in industrial espionage. If you broke into some company’s machines often enough, they were likely to hire you as a cryp to break into other companies, or they might use you as a security consultant to keep out the other cryps. It was a vicious circle—the cryps’ security-cracking escapades created a demand for the services they could provide.

  Trevor Sinclair of GoMotion was a cryp and I liked him a lot, but in principle, I didn’t like phreaks and cryps. I hated for people to use my code without giving me credit. Thanks to the cryps, I had to choose between obsessive security and being ripped off. The airs that some cryps give themselves annoyed me as well—they acted so hip and smart about their stolen information, and often they didn’t understand any of it at all. The fact that the media wasted the noble name “hacker” on them didn’t help either. And now that the ants had whipped my system to shit, I liked phreaks and cryps less than
ever.

  So now, meeting West West’s star cryp, I found myself acting silly and aggressive. “Golly, Mithter Thkitsth,” I lisped, making sure a few drops of spit flew out of my mouth, “Are you gonna do thome thecwet thpy thtuff? Can I watch? Huh? Can I, can I, can I, huuuuuh?”

  “Bithead,” said Sketchy and made strange wiggly gestures with his hands, as if casting a hex on me. “I don’t know why they hired you, Jerzy. I’ve already downloaded all of your GoMotion code.”

  “Sure you have,” I snapped. “Only you don’t know how to read it. And you never will. Spyboy.”

  “Hey, hey,” broke in Ben Brie. “Chill out, gentlemen.”

  “Let me know when the old fart finishes his golf cart ride,” said Sketchy, stalking out of the room.

  “Has he really been crypping down my GoMotion code from West West?” I demanded. My heart was beating fast and my face was flushed. I was badly rattled. Old fart? Well, I was forty-three, and certainly older than anyone I’d met so far at West West—with the possible exception of Otto Gyorgyi, who really was an old fart.

  “It’s a damn good thing he crypped your code,” said Ben Brie. “What with you off the Net and your home system thrashed.” Not that I’d told him my home system was thrashed. These guys were total cryps and pirates. Was there anything about me they didn’t know?

  “West West should spend some money on individual decks,” interrupted Sun Tam, impatiently filliping a fingernail against the beige crinkle-finish sheet metal housing of the Sphex. It was Sun’s style, I would learn, to propose concrete physical solutions to disagreements. “Why should we fight over these two machines every single day? On the street you could get six individual decks for the price of a Sphex. With enough machines, we could all be working at home, Ben. The commute is also a cause of stress, for that matter. The daily grind.”

  Clearly Ben had heard this many times before. “These two Sphexes are top of the line,” he insisted. “Check it out, Jerzy.” He picked up a sensor bead and clipped it to a piece of hair on the top of my head.

  Sun Tam got up and I sat down in his place. The swivel chair in front of the Sphex was a complex custom job with a rocker swivel and a rotating base. I pulled on the gloves and drew the Abbott screen closer to my face. The software showed my gloves with matchstick man arms coming out of them and leading toward me. The screen showed a low workbench with a bunch of machine parts. Faint lines connected the parts, showing how they should hook up. The images were very finely shaded and rendered.

  What the sensor bead did for me was to make the screen seem like a glass window with things behind it. If I leaned to the left, then more stuff came into view at the right of the screen. When I was a kid I once tried to peek down a televised woman’s dress by standing up and leaning over the TV—if Mom and Pop’s TV had been a Sphex deck, this would have worked. I moved my head slightly from side to side, looking things over, getting a feel for the three-dimensional volumes of the objects in the scene.

  A cluster of tool icons hovered over the bench: “tools” like a magnifying glass, a pair of goggles, a coiled spring, a screwdriver, a telephone, a compass, a clipboard, and so on.

  I stuck my hands forward under the edge of the hanging screen, and computer images of my hands appeared. I picked up a few of the machine parts and turned them over. This was obviously a disassembled robot. I recognized many of the component parts from our Veep design; I recognized very many. Of course there were only so many brands of sonar units, motors, struts, wheels, etcetera—but this design’s overlap with our proprietary GoMotion design was more than coincidental, it was obvious and excessive. I was looking at a premarket pirated clone of the GoMotion Veep.

  “Sketchy wasn’t kidding about downloading information from GoMotion, was he?” said I. “I can’t believe this is such a rip off. GoMotion will sue West West for everything they’ve got.”

  “Let them sue,” said Ben Brie carelessly. “Ownership is theft—or a good out-of-court settlement. Some reality therapy, Jerzy: your job here and now is to get a product on the street. Frankly, I’m glad the Adze looks familiar to you. It’ll be that much less effort for you to get up to speed.”

  I sat there not saying anything, just moving my head around and looking at the parts of the machine.

  “Have you used this kind of deck before, Jerzy?” asked Sun Tam. The simple, factual question soothed me. Managers, cryps, lawyers—they’re all leeches. Only programmers are worth talking to. Programmers and women, that is. I remembered that this afternoon I was going to visit the home of Nga Vo.

  Once I’d paid a formal visit, would Nga’s family allow me to take her out on a date right away? She looked truly hot, though of course that kind of presentation was often bogus. I thought of an I Ching fortune I’d once gotten: “Beware of the marrying maiden.” But—the way Nga’s muscles moved under the skin of her cheek—how would it be to kiss that cheek?

  Sun Tam was looking at me. The question at hand: when had I last used a scarce-resource super-duper machine like the Sphex?

  “Couple of weeks. We use one in meetings at GoMotion. But not with this kind of chair. What does the chair do?” It was mounted on a thick base with a serial port cord that led into the back of the Sphex.

  “It’s a Steadiswivel,” said Sun Tam. “New out of L.A. Spin around and look what’s behind you.”

  The problem with fixed-mount displays like the Sphex has always been that when you move, the screen stays put and maybe you can’t see it anymore. The fragile illusion of virtual reality bursts. I pushed my foot against the chair’s base so as to spin my seat to the left.

  I expected to see the screen move off to the right and out of my field of view. But instead the screen stayed right in front of me and the Steadiswivel’s base turned out from under me. The image on the screen swept around the virtual machine-room that Sun Tam had been working in. If I stared at the screen, and kept kicking, I felt sure that I was really turning, and that the window of the screen was turning with me. It was as if I were in a spinning cylinder which had a single rectangular window. Really I was sitting still and kicking a wheel with my foot, and the image on the screen was scanning in exact sync with the turning of the wheel. Kind of a cheap trick; but so was cyberspace, especially if you took a close look at the graphics algorithms.

  “If you try to rock back,” offered Ben, “then the image on the screen scans upward. It’s pretty convincing.”

  I maneuvered back to a view of the parts on the workbench, and reached up to pick the tool icon that looked like a coiled spring. The lines connecting the disassembled robot’s parts began shrinking, with the effect that the components assembled themselves into the image of a small, dome-headed machine with three arms and two small bicycle wheels mounted at the end of single-jointed legs with idler wheels on their knees. It looked a lot like Studly.

  “The Adze,” said Sun Tam, who was watching over my shoulder. “It’s a Seven Lucky machine with West West software.”

  “What’s with the third arm?” I asked.

  “Marketing thought of it,” said Ben. “It’s a way to position the West West Adze as being different from the GoMotion Veep. The third arm is soft and made of piezoplastic. You’ll need to write some new code to run it.”

  Even aside from the extra arm, the Adze was not totally identical to the GoMotion design. It had what looked to be a good new feature or two, although I could see that several suboptimal design decisions had been made. With just a little more tweaking, the design could—

  “Whoa there,” said Ben, as if reading my mind. “You’re looking at a frozen production spec. This design is what Otto Gyorgyi signed off on, and he’s not going to sign again. Our mode is ship this or die. Let the Adze into your heart just as it is, Jerzy. Love it and help it grow. Teach it to do cool things.”

  “How do I drive it?”

  “Touch the goggles icon,” said Sun Tam.

  I touched the goggles, and my viewpoint shifted so that I saw through the virtual
robot’s eyes. I, robot, was now sitting on a three-foot by five-foot workbench. I could see a robotic arm on either side of my visual field. For the moment, the robot’s arms were not moving with the motions of my own gloved hands. Good, that meant West West was using the standard telerobotic interface.

  Recall that there were standard hand gestures for flying your tuxedo about in cyberspace. You’d point and nod to move in some direction, and you’d make a fist to stop. A telerobot in start-up mode was supposed to obey these commands as well. When you wanted to take over a manipulator, you’d make the gesture of slipping your hand into it.

  I pointed and nodded and I began rolling toward the edge of the table. The scene lurched as I drove off the edge of the workbench table. I heard the simulated hum as my virtual gyroscope kept me from tumbling. My legs popped out to full extension and my wheels hit the floor. My knees bent, cushioning me from the impact.

  I made a fist, scanned this way and that, found the exit door, pointed and trundled out the door and into what looked like the living room of a suburban home—a very familiar home. There was a baby asleep on a blanket in the middle of the floor, and here around the corner came none other than . . . Perky Pat Christensen! The West West cryps had even ripped off Our American Home.

  “Change Baby Scooter’s diaper,” Perky Pat told me. “Don’t go near the baby. Follow me into the kitchen, and stay right where you are! Hurry up, damn you!” Her pinched tan face glared at me in pharmaceutical rage. The Adze waved its arms uncertainly.

  Just as I slipped my hands into the left and right manipulators, there was a sudden whoop, and my point of view turned upside down. I glimpsed the sneakers and the blond flattop of Pat’s son Dexter. He’d just turned me over, the rotten little fuck. As I began righting myself, I heard a thud, and my viewpoint began tumbling around rapidly. Walt Christensen had tripped over me. He was drunk again. I was rolling toward the baby! I stuck out my left and right arms to stop my motion, but I was a shade too late, and my floppy middle arm smacked heavily against Scooter’s face. She began her savage screaming.