by Rudy Rucker
I nearly made it. But the hole was five feet off the ground, the dirt at the edge of the pool was muddy, the plastic was weak and saggy, and my hands were slippery with blood and rain. I kept falling back. Now the plastic ants were swarming through the kitchen and into the pool room with me, a few of them flying like air support over the advancing army of the crawling ones. With a final titanic effort, I levered my upper body out into the rainy Swiss morning, but a big piece of the plastic broke loose and I fell backward, hitting my head on the ground. The last thing I saw was flying plastic ants angling down toward me. My last thought was that I missed Carol.
I woke to the sound of a telephone endlessly ringing. There was a mud puddle next to my face with rain splashing into it through the jagged hole I’d made in the pool room roof. Floating in the puddle were scores of plastic ants with their little metal legs folded up against their bodies. Some of them had folded-up wings as well. The cuts in my hands had clotted over. Still the phone rang.
I sat up and felt my head. There was a painful egg on the back of my noggin—nothing serious. I could see more motionless plastic ants in the hallway and in the kitchen. Still the phone rang.
I hoisted myself to my feet. My socks were stiff with blood from the bites the ants had given me. I picked up my flashlight and hammer, and made my way through Roger’s kitchen, the beads of stilled plastic ants sliding beneath my feet. The dark house was hotter than ever; the furnace continued to blast away. Might the boiler actually explode? I moved faster.
When I picked up the phone, a mechanical voice said, “There is a cyberspace call for you, sir. Please put on your headset.”
I snatched up Roger’s headset and looked into it. There, staring at me with an expression that was not quite a smile, was Riscky Pharbeque. He was in a car driving on what looked like Route 1 near Big Sur.
“Shit howdy,” he said. “Don’t say I never did you no favors.”
“Riscky! What happened?”
“Just naturally I put a watchbug into that Pemex twelve I sold you, Jerzy. Sucker paged me when you and your son started using the Hex DEF6 code. You choked, my man, you screwed the pooch! You’re old and slow. Two GoMotion ants from the third colony got away!”
“Do you know where they are? Can you stop them?”
“Hell yes. I’m no friend of Roger Coolidge’s—son of a bitch never did pay me for that phreak job I ran on you. Not to speak unkindly of the dear departed, but he was dumb as dog shit to try and short yours truly. Not paying Riscky was about the last thing Roger ever did, if you catch my drift.”
“You—you had a hand in making his new robots turn bad?”
“Well now, Roger made some random mutations in the colonies writing his robot code—but who’s to say what random is? Phreaky-deaky, dude.” Riscky cackled and held up ten long, wiggling fingers as the cliffs of Big Sur went whipping past.
“Oh God. So what about the escaped GoMotion ants?”
“They jumped right down onto Roger’s house computer hoping to fuck you up. But good ole Riscky came in and took over that machine’s comm ports. The ants can’t get back out. Before you do anything else, Jerzy, run in there and rip that computer out of the wall. Smash it up and bring me its big RAM chip. Just so’s if I ever need it, I can get the GoMotion ant code off of there.”
“Do it now?”
“Do it! I’ll wait.”
I ran into Roger’s living room and yanked his house computer out of its ragged niche. The naked machine crashed to the floor. I used my hammer—yes, I was still carrying it—to kill the power supply. Right away the runaway furnace downstairs stopped. And then I pulled the big terabyte RAM chip off the motherboard. I went back into Roger’s study and put on the headset.
“I got it.”
“Way to go, old son,” said Riscky. “Now gather up a couple or three dozen of those dead ants and bring them and that RAM chip on back to me.”
“How did you turn off the plastic ants, Riscky?”
He opened and closed his right hand rapidly several times, miming signals emanating from a source. His long thin lips drew back toward the rasta tangles of his hair. “Radio. The plastic ants have the same stop signal as any other robot. Being as how I’d taken over the house computer’s communications, I used it to put the plastic ants to sleep. All of them.”
“Thank you, Riscky. Thank you so much.”
“Don’t thank me yet. I want one more thing.”
“Money?”
“My girlfriend’s turned movie agent. I want you to let her handle the rights to your TV miniseries.”
“What?”
“Your adventure, Jerzy, your story. Let my girlfriend handle the rights, or I’ll wake up the plastic ants and there won’t be no story.”
“Sure, Riscky, whatever.” As if I fucking cared about television.
“Hurry home, bro.”
I cleaned myself up and found a raincoat, an umbrella, a scarf, and a pair of leather gloves to hide the cuts in my fingers.
TWELVE
Reboot
I LEFT ROGER’S HOUSE ON FOOT JUST BEFORE noon on Sunday, May 31. I’d half-expected to find the factory burned to the ground outside Roger’s shuttered windows, but the acetone seemed to have burned itself out without managing to set the Swiss concrete building on fire, not that I looked inside. The main thing was that no alarms seemed to have gone off, and everything looked fairly normal. I splashed down to Saint-Cergue, where I found a cafe crowded with peasants drinking vile Swiss beer.
Without anyone taking much notice of me, I phoned for a taxi, which took me to the Geneva airport. Customs didn’t look in my satchel, which could have been luck or could have been something else. I couldn’t tell anymore.
Monday morning I was back in San Jose, just in time for the next part of my trial. I buttonholed Stu in the hall outside the courtroom. He was kind of surprised to see me.
“You’re still here, Jerzy?”
“Yes. I want to win this trial. Let me ask you something point-blank. Do you really want me to lose, or have you just been dogging it because West West stopped paying you?”
“Of course I want you to win. You’re my client. And I think it’s somewhat inaccurate to say that I’ve been dogging it. The problem is that you haven’t given me a defense to work with. And of course I am operating on somewhat limited funds.”
“I’ve come into some money and some new information over the weekend, Stu. It was Roger Coolidge who made Studly put the ants on the Fibernet. He was driving Studly over a remote cyberspace link. Get hold of Coolidge’s phone bill and we can prove it.”
“Use a cryp?”
“Use whatever it takes. And get the same guy who made the prosecutor’s demo to make a cyberspace demo for us. A better demo. Coolidge was on the phone to a transponder in the back of a truck driven by a guy called Vinh Vo.”
“Is he related to the Vo family you were visiting? None of them were willing to talk.”
“Vinh’s the oldest son. I’ve already had dealings with him and I’m sure I can get him to testify for us. Vinh is very money-oriented. The one thing is that our story can’t make Vinh look bad. If Vinh were to turn against me, he could open up information about—never mind what about.” If Vinh and Bety and Vanna and Riscky kept mum, the authorities need never find out that I was the Sandy Schrandt who’d been visiting Roger Coolidge when he died.
“If this Vinh will really testify that Coolidge paid him to run a transponder near Studly, that could break the case wide open,” said Stu.
“I’d like to bring him over to your office this afternoon,” I said. “So we can work on his story with him.
Can you get the judge to postpone the rest of the trial for a couple of days?”
“This will all mean a lot of additional legal expenses,” said Stu tentatively.
“Let’s say I’m good for twenty thousand more dollars, max.”
“That works for me!”
As soon as court went into session, Stu approac
hed the bench and asked the judge for a two-day continuance. The D.A. called it frivolous, but the judge said okay.
I found Vinh Vo at Pho Train that afternoon. He too was surprised to see me. I got him to walk through the SJSU campus toward Stu’s office with me. On the way I talked to him.
“Vinh, I know that you had a transponder in the back of your truck that night that Studly put the ants on the Fibernet. Roger Coolidge was running Studly through the device in your truck. We’re going to have to bring that out for my trial defense.”
Vinh angrily screwed up his face around the fuming cigarette in the corner of his mouth. “Don’t you talk to the cops about me, Mr. Yuppie. I know Eastside Virus boys who’d knife you for fifty dollars.” The Eastside Virus was a notorious Vietnamese street gang.
“Now, Vinh, that’s not being very cooperative. Anyway I’ve already told my lawyer all about you.”
“My boys can kill your lawyer, too.” It was another day of brilliant California sun, and the shadowed creases in Vinh’s face looked hard and dark.
“Calm down,” I urged him. “All you have to do is say that you ran the transponder for Roger Coolidge. You didn’t know why. It’s not a crime. You’ll just be a witness. Coolidge has to take the fall for this, and you have to help me set him up. If you testify in court, I’ll give you a thousand dollars.”
“You think Coolidge will take this lying down? He’s a billionaire. He’ll come back at you with everything he’s got.”
“Coolidge is dead, Vinh.”
Vinh’s customary lack of expression briefly gave way to surprise. His mouth opened and his eyebrows shot up before he regained control.
“You kill him?”
“No, I didn’t. His robots killed him. But nobody ever finds out about Sandy Schrandt, see?”
“That’s a big secret to keep, Rugby. I want five thousand dollars.”
“I’ll give you two. And you tell Bety Byte and Vanna to purge their records and take a long vacation.”
“That’s got to make it four thousand.”
“Okay,” I said. “Who wants to haggle on such a nice sunny day.”
We went to Stu’s office and ironed out our courtroom strategy. Vinh left, and then Stu and I talked a little more. He’d already crypped Roger’s relevant phone records, and he’d scheduled a guy to rush-job our cyberspace demo for tomorrow, which was Tuesday. The trial was due to start back up on Wednesday.
“But don’t forget,” Stu reminded me. “Your bail runs out at noon tomorrow. You have to show up at the jail and turn yourself in.”
“You damn well better win this trial for me, Stu.”
“Here’s hoping!”
That evening I went back to Queue’s. Keith and I were sitting on the porch smoking a joint when Riscky Pharbeque came bouncing up the path—with none other than Susan Poker in tow.
“Yo, bro,” said Riscky. “I brought my friend Sue. She’s the movie agent I was telling you about.” Susan Poker had replaced her hard-shell Realtor garb with black jeans and a Mexican blouse embroidered with cyberspace interface icons. She wore pale lipstick, and had washed the stiffener out of her hair to pull it back into a loose ponytail. She looked arty, in an L.A. kind of way.
“Hi, there!” she sang. “I’m looking forward to representing you. Riscky won’t tell me what he did to convince you.” She gave Riscky a kittenish slap.
I was on my feet staring down over the railing. “Since when are you a movie agent, Poker?” I demanded.
“What you don’t know about me would fill a book, Rugby,” she fired back. “But don’t you think it’s time we got on a first-name basis?”
They sat on the porch and smoked with us for a bit, and then I took Riscky upstairs alone with me.
“I hope to God you don’t tell that flap-mouth about—” I broke off, remembering that my room was probably bugged. Riscky laid a finger on his long sharp nose and looked kindly confidential. He drew a cloth sack out of his pocket and held it up inquiringly. I pointed to my black satchel. He reached into it with the sack and invisibly bagged his RAM chip and the dormant winged plastic ants. I was glad to see them go. I was dead sick of ants.
Back downstairs, Susan Poker said, “We can’t stay long, Jerzy, but I’ve got these papers for you to sign.”
“What?”
“It’s my standard agency contract. I incorporated on Friday—when Riscky told me he’d get you. The networks already know I’m going to represent you, and ABC and TNT are definitely interested.”
I went ahead and signed the papers. What the hey, “Sue” was only asking for fifteen percent. And it wasn’t like, if she got the deal, I would actually have to do anything more than give them my blessing and take a couple of meetings. “The Jerzy Rugby Story,” yeah, I kind of liked it. Or maybe call it “The Hacker And The Ants”? It would be something on TV worth seeing for once—especially if I won my trials and gave it a happy ending.
“Let me just ask you one thing,” I said, handing back the papers. “Was it a woman called Kay Coolidge who got you onto my case in the first place?”
“Go ask Gretchen,” grinned Susan Poker. “She told me she wants you to come see her tonight.”
I drove down to Gretchen’s. She was home alone in her condo, sitting on the couch watching television.
“Where were you all weekend, Jerzy?” she asked petulantly. “I couldn’t find you.”
“Never mind. Look, is it true that Roger Coolidge’s wife Kay hired you and Susan Poker to watch me?”
Gretchen tossed her bell-shaped hairdo. “Okay, yes, that’s true. But right away I started being really fond of you, Jerzy.” She smiled prettily.
“You weren’t too fond of me to give Riscky Pharbeque my cyberspace access code. You watched me typing it in that time right after our first fuck. I just remembered that on the drive over here.”
“Come on and sit down, Jerzy,” said Gretchen, patting the sofa cushion next to her. “Tell me how your trial’s going. Calm down and give me a kiss.”
The phone rang. Gretchen answered. “Yes. Uh-huh. No, I’m still not sure where he was over the weekend. But I know where he is now. Yes, he’s right here. Oh, he already knows. Talk to him? I guess so.” She giggled and held out the receiver. “Here, Jerzy. It’s Kay Coolidge.”
Reluctantly I took the phone. “Hello?”
It was an older woman’s plummy voice, strained with grief. “Mr. Rugby, this is Kay Coolidge in San Francisco. I’ve just gotten word that my husband Roger is dead. Do you know how it happened?”
“Roger framed me for the GoMotion ant release, and you’ve been helping him spy on me for over a month. Why would I suddenly want to help you?”
“Look, Mr. Rugby, Roger told me on Saturday that you were coming to visit him. You’re such an unworldly dreamer that it would be perfectly easy to frame you again, if that’s what you want to call it, you fool. But if you’ll just tell me the truth, I might let you go. Even if you did kill him.”
I took a deep breath. Would this ever be over? “I’m certainly not going to say I was there—” I began.
“Go on.”
“But I might speculate that Roger was killed by some new four-armed robots and some little robots that look like plastic ants. That’s what he was experimenting with, I understand. From having worked with Roger in the past, I can tell you that he could be quite reckless about new forms of artificial life.”
“I see,” said Kay Coolidge quietly. “But the coroner said something about a fire.”
“This would still be pure speculation on my part, but it may be that someone was trying to kill the four-armed robots along with the plastic ants that were crawling on ... on Roger’s body.”
“Oh how horrible.” She started sobbing.
“Will you and your people leave me alone now?” I grated.
There was a hiccuping pause while Kay Coolidge composed herself. “Yes, we’ll leave you alone,” she said finally.
“So good-bye. And I’m sorry about
Roger. You don’t need to say anything else to Gretchen, do you?”
“No need.” Her voice was shakily calm. “Tell Miss Bell that her final check will come this week. Good bye.”
I hung up the phone.
“What was that all about?” asked Gretchen.
“You’re out of that job,” I told her.
“I’m glad, Jerzy. Susan and I have felt terrible about tattling on you.”
“I don’t believe that for a minute,” I said. But I spent the night with her anyway. What with having to turn myself in to the sheriff the next day, who knew when I’d get another chance to sleep with a woman. And, face it, I was still attracted to Gretchen, even if she did have the morals of a Realtor.
The story about Roger Coolidge being killed by his robots broke in the media the next morning. I went downtown at noon and spent the next six days in jail and the courtroom.
On Wednesday morning, Stu presented Vinh’s testimony. There were records of Roger calling Vinh, and of Roger calling the number of Vinh’s transponder. Vinh said he hadn’t known why Roger had wanted him to drive the transponder over to his family’s house; he said he’d thought it was just a divorce case or a matter of industrial espionage. Wednesday afternoon, after Vinh’s testimony, Stu showed a kick-ass cyberspace demo that made the story really hang together.
For his summation on Thursday, Stu got permission from the judge to bring in the fact that Roger had recently been killed by robots, and that all the GoMotion ants seemed to have disappeared from cyberspace with Roger’s death. By the time Stu was through, nobody doubted anymore that Roger had been the sole and supreme master of the GoMotion ants.
The jury came in with a not guilty verdict on Friday, and on Monday, June 8, the federal prosecutor dropped all charges against me. I walked out of jail a free man with a dynamite story. I spent the rest of that day hanging out with my kids. I saw Carol too, of course, and she told me she was having second thoughts about Hiroshi. I kind of got the feeling she wanted me back. Food for thought.
