The Hacker and the Ants (26 page)

“I call it stunglasses mode,” drawled Riscky. “You get a reality shunt going there, with real-world images being routed into cyberspace and back. You tap five-nine-two-six on the left temple to toggle it.”

“How am I going to remember both those four-digit sequences?”

“‘How I need a drink, alcoholic of course,'” said Riscky. “Count the letters in the words.”

“It's pi!” I exclaimed, recognizing the mnemonic. “I love it! Here's your money.”

Riscky took the money and cackled. His toy cow circled about in excited figure eights. “Go on in there and get even, Jerzy!” said Riscky. “Fuck Shit Up!” He got back in his car and drove off. I still had a half hour before I had to meet Gretchen. I put the headset back on and returned to the vast hall of the Bay Area Netport.

I flew over to a public rest room and made my way in past a gaggle of black-lipsticked grrls. I looked in the mirror to see what kind of user tuxedo Riscky had left on his machine? A silly tux, that's what—I looked like a big, wheeled cart with two human hands and the imposing head of a Texas longhorn. The platonic ideal of Riscky's toy.

“Hey, cow!” one of the grrls called to me. “Can we watch you take a piss?” She and her friends laughed like maniacs at this—not that tuxedos ever did take a piss, except in the farthest reaches of the specialty cyberporno arcades.

After staring at myself for awhile, I turned to look at the grrls, all pierced and leathered and tattooed. The one who'd called to me stepped forward and grabbed one of my horns. I felt it as a buzzing against the side of my head; apparently my new headset had touch-pads in its temples.

“I'm Bety Byte,” she said. “And you're Riscky Pharbeque. We owe you a burn for what you did to the Cryp Club library, cow-patty.” She pulled out a little thing like a gun and shot it at me. Everything went black. At first I thought my system had crashed, but then when I flew forward, I saw that all Bety's gun had done was to surround me with an opaque sphere.

As I flew out of the sphere, I tossed my head to hook one of my horns at Bety's realistic icon, expecting my horn to pass harmlessly but perhaps intimidatingly through her. But Bety Byte had her surfaces custom-set for preemptive collision rejection, and my horn clattered off her with a vicious buzz on my temple. She popped her little geometry gun at me again, making things black again, and this time I just kept on going right out of the rest room and up toward the oversize bright pink and blue node of Magic Shell Mall, the cyberspace shopping
mall where Gretchen had gone to Nordstrom's.

Riscky must have had some kind of valid credit number installed in his system, for the Magic Shell node allowed me to enter. I popped out of the Bay Area Netport node that lay at the center of the mall. The green-and-gray light of the Netport node flickered behind me. All over the inner surface of the great Magic Shell were walkways and the shapes of stores.

I arced along a space path toward where the ant had taken me last month, to the vacant lot between the video store and the stockbroker: Total Video and Gibb & Gibb Stocks. I thudded down on my virtual wheels and trundled across the blank surface till I met a seam where two Magic Shell facets met. I turned and followed the seam to a shallow corner where three quadrilaterals met five narrow triangles; this was the same corner as before. I peered at the corner, but I was too big to see if there still was a little round-off error hole in it.

I needed to shrink, but—I now realized—I didn't know how. Perhaps Riscky already had put a “Shrink” hand gesture into his system library? I said “Show Tools,” out loud and, yes, Riscky's system accepted this standard cyberspace command.

Several shapes appeared in the air before me—a telephone, a video camera, a claim stake, a typewriter, a calculator, an atlas, a can of spraypaint, a Swiss knife, a jet engine—but there was nothing that seemed obviously designed to change my size. I pried at the corner in the floor with my head's long cowhorn, but it wouldn't give. Maybe the Swiss knife? I was just opening out the can-opener blade when the grrls caught up with me.

“Bad cow!” yelled Bety Byte. She and her grrlfriends were touching down all around me. “Shoo, Riscky!” yelled one of them, and fired another geometry gun at me. I found myself enclosed inside a yellow tetrahedron,
unable to see anything but my tool icons. I was going to have to get a new, shrinkable tuxedo and come back. I grabbed the jet engine, pointed the exhaust down toward my feet and pushed the button on its side.
ZZZZOOOW
! I burst out of the tetrahedron and flashed in along a radius straight toward the Netport node at the mall's center.

When I popped out into the Netport, I stopped, took off the headset, and turned off the deck. Three-one-four-one. “How I need a.” I had to get a new tuxedo that had a control to make it shrink, and that didn't make people think I was Riscky Pharbeque.

Since Riscky's configuration didn't have a virtual office where I could hack the system, the simplest thing would be to just buy a size-controllable tuxedo from Dirk Blanda's Personography. I had a bone to pick with Dirk Blanda about his having hired Riscky to burn me, though I had to admit there was a sort of justice in it.

Tuxedos sold for seven hundred dollars, and I only had three hundred. Dirk Blanda was certainly the person to go to, unless he was still mad about the CyberBarbie meshes I'd ripped off. Getting him to make me a tux would be hard, but getting him to do it cut-rate might be impossible.

I thought a minute, and then flashed on the idea that Dirk would certainly help me out
if I offered to pay him in pot
. Every time Dirk and I had gotten high together he'd asked me if I could score pot for him. I'd never done so, though. Like, why should I? What for? I'd always just given him a few hits of pot when I had a lot, so that when
I
was out of pot I could count on him to give me some. But he was almost always out of pot. The more I thought about it, the more sure I was that if I apologized to Dirk about CyberBarbie and offered him a fresh quarter ounce, he'd make me a shrinkable tux.

It was three-thirty and I was only a ten-minute drive
from Queue's. I motored on up there.

“Hi, Queue.” She was sitting in front of a Macintosh in her office. The office was right off the lower deck: an anachronistic jumble of papers, disks, tapes, and books. Media Molecules primarily sold hard copy media for those not plugged into cyberspace, although their best-sellers were viewable on-line at the Mondo Alternate Info Service in cyberspace. But a lot of people didn't have good cyberspace decks yet, especially the eternally broke eternal seekers to whom Media Molecules catered. Much of their business was still a quaint matter of putting a physical video or audiotape into a big envelope and like physically mailing it.

“You're looking good, Jerzy.” Queue smiled up at me with her hair across her face. “Hey! Before I forget! Some e-mail for you came in a little while ago.”

“Let me see it.”

She moused around the screen for awhile and finally said, “I guess I erased it.”

“What did it say? Who was it from?”

“It was from Roger something in Switzerland. He said—let me think, yes, he said, ‘I appreciate your brilliant work on the Adze. Sorry about your run of bad luck. I hope to work with you again someday.'”

“Jesus,” I said. “That's Roger Coolidge. He
appreciates
my work for West West? Don't tell me he controls them, too!”

“Wasn't Roger Coolidge the big hacker guy at GoMotion?”

“Yeah. He's like my evil twin. I think he's behind everything bad that's been happening to me. What a guy. And he ‘hopes to work with me again someday,' the prick?”

“That's what he said.”

“Well, thanks for remembering to tell me.” I paused
and gathered my wits, remembering why I'd come here. “Do you have any spare pot, Queue? I need to get hold of a quarter ounce.”

“Wait, wait a minute, your new robots are a huge success? You're celebrating?”

“Not exactly. I got fired again. As for the robots, you should watch the local news. Or—do you have a TV?” I'd never seen a TV at Queue and Keith's, come to think of it. I hate TV so much that I never look for it.

“Keith pawned our set last Christmas,” said Queue. “So we had to miss out on that spacey ants-vs-television hack you pulled. You got fired from West West?”

Keith popped into the office as if on cue.

“Hi, Jerzy,” he said. “Are you still looking for a gun?”

“A
gun
!” cried Queue. “Out of the question, Keith! This is a desperate man!”

“I've been fired again,” I told Keith. “And all I want to buy right now is marijuana.”

“Well, I can't help you with that—though I'd be glad to smoke a bowl with you,” said Keith. “But I was at a pawnshop in Cupertino today and they had a plastic pistol for seventy-five dollars. It was a mean little machine. It looked like the head of a cobra. If you give me the money, I could get it for you.”

“You pawned your guitar again, Keith?” demanded Queue. “You didn't pawn anything of
mine
, did you?”

“I have certain unavoidable expenses,” said Keith with solemn hippie dignity.

I wasn't sure what Keith's unavoidable expenses were—though it was fun to think that the money was for cool, newly synthesized psychedelics. But likely as not the money was simply cash for driving around, for things like gas, bridge tolls, parking meters, tobacco, and an occasional espresso. Queue controlled the cash flow of Media Molecules, and I could readily believe that she
was unwilling to advance Keith a cent.

“Oh,
you
!” said Queue to Keith, and he smilingly drifted back out onto the deck.

“So okay, Jerzy, you want a quarter?” Queue's voice rose musically with the welcome question. “I guess I could spare a little. I'm short on cash.”

“I have cash.” I still had three hundred dollars left. “One fifty?”

Queue gave her temple-bell laugh and mouthed a kiss at me. “One forty is fine.”

While she searched out the quarter, I went upstairs to my room and rooted out the remains of my own stash. I rolled four fat joints in Orange Zig-Zag papers and tucked them into the back of a matchbook. I went back downstairs and paid Queue for the heat-sealed quarter ounce plastic bag of sinsemilla. She said she'd bought it for herself yesterday, but was passing it on to me as a favor. I thanked her profusely. The pot was a beautiful light green mass of female buds with dusty purple stigmas. Dirk would drool over it.

I drove down to Los Perros and parked in Dirk's driveway, right next to our old house on Tangle Way. Dirk usually worked at home rather than in the storefront of Dirk Blanda's Personography.

He came to the door and looked out diffidently. Dirk was a calm, boyish man with a thin head and short white hair. He had a lot of simplistic ideas about economics and politics that he believed the more deeply because he'd thought them all out himself.

“Hi, Jerzy. Come on in.”

I followed him up to his machine room. I meant to be completely nice and diplomatic, but my anger over what he'd done to me came spilling out. “Dirk, you should have talked to me instead of hiring a phreak to burn me. That's a crime, you know. I could report you.”

“Look who's talking about crime. You stole my meshes! That's wrong, Jerzy. If you've just come here to insult me, you might as well go.”

“I'm not here to insult you, and I'm sorry that my companies ripped off your meshes. But we're even now. Your phreak put me through hell.”

Dirk's eyes widened with curiosity. “What did he do?”

“He got me in a voodoo cyberspace watching movies of me and my children getting tortured.”

“Oh! Now that—that's nothing that
I
told him to do.” Dirk looked like a worried boy whose Halloween prank has gone too far. “I wouldn't ever wish any harm on your family.”

“You told him to burn me and he did. But now I've been fired from GoMotion and West West both, so if Mattel still feels like burning someone about the Our American Home test sites, tell them to go after the execs and not after me. I'm out of the loop.”

“I'm sorry to hear that, Jerzy. And your trial starts tomorrow doesn't it? I remember seeing Studly working in your yard plenty of times. I can't believe he killed a dog.”

“I think he started acting different after the GoMotion ants infected him. But now that there's GoMotion ant lions all over the place, it shouldn't happen again.”

“I keep hearing that there's still some ants loose in cyberspace. Have you seen them?”

“No, but as a matter of fact, that's why I'm here. I need a special tuxedo so I can go look for the cyberspace ants.”

“So you need a new tuxedo. I figured it was either that or pot that brought you here. You don't happen to have any pot, do you? I'm all out again.”

“That's what I was hoping,” I grinned. I took out the
bag of pot and handed it to Dirk. “I'll trade you this quarter ounce for a new tux. The tux has to be scalable. It has to have a control on it so that I can change its size.”

Dirk turned the packet this way and that, looking at the buds. “This is awesome, Jerzy. Of course I can make you a scalable tux. If you don't want too much fine detail, I can fix you up in about ten minutes. Do you want it to look like you? I've still got your bodymap on file.”

“No, no, I want to be anonymous.”

“Well, I've got a bunch of art meshes on disk. They don't look like anyone specific. You can pick what you like. Should we get high first?” He tore the plastic open and inhaled. “Mmmm.”