The Hacker and the Ants (27 page)

“I have some already rolled.” I took out one of my joints and lit it. Dirk and I passed the jay back and forth, loving the great warm relaxing sensations it gave us. It was nice to be here, back to normal, getting high with my friendly neighbor. I wished that all the hassles could disappear and that after this joint I could walk across the driveway and into my house and be there with Carol and the kids and my good job at GoMotion.

“I feel it, Jerzy.” Dirk looked around his room happily. “I'm buzzed.”

“You're not mad at me anymore?”

“I'm not mad,” he smiled. There was something so pure and childlike about the guy. Hanging out with him always reminded me of Saturday mornings when I was a kid and would walk over to my neighbor friend's house to set off firecrackers and play computer games.

“So let's make your tux,” said Dirk, handing me a spare cyberdeck headset and pair of gloves. “You can pick out one of my art meshes.”

We were in Dirk's virtual office. Dirk's tuxedo was a muscular version of him, and I was a chromed-over copy of Dirk. I followed after him as he flew through a door
that opened onto a huge Louis the Fourteenth ballroom with a few hundred figures posed on the parquet floor. When we came in, the figures started slowly gesturing, driven by automatic chaos loops. “Here, Jerzy,” came Dirk's voice over the earphones. “This is my art warehouse. I'm always putting together new tuxedos. Fly around and look for something you like.”

The figures were set down in no particular order: a club-wielding caveman, a breastplated Amazon, a
Tyrannosaurus
rex, a happy carrot, Michelangelo's marble David, a pointillist Seurat woman with a bustle, a centaur, a manic white businessman smoking a pipe, a teddy bear, the pope, Bo Diddley, a vertically divided half-Elvis half-Marilyn, JFK with brains dangling from the back of his head, a knight in paisley armor, a forties secretary with glasses and tight bun, a saucer alien with tentacles on its face, a crying clown, ...

“I want to be a crying clown,” I said.

“You sure?”

“Yeah, man, a crying clown is how I feel—what with my trial coming up. Maybe if I look like a crying clown people will be nicer to me.”

“Okay,” said Dirk. “And you need a size lever. Why don't we make his penis be the lever.” Dirk chuckled and pulled the clown's pants down. The clown was endowed with a dangling hairy scrotum and an intricately veined semitumescent penis. “I figured a clown's genitals should be kind of grotesque,” said Dirk. “Getting the pants to go on and off was an interesting hack. How about if you push the clown's penis up he grows, and if you push it down he gets smaller. A Gothic joystick.”

“That's too gnarly, Dirk. Why can't you make the control be ...” I looked over at the businessman figure with his pipe clenched between the teeth of his shit-eating salesman grin. I now recognized the figure as the old
underground culture icon known as “Bob” Dobbs. “Give my clown a copy of the pipe of ‘Bob' Dobbs.”

“I like it,” said Dirk. He popped up the tool icons and picked a little glass box with buttons on it. He moved and resized the box to just fit over “Bob”'s pipe, and then pressed a button to capture a copy of the pipe that he carried over and affixed to the face of my clown. Next he used a screwdriver icon to pry open the clown's chest to reveal a symbolic arrangement of chips and wires. Dirk used a virtual pliers and soldering iron to adjust the circuitry, sealed the clown back up, and pulled down a spray can.

“You can use the pipe for size control, yes. And, Jerzy, as long as we're getting crazy, I'll make your tuxedo's surface reflectivity be like black velvet. A ‘Bob' Dobbs crying clown painted on black velvet.” He sprayed the clown till its surfaces were all matte and soft. “So try on your new tux, Jerzy. Just fly through it, and it'll click onto you.”

I flew forward and, sure enough, the crying clown clicked onto me. I moved the velvety arms around. One side of the ballroom was a huge mirror, and I flew over there to take a closer look.

“The pipe works?” I asked.

“Try it.”

I pushed up on the pipe, and rapidly grew through the ceiling of the ballroom. Outside the ballroom was raw black cyberspace with some things twinkling in the distance. I pushed the pipe down, and shrank back into the ballroom and on down and down to the size of a pissant. Dirk and the art meshes towered above me. I inched myself back up to standard size.

“This is great. Can we get out?”

“Sure.” We flew back into Dirk's virtual office and took off our headsets.

Dirk tore open his quarter ounce and stuffed the bowl of a pipe.

“Uh, Dirk,” I said as he lit the pipe. “About that burn you and Mattel did. Did you ask the phreak to do anything besides scaring me? I mean—you weren't involved in the release of the GoMotion ants, were you?”

Dirk shook his head
no
while holding his breath. He offered me the pipe, but it had already gone out.

“How do you want to get the tuxedo onto your system?” asked Dirk as he exhaled. “Ordinarily I'd say for you to just come through cyberspace and pick it up, but what with your legal situation—”

“Yeah, I'd much rather take it on disk and install it directly on my deck. The less of a trail I leave the better.”

“Agreed. I'll put it on a disk with an install script.”

“Wavy.”

We said our good-byes and I went outside. Without putting my headset on, I tapped three-one-four-one to turn on my deck. I opened the trunk and put the disk in the drive of my Pemex twelve. This was finally the golden age of system-independent plug'n'play, so the deck knew that the disk was meant to be my tuxedo, and the disk knew what format my deck wanted, and they both could agree to run the tuxedo's self-installing script.

I got in the driver's seat of my car and put on my headset for a quick cybercruise to the Bay Area Netport rest room. In the mirror I was a black velvet crying clown with the pipe of “Bob” Dobbs. Bety Byte and her grrlfriends looked at me, but I was no weirder than a lot of the tuxedos going by. I flew out to a corner of the Netport and tested out the shrink and grow commands to my satisfaction. But now it was time to pick up Gretchen.

Just for kicks, I tapped five-nine-two-six for the reality pass-through. Stunglasses mode, Riscky had called it. Instead of the Netport, my headset now showed me a TV
image of the view out my parked car's windshield. Dirk's driveway. I looked down at my hands and waggled them. There was no perceptible lag as the images came in through my headset's small video cameras, traveled to the deck in the trunk, and made their way to the headset's video screens. This was a very fast deck. I felt confident enough of it to pull out of Dirk's driveway and drive down to Los Perros wearing stunglasses. The colors were so rich and the resolution so high that I could barely tell I was wearing a headset at all.

I parked in front of Welsh & Tayke, turned off my deck, and stashed my gloves and headset in the pouch behind my seat. I could see in through the front window—Susan Poker and Gretchen were still there. After what I'd just learned about Susan Poker from Riscky—that she was a professional who'd been in on my burn—well, I didn't want to try to talk to her. I leaned on my horn. Gretchen saw me, grabbed her purse, and danced out laughing to hop in my car. She was glad to see me.

“I'm so sick of the office, Jerzy! It's a beautiful warm day—I should be at the beach!”

“We can still go to the beach. Let's go to Santa Cruz and have supper there. And maybe there's some music happening in Santa Cruz tonight. Do you want to?”

“
Yeah
, I do.” This funny emphasis of agreement was another California speech habit. “My car's down there; let's regroup at my apartment.”

After parking her Porsche at her apartment, Gretchen changed clothes. I borrowed a baggy sweater from her for if it got cold later. We checked in the paper and, yes, there was music tonight; even though it was Tuesday, there was a World Music concert taking place in the Santa Cruz Civic Center at nine. Perfect—I drove us over the Santa Cruz mountains toward the sun.

We hung out on Its Beach near Steamer Lane. It was
sunny and not too windy. Around six-thirty we went to an expensive restaurant looking out over Monterey Bay. We had lobster sausage for our appetizer and duck pizza for our main course. The lobster sausage was exquisitely toothsome, but the duck pizza was a disappointment. Duck was always a disappointment, but somehow I could never learn.

“Let's stay at my place tonight,” I said over our cap-pucino. “I don't want Susan Poker barging in on me again. I don't trust her at all anymore. I found out today that she's a cryp. She's been lying to me. Did you know that, Gretchen?”

“Who told you she was a cryp?”

“Some phreak I met at the Night Watch. His name was Riscky Pharbeque. He sold me a hot new cyberspace deck for a thousand dollars.”

“You just can't leave that stuff alone, can you, Jerzy?”

“So what
about
Susan Poker?” I demanded.

“Well, okay, it's true that she's a cryp. Welsh & Tayke uses her to get early information. I didn't tell you because I didn't want to scare you off.”

“I bet it
was
Susan Poker who called the cops on me.”

“I guess that's possible. Even though Susan smiles a lot, she isn't necessarily that nice a person. Sometimes I wonder how I ended up getting stuck with her as a friend. I'm sorry I didn't tell you, Jerzy. I was scared you'd blame me for what she does.”

“Is somebody paying her to watch me?”

“I don't know.” Gretchen stared out the window, then smiled brightly at me and changed the subject. “Do you think you'll win your trial?”

“I sure hope so. Part of my being fired from West West means that they revoke my bail next week. That three million dollars they put up? With that gone, I'll be sitting in jail.”

“Poor Jerzy. Hey! It's time for the concert.”

“Can you put this meal on your credit card, Gretchen? I'm a little short on cash.”

“Because you spent all your money on another stupid computer? I'll charge it, but you have to pay me back. All of it.
You
asked me out for dinner, so it's
your
treat.”

“Okay, okay. But don't worry, at least I've got enough cash for the tickets.”

We drove over to the Santa Cruz Civic Center, a small old hall the size of a basketball court with concrete bleachers all around. The first group was a band from Uganda. They had a midget who played an instrument made of a gourd with key chains all around it. In the crowd I lit one of my joints and passed it to Gretchen. She took a long deep drag, held her breath, and exhaled an upward plume of smoke. She stuck her tongue out and wagged her head back and forth like: “I'm feeling wild.” I got close to her and enjoyed her smell and the fanning of the air that her body motions made.

When I passed the joint back to her the second time, she stuck out her tongue and made her marijuana-smoking-wild-girl face again: “I'm high and I like it.” I loved Gretchen's tongue-faces so much. She'd made a come-hither tongue-face at me the very first time I'd seen her—at Coffee Roasting. That time her tongue had bent up over her upper lip, but for the wild-girl tongue-face at the Santa Cruz concert, Gretchen's tongue went down over her lower lip. She fascinated me.

After the concert, we went back to my room at Queue's and fucked. Queue and Keith weren't home, so we fucked loud and hard and had a great time, up there in my airy room in the redwooded Santa Cruz mountains. Pretty soon Gretchen dropped off to sleep.

I'd brought my new gloves and headset up from the car with me; they were lying on the floor next to the bed. Lying cozy in my Gretchenful bed, I pulled on the
gloves, donned the headset, and tapped into cyberspace.

You know at the end of the classic Beatles song, “Day In The Life,” how it ends on a big chord, like:
BAAAAOOOUUUUMMM
? That's the sound Riscky's deck made in my earphones, welcoming me in.

I flew across the Netport to the node of the Magic Shell Mall. In the mall, I flew to the vacant lot between Total Video and Gibb & Gibb. I walked to the same old vertex and pushed down on my pipe. The scene around me expanded smoothly, and then I was the size of a pissant and I was standing next to a big round-off error hole in the corner. I crawled through the hole.

At first it was all black, but then I saw an odd shape in front of me; a drifting piece of geometry with faces that swung crazily through each other, faces that appeared and disappeared in no logical order—it was a piece of fnoor.

The rotating fnoor changed size irregularly; at a moment when it looked much bigger than me, I sprang forward and landed on it. I ran across the faces, which flipped out under me. I still had seen no ants. Finally I came to a kind of doorway in the dense angles of the fnoor; I squeezed through it and, as before, the fnoor turned into a solid model that lay all around me.

A weirdly shifting corridor stretched out ahead. I heard a faint chirping sound. I inched forward cautiously, but suddenly the corridor turned inside out and dumped me into a round room that was filled with—ants?

Not ants, not exactly, no. The creatures racing about in the round room were shaped like Perky Pats and Dexters, like Walts and Scooters and Squidboys. I flashed on the sickening realization that all the time I'd been evolving better Squidboys and more difficult Christensens at West West, the ants had been there in the background, using the process to make their
own
code
even better. One of the Perky Pats gave me the finger.