The Hacker and the Ants (4 page)

Rather than keeping a big physical inventory of mechanical and electronic parts, GoMotion used Blackstone Hardware. Blackstone was a cyberspace hardware store with ghostly replicas of all available hardware components on its aethereal and all but endless shelves.
All available hardware
—from pinhead diodes to prestressed concrete bridge beams, from jackhammers to
chip-etching lasers, from rubber washers to superconducting yttrium/iridium whiskers. It cost $1024 an hour to walk around in Blackstone's, but it was totally worth it. Access time was fast, since you would have a knowledgeable and attentive clerk-simmie at your elbow—and once you found the part you wanted, you told the clerk and Blackstone would express mail it to you on the spot.

The Blackstone clerk had whatever appearance you wanted: clean-cut college boy, overalled graybeard, bikini-clad calendar girl—there were about fifty choices. The clerk was a simmie being run by the Blackstone catalog software, though if you had a complicated question, a person at Blackstone would slip into the clerk simmie and talk through it as if it were his or her own tuxedo. You and your clerk could be visible or invisible to the other shoppers—as you liked. For reasons of industrial security, we at GoMotion always stayed invisible in Blackstone's, as did most other big companies' shoppers.

The man who actually built our physical robot models was called Ken Thumb. Ken was a slim blue-collar type; soft-spoken, brilliant, implacable. Before signing on as GoMotion's machinist he'd worked with the Survival Research Lab art/robotics group putting together big crazy machines out of parts he found in abandoned factories and warehouses. You'd just about never see Ken in virtual reality. As someone who built real machines out of real parts, he had an irritated contempt for cyberspace.

It was a fact that cybercad designs didn't always translate effectively from cyberspace to the machine shop. The cyberspace “physics” was, after all, only a limited model of Nature's true laws. Actual materials tended to have small nicks, resonant vibrations, casting strains, thermal noises, transient voltages, and various other sources of unexpected chaoticity. This meant that
some virtual reality designs failed catastrophically when first incarnated by Ken. After he fixed the design, he would post scathing e-mail messages about what we had to do to bring our specs into line with reality.

“We” in this case was not so much me as it was Dick and Chuck, the thirty-year-old guys who did most of the nitty-gritty coding up of our Veep hardware designs. Dick was the Chief Engineer. He was pretty buttoned-down. Chuck was an insanely intense Florida country boy; every time I saw him he looked more gaunt. He was into hideously violent cyberspace battle games, Roman coliseum type matches, with full medical accuracy on the spurting arteries and severed bones.

Another person I was seeing a lot at GoMotion was Jeff Pear, the tech group manager. He'd shown up and started acting like my boss only a few months earlier, which was something I still kind of resented. I hated having a boss, any boss; it was even worse than having a landlord. Pear had bailed to GoMotion from a company that had gone bankrupt using the Lisp programming language.

The problem with Lisp was that it was not a close match for what was actually going on inside any real computer. There could, in principle, be a computer for which Lisp was right; some guy had actually designed a Lisp-based computer chip way back in the nerdly dawn of computation. Jeff Pear even had a big picture of the abandoned Lisp chip on his wall: his long-lost Promised Land. But here in the real Silicon Valley, there weren't any Lisp chips, and running Lisp on a real computer chip was like using a phrasebook to write a letter in Chinese to a friend who doesn't speak Chinese—and then having to mail a copy of the phrasebook with the letter. Running a Lisp program on a real machine meant doing that type of meaningless extra shit a few billion times a second.

The language that I and most other hackers were
using was called SuperC. SuperC was a pattern-based extension of good old C++, a concise object-oriented language that was closely attuned to the architecture of the chips we were using.

For the true killer speed necessary to keep our robots abreast of real time, even SuperC wasn't fast enough. A big part of our Veep code was based on something called ROBOT.LIB, a library of machine-instruction-coded functions and utilities that Roger Coolidge had developed on his own. How Roger had managed to write such an amazingly tight code was something of a mystery; it seemed superhuman, preternatural. Sometimes I briefly lost sight of the fact that my SuperC robot programs wouldn't have worked without Roger's ROBOT.LIB, but Roger was always ready to remind me of my oversight.

Jeff Pear was really into having meetings. At least once a week I was supposed to like physically drive to GoMotion and sit in some room with Chuck and Dick and Leonard and maybe Ken Thumb and a few others and watch while Jeff Pear drew charts on a whiteboard. A total waste of time, though I did enjoy talking to my coworkers before and after the meetings. The body has an atavistic need for physical interaction.

But let's get back to the day when Susan Poker woke me, the day when I first saw a cyberspace ant.

After talking to Leonard, I drifted past the mailboxes and on down the virtual GoMotion offices' hall. The mailboxes were buttons with people's names on them, and if I'd pushed the Jerzy Rugby button, I would have seen a representation of all the e-mail messages waiting for me—the e-mail ranging from plain text or data, up to talking video images, possibly interactive. But just then I was more interested in finding out about the loose ant.

Right near the mailboxes was the door leading to Trevor Sinclair, our man on the Net. He was physically
at the Sunnyvale GoMotion office every weekday. Trevor kept our machines talking to each other, and to the world at large, usually using cyberspace to do it. His virtual office was a life-size model of Stonehenge, accurate to a tolerance of one millimeter. He'd gotten the numerical specifications from some Chinese anthropologists, and he'd gotten the stone's texture maps from a commercial database called Rock.

There was a Wood database too, by the way, and Clouds, Fire, Water, Skin, Metal—you name it, they were all on Pixxy Textures, a subscribers-only website that GoMotion had an account for.

Trevor's tuxedo showed a good-looking man with short red hair and freckles. Trevor was one of the few people at GoMotion who was over forty like me. Despite his age, he was boyish in his enthusiasm for druids and magic. He viewed our work in cyberspace as a rehearsal for
true mastery
.

Trevor could phreak and cryp with the best of them.

“If I can physically get to a machine, I can always get in,” he liked to say. “The secret of Net control is to come on like a physical presence.” Here he'd pause and give a quiet chuckle. “Even when you're not there.”

I found Trevor sitting on a wolfskin draped over a high plinth, ruminatively fondling the magic wand which he used instead of a mouse or a keyboard. Seeing me, he made a series of mystical passes with his hands. Simmies of lizards chased each other up and down the sides of the granite blocks.

“Thought for the day,” said Trevor. “How many light bulbs does it take to change a light bulb?”

“,” I said, or mimed, rather.

“Aw, Jerzy, you've heard it before!”

“You've told it before. But listen: there's a loose ant in my system.”

“Ow,” said Trevor, and contorted his face into a hideous Punch-and-Judy grimace that grew and turned into the gargoyle at Notre Dame, into a cubic Julia set, and then into a cataclysmic explosion of knobby 3-D paisley. One of the fun things about talking to Trevor in cyberspace was that he made such great “faces.” The paisleys spermed off, Trevor's normal body image returned, and his voice resumed.

“Let's assume the worst hasn't happened. Let's assume the ants haven't crawled out over the whole Net. I think that's a reasonable supposition, or we'd be seeing ants right now.”

“Okay,” I said. “But how can they be loose on just my machine?”

“If the ants can slave your display and drive your graphics output, that means they've established a network pseudonode with your IP address,” said Trevor. “A virtual back-end server.”

Half the time I didn't know what Trevor was talking about. But there was never any use in asking, because he would just come back with more of the same. When talking to Trevor, the only way to proceed was to keep plowing forward. “So how do you think the ants got on my machine?”

Trevor made a gesture with his wand, and a scrolling screen of system log info appeared next to him. He laid his forefinger along the side of his nose and studied the list. “I rather strongly suspect you've been hosed by the Founder himself,” he said finally, with a bemused chuckle. “Roger Coolidge has been acting weird. More weird. He's been talking about an ant
eggcase.
His idea was to compile a virtual ant server, tar the binary with a bunch of self-reproducing ant programs, and compress the whole viral mess into a self-extracting program that fits inside a user's boot script. The log entries show that
Roger accessed your boot script sometime last night. Some might call it an honor, Jerzy.”

As well as working on the a-life evolution of better programs for the Veep, I'd been working with Roger and his electronic ants. Roger's interest in the ants had a different slant than mine. I liked artificial life because—like real living systems—a-life programs could do unexpected and beautiful things. The individual programs were what tended to capture my interest. Roger was more pragmatic. He said he was interested in using the GoMotion ants to model the dynamics of actual computer processes. When he did talk about science, he talked about things like species extinction and punctuated equilibria. In his home he had a large collection of expensive fossils that his wife had collected. The viruslike aspect of artificial life was also something that Roger had always found itchily fascinating.

I pointed my finger and flew through the wall of the ant lab at the end of the hall. The wall was made of industrial-strength cryp repellent updated daily by Trevor. Roger, Trevor, and I were the only people who could get into the ant lab. I expected to find Roger Coolidge's body image in there, but for now Roger wasn't there.

We'd been maintaining the cyberspace model of the ant lab so that it looked like a real bio lab, with a big black workbench, another bench full of tools, and a wall lined with cultures. We'd found that the most entertaining way to look at the ants was to let each colony drive a DTV chip to create its image.

Before going on, I have to explain about DTV, or
digital television
. The old analog TV standard had been known as NTSC. For years hackers had bitched that “NTSC” should stand for “Never Twice Same Color,” meaning that the old images had a radically inexact relationship to the signals. At first, people had thought
the next video standard would be a more detailed picture carried by a fatter analog signal. But the proposed analog signals started getting so fat that manufacturers had to invent ways to compress them. And then all of a sudden the compression algorithms had gotten so good that it had become possible to think in terms of using a digital signal for TV instead.

The difference between DTV and regular television was like the difference between CDs and the old LP records. You coded the information as zeroes and ones instead of as a wavering line. It took a shitload of bits to code a whole TV show, but if you had good enough data compression it turned out to be more efficient than broadcasting in analog. The only catch was that a DTV signal didn't look like anything on old television sets. To pick up DTV, your set had to have a DTV chip that could decompress the data and turn it back into uncompressed sound and pictures. It had taken a few years for the transition to happen, but DTV was the only kind of television around anymore, and DTV chips were cheap.

Getting his ant simulations to run on DTV chips had been one of Roger's unbelievable now-I-will-levitate hacks. But it worked great. Standing in the empty ant lab I looked at the wall of virtual screens showing ants—this was all taking place in cyberspace, remember, so the ants' DTV info was actually being routed into image-generation software that was being patched into the image which my goggles maintained. The ants looked more agitated than usual, and there seemed to be more of them.

All of a sudden something appeared in the ant lab with me, a figure that seemed to be Roger Coolidge in his usual tuxedo of gray pants and short-sleeved polyester shirt, looking at me in that moony, pop-eyed, passive-aggressive way he had.

“Hi, Roger,” I said, but now his body icon broke apart
like soft diarrhea and turned into ants, all the ants from all the colonies loose in the ant lab with me, mad ants filling the room and seething in the multiregime patterns of classical turbulence. My earphones blared skritchy chirping and my gloves' touchpads pulsed a weird vibratory massage. I was hallucinating a sharp shit stink off the ants. I was retching. I tore off the headset and the gloves . . .or I
thought
I did.

Two things that could keep a user from taking off cyberspace equipment were “voodoo cyberspaces” and “the dark dream.”

A voodoo cyberspace had hypnotic flickering and rhythmic sound intended to numb or fascinate the user too much for him or her to want to leave. Voodoo cyberspaces were really a form of entertainment, not unlike commercials or music videos.

The ants were potentially good voodoo, much livelier and more realistically seething than any artificial life-form I'd ever seen. Some kind of radically emergent breakthrough in their behavior had happened over the weekend; they were a whole new clade. Good voodoo, but way too intense just now.