The hacker and the ants

ONE

Monday morning when I answered the door there were twenty-one new real estate agents there, all in horrible polyester gold jackets. They came swarming in and scattered to every corner of my great dry-rotted California manse. Several of them had video cameras. What a thing to wake up to.

I’d been tenaciously renting the place for two and a half years despite the fact that the Indiana owner (a Mr. Nutt) continuously had it up for sale. I tried to make it hard for people to get in to look at the house, and even if an agent did manage to bring a client inside, the place had enough flaws (termites, bad foundation, bad plumbing) that nobody had wanted to buy it yet.

Sooner or later, each agent gave up, but then before long a new Realtor would stumble over the listing and come bustling in, eager to make a fat commission- perhaps as much as forty thousand dollars-by moving me out. The one here today was a frozen-faced five-foot-four yuppie blond. She’d been here before. Her name was Susan Poker and she was blandly bent on making my life so miserable that I would move out to make her activities easier.

“I appreciate your working with us on this, Mr. Rugby,” she told me after herding her twenty-one agents in through my door. She wore a dark blue skirt, a frilly white blouse and, as a mark of rank, no gold blazer. She had a gold watch and small but heavy gold earrings. She stood on my front stoop, her sunglasses impenetrable in the bright April sun, her face a mask of peach and tan makeup with thin, bright red lips. She showed her joined teeth as a gesture for a smile.

If I describe Susan Poker so particularly, it does not mean that I found her attractive. My emotions toward her were the opposite of love at first sight. This feeling for Susan Poker was of such intensity that had it been love, I would have proposed to marry her. But as things truly stood, it was my fervent wish never to see her again or, failing that, to crush her like a bug.

Actually, I’d been feeling that way about lots of people lately. My wife Carol had left me two months ago, the bitch, and I was having trouble adjusting to life alone. One of our teenagers was at college, and the other two had gone with Carol, who was living with her boyfriend in a cheesy condo on the east side of the Valley. She had a job teaching English as a Second Language to Hispanics and Vietnamese. I’d kept the big house so the kids could still have their own rooms here when they visited or stopped by after school, but this weekend the two highschoolers had stayed with Carol, the brats. Being all alone, I’d hacked all day every day as usual. Sleep was the only slack I ever had, and Susan Poker had woken me up too early.

“Why did you bring so many agents?” said I, essaying a tone of testy befuddlement. “And why do they have cameras?” My personal robot Studly sidled up behind me to peer out at Susan Poker, and then whipped around to tag after our unwanted guests.

“Some of them are new,” said Susan Poker. “We’re using your property for training today. It could set off some networking. The property’s been so terribly slow to move… I think heroic measures are called for. And the videocams? We want to get a data base so we can give browsers a virtual walk-through to decide if they want to view.” Her well-shod foot tappity-tapped the metal lockbox that she’d recently bolted to the outside of my house, down on the ground next to my front door. “With the key in here, agents will be able to come and go when you’re not home. We’ll be as little bother to you as possible.” She rummaged in her double-jointed beige leather purse and drew out a gold pencil and a small notebook. “What are your work hours? I want to put some times in the listing; times when you’ll be out of the house.” She poised her pencil and glanced up at me. “Another thought. If I can get it cleared with the branch office, I want to set up an Open House for as many Saturdays and Sundays of this month as you and I can handle.” She scrunched her nose to indicate pluckiness.

“That’s impossible!” I exclaimed. “It’s all impossible. I work at home; I never leave. And I don’t want Realtors letting themselves in. And as for an Open House…”

“Looky out back, Donny,” yelled one of the novice Realtors, a lean bumpkin with a Western accent. “Thar’s a crick!” Far from a creek, it was a dry gully. This overlaying of idiotic errors onto my own perceptual space was insufferable.

“I have a rental contract!” I shouted at Susan Poker. “If someone wants to come in here, they have to call me twenty-four hours in advance, and set up an appointment. It’s in my contract! No exceptions!”

“Mr. Rugby, I’m friends with a young couple who are looking for a place to rent. If you’re unwilling to cooperate, I’m sure I can move them in here.” She turned huffily and strode to her idling Mercedes diesel, there theatrically to pick up her cellular phone. The really killing thing about this performance was that Susan Poker had not yet even talked to Mr. Nutt, the home’s owner. She was a plastic-faced scavenger with no moral authority to harass me.

The voices and footsteps of the twenty-one new agents went on and on. Several of them handed me cards, gave encouraging winks, or tried to start conversations. Though but larvae and pupae of the species Realtor, they were frighteningly reminiscent of the adult vermin. Several of them commented on Studly the personal robot, marveling at his ability to follow them up and down my stairs. They’d never seen anything like Studly before, and no wonder, as he was an experimental prototype for a product that had yet to reach the market.

Finally the front door slammed and it was over, though two raggedly linked knots of Realtors lingered outside, chatting. I went and dead-bolted the doors, lest one of the agents get the house key from the lockbox and come back in.

I headed back toward my computer, located in the sun porch off the rear master bedroom. Time to hack some more.

My current job was with GoMotion Incorporated of Santa Clara, California. GoMotion got its start selling kits for a self-guiding dune buggy called the Iron Camel. The kit was a computer software CD that was like an interactive three-dimensional blueprint along with assembly instructions. GoMotion kit software used electronic mail to order all the parts you’d need, and it guided you step-by-step through the assembly, calling in registered building helpers if you needed them. Once you got the thing built, our kit would load intelligent software into the vehicle’s processor board, and you’d have a dune buggy that could drive itself. Various models of the Iron Camel had sold one and a half million units worldwide!

GoMotion had hired me a year earlier to help develop a new product: a kit and software for a customized personal robot called the Veep. The preliminary design work was all being done in virtual reality; instead of building lots of expensive prototype machines, Go-Motion liked to put together computer models of machines that could be tested out inside cyberspace.

My contribution to the Veep project was to use artificial life techniques as a means of evolving better algorithms for the Veep. The idea behind artificial life was to create a lot of different versions of a program, and to let the versions compete, mutate, and reproduce until eventually a winner emerged. In certain situations-like figuring out the best way to set a thousand nonlinearly coupled numerical parameters-a-life was the best way to go, although not everyone in the business believed this. I owed my job at GoMotion to the fact that Roger Coolidge, the superhacker founder of the company, was a vigorous a-life enthusiast, actively engaged in a series of experiments with electronic ant farms.

The robot Studly was the first physical prototype of a Veep that GoMotion had actually built. Studly was a joy to behold, a heartwarming payoff for all the mind-numbing hacking that went into making him happen. He moved around on single-jointed legs which ended in off-the-shelf stunt-bicycle wheels. There were small idler wheels on the knees of these legs, so that on smooth surfaces Studly could kneel down and nestle his body in between his big wheels, with the little knee wheels rolling on ahead. In this mode, he didn’t have to waste compute time keeping his balance. Out in the yard, Studly would rise up into a bent-knee crouch, using arm motions and internal gyroscopes to steady himself. On stairs, the full glory of Studly’s a-life-evolved control algorithms came into play; he would turn sideways and work his way up or down with his two wheels on different steps, using precise lunges and gyro pulses to keep from falling over. Depending on your mood, Studly’s peculiar movements seemed comic, beautiful, or obscurely sinister.

As I sat down at my desk, I had a sudden vision of “giving” Studly to Susan Poker after programming him to chop her up and push her down her garbage disposal. The blood would be on Studly’s manipulators, not mine. I tunelessly hummed the way I do when I think thoughts I shouldn’t.

The phone rang.

“Hello, Mr. Rugby?” A woman’s brisk, aggressive voice.

“Yes.”

“This is Louise Calder from Welsh amp; Tayke Realty. Do you mind if I bring a client by in half an hour? They’re quite interested in the property.”

“I’m very busy today. I don’t want to show the house.”

The voice was instantly, unforgivingly venomous. “I’ll pass that on to the owner, Mr. Rugby. Good-bye.” She hung up and immediately the phone began to ring again. Friends of Susan Poker. While the phone rang on, I donned the headset and control gloves of my computer. The headset showed me the image of an office with a ringing telephone. I had a computer-generated body image in this virtual office, and the body moved around with the gestures of my control gloves. I flew across the office and pulled the virtual wires out of my virtual telephone. The ringing stopped.

My computer system was configured as a cyberdeck, complete with two gray Spandex control gloves and a white plastic headset, all connected to the computer by wires. The system was almost top of the line, but not quite. If GoMotion had been willing to spend just a little more, my gloves and headset would have had wireless computer connections, so that I could move around more while using them.

But anyway. My computer would generate three-dimensional graphics that it could show from any angle, in stereo vision, by feeding pairs of images to the two electronic lenses of my headset. The headset had a microphone and speakers, also a sensor that told the system about my head movements so it could update the viewpoint.

The system let me feel as if I were inside a different space, the artificial reality of the computer. Most people called it cyberspace. Turning or moving my head would change my viewpoint; I could lean to one side and look around a nearby object. And the gloves let the computer generate real-time images of my hands. Seeing moving images of my hands in front of me enhanced the illusion that I was really inside cyberspace.

The simulated objects of cyberspace were known as simmies. My hand images were simmies, as was the virtual phone in my cyberspace office. As well as having a characteristic appearance, a simmie had a characteristic behavior-one simmie might sit still, and another might like to move around. The behavior part of a simmie could become so complicated that the thing practically seemed alive.

In cyberspace I could wrap my fingers around the simmies I found, effectively grabbing hold of them. And once I had hold of a simmie, I could move it about-unless the simmie happened to insist on staying in one place. When I would point and nod, my viewpoint would start moving in the direction I was pointing in. I would make a fist to stop.

But what was cyberspace? Where did it come from? Cyberspace had oozed out of the world’s computers like stage-magic fog. Cyberspace was an alternate reality, it was the huge interconnected computation that was being collectively run by planet Earth’s computers around the clock. Cyberspace was the information Net, but more than the Net, cyberspace was a shared vision of the Net as a physical space.

My illusion of being able to step right into cyberspace was made convincing by my headset’s most excellent electronic lenses. The lenses were lumps of optical glass with funky-looking patches of plastic glued to them. The patches were rhodopsin-doped limpware goodies that worked as endlessly tweakable color monitors, labile as the chromatophores of a squid. The lenses’ glass bent way around on the sides, creating peripheral vision and eyeball kicks from the anamorphic edge-scrunched images my computer would put out.

Whenever I put on the gloves and the headset, it was like being in a different room, an invisible secret room of my house: my virtual office. When I talked or made gestures in my virtual office, my computer interpreted me and executed my commands. The “pulling wires out of the phone” gesture I’d just made, for instance, caused my computer to shunt all my incoming phone calls to an answering machine.

My virtual office could look like almost anything-it could be a palace, an igloo, or a bubble in the deep blue sea. As it happened, I was using the default office pattern which came with my cyberspace software. The default office was really two-thirds of an office: it had one wall missing and no ceiling. One of the remaining walls was for doors to Net locations I often visited, and the other two walls were covered with pictures and documents that I either liked or needed to remember. Over my walls and in the far background I would see whatever landscape I was currently hottest for-in those days it was a swamp with simmies that looked like dinosaurs and pterodactyls. It was called Roarworld; I’d gotten it off the Net.

Each of the simmies in the Roarworld program had a bunch of software stubs to which the user could attach his/her own pieces of code, thus tailoring the Roarworld simmies’ appearance and behavior. If you preferred it, you could have the Roarworld creatures look like lions and tigers, or sharks and dolphins, but to my mind the dinosaur graphics were by far the best. To make the simulation livelier, I’d linked the dinosaurs’ legs to copies of Studly’s control-feedback walking algorithms. My dinosaurs chased after each other really well. When I toggled on the mighty Roarworld sound module, it was more than awesome. GAH-ROOOOONT!

My virtual desk had a simmie keyboard and a mound of flat simmies of sheets of paper: letters and programs I was currently working on. If I wanted to revise a document, I just picked up its simmie, positioned it over the virtual keyboard, and typed away. My simmie keyboard was so sensitively tuned to my glove outputs that I only needed to wiggle the tips of my fingers.

When I was typing, an outside observer would have seen me madly twitching my fingers in the air. I’d gotten rid of my mechanical keyboard because I’d reconfigured my simmie keyboard to the point where it didn’t closely match the dumbly obstinate geometry of the mechanical board.

Even though I typed in thin air, it felt as though I was touching something, for my gloves had tactile feedback. Woven in with the Spandex were special pie-zoplastic touchpads that could swell up and press against my hand. The touchpads on my fingertips pulsed each time I pushed down on a virtual key.

It was marvelous, but sometimes my hands missed the physical support of a keyboard. When I would hack a lot, my forearms would hurt and my thumbs and pinkies would get numb. I sometimes worried about getting carpal tunnel syndrome and losing my ability to type. For a hacker this would be like a trumpeter losing his or her lips. I kept meaning to get a wedge of malleable plastic in the shape of a keyboard. It was easy to get them, like at Fry’s Electronics in Sunnyvale; they were called feely-blank keyboards.

You could get all sorts of feely-blank accessories for cyberspace, and yes, dear horn-dog, there were even male/female feely-blank love-dolls, complete with hinged limbs and cunningly engineered touchpads. The love-dolls came with get-down simmie software to show images that matched the doll’s motions. If you wanted to spend a little more money, you could dial a 900 number for a live person who’d teleconference your doll through all manner of erotic outrages. But I hadn’t looked extensively into the details of cybersex; when you were hacking as much as I did, you didn’t want to be near a computer in your free time.

The two feely-blank things I actually owned were a potter’s wheel and a weighted golf club handle which Carol had given me last Christmas. The club handle was short-so that I didn’t smash everything around me while working my way down, say, the fabulous second oceanside hole of the Toshiba Cyberspace Pebble Beach. The clever thing about the feely-blank golf club was that the tip held a gyroscope which did a cyberized jiggly-doo right when I would hit the virtual ball-giving me the shock of contact.

The potter’s wheel was for Carol, and for awhile she had enjoyed using it. It was like a regular electric wheel, except that it had a permanent “lump of clay” which was made of firm, malleable titaniplast putty. They used the same stuff for the feely-blank keyboards; you could mold and remold it to any shape you wanted, and it never got brittle. I’d kept all the virtual pots Carol made in a file somewhere.

Anyway, I kept meaning to go get a fake keyboard, but physically going places and buying material objects for my computer was not something I was into. I mean walking into a place like Fry’s Electronics was always a downer, everyone sucking down Jolt Colas and munching candy bars, no women in sight, just males-pitiful bewildered larvae from under a rock, or pompous bearded lawn-dwarves with tenor voices, or square-forehead Frankenstein monsters, or sweaty strivers with no fingernails-lumps and losers to a man. How had I ended up associated with this class of people? Oh well, as the California kids would say when something not particularly desirable happened. Oh well!

The two neatest things in my virtual office were my Lorenz attractor and my dollhouse. The Lorenz attractor was a floating dynamical system consisting of orbiting three-dimensional icons, little simmie images that stood for pieces of information or which represented things my computer could do. The icons tumbled along taffy trajectories that knotted into a roller coaster pair of floppy ears with a chaotic figure eight intersection. If I liked, I could make myself small and ride around on the Lorenz attractor in a painless demolition derby with my files. It was a fun way to mull things over.

My dollhouse was a special miniature cyberspace model of my house that I’d once made as a Christmas present for little Ida, but she’d never actually played with it that much-one reason being that I was hardly ever willing to let anyone else use my gloves and headset. I needed them all the time for all the work I had to do-always too much work!

I’d tweaked my real house’s alarm system so that if anyone touched a door or window, the corresponding door or window would light up on the dollhouse. I had little models of myself and my family members inside my dollhouse. Actually my wife and three children shouldn’t have been in the dollhouse at all anymore, as they no longer lived here, but it would have made me too sad and lonely to erase them. In my dollhouse, my wife was in the kitchen and my kids were lying on their stomachs in the living room doing homework and watching a tiny digital TV. If they’d actually been in my house, moving from room to room, the little simmie-dolls that represented them would have moved around too. My house was smart enough always to know who was in which room. The little virtual TV was hooked into the Fibernet system; sometimes I would make myself small and watch it with my dolls, though never for long. Everything on TV enraged me, because everything on TV was the same: the ads, the news, the shows. In my opinion, all TV was all part of the huge, lying Spectacle that the government kept running to oppress us all. Data compression had brought us a thousand channels, but they all sucked, same as ever.

The dollhouse’s Studly-model did move around because he actually was physically in the house with me, rolling around and cleaning, gardening, keeping an eye on things, taking care of business, and occasionally talking to me. If I wanted to check something in the house, I could switch over to Studly’s viewpoint, and see what he was seeing through his two video camera eyes. When Carol had still lived with me, I would sometimes use Studly to sneak in and watch her while she was dressing or taking a piss. That would drive her frantic with rage. “I know you’re in there, Jerzy,” she’d scream as oily Studly sidled up to capture her pixels and send them through the aether to me. “Get your head out of that computer and come talk to me like a human being!” Usually, however, I didn’t have the time. When I was programming, I was always in a terrific rush.

Sitting in my office after Susan Poker left, it occurred to me that if I were to use Studly to kill the Realtor, I wouldn’t really have to program him for it. It would be much easier to couple myself to his manipulators and drive him in real time. That was known as telerobotics — a person driving a robot that was somewhere else, with the distant person using television to “see through the eyes of the robot.” Telerobotics was one of the most fun things you could do with a robot.

Tunelessly humming, I looked up from the doll-house and stared at the images riding my Lorenz attractor. Most of them were quite familiar, but what with my hookup to the Net and the existence of some more or less autonomous processes in our company machines, I would sometimes spot‘ a new icon. Today the new one was a little 3-D image of an ant, a sweetly made photorealistic model with mandibles, head, antennae, alitrunk, legs, petiole, and gaster-the spitting image of the virtual ants that Roger Coolidge had been working on in his lab at GoMotion. But no way were any GoMotion ants supposed to be loose like this. I pincered it up with virtual thumb and forefinger. It wriggled its legs and turned its head to bite me. The ant bite made a tingling physical flutter in my glove’s touchpads. There was a noise with it, a double burst of skritchy chaos. I dropped the ant. Chirping angrily, it dug its way down through my virtual office floor and disappeared.

Instead of chasing after the ant, I pointed my finger to the GoMotion door and nodded in there. The necessary information traveled over the Fibernet and then for a moment I saw nothing but a snowstorm of static, as the GoMotion communication software checked my access codes. There was a warbling tone as our systems synced together, and then I walked into the virtual offices of GoMotion.

How did I look? Like most users, I owned a tailor-made simmie of my cyberspace body. Cyberspace users called their body-simmies tuxedos. My tuxedo was a suite of video images bitmapped onto a blank humanoid form. The form’s surface was a mesh of triangles which could be adjusted like a dressmaker’s dummy; and inside the form were virtual armatures and hinges so that the thing moved about as realistically as one of those little wooden mannequins that artists used to have. The overall size of the thing was adjusted to closely match my body size with, of course, a few inches taken off the waist.

I’d had my body surfaces taped by a professional body-mapping studio right there in Los Perros: Dirk Blanda’s Personography. You’d go to Dirk Blanda’s and in the reception area there was a wall with plaster body-shapes lined up against it. Mounted on the ceiling over each body was a video projector beaming a satisfied customer’s image onto one of the body-shaped screens. Dirk Blanda’s had started out as a photo studio, but when the last big quake had wiped out his building, he’d retooled and gotten modern. I actually knew Dirk fairly well as his house was almost next to mine.

The tuxedo I used was pretty routine; it showed me wearing what I usually wore in real life, which was sandals, patterned socks, shorts, and a California sport shirt. I could change the patterns of the fabrics of my socks and shirt, and if I wanted to, I could get new simmie clothes, or I could even turn my clothes off entirely. The nude version of my tuxedo allowed me the option of deciding whether or not my simmie-genitals should show. In any case, the face was the important part. I had a series of canned expression shots; Dirk’s assistant had spent the better part of two hours coaching me into convincing expressions of laughter, surprise, boredom, anger, grief, etc. For casual communication, my software would guess at my expression from the sound of my voice. For higher-bandwidth communication, there was a pencil-sized video camera on my computer which could map realtime images of my face onto my tuxedo’s head.

I came into the GoMotion reception area wearing an expression of controlled worry. The tuxedo of Leonard, the tech group secretary, looked up at me and activated a roguish-smile expression. Leonard had a damp mustache and a perpetual sunburn. His virtual office was a big loft with clean white walls and skylights showing fluffy clouds overhead. A simmie of Bengt, our virtual prototype for Studly’s successor, was purring back and forth, pushing a polisher across the parquet floor. Bengt’s neck was a bit longer than Studly’s, and his body box had a slimmer shape. But for his legs he used the same inspired wheels-on-legs hack as Studly.

“Hi, Jerzy,” said Leonard.

“Hi, Leonard. Say, I think some of our ants got loose. Has anyone else noticed?”

Leonard laughed merrily. In his tux laugh loop, he would always touch his tongue to his mustache at the right corner of his mouth, a tic which made him seem both puppyish and devil-may-care.

“Why don’t you ask your bad rogue ant for some ID? Dereference a pointer or something.”

“When I picked it up, it bit me,” I explained. Leonard laughed the more wildly.

“It’s not funny, Leonard. If the ant is eating and shitting and leaving trails, all my code is being corrupted. It’s a wonder I can still see.”

“I’d think you’d be proud of yourself. Roger’s been promising us live ante for years, and now that you’ve been working with him, one of his ants has finally gotten smart enough to break out. Isn’t that a good thing, Jerzy?”

“Is Roger here?”

“He’s been in and out all weekend. Maybe he e-mailed you the ant!”

“Maybe.” Sending an experimental artificial life-form out over the electronic mail Net would be an incredibly careless thing to do, but not wholly out of character for Roger Coolidge. He was a genius-level computer hacker, somewhat eccentric, and imbued with the self-confidence that came from having founded a Silicon Valley startup that had mushroomed to a billion dollars in revenue in six short years. It was an honor for me to get to work so closely with him. Sometimes it was also a pain in the neck.

I sighed, and my computer transmitted my sigh from my microphone to Leonard’s receiver, wherever Leonard really was. Often he was physically at the GoMotion office in Sunnyvale, but several days a week he worked from his apartment down on Market Street in San Francisco. Maybe instead of wearing the gloves and the headset, he was watching me on a digital TV set, talking to me over a telephone, and moving his simmie with a video game joystick. For all I knew, looking at Leonard’s brightly cheerful cyberspace simulacrum, he was spending the day in bed with a lover. It was no use speculating. “How’s Bengt been doing? Has he banged into the furniture?”

“No. He’s smarter than Studly. Look.” Leonard scooped a handful of paper clips off his desk and threw them out in front of Bengt. GoMotion had modeled the laws of physics into Leonard’s office, so the little paper clip simmies flew along naturalistic parabolas, bounced on the woodgrain-patterned floor, and skidded to rest.

Bengt had been down on all four wheels pushing his floor buffer, but now he rose up into an alert crouch, balancing easily on his flexed legs. After carefully looking around the room, Bengt wheeled over to stop a few inches from the nearest paper clip and unfolded his pincer-clamp manipulator. Delicately he tweezered up the paper clip and put it in a drawer in his chest. Moving with no wasted motions, Bengt worked his way around the room to pick up all the paper clips before he resumed buffing the floor. The less efficient Studly would have dealt with the paper clips in a one-by-one, piecemeal fashion as his floor polisher bumped into them.

“Right on,” I said. “The improvements are thanks to genetic algorithms and artificial life, Leonard. I think Bengt’s ready for Our American Home.”

After one of our personal robot models could negotiate Leonard’s virtual office, we liked to test it in a full-size simmie-house that we called Our American Home. We had simmies of a family who supposedly lived there: clumsy Walt and Perky Pat Christensen, with son Dexter and daughter Baby Scooter. They all had blond hair and texture-mapped tan skin, and they all bothered the robots in different ways.

Dexter liked to play pranks. He’d tip a robot over onto its back and drag it to the head of the stairs with a blanket over its head. Perky Pat would give the robots contradictory commands, “Now follow me, and stay right where you are. Hurry, dammit!” Baby Scooter was a sullen blob who would nap on the floor, waiting to see if a robot would bump her or nip her so she could scream bloody murder. Sometimes Walt got “drunk,” and Perky Pat got “totally wired,” and they would lurch and spazz around, doing their best to trip over the increasingly wary robot simmie.

The tests in Our American Home were crucial, as the possibility of personal robots injuring someone was the A-number-one factor that had kept them off the open market in the past. Although if there were accidents, GoMotion’s position would be that they were only selling kits and software for the Veep robots-rather than the completed Veeps themselves. If your robot screwed up, it was your fault for having built it. So far this type of defense had held up against people whose Iron Camels had crashed. Our kits came with “no explicit or implied warranty of merchantibility or fitness for a particular purpose.” Even so, the Veeps had to be very safe and very good if they were going to sell well.

My work at GoMotion was to try and use artificial life evolution techniques to improve the programs that controlled the Veep. Once we had the specs for a new prototype, instead of actually building it out of wires and metal, we would generate a simmie of the thing and test it out in cyberspace. Roger Coolidge had been one of the first fully to exploit this great corner-cutting trick. He had used it to design the Iron Camel. Being something of a bullshit artist, in the most Midwestern kind of way, Roger had dubbed his trick “cybercad.”

CAD stood for computer aided design; most architects and engineers were using CAD instead of drafting tools. The idea behind CAD was to draw a three-dimensional computer graphical model of, say, a fan blade before you built it. Someone gave you a blueprint for a fan blade and you made a digital data base which in some sense was the blade. You could generate graphic views of it from every angle, zoom in on its details, take cross sections of it, calculate its weight and volume, etc. Cybercad meant pushing all this a little farther; in cybercad you could pump in virtual air, spin the blade, and measure the net blowage.

The funny thing about the “cyber” prefix was that it had always meant bullshit.

Back in the 1940s, the story went, MIT doubledome Norbert Wiener had wanted a title for a book he’d written about the electronic control of machines. Claude Shannon, also known as The Father Of Information Theory, told Wiener to call his book Cybernetics. The academic justification for the word was that the “cyber” root came from the Greek word for “rudder.” A “kybernetes” was a steersman, or, by extension, a mechanical governor such as a weight-and-pulley feedback device you might hook to your tiller to keep your sailboat aimed at some fixed angle into the wind. The practical justification for the word was contained in Shannon’s advice to Wiener: “Use the word ‘cybernetics,’ Norbert, because nobody knows what it means. This will always put you at an advantage in arguments.”

When I wanted to get a feel for one of our Veep simmies, I would set my viewpoint so that I could see through the robot’s eyes and move its parts with my own hands. I wore the robot-model like a tuxedo, and I drove the robot around in cyberspace houses. No actual robot and no actual house-just an idea for a robot in an idea of a house. I would try and figure out what was right and wrong with the current model. If I noticed a problem with any of the hardware-bad pincer design for instance-I would go into cyberspace and use a Makita Visual Regrammarizer to change the geometry and back-propagate the changes to make a new set of specs.

Once I had a good knowledge of the kinds of things a particular robot could do, I would pull back to try and write software that could drive it around without me being “in” it. And then, I might need to change the simmie to make it work better with the new software. This process would take dozens, scores, hundreds, or even thousands of iterations. The only way to make a profit was to do as much of this as possible in virtual reality. Cybercad!

Even with the use of cybercad, the process still wouldn’t have worked if each iteration involved human judgment-for then it would have taken too long. So GoMotion was using artificial life techniques to make the evolution happen automatically. The way I’d applied this to the Veep was to look at the kinds of changes that the other programmers and I had typically been making to the code. I’d been able to cast our repeated program changes in terms of 1347 different numerical parameters that we were tweaking and re-tweaking. So now the problem of making a good Veep became the problem of finding good values for those 1347 mutually interacting numbers. To do this, Roger and I had run a process of simulated evolution on a population of a few hundred simulated Veeps that we’d installed in a virtual suburb of Our American Homes, each home with a different Veep but the same virtual family consisting of instances of Walt, Perky Pat, Dexter, and Baby Scooter Christensen.

Some of the badly parametrized virtual Veeps did things like get stuck in a corner and buff the floor so long in one place that they made a hole, or wander outside and get lost, or kill everyone in the house and burn the house down. These were parameter sets to get rid of.

Over and over the badly behaving parameter sets were replaced by combinations of the better-behaving sets, and after a quintillion machine instructions had executed we’d gotten a good design. Artificial life!

When GoMotion would get a combination of software and simmie that seemed to work well, they’d order up the parts and build a material prototype of the thing, like Studly.

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 would find 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 did not 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 an object-oriented extension of good old C, a concise 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 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 and cy-mail messages waiting for me-e-mail being plain text or data, and cy-mail being a talking video image, 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 computer compact disk called Rock.

There was a Wood disk too, by the way, and Clouds, Fire, Water, Skin, Metal-you name it, they were all in the Pixxy Textures Library, a data base of fifty CDs mounted on a rack which fit into a device known as a CD jukebox.

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. 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 an Ethernet pseudonode with your 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 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 snowing 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 multire-gime 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 lifeform 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.

I thought I took my headset off, and I thought I saw it lying on my desk. I touched myself, I was fine, I stood up and pushed back my chair, I turned and leaned down and grabbed hold of my power cord and yanked it and saw the plug pop out of the wall, and saw the lights on my computer go out, and saw the little images in the headset on the desk wink out, and then I turned and walked toward the door and out of nothingness something plucked at my temple. Out of thin air, something tugged at the side of my head.

It was the cable that led from my headset to the computer. I was still wearing the headset, I now realized. The ants had put me on the dark dream! I tore off the headset and the gloves.

The essence of the dark dream was to make you think you’d taken off the gloves and headset when really you hadn’t. It was like when your alarm clock goes off and you want to keep sleeping, so you dream you’ve woken up and gotten out of bed and turned off the alarm, and then you start dreaming that the continuing noise of the alarm is just something normal like traffic or a leaf blower or a backing truck’s beeper.

Right before I thought I’d taken off my headset, the dark dream had shown me a perfectly taped and enhanced image of it happening, synced to my movements. It had tricked my hand-eye feedback loop, and like some defective robot, I’d failed to “physically acquire” the headset before I “took it off.”

You probably think you’d never make a mistake like that, but just try perturbing your mouth-ear feedback loop with, say, a half-second delay. Read a sentence and heaheare ahhself reareading try pt-pt-ry to

… When effects lag too far behind your actions, you enter a blithering state of confusion which cyberspace engineers call feebdack, with “feeb” as in “feebleminded.”

I jerked my power cord out of the wall. In the dark dream, I’d gotten hold of it all right, but the cord was way longer than the dark dream had shown me, the cord had two coiled loops of slack under my desk and all I’d done was to straighten out a loop’s worth while the dark dream showed the plug popping out of the wall and made the sound of the plug bouncing off the floor.

I ran down to the kitchen and got a drink of water just to feel something real, then ran back and made sure my machine was really off, grabbed my wallet, took my rack of backup CDs, stepped out of the house and, thank God, Nature was there. No machine’s dark dream could hack the whole world.