The hacker and the ants

TEN

In Geneva I got through passport control and customs without a hitch. Nobody asked me about the Y9707-EX chips. But I was tense; I kept feeling as though people were shoving their faces up close to me.

It was four in the afternoon local time when I stepped out into the public airport lobby, a big stone-floored glass-and-metal hall with lots of shops. For a moment I thought I was free to go off on my own-but then someone tapped my shoulder. It was an athletic, middle-aged Italian man in an unmarked blue serge uniform. He tipped his hat and smiled with his teeth.

“Welcome, Mr. Schrandt! Mr. Coolidge sends me here to drive you. My name is Tonio. Do you have luggage?”

“No,” I sighed. “No, no, this is my only bag. And I can carry it.” I was sad to see this guy. “So you’re going to drive me up to Roger’s villa in Saint-Cergue?”

“Exactly,” said Tonio and gestured sweepingly toward the exit. “Please to come with me.” It would have been nice to buy a big hunting knife first, but, hell, there’d be knives in Roger’s kitchen. I followed along.

Outside it was drizzling briskly. Tonio had parked Roger’s car at the curb right outside the entrance. The car was an unimpressive beige Subaru station wagon. At Tonio’s urging, I sat in back. We did a piece on the Autoroute, and then we headed up the rolling green slopes of the Jura Mountains. Before long we were racing up the same winding road that the Swissair guide had mapped for me in cyberspace. Tonio drove much too fast for my comfort, repeatedly tailgating and passing other cars. I asked him to drive slower, but he chose not to understand.

In the cold Swiss springtime, Saint-Cergue looked battened down and godforsaken. The wet posters for cigarettes and liquors were all in French. There were several barns with piles of straw and manure right on the main street; the runoff from the piles fanned filthily across the pavement. A thin village idiot in a plastic raincoat and a plastic-covered beret went lurching past, one hand fingering his bristly chin.

Tonio slewed into a tiny road off the main street and sped uphill two and a half kilometers to Roger’s domain: two sturdy Swiss buildings that looked to be made of concrete. The walls were covered in rough stucco, and the roofs were of heavy gray tile. No neighboring houses were in sight. The rain was pouring down harder than ever.

The first building was large and windowless; the second was a house, long and low. Its windows had the European metal roll-down shutters, but most of the shutters were open. Tonio snapped open a big black umbrella and walked me up to the house’s automated front door. The puddles splashed over my sandals and soaked my socks.

Roger came quickly after Tonio’s first knock. The door made a heavy thunk as it unlocked itself and swung open.

“Jerzy! You made it! Come on in.”

“Hi, Roger.”

“Do you need anything else, Mr. Coolidge?” asked Tonio.

“I don’t think so, Tonio. Do you need anything, Jerzy?”

“How would I know? I barely know where I am. Can I sleep here?”

“Of course,” said Roger. “You’re my guest. So, yes, that’s all, Tonio. I’ll call you in the morning.” Tonio splashed back down the path to the driveway, and the door locked itself behind him.

All the floors in Roger’s house were dusty plywood; he’d stripped away whatever had been on them before. I’d expected that Roger would be living rich, but no, he was living weird. “Kay is back in California just now,” said Roger, referring to his absent wife. “Would you like a tour?” It didn’t occur to him to offer me food or drink.

“I’d like to talk first.”

“Fine.” Roger wore an inoffensive, even subservient, expression. On things that didn’t matter to him he played the spineless jellyfish but-as I knew from experience-when it came to something he did care about, he was like a saber-tooth tiger.

He led me from the entrance hall into the living room, pausing to point out a tiled structure the size of a refrigerator. “Look at this,” said Roger. “This is a Swiss ceramic stove.”

The stove was nicely tiled in blue and white; some of the tiles had flowers painted on them. My feet were cold and wet, but even so the stove looked anything but cozy-to me it looked like the phreaked-out Beetlejuice Monkey thing I’d seen the last time I went after the cyberspace ants. The Beetlejuice Monkey had been a cross between a Mandelbrot set, an ant and-I felt sure of it now-Roger’s stove. But why? I reached out and touched the stove; it was stone-cold.

About half the wallpaper had been stripped off the living room walls. Set into a jagged hole in the wall near the stove was an uncased computer with a keyboard. The fit was bad enough that I could see the computer’s chips and wires. A nice molding for it would come later, after the wallpaper got fixed.

“That’s my house computer,” said Roger. “It controls the heat, lights, locks, shutters, and so on. I had to put in fifty-seven different servo motors for it. What an interesting hack that was!”

I walked across the room and looked out the living room’s big window. It showed trees and the road that led back down to Saint-Cergue, though with the rain, I could only see a hundred meters before the road melted into mist.

“When it’s clear, you can see Lake Geneva with sailboats on it,” said Roger. “And when it’s very clear, you can see Alps on the other side of the lake. But you said you want to talk. Let’s go into my study.”

The light in the study came on automatically when we entered. The room was as I’d seen it last night in cyberspace. Plywood floor, gray drywall walls with white plaster at the seams, and a window that looked out onto a meadow sloping uphill. A long, filled-in dirt trench scarred one side of the meadow. There was a closed-circuit TV-monitor and a cyberspace deck on the desk. The monitor was tuned to a view of Roger’s empty driveway. Roger sat down in his comfortable armchair; there was a folding plastic chair for me in the corner next to a cardboard box of random home repair tools. I dragged the chair over to sit near Roger.

“This property is very interesting,” said Roger. He was so rich that all the people he ever talked to agreed with him. This gave him license to play the happy prattling boy, babbling on about whatever his current obsession might be, confident that he would be listened to and taken seriously. “The person who lived here before me was a manufacturer of plastics compression-molding equipment. Donar Kupp. He died last year. He patented a method for incorporating three-dimensional electronic circuits into solid lumps of thermosetting imipolex resin. Smart beads. They’re amazing artifacts-I have one around here someplace, it looks like a fly in amber. A very gnarly fly, mind you.” Roger chuckled happily. “All the major pipeline companies use Kupp’s smart beads to monitor fluid flow, and the French riot police use the beads for smart nonlethal bullets.” I’d never read about any of this, but, as usual, Roger knew it all. “Kupp retired here five years ago, and he fixed up the other building-the one by the driveway-he fixed it up like a factory. He wanted to expand on his circuit inclusion technique. Since thermoset imipolex is a semiconductor, he found it possible to grow diode and triode transistors right into-”

“Hey, come on, Roger,” I interrupted. “Let’s talk about the ants. Let’s talk about me being fired and framed and phreaked out of my mind. Why did you do it, Roger? What’s all this been for?”

Roger paused and gazed at me in that blank, dreamy, slightly irritated way of his. “All this has been for better robots,” he said presently. “You did such a good job on the Veep for GoMotion that I wanted you to go to West West and have a second shot at robotics programming. I want to breed the robots, you see, so I needed to have two parents that were different. The next generation of robots could be quite a surprise.”

“You want to breed the robots?”

“That’s the future, Jerzy, it’s manifest destiny. The robots need to breed and evolve. They need to self-replicate. This is about artificial life, for crying in the sink.”

“You want the robots to build more robots? What if they take over the Earth?” I asked.

“I don’t particularly want them to stay on the Earth,” said Roger impatiently. “Robots aren’t meant to be our slaves. Who in his right mind wants a slave anyway? The robots are meant to evolve, to take the torch from us and to grow beyond what we’ve done. We should send robots to the Moon. If you make a robot small enough, it can stand an awful lot of acceleration. Launching a capsule of robots with an electromagnetic railgun might work. I’ve been trying to talk to NASA about this, but so far I’ve only been talking to idiots.”

I shook my head. Space travel was one of Roger’s hobbyhorses-and no way was I about to gallop off on it with him. “Please don’t let’s change the subject, Roger. We’re talking about what you’ve been doing to me. How do the ants fit into the picture? Why did you let them ruin television?”

“I thought you’d be happy. Aren’t you the one who’s always saying he hates TV?”

“Sure, but when you released the ants, you stuck me with the blame. How did you get Studly to do that thing with the Fibernet anyway?”

“I was driving him,” said Roger, smiling slyly. You almost had to love the guy.

“Telerobotics? I thought you were in Switzerland by then!”

“I was, but that doesn’t matter. I used a cyberspace telerobotic interface. My signal would have been too weak, but Vinh Vo was carrying a signal-amplifying transponder in the back of his panel truck. When I heard you were trying to date Nga Vo, I did a data search and found Vinh as a relevant sleazebag. He worked out perfectly.”

“Oh God.” I was struggling to take it all in. “It was you who killed the dog?”

“Well, that was an accident. Driving Studly was like the world’s best arcade game, but it was the first time I’d played.”

“But why pin the ant release on me?”

“You were handy. And it made better sense than letting GoMotion catch the blame! I own a million shares of GoMotion stock. When the stock goes down a point, I lose a million dollars. I had to release the ants so that they’d get out into more environments and evolve faster. I mean, why do you think our robot code worked so well in the first place?”

The heavy rain outside was drumming on the roof and splashing into the puddles. “The robot code?” I said. “It worked well because I wrote good algorithms that I tweaked with genetic evolution.”

Roger cocked his head and stared at me with quizzical annoyance.

“Oh yeah,” I added, “there were also all the basic subroutines you wrote. Your awesome ROBOT. LIB code. I guess nothing would have worked without them. Without ROBOT. LIB the programs wouldn’t have been fast enough to use.”

“They would have sucked wind,” said Roger. “And, guess what, I didn’t write ROBOT. LIB. The GoMotion ants wrote ROBOT. LIB. I wrote the code that wrote the code. That’s the main thing the ants were for. Didn’t you ever realize that?”

“No,” I said, shaking my head in wonder. When I’d started on at GoMotion, Roger had never gotten around to giving me a full explanation of what we were up to. He’d just turned me over to Jeff Pear and to Pear’s deadlines. “But if the ants are in ROBOT. LIB, why don’t they take over and ruin the robots like they ruined television?”

“The ants aren’t in ROBOT. LIB, they just wrote it,” said Roger. “As for the ants taking over the Y9707-chip robots-well, they haven’t been able to so far because of the GoMotion ant lion. The ant lion has a magic bullet that kills ants. It’s a special instruction that stops them dead in their tracks; it fossilizes them. It’s like Raid or Black Flag.”

“I put a bit-for-bit copy of an ant lion into the Adze code,” I said, “but the ant lion is so compressed and encrypted that I still have no idea how it works. What is the magic bullet?”

“Can’t you guess? It’ll be more fun for you if you guess. I love to guess.”

My mind felt slow and sludgy. My feet were cold. Instead of answering, I sullenly looked away. Outside it was still raining.

“Can I have the chips now, Jerzy?” said Roger after awhile.

“What chips?”

“The four Y9707-EXs that you have in your satchel. I’ll give you, oh, eighty thousand dollars for them. Eighty thousand dollars for the chips and for your goodwill. I mean it.”

“When would I get paid?”

“Right away.” Roger stood up and pulled open the top drawer of his desk. “I have your money right here.” He laid it out next to the cyberdeck, eight packets of hundred-dollar bills, each packet with a wrapper band saying $10,000.

“You’re not planning to kill me are you?” I asked nervously.

“Of course not, Jerzy. In fact I’m hoping you can stay here a while and work with me. You’re a fellow maniac!”

I took the packet of chips out of my black satchel and handed it to Roger. He stood aside and gestured at the money. I stuffed the sheaves of dollars into my satchel. They barely fit.

Roger was peering at the chips. “If Vinh Vo didn’t garble my instructions, these should be better for my purposes-these are ant-designed chips that I had one of Vinh’s contacts make at National Semiconductor.” He smiled up at me. “They’re supposed to run twice as fast-and, what’s even more important, they don’t support the ant lion. The ants will be able to get into these new robots and party.” He pocketed the chips and led me out of his study. “Now for the tour!”

First Roger showed me the rest of his house’s ugly, stripped rooms, with plywood, drywall and broken tiles everywhere. The house computer turned the lights on and off as we moved around. At the end of a hall off the kitchen, there was a turbid swimming pool festering under a slanting roof of translucent corrugated plastic. There was raw bare dirt around the pool, and the door to the pool room was off its hinges for repair. It seemed as if Donar Kupp had been as slow with home improvements as Roger. In the basement was a furnace and boiler whose overdesigned Swiss plumbing fascinated Roger-geekin’ engineer that he was.

Back upstairs, we found two beat-up folding umbrellas and splashed down the path to the windowless building Roger called his factory. My feet got soaked all over again.

Even more so than in the house, everything was unfinished and raw in the factory. The floors and walls were bare concrete. On the ground floor there was a ceiling crane and a deep cistern well with a concrete cover over it. There were a bunch of barrels and cans filled with different kinds of resins and solvents for making plastics, and the rest of the floor was covered with packed cardboard boxes of Roger’s stuff.

“We have six hundred boxes all marked Household Goods,” said Roger. “It’s like a treasure hunt, only every box you open has something you’ve seen before.”

He took me down the concrete stairs to the basement of the factory and showed me another furnace and boiler. He said this furnace could heat a whole town. There was a huge, frightening electrical board with the fuses the size of cannon shells. We got into a freight elevator that ran from the basement to the ground floor to the factory’s second floor.

“There’s no stairs to the second floor,” said Roger, “and no windows up there. Donar Kupp was intensely paranoid.” As the elevator inched up to the second floor, Roger pointed at a little handle marked ALARM. “Try turning that, Jerzy.” The little handle turned easily, making a small ringing sound behind the wall of the elevator. “It’s nothing but a bicycle bell!” said Roger, shaking his head. “I don’t like to use the elevator when I’m here alone. To make it even more dangerous, the fuse box for the elevator is on the second floor where nobody can reach it if the elevator breaks! I need to automate the factory with a central computer like I did my house.”

We eased to a stop on the second floor and the elevator doors opened onto a huge room with laboratory benches along the far walls. The area near the elevator was packed with stained industrial machinery-plastics compression molders and the like. In the open middle of the room were two robots looking at us. They moved toward us.

“I named them Walt and Perky Pat,” said Roger devilishly. “I was able to patch in some pieces of the Walt and Perky Pat code you and the ants evolved in the Our American Homes at West West.” He raised his voice to address the robots. “Walt and Perky Pat, this is my friend Jerzy Rugby. He’ll be working here with us for awhile.”

Walt, who was a two-armed Veep, wheeled forward and held out his humanoid hand for me to shake. “Hello, Walt,” I said. Now Perky Pat, a three-armed Adze, came forward too, holding out her hand-shaped manipulator. “Hello, Perky Pat.” I shook both their hands.

“Hello, Jerzy,” they said, not quite in unison. Perky Pat’s voice was higher than Walt’s.

“Roger told us about you, Jerzy,” continued Perky Pat. “He said you helped him design our programs.”

“That’s right,” I said. “First I worked at GoMotion and then I worked at West West. How old are you, Perky Pat?”

“Roger and Walt put me together three days ago. I’m one of the first kits West West shipped.”

“I’m a month old,” volunteered Walt. “Roger built me on May first.”

“That’s nice,” I said. “Roger tells me that you two are supposed to self-replicate.”

“Yes, Jerzy,” said Perky Pat. “Roger wants us to reproduce by building new robots without human help.”

“I know how,” said Walt confidently. “And instead of putting the standard kit software on our children, we’ll patch together combinations of our own programs.”

“We’ve been casting some of the parts ourselves,” said Perky Pat. “Soon we’ll be able to make everything except the chips. And Roger says that by next year we’ll be able to make the chips too.”

“Yes, we do plastics,” said Roger, gesturing toward the big, smelly plastics machines. “These were Donar Kupp’s, Jerzy; they’re linked into a single system driven by standard industrial microcode. The only catch is that the documentation for the system was handwritten by Kupp in German. But I got GoMotion to send me a German language module for Walt. And now he understands the manual.”

“ Ja,” said Walt proudly. “ Ich verstehe.”

“Can you run the machine, Walt?” I asked..

“ Ja, ja. Es geht gam gut.”

“Talk English, Walt,” reprimanded Roger. “And show Jerzy some of the pieces you’ve made.”

“I’ll get them,” said Perky Pat. These robots were eager as Santa’s elves.

Perky Pat darted across the lab and came back with something in each of her three hands. “This is a leg strut we made. And this is a panel of the body. And this here, this is an imipolex resin bead with an electronic circuit in it.”

“Let me see that!” said Roger. “I didn’t know you’d made one of those already.”

Perky Pat handed him the teardrop-shaped bead of hard, shiny plastic. Roger held it up, peered at it, then passed it to me. The bead was yellowish and transparent. Inside it was the dark filigree of an electronic circuit. Some input/output wires bristled from the pointed end of the bead.

“How did you figure out how to make it?” asked Roger.

“The basic recipe was in Kupp’s notes,” said Walt. “And Perky Pat came up with some modifications.”

“I don’t get what it’s for,” I said. “The Veep and the Adze don’t use any parts like this.”

“I’m not sure what it’s for,” said Perky Pat. “The cyberspace ants told me to make it, but the ant lion on my chip keeps me from understanding why. I hate the ant lion.”

“Creativity,” said Roger. “Initiative. A yearning for freedom. Not bad, eh Jerzy?” He drew out the pack of four new chips. “These chips are just what we’ve been waiting for, Walt and Perky Pat. They don’t support the ant lions, and they run faster! Let’s try ’em out. Walt, could you please turn yourself off?”

“Okay, Roger. But will I lose memory?”

“No, I don’t think so. Not unless the new chip malfunctions.”

Stoic Walt opened the manual controls door in his side and flipped his power switch to Off. His body gave a hydraulic sigh as it settled down onto its folded legs with its hands dangling limply. Roger used a screwdriver to open the access panel on Walt’s other side. He pulled Walt’s old Y9707 chip out of its multipin socket and snugged in the new Y9707-EX. Perky Pat watched all this with great interest. Then Roger replaced the access panel and flipped the power switch to On.

“On,” said Walt. “Six-thirteen p.m., Saturday, May 30. Checking memory. Memory okay. I am Walt.” His voice was fast and high.

“What’s the square root of twenty?” said Roger.

“About four point four seven,” chirped Walt. He talked so rapidly that it was hard to understand him.

“I think your new chip has double the old chip’s clock speed,” said Roger. “Please take that into account in your vocalizations. Try halving your output frequencies.”

“Is this better?” said Walt in something like his former voice.

“Fine,” said Roger. He went on to do some more tests, and when everything worked, he went ahead and changed Perky Pat’s chip as well. Having watched how Roger had adjusted Walt, Pat came through the transformation with her voice timbre intact. If anything, she sounded more mellifluous.

“This is fabulous, Roger. And the other two chips are for us?”

“Yes, yes,” said Roger, laying the two new Y9707-EX chips on the lab bench. “Walt and Perky Pat, I want you to build these two chips into child robots like we’ve been talking about.”

“Oh yes,” said Perky Pat, fondling the chips. “Dexter and Baby Scooter! We’ll build them tonight! All by ourselves.”

“Piece of cake,” said Walt gratingly. “Now why don’t you two humans get out of the way and let us work.”

Weird, weird, weird. I felt weak as a leaf. If I didn’t warm up my feet I was going to catch the flu. It was time to get out of this sealed concrete room. I looked at Roger and asked, “Do you have any food?”

“Yes,” he said, as discouragingly as possible. He wanted to stay here in the lab.

“Can I have some of your food, Roger?”

“Oh, all right,” he sighed. “There’s a camera that Kupp installed in the ceiling, so I guess I can keep an eye on things over the monitor.” Sure enough, there was a big lens in the center of the ceiling overhead.

“Good,” I said, pushing the elevator button. “Now give me some warm food and something to drink, for God’s sake, and show me where I’m supposed to sleep.” The two robots stared impatiently at us until we left.

Outside, the rain had slacked off and the gray sky was veined with the golds of sunset.

“It will be better weather tomorrow,” said Roger. “The first day of a new world.”

The front door opened itself at Rogers’s request, and for dinner the kitchen microwaved us three frozen plastic-packed dinners. I had a pork and a beef; Roger had a manicotti. To drink we had Scotch, tap water, or Scotch and water.

“I thought you’d be living better than this, Roger,” I said after I’d eaten my food and downed two drinks. I’d taken off my socks and crossed my legs so that I could rub some life into my feet.

“This is exactly how I like to live,” said Roger. “By eating frozen premade dinners I’m able to precisely calibrate my caloric intake. You know that I watch my weight.”

“What about vitamins?”

“Vitamins are just chemicals, Jerzy. For vitamins I take pills.” As if in confirmation, he brought out a tray of vitamin pill bottles and swallowed a capsule from each. One shiny capsule, a “metals supplement,” held compounds of chromium, manganese, titanium, and palladium. “Food is simply a source of the fats and carbohydrates which the body burns as fuel. Power for the computing medium. Vitamins are the processor components-the nodes of computation, if you will.”

“Oh, whatever. Look, getting back to my own problems, how am I going to keep from going to jail without being on the lam for the rest of my life? Can’t you step forward and admit that it was you who released the ants and made Studly kill the dog?”

“I’m not admitting anything. But I can help you get a better new identity. Those girls-Bety Byte and Vanna-they’re rank amateurs. I could set you up with the top cryp in Calcutta-that’s where professionals get new ID. Even the CIA goes there.”

“I want my old identity, Roger, and I want to win my trial. I want to be able to visit with my family-even if I am getting divorced.” I took another drink. “If I could just get rid of all the ants, the government would like me. Roger, did you know there’s a big nest of ants in cyberspace?”

“Of course I know-there’s three nests in fact. My cyberspace ant lab has windows onto all three of them. One of the nests is what you call the Antland of Fnoor-nice name, by the way. I was right there in the Antland of Fnoor that first night when Riscky Pharbeque was scaring you into working for West West.”

“Oh yeah, that’s right. You were groveling and twisting on the floor.” I chuckled nastily. “All covered in your own blood and shit.”

“Well,” said Roger equably, “that’s the way Riscky made it look-phreak humor, you know. Anyway you can’t stay in a GoMotion ant nest for very long unless you’re prepared to kill quite a few of them. The ants attack non-a-life code.”

“I’ve noticed,” I said. “But you have that magic bullet for killing ants. Come on and tell me what it is!”

“I don’t want you to kill the cyberspace ants, Jerzy. One colony is working on improved chip designs and on the next version of the ROBOT. LIB microcode. Walt and Perky Pat need that code for the new robots. The second colony-that’s your Antland of Fnoor-is evolving high-level code for the new robots. And the third colony is trying to find a way for the new robots to build miniature robots-a third generation. It’s all been going so smoothly that this afternoon I threw in a bunch of random mutations to see if the second- and third-generation robots couldn’t be more of a surprise.”

“The robots in your factory are going to get information from the cyberspace ants?”

“Robots are always in touch with cyberspace. That chip, the Y9707 that robots use? Among other things, it emulates a cyberspace deck. A robot’s vision of the world is an overlay of cyberspace. Robots use cyberspace as a kind of shared consciousness. And with the ant lion absent from the Y9707-EX chips, my new robots will be able to import external ant function pointers. We could see some truly emergent behavior.”

“Heavy,” I yawned. “I didn’t sleep very well on the flight over here. What time is it?”

“It’s after nine. If you like, I’ll show you your room.”

There was a guest room on the end of the house closest to the factory. Rather than an actual bed, it just had a mattress on the floor, but right now that was fine with me. I squeezed my money-stuffed satchel under a corner of the mattress, told the room to turn out the lights, and fell asleep.

Sometime during the night I woke up. With the eight-hour time change it was utterly impossible to tell how long I’d already slept, or what time it was. It took a major mental effort to find the bathroom, take a pee, and drink some water. The rain had stopped completely and it was a quiet night. Falling back into sleep, I thought I heard a tiny bell ringing in the distance, a tiny bell ringing and ringing and ringing. I couldn’t think what it meant. I was more exhausted than I’d ever been in my life.

When I woke again, a pale patch of sunshine was lying across my bed. The house was cool and utterly quiet. I washed up, put on my sandals and my business sweats, and breakfasted on another microwaved meal from Roger’s freezer: pigs in a blanket with warm fruit cocktail.

I asked the front door to open, and stepped outside. Just in case Roger had already gone down to Geneva, I wedged the door open with a rock so it couldn’t lock me out. A cold, gusty breeze was blowing up the mountain meadow, and fresh clouds were massing. The sun had already disappeared. Roger had been wrong about the weather. This was going to be another day of rain. I was going to have to do something about finding some shoes. Borrowing shoes from Roger wasn’t an attractive option, as his size was considerably smaller than mine.

The door to the factory was unlocked; I went inside. When I pushed the call button for the elevator to the second floor, nothing happened. Had it jammed? Could Roger be stuck in there? The memory of the ringing I’d thought I’d heard last night came back to me. Had Roger been in the elevator all night ringing the bell?

There was an emergency box on the wall next to the elevator with German instructions that I couldn’t read. But on breaking the glass of the box, I found a metal crank, or key, that fit into a hole in the elevator doors. I shoved the crank in and began turning it. Turn by turn, the elevator doors edged open, revealing the empty elevator shaft below, and a piece of the elevator cabin above.

Only about a foot and a half of the elevator cabin was visible below the top of the door; it was too high for me to see in.

“Roger?” I called. “Roger, are you in there?” There was no sound in response. I called again, cocked my head, and listened. There were irregular movements in the robot lab upstairs, but not a sound came from the elevator cabin.

Finally, I’d cranked the door wide enough so that a person could fit in. I hauled a bunch of Roger’s Household Goods boxes over and built myself an unsteady mound. I got up on the mound, very nervous that I might tumble into the empty shaft. Balancing and craning forward, I could see into the elevator cabin and yes, Roger was in there. He was lying motionless on the floor facedown.

“Roger!”

No answer came. I have a terror of elevator shafts, and it was very hard to get myself to take the next step. What if the elevator should suddenly start up and guillotine me? But the stillness of Roger’s form was even more terrifying. I had to find out what had happened to him.

I braced my left hand against the floor of the elevator cabin and began tugging on Roger’s leg. He was stiff and heavy. I jerked him around so that his legs were sticking out of the cranked-open door. I wanted a good look at him, but no way was I going to climb up into the death cabin. I took one of his feet in either hand and pulled hard. Just then one of the boxes underfoot gave way, making the mound collapse. Some of the boxes shot out into the empty shaft and I fell backward, with nothing to hold on to but Roger’s feet.

Roger came sliding out of the elevator like a carrot coming out of the ground; I fell on my back and he landed on top of me, his butt on my lap. My legs were sticking out into the empty elevator shaft and so were Roger’s. I put my arms around his waist and started to scoot us back when all of a sudden something sharp dug into my wrist. For a second I thought it was just a random scratch, but the sharp pain redoubled and grew purposeful. There was a distinct sawing sensation. Something was trying to slit my wrist!

I cried out and pushed Roger’s body away from me. He teetered forward and fell into the shaft, twisting as he fell. I got a brief glimpse of him-his throat had a bloody hole in it, and there were big ants clinging to his face. The elevator cables jangled, and Roger’s body thudded on the concrete floor at the bottom of the shaft.

I felt another sharp pain in my wrist. An inch-long plastic ant was crouched down tight against my forearm with its mandibles working away at my skin! The ant’s head was wet and red with my blood. I screamed wildly and slapped at the ant till it fell away. On the floor, the ant quickly oriented itself and raced toward the elevator shaft. I brought the heel of my sandal down hard on its gaster, but the tough plastic bead didn’t give way. Instead, the ant twisted itself up and reached toward my heel, snapping its sharp little jaws. Its legs looked as if they were made of springs and metal, titanium-nickel memory-metal at a guess. For another moment I kept the ant pinned in place, but then it let out a shrill chirp that was answered by a chorus of chirps from down in the shaft. I snapped my foot forward to kick the ant away from me, and then I ran out of the factory, slamming the door behind me.

Fat raindrops were splattering all around. I kept thinking the splashes were ants. I was still screaming. I ran back into the house and let the door lock behind me. What to do?

First of all I went into Roger’s bathroom and washed out the cut on my wrist. The plastic ant hadn’t managed to sever any veins, thank God. I put on some antiseptic and bandaged the cut. My sandaled feet felt so vulnerable and exposed.

I looked in Roger’s closet and found a pair of rubber galoshes that I was able to stretch over my sandaled feet. Just like Roger to have galoshes. Poor Roger. Last night the ants or the robots must have jammed the elevator-and then the ants had finished Roger off at their leisure. But where had the ants come from?

I thought to go into Roger’s study and look at his monitor. Sure enough, it was tuned to the robot lab. It took me a minute to sort out what I was seeing. The monitor was grayscale instead of color, and the camera was a primitive fixed-view fisheye lens that stared dumbly down from the middle of the robot lab’s ceiling. I was shocked at the crudeness of the engineering. Either the camera should have been telerobotically controllable from the monitor, or the monitor should have been smart enough to build up an undistorted image and to let the user pan across and zoom into the image. But this system was just some Swiss security professional’s quick analog hack. The good news was that this Swiss camera/monitor system had an extremely high resolution image, right up there in the terapixel range. With this level of image clarity, I could pick out tiny details simply by leaning close to the screen and squinting.

The fisheye showed me a gray-edged circular disk set into a field of white, the white being the ceiling, and the gray being the walls. Most of the details were at the edges of the disk-like in an M. C. Escher engraving of the hyperbolic plane.

Off to the left I saw two motionless robots lying on their sides. Panels were missing from these robots’ chests, and their wiring seemed to be in an incomplete state. At first I thought these were the unfinished Dexter and Baby Scooter robots, and didn’t pay them close attention.

Rapid, repetitive motions were taking place toward the top of the disk. Peering closer I could see two active robots tending the plastics machines. In addition to the two wheeled legs that they rode on, these robots had four arms each: two pincers, a tentacle, and a humanoid hand. Their body cases were slim and long; with their six limbs they looked a bit like giant mechanical ants. These robots were Dexter and Baby Scooter, and the dead robots were Walt and Perky Pat!

I leaned closer and observed Dexter and Baby Scooter’s frenetic motions. Dexter was casting circuit-filled plastic beads, and Baby Scooter was assembling the beads into- ants! The new robots were manufacturing plastic ants-the new robots had built the plastic ants that had killed Roger!

When each ant was finished, Baby Scooter would set it down on the lab floor, and the ant would scurry off along a meandering ant trail that led to the crack at the base of the closed elevator door. The new ant colony was grouping itself somewhere out of sight.

Just then the phone on Roger’s desk rang. Reflexively, I answered.

“Hello?”

“Allo. Q’est Tonio. Je voudrais Men parler avec Monsieur Coolidge.”

“Tonio!” I cried. “Yes, yes, this is Mr. Schrandt speaking. No, Mr. Coolidge cannot come to the phone.”

“Do he want me to drive him today?”

“Oh, not at all today. He’s in the middle of a very dangerous experiment with his robots.” I mustered my high school French to drum in the point. “ Les robots de Monsieur Coolidge sont tres tres dangereux.”

“So I will telephone tomorrow morning.”

“Bien. Adieu, Tonio.”

I hung up. While I’d been talking I’d noticed another trail of ants; this one led from the elevator shaft to the body of Perky Pat. Plastic ants were crawling about in Perky Pat’s dead innards. Now as I watched, I saw a passel of ants come backing out of Pat’s body, dragging something. It was Perky Pat’s Y9707-EX chip. Working together, the plastic ants had pried out Perky Pat’s processor chip. I stared unbelievingly as a seething stream of plastic ants bore the chip off into the crack at the base of the elevator door.

I stared for awhile at the dead Walt and Perky Pat robots. What had killed them? The ants? No, looking more carefully, I could see that each of them had its head smashed in, as if by a blow from a heavy bar. And yes, sure enough, lying on the floor halfway between the dead parent robots and their children were two thick metal pipes. Clubs. One of Dexter and Baby Scooter’s first sentient acts had been to kill their parents! Now the plastic ants were busying themselves at removing Walt’s Y9707-EX chip.

Things were getting worse faster than I could imagine. So what was I to do? Obviously I should stop the plastic ants. But what would work against them? Their plastic was so hard. It was the cyberspace ants making them act this way. Dexter, Baby Scooter, and the plastic ants were all under the influence of the ants that were holed up in the Antland of Fnoor and in the other two nests Roger had mentioned. Wouldn’t the best thing be to go there and try and kill off those virtual ants first?

My stomach tightened as I remembered my last experience with the cyberspace ants. They’d voodooed and dark-dreamed and stunglassed me into thinking I’d shit in the bed and strangled Gretchen. If they got control of me again, they’d likely as not get me to march down to Roger’s factory and jump into the elevator shaft-me probably thinking all the while that I was going to the kitchen for a snack.

But what about that magic bullet Roger had been talking about? The special instruction that would kill any ant. He’d insisted that I should be able to guess the instruction. But how?

I decided to try to guess the answer before rushing off into cyberspace again. But first I got up and ran around the house-the lights flicking on and off with my passage-and checked that all the doors and windows were locked tight. Back in Roger’s study, I sat down and stared out the window, thinking hard. Roger had said I could guess the magic bullet. Somewhere in the events that had happened to me there must be a clue.

I thought back to the start of my ant adventures. Susan Poker. One reason I hadn’t called Gretchen before leaving the U.S. was that it seemed likely Susan Poker would find out and tell the police. But why would Susan Poker actually do that? To get a reward from whoever was paying her-or maybe just for the joy of making trouble.

And what about Gretchen? I didn’t trust her either anymore. She’d been with a woman named Kay when I’d met her, and Roger’s wife was named Kay. I’d never seen Roger’s wife. Therefore, Gretchen’s friend had been Roger’s wife? Could Roger’s wife have been there to launch agent Gretchen and make sure she picked me up? It certainly would have been a good way for Roger to keep an eye on me after the ant release. But how could Gretchen trick me like that, when I’d loved her. Still loved her, if the ache in my heart meant anything.

I forced my thoughts back to the sequence of events that had happened to me. What, what, what was the magic bullet? As my thoughts raced, there was a sudden crack of thunder right outside. The sky had darkened dramatically; this was the onset of a full-on storm. The rain began coming down in sweeping sheets. Good, I thought, it’ll make it harder for the plastic ants to crawl up here. And there was no doubt in my mind that they would try. Up at the top of the meadow there was a bright forked bolt of lightning followed by sharp thunder so loud that I felt it as a pressure in my nose. And in that moment the answer came to me.

Hex DEF6. Hex DEF6 was a bit pattern that could kill the ants-Hex DEF6 was the magic bullet. Riscky Pharbeque had known it-that’s how he’d been able to move about freely in the Antland of Fnoor. And that’s why Riscky had used Hex DEF6 as his name, and had spray-painted it onto the wall of the Cryp Club library-as a public service. Phreak that he was, Riscky didn’t want any single faction to take over, ever, not even the wild and crazy cyberspace ants. Hex DEF6, yes!

Roger’s cyberspace headset and gloves were well made and wireless; and, thank God, the headset didn’t have cameras for a stunglasses shunt. I pulled on the gloves and gingerly donned the headset.