The hacker and the ants

ELEVEN

I found myself in the huge vaulted stone hall of what seemed to be a castle. Before me lay a scattering of ancient chairs and tables and, on the opposite wall, there was a cavernous hearth with a roaring fire. On some of the tables were parchments and books. The great hall’s walls held a number of doorways. Some of the doorways were open stone arches that gave onto dusky stone corridors, and some were closed tight by wooden doors.

Right behind where I stood was the huge entrance portal, as if I’d just come through it. The massive door was adorned with wonderful, flowing Gothic ironwork. It was wedged closed by a heavy wooden beam, and set into it at eye level was a small, covered peephole. I slid the metal cover aside and peeked out; there was nothing outside but the dead blackness of raw cyberspace. I turned and moved slowly across the great hall. Groany-moany MIDI organ music swelled in sync with my motions. High on the walls hung gorgeously patterned tapestries. At the left end of the great hall were two broad stone staircases, one leading up and one leading down. And the wall on my right bore a stained glass window so beautiful that I was scared to do more than glance at it, lest it voodoo me into idleness.

I stepped cautiously into one of the passages. A dim light preceded my motions. I moved a few meters forward and came up against a stone wall. The space felt nasty, dark and airless. Turning my head back and forth, I saw that I’d come to a T-intersection, with passages leading off both to the right and to the left.

I sighed heavily. Was Roger’s cyberspace office some lame Dungeons and Dragons maze that I would have to like solve? Surely Roger wouldn’t have been that juvenile. Just as I thought this, I spotted a rat down where the wall met the floor. As soon as I visually acquired it, the rat stared up at me and squeaked. A steel sword point popped up in front of my body like a hard-on. The cornered rat reared up and my sword touched him. The rat turned into a puddle of blood next to the drumstick he’d been gnawing. “You may acquire the food,” said a munchkin voice in my earphones.

“Like I’m going to eat food with rat blood on it?” I muttered.

Roger really had set up a D amp;D office, the goofus! If I went into his maze and got lost, I’d be thrashing around until the rain stopped and the plastic ants finished coming up the hill to kill me. There had to be a better way. “Show tools,” I said.

A cloud of several hundred tool icons appeared around me, compressed to fit in the confines of the low stone passage. I flew back out the corridor into the great hall, and the cloud of tools spread out to a proper size.

Out of his own twisted sense of humor, Roger had attached wings to each of the tool icons. Some of the wings were feathered, some were leathern, and some were veined and transparent like the wings of insects. To improve the fun, Roger had attached a chaotic flocking algorithm to the icons. The tools swarmed about: now like a scarf of starlings, now like a plunge of pelicans, and now like a fretfulness of gnats.

I saw a keyboard, a helmet, a knife, a telephone, a geometry gun, a camera, a claim stake, a projector, a pile of money, a sphere with arrows sticking out of it, a frying pan, an ant-

I reached out and tried to grab the winged ant, but it twisted and turned and flew away faster than my eyes could follow. Now it was on the other side of the cloud of tools. I flew toward it through the tools, and it escaped again. I shifted my attention to the helmet, but that eluded me as well.

There was a sudden pounding on the giant entrance door. Startled, I flew back down to the floor and gazed toward the great portal. Again the pounding came.

I slipped my headset off for a moment to make sure that the pounding wasn’t maybe Tonio knocking on Roger’s real front door. But, no, it wasn’t. There was no sound in the house other than the splashing and rushing of water-at least no sound that I heard. The rain outside Roger’s study window was pouring down harder than ever. I glanced at my watch. It was 10:30 A.M.

“Hey, Da!” cried a little voice from the headset’s earphones. “Are you in there?”

I slapped the headset back on and stepped closer to the great hall’s entrance door.

“Da!” came the voice. “It’s Tom!”

I pushed aside the peephole’s metal cover. Right outside the door was a black velvet crying clown with a pipe in his teeth.

“Tom?” I asked. “It is you?”

“Da! Let me in! I’m using the deck in your Animata! Ida’s sitting here next to me! Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. Come on in.” I tried to slide aside the heavy beam that locked the door, but I couldn’t get it to move. It needed some secret unlatching that I didn’t know.

I peered back out the peephole. “Push down on your pipe, Tom, and your tux will shrink, and then you can fly in through this hole.”

In a twinkling, Tom shrank and darted into Roger’s castle through the peephole. He flew a few quick loops around me, then grew himself back to normal size.

“Gimmie five!” said Tom. We slapped hands; my glove’s piezopads buzzed.

“How did you know to come here?” I asked.

“After what Sorrel told us, we figured out you’d gone to see Roger Coolidge,” said Tom. “And I found him in the Swiss phone book. So I thought I’d try coming here to see if you were around. Is that his tuxedo you’re wearing? You look like a geek.”

“Well, yeah. But we shouldn’t say anything bad about poor Roger because-”

“Hi, Daddy,” interrupted the clown. It was the voice of Ida. “I’m sitting right next to Tom in your car. I can hear you over the radio. I’m talking into Tom’s microphone. Let me wear the headset, now, Tom. I want to see Daddy looking like a geek.”

“Okay, but just for a second,” said Tom.

“That’s great that you kids are here,” I said. “You came at just the right time. This castle is like one of those dumb adventure games you two like to play.”

“What are you trying to do?” asked Ida, now ensconced in the clown. “What’s the next goal?”

“Somewhere in this castle there’s an ant lab with access to the three cyberspace ant colonies Roger started.”

“Go in there,” said Ida, pointing at the great hearth. “There’s usually a secret passage behind the fire.”

“Give me back that headset, brat!” came Tom’s voice.

There was the sound of a brief struggle, and then Tom was back in control. The black velvet clown looked up at the tools. “I think I see a rolled-up map,” said Tom.

Tom was good at cyberspace games. With wonderful fluidity, he leapt up and snagged the map before it could fly out of reach. He rolled it out flat on a table and I peered over his shoulder.

The map was like a window looking onto a three-dimensional wireframe model of Roger’s castle.

“Show me the path from here to the ant lab,” said Tom to the map.

A noodle of pale green light appeared in the image. Tom held up the map and moved it around, looking in at the three-dimensional image from various angles.

“Just hold on to my foot,” said Tom finally. I crouched down and latched on to him.

“Close tools,” I said, to make the cloud of icons disappear. The rolled-up map remained in Tom’s hand.

Tom flew forward and darted through one of the doors. We wriggled about in dark passageways for awhile, with rats and goblins scattering at our approach-the goblins were short, fat-bellied creatures with fang teeth and heads like jack-o’-lanterns. On we flew, turning left and right, up and down-Tom navigated rapidly and with confidence.

And then we were in a room with a black table and three glassed-in walls. Each of the three windows looked out onto a cyberspace ant colony. The first window showed a sprawling landscape of etched circuitry, the second showed the Antland of Fnoor, and the third window opened onto a scale model of an enormous dome-covered factory. Each colony was boiling with activity. As usual the ants were busy practicing, busy getting better at what they did.

The ants in the first colony were designing computer chip circuitry and microcode. Their world was a huge flat motherboard intricately chased with filigreed coppery lines. The ants looked like the tools, components, and wires used for circuit design. They were, variously, switches and logic gates plugged into the circuit, soldering irons that moved connections this way and that, jumper wires that made distant connections, and code-packets that tested the system’s logic. These were the guys who had developed ROBOT. LIB and the design for the Y9707-EX.

The ants in the Antland of Fnoor looked like tiny robots and tiny members of the Christensen family-just like during my phreakout. Seeing such a mass of them made me itchy and uncomfortable. I found myself unconsciously flicking my fingers, as if to get ants off me. One difference was that now some of the robots were of the new four-armed variety that I’d just seen on the monitor display of Roger’s factory. But a bigger, more frightening, difference was that the little models of four-armed robots seemed to be deliberately causing as much harm as possible to the other robots and to the Christensens. The evolution of the ants’ and robots’ behavior had taken a sinister turn with the designing of this new generation of robots. They were as murderous and as implacable as an army of skeletons in a medieval painting of the Triumph of Death. Talk about emergent behavior! Roger had put in one mutation too many, poor guy.

The ants in the third colony looked like four-armed robots and plastic ants. All the Veeps and Adzes had been eliminated from this world. The robots were racing up and down the narrow aisles of their factory, stiffly swinging their quadruple arms. Some of them worked frantically at tiny plastics machines that cranked out the tiny models of the plastic ants. And the virtual plastic ants-what were they up to? Off to one side of the factory, I noticed a row of Our American Homes with small Christensen models in them. The cramped little homes made me think of the shantytown dwellings of impoverished factory workers. Over and over, the plastic ants would surge into these homes and tear the occupants limb from limb. Then four of the plastic ants would take on the forms of Perky Pat and her family, and the others would practice killing them again.

I had to turn them off! Next to each of the three windows was a board of controls with an On/Off switch at the top. I pressed Off on the Antland of Fnoor’s board, and two additional buttons appeared above the On/Off switch. The new buttons were marked 0 and 1.

“Please enter the binary digits of the halt code,” said a voice.

“The code is Hex DEF6,” I said.

“Please enter the binary digits of the halt code,” repeated the voice.

“What’s the binary for that number, Da?” asked Tom.

“I don’t exactly remember, but I can figure it out,” I said. “I’ll think aloud so you and Ida know too. ‘Hex’ means ‘base sixteen’ and the base sixteen numerals are 0-1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-A-B-C-D-E-F. A through F stand for ten through fifteen. What’s D? I always think: D is an unlucky grade, and D is thirteen. So DEF6 is thirteen-fourteen-fifteen-six. Now all I have to do is turn those four numbers into binary. Thirteen is eight plus four plus one. An eight, a four, no two, a one: 1-1-0-1. Fourteen is one higher; add one and carry one to get: 1-1-1-0. Fifteen is 1-1-1-1. Six is no eight, a four, a two, no one: 0-1-1-0. So all right.”

I put my hand up to the pair of buttons and slowly entered the bits, thirteen-fourteen-fifteen-six in binary: 1101 1110 1111 0110

The little figures in the Antland of Fnoor stopped moving-all of them. But the ants in the other two colonies became wildly agitated. The great motherboard flashed with desperate signals, and the factory colony boiled with activity.

“Quick, Tom,” I shouted. “You stop the motherboard, and I’ll stop the factory!”

We keyed in the numbers as fast as possible. Riscky’s phreak deck must have had clear-channel satellite access, because there didn’t seem to be any lag in Tom’s transmissions from California to Switzerland. He beat me by half a second. By the time I keyed in my last four bits, the great motherboard colony was already dark and still.

But something bad and unexpected was happening in the factory colony. The plastic ants were swarming all over the window that looked in on them and now, somehow, some of the plastic ant images were out of the colony and in the ant lab with me! My piezopads buzzed as the ants tried to bite me, while I finished my key presses and killed the factory colony. But the handful of plastic ant icons that had escaped were still alive! Some kept on biting me, and the rest of them scuttled past me and off down the corridors of Roger’s dungeon maze.

Before Tom and I could even catch our breath, there was screeching from the tunnel, and a pack of angry goblins came running in to attack us. They’d been taken over by the escaped ants! One of them snatched the map from Tom’s hand and stuffed it into his mouth, chewing and swallowing like mad. The other goblins began tearing at our tuxedos.

“Oneone oh oneoneoneone oh oneoneoneone oh oneone oh!” screamed Tom.

The magic bullet worked once more: the goblins keeled over dead, along with the few plastic ant icons still loose in the ant lab with us.

“All right!” I whooped. “I think we got all of them!”

“Gimmie five!” said Tom.

“Did you kill the ants?” came Ida’s voice.

“Yeah!” said Tom. “Some of the ants escaped and got into orcs, but we killed the orcs too. Da’s spell works.”

“I want to try,” said Ida.

“No!” said Tom. “Get off me, grubber! Is there something else we have to do next, Da?”

“There’s a bunch of real plastic ants in the next building from where I physically am, Tom. They’re like robots. I doubt if the spell will work on them. We have to find a way to kill those ants, too.”

“How?”

“I think we might be able to take over the two big robots who are building them.” I stepped forward and nudged the dead goblin who had swallowed the map. “Can we cut this guy open?”

“I’ll jump on him,” said Tom.

Tom jumped and the contents of the goblin’s stomach spewed onto the floor. The map was a tattered, unreadable mess.

“Can you at least get us back to the entrance hall, Tom?” I asked anxiously. “I can’t remember all the turns we took.”

“I remember, old man,” said Tom. “Grab my foot.”

We flew back to the main hall, alert lest any remaining ant-possessed orc attack us. But if there were any more loose cyberspace ants, they were lying low.

“ Now you let me see!” came Ida’s voice. There was the sound of another tussle, and then Ida had control of the clown again.

“Let’s try looking behind the fire now,” said Ida. “Usually the most important things are there.”

“All right,” I said.

The clown and I walked toward the fire, but the fire was like a wall.

“Um, squeeze around,” said Ida’s low voice.

We sidled over to the side of the hearth and squeezed around behind the fire. There was a sooty trapdoor in the back wall of the chimney. Ida pulled it open, and I followed her through.

Instead of the dungeon passage I’d expected, the room behind the panel was a completely modern-looking office room with bookcases and standard-looking cyberspace portals. One of the doors had an ant on the wall over it-peering in there, I could see that this portal was a hyperjump connection to the same dungeon room that Tom and I had just visited by way of the passages.

“Ahem,” said Ida.

“You’re doing good,” I said. “You were right.”

Right next to the ant lab portal was a door to a room with four booths that looked like arcade cyberspace games, each with swivel-mounted goggles and glove controls. The booths were labeled Walt, Perky Pat, Dexter, and Baby Scooter.

“This is it!” I exulted. “Yay Ida!” Peering into the booths, I saw that the Walt and Perky Pat goggles were dark and dead. But the Dexter and Baby Scooter headsets were flickering with colored images.

“Okay,” I told Ida. “These are for telerobotically controlling two robots that are in a factory next to the building where I am. Those robots have been building plastic ants. We have to go in there and take over the robots and try and get them to kill the plastic ants.”

“Okay,” said Ida a little uncertainly.

“Let me do it,” yelped Tom.

“Maybe Tom should do it, Ida,” I said. “I mean my life kind of depends on this. If we don’t kill all the plastic ants they might crawl over here and kill me. One of them tried to slash my wrist this morning. And Tom is better at games than anyone.”

“Oh all right,” snapped Ida.

Tom quickly took control of the clown. I settled into the Dexter booth and Tom took Baby Scooter. Pulling the Dexter headset over my virtual face shifted my viewpoint to that of the robot’s and, most importantly, this action overrode the robot’s control circuits and put me in charge. Dexter was now slaved to my hands’ motions.

This didn’t happen quite smoothly or automatically. Dexter and Baby Scooter had no desire at all to become our telerobotic slaves. My viewpoint bucked around wildly for a moment after I entered Dexter, and I could see that Baby Scooter was thrashing around as well. But Roger had made sure to hardwire the telerobotic override into the ROBOT. LIB microcode, and there was really nothing Dexter and Baby Scooter could do. As soon as we’d settled in, all their higher logic circuits were turned off.

Even so, the robots’ control circuits were still functional, and you could drive them around with the standard cyberspace control gestures. You didn’t have to worry about the best way to move their legs and so on; you had only to point and nod, and use your hands to control their manipulators. Since the robots had four manipulators each, the control booths actually had four swiveling glove controls.

Once Dexter quieted down, I found myself standing in front of the plastics-casting machine he’d been tending. There was a basket of tiny electronic circuits to my left and a bowl of shining translucent beads to my right. Farther to my right was Baby Scooter. I raised my hand and waved.

“Are you okay, Tom?”

“Yeah,” said Tom, waving back. “I’m fine. Are these the plastic ants?” He pointed at the components spread out before him. “Where are the live ones?”

“Down there.” I pointed at the trail of newly fashioned plastic ants that was marching from Tom’s bench to the crack by the elevator door. “Those are the guys we have to get rid of.” Just as I’d feared, the plastic ants were as lively as ever.

Tom picked up a live ant in one of his pincers. He squeezed hard, trying to crush it, but rather than crumbling, the ant skidded out from his grip and shot across the room like a pinched watermelon seed. “They’re really solid,” said Tom.

I scooped up another ant with my humanoid hand, and then used my two pincers to pull its gaster and its head sections apart from its alitrunk. When I dropped the pieces to the floor, they writhed about spastically. “Tearing them apart works,” I said. “But by now there’s hundreds of them. Maybe even thousands.”

“See how their trail goes into that crack by the elevator door?” said Tom. “Maybe we can pour something down in there that will melt them.”

“It would be even better if we could take the elevator down to where the ants have their nest,” I said.

“What’s wrong with the elevator?”

“It’s jammed.”

“Maybe I can fix it,” said Tom. “You look for something we can pour on them.”

I trucked back and forth on my bent-legged bicycle wheels, looking at the vats and barrels of chemicals. The plastic ants still in the lab seemed to sense we were no longer their friends-they were streaming en masse toward the crack at the bottom of the elevator door.

“Here’s a big can of acetone,” I said presently. “That might be good.” The big square can was of shiny metal marked Acetone — Highly Flammable. It looked like it held about five gallons.

Tom was examining a box on the wall near the elevator. “Somebody took out one of the fuses is all,” he said, rising high up on his legs to look on top of the box. “And, yes, here it is!” Dexter or Baby Scooter had probably removed the fuse, timing it to trap Roger where the plastic ants could finish him off.

Tom replaced the fuse, pressed the elevator button, and *clankclank* the cabin slid up to our level and the doors opened. A dozen plastic ants were running about on the cabin floor.

“Let’s see if they melt,” I said, lumbering over with the heavy can of acetone. I unscrewed the top and slopped some of the stuff onto the plastic ants. But it didn’t slow them down a bit.

“If we could light the acetone…” said Tom.

“That would probably work,” I agreed. “But how can we light it?”

“Make a spark with an electrical wire,” came Ida’s voice.

“That sounds good,” I said. “Let’s do it.”

We got in the elevator. Tom was about to push the button for the basement, but I stopped him and pushed the button for the main floor. “We can’t take the elevator to the basement,” I said. “There’s a dead body at the bottom of the shaft. I was starting to tell you before. The plastic ants killed Roger.”

The main-floor elevator door was still frozen into the half-open position I’d cranked it to. Tom and I squeezed out with some difficulty, and then went down the concrete stairs to the basement.

I looked around the basement. Where were the ants? No trail led out from under the elevator door here, which suggested they had taken up residence inside the shaft. Hopefully right at the bottom.

“Wait,” I told Tom, and hurried back up to the main floor to get the emergency key-crank out of the elevator door. Back in the basement, I put it into the hole in the basement elevator doors.

“Get a wire,” I told Tom.

Tom tore a heavy section of electrical conduit down from the ceiling. Being in robot bodies made us feel pretty reckless. Tom kept pulling on the wire and ripping stuff loose until the wire had about ten feet of slack. And then he yanked the wire in two with his pincer-claws. The two bare wire ends made big sputtering sparks if you held them near each other.

“All right,” I said. “It’s robot kamikaze time.”

“Kick some butt!” yelled Ida.

I clamped the acetone can against my chest with my tentacle, and used my humanoid hand to crank open the door at a furious rate. There behind the door was Roger’s corpse, and all around his corpse were the glistening plastic ants.

The ants were busy-they’d mounted the two Y9707-EX chips on the grungy shaft wall, with wires running around the chips. Several of the ants had fashioned themselves small silicon rectangles that were attached to their bodies like wings. One of the ants was just starting its wings with an abrupt beating stutter. It rose an inch or two into the air.

I pushed forward and slashed my pincers into the metal can of acetone. The can split wide open, dumping the volatile liquid out onto the ants. Tom lunged in next to me and sparked the wires in the midst of the shaft.

WHOOOOOM!

There was a rush of noise and orange light, and then my viewfield went dead. An instant later I felt a shock wave jolt my chair in Roger’s study. I made the gestures to remove the virtual telerobotic headset, and found myself back in the lab behind the castle fireplace. The black velvet clown was here too: Tom and Ida. I “Thanks a million,” I said. “I have to go now. Don’t tell anyone where I am.”

“Good-bye, Da,” said Tom.

“Look out in case there’s any more ants,” called Ida.

I pulled off my headset for real. It was still raining. Oily black smoke was trickling out the roof vents of Roger’s factory. The monitor on Roger’s desk was blank. Down in the basement of Roger’s house, the great boiler shuddered on and began pumping heat into the radiators.

It was time to get out of here. I hurried into the room where I’d slept and pulled my satchel out from under the mattress. There was no car here for me to use, but it would be simple enough to trek down to Saint-Cergue, especially now that I had Roger’s galoshes on. I rushed out through the dim living room-for some reason the lights weren’t working anymore. I pushed on the front door. It didn’t open. “Open the door,” I commanded-but nothing happened. A power failure from the factory explosion?

No, it was worse than that. Roger’s house computer had turned against me. There was a sudden grinding sound from all over the house as the metal roll-down shutters closed off all the windows. The rain beat on the roof and the radiators hissed with steam.

I left my satchel of money by the front door and felt my way into the dark living room, past the great blue-and-white tile stove to the faint glow of the wall-mounted house computer. The computer screen showed a harmless-looking array of icons, but when I went to touch its keyboard, something pounced on my hand and bit it. I cried out and thrashed my hand-a winged plastic ant circled up into the darkness. Now I felt a bite in my ankle. Not knowing which way to turn, I ran back into Roger’s study, dimly lit by his blank monitor. The little room was hot and stuffy.

Looking desperately around, I noticed the cardboard box of tools in the corner. I rummaged through the box and found a flashlight and a hammer. Wonderfully, the flashlight worked.

I went back into the living room with the idea of trying to smash the plastic ants with my hammer. The cone of my flashlight beam showed three of them on the floor. I rushed forward and managed to pound and crush two of them. Bang bang! But the third ant scurried in close to me and bit me on the ankle. I picked it off and pressed its snapping head against the floor while I pulverized its gaster with the hammer. More ants came, some crawling and some flying, their silicon wings glittering in the beam of my flashlight.

I tried yelling the binary digits of Hex DEF6, but it didn’t do a thing-not that it should have. I was dealing with real-world ant robots now instead of the GoMotion software ants of cyberspace. Surely there was some radio control signal to turn these plastic ants off, but without hours of detective-work hacking, I had no way of knowing how to send it.

No, instead of using some subtle software code, I was pounding at the plastic ants with my hammer. Meanwhile they kept attacking me-circling around, jumping up, and dive-bombing; sinking their pincers into my arms, legs, and even my neck; coordinating their motions with the inaudible chirps of robot radio waves. I picked the attackers off and smashed them as best I could, ignoring the cuts in my fingers. I grew dizzy with the pain and the heat. If the ants didn’t kill me, the house would cook me to death-but I didn’t know what to do besides keep crushing ants.

Around then the beam of my flashlight happened to fall on the blue-and-white tile stove, and I saw that hundreds more plastic ants were crawling and flying out through the vents in the stove’s door. Some kind of steam tunnel must have led from the factory to here. The flying ants stuttered their wings and lifted into the air to spiral toward me.

If I stayed here and kept fighting, the plastic ants would bring me down like piranhas attacking a wading cow. Years ago the kids and I had seen just such a cow getting eaten on a TV nature show. The kids had loved it so much that they’d made up a game-Piranhas And Cow-in which Daddy would crawl around on all fours and they’d “bite” at him with their hands until I, Daddy, would collapse in giggles with my arms clamped protectively over my belly and sides.

I slapped a flying ant off my cheek. Thinking of Piranhas And Cow made me think of water, which made me think of Roger’s swimming pool. The pool roof was nothing but corrugated plastic! Still clutching my flashlight and hammer, I tottered back to the front hall, grabbed my black satchel, and ran through the kitchen and down the short hall to the room at the end of the house with the swimming pool. Thank God there was no door to close off the pool room. I reached up and whaled against the plastic of the pool room roof with my hammer till I had in Roger’s office a good-sized hole in it. Rain poured in. I tossed my satchel up through the hole and began trying to crawl out after it.

I nearly made it. But the hole was six feet off the ground, the dirt at the edge of the pool was muddy, the plastic was weak and saggy, and my hands were slippery with blood and rain. I kept falling back. Now the plastic ants were swarming through the kitchen and into the pool room with me, a few of them flying like air support over the advancing army of the crawling ones. With a final titanic effort, I levered my upper body out into the rainy Swiss morning, but a big piece of the plastic broke loose and I fell backward, hitting my head on the ground. The last thing I saw was flying plastic ants angling down toward me.

I woke to the sound of a telephone endlessly ringing. There was a mud puddle next to my face with rain splashing into it through the jagged hole I’d made in the pool room roof. Floating in the puddle were scores of plastic ants with their little metal legs folded up against their bodies. Some of them had folded-up wings as well. The cuts in my hands had clotted over. Still the phone rang.

I sat up and felt my head. There was a painful egg on the back of my noggin-nothing serious. I could see more motionless plastic ants in the hallway and in the kitchen. Still the phone rang.

I hoisted myself to my feet. My socks were stiff with blood from the bites the ants had given me. I picked up my flashlight and hammer, and made my way through Roger’s kitchen, the beads of stilled plastic ants sliding beneath my feet. The dark house was hotter than ever; the furnace continued to blast away. Might the boiler actually explode? I moved faster.

When I picked up the phone, a mechanical voice said, “There is a cyberspace call for you, sir. Please put on your headset.”

I snatched up Roger’s headset and looked into it. There, staring at me with an expression that was not quite a smile, was Riscky Pharbeque. He was in a car driving on what looked like Route 1 near Big Sur.

“Shit howdy,” he said. “Don’t say I never did you no favors.”

“Riscky! What happened?”

“Just naturally I put a watchbug into that Pemex twelve I sold you, Jerzy. Sucker paged me when you and your son started using the Hex DEF6 code. You choked, my man, you screwed the pooch! You’re old and slow. Two GoMotion ants from the third colony got away!“

“Do you know where they are? Can you stop them?”

“ Hell yes. I’m no friend of Roger Coolidge’s-son of a bitch never did pay me for that phreak job I ran on you. Not to speak unkindly of the dear departed, but he was dumb as dog shit to try and short yours truly. Not paying Riscky was about the last thing Roger ever did, if you catch my drift.”

“You-you had a hand in making his new robots turn bad?”

“Well now, Roger made some random mutations in the colonies writing his robot code-but who’s to say what random is? Phreaky-deaky, dude.” Riscky cackled and held up ten long, wiggling fingers as the cliffs of Big Sur went whipping past.

“Oh God. So what about the escaped GoMotion ants?”

“They jumped right down onto Roger’s house computer hoping to fuck you up. But good ole Riscky came in and took over that machine’s comm ports. The ants can’t get back out. Before you do anything else, Jerzy, run in there and rip that computer out of the wall. Smash it up and bring me its big RAM chip. Just so’s if I ever need it, I can get the GoMotion ant code off of there.”

“Do it now?”

“Do it! I’ll wait.”

I ran into Roger’s living room and yanked his house computer out of its ragged niche. The naked machine crashed to the floor. I used my hammer-yes I was still carrying it-to kill the power supply. Right away the runaway furnace downstairs stopped. And then I pulled the big gigabyte RAM chip off the motherboard. I went back into Roger’s study and put on the headset.

“I got it.”

“Way to go, old son,” said Riscky. “Now gather up a couple or three dozen of those flying ants and bring them and that RAM chip on back to me.”

“How did you turn off the plastic ants, Riscky?”

He opened and closed his right hand rapidly several times, miming signals emanating from a source. His long thin lips drew back toward the rasta tangles of his hair “ Radio. The plastic ants have the same stop signal as any other robot. Being as how I’d taken over the house computer’s communications, I used it to put the plastic ants to sleep. All of them.”

“Thank you, Riscky. Thank you so much.”

“Don’t thank me yet. I want one more thing.”

“Money?”

“My girlfriend’s turned movie agent. I want you to let her handle the rights to your TV miniseries.”

“What?”

“Your adventure, Jerzy, your story. Let my girlfriend handle the rights, or I’ll wake up the plastic ants and there won’t be no story.”

“Sure, Riscky, whatever.” As if I fucking cared about television.

“Hurry home, bro.”

I cleaned myself up and found a raincoat, an umbrella, a scarf, and a pair of leather gloves to hide the cuts in my fingers.