The hacker and the ants

TWO

Out in the world, it was half past eleven o’clock of a Monday morning, and there was a trail of real ants running across the porch step where Susan Poker had stood. I sat down next to them, catching my breath. Have you ever studied an ant closely? I sure have.

Front to rear, an ant’s body has four parts: the head, the alitrunk, the petiole, and the gaster.

The head bears a pair of large hooked mandibles which have serrations that fit together like teeth. The mouth itself is a complex structure with two small pairs of feelers or palps, though you can’t see the palps when the mouth is closed. The ant’s two big antennae sprout right above the mouth, about where you might expect a nose to be, and the ant’s great compound eyes are on either side of its head, posterior to the antennae. Most of an ant’s “facial expression” comes from the way it holds its antennae. Each antenna is like a pennant on a stick; the “stick” is a long segment called a scape, and coming off the tip of the scape is a segmented “pennant” of eleven funiculi. When an ant is running along, it holds its scapes forward with the funiculi pressed down to smell out the territory. When an ant is alarmed, it holds its antennae up like a hunting dog’s ears.

The alitrunk is the ant’s walking machine: it’s an intricate structure bearing three pairs of legs. Each leg has a thigh and shin, and attached to each shin is a thing like a foot, consisting of one long segment followed by four small segments and a terminal claw. The ants have wicked spurs near the back ends of their feet.

The petiole is small spacer segment between the alitrunk and the gaster, fitted in as neatly as the seat on a motorcycle. The petiole serves as a universal joint.

After the intricate machineries of the ant’s mouth and legs, the gaster is a cheerful bit of comic relief; nothing more than a fat, elegantly shaped butt with a stinger and a cloaca serving as the gateway for the earth, air, fire, and water of the ant’s excretion, smell signals, poison, and reproduction. Not that the gaster is a featureless balloon; no, if you look carefully, you’ll see that the gaster is structured like a plant bud or a pinecone, it’s made up of a series of overlapping plates capable of sliding enough so that the gaster can bend quite a bit.

The gaster contains glands that secrete poison. In order to repel enemies, some ants rear back and squirt out jets of poison. For closer infighting, ants inflict stab wounds with their poison-smeared stingers. Ant poison is a mixture of formic acid, neurotoxins, and histamines.

Ants’ gasters also secrete pheromones, or so-called semiochemicals. These chemical signals can express alarm, a recruitment call, or a desire to exchange oral and anal liquid; pheromones tag the smells of nest-mates and the members of the various castes; judicious sprays of pheromones serve as trail markers and as territorial boundaries.

Ants are cool. The motion of a trail is continuous as water flowing, but if you watch one particular ant, you’ll see that she (the only male ants are the winged ones that appear for mating flights) does not, on the average, follow the main line of the trail she’s moving along. Instead she meanders back and forth across the trail, occasionally breaking into fresh territory and then turning back. She rubs antennae with every sister she encounters. “Seen anything new?” “What’s up?” “How do you feel?” “How’re things back in the nest?” “Found any food?” “Which way are you headed?”

Back East, when I lived in a small Virginia town called Killeville, people had been like that, too, male or female, always stopping to chat and rub antennae. No way in CA. In California we drove around in our cars instead of rubbing antennae like ants. Rush, drive, work, and buy-with a cold smile and a hard laugh, a snarl and The Finger, with a shrug and a higher fence.

I put my rack of backup CDs in the trunk of my car. The backup was only a week old, so once the ants had been flushed out of my system I could start over. All my source code and programming tools were in there.

I figured the best thing to do right now would be to drive up to GoMotion and find out what had actually happened. On the other hand, it was a forty-minute commute each way, and I was going to have to do it again for Jeff Pear’s weekly meeting on Wednesday-day after tomorrow. And, it occurred to me, if Coolidge was going to play tricks on me, why should I be in such a big hurry to report back in at his company? I decided to take the day off… but to do what? I stood there near my car, thinking and looking around.

My house’s front yard was five steep feet of tough dirt with wizened shrubs. The street was Tangle Way, a looping blacktop two-laner that ran uphill and eventually back down. Our hill was called Polvo Para Hor-near, a needlessly complicated name that at least wasn’t religious, so far as I knew. There were so many Spanish and Catholic names in California that I felt like an immigrant and an atheist.

Numerous dead-end roadlets branched off of Tangle Way. Next to my house was the tiniest of traffic’s capillaries, a dirt alley that led to one last house perched on the edge of the eternally dry gully behind my home. Old Mr. and Mrs. Toth lived there. Mrs. Toth was a New Age healer. She had a massage table in her front hall and she talked about the supernatural in a cozy apple-cheeked way.

Shortly after we’d moved in, Mrs. Toth had found out I’d been a math professor back East. She talked me into giving a talk to her “realization group,” which met monthly in the community center. I’d spoken on synchronicity and Hilbert Space, an old interest of mine from grad school days. A few members of Mrs. Toth’s group had been angered by my insistence that coincidences are explicitly not subject to control by human will. But in my opinion, the Beyond is out of our control, and ESP is a pipe dream for the powerless, an opiate pernicious as politics and TV.

Across the alley from my house was a heavily weathered Victorian inhabited by Krystle Kattle and her ratty Mom. The family had been there for decades; they were poor, and had always been poor, which made them a highly singular anomaly among Los Perros homeowners. The most striking feature of their blasted, filth-strewn lot was a parallelopiped-shaped garage whose angles were in the process of being slowly but radically sheared by the expanding girth of a hyperthyroid eucalyptus tree rooted in the lot between the Kattles and the Toths.

Krystle worked in a Western store selling boots, saddles, and fringed leather vests. She had a sometime boyfriend who wanted to be a biker. He was blond with a well-built steroid body. He, Krystle, Carol, and I had gotten drunk together on the lees of a keg left over from our housewarming party. Carol and I hadn’t realized yet that in California you don’t do casual things with strangers.

There were too many strangers. Now that I’d settled in, I always treated Krystle like a stranger, and I would never have spoken to a group like Mrs. Toth’s. I was too busy, and I never had fun.

I decided that I should have some fun, that I should smoke some marijuana.

The house with the eucalyptus-the house between the Kattles and the Toths-was rented by Dirk Blanda, founder of Dirk Blanda’s Personography, the bodymap-ping shop who’d made my tuxedo. Dirk often had some weed. I strolled over there to see if he’d get me high.

But Dirk wasn’t home; his house echoed hollowly with the banging of the knocker. I went dejectedly back inside my house and looked through the packs of matches on my bedroom dresser; sometimes a match-book would have an old roach tucked into the back. But I’d already searched the matches and scraped my drawer bottoms on my last free day, a couple of weeks ago, and there was no dope to be found. Not a roach in the house, not even a pinner.

Studly came into the bedroom, and it occurred to me that while I’d been on the dark dream, the ants would have had time to go across the radio link and to infect Studly. He acted like he was quietly dusting my furniture, but his photocell eyes seemed to glint evilly, and I had the feeling he was edging over to me. But surely this was only paranoia. Instead of turning Studly off, I spoke to him.

“Studly.”

“Yes, Jerzy?” Studly had a pleasant voice thanks to his Talkboy chip.

“Do you know anything about the ants?”

“Last week, I put Grants For Ants ant poison packages near all the doors as instructed. I have not seen any ants in our house today.”

“I mean ants inside my computer.”

“Why do you say there are ants inside your computer, Jerzy?”

“I saw them in my cyberspace goggles. They’re like a computer virus. Have they infected you, Studly? Do you feel normal?”

“My activation levels are all within the customary ranges. Do you think the ants have infected me?”

“I guess not. Go to living room and wait for me there. Stay idle.”

“I can dig it.”

When I had nothing better to do, I was always programming new catch phrases and response tricks into Studly, which made talking to him mildly entertaining.

“Was there anything else, Studly?”

“Yesterday you were talking to yourself and you said I want Carol back, Jerzy. Can you comment on that?”

This seemingly thoughtful hedge was from the dinosaur days of artificial intelligence programming. You have your device keep a list of all the things it hears you say and then every so often the device builds a sentence of the form: Why did you say (quote-past-statement), (user-name)? It was a cheap trick, but it set me off, just like it was supposed to.

“I do want Carol back, Studly. But I’m also glad she’s gone. We were fighting all the time, don’t you remember? Are you going to be like the kids and keep trying to get us back together? Face it Studly, you’re a poor robot from a broken home. Go on into the living room and stay out of trouble now, will you?”

The Studster went.

It was so quiet in my big, empty house. I wandered back into my machine room. My unplugged computer was dark and silent. I pulled my phone jack out of the computer and plugged it directly into a Fibernet wall plug. Hallelujah, a dial tone.

I got out my address book. I sometimes scored pot from a hippie woman my age named Queue Harmaline. She and her permanent boyfriend Keith lived among redwoods on the wet western slopes of the Santa Cruz mountains. Queue and Keith made a living producing digitized tapes and films of various hip events. Queue usually had a good stash of primo sinsemilla. Although she was not a dealer, if I begged hard enough, she could normally be prevailed upon to sell me a bit of her hoard.

Since Queue wasn’t really interested in selling off her pot to me, the price was high, but a quarter ounce of the stuff was strong enough to last me for months, unless I got reckless. Also, I always enjoyed having a chance to visit with Queue. She was slim and dark and hip and she laughed a lot.

It was important to call in advance if I wanted to try to get pot from her. Queue hated to go into her stash with anyone around. Once I’d shown up without warning and she gave me a tongue-lashing and then subjected me to a forty-minute wait while she did four other things at once. Finally, after taking $160 off me, she’d put me outside on the deck while she scampered up and down the three levels of her house like a squirrel, pausing here, pausing there, so that finally I could make no estimate of where in the house she found the anorexic rolled-up baggie she ultimately granted me. That’s how I’d learned always to call.

More often than not, Queue and Keith let their scratchy answering machine take messages they never listened to, but today, for a wonder, Queue was right there.

“Media Molecules.” That’s what she called her tape business.

“Hi, Queue, this is Jerzy. I wonder if I could score a tape off you today.” One of anything was our code word for a quarter ounce.

“Mm-hmm. The usual. How come you never call unless you want something, Jerzy? And what about you and Carol?”,

“She hasn’t come back.”

“Didn’t you say you and Carol were going to try counseling?”

“It didn’t work. It made things worse. The counselor was a woman, and Carol thought she was taking my side. The concept is that the counselor is a neutral referee, right, and you can both say anything you want, but then when she asks follow-up questions you can tell whose story she’s buying into. The counselor bought into my story even though I’m wrong.”

“Why are you always so down on yourself, Jerzy?”

“I had an unhappy childhood. My wife hates me. And I’ve sold my soul to the machines.” I always felt like I could say just about anything to Queue. Her ready laughter was a stifled chirp phasing into a tinkling giggle.

“How’s your big job at GoMotion? Is that still happening?”

“We’re designing a line of personal robots in cyberspace. It’ll be called the Veep. We made a prototype of the first one, and it cleans my house. But now my computer’s messed up. Something really strange happened today. You don’t know about the dark dream, do you, Queue? It’s when you think you’ve left cyberspace and you’re still in it. That happened to me today.”

“On the computer? Was it fun? I’ve had things like that happen to me with… in certain situations. Levels of reality?” She was talking about psychedelics, but she never ever mentioned drugs on the phone.

“No, no, it was horrible. I was walking across the room away from my machine and then something tugged at the side of my head and it was the cable to my goggles. I thought I’d taken them off and I was still wearing them. It was pure disorientation. The ants did it to me. I think there’s a virtual server that lets them get into my machine.”

“You have a computer virus?”

“I have ants, Queue. They’re a new thing you’ve never heard of. They’re much smarter than a virus.”

“You’re so cutting edge, Jerzy. That’s what I like about you.”

“So okay, Queue, I’m coming right up for that tape. Is Keith around? What with Carol gone I’m highly available.”

She lowered her voice. “I can’t. Keith is very jealous, and he’s the one I’ve taken on.” Queen Queue owned her house and kept Keith as her Prince Consort. “I would never fool around unless it was for real.”

“This isn’t for real, Queue. I’m only after some human warmth.”

“We’ll only be here for another two hours.” Queue and Keith are always taking trips in their camper van. “We have to record Brian Jones drumming congas at the Hindu Center.”

“Brian Jones? Is he like an Elvis imitator?”

Temple-bell laughter. “It’s his real name. And, Jerzy, when you come up, bring some show-and-tell. You said you have a working robot? A Veep?”

“Uh… yeah. His name is Studly. But-”

“Studly!” More chirp-giggle laughter. “You are such a crazed sick computer jock, Jerzy. Bring Studly and don’t be a tight-ass! Can he vacuum my floor?”

I thought of Queue’s house with its narrow staircases and lumpily layered rugs. “Well, maybe. We’ll see.”

“All right! Bah.” Queue had her own hip, dynamic way of saying bye, a plosive, husky sound.

I went out to the living room.

“Follow me out to the car, Studly.”

“Yes, master.”

He trundled after me to the car, and once I had the trunk open, Studly went and stood sideways to it. I pushed my rack of backup CDs to one side so they’d be out of Studly’s way.

“Okay, Studly, get in.”

Studly pushed both legs out to their full extension, and then quickly retracted the leg on the side toward the trunk. As he began falling toward the trunk, he snapped up his other leg, and fell sideways into the trunk, breaking his fall with his humanoid hand. He shifted himself into a comfortable position.

“You wait in there, Studly, and I’ll drive you to visit a friend. Her name is Queue.”

“Right on, Jerzy.”

I closed the trunk and got in my car with a fine sense of purpose. I’d grab a snack, go to the bank, get gas, hit the freeway, and be at Queue’s in an hour. It would be fun to see her and Keith. If it weren’t for having to buy pot every now and then, I’d never go anywhere except GoMotion and the supermarket. In today’s America, the many positive aspects of recreational drug use are too often ignored. The need to score gets the user out of his or her house and into the sunshine-out into the community and meeting people! Drugs are about networking!

My car is an Animata Benchmark. It’s the only really expensive thing I’ve ever owned. Driving it makes me feel good. I got it after my first year out here. Tooling slowly through the streets of my yuppie village of Los Perros, I marveled as always at the massive number of good-looking women to be seen in California. It was a brilliantly sunny April day with the air clear and cool as water-the kind of day you’d remember as “the best weather of the year” back East, a day when you could slowly windmill your arms in the sweet air and feel yourself to be swimming. Days like this come thick as pearls on the California year’s necklace.

A crowd of people in Spandex stood in front of the Los Perros Coffee Roasting Company, taking the air and enjoying each other’s company, some of them planning or returning from a jog along the Dammit Trail that leads up along Route 17 to the all but dry Hidalgo Reservoir.

When Carol and I moved to California, I was an unemployed mathematics professor, and I’d felt a disenfranchised academic mouse’s contempt for the Los Perros yuppies with their good cars, fit bodies, and standoffish demeanor.

Cars? My maroon Chevy Caprice whale wagon had been a damned fine car back in Killeville, Virginia, where Carol and I bought it used for $8,000. It was the only car we’d brought across the country with us, but in Los Perros, the whale hadn’t been any kind of a car to be proud of at all. We’d darted our heads around spotting BMWs, Mercedes, Porsches, even Ferraris and Lamborghinis, cars insanely out of our price range. For our second car we came up with $4K and bought a six-year-old Honda Accord, thinking at least now we’re fuel efficient! Then I’d gotten the GoMotion job and the Animata.

Yes, instead of remaining angry embittered losers, Carol and I had gotten job skills and turned that shit around. We’d gotten the bucks and become Californian and had no problems with drinking coffee at the Los Perros Coffee Roasting Company. It wasn’t snooty in there, it was civilized and practical-in the manner of a European cafe and in the manner of a McDonald’s-in the California manner, in short, and Carol and I were now at ease there. We were Californians: fit, in a hurry, making good bread, and with serious problems that we were beginning to try to learn to deal with.

The light was red, and I sat there in my Animata, with my windows and sunroof open, looking at all the beautiful women. I had a severe horn. It had been five weeks. Things change when you go so long without the cheering contact of another human’s fluids and skin. Crossing the street were a pair of twin young mothers pushing identical light blue strollers, each stroller holding a pair of twins. Six people! Were they models, come to profit in California? Mentally I selected a cube of space around one of the women, deleted her from the street, and inserted her into my head’s own seraglio, nude and chatty.

A joyfully chic Mexican woman with a high-fashion straw hat crossed next. She gazed at me evenly, smiled-and kept walking, right into the Roasting and right out of my life. In California you often see people that you never see again.

Here came a girl in stiff, poured-on jeans, her fluffy mass of combed curly hair formed into a huge ponytail resting on her back. With a barrette at either end, her ponytail had the shape of a great, thick jouncing cigar, which contrasted nicely with the sharply cut lines of her hips in their covering of thick, furrowed denim.

A plucky nineteen-year-old with dark eyebrows and a clean-cut nose appeared with two friends. Her mouth was lively, seductive and ironic, with narrow dark lips, crisply edged.

Right outside my car window sat a woman on the wide wall of the planter before the Roasting’s storefront. She wore a tasteful sweater of large argyle diamonds, her bell of hair was streaked and set just so, her soft face was womanly, yet childishly pert-I guessed she was a dissipated California Girl who had divorced or never married. She looked like Carol, only more symmetrical, ten years younger and ten pounds lighter. Suddenly I realized she was staring back at me. The light changed. Behind me was a Mercedes driven by a blond-bobbed woman in white silk, diamonds, and gold.

Turning the corner onto Santa Ynez Avenue, who should I see before the office of Welsh amp; Tayke Realty but Susan Poker, animatedly talking to a stocky woman with a portable phone and a black leather purse yet larger than Susan Poker’s. The stocky woman had shiny skin, short hair, and an expensive suit cut from folk-art fabric. Susan Poker was holding a sheaf of papers and acting extremely friendly, punctuating her remarks with many smiles and nods. Zzzt, I thought, mentally zapping her out of existence. ZzzzzzZZTT!

I parked behind the bank and walked half a block to a croissant bakery to grab some lunch. The bakery was run by a Vietnamese family, and I was half in love with a girl who worked behind the counter. Her name was Nga Vo.

Nga was taut and young, dressed always in black, with long hair worn poufed way up on one side. She had quick sneaky eyes that could narrow down to up-curved slits. She had a full, pouty, red-lipsticked mouth made yet more perfect by a roughness in the line of her left upper lip. I wanted to kiss and kiss that lip. She had a soft clean jawline and a weak yet stubborn chin, a California Girl chin. Beneath her face’s pale skin was an intricately expressive play of muscles: now molding a fleeting chipmunk cheeK, now forming a quick corrugation across her sweet brow. When Nga wrote out a sales check, she would rest her hand on a piece of paper she’d folded in four out of some ritual of Saigonese penmanship. Every time I talked to her, I did my best to stretch out our conversation.

“A medium roast beef croissant,” I said to Nga. “And a seltzer, please.”

“Yes,” said she. “Six forty-nine. How you doing today.”

“Fine.” I wanted to say so much more. How did you and your family escape from Vietnam? Do you like life in America? Do you have a boyfriend? Could you ever be attracted to a Western man? Will you move in with me? “It’s such nice weather,” I added breathlessly, as she counted out my change. “I hope you don’t have to work all day?”

“I here till six o’clock closing time.” Nga gave a quick laugh, breathless as a sob.

“Would… would you like to have dinner with me?” Yes! I’d finally said it!

Nga looked at me blankly. “What do you mean?” Her mother and aunt were watching us now, and the pushy pig behind me in line cleared his throat preparatory to placing his order.

“A date for dinner. You and me.”

Nga slid her eyes to one side and spoke in rapid Vietnamese to her mother. Her mother gave a very brief answer. Nga cast her eyes down.

“I no think so.”

Wearing a numb, frozen smile, I took my soda and sandwich outside to sit down at one of the bakery’s sidewalk tables. From inside came the chatter of Vietnamese voices. I swallowed the food too rapidly and it made a big painful lump in my throat. I was fat and old and crazy and nobody would ever love me again. Were those tears in my eyes?

A Vietnamese boy came out to clear the tables. He giggled when his eyes met mine.

“Are you Nga’s brother?” I asked desperately.

“She my cousin.” He nodded his head towards the bakery. “My name Khanh Pham. Nga say you ask her go on dinner date.”

“Yes,” said I. “Just to talk.”

“In traditional Vietnamese date, boy must come visit girl family. Maybe you yisit us, then Nga go on dinner date.”

“Uh… where do you live?”

“On East side.”

God. What if some of the Vo family were Carol’s students? I glanced down at my left hand, noticing the dent where my wedding ring had lived so many years. Asking Nga Vo for a date had been a stupid idea.

“Here our address,” said the boy, handing me a neat square of paper inscribed with Nga’s fine script. “Bakery close every Tuesday. Maybe you come visit tomorrow.”

My breath rushed out of me. “Yes. Yes, I will come!”

When I finished eating I took my paper plate and my seltzer bottle back. Nga’s mother, aunt, and cousin were there, with her father in the hallway out back. Nga slipped me a couple of bold, sneaky glances. “See you tomorrow!” I sang out.

The trees along Santa Ynez Avenue were blooming: bottlebrushes with cylindrical flowers made up of red bristles, catalpas with pendulous racemes of two-toned lavender flowers, and mimosas thick with tiny, sweet-smelling yellow blooms. Most of the fabulous plants in California are imported exotics. I wondered if the woman who reminded me of Carol was still at the Coffee Roasting. Now that I’d worked up the nerve to approach Nga, I felt brave enough to talk to anyone.

I put my card into the bank’s outdoor teller machine and pushed the buttons to get $200 in cash out of our checking account. UNABLE TO PERFORM THE REQUESTED TRANSACTION AT THIS TIME, read the machine’s little screen. PLEASE REMOVE CARD. I removed it and started over, this time trying to take the money out of the savings. Still no go. Had Carol-I reinserted the card and checked the balances of our checking and savings accounts. The balances were, respectively, $0.00 and $26.18. When our checking account runs short, money is transferred automatically from the savings. Carol had cleaned us out by writing too many checks. I seemed to remember her having mentioned something about having to pay the car insurance bill. I hadn’t realized it would come to so much.

I took the last whole $20 out of our savings and put it in my wallet, which gave me $34 dollars in all. Today was Monday, April 27, which meant GoMotion wouldn’t transfer my pay till like Friday. I was going to have to go all week on $34? And how was I going to get that pot from Queue? No way she’d take a check. Maybe I should pocket the weed and then pretend I’d forgotten my wallet? Being broke on top of being separated made me feel totally reckless. My mind flashed back to the bell-haired woman in the argyle sweater at the Roasting. I decided to hustle back there and try to talk to her before I did anything else.

I went down back streets the two blocks to the Roasting and yes, yes, the bell-haired woman was still there, sitting with the artsy-craftsy phone-toting woman I’d seen talking to Susan Poker before. But, despite her company, the bell-haired woman was definitely the type for me.

She had slightly stunned eyes and a plumpness in her neck beneath her chin. She was like someone’s sexy Mom, and I was old enough to be Daddy. I got a coffee with sugar and cream, sat down on a bench near her, and looked at her anew with each sip of my coffee. She noticed, she looked back at me, she looked again, our eyes met, and I smiled. Smoothly and deliberately, she stuck out her tongue and pressed it tight against her upper lip. Definitely a signal. In the past, women had occasionally given me such come-ons, but as a cautious married man I’d always passed them up. Today things would be different. I stood up and I walked over to her. I felt light-headed; my blood was pounding in my ears.

“Hi,” said I. “You’re really pretty.”

She laughed softly. “I was hoping you’d talk to me. Where are you from?”

“I live right here in Los Perros. My name’s Jerzy?” I stuck out my hand. She took it lightly. The touch of her hand was firm and warm.

“I’m Gretchen. And this is my friend Kay.” I nodded to stocky Kay and concentrated on Gretchen.

“What kind of work do you do?” asked Gretchen.

“I’m a computer programmer. I’m helping to design a personal robot. We’re going to call it the Veep. Like vice president?”

“Oh.” Gretchen turned and said something to her friend. “Do you work in an office?”

“No, I work at home. I’m all alone there. My wife left me six weeks ago.”

Gretchen looked very interested. “Are you planning to sell the property?”

“Don’t tell me you’re a Realtor!”

“I do a variety of things,” she said, her calm California eyes drilling into mine. Again she did that thing with her tongue.

“Would you like to come up to my house and look around?”

“Sure,” said Gretchen. “Why not.”

She talked some more with Kay, tying up loose ends, and then she walked slowly with me to my car and got in. Close up, she had tired eyes.

“Do you want anything?” I asked Gretchen.

She looked languidly greedy. “How about some fine wine? And two packs of Kents.”

The two crazy liquor store clerks were behind the counter, the thin giggling bearded one and the bowling pin-shaped one with the mustache. One of the nice things about California was how many workaday jobs were held by freaks. I got a bottle of good chardonnay and the Kents. It came to thirteen dollars and change. And then I was back in the car with Gretchen. This beautiful new woman was sitting in the bucket seat of my Animata, looking at her makeup in the mirror on the visor, fixing her face with the calm seriousness of a grown woman, her actual soft butt on the real leather of my car.

“I’m stoked,” said I. “I’m ready to party.”

Gretchen smiled. “I’m eager to see your house.” Again I studied her eyes. They were blue and… blank?

“I can show you my computer.”

“Yippee,” said Gretchen softly, and lit a cigarette. “I failed math in high school.”

“Are you from around here?”

“No, I’m from the Southland. Buena Park?”

“That’s near LA?”

“Not far from Disneyland. That used to be my summer job.”

“You worked in Disneyland? Wow. Talk about a real Californian. What did you do?”

“My last summer there I got to be Alice in Wonderland. In the parades?”

“God, Gretchen, that’s heavy. Did the men ever hit on you?”

“The single Dads. You had to look out for them. If they got too insistent, I’d look at Baloo Bear a special way, and he’d talk to them.”

“I’m a single Dad, Gretchen.” I laid my hand on her leg above the knee. She regarded me calmly, not moving my hand away.

A few minutes later I was back in my driveway. It was quarter past one. Though my oldest daughter Sorrel was off at college, son Tom and daughter Ida were still students at Los Perros High. They usually stopped by around three-thirty to regroup before heading across town to Carol’s. That gave Gretchen and me two clear hours.

“Nice big place,” said Gretchen. “Do you own it?”

“I rent.” A wrong answer. I was tracking Gretchen’s interest level as closely as an over-leveraged speculator watching the price of gold. I hurried to get the door open. Gretchen ambled in slowly.

“Where’s the powder room?”

“Right over there. I’ll open the wine.”

I went down to the kitchen and poured two glasses of wine. Glasses which Carol had bought in Mexico two years ago. I tore my thoughts away from that. Don’t stop to think, Jerzy, just do!

Gretchen was pacing around the living room, looking unexpectedly dynamic. “I love your things, Jerzy. All those seashells. Want to show me around the rest of the place?”

“Sure, Gretchen, I’d love to.” Graciously she took her wineglass, clinked it with mine, and gave a simpering, slightly naughty giggle. Who said middle-aged people couldn’t still have fun? I led her off on the house tour.

Our big old two-level house had a linoleum kitchen and dining area downstairs. At one end of the upstairs was a low-ceilinged living room with redwood paneling. A long hall ran along the front of the house from the living room to the other end of the house. The kids’ three bedrooms were off the long hall, and at the end of the hall was my (and formerly Carol’s) bedroom, a nice space that boasted a sun porch and a working fireplace, no less.

“What are those gloves and goggles,” Gretchen asked me when we reached the sun porch. “Were you and the wife into bondage?” She laughed softly and took a sip of her wine.

“I work in virtual reality,” I told her. “Cyberspace?”

Gretchen looked enthusiastic. Cyberspace was getting more popular every day. “That’s great! Can I try?”

A wave of horniness engulfed me. I stepped forward and put my arms around her. “Sure you can try it,” said I. “Everything I own is yours, Gretchen in Wonderland.”

“How sweet.”

We put down our wineglasses and I took her in my arms. Gretchen cocked her head and kissed me full on. Her mouth tasted cool and good. We made our way to the bed and lay down. Her sweater and skirt came off easily. She wore silky skin-colored underwear, and that came off easily too. I kissed her breasts and then I put on a rubber and we fucked. She wrapped her legs around my waist and moaned really loud, which made me feel great. She even said my name: “Jerzy, Jerzy, oh Jerzy!” All right.

After we came, we wandered naked into the sun porch. My windows looked out on pure nature: the live oaks and eucalypti of the dry gully behind the house. There were squirrels and birds. Standing there naked with Gretchen it felt like we were Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Sometimes Carol and I had stood here like this.

“I still want to see cyberspace,” said Gretchen, brushing my arm with the tip of a tit.

“One thing,” I cautioned. “I got a kind of infection in my machine this morning, a thing like a computer virus. We call them ants. It’s possible they might make it… malfunction.”

“Are you going to show me cyberspace or not?” demanded Gretchen.

“Oh, sure, I guess it’s okay,” said I, unable to resist finding out if this were true.

I turned on the computer and Gretchen watched me type in my cyberspace access code. Then I helped her don the gloves and headset. She sat in my desk chair, turning her head this way and that, while my desk monitor showed what she was seeing. I was ready to pull the plug if anything was weird, but so far everything looked normal. Gretchen was in my virtual office with Roarworld in the background.

“Dinosaurs!” exclaimed Gretchen in the too-loud voice of a person wearing earphones. “This is wonderful, Jerzy. Can I move around?”

I took her hand in mine and pushed the fingers into a pointing position. With my other hand I nodded her head to make her start flying. The screen images zoomed among the dinosaurs. I closed her fingers into a fist to make the motion stop. Gretchen understood and began flying around at will. Roarworld is quite shallow: its depth axis wraps after forty feet, meaning that if you fly forty feet deep into Roarworld, you find yourself back where you started. After she’d figured this out, Gretchen focused back on my virtual office.

It was fun to stand back and watch this naked, goggled woman sitting in my desk chair and moving her hands and head so oddly as she explored the invisible office that is layered over my sun porch. I kept a close eye on the screen, watching for any return of the ants-but there was no sign of them. Maybe the ant explosion was confined to the room at the end of the hall at GoMotion. But why had the ants put me on the dark dream; and how had they done it so easily?

As well as a door to GoMotion, my virtual office had a door to the Bay Area Netport. The Netport door was round and was patterned with the light gray-and-green yin-yang that was the Bay Area Netport logo. Gretchen flew on in there as I watched along on my computer’s screen.

Some nostalgic, displaced hacker had designed the Bay Area Netport to look like the waiting room of Grand Central Station in New York City. This cavernous simmie was programmed to be gravity-free, and you would see people’s body images floating around all over the mock steam-age space. Collision detection was usually turned off in these public spaces, so that if you bumped into someone else’s tuxedo, you would pass right through it. Ranged all along the walls, floor, and ceiling were hyperjump nodes: the gates, or magic doors, that opened into the different cyberspace worlds accessible in one jump from the Bay Area Netport. The nodes were shaped like spheres, so that you could dive into a node from any direction.

Set here and there in the walls were square portals marked REST ROOM. These were places for meeting people and for tweaking your tuxedo. Gretchen flew into the closest rest room and looked into the mirror.

“God, I look like you, Jerzy,” shouted Gretchen. “Can’t you get me a female tux?” I did in fact have a tux patterned after Carol, but I didn’t want Gretchen to wear it.

I leaned close to her headset so she could hear me. “Maybe later. Why don’t you go ahead and stay in my tux for now? There’s still a lot to see.”

“All right,” said Gretchen, drifting back out into the Netport. “Which way to Magic Shell Mall? I read an article about Magic Shell Mall just last week.”

“It’s right over there on the wall to your left. The extra big node that’s flashing pink and light blue?”

Just as Gretchen pointed her finger to fly into the cyberspace shopping mall, my doorbell rang. Shit! Already quarter to four! It was one of the kids!

“Gretchen, I gotta get the door. Don’t worry, I’ll keep them out of here. Have fun.”

I threw on some clothes and left my bedroom, closing the door. I’d say hi to the kids and come right back.

Tom was at the door, tall and full of beans. He had braces-the main reason I’d quit teaching and moved to California was to get enough money to pay for the children’s braces and college. Tom had grown something like six inches in the last year, and now he was taller than me. He was wonderfully enthusiastic about life.

“Hi, Da!” He poked me playfully in the side, right under my ribs. “Let’s play suckling pigs on Daddy!”

“Stop it!” I cried, clamping my elbows against my side in self-defense. Tom kept poking, rotating his fist back and forth to achieve a grinding motion. “Get your hands off me, Tom, or I’ll beat you! Stop it!” I deepened my voice to sound more authoritative. Tom was whooping and laughing. I made fists, stuck out the knuckles of my middle fingers, and pushed against Tom’s hard-muscled stomach, trying to give as good as I got.

There was a squeal as wide-faced, grinning Ida entered the fray as well. “Get Da!” she hollered, and set her fists to rooting against my abdomen. Ida was always ready to join in wild fun.

I fell to the floor with the two kids on top of me. I rapped on Tom’s shin hard enough to give him pause, and managed to squirm free, though Ida still hung onto one foot. Tom was just about to start back in on me when Ida sat up, looking puzzled.

“Who’s that screaming?”

It was Gretchen! I ran full tilt to the bedroom. Gretchen was clawing at the air, unsuccessfully trying to get the headset off. The desk monitor showed a voodoo blur of seething ants, and the skritchy ant sound percolated faintly out of the headset’s earphones. The ants completely blocked the view through the screen; they moved about in the self-similar patterns of turbulence-like the smoke of an explosion, like the florets of a cauliflower-three-dimensional patterns of fractal lace, dark patterns veined with thin dotted lines of color. There was no way to see in past the ants to wherever Gretchen had been when they’d come.

Despite Gretchen’s terror, the ant patterns were so fascinating that I decided not to turn off the machine. I pulled the headset and gloves off Gretchen and helped her out of the chair and onto my rumpled bed. She was shaking her head and moaning. Tom and Ida were at the bedroom door, looking terribly upset and worried.

“It’s okay, kids,” I called. “I was showing cyberspace to this lady and it made her feel sick.”

“She’s naked,” said Ida.

“It’s okay. Go down to the kitchen and get a snack. Everything’s okay.”

“Nothing’s okay,” yelled Ida. “I’m going to tell Ma!” She slammed my door shut.

Gretchen was curled up on her side, facing away from the sun porch and staring at the wall. She’d stopped sobbing and was taking low, steady breaths.

“What can I get you?”

“Get away from me,” she said quietly. “You creep. You sick creep.”

“I didn’t know the ants would come out at you,” I said. “I’m sorry it happened. It’s not my fault. I really like you, Gretchen, I wouldn’t want to hurt you.”

Heartened by rage, she sat up and began to dress. “I ought to sue you,” she said. “And what are you doing bringing your kids in here to stare at me? Call me a cab.”

“I don’t think they have cabs in Los Perros, Gretchen. Let me drive you.”

“I want a cab, and I want cab fare. I want four hundred dollars.”

“Is it money you’re after? Is that why you came home with me? I hate to tell you, Gretchen, but all I have is a twenty.”

She took a lipstick and compact out of her purse and made up her mouth. “Then write me a check. And, no, I didn’t come up here for money, and I resent your implications. But after putting those sick bugs on me, you owe me something. How would you like it if I went to the police?”

“And told them what? That you got scared by something you saw on my computer?”

“No, Jerzy, what if I told them that you got your children to watch us being sexually intimate together? How do you think that would play?”

“Hey, come on now, don’t be ridiculous,” I said, meanwhile thinking Heeeelp!

If you get involved with any kind of charge combining sex and children in the courts, you’re totally screwed forever, especially in California. I needed to get Gretchen back on my side, but if I wrote her a check, I’d lose my deniability. Deniability; Christ, she had me thinking like a lawyer. All this hassle just to get laid? Maybe feely-blank love-dolls were the way to go. I signed and started talking.

“I won’t write you a check because, first of all, I’m not going to be blackmailed on bullshit charges, and, second of all, if I wrote a check it would bounce. I don’t get paid till Friday.” I hunkered down beside the bed to put my face at her level. “Be reasonable, honey. We like each other. Remember how good we made each other feel? Calm down, Gretchen, give me your phone number, and this weekend I’ll take you out wherever you want.”

“San Francisco?”

“No problem. We’ll get a room at the Mark Hopkins Hotel on Nob Hill. Shopping in Union Square, dinner at the Zuni Cafe, hit some rock clubs-it’ll be my pleasure, Gretchen. I like you!”

Abruptly she pushed her face forward and gave me a peck on the cheek. “I like you, too, Jerzy. But now take me back to the Roasting. I’m too embarrassed to stay here just now.”

So I ferried her back down the hill, she gave me her number, and I told her I’d call later in the week to fix our plans.