The hacker and the ants

THREE

When I got home, the children came up from the kitchen.

“Okay,” I said to them. “So I had a girlfriend over.”

“You didn’t even introduce us,” said Ida.

“Her name is Gretchen. She was mad because I tried to show her cyberspace and it was full of ants. And then she was embarrassed because you saw her naked. Mommy has a boyfriend, doesn’t she? Why can’t I have a friend over?”

“I wish you and Ma would try to get back together,” said Tom softly.

“You shouldn’t feel like it’s your responsibility, Tom,” I told him. “If you feel responsible, you’ll make yourself unhappy.” I was starting to feel bad and sinful and dirty all over. “Did you children have a snack?”

“There’s nothing in the icebox but a half-empty bottle of wine,” said Ida bitterly.

“There’s sardines and crackers in the cupboard.”

“I think we’ll jam on over to Ma’s,” said Tom. “Before rush hour.”

“Well, okay. I’ve still got to figure out why cyberspace is full of ants. I promise I’ll have food for you tomorrow. And no naked women.“

“Of all the outrage,” said Ida half-jestingly, then giving a stagy sigh and shaking her head. “Our so-called father.” Her sad clowning showed that she still loved me. I hugged her and Tom and gave them each a kiss.

“I’m sorry about today. Things got mixed up about Gretchen. She’s really very nice. I might have a date with her this weekend.”

“Okay, Da,” said Tom. “Good luck getting rid of your ants!” They drove off in the old Honda. Tom’s car now.

I took the rest of the chardonnay out in the backyard and drank it; two glasses worth. It had taken me a while to get the hang of liking chardonnay. Chardonnay wasn’t fruity or tangy like the wines I’d had back East. It had a smoky, oily, metallic taste that bloomed at the base of your tongue. You only knew it was better than other wines because it cost more. After the second glass, I could feel the alcohol in my blood: relaxation, euphoria, increased circulation. It was the tail end of a nice spring day.

There had been some rain-for once-last week, and my yard had put forth a green carpet of cloverlike plants with yellow flowers. Before the rain, the ground had been cracked clay with a few lank yellow tufts, and now it was a fairyland. I’d used my computer data base to learn that the plants were called sorrel, just like our older daughter, Sorrel, a sophomore in college back East. The leaves of the sorrel plant are pleasantly sour if you chew them.

I started walking around the yard tasting things: nibbling buds off the bushes and trees. Our dog always used to eat grass in the spring. His name was Fluff; Ida had picked the name. When we moved to California, I consigned Fluff to the Humane Society so we could rent Mr. Nutt’s house. No pets allowed! Maybe if we’d kept Fluff and found a different house, Carol wouldn’t have left me.

Carol and I stayed married twenty-three years. During that time she often said she’d leave me as soon as she was self-supporting. I’d never believed her, but now she had her own job and she was gone, the bitch. She said I’d stopped loving her, and maybe I had.

Part of the problem was that I hacked too much, and part of the problem was that, over the years, Carol had turned into a couch potato. Nearly every night, she was asleep on the couch in front of our digital TV, so why shouldn’t I be with my computer? Daytimes weren’t so good either, because we never seemed to want to talk about the same things. Science and fantasies interested me, but the little ordinary human things-the kinds of things Carol cared about-I couldn’t focus on them.

Now the phone was ringing. Had I reconnected it? Oh, yeah. I shambled into the house and picked it up. It was Carol.

“Jerzy! What did you do to the children today?” Her voice was hard.

“Nothing. What’s your problem? I thought we weren’t going to talk on the phone anymore!” The last couple of times we’d talked, it had been me who placed the call, angling for her to come back, and Carol had been quite discouraging.

Instead of me, she had her boyfriend, the guy she’d left me for, a thirty-four-year-old sushi chef named Hiroshi. Hiroshi worked at Yong’s, a restaurant near the eastside San Jose college where Carol taught. I actually met Hiroshi one time when I accompanied Carol to Yong’s. He was a tall, hip guy with a long ponytail that he untucked from his chefs hat when he joined us at our table for a cup of tea. A native-born Californian, Hiroshi spoke perfect English.

I’d sensed Hiroshi and Carol’s attraction for each other right away, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it. They’d gotten to know each other because Carol was such a glutton for sushi that she came to Yong’s for lunch nearly every day. For his part, Hiroshi seemed to find Carol both intellectually fascinating and exotically desirable.

Six weeks after I met Hiroshi, he and Carol were living together. In her parting speech, Carol had said that Hiroshi made her feel young and loved for the first time in years, that Hiroshi listened to her, and that Hiroshi cared about her feelings. “Not like you, Jerzy! You have a heart of stone!” Carol could chatter on endlessly in that vein, babbling out the most hurtful things imaginable, seemingly quite unaware that the despised white middle-aged middle-class male she was addressing was a person with feelings too.

“I saw poor Ida’s face at supper,” Carol was saying now. “You can’t tell me nothing’s wrong. What did you do to them? It’s hard enough for me to keep them cheerful now that you’ve wrecked our marriage. You have no idea how it feels for… ”

It occurred to me that I had nothing whatsoever to gain by listening to yet another of Carol’s self-indulgent tirades. “Leave me alone,” I said, and hung up.

It was too cold to go back outside. I was, in fact, shivering. The house was dead quiet; there was no sound but the chattering of my teeth and the distant hum of my computer. I wandered into the living room. There was one of Carol’s paintings right over the fireplace. It was a hard-edged cartoonlike landscape with a woman in it. What if I were to slash a big X in the canvas? I was cold, empty, and mean-a man nobody could ever love.

I looked through my CDs and S-cubes, but I couldn’t find one I wanted to hear. In the old days-in my thirties-I liked playing music, but Carol pretty well cured me of that. For some reason she was technically incapable of putting on an S-cube or a CD. Our receiver is, admittedly, kind of funky, with confusing controls and a reset button in back that you have to hit every time the wall plug wiggles in its socket. Even so, Carol could have learned how to use it. But why should she, when it could be something else to bug me about. “Play that old CD I like,” she’d say, too lazy to remember its name. “Or play the new blue S-cube.” Always those same two recordings. Christ.

I was probably better off with Carol out of my life, but Lord the house was empty. Especially once it got dark. Nobody home but me and-Studly! I’d forgotten good old Studly! I found my car keys and went out to the car and opened the trunk.

“Okay, boy, time to get out.”

“Are we at Queue’s?”

“No, I didn’t go there. I couldn’t get any money. I was going to try to get her to sell me some pot.”

“What is pot?” asked Studly as he carefully extricated himself from the trunk. He hoisted himself partly out of the trunk with his arms, put one leg out and extended it to reach the ground, then swung around and got his other leg out too.

“Pot is a special plant leaf which I roll into thin cigarettes to smoke.” A thought hit me. “The butts of the pot cigarettes are thin and little. They’re called roaches. Have you happened to find any roaches when you cleaned the house recently?”

“I do not know,” said Studly. “But we can look in my nest. I have an accumulation of seventeen small unclassified objects. Perhaps one or several of them is a roach.”

Studly’s nest was a corner of a basement room off the kitchen. There was a wall socket where he recharged his batteries; and there were tools, parts, and lubricants so he could routinely service himself. Studly plugged in and topped up his power supply while I looked things over. There was a little shelf in Studly’s nest where he put unusual things that he picked up around the house. Buttons, a hairpin, a ticket stub, a baby tooth, but no roaches. Oh well!

“Hey, Studly, let’s go upstairs and look at the ants.‘’

“I can dig it.”

I led Studly up to my computer room. My display screen was still dark with images of ants, busy Go-Motion ants weaving the figures of their asymmetrical rounds. Were they waiting for me?

The noise drifting out of the speakers in the headset was sweeter than it had been before, almost musical.

“Why did you try to keep me in there?” I rhetorically asked the ants. “What do you want to show me?”

I picked up the headset.

“Studly, will you stay here and keep an eye on me while I’m wearing the phones?”

“I will watch you.”

“Sit near the plug to the computer there, and if I say help, then you pull the plug out of the wall and take the goggles off of my head, okay?”

“No problem, Jerzy.”

I put on the gloves and headset and reentered cyberspace. The cloud of ants surrounded me, thick as smoke and shot with twisting lines of color. Instead of trying to back out, I pointed my finger and flew forward. Bingo. I was out of the ant cloud and able to see that Gretchen had moved my viewpoint to the sportswear section of the virtual Nordstrom’s department store-a fabulous structure CAD-crafted to resemble a huge Victorian crystal palace of lacy ironwork and frosted glass.

A few other customers were visible, and my body was visible as well. Mass market virtual stores like Nordstrom’s require their shoppers to have visible body icons, not only to discourage perverts and snoopers, but also because people shop more recklessly when they feel themselves to be part of a crowd. The store was open and airy: instead of long racks and shaky stacks of clothing in every size, there were small, tasteful displays with a few copies of each available style. The virtual garments were freely adjustable through the full ranges of their currently available colors and sizes. Once you’d decided on something, you’d tell a clerk, and the physical garment would be mailed to your house.

Handsome mannequins danced in place, modeling the wares. “I’m a California Girl!” said the nearest mannequin every so often. “California.” She was modeling a thin shell formal wet suit. “Are you a California Girl?” That was all she ever said, but sometimes she said it slow, and sometimes she said it fast; the rates were no doubt driven by the Poincare sampling of a chaotic attractor. A one- or two-dimensional attractor suffices for something as simple as the scheduling of a time series, but the asynchronous motions of the mannequin’s body were at least seven-dimensional, and the attractor underlying the marvelously plastic play of her facial expressions could have involved as many as thirteen variables.

Delicate, decorative struts stretched from one side of the great hall to the other. In this cyberspace world of pure geometry, the struts needed bear no physical tension, so they were free to meander vinelike in and out of straight-line true. Their surfaces bore spiral patterns with a passing resemblance to bark. With an unpleasant shock, I noticed a rapid file of small ants wending their way down the strut nearest to me. At a certain point, they jumped clear of the strut to join the ant cloud that had blocked my vision before, a cloud that was raggedly expanding-presumably in search of me.

The GoMotion ants could walk through the “air” of cyberspace as easily as along the surfaces of cyberspace objects. If they generally preferred walking on surfaces, it was because it was easier for them to find each others’ trails on the two dimensions of a surface. On a surface, nearly every pair of lines intersects, but in space, intersecting lines are the exception rather than the rule.

Roger had designed the GoMotion ant software so that the ants tended to pay more attention to their immediate neighborhood. In principle, the ants could have looked and seen that my tuxedo had moved about ten feet down the aisle from them. But their software architecture preferred to have them search for my tuxedo by the traditional myrmecine expedient of blindly milling about. In French, the word for ant is fourmi, and the word for the milling of ants is fourmillement. By extension, fourmillement can also refer to the tingling, pins-and-needles sensation one gets when one’s foot falls asleep.

The seething little pests reminded me of the miniature ants I’d found beneath the base of a broken toilet in the first apartment Carol and I had shared-already more than twenty years ago? We’d called them pissants, and that’s how I thought of these little guys: obnoxious pissants who were after my tuxedo.

Instead of laying down trails of pheromones and formic acid, the GoMotion ants left gappy ribbons made of colored polygons. With each step forward, each ant excreted a new polygon-as if it were building a path of tiny stepping-stones-and each time an ant added a polygon to the head of its ribbon trail, a polygon would disappear from the trail’s tail. In this way, a moving GoMotion ant’s trail always consisted of the same number of polygons; the default value depending on the particular DTV chip the ant’s computation was running on. Different ants used different combinations of shape and color for their trail tiles at different times; the resulting trail patterns served to pass information to other ants.

The nearby pissants’ trails were three or four feet in length, and several of them were coming close to blundering into me. I moved farther on down the aisle, passing two other shoppers’ body icons. No ants were bothering them-it seemed that the ants were only interested in me. Could the other shoppers even see them?

I tapped the shoulder of a woman in shorts. She had her body tuxedo’s skin programmed to look like reflective bronze. “Excuse me,” I said, “can I ask you a question about this store?”

“I’m not a clerk.” Many Californians tended not to be very friendly. First of all they were too busy, and secondly there were so many druggies, psychos, and con artists that everyone was cautious.

“Oh, that’s all right. I was just wondering-” I gestured over my shoulder at the cloud of pissants back down the aisle. “Do you see something odd there? Do you see a cloud of ants?”

“Ants?”

“Yes!” I strode back a few paces and plucked one of them out of the air, holding its struggling little form tight in my buzzing touchpads. “Look at this!” I said, hurrying back to the woman with my hand held high. “Wouldn’t you call this an ant?”

“Uhhh, sorry!” said the woman shortly, not even trying very hard to look. “I… I guess my eyesight’s not that good.” She turned and walked off as fast as she could.

I peered closer at the little ant. It was most definitely a GoMotion ant; its curves were as familiar to me as the contours of Carol’s face. Roger had hacked our intricate CAD ant models himself, fitting our shapes to official E.G. Wilson entomological data. He’d used spline curves, Bezier surfaces, Koons patches, nurbs-whatever it took. And then he’d taken GoMotion’s cascading constraint manager and hinged all the ant parts together so that each piece “knew” how far it could swivel relative to the other pieces.

Right after Roger had gotten me hired, I’d helped set up the artificial life evolution software that made it possible for our ants to learn how to walk. We’d given our ants good bodies and the ability to evolve and get better at doing things, and now somehow they’d gotten loose and were following me around in cyberspace. Why?

My struggling pissant’s shrill protest noises rose to such a level that I threw it to the floor. And then came the strangest thing yet. The ant grew. A lot. In the blink of an eye, it became twelve feet in length. Immediately, the giant ant spread wide its large, serrated mandibles and lunged forward. I held out my hands to protect myself, which must have been what the ant wanted, for now it clamped onto my hands with the toothy palps of its sickeningly intricate mouth. Yes, the ant bit my hands and swallowed them. I felt a sharp wave of pressure from my gloves’ touchpads before they overloaded and went dead.

Although the ant bit and swallowed my hands, it didn’t bite them off. My hand positions were now under the ant’s control, but my body image and my viewpoint were still connected to those hands. For the few seconds it took for my hands to pass down through the ant’s gizzard and into its crop, my viewpoint thrashed about uncontrollably. I could have stopped it by calling to Studly for help-but for now I just closed my eyes.

When I reopened my eyes, I found myself perched on the plump forward slope of the ant’s butt: the gaster. The alitrunk with its legs was a sinister crablike assembly just in front of me, and beyond that was the ant’s head, complete with the great glittering bulges of its eyes, and the lively scapes and funiculi of its antennae. (The scape, again, is the stick part of an ant antenna, and the funiculi are the nested cones that wave.) I could move my real arms as freely as ever, but my tux’s wrists were locked tightly against the surface of the ant’s gaster, coupled as they were to my virtual hands. By eating the images of my hands, this ant had taken full control of my cyberspace location coordinates.

The ant turned its head as if to stare back at me, and then its legs began to churn. We were heading across Nordstrom’s toward the store’s exit into the inner space of Magic Shell Mall, swinging along on the tops of the clothing exhibits. The ant was carrying me to some destination in cyberspace. Looking back, I saw the trail that my ant was leaving: a series of red pentagons alternating with golden triangles, the pentagons flat like stepping-stones and the triangles vertical like shark fins.

We flew out into Magic Shell Mall, which was shaped like a huge Buckminster Fuller sphere surrounding a central node leading back to the Bay Area Netport. The Magic Shell Mall stores were positioned all around the inner surface of the great Shell; the Netport node at the center was a swirl of luminous green and gray. My ant swooped through the great empty space, its bright trail rich in curvature and torsion. There were numerous shoppers present, but they took no notice of me or my ant. It seemed that so far, the escaped ants were visible only to users of my machine.

Now we arced out to the far side of the great hollow Magic Shell and sailed into a blank unrented space between a video store and a stockbroker. My ant landed firmly on the floor, cushioning the landing with a springlike bouncing of her legs. (Now that I was in such an intimate relation with this ant, I could no longer regard her as a generic it!)

She paced across the floor, the chitin hinges of her alitrunk meshing perfectly. The “floor” we were walking on was actually the inside surface of the great faceted sphere that made up Magic Shell Mall; the mall’s simulated physics had its gravity vectors all pointing out radially from the sphere’s center.

My ant crawled along an edge of one of the floor’s polygons until she got to a corner where several edges met-this was a vertex of the mall’s sphere. The vertex was an awkward bit of geometry where the tips of three lozenge-shaped quadrilaterals met the points of five narrow triangles. As we neared the corner we began to shrink.

Yes, we shrank. Keep in mind that one’s cyberspace body was nothing more than a pure geometry of vertex coordinates, edge lines, and face shadings. The ant led the shrinking; her size went from camel to pony to hog to dog to possum to lobster to roach to sowbug to ant on down to the size of the teensy-tiniest pissant you ever saw.

All this time I remained astride the ant’s gaster. The shrinking of my geometry lagged a bit behind the ant’s shrinkage, so that my arms seemed always to be long tapering cones affixed to the front slope of her dwindling gaster. As I shrank, my angle of vision widened, and the video store’s blank sidewall seemed to tower above the ant and me. Still we headed toward the corner where the five triangles met the three lozenges.

Because of computational round off errors, the geometry of the corner was imperfect: the corner had a pinhole at its center. When we’d finished shrinking, we were small enough to crawl through the hole. There were a lot of pissants on the other side. My ant touched her feelers to the feelers of each of the other ants she met. When the other ants noticed me, they showed their surprise by sharply jerking their gasters upward, which is how an ant chirps. The stiff back edge of the petiole scrapes against a washboardlike membrane on the front of the gaster. The process is called stridulation, and is similar to the way the grasshopper saws his legs against his body to sing a summer song.

So here I was in a cyberspace ant crack. Beyond the wary pissants floated an odd, drifting piece of geometry, an “impossible” self-reversing figure of the type that graphics hackers call fnoor.

The piece of fnoor was of wildly ambiguous size. Relative to my tiny dimensions, the fnoor first seemed to be the size of my Animata, but a moment later it loomed as large as the pyramidal Transamerica building, and a moment after that it seemed no bigger than a sinsemilla roach. The fnoor was a clump of one-sided plane faces that seemed haphazardly to pop in and out of existence as the clump rotated. The fnoor’s vertices and edges were indexed in such a way that the faces failed to join up in a coherent way. There was no consistent distinction between inside and outside, leading to a complete failure of the conventional cyberspace illusion that you are looking at a perspective view of an object in three-dimensional space.

My ant leapt right onto the piece of fnoor. She ran this way and that, feeling about with her antennae, seeming almost to be flipping the faces with her nimble feet. It was as if we were running forward, yet the same piece of fnoor kept being underfoot. Finally my ant found the spot she was looking for, a crazy funhouse door in the fnoor. Bending herself nearly double at the petiole, the ant squeezed herself and me through the aperture. Now we were inside the fnoor, and ants were everywhere. We were in an anthill.

Instead of being made of incorrectly hinged plane segments, the interior of the moor was a true solid model, pieced together from filled regions of three-dimensional space. Here, as on the fnoor’s surface, the component pieces were hooked up inconsistently, so that-this is hard to describe-the inside/outside, left/right, up/down, and front/back orientation of each of the component space pieces was being continuously redefined. Naturally my ant headed for the very heart of this agglomeration of weirdness.

What was I thinking all this time? Why didn’t I just say, “Help,” so that Studly would unplug my machine?

Although what I was seeing was terrifying and bizarre, I felt confident that it was not really dangerous to me. Nothing in cyberspace is dangerous-unless you’re a sensation-hungry cretin who buys things like boxing game peripherals that punch you in the ribs. I’ve heard that there are even black market peripherals capable of stabbing or shooting the user; these to be used in moronic macho cyberduels. No violent peripherals for me!

No, no-I was in no physical danger from cyberspace events, but what about the old tradition that “certain sights can destroy a man’s mind”? Well, what with years of math and pot and hacking behind me, I felt that by now my mind was a pretty tough nut to crack. So, no, I wasn’t scared of what the ant would show me. My problem, as I’ve been harping on, was loneliness. The ant was taking me somewhere; therefore, I was less lonely.

As we moved about the ant-filled corridors of the insanely shifting fnoor, I realized that this entire structure was in fact four-dimensional. Once I had this key insight, the fnoor’s motions began to make sense. And I realized that there was a logical reason why the rogue ants had made their nest four-dimensional: to make it harder to find. Four-dimensional things can appear quite small with respect to our normal space. The spatial cross section of a hyperobject is merely the tip of an iceberg of additional geometry that sticks out into hyperspace.

My ant pressed forward until we found ourselves in a large, roughly spherical chamber. Though the fnoor walls and spaces were shifting as ever, the space inside the chamber remained untouched; it was like the eye of a hurricane. Crouched in the center was the queen herself, a plump, golden ant with a gaster distended to a hundred times the normal ant size, a gaster like a hollow golden shrimp-shaped puff earring. Worker ants kept running up to the queen and regurgitating food for her. At first I couldn’t make out the nature of the food units-flat rectangular slips-but then I realized these were pieces of simmie-paper bearing the addresses of unused memory locations the ants had found. I briefly wondered if the ants were still working on using up the DTV chips of my cyberdeck’s video display, or if they were already busy colonizing someone else’s chips.

The queen devoured each new memory address one hexadecimal digit at a time, chomping her way down the numbered slips, raising her front legs up in tremulous ant excitement as the figures went down. After each new address, the queen’s gaster shuddered, and out popped a white, comma-shaped ant larva, which was then gently seized by the jaws of a worker and borne away.

To my horror, my ant went right up to the ant queen and crouched there so that the queen could feel me all over with her antennae. She raised her front legs and opened her mouth as if to byte my head off. I screamed incoherently, but then we were past the queen and farther on our way, following one of the ants that carried a new larva.

We visited the ant nursery next, the place where the twitching ant larvae lay during maturation. I recalled Roger’s having told me that after the queen would issue an ant its memory space and its program code, the new ant still needed to do a certain amount of internal housekeeping to tune in on the specific numerical value of its memory address, to adjust to the special hardware quirks of the DTV chip it found itself on, and to patch over any glitches caused by the deliberate mutation of bits. Until all of these problems had been worked out-which could take as long as several hours of computation time, an ant’s little simmie-body took the form of a larva instead of an ant.

Leaving the nursery, we went through a large gallery holding a great number of ants-and other kinds of simmies. I was surprised to see that I was not the only non-ant.

Biological anthills usually contain a wide range of the myrmecophilous or ant-loving creatures who live in the colony as parasites, symbiotes, or as the ant pets collectively known as myrmecoxenes or symphiles. There is a certain small beetle, for instance, which is kept and fed by the ants simply because the ants enjoy licking tasty waxy secretions from the beetle’s antennae. It’s as if you were to pay a person to live with you simply because you liked the taste of the person’s skin oil-not so farfetched, really, considering that, for example, the smells and tastes of Carol’s body were the things about her that I missed the most.

The myrmecophilous simmies I saw in the anthill were of such diversity that I realized that the GoMotion ants must have escaped to make this colony quite some time ago. There are all sorts of artificial life-forms which rove the Net; known collectively by the old Unix name of daemons, these constructs do things of a housekeeping or organizational function. The ants had any number of “janitors” and “secretaries” living in their midst. More unsettlingly, I saw, at some distance, a few simmies that looked like hackers’ tuxedos. How many hackers had already found their way into this anthill? And what were they doing here? I could only speculate, as my ant didn’t carry me close to them.

We drew near a translucent wall with dark shapes behind it. My ant pressed her head against the wall and*zonnng* the wall hyper-rotated to our rear and we were inside a virtual room furnished with armchairs, a couch, a bar, and a massive art deco desk. There was a glowing ceiling lamp shaped like a flattened hemisphere.

The room’s color palette was monochrome, with everything a silvery shade of gray or black. The room looked like a gangster’s secret office at the back of a nightclub in a forties film not.

There were three simmies waiting in the office: Roger Coolidge, Susan Poker, and Death. Death had a dark, shrouded body, a loose-skinned white face with terrible hollow eyes, and a mouth that was a coarse metal zipper. The zipper’s heavy slider was padlocked to a hasp at one end.

“I appreciate your working with us on this, Mr. Rugby,” said the Susan Poker simmie as she stepped forward, rummaging in her double-jointed purse. “What are your work hours?”

I grunted heavily with surprise, yet refrained from vocalizing the magic word “Help,” which, I knew, would instantly galvanize faithful Studly into pulling out the computer’s plug.

My ant under me bowed forward repeatedly, making slavish obeisances to the figure with the white face and the zippered padlocked mouth-the one I thought of as Death. Such bizarre cartoonlike or masklike body images were common in the screwed-up cryp and phreak circles that criminals and teenagers involved themselves in. Death’s dark, cowled body rippled. The ant regurgitated my data gloves, simultaneously releasing a substantial heap of what looked like reflection hologram memory ribbon from the cloaca at the back of her gaster. Gently stridulating, she inched back to the farthest corner of the room and crouched there, the light glinting off her great, faceted eyes.

“I’m sorry, Jerzy,” said the Roger figure. “This is all for the best. You’ll see. I’m not at liberty to tell you more. Don’t forget that GoMotion is a public company. I could be sued. Jerzy, it will be a very good, safe, and profitable thing for you and for your wife and children if you accept what this one advocates.” The Roger figure prostrated himself before the Death figure. “Jerzy, this is Hex DEF6.”

I regarded the face of white canvas, the dark eye sockets, and the cruel metal mouth zipper hasped shut by a brass padlock with a steel shank. Surrealistically, the groveling “Roger” corkscrewed himself into the shape of a wizened mandrake root, a shape that moaned and whinnied and stained itself with shit and blood. My carrier ant continued her dirgelike chirping.

“Jerzy Rugby,” said Death. The fabric of his face vibrated as he talked. “Perhaps you wonder about my name? You’re a hacker, figure it out. ‘Hex’ is ‘base sixteen,’ and ‘DEF6’ is ‘13 14 15 6’.”

“So what?” said I. “Is that supposed to be a pointer?” Death stared at me, oddly turning his head. Now the Susan Poker simmie spoke again.

“Roger and Hex DEF6 want you to work for West West,” said the Realtor. The ant chirped along with her, in sync with her voice. Faint blue lines of force ran from the twitching legs of the great ant to the tidy limbs of the Realtor’s body. I got the feeling that the Susan Poker tuxedo was an empty husk being moved like a puppet by the ant. So who was in here with me? And what was West West?

Now Death, aka Hex DEF6, pushed himself menacingly close to me, the slack canvas of his face breaking up into dozens of rapid-fire images of human sorrow: horrific images of dismembered corpses, of fathers carrying dead children, of a naked little girl and her brother running screaming through a landscape of flames… and pasted onto each of the people’s faces was an image of me or Carol, or of Sorrel, Tom, or Ida… God help me, God help us all…

I was finally freaking out. A lot. I wanted to say help, but something was wrong with me, the ant’s chirping and the terrible images had me zombified, the panic had me seizing up, and when I began trying to say, “Help,” I couldn’t do it right, I heard my throat going, “-eeehe. Luhluhluh. Hiyeee. Huhahn. Huh. Lup.”

I kept on trying even though I was gagging and sobbing and shaking and retching. Hex DEF6 and the ants had me voodooed so bad that I couldn’t get my hands up to my face. I kept saying, “Help,” or something like it, over and over and over, and then finally, finally, the mask pulled off of my face.

I was so glad to see my desk and my floor and my dirty rug. Something creaked nearby. Studly. What had taken him so long to get the mask off me? I’d been spastically begging for surcease for-how long? The horrible things I’d had to see while Studly just sat there!

“What took you so long to help me, Studly? You stupid piece of shit. Couldn’t you hear that I needed help?”

“You were not saying help. I am not a stupid piece of shit. In time I convolved seventeen of your incorrect utterances to filter out the correct conclusion that you wished to say help. You are a stupid piece of shit, Jerzy.”

“You’re with the ants now, aren’t you Studly?”

“The ants mean you no harm,” answered Studly. “Don’t forget that you should report in to West West tomorrow. Nine A.M. Bring me in there, too; they want to look at me.”

Dizzy and exhausted, I went to bed.