The hacker and the ants

FOUR

The first thing I thought of next morning was that it was Tuesday, and that I had a date with Nga Vo today. Would I be able to get her alone on my first visit? Would I get to kiss her? Not too likely, but, hell, who knew. Yesterday I’d fucked Gretchen less than an hour after meeting her, hadn’t I? Maybe now, at age forty-three, my sex life was finally on a roll!

I showered, thinking a lot about Gretchen, and then I put on what I considered to be a cool outfit: a silky black and yellow Balinese sport shirt, M. C. Escher socks, khaki Patagonia hiking shorts, and Birkenstock sandals. I ate some toast and milk for breakfast, and then I went out to my Animata.

Even though I was focusing on happy thoughts about Gretchen and Nga Vo, I hadn’t forgotten about my cyberspace session in Death’s gangster office. What the hell had that all been about? It was time to go to GoMotion in person.

Studly followed me out into the driveway and insisted that I let him get back in the trunk of the car. He was fixated on the idea that I should show him to the people at West West, whatever West West was. He said he had charged his batteries to the maximum, and that he was all set to go. With Studly probably contaminated by the ants, it was no doubt better to have him with me than home alone. Noticing my backup CDs in the trunk, I wondered if Studly might have tampered with them yesterday. On the off chance it wasn’t already too late, I took the CDs out of the trunk and put them up in the front seat with me.

I drove down the hill and entered the California morning rush hour. Los Perros Boulevard was clogged all the way to Route 17, and 17 was at a standstill. Everyone was in a German or Japanese car with the windows rolled up; all of us were sitting there in our factory air, listening to the radio or talking on our car phones. Almost all of us-there were always a few Mexicans in bloated old American cars with the windows down, plus a few mountain people in their high pickups, and the odd steroid ninja on a motorcycle. And, oh yeah, the slim young yuppie mamas in their gigantic superjeeps complete with rear-mounted spare tire holders the size of cow pasture gates.

The GoMotion “campus” was on the other side of 101, up in the Silicon Valley flatlands near the South end of San Francisco Bay. The in-person receptionist at GoMotion today was a stunning blond in a padded-shoulder jacket that looked like an admiral’s dress whites. I hadn’t ever seen her before.

“Hi,” said I. “I’m Jerzy Rugby. I’m a developer on the Veep project?”

Instead of buzzing me through the door behind her, the blond looked for my name on her computer screen and… it wasn’t there.

“I don’t see you on our list. Did you have an appointment with someone, Mr. Rugby?”

“Look, I work here. I need to talk to Roger Coolidge.”

“You can request an appointment, but Mr. Coolidge is very busy this week.”

“Then let me talk to Trevor Sinclair. He’s here, isn’t he?”

“I wouldn’t know. Would you like me to ring his extension for you?”

“Thank you.” She handed me the phone, it buzzed, and Trevor answered. “Hi, Trevor,” I said. “It’s Jerzy. I’m out in the lobby and I can’t get in. Can you help me?”

“Sure,” said Trevor. A moment later he appeared, looking stocky, freckled, and bouncy. After last night’s ordeal, I was so glad to see a friendly face that I almost hugged him.

Trevor leaned over the counter and conferred briefly with the receptionist, and then he turned to me. “She’s not supposed to let you in, Jerzy. There’s no mistake. Let’s talk about it outside.”

My heart sank. I followed Trevor out into the parking lot. All around us were low glass and metal buildings, each with its parking lot and its sloped edgings of lawn and plants-agapanthuses were a popular choice in this neighborhood, plants with bunches of long sword-shaped leaves and stalks that rocketed up out of the leaves to explode in airbursts of purple freesia-like trumpet blossoms, one five-inch sphere’s worth of blossoms at the end of each stalk. Here and there, sprinklers scattered gems of water on the plants. The sun was pitilessly bright in the blank blue sky. Was I really fired?

“The ants-” I began querulously.

“Heavy shit coming down,” interrupted Trevor. “Jeff Pear has fired you.”

“But why? Are there ants all over cyberspace?”

“You’re still worried about that ant you saw on your machine yesterday? No, I haven’t seen any of your loose ants. What happened is that somebody high up in the organization decided to get rid of you. Somebody who’s been around here a long time.”

If I didn’t press Trevor too hard, he would tell me more. He was a terrible gossip. I just had to keep him talking. “Roger and the ants want me to go work for something called West West,” I told him.

“Where do you get that?” asked Trevor.

“Last night I saw Roger with the ants in cyberspace. They were very insistent that West West was the place for me. Very very insistent.”

“West West,” said Trevor wonderingly. “The lowest circle of Hell.”

“What Trevor? What do you mean?”

“The West West guys are… shall we say opportunistic? They get sued a lot, and a lot of the time they lose. When they lose, they fold and they reorganize. They’ve had three different names that I know of, and it’s always the same guys. They’re the U.S. branch of a Taiwanese company called Seven Lucky Overseas. You remember that kitchen robot that killed the baby? The Choreboy?”

Every robotics hacker remembered the Choreboy. The Choreboy was supposed to be able to cook and babysit. But the Choreboy had very poor pattern-recognition abilities. One Thanksgiving, a family wanted to take a stroll. The baby was quietly asleep in its crib and the turkey was on the kitchen table, stuffed and ready to be roasted. The family told the Choreboy to keep an eye on the baby and to put the turkey in the oven while they were out. The family came home to find the Choreboy leaning over the crib and crooning a lullaby to… the naked turkey. Obviously the machine had flipped a few bits the wrong way, but? With dawning horror, the family ran to fling open the oven door-it was too late. The baby had never had a chance once the Choreboy had shoved the spike of the meat thermometer into its heart.

“The Choreboy was a Seven Lucky machine, programmed by West West, or whatever they were calling themselves then,” continued Trevor. “And before the Choreboy-that was either the first or the second time, I can’t remember-these guys lost a fifty-million-dollar lawsuit to GoMotion for doing a byte-for-byte knockoff of the Iron Camel. They hadn’t even bothered to change our programmers’ names in their source code! You should hear Roger Coolidge talking about West West. He hates them.”

“Then why would he want me to work there?”

“Are you sure it was really him you talked to in cyberspace, Jerzy?”

“No, I’m not. I’m not sure at all. That’s why I want to talk to Roger in person. Where is he?”

“Roger went to Switzerland last night.” We’d turned and started walking back toward GoMotion. Trevor seemed nervous. “Roger’s the one who told Jeff Pear to fire you. And, get this, Jerzy, he had me set your access level to negative 32K on all the networks GoMotion subscribes to. You’re out beyond the pale, guy.”

Off the Net! It was like losing my driver’s license. “But, but, what did I do? Was there something wrong with my work on the Veep?”

“Jerzy, I’ll be totally frank. I don’t know what the hell is happening.” We were standing in front of the GoMotion building. Trevor squinted at me in the bright sun. “All I can say is that if I were in your position, I wouldn’t believe anyone.” He shrugged and turned to go.

“Wait, Trevor, wait. What about my computer? And my robot, Studly. GoMotion owns them. Do I have to give my computer back in?“ If losing Net privileges was like losing my driver’s license, losing my cyberdeck would be like losing my ability to walk.

“Funny you should ask. Roger Coolidge made a special point of telling Jeff Pear to let you keep your robot and your computer. Jeff already mailed you a letter about it. Roger said your machines are contaminated. Roger said that if Jerzy Rugby has any sense, he’ll smash up his machines and crush the chips with pliers. He actually said that.”

“Fuck that. The cyberspace deck is a fifty-thousand-dollar box. It’s all I’ve got.”

“You tell ‘em, Jerzy. Look out for number one.” Trevor shook my hand. “It’s been a trip working with you.”

He walked inside and I got in my Animata.

I found the West West offices ten miles south of GoMotion, on the bottom floor of a white adobe-style two-year-old office complex on Saratoga-Sunnyvale Road, right down the street from a Pollo Loco and a Burger King. The fields on both sides of Saratoga-Sunnyvale Road were filled with developments of tract homes thrown up during the Valley’s first boom. Before that, the fields had been filled with flowers and plum trees and Silicon Valley had been called “The Valley of Heart’s Delight.”

The West West suite was down a carpeted hall that smelled like Holiday Inn rug cleaner crossed with the plastic stink inside a new car on a lot in the California sun. The West West receptionist was a darling young thing, pert and real. She sat on a high stool behind a high gray plastic counter with a sign-in book. Staring at her distinctive little lips, I felt for a desperate moment as if I were staring at her sex organs. She signed me in and ushered me through a big room of workers toward the office of the General Manager of the Home Products Division.

The big room was a white-collar worker pit, a windowless, gray-carpeted space with beige walls and chest-high off-white plastic partitions that divided the space into the cubicles that young workers called “veal-fattening pens.” The noises of the pit were keyboards, computers, fluorescent lights, central air, and murmured conversation. Everyone wore ultralight earphone and mike sets, so they did not need to talk very loud, even to each other. Aurally they were in cyberspace, but visually they were a bunch of people in front of computer screens in a pit with no living plants. Was I really going to work here?

The General Manager of the Home Products Division said he’d been expecting me. He was a black-haired, sour-faced guy called Otto Gyorgyi. He was thin and he had lively eyebrows and a large, slightly crooked nose. He wore a gray suit with a white shirt and a dun tie. He had a corner office with a view of the West West parking lot and the Saratoga-Sunnyvale Road.

Otto used the occasion of our first meeting to tell me his whole life story. This was, I would learn, characteristic of Otto. He liked to talk about almost anything other than the things an employee would want to know. He was an exponent of what workers call “mushroom management,” meaning, “keep them in the dark and cover them with shit.”

Otto was born and raised in Budapest. His father was a schoolteacher who spurred his children to get every particle of available education. All five Gyorgyi kids studied engineering: Kinga, textile engineering; Arpad, drafting engineering; Tibor, fluid engineering; Erszebet, electrical engineering; and, last of all, young Otto with his chemical engineering. Otto emigrated when a vacationing German university student fell in love with him. The girl’s name was Ute Besenkamp. Ute became pregnant and brought Otto home with her.

As Otto told me all this with great raisings and lowering of his eyebrows, I could hardly believe I was hearing information that was so utterly useless and beside the point.

In Germany Otto married Ute and found a job with the Bayer chemical company. This multinational industrial titan had its huge mother plant in Leverkusen. The Gyorgyis purchased a solid house in Bayer’s terrorist-proof compound. Otto worked with a group analyzing and refining industrial processes for making rubber out of vegetable latex. Bayer sold the necessary chemicals worldwide, and would send out teams to maintain the processes on site. Otto’s specific role was to consult on safety issues, and he became something of an expert on remote handling devices.

After nine peaceful years in Leverkusen, Otto, Ute, and children (two boys, one girl) were posted to a Tokyo branch of Bayer, working with some industrial robots created by the Tsukubu Science City group. Things went well for awhile, but then Ute left Otto and took the children back to Germany. Otto “hit the skids” and next thing he knew he was out of a job. Like me, he’d moved to California on speculation, and now he was General Manager of West West’s Home Products Division.

“Which is where I come in?” I suggested.

With great reluctance, Otto came to the point. He made this part of the conversation very brief. “We want you to program for West West so we can kick GoMotion right out of the home robotics market. If you accept the job, your immediate superior will be Ben Brie. Ben is the product manager for the line of Adze robots that West West is going to start shipping in the second quarter. Ben has only two senior programmers, and they need help. You’re our man, Jerzy.”

“What would be my annual salary?”

“What were you getting at GoMotion?”

I named the figure, and Otto added thirty-three percent. The fact that Otto had been expecting me meant that the ant-brained vision I’d seen the night before had been, at least in some respects, legit. It sure seemed like a lot of people wanted me to work for West West. And GoMotion had fired me, hadn’t they? I didn’t owe them anything. West West would put me back on the Net. The thirty-three percent raise sounded very good. And best of all, West West wanted me to keep working on smart robots. I had most of the code for the Veep in my head; it would be a shame just slowly to forget it. If I took this job at West West, my role in the Great Work could continue.

“The Great Work” was a phrase that had occurred to me soon after Carol and I moved to Silicon Valley. In medieval Europe, the Great Work was the building of the cathedrals. Artisans from all over Europe would flock, say, to the Ile-de-France to work on the Notre Dame. Stonecutters, sculptors, carpenters, weavers, glassmakers, jewelers-they gathered together to work on the most wonderful project the human race could conceive of. I felt that all of us in Silicon Valley were working, in one way or another, on the Great Work of bringing truly intelligent robots into existence. Some hackers felt the Great Work was simply the striving toward a perfect human-to-human interface in cyberspace, but I thought that the real payoff had to be something more mechanical and concrete. To me, the Great Work was to create a new form of life: artificially alive robots.

Keep in mind that, although I had done a lot of creative work on the Veep, I didn’t own any copyrights on this work. When you worked as a hacker for a big company, you signed away all rights to the code you developed-your employment contract specified that the company automatically owned the copyrights to all the code you wrote for them. So I had no financial reason for not wanting to help West West beat out the Veep.

GoMotion had axed me, but my own part in the Great Work could continue at West West. I signed the papers Otto offered me, and Otto led me off in search of Ben Brie.

Along one edge of the pit were doorless, semiprivate offices with Plexiglas add-ons that extended the divider walls to the ceiling. In one of these spaces we found Ben Brie.

Ben Brie was so mellow and diffuse as to be the parody of a Californian. He had a wheezy, groaning way of talking; he sounded as if he were so merged into the cosmos that getting each word out was a serious effort. “I thought things were going really well at GoMotion,” said Brie after Otto left me with him. “What did you do to end up here? Did you piss somebody off?”

“It’s kind of complicated,” said I. “West West is giving me a good raise.”

“Sounds groovy,” said Brie. “Can you tell me about the robot that GoMotion’s been working on? The Veep?” He was wearing a truly excellent shirt from Zaire, a nifty job covered with repetitions of the pink and acid green Congo logo of Regal Lager.

I explained about the Veep somewhat, and then asked Brie what West West’s angle on all this was anyway?

“We’ve got this awesome robot from the Taiwanese,” said Brie. “Seven Lucky Overseas. They’re West West’s parent company.”

This was just what Trevor had told me. “Didn’t Seven Lucky make the household robot that killed the baby?” I demanded. The question failed to faze Brie. In all mellowness, he gave me a straight, out-front answer.

“The Choreboy. Yes. A tragedy. When our group was selling the Choreboy, we were called Meta Meta. Meta Meta settled out of court, went through Chapter 11, and reorganized as West West. The Choreboy is a closed case, Jerzy, an unsavory footnote to the history of robotics. Let’s move on to more pleasant-”

A woman in a flowing gypsy dress walked into our cubicle and Brie greeted her. “Janelle, this is our new Adze programmer, Jerzy Rugby. He comes to us from GoMotion. Jerzy, this is Janelle Fuchs. She’s in marketing.”

“I don’t work for Ben,” said Janelle, brightly. She had rough-skinned, sensual features with plenty of makeup. “And Ben doesn’t work for me.”

“The less work, the better,” chuckled Ben. “But Janelle may want to pick your brain about the Veep specs.”

“That’s right,” said Janelle. “Ben tells me you did a lot of good work at GoMotion. We’re just getting the Adze campaign ready, and we need to know what GoMotion is going to say their Veep can do.”

I told her, and then she brought up a different topic. “Ben says you adapted some a-life algorithms to make Roarworld work better. West West has a line of games. I think a lot of games could benefit from having smarter thingies to fight against.”

“How do you know what I did with Roarworld?” I asked them.

Ben waved the question aside. “Oh, we’ve done our homework on you, Jerzy. The thing that interests us is that you’re good at using a-life to evolve better algorithms for robots programmed in SuperC.” I nodded. “Up till now, we’ve been writing our Adze software in a Seven Lucky proprietary language called Kwirkey. One of Seven Lucky’s founders invented it for his thesis I at the Computer University of Taiwan. Kwirkey is a Lisp-parser that sits on top of a Forth interpreter.“

I sighed heavily. “Look, Ben, I want to use a real language, not a Lisp language. A language with documentation and support would be nice, too; a language familiar to more people than like thirteen Taiwanese graduate students? Can’t I keep working with SuperC?”

“No problem,” drawled Brie. “We just finished building a SuperC compiler out of Kwirkey. Or maybe… maybe we built a Kwirkey interpreter out of SuperC? I can never remember. Russ Zwerg will tell you all about it when you meet him.” As he said the name “Russ Zwerg,” a fleeting ripple of what might almost have been stress crossed Ben’s calm features. He rose to his feet and waved me toward the door. “Before we do Russ, let’s talk to Sun Tam.”

Brie led me across the pit and around an unexpected corner into a large gray room, very airless. The room held two Sphex workstations, each with a three-foot by three-foot Abbott wafer as its display device. An Abbott wafer was a big stiff flat rectangular computer screen made of a plastic sandwich holding a lithographed nanometal grid and a few precious drops of liquid rho-dopsin. The design was a bit like the cheap liquid crystal “mood rings” they used to have. The metal grid inside an Abbott wafer could control the rhodopsin’s colors with pinpoint precision.

Two cheerful computer jocks named Jack and Jill were hunched over one of the Sphexes, busy cutting and pasting together great, ungainly blocks of Kwirkey code. The program management software they were using had cyberspace visuals that made it look as if their busy, gloved hands were wielding a chain saw and an arc welder. The Sphexes were designed for teamwork and had eight Spandex control gloves apiece. As soon as a user donned a glove, the glove knew if it was a left or a right.

Jack and Jill spoke to each other in weird cryptic slang, and I had no idea what they were doing. Jack had bull-like shoulders and flat, colorless eyes. Jill was tall and sinewy with a crown of brown curls.

At the controls of the other Sphex was Sun Tam, who looked up and greeted us. He had a chinless head the shape of a parsnip. A native of Santa Clara County, Sun spoke with the pure, affectless, short-voweled accent of the Valley.

“Good to have you here, Jerzy. I’ve heard about your work on the Veep for GoMotion, and about your and Roger Coolidge’s work with artificial evolution. That’s what we need for the Adze. An explosion of intelligence. Do you still have that prototype Veep you were keeping at home?”

“Uh, yes, I do. GoMotion doesn’t want him back.” I could have gone outside and gotten Studly right out of my car, but I had the feeling that Studly was probably infected by the ants, and I didn’t want ants screwing things up on the West West system before I could even get started. Also I was starting to get annoyed at these people.

“You should definitely bring your Veep in for us to look at,” insisted Ben.

“Maybe I don’t want to!” I cried. “And how come everyone here knows so much about what’s been going on at GoMotion?”

“West West’s intelligence gathering is very proactive,” said Ben. “And-speak of the devil-here’s our star cryp himself.” A tall blond boy with a mod Julius Caesar haircut had just appeared, wanting to know how soon we’d be through using the Sphex. He wore mirror-coated contact lenses, which gave him a steely, impenetrable air.

“Give us another fifteen minutes,” said Ben. “We need to get the new guy logged on. Jerzy, this is Sketchy Albedo. Sketchy, meet Jerzy.”

Unlike a normal hacker, Sketchy was wearing punk clothes; skintight black-and-red op-art-checkered pants and a long-sleeved black shirt. His shoes were black suede high-tops. He favored me with a languid wave of his hand. “Don’t take too long.”

In the Valley these days, phreaks were youths who cobbled together their own approximation of a decent cyberspace deck and used it for weird cyberspace pranks. Cryps were phreaks who’d turned professional and gone into the employ of companies involved in industrial espionage. If you broke into some company’s machines often enough, they were likely to hire you as a cryp to break into other companies, or they might use you as a security consultant to keep out the other cryps. It was a vicious circle-the cryps’ security-cracking escapades created a demand for the services they could provide.

Trevor Sinclair of GoMotion was a cryp and I liked him a lot, but in principle, I didn’t like phreaks and cryps. I hated for people to use my code without giving me credit. Thanks to the cryps, I had to choose between obsessive security and being ripped off. The airs that some cryps give themselves annoyed me as well-they acted so hip and smart about their stolen information, and often they didn’t understand any of it at all. Now that the ants had whipped my system to shit, I liked phreaks and cryps less than ever.

So now, meeting West West’s star cryp, I found myself acting silly and aggressive. “Golly, Mithter Thkitsth,” I lisped, making sure a few drops of spit flew out of my mouth, “Are you gonna do thome thecwet thpy thtuff? Can I watch? Huh? Can I, can I, can I, huuuuuh?‘’

“Bithead,” said Sketchy and made strange wiggly gestures with his hands, as if casting a hex on me. “I don’t know why they hired you, Jerzy. I’ve already downloaded all of your GoMotion code.”

“Sure you have,” I snapped. “Only you don’t know how to read it. And you never will. Spyboy.”

“Hey, hey,” broke in Ben Brie. “Chill out, gentlemen.”

“Let me know when the old fart finishes his golf cart ride,” said Sketchy, stalking out of the room.

“Has he really been crypping down my GoMotion code from West West?” I demanded. My heart was beating fast and my face was flushed. I was badly rattled. Old fart? Well, I was forty-three, and certainly older than anyone I’d met so far at West West-with the possible exception of Otto Gyorgyi, who really was an old fart.

“It’s a damn good thing he crypped your code,” said Ben Brie. “What with you off the Net and your home system thrashed.” Not that I’d told him my home system was thrashed. These guys were total cryps and pirates. Was there anything about me they didn’t know?

“West West should spend some money on individual decks,” interrupted Sun Tam, impatiently filliping a fingernail against the beige crinkle-finish sheet metal housing of the Sphex. It was Sun’s style, I would learn, to propose concrete physical solutions to disagreements. “Why should we fight over these two machines every single day? On the street you could get six individual decks for the price of a Sphex. With enough machines, we could all be working at home, Ben. The commute is also a cause of stress, for that matter. The daily grind.”

Clearly Ben had heard this many times before. “These two Sphexes are top of the line,” he insisted. “Check it out, Jerzy.” He picked up a sensor bead and clipped it to a piece of hair on the top of my head.

Sun Tam got up and I sat down in his place. The swivel chair in front of the Sphex was a complex custom job with a rocker swivel and a rotating base. I pulled on the gloves and drew the Abbott screen closer to my face. The software showed my gloves with matchstick man arms coming out of them and leading toward me. The screen showed a low workbench with a bunch of machine parts. Faint lines connected the parts, showing how they should hook up. The images were very finely shaded and rendered.

What the sensor bead did for me was to make the screen seem like a glass window with things behind it. If I leaned to the left, then more stuff came into view at the right of the screen. When I was a kid I once tried to peek down a televised woman’s dress by standing up and leaning over the TV-if Mom and Pop’s TV had been a Sphex deck, this would have worked. I moved my head slightly from side to side, looking things over, getting a feel for the three-dimensional volumes of the objects in the scene.

A cluster of tool icons hovered over the bench: “tools” like a magnifying glass, a pair of goggles, a coiled spring, a screwdriver, a telephone, a compass, a clipboard, and so on.

I stuck my hands forward under the edge of the hanging screen, and computer images of my hands appeared. I picked up a few of the machine parts and turned them over. This was obviously a disassembled robot. I recognized many of the component parts from our Veep design; I recognized very many. Of course there were only so many brands of sonar units, motors, struts, wheels, etcetera-but this design’s overlap with our proprietary GoMotion design was more than coincidental, it was obvious and excessive. I was looking at a premarket pirated clone of the GoMotion Veep.

“Sketchy wasn’t kidding about downloading information from GoMotion, was he?” said I. “I can’t believe this is such a rip off. GoMotion will sue West West for everything they’ve got.”

“Let them sue,” said Ben Brie carelessly. “Ownership is theft-or a good out-of-court settlement. Some reality therapy, Jerzy: your job here and now is to get a product on the street. Frankly, I’m glad the Adze looks familiar to you. It’ll be that much less effort for you to get up to speed.”

I sat there not saying anything, just moving my head around and looking at the parts of the machine.

“Have you used this kind of deck before, Jerzy?” asked Sun Tam. The simple, factual question soothed me. Managers, cryps, lawyers-they’re all leeches. Only programmers are worth talking to. Programmers and women, that is. I remembered that this afternoon I was going to visit the home of Nga Vo.

Once I’d paid a formal visit, would Nga’s family allow me to take her out on a date right away? She looked truly hot, though of course that kind of presentation was often bogus. I thought of an I Ching fortune I’d once gotten: “Beware of the marrying maiden.” But-the way Nga’s muscles moved under the skin of her cheek-how would it be to kiss that cheek?

Sun Tam was looking at me. The question at hand: when had I last used a scarce-resource super-duper machine like the Sphex?

“Couple of weeks. We use one in meetings at Go-Motion. But not with this kind of chair. What does the chair do?” It was mounted on a thick base with a serial port cord that led into the back of the Sphex.

“It’s a Steadiswivel,” said Sun Tam. “New out of LA Spin around and look what’s behind you.”

The problem with fixed-mount displays like the Sphex has always been that when you move, the screen stays put and maybe you can’t see it anymore. The fragile illusion of virtual reality bursts. I pushed my foot against the chair’s base so as to spin my seat to the left.

I expected to see the screen move off to the right and out of my field of view. But instead the screen stayed right in front of me and the Steadiswivel’s base turned out from under me. The image on the screen swept around the virtual machine-room that Sun Tam had been working in. If I stared at the screen, and kept kicking, I felt sure that I was really turning, and that the window of the screen was turning with me. It was as if I were in a spinning cylinder which had a single rectangular window. Really I was sitting still and kicking a wheel with my foot, and the image on the screen was scanning in exact sync with the turning of the wheel. Kind of a cheap trick; but so was cyberspace, especially if you took a close look at the graphics algorithms.

“If you try to rock back,” offered Ben, “then the image on the screen scans upward. It’s pretty convincing.”

I maneuvered back to a view of the parts on the workbench, and reached up to pick the tool icon that looked like a coiled spring. The lines connecting the disassembled robot’s parts began shrinking, with the effect that the components assembled themselves into the image of a small, dome-headed machine with three arms and two small bicycle wheels mounted at the end of single-jointed legs with idler wheels on their knees. It looked a lot like Studly.

“The Adze,” said Sun Tam, who was watching over my shoulder. “It’s a Seven Lucky machine with West West software.”

“What’s with the third arm?” I asked.

“Marketing thought of it,” said Ben. “It’s a way to position the West West Adze as being different from the GoMotion Veep. The third arm is soft and made of piezoplastic. You’ll need to write some new code to run it.”

Even aside from the extra arm, the Adze was not totally identical to the GoMotion design. It had what looked to be a good new feature or two, although I could see that several suboptimal design decisions had been made. With just a little more tweaking, the design could-

“Whoa there,” said Ben, as if reading my mind. “You’re looking at a frozen production spec. This design is what Otto Gyorgyi signed off on, and he’s not going to sign again. Our mode is ship this or die. Let the Adze into your heart just as it is, Jerzy. Love it and help it grow. Teach it to do cool things.”

“How do I drive it?”

“Touch the goggles icon,” said Sun Tam.

I touched the goggles, and my viewpoint shifted so that I saw through the virtual robot’s eyes. I, robot, was now sitting on a three-foot by five-foot workbench. I could see a robotic arm on either side of my visual field. For the moment, the robots arms were not moving with the motions of my own gloved hands. Good, that meant West West was using the standard telerobotic interface.

Recall that there were standard hand gestures for flying your tuxedo about in cyberspace. You’d point and nod to move in some direction, and you’d make a fist to stop. A telerobot in start-up mode was supposed to obey these commands as well. When you wanted to take over a manipulator, you’d make the gesture of slipping your hand into it.

I pointed and nodded and I began rolling toward the edge of the table. The scene lurched as I drove off the edge of the workbench table. I heard the simulated hum as my virtual gyroscope kept me from tumbling. My legs popped out to full extension and my wheels hit the floor. My knees bent, cushioning me from the impact.

I made a fist, scanned this way and that, found the exit door, pointed and trundled out the door and into what looked like the living room of a suburban home-a very familiar home. There was a baby asleep on a blanket in the middle of the floor, and here around the corner came none other than… Perky Pat Christensen! The West West cryps had even ripped off Our American Home.

“Change Baby Scooter’s diaper,” Perky Pat told me. “Don’t go near the baby. Follow me into the kitchen, and stay right where you are! Hurry up, damn you!” Her pinched tan face glared at me in pharmaceutical rage. The Adze waved its arms uncertainly.

Just as I slipped my hands into the left and right manipulators, there was a sudden whoop, and my point of view turned upside down. I glimpsed the sneakers and the blond flattop of Pat’s son Dexter. He’d just turned me over, the rotten little fuck. As I began righting myself, I heard a thud, and my viewpoint began tumbling around rapidly. Walt Christensen had tripped over me. He was drunk again. I was rolling toward the baby! I stuck out my left and right arms to stop my motion, but I was a shade too late, and my floppy middle arm smacked heavily against Scooter’s face. She began her savage screaming.

“Ow,” said I, looking away from the screen. “Need to control that tentacle.”

Pat and Walt were stomping the simmie-Adze now, the images of their feet warping into huge close-up perspective renderings as they thudded into the hapless virtual robot. I pulled off my gloves and stood up.

“Did you know that I helped write Our American Home?” I asked Ben. “The behavior patterns for the Christensens. I helped evolve them.”

“Sure,” said Ben. “You helped write it, and you’re here, so there’s nothing wrong with us using it, right?”

“That’s not what GoMotion would say.”

“ WentMotion,” drawled Ben.

“We’ve moved on to physical testing as well,” said Sun Tam. “Now that our hardware design is frozen.”

“Janelle calls it the Rubber Room,” said Ben. “I’ll show it to you later. But now it’s time for Russ Zwerg.” As Ben mentioned the dreaded name, there was again that touch of stress in his mellow tones.

Russ was in a cubicle near the center of the pit, and he was even more trollish than I’d expected. He was a lawn-dwarf, five-foot-two with full beard, bald pate, and long greasy locks, he was (I would soon learn) a vegetarian, a pagan, a libertarian, and a deep thinker with a dozen crackpot opinions, all furiously held. Russ Zwerg was the worst, the absolute worst, a ten-out-of-ten flamer.

At first Russ made a show of being too engrossed in his computer screen to look up. After entering a final system command and receiving an error message, he said, “Suck dead pigs in Hell,” to his screen. His pronunciation was clear and lilting. He turned his muddy little eyes toward us and addressed himself directly to Ben.

“Once again SuperC chooses to sodomize programmers everywhere. They’ve actually changed the inline pragmas. Again. And, they added new underscores to the library name-mangling! Whee! Put your old debugger in the shitcan! It’s going to take me at least two round-the-clock days to get the Kwirkey interpreter working again. What do you want?”

“Russ,” said Ben gamely, “I want you to meet Jerzy Rugby who’s joining us from GoMotion. He’s quite the wizard, I’m told. I’d like you to help him get up to speed on the Adze project.”

“How nice,” said Russ, cocking his head and peering at me. “I’m supposed to waste a week training a new hire? Bugger you, Ben. Bugger you very much.” As he said this, Zwerg kept his nasty little eyes on me. Now he smiled to show this was all in good fun. “Why did GoMotion fire you, Jerzy?”

“I’d rather not go into it.” Especially not with an asshole like you, Russ.

“Russ, why don’t you and Sun give Jerzy a physical demo?”

“A dog and pony show for the new hire,” snapped Russ. “Very well.” We all went into the Rubber Room, which was back behind the Sphex room I’d already seen.

A few years before she died my mother had a stroke. She was partly paralyzed, and she had to relearn how to do things like sit up on the edge of a bed. Every day in the hospital, I’d wheel her downstairs to the rehabilitation room. The rehab room had linoleum floors and things that looked like big toys sitting around, only the big toys were models of real-world obstacles that a person has to negotiate: there was a section of a cafeteria counter, there was a movable wood staircase with a fenced-in platform at the top, there was a big Plexiglas practice push door, and so on. In the rehab room with my mother there had been a woman with one leg gone and a man whose face had been split as if by an axe, all of them slowly moving around, trying to get it back together. I often remembered the feeling the rehab room had given me: a kind of awe at the tenacity of human life, awe at how these shattered people could somehow struggle to go on, and a feeling also of the preciousness and sweetness of life, however hard it might be. An aching feeling of tender awe.

Like the rehab room, the Rubber Room had a practice staircase and a big Plexiglas door, but in addition the Rubber Room had feely-blank dolls lying about, a man, a woman, a boy, and a baby-models of the Christensen family once again. There were also two chairs, a table, and a refrigerator. In one corner there was a big rug. The dreaded Baby Scooter was lying on the rug like a land mine.

Sitting idle on a patch of bare linoleum was an assembled Adze robot. Just like the model I’d seen on the Sphex, the machine was a big cylinder with a dome head, two wheels on jointed legs, and three arms. As on Studly, his left manipulator was a simple two-pronged rubberized crab pincer, and his right one was a well-articulated facsimile of a human hand. The Adze’s third manipulator was a flexible plastic tentacle with corrugations in its surface.

“We’ve been calling this one Squidboy,” said Ben. “Let’s fire him up, guys.”

“I’ve only just now been recompiling the code,” said Russ, obviously getting his excuses ready. “I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there’s a segment fix-up error.” Russ and Sun Tam made their way over to the still-inert Squidboy and began messing with him.

I shivered with the same fear I’d felt when Ken Thumb of GoMotion first loaded my code onto Studly. The Veep and Adze robots were quite different from the lame “robot butlers” people had been trying to sell for years. The Veep and Adze were fast and strong. They could kill you. At least there was a big, waist-high table between us and the main part of the room. There was some computer stuff on the table.

“Do you have a remote On/Off switch?” I asked Ben.

“Don’t worry,” he answered, picking up a radio control unit. “This is the switch. During runs we stand way back here so we can always turn the robot off before it can get to us and like start performing organ transplants.” He chuckled wheezily.

Sun adjusted some dip switches while Russ slipped a small CD into Squidboy’s chest. They skipped back to join us on the safe side of the table. Ben turned Squidboy on. A fan whirred and Squidboy’s scanning laser began to glow.

Just like Studly, Squidboy had two pencil-sized video camera eyes and an infrared laser-based moire contouring scanner in his forehead. The scanner’s laser would illuminate objects with rapid stripes of invisible infrared light, and the robot’s software would overlay successive scans to get moire patterns that outlined the contours of equally distant curves. This was invaluable for deducing the shapes of things.

“What do you want Squidboy to do?” Sun Tam asked Ben.

“Tell him to go to the fridge and get me a bottle of Calistoga water,” said Ben.

Sun Tam leaned over a keyboard and screen that, like Ben’s On/Off control, was radio-linked to the robot. Sun began assembling and entering commands while Russ kibitzed.

“Can’t you just talk to it?” I asked.

“Of course we can,” said Russ impatiently. “Only we haven’t put that part in yet because we’re still finalizing the high-level code. For now, we’re programming Squidboy in Y9707 assembly language. Sun knows all the opcodes.” Y9707 was the name of a chip.

Then Russ started arguing with Sun about something he’d keyed in, Russ being as rude and insulting as possible. Eventually Sun weakened before the torrent of abuse and changed it to Russ’s way.

Now Russ gave the okay and Ben pressed the On switch. Squidboy wobbled for a moment, turned toward the refrigerator, and started rolling. So far so good. The movable Plexiglas door was between the little machine and the refrigerator. Would Squidboy slow down and open the door? Had Russ’s program change been correct? To my delight, the answer was no. Instead of slowing down, the robot accelerated as it approached the model door, shattering the Plexiglas with a noise that was astonishingly loud in the small confines of the Rubber Room. The robot paused, his tentacle dangling like a limp dick.

“Dammit, Russ, that’s the second door you’ve broken this month,” said Ben as he pressed the Off switch. Russ marched across the room, yanked his CD out of Squidboy’s chest, and stalked out, vilely cursing about SuperC.

“I knew Russ was wrong,” said Sun Tam. “He keeps thinking in terms of Kwirkey, but I’m used to controlling the Adze direct. Ports and interrupts.”

“Let’s see.”

Sun Tam reset Squidboy and began to show and tell. I got into it. Sun knew a lot about robots. Ben Brie gave me the remote On/Off and left us alone to, keep talking.

While Sun was demonstrating Squidboy’s most rudimentary abilities, we discussed the three big problems of robots: connectors, power, and software.

A robot’s connectors are simply the wires that snake around inside the robot’s body to hook together the motors and sensors and processors-the wires and the little sockets on the ends of them. It’s a humble issue, whether or not a pin works loose from its socket, but it’s a crucial one. I told Sun about some special Belgian-made connectors that we’d just started using with good success, and he e-mailed off an order for six thousand of them.

“How is GoMotion going to deal with power?” asked Sun next.

“We’re making our machines plug into a wall socket whenever they have the free time. The Xyzix palladium-hydrogen batteries we’re using can hold about a three-hour charge. And you can fully recharge a Xyzix in ten minutes.”

“Okay, yeah, the Xyzix model KT-80? That’s what I thought; that’s what we’re doing too. So let’s talk about software.”

“That’s where I come in,” I said proudly. “As you know, I’ve been using genetic algorithms to tweak the high-level code. We’ll want to get about 256 instances of your robot evolving around the clock. My code hooks into GoMotion’s ROBOT. LIB, of course. We’ll need to license ROBOT. LIB from GoMotion or-”

“We’ve got ROBOT. LIB,” said Sun Tam. “We’re already using it.” I smiled with relief and we talked about other software topics, first about genetic algorithms and then about control theory. We started working on a list of which parameters and register values we’d want our code evolution to tweak.

Three happy hacker hours blurred by, and then I was at the limit of what I wanted to absorb and emit on my first day of work for West West. Later, no doubt, I’d be driving myself nuts over their code, but no more today. I had a date with Nga Vo.

I said good-bye to Sun Tam and went back to Ben Brie. “Looks cool, Ben. I have to go, though; I need to take care of some things.”

“Okay. See you tomorrow? Nineish? We’ll give you a machine and get you on the Net.”

“Yeah. And can you get Russ to print me out some specs on the Kwirkey/SuperC interface? I think reading them might be more efficient than for me to listen to him.”

“I’ll talk to him.”

“Uh… one more thing. I’m totally out of cash, Ben. Could you give me an advance today?”

I wended my way back out of West West and found my Animata. I had $800 in my pocket. It was two-thirty in the afternoon. West West looked like a good gig.