The hacker and the ants

EIGHT

Russ, Sun Tam, Janelle, and a bunch of other people went down to the San Jose Fairmont for the rollout, but Ben asked me to stay back at West West with him. “This way we’ll be ready to turn him off or go telerobotic if there’s any problems,” said Ben.

Ben and I sat in the Sphex room; Jack and Jill were on the other machine as usual. We had our headsets coupled right to Squidboy’s two cameras, and our headset earphones were taking their feed from Squid-boy’s mikes. We saw and heard through Squidboy’s head. Ben had a line linked to an emergency On/Off radio control that was at the site with the robot, and I was ready to slip my virtual hands into the images of Squidboy’s manipulators and take him over in case of a less drastic malfunction. If things started going to pieces, I could fake the demo.

Squidboy was up on a dais at one end of the Fairmont ballroom, shifting his field of view this way and that. If he noticed someone staring right at him he’d wave his humanoid hand at them and I’d see the hand in the right part of his viewfield. “ hand_flag 2,” I thought happily.

It was a fancy room, with big crystal chandeliers. The walls were covered with gold-and-cream striped wallpaper. The rug had a diagonal grid pattern with florets at the intersections. Facing the dais were seventeen rows of tables with white linen tablecloths. The tables held pens, notepads, dishes of wrapped hard candy, glasses, and pitchers of ice water for the assembled industry bigwigs and press. I recognized Jeff Pear in the third row with Dick and Chuck from GoMotion. Squid-boy waved at them. They looked tense and depressed, which was just what I’d been hoping for. We’d beaten them out the starting gate and there was nothing they could do about it except sue.

The room was filled with the mutter of conversation. Now Otto Gyorgyi stepped to the podium, dressed in his usual gray suit and bilious tie. His slicked-down black hair gleamed in the spotlights. Squidboy gazed at him.

“Hello,” he said, “I’m Otto Gyorgyi, the General Manager of the West West Home Products Division. It’s my pleasure today to announce our new line of Adze home robot kits. As of today, West West is shipping this kitware throughout the world. Before I fill in any more information, let’s have a little fun.” Otto forced his sour face into a smile. There was an expectant hush. “Hello, Squidboy,” said Otto. “My name is Otto.”

“Hello, Otto,” said Squidboy. “What can I do for you?”

“I’m thirsty, Squidboy. Get me a glass of water.”

Squidboy looked around the dais.

“I’m sorry, Otto, but where is the water?”

“On the table down there.” Squidboy stared at Otto’s pointing hand, then turned his gaze toward the front row of tables.

“Thank you, Otto.”

Squidboy wheeled to the edge of the stage, turned sideways, and began carefully stepping down the dais steps. I held my breath till he’d safely reached the bottom. Whew! Squidboy wheeled forward and the glass and pitcher loomed before us. Behind the glass and pitcher were the faces of two reporters. Squidboy grasped the glass with his tentacle and picked up the pitcher with his humanoid hand. He poured water into the glass and set down the pitcher.

The viewpoint swung toward the stage and Squidboy galumphed back up the steps, rocking from side to side on his bicycle wheels and his flexing legs. The tentacle-manipulator held the glass steadfastly upright, and not a drop was spilled.

“Thank you,” said Otto as the robot handed him the glass. The audience burst into applause.

“Go to sleep for fifteen minutes, Squidboy,” said Otto. “And call my name when you wake.” Our vision screens went blank.

“I wish I was there,” I said, pulling off my headset.

“West West wants to minimize any linkage between you and the Adze,” said Ben.

“Because they pirated ROBOT. LIB and my SuperC code from GoMotion?”

“It’s not that,” said Ben uncomfortably. “We’re used to lawsuits. It’s because of your trial. It starts day after tomorrow doesn’t it?”

“Uh, yeah, I guess it does. I’ve been hacking too much to think about it, but yes, today is Tuesday and the state trial starts Thursday. Criminal trespass, computer intrusion, and extreme cruelty to animals.”

“What’s the story with the cruelty to animals?” laughed Ben, momentarily falling out of his manager persona. “Is that some kind of right-to-artificial-life thing on behalf of the ants?”

“No, man, it’s because of the dog that Studly killed.”

“I’d forgotten about the dog.” Ben got serious again. “The word from my higher-ups is that your presence at West West is bad for our corporate image.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“It gets worse,” sighed Ben. “Come on back to my office.” I followed him, wondering what was up, and then Ben fumbled around on his desk and produced a folder with my name on it. “I argued myself hoarse with Otto Gyorgyi about this, but his mind is made up.” He handed me a letter which read:

DEAR JERZY RUGBY,

(1) As a result of a top management decision, you will be redeployed, effective today.

(2) You will continue to be a West West employee, receiving your current compensation and benefits for 7 days. The 7-day period is called your Redeployment Notice Period; your Redeployment Notice Period will end at noon on June 2.

(3)…

“I’m fired?” I yelped. “This is what I get for writing the code for a new product? A new product that’s starting to ship? This is the payoff?”

“Well, you should at least note that paragraph (3) says that you’ll get an extra four weeks of severance pay with your check this Friday. I got you that. Otto feels that from now on Russ and Sun Tam will be able to handle the Adze code support on their own. It’s a rotten break for you, Jerzy. I’m sorry about it.”

“What the fuck does Otto know about anything?”

“He watches every dollar that goes out or comes in.” Ben glanced around to make sure nobody was within earshot. “I’ll just come out and level with you, Jerzy. This is really about that three million dollars West West put up for your bail. West West wants the money back.”

“You’re going to revoke my bail?”

“At the end of the redeployment period, yes, your bail will be revoked. As I think I told you before, bail falls under the category of a West West employee benefit.”

“No wonder there was such a big rush to get me to finish the Adze code,” I said bitterly. “So you guys could go ahead and copyright it for West West and then cut me loose.” I racked my brain for a way out. “But… But what if there’s a problem with the Adze code? I could consult on a part-time basis, couldn’t I? You wouldn’t need to pay me benefits or give me an office! Just lend me a cyberdeck so I can work from home- or work from jail if that’s what it comes to.”

“No way,” said Ben after the briefest pause for thought. “Equipping a computer criminal with unsupervised cyberspace access would open West West to highly negative legal exposure.”

“Computer criminal. I don’t believe this.”

“I’m sorry, Jerzy. You’re a great programmer, but West West is laying you off. It sucks, but that’s life in the Valley. You might check back with us if you win your trials.” He glanced at his watch. “I better tune in on Squidboy again. Good-bye.”

I went into Los Perros to seek out the consolation of my soft-chinned, bell-haired Gretchen.

“Look who’s here,” said Susan Poker as I entered Welsh amp; Tayke.

“Oh hi, Jerzy,” said Gretchen, looking up from some papers on her desk. “What’s new?”

“Are you busy?”

“Kind of. We’re putting the paperwork through on two properties today. It’ll take most of the afternoon. I get off at four-thirty.”

“You really should buy that house you were living in,” said Susan Poker. “It’s just standing empty, and Mr. Nutt’s ready to accept a very low offer. Have you asked West West about it?”

“Don’t you ever give up?” I asked her.

“Not me!”

“Hey, Gretchen, come outside for just a minute so I can tell you something in private.”

“Secrets from moi?” exclaimed Susan Poker.

“I’ll come,” said Gretchen. “But just for a minute.”

So out there on the sidewalk I told her. “We finished that robot I’ve been working on, and now I’ve been fired.”

“Oh. Poor Jerzy. And your trial starts day after tomorrow. This is a bad week for you.” She patted my cheek and kissed me. “We should do something fun tonight, to take your mind off your woes.”

“I’ll try to think of something. Meanwhile I think I’ll get a drink.”

“It’s barely two o’clock, Jerzy.”

“Hey, I’m unemployed!”

“Be back here at four-thirty, don’t forget.”

“Okay.”

I walked very slowly down the street. As an unemployed person, I had all the time in the world. It was a funny feeling not to be in a rush.

I’d been racing from one job to another for more than twenty years now. For awhile I’d been a math professor, then I’d had a job selling textbooks, and then we’d moved to California and I’d become a hacker. Rush, rush, rush, and for what? To age and to die. Despite my big dreams, I’d never been anything more than a struggling shrimp in the world’s big water, nothing but a gnat in the blank California sky.

My job and family were gone, but at least Queue and Keith were being nice to me these days-of course I was paying them rent. I wished I’d brought a joint with me today. This was not a day when I felt like being the real me.

I walked a little farther and found myself in front of the Los Perros bakery. I’d been avoiding the place ever since my big night at the Vos‘, but today it seemed natural to drift in for a sandwich. There was Nga behind the counter as usual, dressed in black and with her hair poufed up on one side. Her quick eyes twinkled when she saw me, and her kissy red lips curved in a smile.

“Jerzy! How you doing!”

“Not so well. I have to go to court day after tomorrow.”

“I know. The D.A. want one of us testify, but we no see nothing.”

“That’s good.”

Now Nga’s mother Huong Vu looked up and noticed me.

“We no want talk to you,” she said flatly.

“I’m sorry about the neighbor’s dog.”

She shook her head. “We glad dog is gone, but we no want you come back our house ever again.”

“I understand. Uh, Nga, I’ll take a medium croissant with turkey and Swiss cheese. To go.”

“No problem, Jerzy,” said Nga. “Five thirty-four.” A tingle went up my arm from the sly caress of her fingertips when she gave me my change. “Come back soon,” smiled Nga, though Huong Vu snapped at her in Vietnamese.

Nga Vo’s cousin Kanh Pham followed me out of the store. He flipped his long hair and cleared his throat.

“What?” I said.

“My cousin Vinh Vo still very interest do business with you.”

“What kind of business?” For a minute I really couldn’t remember.

“He say you company going need some Y9707 chip for robot.”

“Oh yes, I remember that. But I don’t work for a company anymore.”

“Maybe you tell somebody anyhow.”

“Maybe.” If Vinh Vo really had access to a big stash of cheap Y9707 chips, this could be an opportunity for me to play middleman and make some good bread. With the Adze and Veep kits on the market, the demand for Y9707s could run way ahead of the supply. Y9707s were wholesaling at twelve hundred bucks per chip and, I now recalled, Vinh had offered to sell me several hundred of them for $120 a chip. If I could find a way to resell them, I could make a thousand dollars profit on each chip. “Where would somebody reach Vinh Vo?”

Khanh Pham wrote a phone number on a piece of paper and gave it to me.

“Just out of theoretical curiosity, Khan, how does Vinh Vo get hold of his chips?”

“Many Vietnamese people who work in the fab and component plants give some chips to him. They bring chips home from assembly line. Vinh Vo is like a godfather to them.”

In other words Vinh Vo was running a protection racket that victimized his newly arrived fellow nationals. Those of them who were computer workers were allowed to pay Vinh Vo with chips instead of cash. Well, that explained how he could afford to sell the chips in the black market for one dollar on the ten. When Vinh had originally made me the offer, I’d been put off by the obvious criminality of the deal, but with my trials coming up and West West about to cut me loose, I had less and less to lose.

“I’ll think about calling him. Give my best to Nga.”

“She has two new boyfriend.” He giggled sputter-ingly and tossed his hair several times.

“Oh well!” I laughed along with him. He was a nice boy.

“Did you see my new motorcycle?” asked Khanh Pham. “Vinh Vo bought it for me!” There was indeed a black Kawasaki parked in front of the bakery.

“Congratulations!”

I took my sandwich down the street to a scuzzy bar called the Night Watch. This was not a yuppie watering hole like D. T. Finnegan’s; no, the Night Watch had black plywood walls, plastic furniture, and a resident motorcycle club: people with leather jackets that said KNIGHTS OF THE NIGHT WATCH on them. The Knights weren’t exactly Hell’s Angels-this was, after all, still Los Perros-but they were a fairly scurvy crew. Three of them were at a table in the rear: a fat man, a thin man, and a fat woman. I sat up at the bar to the left of a kid with shoulder-length brown hair. I ordered a beer and started in on my turkey croissant.

The wall to my left was covered with bright colored lights. There was a TV showing a vintage Porky Pig cartoon, a neon beer sign shaped like the Golden Gate Bridge, a 3-D magnetic pinball machine, a dollar-a-minute cyberspace game with a bicycle seat and handlebars, and a big Abbott wafer screen showing music videos from the Total Video Library in cyberspace. The current video was a horrible, yelling antique number captioned as being by somebody called Tom Jones singing something called “Delilah.” The bartender was lustily singing along.

“Jesus this is bad,” I couldn’t help saying. “This is the worst thing I’ve heard in my whole life.”

“The mid-twentieth century was a golden age for the vocal arts,” said the bartender. He was a blond, limp man with a mustache and a dirty T-shirt. He had a winningly sniggering way of talking. “Watch the finale. That’s when all the women throw their underwear onstage. It’s really choice.”

“I need another beer for this shit.”

“Punch up some country music after this, Lester,” twanged the boy next to me. “That’ll make us feel even more like drinkin‘.” His voice trailed off at the end of every sentence. He had something on the bar in front of him, a little car or-I looked closer. It was a little car with the rubber head of a cow. This was the same boy who’d come up to me outside Queue’s gate. The bartender gave me another beer and drifted down to the other end of the bar to talk with the bikers.

“What’s up, doc?” said the boy to me, waggling his eyebrows. He tossed his head to get his rasta tangles out of his face. His thin lips pulled back in a stretching motion that was more wince than smile. His breath smelled of some unfamiliar chemical, and he looked zonked.

“Are you really Hex DEF6?” I’d taken the wrong approach in my last conversation with him. Though I was still angry about the voodoo cyberspace head trip he’d run on me back in the Antland of Fnoor, I tried to make my voice sound mild and admiring. The point was to get some information out of him.

“That’s not who I am,” he said with spaced-out precision. “Hex DEF6 was a gig. My name is Riscky Pharbeque and I’m from Fort Worth, Texas.” He stuck out his hand and I shook it.

“So who hired you to scare the shit out of me? Was it West West?”

“No, man, it was a guy called Dirk Blanda. Mattel Incorporated fronted him the money to burn you.”

“ Dirk Blanda? My neighbor? The bodymapper who runs Dirk Blanda’s Personography? And-Mattel the toy company? I don’t get it.”

“It’s that Our American Home shit you did, old son. Perky Pat? You ripped off the CyberBarbie meshes Dirk did for Mattel, so they-all hired a phreak to burn you. Frontier justice, pardner. That’s how it goes. I picked the gig up off a phreak bulletin board. We call it the Burn Exchange, all kinds of kinky offers get posted there. But it was nothing personal, you wave?”

“Sure, Riscky, no problem,” I smiled. “But why was Hex DEF6 telling me to work for West West?”

“Well this was a real special gig. I got paid twice. Was supposed to get paid twice, anyhow. There was two rewards out on you, Jerzy. Blanda paid me up front to burn you, but a guy called Roger Coolidge said he’d pay me more to tell you to work for West West. Except he still hasn’t coughed up. He’s hog-stupid if he thinks he can short Riscky Pharbeque. I don’t much like Coolidge, and I might could burn him really bad.”

“That was really Roger there with us in Antland of Fnoor?” I remembered the weird gangster nightclub back room that the big ant had carried me to. Hex DEF6 had been there, and tuxedos of Roger and Susan Poker. Though when I’d asked Susan Poker about it, she’d insisted she was a computer illiterate who’d never been in cyberspace.

“That was Roger’s tuxedo all right, and he was in it-at least until I twisted him up. It was you, me, Roger and, oh yeah, Sue Poker. You know her, don’t you? Sue’s a cryp at Welsh amp; Tayke Realty. She knew your cyberspace access code, so I cut her in for fifteen percent. She wanted to watch me burn you, so I brought her along and slaved her tuxedo motions to the twitching of that big ant. Sue’s hot stuff under all that plastic.” Riscky Pharbeque cackled and then raised his voice to call to the bartender as Tom Jones reached his rutting, bellowing climax. “Come on, Lester, play some country next. Does Total Video got any like Charlie Daniels in all that old shit?”

“They’ve even got Van Halen, dude. Total Video rules.”

“Well git on it.”

“And give Riscky and me a round, Lester,” I called. “Two Coronas and two shots of tequila.”

“Thankee kindly,” said Riscky.

The bartender pressed a microphone button and asked the videoplayer for Charlie Daniels. The screen showed a grid of titled images and with Riscky’s loud advice, Lester tapped one of them. The music started. Lester served our drinks and went back to the bikers.

I raised my shot glass to Riscky Pharbeque in mock salute. “You’re a hell of a phreak, Riscky. As long as I’m asking questions, how about the GoMotion ants?”

“ Wiggly little suckers. Hats off to you on that, Jerzy. All us phreaks are rooting for you.”

“I mean, how did you get an ant to swallow my hands and carry me to you?”

“Hellfire, Jerzy, I ain’t gonna give all my secrets away. If you want to know how to use the ants, go and ask them yourself.”

“I can’t. I don’t have a cyberdeck.”

“ Business opportunity!” twanged Riscky happily. He played his accent like a musical instrument. “I got a deck I can sell you from out of the trunk of my car.”

“How much?”

“It’s a forty-thousand-dollar Pemex model twelve. I ain’t had it but ten weeks. I’d be amenable to oh…” He regarded me narrowly, suddenly not seeming as drunk and stoned as I’d thought he was. “Nine hundred dollars cash. That’ll leave you about four hundred dollars in the bank.”

“Of course you know my bank balance?”

“I got an interest in you, Jerzy. You make a run across the street and get the cash from Wells Fargo and then I’ll move the deck to your Animata. Do you know how to connect to the moonroof satellite dish?”

“Well, sort of. Not really. But I want to.”

“I’ll help you for another hundred bucks. One thousand dollars for a Pemex cyberdeck twelve, next to new, fully configured, and hardware-installed on an invisible phreak patch to the Net. Deals don’t come much sweeter than that, Mister Rugby.”

“What’s the catch?”

“I don’t pay for the cyberdecks, old son. I just get ’em delivered. I’m fixin’ to get me a Pemex thirteen delivered later today, so I might as well lay my old box off on you. I’ll have you up and running in an hour for one thousand dollars cash.”

The Charlie Daniels video ended and the floppy blond bartender started back up the bar toward us.

“Let’s do it, Mister Pharbeque,” I said.

Riscky waited in the bar while I got the money out of my bank. He’d been right about my balance: it was $1385. Just so I’d have some money in my pockets, I went ahead and took out thirteen hundred. Today was Tuesday, and on Friday my last paycheck from West West would come in. The last two weeks pay plus the four weeks severance pay would come to something like thirteen thousand dollars after taxes. Cash flow was all-important to me these days, as my credit cards had been canceled as soon as I’d been indicted for computer crime.

Riscky followed my car up to a deserted pull-out in the hills of Los Perros, about halfway to Queue’s. Within the hour, he had the Pemex cyberdeck installed in the trunk of my car right next to the map machine. The cyberdeck’s hookup to the Net was via the map machine’s antenna, which was a barely visible bull’s-eye of titanium rings embedded in the clear plastic of the Animata’s moonroof. The ring spacing was such that the pattern acted as a radio-wave Fresnel lens, able to transmit to and receive from satellites. Ordinarily the lens was only used to consult the navigational satellites, but with Riscky Pharbeque’s expertise, the system was soon tuned to the frequency of the cybernet communication satellites.

The Pemex twelve cyberdeck was awesome. It had a radio-connected headset that looked like a big pair of wraparound mirrorshades, and the control gloves were radio-linked as well.

“The deck can suck juice out of your car’s battery no matter if the car is off or on,” Riscky explained. “The glove and headset signals have a throw of four hundred feet. You can park your car and take the headset and gloves with you.”

“Does the deck always have to be on?” I asked. “Like overnight?”

“Naw, you can turn it on from the goggles, they’re sensitive to a certain sequence of taps. You do three fast taps, wait, then tap once, then wait, then tap four fast taps, then wait, and then tap one last time. That’s the code I set it to.”

I put on the goggles and tapped the Pharbeque three-one-four-one sequence on the temple. Ping, I was floating inside the familiar Bay Area Netport.

“I don’t have it set up for an office,” said Riscky half-apologetically. He was standing next to me. “We can’t use an office/cause this is an illegal connect. Turn her on and you pop up somewhere random in a given target space. I got the target set to the Netport. You can always change the target with the claim stake tool.”

I swung my head slowly back and forth. The visual effects were better than any I’d seen before-the resolution was incredibly high, and the updates were shockingly fast. There were no jaggies, no dithering, no lag time, no lurches, no compromises. What I saw was the purest and most convincing virtual reality I’d ever seen.

“It’s wonderful, Riscky. I didn’t know they made headsets this good.”

“Hell, Jerzy, I phreakified it is why it runs so good. This is an undocumented billion-pixel video mode. And look at this!” He tapped the other side of my headset in a five-nine-two-six tattoo, and suddenly it was as if I were looking through the headset at the dashboard of my car. I turned my head and saw Riscky. But the headset was opaque! Was this another dark dream, another voodoo cyberspace? I pulled the goggles off fast and looked at them. I hadn’t noticed before that there were two TV cameras like transparent glass pinheads set where my pupils would be.

“I call it stunglasses mode,” drawled Riscky. “You get a reality shunt going there, with real-world images being routed into cyberspace and back. You tap five-nine-two-six on the left temple to toggle it.”

“How am I going to remember both those four-digit sequences?”

‘ ¦How I need a drink, alcoholic of course“ said Riscky. ”Count the letters in the words.“

“It’s pi!” I exclaimed, recognizing the mnemonic. “I love it! Here’s your money.”

Riscky took the money and cackled. His toy cow circled about in excited figure eights. “Go on in there and get even, Jerzy! Fuck Shit Up!” He got back in his car and drove off. I still had a half hour before I had to meet Gretchen. I put the headset back on and returned to the vast hall of the Bay Area Netport.

I flew over to a public rest room and made my way in past a gaggle of black-lipsticked grrls. I looked in the mirror to see what kind of user tuxedo Riscky had left on his machine? A silly tux, that’s what-I looked like a big, wheeled cart with two human hands and the imposing head of a Texas longhorn. The platonic ideal of Riscky’s toy.

“Hey, cow!” one of the grrls called to me. “Can we watch you take a piss?” She and her friends laughed like maniacs at this-not that tuxedos ever did take a piss, except in the farthest reaches of the specialty cyberporno arcades.

After staring at myself for awhile, I turned to look at the grrls, all pierced and leathered and tattooed. The one who’d called to me stepped forward and grabbed one of my horns. I felt it as a buzzing against the side of my head; apparently my new headset had touch-pads in its temples.

“I’m Bety Byte,” she said. “And you’re Riscky Pharbeque. We owe you a burn for what you did to the Cryp Club library, cow-patty.” She pulled out a little thing like a gun and shot it at me. Everything went black. At first I thought my system had crashed, but then when I flew forward, I saw that all Bety’s gun had done was to surround me with an opaque sphere.

As I flew out of the sphere, I tossed my head to hook one of my horns at Bety’s realistic icon, expecting my horn to pass harmlessly but perhaps intimidatingly through her. But Bety Byte had her surfaces custom-set for preemptive collision rejection, and my horn clattered off her with a vicious buzz on my temple. She popped her little geometry gun at me again, making things black again, and this time I just kept on going right out of the rest room and up toward the oversize bright pink and blue node of Magic Shell Mall, the cyberspace shopping mall where Gretchen had gone to Nordstrom’s.

Riscky must have had some kind of valid credit number installed in his system, for the Magic Shell node allowed me to enter. I popped out near the Bay Area Netport node that lay at the center of the Magic Shell Mall. The green-and-gray light of the Netport node flickered behind me. All over the inner surface of the great Magic Shell were walkways and the shapes of stores.

I arced along a space path toward where the ant had taken me last month, to the vacant lot between the video store and the stockbroker: Total Video and Gibb amp; Gibb Stocks. I thudded down on my virtual wheels and trundled across the blank surface till I met a seam where two Magic Shell facets met. I turned and followed the seam to a shallow corner where three quadrilaterals met five narrow triangles; this was the same corner as before. I peered at the corner, but I was too big to see if there still was a little round off error hole in it.

I needed to shrink, but-I now realized-I didn’t know how. Perhaps Riscky already had put a shrink hand gesture into his system library? I said “Show Tools,” out loud and, yes, Riscky’s system accepted this standard cyberspace command.

Several shapes appeared in the air before me-a telephone, a video camera, a claim stake, a typewriter, a calculator, an atlas, a can of spraypaint, a Swiss knife, a jet engine-but there was nothing that seemed obviously designed to change my size. I pried at the corner in the floor with my head’s long cowhorn, but it wouldn’t give. Maybe the Swiss knife? I was just opening out the can-opener blade when the grrls caught up with me.

“Bad cow!” yelled Bety Byte. She and her grrlfriends were touching down all around me. “Shoo, Riscky!” yelled one of them, and fired another geometry gun at me. I found myself enclosed inside a yellow tetrahedron, unable to see anything but my tool icons. I was going to have to get a new, shrinkable tuxedo and come back. I grabbed the jet engine, pointed the exhaust down toward my feet and pushed the button on its side. ZZZZOOOW! I burst out of the tetrahedron and flashed in along a radius straight toward the Netport node at the mall’s center.

When I popped out into the Netport, I stopped, took off the headset, and turned off the deck. Three-one-four-one. How I need a. I had to get a new tuxedo that had a control to make it shrink, and that didn’t make people think I was Riscky Pharbeque.

Since Riscky’s configuration didn’t have a virtual office where I could hack the system, the simplest thing would be to just buy a size-controllable tuxedo from Dirk Blanda’s Personography. Of course I had a bone to pick with Dirk Blanda about his having hired Riscky to burn me, though I had to admit there was a sort of justice in it.

Tuxedos sold for seven hundred dollars, and I only had three hundred. Dirk Blanda was certainly the person to go to, unless he was still mad about the CyberBarbie meshes I’d ripped off. Getting him to make me a tux would be hard, but getting him to do it cut-rate might be impossible.

I thought a minute, and then flashed on the idea that Dirk would certainly help me out if I offered to pay him in pot. Every time Dirk and I had gotten high together he’d asked me if I could score pot for him. I’d never done so, though. Like, why should I? What for? I’d always just given him a few hits of pot when I had a lot, so that when I was out of pot I could count on him to give me some. But he was almost always out of pot. The more I thought about it, the more sure I was that if I apologized to Dirk about CyberBarbie and offered him a fresh quarter ounce, he’d make me a shrinkable tux.

It was three-thirty and I was only a ten-minute drive from Queue’s. I motored on up there.

“Hi, Queue.” She was sitting in front of a Macintosh in her office. The office was right off the lower deck: an anachronistic jumble of papers, disks, tapes, and books. Media Molecules primarily sold hard copy media for those not plugged into cyberspace, although their best-sellers were available on-line from the Mondo Alternate Info Service over the cyberspace Net. But most people didn’t have cyberspace yet, especially the eternally broke eternal seekers to whom Media Molecules catered. Most of their business was still a quaint matter of putting a physical video or audiotape into a big envelope and like physically mailing it.

“You’re looking good, Jerzy.” Queue smiled up at me with her hair across her face. “Hey! Before I forget! Some e-mail for you came in a little while ago.”

“Let me see it.”

She moused around the screen for awhile and finally said, “I guess I erased it.”

“What did it say? Who was it from?”

“It was from Roger something in Switzerland. He said-let me think, yes, he said, ‘I appreciate your brilliant work on the Adze. Sorry about your run of bad luck. I hope to work with you again someday.’ ”

“Jesus,” I said. “That’s Roger Coolidge. He appreciates my work for West West? Don’t tell me he controls them, too!”

“Wasn’t Roger Coolidge the big hacker guy at GoMotion?”

“Yeah. He’s like my evil twin. I think he’s behind everything bad that’s been happening to me. What a guy. And he ‘hopes to work with me again someday,’ the prick?”

“That’s what he said.”

“Well, thanks for remembering to tell me.” I paused and gathered my wits, remembering why I’d come here. “Do you have any spare pot, Queue? I need to get hold of a quarter ounce.”

“Wait, wait a minute, your new robots are a huge success? You’re celebrating?”

“Not exactly. I got fired again. As for the robots, you should watch the local news. Or-do you have a TV?” I’d never seen a TV at Queue and Keith’s, come to think of it. I hate TV so much that I never look for it.

“Keith pawned our set last Christmas,” said Queue. “So we had to miss out on that spacey ants-vs-television hack you pulled. You got fired from West West?”

Keith popped into the office as if on cue.

“Hi, Jerzy,” he said. “Are you still looking for a gun?”

“A gun!” cried Queue. “Out of the question, Keith! This is a desperate man!”

“I’ve been fired again,” I told Keith. “And all I want to buy right now is marijuana.”

“Well, I can’t help you with that-though I’d be glad to smoke a bowl with you,” said Keith. “But I was at a pawnshop in Cupertino today and they had a plastic pistol for seventy-five dollars. It was a mean little machine. It looked like the head of a cobra. If you give me the money, I could get it for you.”

“You pawned your guitar again, Keith?” demanded Queue. “You didn’t pawn anything of mine, did you?”

“I have certain unavoidable expenses,” said Keith with solemn hippie dignity.

I wasn’t sure what Keith’s unavoidable expenses were-though it was fun to think that the money was for cool, newly synthesized psychedelics. But likely as not the money was simply cash for driving around, for things like gas, bridge tolls, parking meters, tobacco, and an occasional espresso. Queue controlled the cash flow of Media Molecules, and I could readily believe that she was unwilling to advance Keith a cent.

“Oh, you!” said Queue to Keith, and he smilingly drifted back out onto the deck.

“So okay, Jerzy, you want a quarter?” Queue’s voice rose musically with the welcome question. “I guess I could spare a little. I’m short on cash.”

“I have cash.” I still had three hundred dollars left. “One fifty?”

Queue gave her temple-bell laugh and mouthed a kiss at me. “One forty is fine.”

While she searched out the quarter, I went upstairs to my room and rooted out the remains of my own stash. I rolled four fat joints in Orange Zig-Zag papers and tucked them into the back of a matchbook. I went back downstairs and paid Queue for the heat-sealed quarter ounce plastic bag of sinsemilla. She said she’d bought it for herself yesterday, but was passing it on to me as a favor. I thanked her profusely. The pot was a beautiful light green mass of female buds with dusty purple stigmas. Dirk would drool over it.

I drove down to Los Perros and parked in Dirk’s driveway, right next to our old house on Tangle Way. Dirk usually worked at home rather than in the storefront of Dirk Blanda’s Personography.

He came to the door and looked out diffidently. Dirk was a calm, boyish man with a thin head and short white hair. He had a lot of simplistic ideas about economics and politics that he believed the more deeply because he’d thought them all out himself.

“Hi, Jerzy. Come on in.”

I followed him up to his machine room. I meant to be completely nice and diplomatic, but my anger over what he’d done to me came spilling out. “Dirk, you should have talked to me instead of hiring a phreak to burn me. That’s a crime, you know. I could report you.”

“Look who’s talking about crime. You stole my meshes! That’s wrong, Jerzy. If you’ve just come here to insult me, you might as well go.”

“I’m not here to insult you, and I’m sorry that my companies ripped off your meshes. But we’re even now. Your phreak put me through hell.”

Dirk’s eyes widened with curiosity. “What did he do?”

“He got me in a voodoo cyberspace watching movies of me and my children getting tortured.”

“Oh! Now that-that’s nothing that I told him to do.” Dirk looked like a worried boy whose Halloween prank has gone too far. “I wouldn’t ever wish any harm on your family.”

“You told him to burn me and he did. But now I’ve been fired from GoMotion and West West both, so if Mattel still feels like burning someone about the Our American Home test sites, tell them to go after the execs and not after me. I’m out of the loop.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, Jerzy. And your trial starts tomorrow doesn’t it? I remember seeing Studly working in your yard plenty of times. I can’t believe he killed a dog.”

“I think he started acting different after the GoMotion ants infected him. But now that there’s GoMotion ant lions all over the place, it shouldn’t happen again.”

“I keep hearing that there’s still some ants loose in cyberspace. Have you seen them?”

“No, but as a matter of fact, that’s why I’m here. I need a special tuxedo so I can go look for the cyberspace ants.”

“So you need a new tuxedo. I figured it was either that or pot that brought you here. You don’t happen to have any pot, do you? I’m all out again.”

“That’s what I was hoping,” I grinned. I took out the bag of pot and handed it to Dirk. “I’ll trade you this quarter ounce for a new tux. The tux has to be scalable. It has to have a control on it so that I can change its size.”

Dirk turned the packet this way and that, looking at the buds. “This is awesome, Jerzy. Of course I can make you a scalable tux. If you don’t want too much fine detail, I can fix you up in about ten minutes. Do you want it to look like you? I’ve still got your bodymap on file.”

“No, no, I want to be anonymous.”

“Well, I’ve got a bunch of art meshes on disk. They don’t look like anyone specific. You can pick what you like. Should we get high first?” He tore the plastic open and inhaled. “Mmmm.”

“I have some already rolled.” I took out one of my joints and lit it. Dirk and I passed the jay back and forth, loving the great warm relaxing sensations it gave us. It was nice to be here, back to normal, getting high with my friendly neighbor. I wished that all the hassles could disappear and that after this joint I could walk across the driveway and into my house and be there with Carol and the kids and my good job at GoMotion.

“I feel it, Jerzy.” Dirk looked around his room happily. “I’m buzzed.”

“You’re not mad at me anymore?”

“I’m not mad,” he smiled. There was something so pure and childlike about the guy. Hanging out with him always reminded me of Saturday mornings when I was a kid and would walk over to my neighbor friend’s house to set off firecrackers and play computer games.

“So let’s make your tux,” said Dirk, handing me a spare cyberdeck headset and pair of gloves. “You can pick out one of my art meshes.”

We were in Dirk’s virtual office. Dirk’s tuxedo was a muscular version of him, and I was a chromed-over copy of Dirk. I followed after him as he flew through a door that opened onto a huge Louis the Fourteenth ballroom with a few hundred figures posed on the parquet floor. When we came in, the figures started slowly gesturing, driven by automatic chaos loops. “Here, Jerzy,” came Dirk’s voice over the earphones. “This is my art warehouse. I’m always putting together new tuxedos. Fly around and look for something you like.”

The figures were set down in no particular order: a club-wielding caveman, a breastplated Amazon, a Tyrannosaurus rex, a happy carrot, Michelangelo’s marble David, a pointillist Seurat woman with a bustle, a centaur, a manic white businessman smoking a pipe, a teddy bear, the pope, Bo Diddley, a vertically divided half-Elvis half-Marilyn, JFK with brains dangling from the back of his head, a knight in paisley armor, a forties secretary with glasses and tight bun, a saucer alien with tentacles on its face, a crying clown,…

“I want to be a crying clown,” I said.

“You sure?”

“Yeah, man, a crying clown is how I feel-what with my trial coming up. Maybe if I look like a crying clown people will be nicer to me.”

“Okay,” said Dirk. “And you need a size lever. Why don’t we make his penis be the lever.” Dirk chuckled and pulled the clown’s pants down. The clown was endowed with a dangling hairy scrotum and an intricately veined semitumescent penis. “I figured a clown’s genitals should be kind of grotesque,” said Dirk. “Getting the pants to go on and off was an interesting hack. How about if you push the clown’s penis up he grows, and if you push it down he gets smaller. A Gothic joystick.”

“That’s too gnarly, Dirk. Why can’t you make the control be…” I looked over at the businessman figure with his pipe clenched between the teeth of his shit-eating salesman grin. I now recognized the figure as the old underground culture icon known as “Bob” Dobbs. “Give my clown a copy of the pipe of ‘Bob’ Dobbs.”

“I like it,” said Dirk. He popped up the tool icons and picked a little glass box with buttons on it. He moved and resized the box to just fit over “Bob” ‘s pipe, and then pressed a button to capture a copy of the pipe that he carried over and affixed to the face of my clown. Next he used a screwdriver icon to pry open the clown’s chest to reveal a symbolic arrangement of chips and wires. Dirk used a virtual pliers and soldering iron to adjust the circuitry, sealed the clown back up, and pulled down a spray can.

“You can use the pipe for size control, yes. And, Jerzy, as long as we’re getting crazy, I’ll make your tuxedo’s surface reflectivity be like black velvet. A ‘Bob’ Dobbs crying clown painted on black velvet” He sprayed the clown till its surfaces were all matte and soft. “So try on your new tux, Jerzy. Just fly through it, and it’ll click onto you.”

I flew forward and, sure enough, the crying clown clicked onto me. I moved the velvety arms around. One side of the ballroom was a huge mirror, and I flew over there to take a closer look.

“The pipe works?” I asked.

“Try it.”

I pushed up on the pipe, and rapidly grew through the ceiling of the ballroom. Outside the ballroom was raw black cyberspace with some things twinkling in the distance. I pushed the pipe down, and shrank back into the ballroom and on down and down to the size of a pissant. Dirk and the art meshes towered above me. I inched myself back up to standard size.

“This is great. Can we get out?”

“Sure.” We flew back into Dirk’s virtual office and took off our headsets.

Dirk tore open his quarter ounce and stuffed the bowl of a pipe.

“Uh, Dirk,” I said as he lit the pipe. “About that burn you and Mattel did. Did you ask the phreak to do anything besides scaring me? I mean-you weren’t involved in the release of the GoMotion ants, were you?”

Dirk shook his head no while holding his breath. He offered me the pipe, but it had already gone out.

“How do you want to get the tuxedo onto your system?” asked Dirk as he exhaled. “Ordinarily I’d say for you to just come through cyberspace and pick it up, but what with your legal situation-”

“Yeah, I’d much rather take it on disk and install it directly on my deck. The less of a trail I leave the better.”

“Agreed. I’ll put it on a disk with an install script.”

“Cool.”

We said our good-byes and I went outside. Without putting my headset on, I tapped three-one-four-one to turn on my deck. I opened the trunk and put the disk in the drive of my Pemex twelve. This was finally the golden age of system-independent plug’n‘play, so the deck knew that the disk was meant to be my tuxedo, and the disk knew what format my deck wanted, and they both could agree to run the tuxedo’s self-installing script.

I got in the driver’s seat of my car and put on my headset for a quick cybercruise to the Bay Area Netport rest room. In the mirror I was a black velvet crying clown with the pipe of “Bob” Dobbs. Bety Byte and her grrlfriends looked at me, but I was no weirder than a lot of the tuxedos going by. I flew out to a corner of the Netport and tested out the shrink and grow commands to my satisfaction. But now it was time to pick up Gretchen.

Just for kicks, I tapped five-nine-two-six for the reality pass-through. Stunglasses mode, Riscky had called it. Instead of the Netport, my headset now showed me a TV image of the view out my parked car’s windshield. Dirk’s driveway. I looked down at my hands and waggled them. There was no perceptible lag as the images came in through my headset’s small video cameras, traveled to the deck in the trunk, and made their way to the headset’s video screens. This was a very fast deck. I felt confident enough of it to pull out of Dirk’s driveway and drive down to Los Perros wearing stunglasses. The colors were so rich and the resolution so high that I could barely tell I was wearing a headset at all.

I parked in front of Welsh amp; Tayke, turned off my deck, and stashed my gloves and headset in the pouch behind my seat. I could see in through the front window-Susan Poker and Gretchen were still there. After what I’d just learned about Susan Poker from Riscky-that she was a professional who’d been in on my burn-well, I didn’t want to try to talk to her. I leaned on my horn. Gretchen saw me, grabbed her purse, and danced out laughing to hop in my car. She was glad to see me.

“I’m so sick of the office, Jerzy! It’s a beautiful warm day-I should be at the beach!”

“We can still go to the beach. Let’s go to Santa Cruz and have supper there. And maybe there’s some music happening in Santa Cruz tonight. Do you want to?”

“ Yeah, I do.” This funny emphasis of agreement was another new California speech habit. “My car’s parked over there; let’s regroup at my apartment.”

After parking her Porsche at her apartment, Gretchen changed clothes. I borrowed a baggy sweater from her for if it got cold later. We checked in the paper and, yes, there was music tonight; even though it was Tuesday, there was a World Music concert taking place in the Santa Cruz Civic Center at nine. Perfect-I drove us over the Santa Cruz mountains toward the sun.

We hung out on Its Beach near Steamer Lane. It was sunny and not too windy. Around six-thirty we went to an expensive restaurant looking out over Monterey Bay. We had lobster sausage for our appetizer and duck pizza for our main course. The lobster sausage was exquisitely toothsome, but the duck pizza was a disappointment. Duck was always a disappointment, but somehow I could never learn.

“Let’s stay at my place tonight,” I said over our cappucino. “I don’t want Susan Poker barging in on me again. I don’t trust her at all anymore. I found out today that she’s a cryp. She’s been lying to me. Did you know that, Gretchen?”

“Who told you she was a cryp?”

“Some phreak I met at the Night Watch. His name was Riscky Pharbeque. He sold me a hot new cyberspace deck for a thousand dollars.”

“You just can’t leave that stuff alone, can you, Jerzy?”

“So what about Susan Poker?” I demanded.

“Well, okay, it’s true that she’s a cryp. Welsh amp; Tayke uses her to get early information. I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to scare you off.”

“I bet it was Susan Poker who called the cops on me.”

“I guess that’s possible. Even though Susan smiles a lot, she isn’t necessarily that nice a person. Sometimes I wonder how I ended up getting stuck with her as a friend. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, Jerzy. I was scared you’d blame me for what she does.”

“Is somebody paying her to watch me?”

“I don’t know.” Gretchen stared out the window, then smiled brightly at me and changed the subject. “Do you think you’ll win your trial?”

“I sure hope so. Part of my being fired from West West means that they revoke my bail next week. That three million dollars they put up? With that gone, I’ll be sitting in jail.”

“Poor Jerzy. Hey! It’s time for the concert.”

“Can you put this meal on your credit card, Gretchen? I’m a little short on cash.”

“Because you spent all your money on another stupid computer? I’ll charge it, but you have to pay me back. All of it. You asked me out for dinner, so it’s your treat.”

“Okay, okay. But don’t worry, at least I’ve got enough cash for the tickets.”

We drove over to the Santa Cruz Civic Center, a small old hall the size of a basketball court with concrete bleachers all around. The first group was a band from Uganda. They had a midget who played an instrument made of a gourd with key chains all around it. In the crowd I lit one of my joints and passed it to Gretchen. She took a long deep drag, held her breath, and exhaled an upward plume of smoke. She stuck her tongue out and wagged her head back and forth like: I’m feeling wild. I got close to her and enjoyed her smell and the fanning of the air that her body motions made.

When I passed the joint back to her the second time, she stuck out her tongue and made her marijuana-smoking-wild-girl face again: I’m high and I like it. I loved Gretchen’s tongue-faces so much. She’d made a come-hither tongue-face at me the very first time I’d seen her-at Coffee Roasting. That time her tongue had bent up over her upper lip, but for the wild-girl tongue-face at the Santa Cruz concert, Gretchen’s tongue went down over her lower lip. She fascinated me.

After the concert, we went back to my room at Queue’s and fucked. Queue and Keith weren’t home, so we fucked loud and hard and had a great time, up there in my airy room in the redwooded Santa Cruz mountains. Pretty soon Gretchen dropped off to sleep.

I’d brought my new gloves and headset up from the car with me; they were lying on the floor next to the bed. Lying cozy in my Gretchenful bed, I pulled on the gloves, donned the headset, and tapped into cyberspace.

You know at the end of the classic Beatles song, “Day In The Life,” how it ends on a big chord, like: BAAAAOOOUUUUMMM? That’s the sound Riscky’s deck made in my earphones, welcoming me in.

I flew across the Netport to the node of the Magic Shell Mall. In the mall, I flew to the vacant lot between Total Video and Gibb amp; Gibb. I walked to the same old vertex and pushed down on my pipe. The scene around me expanded smoothly, and then I was the size of a pissant and I was standing next to a big round off error hole in the corner. I crawled through the hole.

At first it was all black, but then I saw an odd shape in front of me; a drifting piece of geometry with faces that swung crazily through each other, faces that appeared and disappeared in no logical order-it was a piece of fnoor.

The rotating fnoor changed size irregularly; at a moment when it looked much bigger than me, I sprang forward and landed on it. I ran across the faces, which flipped out under me. I still had seen no ants. Finally I came to a kind of doorway in the dense angles of the fnoor; I squeezed through it and, as before, the fnoor turned into a solid model that lay all around me.

A weirdly shifting corridor stretched out ahead. I heard a faint chirping sound. I inched forward cautiously, but suddenly the corridor turned inside out and dumped me into a round room that was filled with-ants?

Not ants, not exactly, no. The creatures racing about in the round room were shaped like Perky Pats and Dexters, like Walts and Scooters and Squidboys. I flashed on the sickening realization that all the time I’d been evolving better Squidboys and more difficult Christensens at West West, the ants had been there in the background, using the process to make their own code even better. One of the Perky Pats gave me the finger.

I guess I must have tapped five-nine-two-six for the stunglasses pass-through then, but I don’t remember doing it. All I remember is that I was looking up at the ceiling of my bedroom with everything radiating off optical echoes of itself, everything receding and surrounded by memory images. The beams in the ceiling were covered with crawling colored lights, and my ears were filled with a resonant flutter. My stomach cramped and my bowels turned to water, I jumped out of bed and rushed to the toilet. I shit out a big nasty wet mess; it seemed to keep coming forever. When I was through, I stood up and looked in the mirror. I didn’t see stunglasses on my face; all I saw was an aging guy with severe diarrhea.

When I walked back to my bedroom, something rushed out at me from the left side of my field of vision. It was a cross between an ant, a face, a 3-D Mandelbrot set, and-oh, a furnace-stove made of blue and white tiles. It was way fast. It said some nonsense phrase like, “Beetlejuice monkey!” and I murmured, “Beetlejuice monkey?” to myself, trying to assimilate, and then the creature sped up a thousand times and sneered, “Nah, Beetlejuice monkey!” and I tried to relate, and the creature went faster, and it and I went into a hideous hebephrenic thought loop as the flutter in my ears sped higher and higher. The mandible-snout Beetlejuice Monkey was mocking and aggressive, it was totally dissing my thought speed, it was trying to dominate and show me where it’s really at-it did unbelievable shit like counting from one to one quadrillion. Out loud and by ones. It was way, way fast.

At some point in this psycho nightmare I decided the only way to stop the Beetlejuice Monkey was to kill it. I lunged forward with my velvet clown hands sticking out before me, and I grabbed the creature at its narrowest part. I began squeezing, and it was struggling and hitting back at me, and then someone grabbed me from behind and jerked at me, and then there was a wrenching at my face and everything got slow and different.

Keith was holding me in a full nelson.

“Jerzy! Jerzy! What’s going on? We just got home. What are you doing, man? What did you do to your chick?”

Gretchen was squeezed back against the wall, her face all blue, her dear face a frozen dead mask of horror. Her cold dead tongue was sticking out between jaws that were open in a wide death-agony rictus; it was poor Gretchen’s last tongue-face. I’d killed her. My diarrhea was all over my legs and all over the bed.

“You’re going to die for this, Jerzy,” screamed Queue, pushing past Keith and shoving her face up against mine. “You’re going to get the gas chamber and go to hell!”

I cringed back from the hideousness of what I’d done; I just couldn’t deal. I wanted to be catatonic. I fell back against my shit-covered bed and merged into the Beetlejuice Monkey.