The hacker and the ants

NINE

Inthe morning i woke soft and sweet, my mind a blank. Before opening my eyes, I happened to rub my hand up against my head and I felt the headset. I pushed it off, opened my eyes, and looked around as the horrible memories came flooding back to me.

Beautiful unharmed naked Gretchen was in bed with me. I hadn’t strangled her. I lifted up the sheet and looked down. There was no diarrhea. Had everything after Perky Pat’s giving me the finger been a phreak burn? What had I said to Gretchen and Keith-what had they seen me do?

“Keith,” I called, hurrying naked down the spiral staircase from the aerie I rented. “Hey, Keith!” I was ashamed to hear how my voice shook. My stomach looked fat and vulnerable. The living room and the kitchen were empty and the house was utterly quiet. Presumably they were still asleep in their bedroom downstairs. Or maybe they’d never come home at all. Maybe that thing about Keith shaking me had been part of the dark dream.

“Keith? Queue?” I walked halfway down the stairs from the living room to the next lower level. “Keith?” At the bottom of the stairs I opened the door to Keith and Queue’s bedroom. The messy room was cool and empty. No one had slept here last night.

I ran back up the stairs to the living room and back up the spiral staircase to my room. Gretchen was on the bed with the sheet wrapped around her, sitting there looking out the window at the beautiful fog and sun in the redwoods.

“Why were you yelling? God, you’re uptight. You woke me.”

“I… Did I do anything funny last night?”

“You did lots of things that were funny,” laughed Gretchen. “Now get back in bed so we can cuddle. What are you stressing for? You’re all red!”

I saw Riscky’s headset lying on the floor. It was still live, with images playing inside it. I wanted to stomp and crush the headset, but I was barefoot. Instead I tapped three-one-four-one (how-I-need-a) on the right temple to turn off the satanic engine.

I lay down on the bed. Gretchen spread the sheet over both of us and spooned herself against my back.

“Was I yelling last night?” I asked.

“If you were, I slept right through it. Pot and good sex puts me totally to sleep.”

“After you went to sleep, I put on my new cyberspace headset and I had-I had a terrible experience. I thought you were dead. I thought I choked you. I thought I had diarrhea in the bed.”

“Were you with the ants?”

“Yes. Only now they look like robots and people. They’re much much much faster than they used to be.”

“Jerzy, why do you fry your brain?” Gretchen sounded mad. “It’s like you don’t begin to realize-” She shook her head. “The ants are shit, Jerzy. The ants suck.”

“Nice talk for a mortgage insurance broker.” Thank God I had this warm real woman with me. “I love you, Gretchen. I’m glad you’re here. I’m so scared about everything.”

“About your trial starting tomorrow?”

“And about the ants. And about this latest burn. I don’t think there was a phreak behind this one. I think the ants did it to me themselves.”

“Did you do something to bother the ants?”

“Well, yes, I went into their nest. The Antland of Fnoor, I call it.”

“So don’t go there again. Don’t go into cyberspace at all.”

“And I’m worried about what the ants might do to the new robots. We copied a GoMotion ant lion into the new robot code, but these cyberspace ants I saw last night-I think they’ve been sitting in the machines at West West and watching me create the code. They were imitating Squidboy and even Perky Pat. If there’s a loophole in my code, the cyberspace ants are going to find it. The new robots might not be safe to use.”

“You should tell GoMotion and West West. Get your lawyer to fax them a letter so that if something new goes wrong you’ll have a defense.”

“That’s a good idea.”

We ate some yogurt and granola from Keith and Queue’s kitchen. Instead of crushing my headset, I put it and the gloves into my car’s trunk. And then I drove Gretchen to her apartment.

“See you again tonight, Jerzy?”

“I’m not sure. I’ll call you.”

“Stay away from the ants!”

“I’ll try.”

I went to see Stu at his office in downtown San Jose. He had a spiffed-up one-room office in the old Bank of America building. Instead of a secretary, he had a smart computer with good voice-recognition and speech-generation software. He could dictate documents to it, and it was able to answer the phone. He called his computer Miss Prentice.

Standing outside Stu’s door in the empty BofA building hallway, I could hear him talking with Miss Prentice. “Take your penis out and masturbate yourself,” Miss Prentice was saying.

“I’m busy right now,” whined Stu. “I don’t want to. I don’t have the energy.”

“Do you refuse to obey your mistress?” growled Miss Prentice. “I will not tolerate such behavior. You have dared to have an erection in the presence of your mistress, and now you must masturbate it away!”

“I don’t have an erection yet, Miss Prentice,” said Stu. “Can you show me some dirty pictures?”

I knocked quickly on the office door before the sordid scene could progress any farther. Miss Prentice’s voice rose an octave. “Who’s there?”

“It’s Jerzy Rugby.”

“Mr. Koblenz will see you now.” The door swung open.

Stu was sitting at his desk with his hands in his lap. He was holding an orange Nerfball. He was wearing a thin wrinkled suit and a tie.

“How’s it going?” said Stu, taking aim and shooting the Nerfball at a basketball hoop he’d glued to the wall. There was a Scotch-taped paper chute so that if Stu made a basket the ball would roll back to him. The ball went in. “I made another one, Miss Prentice,” said Stu, catching the ball from the trough. “What does that make my average for today?”

“You’re making eighty-seven percent of them, Mr. Koblenz,” said the computer. “Congratulations.” Unlike my robots, Miss Prentice didn’t look at all alive. Miss Prentice was nothing but a big computer box with a video screen, a printer, a microphone, and a speaker. I glanced quickly at the screen-it showed an insipid spreadsheet, probably fake.

I sat down. “Stu, I’m worried about the West West and GoMotion robot software that I helped develop. I don’t think it’s safe. I think the GoMotion ants might be able to infect the robots. Can you send letters to West West and GoMotion in my name saying that? A snail-mail letter and a fax to each of them? If the robots malfunction, I don’t want even more blame to be laid on me.” Snail-mail was the hacker word for ordinary, nonelectronic mail.

Stu thought for a minute, then shook his head. “How did you come up with such a terrible idea? You don’t want to send letters like that. If the robots were to malfunction, those letters would be viewed as proof that you’d known you’d sabotaged the code. A confession. So I won’t send them, no.” Stu regarded me distantly. “It would only make you the more convictable.”

“What do you mean convictable? Aren’t we going to win this trial? Aren’t you ready? You’re sitting here jacking off and playing Nerfball! What are you going to do for me in court tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow and Friday the judge selects and instructs a jury. Friday afternoon the D.A. and I make our opening statements. Monday we start with the witnesses. Sure I’m ready. But I don’t think we’ll win. You’re in big trouble, Jerzy. In fact, you’re screwed.”

“How so?” My voice was tight and small. “I wasn’t in control of Studly! None of the charges is true!”

“I guess you haven’t seen the new National Enquirer.” Stu tossed me a copy of the tabloid newspaper. The front page was a big picture of Studly with the headline: JERZY TOLD HIS ROBOT TO KILL MY DOG!

Exclusive Interview!

Studly had his pincer up in the air and they’d drawn a sizzling laser ray coming out of his head. Boxed in along the side of the page were small pictures of me, Jose Ruiz, the bloody corpse of Dutch the dog, and a TV screen full of ants. I looked insanely evil.

“Jose is going to be the prosecution’s star witness,” said Stu, fondling his Nerfball. “According to this article, he saw and heard you telling Studly to infect the Fibernet and to kill his dog. The West West cryps tell me that’s exactly what he’s going to testify to in court.” Stu shot the ball at the basket and missed. “I missed one, Miss Prentice. Can you get that, Jerzy?”

“Eighty-four percent,” said Miss Prentice.

I picked the ball up off the floor and handed it to Stu. “But look, Stu, we knew all along that Ruiz was going to be the prosecution’s best witness. And now that you know exactly what Ruiz is going to say, that’s an advantage, isn’t it? Think of questions to trip him up! Go out and measure the distance from Ruiz’s window to his picnic table and prove that he couldn’t have actually heard me-or do something else like that! Why are you just sitting here?”

“My main problem is that West West isn’t going to pay me any more.”

“Oh. You heard?”

“Yeah, Otto Gyorgyi called me yesterday. We’re cutting you loose.”

“And my bail’s only going to be good until…”

“Until noon on Tuesday.” Stu shot and made another basket, then got to his feet. “I just sank another one, Miss Prentice. Now watch the office for a few minutes, you slutty bitch. Mr. Rugby and I are going to take a walk.” Miss Prentice kept her silence. She’d even up things with Stu later.

Stu led me out into the hall, down the elevator, and out into the street. “I want to make a suggestion to you in strictest confidence, Jerzy. I’m doing this because I happen to think you’re a good guy.”

“What?”

“I don’t like to come out and say it. This is such a weird case. It’s like a house full of termites. Every source we’ve checked has shown signs of other cryps. I’d lay five to three that right now somebody in one of these cars or buildings is tracking us with a parabolic mike.” Stu steered us around a corner to stand by a big, noisy fountain in front of the San Jose Fairmont.

“So what are you telling me to do?” I demanded.

Stu put a handkerchief near his face as if to blow his nose, and leaned toward me to whisper: “Run, Jerzy. Jump bail and go underground. Flee the country. Ecuador and Switzerland are good for nonextradition these days. I didn’t say this.” With a flourish Stu snapped his handkerchief back into his suit pocket.

“So, Jerzy,” he raised his voice and shook my hand good-bye. “I’ll see you at the Hall of Justice bright and early tomorrow. Eight-thirty. It’s on West Hedding between San Pedro and Guadelupe. Our case is with Judge Carrig in courtroom 33 on the fifth floor. And don’t forget my advice: make sure to park your car in the parking lot instead of at a meter. They’re awfully fast to give tickets there.”

“But…”

“Don’t worry about a thing.” He smiled grimly and walked away.

Stu was telling me to run-but I didn’t have any money. I looked in my wallet confusedly. I had twenty dollars, no credit cards, and nothing in the bank. But with the severance pay included, my Friday deposit from West West would be for thirteen thousand dollars. I could jump bail over the weekend. I noticed a scrap of paper in my wallet. Vinh Vo’s phone number. Why not talk to him about getting fake ID? I walked on into the Fairmont and called the number from a pay phone.

“Pho Train noodle shop.” It was a woman’s voice with a lot of noise in the background.

“I’m looking for Vinh Vo,” I said.

“Who you?”

“Is Vinh Vo there?”

“You come see.”

“Where are you?”

“Pho Train on Tenth Street near Taylor.”

“Thank you.”

I walked through the campus of San Jose State University to get to Tenth Street. The campus quad was green and lush, with palm trees and a fountain and some elegant old brick buildings. Students milled ant-like near the glass and concrete library. I walked past the Aztec-styled student center, past the small dorms, and out into the mixed Mexican and Southeast Asian neighborhood that lay along Tenth Street.

A grill called Supertaqueria was on one side of the street, and on the other side was a defunct gas station, a Cambodian grocery, and Pho Train, a small restaurant with big glass windows and plastic picnic tables. Pho is the Vietnamese name for a special beef broth with spaghetti-like noodles and slices of meat. I ordered a large portion.

“You call here a few minute ago?” the woman at the counter asked me. With my soup she gave me a small dish of bean sprouts and a little branch of some fragrant, spicy leaves.

“Yes,” I told her. “My name is Jerzy.”

“Okay.”

I paid, sat down, and started to eat. The pho was delicious. When I was half-through, Vinh Vo appeared from behind the counter and came to sit across from me.

“Hi, Mister Yuppie,” said Vinh in his flatly accented American English.

“Hi, Vinh. Can we talk here?”

He nodded and lit one of his unfiltered cigarettes.

“I need a new passport,” I told him.

Vinh Vo looked puzzled and disappointed. “But I want to sell you Y9707 chips!”

“I don’t know that I really need any.”

“If you won’t buy any chips, I won’t do business with you,” said Vinh. “I need to start unloading them.”

It occurred to me that it might actually be useful to be able to build some robots of my own sometime down the line. Assuming Vinh’s chips were any good. “Well, okay, I’ll take four of them. Four hundred eighty dollars. Give me a passport as well and I’ll make it a thousand. And if the chips are okay, I might order more of them.”

Vinh smoked quietly for a minute. “Okay,” he said finally. “I can arrange your passport. I’ll have to drive you to the place. Do you have the money?”

“I’ll have the money on Friday. But let’s get the passport today.”

“You’re asking me for credit?” said Vinh Vo unbelievingly. “For a passport? No way, Mister Yuppie. Come back Friday with the cash.”

“Should I call first?”

“I’ll be here.” Vinh lit a second cigarette from the stub of the first.

“I’ll be coming later in the day,” I cautioned. “Around four-thirty.”

“No problem.”

Vinh stuck his cigarette into the corner of his mouth, walked behind the counter, and disappeared back through the kitchen. He moved like a gangster in a stiff ballet. The butt in the ashtray was fuming. My pho had gone cold and gnarly. I went outside.

If I would be leaving the country soon, it would be a good idea to visit with my family. I drove across town to Carol’s. Carol and Hiroshi were still at work, but Tom and Ida were home from school, peacefully grubbing about. Tom was in the kitchen eating ice cream, and Ida was on the phone with a friend. It did my heart good to see my larvae.

“Hi, kids!”

“Hi, Da!”

“You kids want to do something? You want to go for a last hike with me before I go on trial? Who knows, it might be a long time till we get another chance.”

“Poor Da.”

Since we were already on the east side, I drove over to Alum Rock Park. There were lots of teenagers and Mexican families. We took a loop trail that led past some hot springs and zigzagged to the top of a foothill.

“Are you scared, Daddy?” asked Tom. He looked so vulnerable with his teenage complexion and his braces. “We talked to Sorrel last night. She wanted to know if she should skip finals and fly out.”

“For the trial?”

“Ida and me are going to be there,” said Tom. “Mommy said she’ll get us excused from school.”

“Carol’s coming to the trial too? Ma?”

“Yes,” said Ida in her calm, deep voice. “We all love you, Da. Maybe if the jury sees you have a family, they’ll feel sorry for you.”

“Aw. That’s wonderful. You’re so sweet to stand behind me. I’m deeply touched. I love you.” I put my arms around them.

All of San Jose lay spread out before us, and beyond San Jose, Silicon Valley stretched north like a chip-laden motherboard. The great old concrete blimp hangers of Moffat Field stuck up like heavy-duty capacitors. It was such a clear day that, looking farther, we could see all the way up the Bay to the tiny smudges of Oakland and San Francisco. A strong, steady breeze swept down the Bay, across Silicon Valley, and over the crest of our hill.

“The Lord hates Daddy’s ants,” said Tom presently, and poked me high up under my ribs.

“Suckling pigs on Daddy style,” intoned Ida, and poked my other side. We laughed and wrestled for a minute, and then the kids let me be.

“I’m getting to hate the ants, too,” I said when I caught my breath. “If I could find a way to kill them all, I’d do it. They’ve made so much trouble already, and now it might get worse.”

“Are they going to break TV some more?”

“Maybe, but what I’m most worried about today is that the ants might infect the software for those new robots I worked on for West West. Whatever you do in the near future, don’t go close to any of those robots.”

“Is Studly in jail?” asked Ida.

“Sort of. The police are keeping him for an exhibit in the trial.”

“Do you think he might go hyper and kill everyone in the courtroom if they turn him on at the trial?” asked Tom, arching his high eyebrows.

“It might be a good idea not to come for that day of the trial, actually,” I said. “If they don’t stop the trial first.”

“Why would they stop the trial?” asked Tom.

“Well… maybe if some of the main people stopped coming. The judge or the lawyer or somebody.” I gave him a long look, and he got the picture.

“I’m flying,” said Ida, holding out her arms and letting the breeze beat at her sleeves. “I’m flying away!” Tom and I held out our arms to fly too, and then we ran off, flying, down the zigzags of the rest of the loop trail.

Carol was home when I brought the kids back to the apartment. I didn’t really want to go in, but before I knew it, Carol had me sitting on the couch with a cup of hot tea.

“I can’t stay long,” I said. These tete-a-tetes with Carol made me acutely uncomfortable. After all the pain of our separation, I didn’t want to contemplate getting back together with her.

“Okay, but what should I tell Sorrel about the trial? Why don’t you call her? She’s upset.”

“Good idea.”

I dialed Sorrel’s number on Carol’s phone. Someone on her dorm hall answered and trudged off in search of Sorrel. Then my firstborn’s bright voice came through the receiver.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Sorrel, it’s Da.”

“Da, I have a problem. I want to be there for your trial, but I have finals all next week.”

“When were you originally planning to come home?”

“June fifth,” put in Carol, who was sitting on a chair next to the couch. “The ticket she has is for next Friday.”

“Well, don’t change your ticket, Sorrel, it’ll cost a lot more. And there’s no point missing your exams. I’ll just be sitting on a chair in a room with a judge.”

“But what if you go to jail? I want to take a last walk with you, Da.”

“I do, too, honey. Actually, they’re revoking my bail on Tuesday, so I might be in jail from then on.” My voice cracked in despair and self-pity. “I’ve got an idea-why don’t you come home just for a day. Fly out here tomorrow morning, spend tomorrow night and all day Friday here, and fly back to school on Saturday. Then you can still study on Sunday and be ready for your tests.”

“Should I really?”

“I’ll pay. Get a direct flight into San Francisco and rent a car.”

“I don’t have to rent a car. Tom or Ida can pick me up.”

“It’ll be easier all around if you drive.” I was thinking of uses for that rental car. “Just write checks or charge it and I’ll pay you back in cash.”

“Great! I’ll do it!”

“And Friday afternoon we’ll go off together. I already took Tom and Ida for a walk today.”

We wound up the conversation. Carol got on the phone with Sorrel for a minute and talked about details. It was like old times, thinking and planning together as a family.

Of course Hiroshi came home then, so I finished my tea and cleared out. Carol saw me to the door.

“The trial is at the Hall of Justice on West Hedding between San Pedro and Guadelupe,” I told her. “It’s with Judge Carrig on the fifth floor, courtroom 33. I’m supposed to be there at eight-thirty, but it probably doesn’t start till later.”

“Where’s West Hedding?”

“Up near First Street and 880.”

“What was that I heard you tell Sorrel about your bail being revoked?”

“West West fired me.”

“Oh, Jerzy. I’m sorry. But if Sorrel will be here with a rental car on Friday, I might work that day. I can’t miss too many days. It’s only Tom and Ida who insist they see every day of the trial.”

“That’s fine. And thanks for all the support. Bye, kids!”

Carol closed the door. I drove home to Queue’s and called Gretchen to tell her I was too tired to get together. I went to bed early.

The courtroom was much smaller than I’d expected; it was just one of thirty or forty courtrooms in the Hall of Justice. In the back were five rows of seats for onlookers, and then a waist-high partition-the bar-with a sign on it that said:

ALL COMMUNICATIONS WITH THE PRISONERS VERBAL, WRITTEN OR SIGNED IS UNLAWFUL WITHOUT THE PERMISSION OF THE DEPUTIES.

Carol, Tom, and Ida were there. On my side of the bar were, from left to right, a desk with a Santa Clara County sheriff with a gun and a computer, a desk with a DEFENDANT sign where I sat next to Stu, a desk with a PEOPLE sign where the District Attorney sat, and, against the right wall, two rows of comfortable chairs for the jury. There was also a desk for the court clerk, and the judge sat behind a big raised pulpit-the bench. The witness stand was squeezed in between the bench and the jury. The judge’s name was on his bench: Francis J. Carrig.

The first part of Thursday was spent in dealing with the people who wanted to get out of jury duty. Beefy Judge Carrig spoke very slowly and clearly in a slightly overbearing way. He didn’t seem like a guy you’d want to interrupt or argue with. Out of boredom I jotted down some of his more judicious-sounding phrases, and came up with these:

“Let me finish. I’m asking for your cooperation. I don’t want to have to repeat this. I have the utmost confidence that this case will be completed by June fifth. Let me help you out. I will ask you the same question collectively. Can you be a fair impartial fact finder? Counsel approach the bench.”

That’s what the judge sounded like. Once he’d found twelve willing jurors, he asked the prosecutor and the defense to introduce themselves. The prosecutor’s name was Eddie Machotka-he was wiry and intense, with a bald pate and big puffs of curly clown hair on the sides of his head. Then the judge read out my name and the charges against me: criminal trespass, computer intrusion, and extreme cruelty to animals.

“Are any of you jurors familiar with this case?” asked Judge Carrig. Of course they all were-prior questioning had already revealed that everyone on the jury had a TV. So then the judge went into finding out if anyone on the jury was already convinced I was guilty. Could they be objective? As Judge Carrig put it, “We’re not asking you to decide complex technical issues. Just things like: was it up or was it down, was it left or was it right, was it hot or was it cold?” Two jurors got weeded out here, and the judge replaced them with two of the alternates who were waiting in the onlookers’ seats. I turned around and looked at my family every now and then.

By Thursday afternoon, the judge had finished impaneling a jury that neither Stu nor the D.A. objected to. I spent Thursday night at Gretchen’s. It hadn’t occurred to her to come to the trial, which was just as well. We ordered out for Mexican food and watched a video from Total Video-it was Natalie Wood and Tony Curtis in Sex and the Single Girl. It turned out Gretchen was a big fan of Natalie Wood; she even had a big book about Natalie, with an Andy Warhol portrait on the cover.

Friday morning, Sorrel was there in the courtroom with Tom and Ida-Sorrel with her short mouth, messy hair, and big cheeks. Judge Carrig began talking about some of the points of law relevant to my charges, and explained that the jury was to decide whether or not I was in control of the actions of Studly.

After lunch, Eddie Machotka, the D.A., made his opening presentation, followed by Stu’s opening statement for the defense.

Machotka had prepared an incredibly realistic cyberspace mock-up of the crimes as he thought they had happened. His simulation held a space-time continuum surrounding Jose Ruiz’s block of White Road for the crucial three minutes, and he could observe the running of his world from any position in it, or from any series of positions in it-he could pick any space-time trajectory he pleased. He could even speed up and slow down time, or run time backward-he was the master of space and time.

As we in the courtroom watched a big Abbott wafer display, Machotka flew us through his world. First he showed Studly standing on the picnic table and me standing next to him talking to him. Jose Ruiz was visible in his house, watching us out his window. The words Ruiz attributed to me appeared on the bottom of the screen like subtitles: Jerzy Rugby: Yes, Studly, now send in the ant viruses! Then Dutch the dog came running out of Ruiz’s house and I fled, calling back to Studly. Ruiz’s quote of my words: Jerzy Rugby: Studly, kill that dog! It was quite convincing. Machotka flew us through his world four times, from four different angles. Members of the jury kept glancing over at me and looking away.

Stu’s presentation was much more limp and legalistic. More than anything else, he harped on the point that Studly had legally been the property of GoMotion at the time of the crimes. Nobody in the courtroom looked like they gave a fuck. Stu insisted that I hadn’t told the robot to screw up the Fibernet, nor had I told Studly to kill the dog, but after Machotka’s virtual reality demo, Stu’s bald assertions carried no force.

Leaving the courtroom at three-thirty Friday afternoon, I felt sure that we were going to lose. Before the reporters pressed in on me, I managed to say hi to Sorrel and tell her I’d see her at Carol’s in an hour.

After I shook off the press, I drove to the Wells Fargo in downtown San Jose and found a parking space on the street. My bank balance was indeed thirteen thousand dollars plus. Thank you, West West! Though the teller didn’t like it, I got the thirteen thousand in cash; it made a fat envelope of 130 hundred-dollar bills. I’d decided to give a third of it to Carol for the children, so I asked for another envelope and counted 44 hundreds into that one. I felt grim and sad. I was leaving my country and my poor little family-maybe for good.

I calmed down a little on the walk over to Pho Train. I ordered the same pho soup again. This time I used the tip of my chopstick to add some red-pepper paste to the broth. With the pepper and the spicy green leaves, the soup was truly delicious. I slurped down as much as I could before Vinh appeared, fuming cigarette in hand.

“You ready?” he asked. “We can walk from here. But give me the thousand first.”

“Okay.” I pulled my main envelope of hundreds out of my pants pocket and counted out ten bills for Vinh under the table. His bony hand reached across to take them, and then he passed me a flat plastic package under the table: my four Y9707 chips. I stuck the package unopened in my other pants pocket.

We walked two blocks to a neighborhood of rundown two-story apartment buildings made of crumbling pink stucco over plywood. The buildings had flat roofs, prefab aluminum windows, and concrete stairwells. All the children playing in the street were Vietnamese-a regular Our Gang of loud little girls, T-shirted toddlers, and watchful boys. Everyone seemed to recognize the pockmarked, chain-smoking Vinh Vo. Vinh knocked at a street-level apartment door and a thin young woman holding a screwdriver let us in.

It was a single-room efficiency apartment with another young woman, fat, sitting down. The windows were hermetically closed off with filthy curtains and Venetian blinds. The room was lit by computer monitors and lamps; the ventilation came through an antique wall unit air conditioner. There was a great hoard of computer equipment along the walls, and there were loads of books and computer manuals. The chairs had vinyl cushions.

“Here’s your customer, girls,” said Vinh. He smiled thinly at me. “This is Bety Byte and Vanna. They’re computer science students at San Jose State. They’re the best cryps in our Vietnamese community.”

Heavyset Bety Byte wore a cyberspace headset pushed up onto the top of her head like sunglasses. She had thick lips, yellow, skin, and greasy, permed, distressed hair. Surely she had no inkling that I’d seen her tuxedo in cyberspace-and I wasn’t about to tell her. Pale, slim Vanna wore tight black slacks and a round-collared pink blouse buttoned up to the top. Her glossy hair was cut in a tidy bob. Bety Byte and Vanna didn’t look much like their tuxedos.

“I recognize this dude from TV,” said Bety Byte, pointing a control-gloved hand at me. The tips of the control gloves were cut off and I could see her fingernails. She wore chipped black nail polish. “You’re Jerzy Rugby!” She spoke with a perfect riot-grrl mall-rat accent.

“No,” I said emphatically. “I am not. I’m not anyone until you tell me my new name.”

“He’s incognito,” laughed Vanna. “I think he’s scared.”

“Do you know how passport authentication works?” asked Bety Byte.

“Sort of. As well as forging me a passport, you have to put a valid bar code on it. The government uses a secret algorithm to generate long authentication numbers that go into the bar code.”

“That’s right,” said Vanna. She was still holding her screwdriver. “We haven’t figured out how to generate our own authentication numbers, but we do have a way into the current State Department passport files. What we’ll do is to find the name of someone who has a passport and who resembles you. Then we’ll use his passport’s authentication number on our forgery.” She smiled and gave a quick nod for emphasis.

“Crypping the State Department can’t be very easy,” I said politely.

“Well, we have this killer can opener program that we got from a phreak friend of ours,” said Bety from her chair. “ Ex friend, that is.” I had the feeling she was talking about Riscky Pharbeque. From what I’d heard Bety and Vanna say in cyberspace, they were mad at Riscky for spray-painting “Hex DEF6” on the wall of the Cryp Club library. But I had nothing to gain by chatting about this topic.

“Do you have to take my picture first or what?” I asked.

“First you have to pay us,” said Bety.

“Here’s two hundred dollars,” said Vinh, stepping forward and holding out two of the bills I’d given him.

“I told you seven hundred,” cried Bety.

“Three hundred dollars is my final offer,” said Vinh Vo and added another bill to the little fan he held out toward Bety.

“We won’t do it for less than four hundred,” said Bety. She unwrapped a stick of pharmaceutical green bubble gum and popped it in her mouth. “Bye, Vinh. Bye, Jerzy. Show ‘em out, Vanna.”

Vanna laughed in that meaningless Asian way, but she didn’t immediately do anything-she just stood there holding her screwdriver. I fumbled in my pocket to find one more bill. Vinh Vo watched me with unblinking, predatory interest. I passed him the bill and he tendered the four hundred dollars to Bety. She tucked the money into her pants pocket and gave Vanna a nod.

“Okay, Jerzy,” said Vanna. “Lets narrow in on a name.” She laid down her screwdriver and put on control gloves and a headset.

“How tall are you?” she asked. “How much do you weigh? Place of birth? Date of birth? Scars?” She input my responses by making flowing hand gestures in midair; she was dancing her way up the search tree of the sample space. “Here’s twenty good ones,” said Vanna presently and snapped her fingers.

A list of names appeared in a box on the computer screen next to me. I chose a forty-two-year-old divorced electrical engineer named Sandy Schrandt.

Bety Byte picked up a small video camera and slid her headset down over her eyes. She began walking rapidly around the cluttered room while pointing the camera at me.

“In case you’re wondering, I’m not going to bump into anything,” said Bety, chomping on her green gum. “I’m seeing through this videocam. I’m using a pass-through.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “Just like stunglasses.” It was a hacker point of pride to be down with the latest street tech.

Bety kept on shooting video of me, occasionally flicking a finger to capture a still image. The images accumulated in a grid on the computer screen. Before long, Bety had filled the grid with pictures of me: the central pictures were full-on, or nearly so, and the pictures at the edge of the grid were shot from sharper and sharper angles. It was a discontinuous Mercator projection of my head.

Bety sat down and gestured in the air for a minute and then the color laser printer coughed and spit out the eleven double pages of my new passport, each page with Sandy Schrandt’s passport bar code on the edge. On the top page there was a shiny reflection hologram that showed a three-dimensional image of my head. Bety and Vanna’s software had fused the grid images of me into a single holographic image that turned as you tilted it from side to side.

“Great!” I exclaimed.

Vanna changed the paper tray and the copier coughed once more to produce a thick passport cover. She and Bety Byte took off their headsets and studied the pages for a minute, and then they used hot glue and a small sewing machine to bind the passport up.

Bety handed the passport to me-it looked perfect. But then I thought of something.

“What if the real Sandy Schrandt happens to come through customs in the same place on the same day I do? Won’t the officials get suspicious when they check the same number twice?”

“If that happens you’re a dead cow,” said Vanna. “I mean dead duck.” She began giggling so wildly that she had to put both hands over her mouth.

“You just have to hope for the best,” said Bety. She was laughing too.

Was this forged passport part of the ongoing international get-Jerzy burn? Or were the girls just being silly? I started to say something-but what could I say? I fell back on the standard California nonreaction:

“Whatever.”

I got out of there and split off from Vinh Vo as rapidly as I could. I swung in a circle through the San Jose State campus to make sure I’d lost him. Then I got my car from near Wells Fargo and drove out to Carol’s.

Tom and Ida had gone off with friends and Sorrel was waiting for me. We hugged each other and then we sat down and talked for awhile. I loved her lively, confiding little voice and her vehement opinions. She often used a fragmented, creative grammar that Carol and I called “Sorrelese.” She and I talked about my trial and about her life at college. Sorrel had a new boyfriend, and she was doing cartoons for her school paper.

“So, Da,” said Sorrel after awhile, “Don’t you want to make us scarce before Ma and Hiroshi get home?”

“Yes. Why don’t we go for a drive? We could go over to where I rent and take a walk in the woods.”

“Okay.”

I left my Animata at Carol’s and got Sorrel to let me drive her rented car. Sorrel looked at me and I looked at her in the shitty tiny rental car with wheels so small you worried they would get stuck in the grooved highway’s grooves.

“Your eye looks just like Mom’s,” said Sorrel, using our family name for my mother, now dead one year. “The way your skin is all wrinkled at the corner. Mom used to have such a nice cute old eye. And your eye’s just the same.”

“Poor old Mom,” I sighed. “At least she’s not here to see me in so much trouble.”

“You’re going to run away, aren’t you, Da?” said Sorrel. “Tom and Ida suspect. Is it true?”

“Yes. In fact I’m planning to do it today.”

“In fact that’s what we’re doing right now?” said Sorrel. “We’re going back to the stupid airport I just came from last night? So that’s why you wanted me to get a rental car. Mmm- hmmm.” Sorrel made her Big Sis “knowing face,” an expression in which she pressed her lips tight together and nodded her head up and down with her chin sticking out. “Are we still going to Queue’s?”

“I have a brand-new forged passport,” I confessed. “I think the smartest thing I can do is get out of the country as fast as possible. Somebody-the cops or the cryps or the phreaks or West West or GoMotion-somebody probably has a miniature TV camera watching Queue’s place anyway. And Carol’s place, too. The less I give them to go on, the better. If it’s okay with you, I’d like to drive straight to the airport.”

“Let me see your passport!” Sorrel looked through it with interest. “This hologram of you is neat. What country are you going to?”

“Switzerland. My lawyer-that Stu Koblenz who did such a lame job in court today-he said Ecuador and Switzerland are good havens from U.S. law. And there’s a guy in Switzerland I reeeeally want to see.” I was thinking of Roger Coolidge, rich Roger, who’d started all this by releasing the ants and firing me from GoMotion. I aimed to find him and to beat the truth out of him if need be. But there was no need to burden Sorrel with this information.

At the San Francisco Airport, I pulled up in front of the American Airlines terminal. “Run in there, Sorrel, and see if they have a direct flight from San Francisco to Zurich or Geneva tonight. And if they don’t have a flight, then ask who does. Don’t give your name!”

“Right,” said Sorrel, her mouth a short determined line. She darted into the terminal and emerged five minutes later.

“Swissair,” said Sorrel. “They’re flying direct to Geneva tonight at seven-thirty. It’s a twelve-hour flight.”

“Beautiful.” I got out of the car and moved over into the passenger seat. “You can drive me up to the Swissair part of the international terminal. Just drop me off there and go back to Carol’s. How much is this trip costing you, anyway? For the ticket and the car?”

“About six hundred dollars.”

I drew out the smaller envelope of hundred-dollar bills and took out six of them for Sorrel.

“This is for you, and you give the rest of the money in this envelope to Ma. And here,” I handed her my keys as well. “Tell Ma she can have the Animata, too.”

Sorrel messily stuffed the money and keys into the glove compartment.

“Oh, one other thing,” I said. “There’s a cyberspace deck with glove and headset in the trunk of the Animata. You tap three-one-four-one on the right side of the headset to turn it on or off. But it’s a phreak deck, it’s not registered, so you probably shouldn’t use it.”

“Tom and Ida are sure to grub and fiddle with it,” said Sorrel loftily. She drew back her chin for “geek face,” and spittily lisped, “Thyberthpayth!”

“Cyberspace is important, Sorrel! Tell Tom not to let the police find the deck. It might be better to throw the deck away. Ida, Tom, and Carol will have to decide.”

Sorrel drove me the short distance to Swissair. I hugged her and kissed each of her nice soft cheeks. That had been one of the first things I noticed about her when she was a baby: her cheeks.

“Good luck, Da,” said Sorrel. “Take care.”

“Thanks, Sorrel. I love you.”

Before buying a ticket, I cruised the souvenir shop for travel gear. I got a small black leatherette satchel, a toothbrush, and-some business sweats.

These days a lot of businessmen were wearing sweat suits all the time. In principle, you could jog or work out in these cotton and polyester outfits, but business sweats were not normally used for exercise. Business sweats were for display purposes; they were meant to say, “I’m fit and I’m rich.”

I snagged a pompous gray XL outfit for $300. It had shiny gold stripes down the pant legs, and a sewn-in burgundy sash angling diagonally across the chest. The sash had a gold medal embossed on it.

In the men’s room I changed into the sweats and stuffed my shorts and sport shirt into the satchel. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I looked like the Swedish ambassador, man-except for my sandals.

Out in the lobby I sat down for a minute to arrange my junk. I positioned my passport and my money in the satchel’s outside zipper pocket, and then I folded my shirt and shorts. The plastic packet of chips was still in my shorts pocket. Was it worth trying to take the chips through customs?

I took out the packet and opened it. Inside were four square chips snugged into plastic pin protectors. The backs of the chips read National Semiconductor Y9707-EX. I hadn’t seen the “- EX ” suffix before, but I assumed it meant that these chips had been made a little faster and smarter than the last batch. Chip makers were always upgrading to longer product names.

I closed the chip packet and put it in my satchel under my shirt and shorts. Nobody was going to care about four standard production chips. If anyone asked me, the chips were my own property, to be used solely for demonstration purposes. I, Sandy Schrandt, was thinking about designing some custom applications for the Y9707-EX chip in the Swiss industrial market, yes.

So that was that, except for one thing: I hadn’t said good-bye to Gretchen. I’d been so excited about seeing Sorrel, and about my escape, that I hadn’t thought of Gretchen since leaving her apartment this morning. But I couldn’t very well phone Gretchen now because-it had finally occurred to me-Gretchen might be a spy paid to watch me. So, yeah, that was that.

I walked up to the Swissair counter and bought a ticket with no trouble, though all they had left was business-class. To look less suspicious, I made it a round-trip ticket. At the baggage X-ray station, I handed the guard my chips; he sleepily glanced at them and passed the package around the X-ray machine. Fifteen minutes later, I was sitting in the plane. Business-class was luxurious, with widely spaced seats, instant free cocktails, and lobster.

After supper, the stewardess told us that in Swissair business-class, the in-flight entertainment was cyberspace, with the fees to be charged to your credit number. When she got to me, I told her I had no credit number, and she let me buy two hundred dollars worth of prepaid credit. She told me that was generally enough for three hours.

The steward behind her issued me a bottom-of-the-line headset/gloves kit that plugged into a socket on the top of the seat in front of me.

When I put on the headset, I was in an Alpine meadow with three guys off to one side blowing long Alpine horns. There was a crossing of two trails nearby. An Alpine guide strolled up to me; he was a software daemon like Kwirkey Debug. “Hello, Mr. Schrandt,” said the daemon. “My name is Karl. I will be your guide for this session. There is an urgent cy-mail message for you. Do you want to view it?”

It seemed Sandy Schrandt was quite the up-to-date engineer. But I had no desire to look at his cy-mail- it would probably turn out to be some dweeb holding up a circuit diagram and talking about it.

“No messages now, thanks.”

I walked over to the signpost at the trail crossing and looked at it. Some of the little signboards read:

Duty Free Shops-›

Entertainment-›

Information-›

I decided to try some exercise first. As I started down the trail in the indicated direction, my guide caught up with me and told me that when I pressed a certain button on the arm of my seat, bicycle handlebars and pedals would pop out from the floor. He said that I should take off my headset, push the button, get myself positioned on the pedals, and then put the headset back on so we could continue.

“Where will we go?”

“We’ll mountain-bike up the Matterhorn,” the guide replied. He had cheery, twinkling, pale blue eyes. He pointed up to the left, and there was the Matterhorn itself: huge, rocky and snowcapped. Its crag castles made wondrous silhouettes against the blue sky. A gauzy puff of cloud trailed from the downwind side of the mountain’s crooked peak.

I slipped off my headset and pushed the special button on my seat. The floor opened up and a heavy-duty pair of bicycle pedals appeared, with a sturdy pair of handlebars sticking out over them. I leaned back, put my feet on the pedals, and grabbed the handlebars. The setup felt more like a pedal boat than a bicycle-but it worked for me. I put on my headset.

“You can adjust the drag with the left handgrip and the motion-speed with the right,” Karl told me. “Let’s start by heading for the Hornli Hutte-it’s a mountaineers’ hut up on that ridge.”

I pedaled along, watching the lovely mountain scenery go by. No matter how fast or slow I went, the guide always stayed in front of me, pointing out the path I should take. When I ran over big rocks it didn’t matter-they’d flatten out under me. It was fun. At the top of the Matterhorn I finally caught up with the guide.

“What do you want to do now?” he asked me. “Ride back down?”

I felt good and aerobic. “That’s enough exercise. Let me retract the pedals.” I slid my headset up and pushed the button to fold the pedals back down. All the other passengers were asleep or in their headsets. I returned to the pristine summit of the Matterhorn.

“What would you like to do next?” repeated the guide daemon, eager to spend my money.

“Can I find out the address of somebody in Switzerland?”

“I can try for you. If the person has a telephone they will be in the telephone directory, as there are no unlisted phones in Switzerland. What is the name?”

“Roger R. Coolidge.”

“Yes, we have a Roger Reaumur Coolidge in Saint-Cergue,” responded the guide in a flash.

“Can you show me where Saint-Cergue is on a map?”

“Hold my hand,” said the guide. “We’ll fly.” I took his hand, and then he leapt up into the air. It was a fabulous feeling to fly straight up from the top of the Matterhorn. Soon we were at such an altitude that our virtual Switzerland had become its own map.

“Saint-Cergue is near Geneva,” said the guide. We flew out of the Alps and up the great curve of Lake Geneva. Soon we were near the city of Geneva at the far end of the lake. The guide pointed away from Geneva toward a meek range of rounded mountains to our right. “Those are the Jura Mountains,” he said. “See that little peak? That is the Dole. Saint-Cergue is in the saddle of the pass beside the Dole.”

He flew us lower, showed me the Geneva airport, and jovially instructed me to make steering wheel motions so as to remotely pilot a distant virtual car up the serpentine road that led from the Geneva/Lausanne Autoroute to Saint-Cergue. The simulation reminded me of a recurrent nightmare that I’d had when I’d been in my twenties-a dream where I’d be driving a car with a steering wheel column that grew to be hundreds of yards long. I declined the simulation, and the guide flew us straight on up to Saint-Cergue.

“Do you know which building Roger Coolidge lives in?” I asked.

“Yes,” said the guide, and one of the properties began blinking. It was a compound of two large buildings up in a meadow two or three kilometers above the main drag of Saint-Cergue. I stared for a few minutes, fixing landmarks in my mind. I could rent a car at the Geneva airport and drive right up to Roger’s. I’d buy a big hunting knife at a Swiss knife shop first. It was kind of too bad I’d never gotten that plastic gun Keith had told me about.

“Was there anything else?” the guide asked.

“Okay, yeah, I’d like to see a movie. How’s my credit holding up?”

“You have more than enough credit for a movie. We have several special made-for-cyberspace productions, and many of our standard films have been cyberized.”

“Take me to your interface.”

We jumped to a room with thousands of tiny screens showing small images. There were some big posters. Off to one side of the room a live cyberspace action film was being acted out, a fight-it-out shoot-’em-up kind of thing.

“I guess you don’t have any hard-core pornography?” I asked the guide.

“We have a selection of tasteful erotic films available for the passengers of our business-class.”

“No thanks, I don’t think so. And I’m kind of tired, so I don’t want the stress of a cybershow. Maybe an old movie. What do you have with Natalie Wood?”

“Fortunate choice, Mr. Schrandt! We have two movies available with Natalie Wood. First is Rebel Without a Cause, released 1956, featuring James Dean, Sal Mineo, and Natalie Wood. Critic Lester Seda terms Rebel Without a Cause ”An early cult movie of teenage anomie in the computer age.“ Second is Brainstorm, released 1977, a classic science fiction thriller featuring Natalie Wood as a mystical scientist who records her brain onto reflection hologram memory ribbon. Of Brainstorm, critic Lester Seda says, ”Released after Natalie Wood’s death, Brainstorm is eerily prescient and campily elegant.“

I watched Brainstorm. They’d cyberized it enough so that it wrapped around about half the field of my vision. It was a good flick.

When the credits started running, Karl the guide daemon reappeared like a person coming up to you in your seat at the movies.

“What,” I said.

“It’s about your cy-mail message, Mr. Schrandt. The sender has been steadily pinging us. He knows you’re on this flight. Wouldn’t you care to view the message now?”

“All right,” I sighed. “Let it come down.” I really dreaded this, whatever it was. I kept both hands poised on my headset, ready to tear it off lest I suffer another burn.

There was a buzzing, the Brainstorm credits melted, and then I was looking at Roger Coolidge, Roger sitting there looking at me from an armchair in a shitty unfinished drywall room. He was wearing gray pants and a short-sleeved white polyester shirt.

“Hi, Jerzy. I’m talking to you live from my house in Saint-Cergue,” said Roger. “Excuse the mess-Kay and I have been remodeling.“ Roger’s dusty study had a desk and a picture window; I could see up a sloping green hillside to the concave horizon of a mountain pass. It was early on a rainy morning. Roger stared passively in thought, like a beaver resting by a stream. Finally he spoke again. ”I had a feeling you’d come to me. Thanks for making it so easy. My chauffeur Tonio will meet you at the Geneva airport and bring you to Saint-Cergue. I’ll explain the whole thing when you get here, okay?“

I pawed the headset off and stumbled blindly down the carpeted floor that hid the thin metal fuselage of this most improbable construct: a jetliner. We were ants in an aluminum beer can hurtling through the sky. I found the stewardess in the galley and told her that my cyberspace hookup didn’t seem to be working correctly, and that she should switch if off before it ate any more of my credit. I took a glass of cognac back to my seat and fell into troubled sleep.