The Hacker and the Ants (30 page)

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: “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: “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 run-down 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 screens 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 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 corrugations.

“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.

“Swiss airlines,” 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 Swiss 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?”