The Hacker and the Ants (33 page)

I shook my head. Space travel was one of Roger's hobbyhorses—and no way was I about to gallop off on it with him. “Please don't let's change the subject, Roger. We're talking about what you've been doing to me. You sent me to West West so the Adze would work. Okay. But how do the ants fit into the picture? Why did you let them ruin television?”

“I thought you'd be happy. Aren't you the one who's always saying he hates TV?”

“Sure, but when you released the ants, you stuck me with the blame. How did you get Studly to do that thing with the Fibernet anyway?”

“I was driving him,” said Roger, smiling slyly. You almost had to love the guy.

“Telerobotics? I thought you were in Switzerland by then!”

“I was, but that doesn't matter. I used a cyberspace telerobotic interface. My signal would have been too weak,
but Vinh Vo was carrying a signal-amplifying transponder in the back of his panel truck. When I heard you were trying to date Nga Vo, I did a data search and found Vinh as a relevant sleazebag. He worked out perfectly.”

“Oh God.” I was struggling to take it all in. “It was you who killed the dog?”

“Well, that was an accident. Driving Studly was like the world's best arcade game, but it was the first time I'd played.”

“But why pin the ant release on me?”

“You were handy. And it made better sense than letting GoMotion catch the blame! I own a million shares of GoMotion stock. When the stock goes down a point, I lose a million dollars. I had to release the ants so that they'd get out into more environments and evolve faster. Ninety-eight percent of Earth's computing capacity is on DTV chips now, you know. For a few glorious hours, all those chips were running my GoMotion ants. It was a Cambrian explosion; it was like running my little ant-lab simulations for thousands of years. All in one day. My ants are so much better than they were before.” Roger smiled at the thought.

“So what?” I snapped. “Who cares?”

He glared at me, upset that I didn't love the ants as much him. “So the Veeps can kick the Adze's butts, if you need a reason. You don't think I'd let the Veeps use the same code I gave to West West, do you?”

“I'm missing something here,” I sighed. “I still don't see the connection between the robots and the ants.”

“Why do you think the robot code works so well?” asked Roger in a tone of exaggerated patience.

The heavy rain outside was drumming on the roof and splashing into the puddles. “The robot code?” I said. “It worked well because I wrote good algorithms that I tweaked with genetic evolution.”

Roger cocked his head and stared at me with quizzical annoyance.

“Oh yeah,” I added, “there were also all the basic subroutines you wrote. Your awesome ROBOT.LIB code. I guess nothing would have worked without them. Without ROBOT.LIB the programs wouldn't have been fast enough to use.”

“They would have sucked wind,” said Roger. “And, guess what,
I didn't write
ROBOT.LIB. The GoMotion ants wrote ROBOT.LIB. I wrote the code that wrote the code. That's the main thing the ants were for. Didn't you ever realize that?”

“No,” I said, shaking my head in wonder.

“And now, thanks to the ants' romp on our planet's DTV chips, GoMotion's version of the ROBOT.LIB code is better,” said Roger. “Better than what we let West West cryp. The Adze will be serviceable; the Veep will be magnficent.”

I was still trying to wrap my mind around the notion of the ants having written the core machine language code in ROBOT.LIB. When I'd started on at GoMotion, Roger had never gotten around to giving me a full explanation of what we were up to. He'd just turned me over to Jeff Pear and to Pear's deadlines. “But if the ants are in ROBOT.LIB, why don't they take over and ruin the robots like they ruined television?”

“The ants aren't
in
ROBOT.LIB, they just wrote it,” said Roger. “As for the ants taking over the Y9707-chip robots—well, they haven't been able to so far because of the GoMotion ant lion. The ant lion has a magic bullet that kills ants. It's a special instruction that stops them dead in their tracks; it fossilizes them. It's like Raid or Black Flag.”

“I put a bit-for-bit copy of an ant lion into the Adze code,” I said, “but the ant lion is so compressed and
encrypted that I still have no idea how it works. What is the magic bullet?”

“Can't you guess? It'll be more fun for you if you guess. I love to guess.”

My mind felt slow and sludgy. My feet were cold. Instead of answering, I sullenly looked away. Outside it was still raining.

“Can I have the chips now, Jerzy?” said Roger after awhile.

“What chips?”

“The four Y9707-EXs that you have in your satchel. I'll give you, oh, eighty thousand dollars for them. Eighty thousand dollars for the chips and for your goodwill. I mean it.”

Of course Roger Knew about Vinh giving me the chips. I was here as a courier. There seemed to be no end to the levels at which I was being gamed. But the money sounded good. “When would you pay me?”

“Right away.” Roger stood up and pulled open the top drawer of his desk. “I have your money right here.” He laid it out next to the cyberdeck, eight packets of hundred-dollar bills, each packet with a wrapper band saying $10,000.

“You're not planning to kill me are you?” I asked nervously.

“Of course not, Jerzy. You're taking the fall for the ants, I appreciate that. No need to go to jail. I'm hoping you can stay here a while and work with me. You're a fellow maniac!”

I took the packet of chips out of my black satchel and handed it to Roger. He stood aside and gestured at the money. I stuffed the sheaves of dollars into my satchel. They barely fit.

Roger was peering at the chips. “If Vinh Vo didn't garble my instructions, these should be better for my purposes—these
are ant-designed chips that I had one of Vinh's contacts make at National Semiconductor. The ants got a lot done for me while they were running TV.” He smiled up at me. “These chips are supposed to run twice as fast—and, what's even more important, they don't support the ant lion. The ants will be able to get into these new robots and party.” He pocketed the chips and led me out of his study. “Now for the tour!”

First Roger showed me the rest of his house's ugly, stripped rooms, with plywood, drywall and broken tiles everywhere. The house computer turned the lights on and off as we moved around. At the end of a hall off the kitchen, there was a turbid swimming pool festering under a slanting roof of translucent corrugated plastic. There was raw bare dirt around the pool, and the door to the pool room was off its hinges for repair. It seemed as if Donar Kupp had been as slow with home improvements as Roger. In the basement was a furnace and boiler whose overdesigned Swiss plumbing fascinated Roger—geekin' engineer that he was.

Back upstairs, we found two beat-up folding umbrellas and splashed down the path to the windowless building Roger called his factory. My feet got soaked all over again.

Even more so than in the house, everything was unfinished and raw in the factory. The floors and walls were bare concrete. On the ground floor there was a ceiling crane and a deep cistern well with a concrete cover over it. There were a bunch of barrels and cans filled with different kinds of resins and solvents for making plastics, and the rest of the floor was covered with packed cardboard boxes of Roger's stuff.

“We have six hundred boxes all marked
Household Goods
,” said Roger. “It's like a treasure hunt, only every box you open is something you've seen before.”

He took me down the concrete stairs to the basement of the factory and showed me
another
furnace and boiler. He said this furnace could heat a whole town. There was a huge, frightening electrical board with the fuses the size of cannon shells. We got into a freight elevator that ran from the basement to the ground floor to the factory's second floor.

“There's no stairs to the second floor,” said Roger, “and no windows up there. Donar Kupp was intensely paranoid.” As the elevator inched up to the second floor, Roger pointed at a little handle marked ALARM. “Try turning that, Jerzy.” The little handle turned easily, making a small ringing sound behind the wall of the elevator. “It's nothing but a bicycle bell!” said Roger, shaking his head. “I don't like to use the elevator when I'm here alone. To make it even more dangerous, the fuse box for the elevator is on the second floor where nobody can reach it if the elevator breaks! I need to automate the factory with a central computer like I did my house.”

We eased to a stop on the second floor and the elevator doors opened onto a huge room with laboratory benches along the far walls. The area near the elevator was packed with stained industrial machinery—plastics compression molders and the like. In the open middle of the room were two robots looking at us. They moved toward us.

“I named them Walt and Perky Pat,” said Roger devilishly. “I was able to patch in some pieces of the Walt and Perky Pat code you and the ants evolved in the Our American Homes at West West.” He raised his voice to address the robots. “Walt and Perky Pat, this is my friend Jerzy Rugby. He'll be working here with us for awhile.”

Walt, who was a two-armed Veep, wheeled forward and held out his humanoid hand for me to shake. “Hello, Walt,” I said. Now Perky Pat, a three-armed Adze, came
forward too, holding our
her
hand-shaped manipulator. “Hello, Perky Pat.” I shook both their hands.

“Hello, Jerzy,” they said, not quite in unison. Perky Pat's voice was higher than Walt's.

“Roger told us about you, Jerzy,” continued Perky Pat. “He said you helped him design our programs.”

“That's right,” I said. “First I worked at GoMotion and then I worked at West West. How old are you, Perky Pat?”

“Roger and Walt put me together three days ago. I'm one of the first kits West West shipped. But Roger gave me the improved ROBOT.LIB. Like Walt.”

“I'm a month old,” volunteered Walt. “Roger built me on May first.”

“That's nice,” I said. “Roger tells me that you two are supposed to self-replicate.”

“Yes, Jerzy,” said Perky Pat. “Roger wants us to reproduce by building new robots without human help.”

“I know how,” said Walt confidently. “And instead of putting the standard kit software on our children, we'll patch together combinations of our
own
programs.”

“We've been casting some of the parts ourselves,” said Perky Pat. “Soon we'll be able to make everything except the chips. And Roger says that by next year we'll be able to make the chips too.”

“Yes, we do plastics,” said Roger, gesturing toward the big, smelly plastics machines. “These were Donar Kupp's, Jerzy; they're linked into a single system driven by standard industrial microcode. The only catch is that the documentation for the system was handwritten by Kupp in German. But I got GoMotion to send me a German language module for Walt. And now he understands the manual.”

“
Ja
,” said Walt proudly. “
Ich verstehe
.”

“Can you run the machine, Walt?” I asked.

“
Ja, ja. Es geht ganz gut
.”

“Talk English, Walt,” reprimanded Roger. “And show Jerzy some of the pieces you've made.”

“I'll get them,” said Perky Pat. These robots were eager as Santa's elves.

Perky Pat darted across the lab and came back with something in each of her three hands. “This is a leg strut we made. And this is a panel of the body. And this here, this is an imipolex resin bead with an electronic circuit in it.”

“Let me see that!” said Roger. “I didn't know you'd made one of those already.”

Perky Pat handed him the teardrop-shaped bead of hard shiny plastic. Roger held it up, peered at it, then passed it to me. The bead was yellowish and transparent. Inside it was the dark filigree of an electronic circuit. Some input/output wires bristled from the pointed end of the bead.

“How did you figure out how to make it?” asked Roger.

“The basic recipe was in Kupp's notes,” said Walt. “And Perky Pat came up with some modifications.”

“I don't get what it's for,” I said. “The Veep and the Adze don't use any parts like this.”

“I'm not sure what it's for,” said Perky Pat. “The cyberspace ants told me to make it, but the ant lion on my chip keeps me from understanding why. I hate the ant lion.”

“Creativity,” said Roger. “Initiative. A yearning for freedom. Not bad, eh Jerzy?” He drew out the pack of four new chips. “These chips are just what we've been waiting for, Walt and Perky Pat. They don't support the ant lions, and they run faster! Let's try ‘em out. Walt, could you please turn yourself off?”

“Okay, Roger. But will I lose memory?”

“No, I don't think so. Not unless the new chip malfunctions.”

Stoic Walt opened the manual controls door in his side and flipped his power switch to Off. His body gave a hydraulic sigh as it settled down onto its folded legs with its hands dangling limply. Roger used a screwdriver to open the access panel on Walt's other side. He pulled Walt's old Y9707 chip out of its multipin socket and snugged in the new Y9707-EX. Perky Pat watched all this with great interest. Then Roger replaced the access panel and flipped the power switch to On.

“On,” said Walt. “Six-thirteen P.M., Saturday, May 30. Checking memory. Memory okay. I am Walt.” His voice was fast and high.

“What's the square root of twenty?” said Roger.