The Hacker and the Ants (22 page)

Russ's verbal comments and e-mail messages grew ever more crazed and hostile. Even though we worked thirty feet apart from each other, we talked by e-mail lest we get involved in a public shouting match that might get us both fired. In our e-mail Russ called me a twit, a professor, and a charlatan; while I called him a lawn-dwarf, a dropout, and a nut.

An exceedingly hostile or schizophrenic e-mail message is called a
flame.
Even though Russ and I were still exchanging scientific information, we were at the same time in the throes of a
flame war.
But it didn't really matter. As Roger Coolidge had once told me, “If you're a serious hacker you don't let flames bother you. Instead you grow thick scales.”

One fabulous Tuesday, two weeks after the GoMotion ant attack, something yielded, the jam broke up, and Russ had fully hacked a fast and beautiful Kwirkey/ SuperC interface. I could program the Adze in mixed Kwirkey and SuperC as transparently as if my hands were picking up sand dollars in clear water. I was like a
kid in a candy shop. At the end of three dizzyingly wonderful hours, I found that I'd linked every single one of the Veep algorithms into our prototype Adze software. And, so far as I could check using the feeble cyberspace of my desk machine, my new code worked fine.

I told Russ and he was cautiously glad. Flame mode: Off. We hurried to the big Sphex monitor in the back room.

Jack and Jill, the jolly jock hackers, were on one of the machines, laughing excitedly and looking at their new program. The screen showed a box-shaped room that was full of tumbling three-dimensional boxes. The boxes were translucent and inside each box were more boxes, also translucent, and also with boxes inside them. It went down for as many levels as the screen resolution could handle.

“This is our new Kwirkey interface,” explained Jack when he noticed me watching. “ Jill calls it Gizmos.” The boxes made noises as they bounced around, noises like
boing whumpa boing
. Jack's pale eyes were glowing with excitement.

Brown-eyed Jill flew our view down into one of the boxes and the box seemed like the whole room. The boxes were moving so fast and smoothly that it was totally hypnotic to look at. Jill zoomed down and down through the rooms and eventually the view was the same as the start room. “We keep the top views down inside each of the smallest boxes,” said Jill. “So it has circular scale.”

“Or sideways scale,” put in Jack, making a gesture with his gloved hands. A web of lines sprang onto the screen, lines like bungee-cords connecting the wild boxes. “These are the bindings.”

“What
are
the boxes?”

“The boxes are
gizmos
,” laughed Jill and started moving
her hands around, panning and zooming her gesturing glove icons about in the virtual space of the interface. The boxes became clothed in translucent shapes—a shovel, a crow, a house, an oak tree, a Scotty dog. Jack reached in and adjusted the cables between the gizmos; they began to writhe and move in twisty, nonlinear ways.

“So far we've been single-stepping,” said Jack. “But now I can speed it all up.” He made a fist of his hand and the images blurred with smooth rapid motions. “And then it converges on one of the limit cycles of the attractor. Check it out, Jerzy.”

The images had locked into slow, deeply computed interactions. I was looking at an oak tree in front of a house, with a Scotty dog running around the yard. There was a ditch with a shovel next to it; the Scotty jumped over the ditch. The crow sailed down from the tree and cawed at the Scotty. The Scotty barked and jumped back over the ditch.

“Gizmos are object-oriented Kwirkey frames,” said Russ, who always made a point of knowing what his fellow programmers were up to. “Self-modifying structures of data and function pointers.”

Jack interrupted. “You should use it for the Adze. A gizmo could be an Adze eye or wheel or neural array. A gizmo can be a user, or it can be something the user wants to do.”

“Gizmos are God,” said Jill. She looked calm and pleased.

“So when are you guys going to have your Adze code happening?” asked Jack. “I'm ready to try and gizmofy it.”

“I think it's working now,” I said. “Now that Russ has finished his port.”

“Show me now,” said Russ coldly.

We left Jack and Jill, who got back to their boxes. Sketchy Albedo was on the other Sphex. Janelle Fuchs
had been praising Sketchy to me. “He's a skater,” she'd told me. “
Sketchy
is a skater word. He's a fun guy at a party. He just likes to harsh on older men. He doesn't mean anything by it.” For his part, Sketchy had decided I was okay when he found out about the wide range of court charges against me. I was practically a cryp.

“Gronk,” said Russ to Sketchy. “Gronk gronk gronk.” Russ squinted his eyes shut and opened his mouth wide as he did this. He tilted his head back so that his beard rose up off his chest. God he was ugly.

“Russ means can we use the machine,” I said.

“The lawn-dwarf and the twit,” said Sketchy, quoting from our private e-mail flame letters. Sketchy read whoever's e-mail he felt like. “I was thinking—can you spazzes teach Squidboy to skate?”

“Maybe,” I said. “Provided there's a physically accurate cyberspace skate simulation that the program can practice in.”

“Sure there's a program like that,” said Sketchy. “
Cyberskate
. Real Knot ships it with their deck along with a spring-mounted feely-blank skateboard that you stand on for your interface.”

“If someone could set up message-passing between Cyberskate and the Adze code it would be feasible,” said Russ. “But neither of you amateurs has a prayer of doing it, and
I'm
not about to. Guess what?” Russ mimed a false hobbit smile, then scowled and began yelling, “Marketing has gotten Brie and Gyorgyi to sign off on a schedule which gives Sun Tam, Jerzy, and me six days from now to give Developer Services and Quality Assurance some working code. That's next Monday.
So get your feeble butt off the Sphex!
For future reference: that's what ‘gronk' stands for!” Sketchy sprang up and Russ plopped himself down into the Sphex's Steadiswivel chair. I sat down next to him, and we each
pulled on two gloves.

Sketchy had ridden the viewer into a cyberspace library that looked like a British club, with parquet walls and leather furniture, though the tuxedos of the people in it were odd as surrealist cartoons—a giant duck, a stepping razor, a clam with teeth, and a staticky bit of cloud. To make it the gnarlier, the tuxedos were morphing themselves among several alternate shapes as we watched. The duck slowly transformed into a rabbit and then back into a duck. The cloud molded itself into a series of tornado shapes, and then into something like a Corinthian column.

“This is the Cryp Club library,” explained Sketchy. “No phreaks allowed.”

“How do you tell who's who?” I asked.

“We all know who we are,” said Sketchy. “Cryps work for money, and phreaks just do it to be weird, though sometimes a phreak will take money, too. Phreaks are younger, mostly. It's almost like two gangs. If I showed up in the phreak library, somebody would try to burn me.”

“Speaking of cryps and phreaks,” I asked him, “do you know anything about Hex DEF6?”

“Hex DEF6!” Sketchy looked surprised. “That's the third time I heard that in the last two days.”

“Where?”

“Yesterday it was written on the wall in spraypaint over there.” He pointed toward one of the library walls that swept by as Russ steered us toward the exit node that hovered in the middle of the library like an oversize world globe.

“It's very incorrect,” continued Sketchy, “to deface the Cryp Club library. So of course nobody would cop to it. I cleaned it off myself; it was my day for maintenance duty. Maybe a phreak got in and did it. If we catch him
we're going to burn him bad.”

Russ jumped into the exit node and brought us out in the Bay Area Netport. The huge Beaux Arts architectural space stretched out before us, with spherical hyperjump nodes all along the ceiling, floor, and walls.

“The second time I heard of Hex DEF6 was this morning,” continued Sketchy. “A phreak was trying to bust into the West West node. The dude's tuxedo looked like a canvas mask with a zipper instead of a mouth. I iced him and he left, but before he left he gave me the finger and said his name was Hex DEF6. And now you're asking me about him. That's three times in two days. So, yeah, what
is
Hex DEF6?”

With quick jerky movements, Russ was steering the viewpoint across the Netport to the West West node, a shiny copper ball decorated with the West West WW logo that was, Janelle had told me, the same as the old Meta Meta MM logo upside down. We slid through the surface of the ball and saw an aerial view of the West West building plus a virtual housing development of Our American Homes set up out in back of the parking lot. At my request, Sun Tam had installed 256 of them; it was as many as the West West computers had room for. It took a petabyte of memory to maintain this big a subdivision of Our American Homes.

“I saw that zipper-mouth Hex DEF6 with a bunch of GoMotion ants a couple of weeks ago,” I said. “He told me he'd injure me and my children if I didn't work for West West. And this week a kid followed me home and said that he was Hex DEF6, or that he worked for him or something. But you don't think West West is behind it?”

“Sounds like a phreak burn to me,” said Sketchy.

“Sorry to interrupt these exciting
spyboy
adventures,” said Russ, using the standard code hacker insult for cryps and phreaks. “But where'd you put your Adze code,
Jerzy?” He was hovering over my virtual desk, right there in the model of my cubicle in the pit.

“I'll get it.”

I pulled open the virtual desk's top drawer to reveal a three-dimensional chrome box with a socket and a keyhole in it. Written on the box in flowing gold cursive was “SuperC/Kwirkey For Adze, Jerzy Rugby.” There was no way to pick the box up, as I'd permanently attached it to the cyberspace aether—meaning that there was no way to change the box's location coordinates without destroying it. To use the software you had to unlock the box with a key. I popped up a privacy shield.

The key I kept hidden in my lower drawer, which was filled with a mess of several hundred random solid 3-D images. Today I had the key hidden inside a swordfish. I took the thrashing swordfish out of the drawer and zoomed down onto the third spine of the dorsal fin. Stuck down at the spine's base was the billion-bit key I'd generated last time I locked the program. It looked like a wriggly piece of wire with a round handle on one end. I pulled the wire out from the base of the swordfish's fin-spine, put the swordfish away, and stuck the key into the software box. Now it was unlocked. I turned off my privacy curtain.

Russ pulled down a cable icon with his data glove. He stuck one end of the cable into my software box's socket and held on to the other end of the cable as he flew up out of the virtual West West building and over to the nearest model of Our American Home. Russ pushed the doorbell and Perky Pat Christensen came to the front door and opened it.

“Walt and I are so glad you came. Dexter and Scooter are here as well!” She moved with the angular abruptness of a virtual Barbie doll, which was no surprise, as GoMotion had licensed the CyberBarbie surface meshes
and joint-constraints from Mattel. Well, actually, GoMotion
hadn't
licensed the info, Trevor had simply crypped it from Mattel. And then Sketchy had crypped it from GoMotion. It seemed Mattel didn't have a clue.

We flew on into the kitchen, Russ still holding the infinitely stretchable cable in his hand. Virtual Squidboy was sitting there in his nest, his food cord plugged into the wall. Russ opened the little door in Squidboy's back, stuck the cable into the back of Squidboy, and squeezed the cable's Download lever as if he were filling Squidboy up with gas. Once the download was over, Russ pulled out the cable and said, “Kwirkey Run.” Squidboy sat up and looked around. Russ flew up to join me on the ceiling.

Young Dexter Christensen wandered into the kitchen and glanced up at us. In this simulation, we looked like gloved hands attached to matchstick arms, but Dexter talked to us just the same.

“Wow! Are you startin' up the robot?” asked Dexter.

We didn't bother answering him.

“Hello Squidboy,” chirped Squidboy, waving his tentacle.

“Hi, Mr. Robot,” said Dexter. “Do you wanta play?”

“Wanta play?” echoed Squidboy. We'd started him from a blank state and he was in language acquisition mode.

“Let's go in the living room,” said Dexter and reached out toward Squidboy's left-hand pincer-manipulator. To my horror, instead of gently taking the boy's hand, Squidboy darted rapidly forward and slashed into the boy's abdomen with inhuman fury.

“Hello Squidboy,” said the virtual machine, peering at the trashed geometry that had been the lad's body. “Wanta play? Hello Squidboy. Wanta play?”

“Kwirkey Halt,” said Russ, and Squidboy and the Dexter-fragments stopped moving. Russ turned to me, a
savage gleam in his eye. “What do you bet it's your fault?”

“My code was fully tested for the Veep,” I spluttered. “Keep in mind that the Adze is a different machine. And of course it could be your port that's causing the problem.”

“You wish,” said Russ, then spoke again to the Kwirkey operating system that was running this simulation. “Kwirkey Debug!”

A ray-traced retrocurved chrome figure appeared in the cyberspace of the kitchen.

“I am Kwirkey Debug. I am ready.”