The Hacker and the Ants (18 page)

“That is the name of my robot, yes.”

“A man and a robot resembling you and Studly were reported to have been in an altercation with a Jose Ruiz of 5782 White Road yesterday afternoon. The man's dog was killed, and the Fibernet cable to his house was cut. Shortly after the cable was cut, a computer virus infected all of the digital compression hardware at Fibernet San Jose and bounced out to the chips of all the active TV sets in San Jose. Worse than that, the virus worked its way upstream from Fibernet San Jose into the local TV station studios and got into their DTV compression chips as well. Shortly after that, the virus went out with San Jose news feeds over the satellite links and infested the studios of every digital TV station and cable service in
the world. For the moment there's damn near no television. Do you have a reaction to that?”

I knew better than to reveal my true feelings of triumph and awe. “I suppose that's very inconvenient for many people. But it's certainly not my fault.”

“Do you admit that you were at 5782 White Road yesterday?”

“I don't admit anything.”

“Jerzy, I'd like to make it easy for you. You seem like an intelligent man. You can work with me or you can work against me. And if you work against me you're going to spend a long time in jail. You might even get the death penalty. You don't want to die in jail, do you, Jerzy?” I shook my head and Captain Austin smiled. “So help me out a little. I'm trying to understand what happened. Jeffrey Pear says it's all your fault, but maybe he's not giving me the straight story. What happened at GoMotion? Why were you fired? Pear says it was simply a matter of incompetence.” Captain Austin paused and looked at his pad again. “Pear says, ‘Jerzy Rugby doesn't know a function pointer from a linked list.' He says you ripped off some experimental virus-like software and deliberately used it to blank out television so as to give GoMotion a black eye. Would you call that an accurate account?”

“Hell no!” I flared. “What Pear says is total bullshit. Look—if you
really
want to know about the GoMotion ants, ask Roger Coolidge. I bet Pear didn't mention
him
to you. Roger Coolidge is the founder of GoMotion. He left for Switzerland Monday night. Roger built the GoMotion ants before I even started working there. I used to talk to him about his design, but he called the shots. The ants were Roger's experiment with artificial life. They were meant to be like living, self-improving pieces of DTV display code. Roger Coolidge is the one
who set the ants loose. He e-mailed an eggcase of them to my deck, took off for Switzerland, and then had Jeff Pear fire me. It's a total setup.
I'm just a patsy
.”

“That's very helpful, Jerzy. Why don't I call in a stenographer to take down your story. It would be a good thing to get your side on record.”

The captain's voice had taken on a soothing, caressing tone. The captain was my friend. It would be so great to sit here and tell him my side of the story without worrying about silly legalistic things like my Miranda rights . . . at least maybe that's what I was supposed to think. But I wasn't a kid anymore. I'd pleaded guilty to pot possession for a two hundred dollar fine once in my twenties, and it had cost me tens of thousands of dollars in job rejections and increased insurance premiums over many many years. No, the police are not your friends.

“I want to talk to a lawyer.” I crossed my arms and leaned back in my chair.

“Go ahead.” He pushed his phone across his desk. “You can make one call. One seven-digit number. No phone phreaking.”

As if being a serious code hacker were the same as being a cryp all hot to dial into the weapons division of Livermore Labs, or an anarchist bent on bringing down the phone system. Though, heh, in the government's eyes I was a terrorist who'd done something even worse. I'd blanked out digital TV: treason?

I took the phone and, come to think of it, I didn't actually know any lawyers in California. Carol had said she was going to talk to a lawyer today about child support payments, but she hadn't told me his or her name, not that I'd want to talk to Carol's lawyer. Instead of calling a lawyer, I should call someone who could really help me. Not GoMotion, certainly, but—why not West West? No doubt they were ecstatic over the bad publicity the
ants were bringing to GoMotion. I pulled Ben Brie's business card out of my wallet and dialed his number.

“Ben Brie speaking.”

“Ben, it's Jerzy Rugby. Something's come up. I've been arrested.”

“Does that mean you'll be late to work?” He chuckled softly. “Are you in for something juicy?” His sarcastic drawl was wonderful to hear.

“It's the television thing. The GoMotion ants. They're trying to pin it on me.”

“Very interesting.” He stretched the words out as he thought things over. “You're calling because you need a lawyer?”

“Right. I figured you guys must know a lot of lawyers.”

“We do. Hmmm. I'll talk to Otto Gyorgyi, and if he approves, which I'm sure he will, we'll send someone over. Where are you?”

“The San Jose police station on First Street.”

“Okay, Jerzy. Keep your mouth shut and wait for the lawyer. West West will have you out on bail before you know it.”

“Thanks, Ben.”

“Hey, it's a standard employee benefit!”

I was free on bail by suppertime. The reporters outside were rabid; they were personally affronted by the blankout of TV. If this kept up, many of them would be out of a job. Till now, I'd been nursing a deep-seated feeling that the mass of people would be as glad as I was to have TV gone. But seeing the reporters' anger, I realized I might be wrong.

The West West lawyer—a tall, soft curly-haired guy called Stu Koblenz—gave me a ride back to Los Perros in his car. Vans and cars with reporters followed us down the freeway. When we got to my house, there were so
many newspeople standing there that I was scared to get out. I had my keys, and my car was still there in the driveway, but I didn't see any way to get out without being totally mobbed.

“Just drive on past and drop me down in Los Perros, Stu. I'll come back here on foot later.”

“Okay.”

As we motored past my home, I noticed a piece of paper tacked to the front door. An eviction notice? A sheriff's sequestration? “
Tat tvam asi
,” as the mantra goes. “And this too.” Back in my thirties, before I filled my heart with computer code, I had a few periods of total spiritual enlightenment, or so I'd imagined. All is One, and each event is a gem facet of the One, even a Pig scrawl on your front door. Enlightenment is a big help in crisis times, though the rest of the time there's still the unyielding question of what to do with the rest of your life.

Down in Los Perros, I directed Stu to drive briskly around the block and whip into an alley, leaving our tail momentarily out of sight. I hopped out, ran into the back door of Mountain Pizza, and stepped out of the front.

There on the sidewalk was a rack of evening newspapers. My picture was on the front page with the headlines:

I bought a copy and folded it in half. Down the block was a clothes store. I went in and bought a 49ers sweatshirt. To complete my disguise I bought one of those moronic billed caps with a plastic strap in back—the kind of hat that people who watch television wear.

I went around the corner to an Irish bar called D.T.
Finnegan's, a publike space with green carpets, dark wood wainscoting, and antique stained glass windows. The bartender there knew me, but I sat at a table with my back to him and with my billed cap pulled down so he wouldn't notice me. His name was Tommy. At this very moment he was, in fact, discussing my case with the men at the bar.

“A nice guy,” he was telling them. The three TV screens over the bar were blank. I found the silence wonderful, but the men did not. They were sullen and bewildered. There was some kind of sports event they wanted to be watching. “He comes in here afternoons when he gets tired of programming,” Tommy was saying. “He's kind of an old hippie.”

“They ought to castrate him,” someone opined.

“People will go nuts with no TV,” another one put in. “I can't face going home tonight. What the hell am I going to do all evening?”

The waitress came to me and I ordered a beer and a barbecued pork sandwich. I was very hungry. While I waited for the food, I studied the newspaper. There was no TV working anywhere on the planet save for the few remaining analog backwaters—Borneo, Peru, New Guinea, Zaire, Micronesia. The “GoMotion ant virus” was believed to have been released by Jerzy Rugby, a disaffected programmer recently fired by GoMotion. Nancy Day, the president of GoMotion, promised that a “GoMotion ant lion” would soon be available to set things right. I guessed that Nancy Day, whom I'd never met, was fronting for Roger. There was a big sidebar article with some Q&A on the situation.