The Hacker and the Ants (36 page)

The ants in the first colony were designing the third
version of the ROBOT.LIB microcode. Their world was a huge flat motherboard intricately chased with filigreed coppery lines. The ants looked like the tools, components, and wires used for logic design. They were, variously, switches and logic gates plugged into the circuit, connectors to shunt signals this way and that, virtual jumper wires that made remote references, and code-packets that tested the system's logic. These were the guys who had developed ROBOT.LIB for the Y9707-EX.

The ants in the Antland of Fnoor looked like tiny robots and tiny members of the Christensen family—just like during my phreakout. Seeing such a mass of them made me itchy and uncomfortable. I found myself unconsciously flicking my fingers, as if to get ants off me. One difference was that now some of the robots were of the new four-armed variety that I'd just seen on the monitor display of Roger's factory. But a bigger, more frightening, difference was that the little models of four-armed robots seemed to be deliberately causing as much harm as possible to the other robots and to the Christensens. The evolution of the ants' and robots' behavior had taken a sinister turn with the designing of this new generation of robots. They were as murderous and as implacable as an army of skeletons in a medieval painting of the Triumph of Death. Talk about emergent behavior! Roger had put in one mutation too many, poor guy.

The ants in the third colony looked like four-armed robots and plastic ants. All the Veeps and Adzes had been eliminated from this world. The robots were racing up and down the narrow aisles of their factory, stiffly swinging their quadruple arms. Some of them worked frantically at tiny plastics machines that cranked out the tiny models of the plastic ants. And the virtual plastic ants—what were they up to? Off to one side of the factory, I noticed a row of Our American
Homes with small Christensen models in them. The cramped little homes made me think of the shantytown dwellings of impoverished factory workers. Over and over, the plastic ants would surge into these homes and tear the occupants limb from limb. Then four of the plastic ants would take on the forms of Perky Pat and her family, and the others would practice killing them again.

I had to turn them off! Next to each of the three windows was a board of controls with an On/Off switch at the top. I pressed Off on the Antland of Fnoor's board, and two additional buttons appeared above the On/Off switch. The new buttons were marked 0 and 1.

“Please enter the binary digits of the halt code,” said a voice.

“The code is Hex DEF6,” I said.

“Please enter the binary digits of the halt code,” repeated the voice.

“What's the binary for that number, Da?” asked Tom.

“I don't exactly remember, but I can figure it out,” I said. “I'll think aloud so you and Ida know too. ‘Hex' means ‘base sixteen' and the base sixteen numerals are 0-1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-A-B-C-D-E-F. A through F stand for ten through fifteen. What's D? I always think: 'D is an unlucky grade, and D is thirteen.' So DEF6 is thirteen-fourteen-fifteen-six. Now all I have to do is turn those four numbers into binary. Thirteen is eight plus four plus one. An eight, a four, no two, a one: 1-1-0-1. Fourteen is one higher; add one and carry one to get: 1-1-1-0. Fifteen is 1-1-1-1. Six is no eight, a four, a two, no one: 0-1-1-0. So all right.”

I put my hand up to the pair of buttons and slowly entered the bits, thirteen-fourteen-fifteen-six in binary:

The little figures in the Antland of Fnoor stopped
moving—all of them. But the ants in the other two colonies became wildly agitated. The great mother board flashed with desperate signals, and the factory colony boiled with activity.

“Quick, Tom,” I shouted. “You stop the motherboard, and I'll stop the factory!”

We keyed in the numbers as fast as possible. Riscky's phreak deck must have had clear-channel satellite access, because there didn't seem to be any lag in Tom's transmissions from California to Switzerland. He beat me by half a second. By the time I keyed in my last four bits, the great motherboard colony was already dark and still.

But something bad and unexpected was happening in the factory colony. The plastic ants were swarming all over the window that looked in on them and now, somehow, some of the plastic ant images were out of the colony and in the ant lab with me! My piezopads buzzed as the ants tried to bite me, while I finished my key presses and killed the factory colony. But the handful of plastic ant icons that had escaped were still alive! Some kept on biting me, and the rest of them scuttled past me and off down the corridors of Roger's dungeon maze.

Before Tom and I could even catch our breath, there was screeching from the tunnel, and a pack of angry goblins came running in to attack us. They'd been taken over by the escaped ants! One of them snatched the map from Tom's hand and stuffed it into his mouth, chewing and swallowing like mad. The other goblins began tearing at our tuxedos.

“Oneone oh oneoneoneone oh oneoneoneone oh oneone oh!” screamed Tom.

The magic bullet worked once more: the goblins keeled over dead, along with the few plastic ant icons still loose in the ant lab with us.

“All right!” I whooped. “I think we got all of them!”

“Gimmie
five
!” said Tom.

“Did you kill the ants?” came Ida's voice.

“Yeah!” said Tom. “Some of the ants escaped and got into orcs, but we killed the orcs too. Da's spell works.”

“I want to try,” said Ida.

“No!” said Tom. “Get
off
me, grubber! Is there something else we have to do next, Da?”

“There's a bunch of real plastic ants in the next building from where I physically am, Tom. They're like robots. I doubt if the spell will work on them. We have to find a way to kill those ants, too.”

“How?”

“I think we might be able to take over the two big robots who are building them.” I stepped forward and nudged the dead goblin who had swallowed the map. “Can we cut this guy open?”

“I'll jump on him,” said Tom.

Tom jumped and the contents of the goblin's stomach spewed onto the floor. The map was a tattered, unreadable mess.

“Can you at least get us back to the entrance hall, Tom?” I asked anxiously. “I can't remember all the turns we took.”

“I remember, old man,” said Tom. “Grab my foot.”

We flew back to the main hall, alert lest any remaining ant-possessed orc attack us. But if there were any more loose cyberspace ants, they were lying low.

“
Now you let me see
!” came Ida's voice. There was the sound of another tussle, and then Ida had control of the clown again.

“Let's try looking behind the fire now,” said Ida. “Usually the most important things are there.”

“All right,” I said.

The clown and I walked toward the fire, but the fire was like a wall.

“Um, squeeze around,” said Ida's low voice.

We sidled over to the side of the hearth and squeezed around behind the fire. There was a sooty trapdoor in the back wall of the chimney. Ida pulled it open, and I followed her through.

Instead of the dungeon passage I'd expected, the room behind the panel was a completely modern-looking office room with bookcases and standard-looking cyberspace portals. One of the doors had an ant on the wall over it—peering in there, I could see that this portal was a hyperjump connection to the same dungeon room that Tom and I had just visited by way of the passages.

“Ahem,” said Ida.

“You're doing good,” I said. “You were right.”

Right next to the ant lab portal was a door to a room with four booths that looked like arcade cyberspace games, each with swivel-mounted goggles and glove controls. The booths were labeled
Walt, Perky Pat, Dexter
, and
Baby Scooter.

“This is it!” I exulted. “Yay Ida!” Peering into the booths, I saw that the Walt and Perky Pat goggles were dark and dead. But the Dexter and Baby Scooter headsets were flickering with colored images.

“Okay,” I told Ida. “These are for telerobotically controlling two robots that are in a factory next to the building where I am. Those robots have been building plastic ants. We have to go in there and take over the robots and try and get them to kill the plastic ants.”

“Okay,” said Ida a little uncertainly.

“Let me do it,” yelped Tom.

“Maybe Tom
should
do it, Ida,” I said. “I mean my life kind of depends on this. If we don't kill all the plastic ants they might crawl over here and kill me. One of them tried to slash my wrist this morning. And Tom is better at games than anyone.”

“Oh all
right
,” snapped Ida.

Tom quickly took control of the clown. I settled into the Dexter booth and Tom took Baby Scooter. Pulling the Dexter headset over my virtual face shifted my viewpoint to that of the robot's and, most importantly, this action overrode the robot's control circuits and put me in charge. Dexter was now slaved to my hands' motions.

This didn't happen quite smoothly or automatically. Dexter and Baby Scooter had no desire at all to become our telerobotic slaves. My viewpoint bucked around wildly for a moment after I entered Dexter, and I could see that Baby Scooter was thrashing around as well. But Roger had made sure to hardwire the telerobotic override into the ROBOT.LIB microcode, and there was really nothing Dexter and Baby Scooter could do. As soon as we'd settled in, all their higher logic circuits were turned off.

Even so, the robots' control circuits were still functional, and you could drive them around with the standard cyberspace control gestures. You didn't have to worry about the best way to move their legs and so on; you had only to point and nod, and use your hands to control their manipulators. Since the robots had four manipulators each, the control booths actually had four swiveling glove controls.

Once Dexter quieted down, I found myself standing in front of the plastics-casting machine he'd been tending. There was a basket of tiny electronic circuits to my left and a bowl of shining translucent beads to my right. Farther to my right was Baby Scooter. I raised my hand and waved.

“Are you okay, Tom?”

“Yeah,” said Tom, waving back. “I'm fine. Are these the plastic ants?” He pointed at the components spread out before him. “Where are the live ones?”

“Down there.” I pointed at the trail of newly fashioned plastic ants that was marching from Tom's bench to the crack by the elevator door. “Those are the guys we have to get rid of.” Just as I'd feared, the plastic ants were as lively as ever.

Tom picked up a live ant in one of his pincers. He squeezed hard, trying to crush it, but rather than crumbling, the ant skidded out from his grip and shot across the room like a pinched watermelon seed. “They're really solid,” said Tom.

I scooped up another ant with my humanoid hand, and then used my two pincers to pull its gaster and its head sections apart from its alitrunk. When I dropped the pieces to the floor, they writhed about spastically. “Tearing them apart works,” I said. “But by now there's hundreds of them. Maybe even thousands.”

“See how their trail goes into that crack by the elevator door?” said Tom. “Maybe we can pour something down in there that will melt them.”

“It would be even better if we could take the elevator down to where the ants have their nest,” I said.

“What's wrong with the elevator?”

“It's jammed.”

“Maybe I can fix it,” said Tom. “You look for something we can pour on them.”

I trucked back and forth on my bent-legged bicycle wheels, looking at the vats and barrels of chemicals. The plastic ants still in the lab seemed to sense we were no longer their friends—they were streaming en masse toward the crack at the bottom of the elevator door.

“Here's a big can of acetone,” I said presently. “That might be good.” The big square can was of shiny metal marked “Acetone—Highly Flammable.” It looked like it held about five gallons.

Tom was examining a box on the wall near the elevator.
“Somebody took out one of the fuses is all,” he said, rising high up on his legs to look on top of the box. “And, yes, here it is!” Dexter or Baby Scooter had probably removed the fuse, timing it to trap Roger where the plastic ants could finish him off.

Tom replaced the fuse, pressed the elevator button, and
clankclank
the cabin slid up to our level and the doors opened. A dozen plastic ants were running about on the cabin floor.

“Let's see if they melt,” I said, lumbering over with the heavy can of acetone. I unscrewed the top and slopped some of the stuff onto the plastic ants. But it didn't slow them down a bit.

“If we could light the acetone . . . ” said Tom.

“That would probably work,” I agreed. “But how can we light it?”

“Make a spark with an electrical wire,” came Ida's voice.

“That sounds good,” I said. “Let's do it.”

We got in the elevator. Tom was about to push the button for the basement, but I stopped him and pushed the button for the main floor. “We can't take the elevator to the basement,” I said. “There's a dead body at the bottom of the shaft. I was starting to tell you before. The plastic ants killed Roger.”

The main-floor elevator door was still frozen into the half-open position I'd cranked it to. Tom and I squeezed out with some difficulty, and then went down the concrete stairs to the basement.

I looked around the basement. Where were the ants? No trail led out from under the elevator door here, which suggested they had taken up residence inside the shaft. Hopefully right at the bottom.