The Hacker and the Ants (37 page)

“Wait,” I told Tom, and hurried back up to the main floor to get the emergency key-crank out of the elevator
door. Back in the basement, I put it into the hole in the basement elevator doors.

“Get a wire,” I told Tom.

Tom tore a heavy section of electrical conduit down from the ceiling. Being in robot bodies made us feel pretty reckless. Tom kept pulling on the wire and ripping stuff loose until the wire had about ten feet of slack. And then he yanked the wire in two with his pincer-claws. The two bare wire ends made big sputtering sparks if you held them near each other.

“All right,” I said. “It's robot kamikaze time.”

“Kick some butt!” yelled Ida.

I clamped the acetone can against my chest with my tentacle, and used my humanoid hand to crank open the door at a furious rate. There behind the door was Roger's corpse, and all around his corpse were the glistening plastic ants.

The ants were busy—they'd mounted the two Y9707-EX chips on the grungy shaft wall, with wires running around the chips. Several of the ants had fashioned themselves small silicon rectangles that were attached to their bodies like wings. One of the ants was just starting its wings with an abrupt beating stutter. It rose an inch or two into the air.

I pushed forward and slashed my pincers into the metal can of acetone. The can split wide open, dumping the volatile liquid out onto the ants. Tom lunged in next to me and sparked the wires in the midst of the shaft.

There was a rush of noise and orange light, and then my viewfield went dead. An instant later I felt a shock wave jolt my chair in Roger's study. I made the gestures to remove the virtual telerobotic headset, and found myself back in the lab behind the castle fireplace. The black velvet clown was here too: Tom and Ida.

“Thanks a million,” I said. “I have to go now. Don't
tell anyone where I am.”

“Good-bye, Da,” said Tom.

“Look out in case there's any more ants,” called Ida. I pulled off my headset for real. It was still raining. Oily black smoke was trickling out the roof vents of Roger's factory. The monitor on Roger's desk was blank. Down in the basement of Roger's house, the great boiler shuddered on and began pumping heat into the radiators.

It was time to get out of here. I hurried into the room where I'd slept and pulled my satchel out from under the mattress. There was no car here for me to use, but it would be simple enough to trek down to Saint-Cergue, especially now that I had Roger's galoshes on. I rushed out through the dim living room—for some reason the lights weren't working anymore. I pushed on the front door. It didn't open. “Open the door,” I commanded—but nothing happened. A power failure from the factory explosion?

No, it was worse than that. Roger's house computer had turned against me. There was a sudden grinding sound from all over the house as the metal roll-down shutters closed off all the windows. The rain beat on the roof and the radiators hissed with steam.

I left my satchel of money by the front door and felt my way into the dark living room, past the great blue-and-white tile stove to the faint glow of the wall-mounted house computer. The computer screen showed a harmless-looking array of icons, but when I went to touch its keyboard, something pounced on my hand and bit it. I cried out and thrashed my hand—a winged plastic ant circled up into the darkness. Now I felt a bite in my ankle. Not knowing which way to turn, I ran back into Roger's study, dimly lit by his blank monitor. The little room was hot and stuffy.

Looking desperately around, I noticed the cardboard
box of tools in the corner. I rummaged through the box and found a flashlight and a hammer. Wonderfully, the flashlight worked.

I went back into the living room with the idea of trying to smash the plastic ants with my hammer. The cone of my flashlight beam showed three of them on the floor. I rushed forward and managed to pound and crush two of them. Bang bang! But the third ant scurried in close to me and bit me on the ankle. I picked it off and pressed its snapping head against the floor while I pulverized its gaster with the hammer. More ants came, some crawling and some flying, their silicon wings glittering in the beam of my flashlight.

I tried yelling the binary digits of Hex DEF6, but it didn't do a thing—not that it should have. I was dealing with real-world ant robots now instead of the GoMotion software ants of cyberspace. Surely there was some radio control signal to turn these plastic ants off, but without hours of detective-work hacking, I had no way of knowing how to send it.

No, instead of using some subtle software code, I was pounding at the plastic ants with my hammer. Meanwhile they kept attacking me—circling around, jumping up, and dive-bombing; sinking their pincers into my arms, legs, and even my neck; coordinating their motions with the inaudible chirps of robot radio waves. I picked the attackers off and smashed them as best I could, ignoring the cuts in my fingers. I grew dizzy with the pain and the heat. If the ants didn't kill me, the house would cook me to death—but I didn't know what to do besides keep crushing ants.

Around then the beam of my flashlight happened to fall on the blue-and-white tile stove, and I saw that hundreds more plastic ants were crawling and flying out through the vents in the stove's door. Some kind of steam
tunnel must have led from the factory to here. The flying ants stuttered their wings and lifted into the air to spiral toward me.

If I stayed here and kept fighting, the plastic ants would bring me down like piranhas attacking a wading cow. Years ago the kids and I had seen just such a cow getting eaten on a TV nature show. The kids had loved it so much that they'd made up a game—Piranhas And Cow—in which Daddy would crawl around on all fours and they'd “bite” at him with their hands until I, Daddy, would collapse in giggles with my arms clamped protectively over my belly and sides.

I slapped a flying ant off my cheek. Thinking of Piranhas And Cow made me think of water, which made me think of Roger's swimming pool. The pool roof was nothing but corrugated plastic! Still clutching my flashlight and hammer, I tottered back to the front hall, grabbed my black satchel, and ran through the kitchen and down the short hall to the room at the end of the house with the swimming pool. Thank God there was no door to close off the pool room. I reached up and whaled against the plastic of the pool room roof with my hammer till I had a good-sized hole in it. Rain poured in. I tossed my satchel up through the hole and began trying to crawl out after it.

I nearly made it. But the hole was five feet off the ground, the dirt at the edge of the pool was muddy, the plastic was weak and saggy, and my hands were slippery with blood and rain. I kept falling back. Now the plastic ants were swarming through the kitchen and into the pool room with me, a few of them flying like air support over the advancing army of the crawling ones. With a final titanic effort, I levered my upper body out into the rainy Swiss morning, but a big piece of the plastic broke loose and I fell backward, hitting my head on the
ground. The last thing I saw was flying plastic ants angling down toward me. My last thought was that I missed Carol.

I woke to the sound of a telephone endlessly ringing. There was a mud puddle next to my face with rain splashing into it through the jagged hole I'd made in the pool room roof. Floating in the puddle were scores of plastic ants with their little metal legs folded up against their bodies. Some of them had folded-up wings as well. The cuts in my hands had clotted over. Still the phone rang.

I sat up and felt my head. There was a painful egg on the back of my noggin—nothing serious. I could see more motionless plastic ants in the hallway and in the kitchen. Still the phone rang.

I hoisted myself to my feet. My socks were stiff with blood from the bites the ants had given me. I picked up my flashlight and hammer, and made my way through Roger's kitchen, the beads of stilled plastic ants sliding beneath my feet. The dark house was hotter than ever; the furnace continued to blast away. Might the boiler actually explode? I moved faster.

When I picked up the phone, a mechanical voice said, “There is a cyberspace call for you, sir. Please put on your headset.”

I snatched up Roger's headset and looked into it. There, staring at me with an expression that was not quite a smile, was Riscky Pharbeque. He was in a car driving on what looked like Route 1 near Big Sur.

“Shit howdy,” he said. “Don't say I never did you no favors.”

“Riscky! What happened?”

“Just naturally I put a watchbug into that Pemex twelve I sold you, Jerzy. Sucker paged me when you and your son started using the Hex DEF6 code. You choked,
my man, you screwed the pooch! You're old and slow. Two GoMotion ants from the third colony got away!”

“Do you know where they are? Can you stop them?”

“
Hell
yes. I'm no friend of Roger Coolidge's—son of a bitch never did pay me for that phreak job I ran on you. Not to speak unkindly of the dear departed, but he was dumb as dog shit to try and short yours truly. Not paying Riscky was about the last thing Roger ever did, if you catch my drift.”

“You—you had a hand in making his new robots turn bad?”

“Well now, Roger made some random mutations in the colonies writing his robot code—but who's to say what
random
is? Phreaky-deaky, dude.” Riscky cackled and held up ten long, wiggling fingers as the cliffs of Big Sur went whipping past.

“Oh God. So what about the escaped GoMotion ants?”

“They jumped right down onto Roger's house computer hoping to
fuck you up.
But good ole Riscky came in and took over that machine's comm ports. The ants can't get back out. Before you do anything else, Jerzy, run in there and rip that computer out of the wall. Smash it up and bring me its big RAM chip. Just so's if I ever need it, I can get the GoMotion ant code off of there.”

“Do it now?”

“Do it! I'll wait.”

I ran into Roger's living room and yanked his house computer out of its ragged niche. The naked machine crashed to the floor. I used my hammer—yes, I was still carrying it—to kill the power supply. Right away the runaway furnace downstairs stopped. And then I pulled the big terabyte RAM chip off the motherboard. I went back into Roger's study and put on the headset.

“I got it.”

“Way to go, old son,” said Riscky. “Now gather up a couple or three dozen of those dead ants and bring them and that RAM chip on back to me.”

“How did you turn off the plastic ants, Riscky?”

He opened and closed his right hand rapidly several times, miming signals emanating from a source. His long thin lips drew back toward the rasta tangles of his hair. “
Radio
. The plastic ants have the same stop signal as any other robot. Being as how I'd taken over the house computer's communications, I used it to put the plastic ants to sleep. All of them.”

“Thank you, Riscky. Thank you so much.”

“Don't thank me yet. I want one more thing.”

“Money?”

“My girlfriend's turned movie agent. I want you to let her handle the rights to your TV miniseries.”

“What?”

“Your adventure, Jerzy, your story. Let my girlfriend handle the rights, or I'll wake up the plastic ants and there won't
be
no story.”

“Sure, Riscky, whatever.” As if I fucking cared about television.

“Hurry home, bro.”

I cleaned myself up and found a raincoat, an umbrella, a scarf, and a pair of leather gloves to hide the cuts in my fingers.

I
LEFT ROGER'S HOUSE ON FOOT JUST BEFORE noon on Sunday, May 31. I'd half-expected to find the factory burned to the ground outside Roger's shuttered windows, but the acetone seemed to have burned itself out without managing to set the Swiss concrete building on fire, not that I looked inside. The main thing was that no alarms seemed to have gone off, and everything looked fairly normal. I splashed down to Saint-Cergue, where I found a cafe crowded with peasants drinking vile Swiss beer.

Without anyone taking much notice of me, I phoned for a taxi, which took me to the Geneva airport. Customs didn't look in my satchel, which could have been luck or could have been something else. I couldn't tell anymore.

Monday morning I was back in San Jose, just in time for the next part of my trial. I buttonholed Stu in the hall outside the courtroom. He was kind of surprised to see me.

“You're still here, Jerzy?”

“Yes. I want to win this trial. Let me ask you something
point-blank. Do you really want me to lose, or have you just been dogging it because West West stopped paying you?”

“Of course I want you to win. You're my client. And I think it's somewhat inaccurate to say that I've been dogging it. The problem is that you haven't given me a defense to work with. And of course I
am
operating on somewhat limited funds.”

“I've come into some money and some new information over the weekend, Stu. It was Roger Coolidge who made Studly put the ants on the Fibernet. He was driving Studly over a remote cyberspace link. Get hold of Coolidge's phone bill and we can prove it.”

“Use a cryp?”

“Use whatever it takes. And get the same guy who made the prosecutor's demo to make a cyberspace demo for us. A better demo. Coolidge was on the phone to a transponder in the back of a truck driven by a guy called Vinh Vo.”

“Is he related to the Vo family you were visiting? None of them were willing to talk.”

“Vinh's the oldest son. I've already had dealings with him and I'm sure I can get him to testify for us. Vinh is very money-oriented. The one thing is that our story can't make Vinh look bad. If Vinh were to turn against me, he could open up information about—never mind what about.” If Vinh and Bety and Vanna and Riscky kept mum, the authorities need never find out that I was the Sandy Schrandt who'd been visiting Roger Coolidge when he died.