The Hacker and the Ants (9 page)

A few other customers were visible, and my body was visible as well. Mass market virtual stores like Nordstrom's require their shoppers to have visible body icons, not only to discourage perverts and snoopers, but also because people shop more recklessly when they feel themselves to be part of a crowd. The store was open and airy: instead of long racks and shaky stacks of clothing in every size, there were small, tasteful displays with a few copies of each available style. The virtual garments were freely adjustable through the full ranges of their currently available colors and sizes. Once you'd decided on something, you'd tell a clerk, and the physical garment would be mailed to your house.

Handsome mannequins danced in place, modeling the wares. “I'm a California Girl!” said the nearest mannequin every so often. “California.” She was modeling a thin shell formal wet suit. “Are you a California Girl?” That was all she ever said, but sometimes she said it slow, and sometimes she said it fast; the rates were no doubt driven by the Poincaré sampling of a chaotic attractor. A one- or two-dimensional attractor suffices for something as simple as the scheduling of a time series, but the asynchronous motions of the mannequin's body were at least seven-dimensional, and the attractor underlying the marvelously plastic play of her facial expressions could have involved as many as thirteen variables.

Delicate, decorative struts stretched from one side of the great hall to the other. In this cyberspace world of pure geometry, the struts needed bear no physical tension, so they were free to meander vinelike in and out of straight-line true. Their surfaces bore spiral patterns with a passing resemblance to bark. With an unpleasant shock, I noticed a rapid file of small ants wending their way down the strut nearest to me. At a certain point, they jumped clear of the strut to join the ant cloud that had
blocked my vision before, a cloud that was raggedly expanding—presumably in search of me.

The GoMotion ants could walk through the “air” of cyberspace as easily as along the surfaces of cyberspace objects. If they generally preferred walking on surfaces, it was because it was easier for them to find each others' trails on the two dimensions of a surface. On a surface, nearly every pair of lines intersects, but in space, intersecting lines are the exception rather than the rule.

Roger had designed the GoMotion ant software so that the ants tended to pay more attention to their immediate neighborhood. In principle, the ants could have looked and
seen
that my tuxedo had moved about ten feet down the aisle from them. But their software architecture preferred to have them search for my tuxedo by the traditional myrmecine expedient of blindly milling about. In French, the word for ant is
fourmi,
and the word for the milling of ants is
fourmillement.
By extension,
fourmillement
can also refer to the tingling, pins-and-needles sensation one gets when one's foot falls asleep. Have I mentioned that I used to be a professor?

The seething little pests reminded me of the miniature ants I'd found beneath the base of a broken toilet in the first apartment Carol and I had shared—already more than twenty years ago? We'd called them
pissants,
and that's how I thought of these little guys: obnoxious pissants who were after my tuxedo.

Instead of laying down trails of pheromones and formic acid, the GoMotion ants left gappy ribbons made of colored polygons. With each step forward, each ant excreted a new polygon—as if it were building a path of tiny stepping-stones—and each time an ant added a polygon to the head of its ribbon trail, a polygon would disappear from the trail's tail. In this way, a moving GoMotion ant's trail always consisted of the same number of polygons;
the default value depending on the particular DTV chip the ant's computation was running on. Different ants used different combinations of shape and color for their trail tiles at different times; the resulting trail patterns served to pass information to other ants.

The nearby pissants' trails were three or four feet in length, and several of them were coming close to blundering into me. I moved farther on down the aisle, passing two other shoppers' body icons. No ants were bothering them—it seemed that the ants were only interested in me. Could the other shoppers even see them?

I tapped the shoulder of a woman in shorts. She had her body tuxedo's skin programmed to look like reflective bronze. “Excuse me,” I said, “can I ask you a question about this store?”

“I'm not a clerk.” Many Californians tended not to be very friendly. First of all they were too busy, and secondly there were so many druggies, psychos, and con artists that everyone was cautious.

“Oh, that's all right. I was just wondering—” I gestured over my shoulder at the cloud of pissants back down the aisle. “Do you see something odd there? Do you see a cloud of ants?”

“Ants?”

“Yes!” I strode back a few paces and plucked one of them out of the air, holding its struggling little form tight in my buzzing touchpads. “Look at this!” I said, hurrying back to the woman with my hand held high. “Wouldn't you call this an ant?”

“Uhhh, sorry!” said the woman shortly, not even trying very hard to look. “I . . . I guess my eyesight's not that good.” She turned and walked off as fast as she could.

I peered closer at the little ant. It was most definitely a GoMotion ant; its curves were as familiar to me as the contours of Carol's face. Roger had hacked our intricate
CAD ant models himself, fitting our shapes to official E.O. Wilson entomological data. He'd used spline curves, Bezier surfaces, Koons patches, nurbs—whatever it took. And then he'd taken GoMotion's cascading constraint manager and hinged all the ant parts together so that each piece “knew” how far it could swivel relative to the other pieces.

Right after Roger had gotten me hired, I'd helped set up the artificial life evolution software that ma de it possible for our ants to learn how to walk. We'd given our ants good bodies and the ability to evolve and get better at doing things, and now somehow they'd gotten loose and were following me around in cyberspace. Why?

My struggling pissant's shrill protest noises rose to such a level that I threw it to the floor. And then came the strangest thing yet. The ant grew. A lot. In the blink of an eye, it became twelve feet in length. Immediately, the giant ant spread wide its large, serrated mandibles and lunged forward. I held out my hands to protect myself, which must have been what the ant wanted, for now it clamped onto my hands with the toothy palps of its sickeningly intricate mouth. Yes, the ant bit my hands and swallowed them. I felt a sharp wave of pressure from my gloves' touchpads before they overloaded and went dead.

Although the ant bit and swallowed my hands, it didn't bite them
off
. My hand positions were now under the ant's control, but my body image and my viewpoint were still connected to those hands. For the few seconds it took for my hands to pass down through the ant's gizzard and into its crop, my viewpoint thrashed about uncontrollably. I could have stopped it by calling to Studly for help—but for now I just closed my eyes.

When I reopened my eyes, I found myself perched on the plump forward slope of the ant's butt: the gaster. The alitrunk with its legs was a sinister crablike assembly just
in front of me, and beyond that was the ant's head, complete with the great glittering bulges of its eyes, and the lively scapes and funiculi of its antennae. (The
scape
, again, is the stick part of an ant antenna, and the
funiculi
are the nested cones that wave.) I could move my real arms as freely as ever, but my tux's wrists were locked tightly against the surface of the ant's gaster, coupled as they were to my virtual hands. By eating the images of my hands, this ant had taken full control of my cyberspace location coordinates.

The ant cocked its head as if to stare back at me, and then its legs began to chum. We were heading across Nordstrom's toward the store's exit into the inner space of Magic Shell Mall, swinging along on the tops of the clothing exhibits. The ant was carrying me to some destination in cyberspace. Looking back, I saw the trail that my ant was leaving: a series of red pentagons alternating with golden triangles, the pentagons flat like stepping-stones and the triangles vertical like shark fins.

We flew out into Magic Shell Mall, which was shaped like a huge Buckminster Fuller sphere surrounding a central node leading back to the Bay Area Netport. The Magic Shell Mall stores were positioned all around the inner surface of the great Shell; the Netport node at the center was a swirl of luminous green and gray. My ant swooped through the great empty space, its bright trail rich in curvature and torsion. There were numerous shoppers present, but they took no notice of me or my ant. It seemed that, so far, the escaped ants were visible only to users of my machine.

Now we arced out to the far side of the great hollow Magic Shell and sailed into a blank unrented space between a video store and a stockbroker. My ant landed firmly on the floor, cushioning the landing with a springlike bouncing of
her
legs. (Now that I was in such an
intimate relation with this ant, I could no longer regard her as a generic
it!
)

She paced across the floor, the chitin hinges of her alitrunk meshing perfectly. The “floor” we were walking on was actually the inside surface of the great faceted sphere that made up Magic Shell Mall; the mall's simulated physics had its gravity vectors all pointing out radially from the sphere's center.

My ant crawled along an edge of one of the floor's polygons until she got to a corner where several edges met—this was a vertex of the mall's sphere. The vertex was an awkward bit of geometry where the tips of three lozenge-shaped quadrilaterals met the points of five narrow triangles. As we neared the corner we began to shrink.

Yes, we shrank. Keep in mind that one's cyberspace body was nothing more than a pure geometry of vertex coordinates, edge lines, and face shadings. The ant led the shrinking; her size went from camel to pony to hog to dog to possum to lobster to roach to sowbug to ant on down to the size of the teensy-tiniest pissant you ever saw.

All this time I remained astride the ant's gaster. The shrinking of my geometry lagged a bit behind the ant's shrinkage, so that my arms seemed always to be long tapering cones affixed to the front slope of her dwindling gaster. As I shrank, my angle of vision widened, and the video store's blank sidewall seemed to tower above the ant and me. Still we headed toward the corner where the five triangles met the three lozenges.

Because of computational round-off errors, the geometry of the corner was imperfect: the corner had a pinhole at its center. When we'd finished shrinking, we were small enough to crawl through the hole. There were a lot of pissants on the other side. My ant touched her feelers to the feelers of each of the other ants she met. When the
other ants noticed me, they showed their surprise by sharply jerking their gasters upward, which is how an ant chirps. The stiff back edge of the petiole scrapes against a washboardlike membrane on the front of the gaster. The process is called
stridulation
, and is similar to the way the grasshopper saws his legs against his body to sing a summer song.

So here I was in a cyberspace ant crack. Beyond the wary pissants floated an odd, drifting piece of geometry, an “impossible” self-reversing figure of the type that graphics hackers call
fnoor.

The piece of fnoor was of wildly ambiguous size. Relative to my tiny dimensions, the fnoor first seemed to be the size of my Animata, but a moment later it loomed as large as the pyramidal Transamerica building, and a moment after that it seemed no bigger than a sinsemilla roach. The fnoor was a clump of one-sided plane faces that seemed haphazardly to pop in and out of existence as the clump rotated. The fnoor's vertices and edges were indexed in such a way that the faces failed to join up in a coherent fashion. There was no consistent distinction between inside and outside, leading to a complete failure of the conventional cyberspace illusion that you are looking at a perspective view of an object in three-dimensional space.

My ant leapt right onto the piece of fnoor. It was bigger than us after all. The ant ran this way and that, feeling about with her antennae, seeming almost to be flipping the faces with her nimble feet. It was as if we were running forward, yet the same piece of fnoor kept being underfoot. Finally my ant found the spot she was looking for, a crazy funhouse door in the fnoor. Bending herself nearly double at the petiole, the ant squeezed herself and me through the aperture. Now we were inside the fnoor, and ants were everywhere. We were in an anthill.

Instead of being made of incorrectly hinged plane segments, the interior of the fnoor was a true solid model, pieced together from filled regions of three-dimensional space. Here, as on the fnoor's surface, the component pieces were hooked up inconsistently, so that—this is hard to describe—the inside/outside, left/right, up/down, and front/back orientation of each of the component space pieces was being continuously redefined. Naturally my ant headed for the very heart of this agglomeration of weirdness.

What was I thinking all this time? Why didn't I just say, “Help,” so that Studly would unplug my machine?

Although what I was seeing was terrifying and bizarre, I felt confident that it wasn't really dangerous to me. Nothing in cyberspace is dangerous—unless you're a sensation-hungry cretin who buys things like boxing game peripherals that punch you in the ribs. I've heard that there are even black market peripherals capable of stabbing or shooting the user; these to be used in moronic macho cyberduels. No violent peripherals for me!

No, no—I was in no physical danger from cyberspace events, but what about the old tradition that “certain sights can destroy a man's mind”? Well, what with years of math and pot and hacking behind me, I felt that by now my mind was a pretty tough nut to crack. So, no, I wasn't scared of what the ant would show me. My problem, as I've been harping on, was loneliness. The ant was taking me somewhere; therefore, I was less lonely.