about the same things. Science and fantasies interested me, but the little ordinary human things-the kinds of things Carol cared about-I couldn’t focus on them.
Now the phone was ringing. Had I reconnected it? Oh, yeah. I shambled into the house and picked it up. It was Carol.
“Jerzy! What did you do to the children today?” Her voice was hard.
“Nothing. What’s your problem? I thought we weren’t going to talk on the phone anymore!” The last couple of times we’d talked, it had been me who placed the call, angling for her to come back, and Carol had been quite discouraging.
Instead of me, she had her boyfriend, the guy she’d left me for, a thirty-four-year-old sushi chef named Hiroshi. Hiroshi worked at Yong’s, a restaurant near the eastside San Jose college where Carol taught. I actually met Hiroshi one time when I accompanied Carol to Yong’s. He was a tall, hip guy with a long ponytail that he untucked from his chefs hat when he joined us at our table for a cup of tea. A native-born Californian, Hiroshi spoke perfect English.
I’d sensed Hiroshi and Carol’s attraction for each other right away, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it. They’d gotten to know each other because Carol was such a glutton for sushi that she came to Yong’s for lunch nearly every day. For his part, Hiroshi seemed to find Carol both intellectually fascinating and exotically desirable.
Six weeks after I met Hiroshi, he and Carol were living together. In her parting speech, Carol had said that Hiroshi made her feel young and loved for the first time in years, that Hiroshi listened to her, and that Hiroshi cared about her feelings. “Not like you, Jerzy! You have a heart of stone!” Carol could chatter on endlessly in that vein, babbling out the most hurtful things imaginable, seemingly quite unaware that the despised white middle-aged middle-class male she was addressing was a person with feelings too.
“I saw poor Ida’s face at supper,” Carol was saying now. “You can’t tell me nothing’s wrong. What did you do to them? It’s hard enough for me to keep them cheerful now that you’ve wrecked our marriage. You have no idea how it feels for… ”
It occurred to me that I had nothing whatsoever to gain by listening to yet another of Carol’s self-indulgent tirades. “Leave me alone,” I said, and hung up.
It was too cold to go back outside. I was, in fact, shivering. The house was dead quiet; there was no sound but the chattering of my teeth and the distant hum of my computer. I wandered into the living room. There was one of Carol’s paintings right over the fireplace. It was a hard-edged cartoonlike landscape with a woman in it. What if I were to slash a big X in the canvas? I was cold, empty, and mean-a man nobody could ever love.
I looked through my CDs and S-cubes, but I couldn’t find one I wanted to hear. In the old days-in my thirties-I liked playing music, but Carol pretty well cured me of that. For some reason she was technically incapable of putting on an S-cube or a CD. Our receiver is, admittedly, kind of funky, with confusing controls and a reset button in back that you have to hit every time the wall plug wiggles in its socket. Even so, Carol could have learned how to use it. But why should she, when it could be something else to bug me about. “Play that old CD I like,” she’d say, too lazy to remember its name. “Or play the new blue S-cube.” Always those same two recordings. Christ.
I was probably better off with Carol out of my life, but Lord the house was empty. Especially once it got dark. Nobody home but me and-Studly! I’d forgotten good old Studly! I found my car keys and went out to the car and opened the trunk.
“Okay, boy, time to get out.”
“Are we at Queue’s?”
“No, I didn’t go there. I couldn’t get any money. I was going to try to get her to sell me some pot.”
“What is pot?” asked Studly as he carefully extricated himself from the trunk. He hoisted himself partly out of the trunk with his arms, put one leg out and extended it to reach the ground, then swung around and got his other leg out too.
“Pot is a special plant leaf which I roll into thin cigarettes to smoke.” A thought hit me. “The butts of the pot cigarettes are thin and little. They’re called roaches. Have you happened to find any roaches when you cleaned the house recently?”
“I do not know,” said Studly. “But we can look in my nest. I have an accumulation of seventeen small unclassified objects. Perhaps one or several of them is a roach.”
Studly’s nest was a corner of a basement room off the kitchen. There was a wall socket where he recharged his batteries; and there were tools, parts, and lubricants so he could routinely service himself. Studly plugged in and topped up his power supply while I looked things over. There was a little shelf in Studly’s nest where he put unusual things that he picked up around the house. Buttons, a hairpin, a ticket stub, a baby tooth, but no roaches. Oh well!
“Hey, Studly, let’s go upstairs and look at the ants.‘’
“I can dig it.”
I led Studly up to my computer room. My display screen was still dark with images of ants, busy Go-Motion ants weaving the figures of their asymmetrical rounds. Were they waiting for me?
The noise drifting out of the speakers in the headset was sweeter than it had been before, almost musical.
“Why did you try to keep me in there?” I rhetorically asked the ants. “What do you want to show me?”
I picked up the headset.
“Studly, will you stay here and keep an eye on me while I’m wearing the phones?”
“I will watch you.”
“Sit near the plug to the computer there, and if I say help, then you pull the plug out of the wall and take the goggles off of my head, okay?”
“No problem, Jerzy.”
I put on the gloves and headset and reentered cyberspace. The cloud of ants surrounded me, thick as smoke and shot with twisting lines of color. Instead of trying to back out, I pointed my finger and flew forward. Bingo. I was out of the ant cloud and able to see that Gretchen had moved my viewpoint to the sportswear section of the virtual Nordstrom’s department store-a fabulous structure CAD-crafted to resemble a huge Victorian crystal palace of lacy ironwork and frosted glass.
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 Poincare 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
