A robot’s connectors are simply the wires that snake around inside the robot’s body to hook together the motors and sensors and processors-the wires and the little sockets on the ends of them. It’s a humble issue, whether or not a pin works loose from its socket, but it’s a crucial one. I told Sun about some special Belgian-made connectors that we’d just started using with good success, and he e-mailed off an order for six thousand of them.
“How is GoMotion going to deal with power?” asked Sun next.
“We’re making our machines plug into a wall socket whenever they have the free time. The Xyzix palladium- hydrogen batteries we’re using can hold about a three-hour charge. And you can fully recharge a Xyzix in ten minutes.”
“Okay, yeah, the Xyzix model KT-80? That’s what I thought; that’s what we’re doing too. So let’s talk about software.”
“That’s where I come in,” I said proudly. “As you know, I’ve been using genetic algorithms to tweak the high-level code. We’ll want to get about 256 instances of your robot evolving around the clock. My code hooks into GoMotion’s ROBOT. LIB, of course. We’ll need to license ROBOT. LIB from GoMotion or-”
“We’ve got ROBOT. LIB,” said Sun Tam. “We’re already using it.” I smiled with relief and we talked about other software topics, first about genetic algorithms and then about control theory. We started working on a list of which parameters and register values we’d want our code evolution to tweak.
Three happy hacker hours blurred by, and then I was at the limit of what I wanted to absorb and emit on my first day of work for West West. Later, no doubt, I’d be driving myself nuts over their code, but no more today. I had a date with Nga Vo.
I said good-bye to Sun Tam and went back to Ben Brie. “Looks cool, Ben. I have to go, though; I need to take care of some things.”
“Okay. See you tomorrow? Nineish? We’ll give you a machine and get you on the Net.”
“Yeah. And can you get Russ to print me out some specs on the Kwirkey/SuperC interface? I think reading them might be more efficient than for me to listen to him.”
“I’ll talk to him.”
“Uh… one more thing. I’m totally out of cash, Ben. Could you give me an advance today?”
I wended my way back out of West West and found my Animata. I had $800 in my pocket. It was two-thirty in the afternoon. West West looked like a good gig.
FIVE
While I was driving 280 across town to East San Jose, I fished out the scrap of paper that Nga’s cousin had given me-5778 White Road. I flicked on the electronic map attached to my dash and told it Nga’s address.
Intense green lines appeared, showing a diagram of San Jose, with a highlighted path indicating the best route from my satellite-calculated current location to Nga Vo’s.
The east side of San Jose was bounded by rounded yellow foothills that undulated hugely toward some mountain peaks that you could see on a smogless day. The hills weren’t very good for hiking because they were bone-dry with tough sharp grass that stabbed your ankles. But they were nice to look at from the freeway.
As I drew closer to Nga’s, the map rescaled itself, always maintaining a magnification that just held the bright wriggle of the remaining route. Right before crucial turns, the map would speak to me in a quiet woman’s voice. Carol’s voice, actually. Last year I’d fed the device a phonetic map of Carol’s voice. I’d thought that was funny, since Carol was terrible at reading maps. Carol had thought it was stupid of me, not to mention being an invasion of her sacred privacy, almost as bad as my using Studly to peek at her taking a pee. Whatever. The phonetic map was a good hack, and whether Carol liked it or not, I could still hear the sound of her voice, which was something I missed almost as much as the smell of her body.
Two blocks from the Vos’ house, the map showed me something I didn’t want to see: a detailed, stippled picture of an ant. A cunning dusting of dither pixels added informative shadings to the image. The scapes of this ant’s antennae were tilted toward me, and her mandibles were wide open. Her body rocked back and forth in the sawing motions of stridulation. The map’s tiny speaker began stringing fragments of Carol’s voice into deep, demented chirps.
The sound was scary, but also fun to listen to, in a sick kind of way. It was as good as the thrash I might hear on like “Ted Bed’s Skunk Bunk on the Rhythm Wave of the West, Radio KFJC, 89.7 on your FM dial, broadcasting from Foothill College in Los Altos Hills, California,” a personal favorite. Ted Bed always sounded like he’d been up all night flying on candyflip in a cyberclub.
Most kids couldn’t afford their own cyberdecks, but there were plenty of clubs with wall-sized Abbott wafer screens on three out of the four walls. Users in the club wore stereo-shutter flicker glasses. Cheap and dirty video technology would capture their dancing images and put them up into the big cube of shared cyberspace above the dance floor, and the deck would mix the dancers with daemons, Simmies, and active tool icons: virtual buttons, dials, and sliders the dancers could use to change the synthetic musical sounds. Flying on a and e: everyone inside the same rave deck, everyone inside the controls. It would be interesting if the ants showed up in those clubs. The Attack of the Giant Ants! It’s Them!
The ants, the ants, the ants. I had a feeling that it was thanks to the ants I’d been fired from GoMotion. Thanks to the ants I’d seen the Death simmie, that thing that called itself Hex DEF6. Thanks to the ants, Hex DEF6 had gotten the opportunity to threaten to have me and my children tortured and killed. As I reached toward the map to turn it off, the ant image rocked her head and let her pixels turn into a plat-a lot-by-lot map-of Nga’s street. I turned the map off anyway. I had arrived.
The houses were tidy one-story slab-foundation ranch-style homes, each painted a different pastel color, and each with rosebushes blooming in its front yard. All the houses in sight were architecturally identical, and all were equally well kept up-all save for one gray, run-down, whipped-to-shit number down at the corner. The whipped-to- shit clone had two Toyota minitrucks in the driveway: one good truck and one whipped-to-shit truck with no wheels.
The Vos’ house, on the other hand, was pale pink with white and yellow roses and the Vos’ car was a beige Dodge Colt. The golden foothills rose up behind the Vo home like stage scenery. Nga greeted me on the small front stoop, her sly, adorable face dimpling with smiles. We stepped into the living room, where Nga’s parents, aunt, and grandmother sat on two couches.
The room had wall-to-wall carpeting, and the windows were covered with flowered drapes. There was a mat by the front door; I understood that I should remove my shoes. I crouched to get my sandals off, facing a big red and gold calendar from Lion Supermarkets which hung over an assemblage of electronic equipment: a CD jukebox, a bigscreen DTV, a gameplayer, and an S-cube deck. On the top of the machines were two white nylon doilies with vases of plastic flowers. There was a Vietnamese religious shrine on the other side of the room. The shrine was a red-painted wooden table holding up narrow corniced shelves, the whole thing a couple of feet wide. On the table were joss sticks, a bowl of fruit, some red tubes holding candle-emulating light bulbs, and a picture of a god. There were other, more mysterious items in wrappings on the shelves.
With much laughing and many interruptions from her mother, Nga introduced me all around. The family consisted of Nga’s parents Thieu Vo and Huong Vo, Huong’s sister Mong Pham, Huong and Mong’s old mother Loan Vu, Mong’s son Khanh Pham, who was home but not presently visible, and Nga’s two little brothers The and Tho, who were still at school. Nga had an older brother named Vinh as well, “but he not here very often.”
Old Loan Vu had white hair, and said nothing. Her eyes were very slanted. Nga’s parents and aunt were slender with broad faces and prominent cheekbones. All of them were interminably smoking cheap cigarettes.
Now Nga’s mother Huong led me on a tour of the house. The bedrooms were quite bare, with all the bedding stripped off the large beds save for the flowered bottom sheets. Like the front room, each bedroom had flowered drapes and a red and gold Lion Supermarkets calendar.
In the spotless kitchen, we found Khanh Pham, the one who’d handed me Nga’s address at the croissant shop. He was sitting at the round kitchen table reading a motorcycle magazine. He had a big Adam’s apple and
