desirable happened. Oh well!
The two neatest things in my virtual office were my Lorenz attractor and my dollhouse. The Lorenz attractor was a floating dynamical system consisting of orbiting three-dimensional icons, little simmie images that stood for pieces of information or which represented things my computer could do. The icons tumbled along taffy trajectories that knotted into a roller coaster pair of floppy ears with a chaotic figure eight intersection. If I liked, I could make myself small and ride around on the Lorenz attractor in a painless demolition derby with my files. It was a fun way to mull things over.
My dollhouse was a special miniature cyberspace model of my house that I’d once made as a Christmas present for little Ida, but she’d never actually played with it that much-one reason being that I was hardly ever willing to let anyone else use my gloves and headset. I needed them all the time for all the work I had to do-always too much work!
I’d tweaked my real house’s alarm system so that if anyone touched a door or window, the corresponding door or window would light up on the dollhouse. I had little models of myself and my family members inside my dollhouse. Actually my wife and three children shouldn’t have been in the dollhouse at all anymore, as they no longer lived here, but it would have made me too sad and lonely to erase them. In my dollhouse, my wife was in the kitchen and my kids were lying on their stomachs in the living room doing homework and watching a tiny digital TV. If they’d actually been in my house, moving from room to room, the little simmie-dolls that represented them would have moved around too. My house was smart enough always to know who was in which room. The little virtual TV was hooked into the Fibernet system; sometimes I would make myself small and watch it with my dolls, though never for long. Everything on TV enraged me, because everything on TV was the same: the ads, the news, the shows. In my opinion, all TV was all part of the huge, lying Spectacle that the government kept running to oppress us all. Data compression had brought us a thousand channels, but they all sucked, same as ever.
The dollhouse’s Studly-model did move around because he actually was physically in the house with me, rolling around and cleaning, gardening, keeping an eye on things, taking care of business, and occasionally talking to me. If I wanted to check something in the house, I could switch over to Studly’s viewpoint, and see what he was seeing through his two video camera eyes. When Carol had still lived with me, I would sometimes use Studly to sneak in and watch her while she was dressing or taking a piss. That would drive her frantic with rage. “I know you’re in there, Jerzy,” she’d scream as oily Studly sidled up to capture her pixels and send them through the aether to me. “Get your head out of that computer and come talk to me like a human being!” Usually, however, I didn’t have the time. When I was programming, I was always in a terrific rush.
Sitting in my office after Susan Poker left, it occurred to me that if I were to use Studly to kill the Realtor, I wouldn’t really have to program him for it. It would be much easier to couple myself to his manipulators and drive him in real time. That was known as telerobotics — a person driving a robot that was somewhere else, with the distant person using television to “see through the eyes of the robot.” Telerobotics was one of the most fun things you could do with a robot.
Tunelessly humming, I looked up from the doll-house and stared at the images riding my Lorenz attractor. Most of them were quite familiar, but what with my hookup to the Net and the existence of some more or less autonomous processes in our company machines, I would sometimes spot‘ a new icon. Today the new one was a little 3-D image of an ant, a sweetly made photorealistic model with mandibles, head, antennae, alitrunk, legs, petiole, and gaster-the spitting image of the virtual ants that Roger Coolidge had been working on in his lab at GoMotion. But no way were any GoMotion ants supposed to be loose like this. I pincered it up with virtual thumb and forefinger. It wriggled its legs and turned its head to bite me. The ant bite made a tingling physical flutter in my glove’s touchpads. There was a noise with it, a double burst of skritchy chaos. I dropped the ant. Chirping angrily, it dug its way down through my virtual office floor and disappeared.
Instead of chasing after the ant, I pointed my finger to the GoMotion door and nodded in there. The necessary information traveled over the Fibernet and then for a moment I saw nothing but a snowstorm of static, as the GoMotion communication software checked my access codes. There was a warbling tone as our systems synced together, and then I walked into the virtual offices of GoMotion.
How did I look? Like most users, I owned a tailor-made simmie of my cyberspace body. Cyberspace users called their body-simmies tuxedos. My tuxedo was a suite of video images bitmapped onto a blank humanoid form. The form’s surface was a mesh of triangles which could be adjusted like a dressmaker’s dummy; and inside the form were virtual armatures and hinges so that the thing moved about as realistically as one of those little wooden mannequins that artists used to have. The overall size of the thing was adjusted to closely match my body size with, of course, a few inches taken off the waist.
I’d had my body surfaces taped by a professional body-mapping studio right there in Los Perros: Dirk Blanda’s Personography. You’d go to Dirk Blanda’s and in the reception area there was a wall with plaster body-shapes lined up against it. Mounted on the ceiling over each body was a video projector beaming a satisfied customer’s image onto one of the body-shaped screens. Dirk Blanda’s had started out as a photo studio, but when the last big quake had wiped out his building, he’d retooled and gotten modern. I actually knew Dirk fairly well as his house was almost next to mine.
The tuxedo I used was pretty routine; it showed me wearing what I usually wore in real life, which was sandals, patterned socks, shorts, and a California sport shirt. I could change the patterns of the fabrics of my socks and shirt, and if I wanted to, I could get new simmie clothes, or I could even turn my clothes off entirely. The nude version of my tuxedo allowed me the option of deciding whether or not my simmie-genitals should show. In any case, the face was the important part. I had a series of canned expression shots; Dirk’s assistant had spent the better part of two hours coaching me into convincing expressions of laughter, surprise, boredom, anger, grief, etc. For casual communication, my software would guess at my expression from the sound of my voice. For higher- bandwidth communication, there was a pencil-sized video camera on my computer which could map realtime images of my face onto my tuxedo’s head.
I came into the GoMotion reception area wearing an expression of controlled worry. The tuxedo of Leonard, the tech group secretary, looked up at me and activated a roguish-smile expression. Leonard had a damp mustache and a perpetual sunburn. His virtual office was a big loft with clean white walls and skylights showing fluffy clouds overhead. A simmie of Bengt, our virtual prototype for Studly’s successor, was purring back and forth, pushing a polisher across the parquet floor. Bengt’s neck was a bit longer than Studly’s, and his body box had a slimmer shape. But for his legs he used the same inspired wheels-on-legs hack as Studly.
“Hi, Jerzy,” said Leonard.
“Hi, Leonard. Say, I think some of our ants got loose. Has anyone else noticed?”
Leonard laughed merrily. In his tux laugh loop, he would always touch his tongue to his mustache at the right corner of his mouth, a tic which made him seem both puppyish and devil-may-care.
“Why don’t you ask your bad rogue ant for some ID? Dereference a pointer or something.”
“When I picked it up, it bit me,” I explained. Leonard laughed the more wildly.
“It’s not funny, Leonard. If the ant is eating and shitting and leaving trails, all my code is being corrupted. It’s a wonder I can still see.”
“I’d think you’d be proud of yourself. Roger’s been promising us live ante for years, and now that you’ve been working with him, one of his ants has finally gotten smart enough to break out. Isn’t that a good thing, Jerzy?”
“Is Roger here?”
“He’s been in and out all weekend. Maybe he e-mailed you the ant!”
“Maybe.” Sending an experimental artificial life-form out over the electronic mail Net would be an incredibly careless thing to do, but not wholly out of character for Roger Coolidge. He was a genius-level computer hacker, somewhat eccentric, and imbued with the self-confidence that came from having founded a Silicon Valley startup that had mushroomed to a billion dollars in revenue in six short years. It was an honor for me to get to work so closely with him. Sometimes it was also a pain in the neck.
I sighed, and my computer transmitted my sigh from my microphone to Leonard’s receiver, wherever Leonard really was. Often he was physically at the GoMotion office in Sunnyvale, but several days a week he worked from his apartment down on Market Street in San Francisco. Maybe instead of wearing the gloves and the headset, he was watching me on a digital TV set, talking to me over a telephone, and moving his simmie with a video game joystick. For all I knew, looking at Leonard’s brightly cheerful cyberspace simulacrum, he was spending the day in bed with a lover. It was no use speculating. “How’s Bengt been doing? Has he banged into the furniture?”
“No. He’s smarter than Studly. Look.” Leonard scooped a handful of paper clips off his desk and threw them
