I felt like a moth being wrapped in spider silk: snared, envenomed, paralyzed, cocooned, and slowly sucked dry-or made the living host of eyeless larvae. I tried to struggle, to shake the web. “Have either of you heard of Hex DEF6?” I demanded. “Out with it!”
“Hex deaf sex?” giggled Susan Poker-a bit too glibly?
“What are you talking about, Jerzy?” asked Gretchen, bringing the toast.
“Hex DEF6 is the name of a simmie I talked to in cyberspace. It was Monday, the same day the ants scared you, Gretchen. That night I put the goggles back on and I flew out of the ant cloud you’d been in. One of the ants got big and it carried me back to the ants’ cyberspace nest. Inside the nest was this simmie that looked like Death and said his name was Hex DEF6. There was a Susan Poker simmie in there too. Were you in it Susan?”
“Me in cyberspace?” She laughed and shook her head. “I’m computer illiterate. Are you sure you saw a simmie of me?”
“Well, it might have just been there to scare me,” I allowed. “The whole scene was pretty weird. Instead of a mouth, Hex DEF6 had a metal zipper with a padlock on it.”
“Could he talk?” asked Gretchen.
“Yes. He said that he’d hurt me and my children if I didn’t go work for-” I stopped myself from saying more.
“For Seven Lucky Overseas,” finished Susan Poker.
“That’s not the name they’re using!” I exclaimed happily, and bit into my toast. Once you got used to Susan Poker she was sort of amusing. She was so totally out front about her nosiness and pushiness. A born Realtor.
“Have you considered selling your story to the press?” asked Susan Poker. “You could go on ‘Sixty Minutes.’”
“There’s nothing but amateur TV anymore,” reminded Gretchen.
“Well, when the networks come back,” said Susan Poker, sipping her coffee. “You need an agent, Mr. Rugby. I could do it for fifteen percent. I’ve got more connections than you realize.”
Done with eating, I shook my head and stood up.
“Good-bye, ladies. It was fun, Gretchen. I’ll call.”
“How will you get to work?” demanded Susan Poker. “Can I give you a ride?”
“And where will you stay tonight?” asked Gretchen. “Are you going to come back here?”
“ I’ll call. I am not going to discuss every goddamn detail of my life in front of Susan Poker.”
“Good-bye, Mr. Rugby,” said Susan Poker.
Gretchen followed me into the hall and gave me a giggling kiss. This was all pretty funny, I guess. Love makes everything funny. Love? Yes, I loved Gretchen, though that didn’t mean much. Love is, after all, an elastic concept; like many men, I fall in love several times every day. So why not say it.
“I love you, Gretchen.”
“I like that in a man.” She pursed her lips and planted a kiss on me, just like Carol used to do. “Have a nice day. And come back. You don’t really have to take me to the Mark Hopkins.”
“Should I come back tonight?”
For the first time this morning, Gretchen looked evasive. “Well, tonight I have a date. But if you’re desperate, I’ll break it. You’re scared to go back to your own house, huh?”
“I’m going to get my car, but I’m not going to stay there.”
“Well…” While Gretchen hesitated, Susan Poker briefly popped her head out of Gretchen’s door for a peek at what was taking us so long. If the loathsome Susan Poker was in this space, why was I so intent on trying to stay here? For more sex with Gretchen? But I’d just finished realizing that sex could happen with lots of different women, right?
“Gretchen, enjoy your date and don’t worry about where I stay. I’ve got it together.” I tapped the top of my head to mime the togetherness that I hoped would soon arrive. “I’ll call tomorrow. And don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten about the Mark Hopkins.”
Key in hand, I made my way up Tangle Way. The notice was still on my front door, but I didn’t dare go close enough to read it. There were a half-dozen reporters sitting in their cars. My driveway was clear. Moving quickly, I got in my Animata and drove off, shaking the pursuit cars on the freeway to West West.
SEVEN
I got seriously into hacking the code for the ADZE robot, and the next three and a half weeks went by in a blur.
Hacking is like building a scale-model cathedral out of toothpicks, except that if one toothpick is out of place the whole cathedral disappears. And then you have to feel around for the invisible cathedral, trying to figure out which toothpick is wrong. Debuggers make it a little easier, but not much, since a truly screwed-up cutting-edge program is entirely capable of screwing up the debugger as well, so that then it’s as if you’re feeling around for the missing toothpick with a stroke-crippled claw-hand.
But, ah, the dark dream beauty of the hacker grind against the hidden wall that only you can see, the wall that only you wail at, you the programmer, with the brand new tools that you made up as you went along, your special new toothpick lathes and jigs and your real-time scrimshaw shaver, you alone in the dark with your wonderful tools.
In the real world, I spent Friday and Saturday at the Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco with Gretchen. The city was full of people partying; there was a kind of holiday mood over the absence of TV; everyone was talking and laughing much more than usual.
Actually, there was a certain amount of analog TV: crazy amateur shows being put out by random nobodies. A few places had analog TVs set up to show amateur TV to the true tube addicts, and you got the feeling that some of this unofficial stuff might catch on. Who really needed the networks anyway? We were free of the bullshit, free of the Pig. But it was too good to last.
Sunday morning, GoMotion released the ant lion virus and by Sunday evening, the ant lions had cleaned up DTV. Roger Coolidge made an appearance on the news, taking credit for the ant lion, and apologizing to the public- in a nonspecific kind of way-for any difficulty that the unfortunate release of the GoMotion ants might have caused. Everyone understood that “unfortunate” was a code word for “crazy Jerzy Rugby.”
Like the GoMotion ants, the ant lions lived on DTV compression and decompression chips, but they didn’t affect the images. All they did was sit there and kill anything that acted like a GoMotion ant, though exactly how the ant lions killed the ants was a GoMotion trade secret.
The ant-detection code made the GoMotion ant lion into a huge lurking memory hog that wallowed in a DTV chip’s memory like a sullen supertanker in a mountain lake. This was a problem because DTV’s fractal-theoretic image-expansion algorithms wanted to use a lot of memory for scratch paper: the finer the image, the more memory was needed. With the ant lion taking up so much chip memory, the highest-resolution DTV formats were plagued with the bail-out blotches that result from incomplete computations.
But mid-resolution broadcast DTV was working fine, which was the main thing. The highest-resolution DTV was mainly for playing back digitally mastered movies that you could download over the Fibernet. Intel, National Semiconductor, Motorola, and the other chip-sters were promising to roll out DTV memory-expansion minicards with enough room for both high-resolution mode and an ant lion by the next financial quarter. Funny how ready for that they were. I wondered if GoMotion had recently bought a lot of chip stock.
My state trial got scheduled for May 28, some three and a half weeks off, with the federal trial still pending. Stu said my chances in court were fair to good.
The paper on the door of my house turned out to be a notice of an attempted Wednesday morning delivery by Federal Express. The documents Fed Ex had been trying to deliver to me had been mailed by GoMotion at 6:00 p.m. on Tuesday afternoon. Stu picked up the documents Thursday and found a unilateral letter of dismissal signed by Jeff Pear, along with two copies of a severance agreement signed by GoMotion president Nancy Day, with blank lines waiting for my signature.
