The lateness of the delivery was good news. Since I had not even received the agreement by Tuesday night, Studly was-Stu assured me-the legal property and responsibility of GoMotion Inc. during the time frame when Jose Ruiz’s dog was killed and the GoMotion ants were released. And furthermore, since I now declined to sign the severance agreement, Studly and my cyberdeck were in fact still the property and responsibility of GoMotion, pending further negotiation.
The legal issue of whether I had maliciously influenced the robot Studly’s actions was less favorable. According to the West West cryps, Jose Ruiz was going to be the D.A.‘s star witness. Apparently he was saying he’d watched me and Studly through his window. This part of the trial was going to be tough; Stu would just have to challenge the accuracy of what Jose Ruiz thought he’d seen and heard.
Above and beyond all factual matters were a host of technical issues about the statutes I was charged under; did these particular statutes apply to the unique events of that Tuesday evening on White Road? Stu said that even if I was convicted of something, he could keep me out of jail on appeals for years-or for as long as West West was willing to foot the bill.
I used Stu’s computer to e-mail Roger asking if he’d testify that it was he who’d infected Studly with the ants, but Roger e-mailed back that the best he could do was wish me good luck. He was very busy in Switzerland, and in any case he “would not feel right” in offering testimony to support my “highly idiosyncratic interpretation of the events.” I was, in other words, free to twist slowly in the wind.
My house on Tangle Way was unlivable. Not only were there reporters encamped round the clock, but, according to Stu, death threats were rolling in. The public had it in for me, the morons. And the network news was making me out to be some kind of rabid hyena. Even the so-called liberal pundits were judiciously intoning things like, “A free society cannot tolerate misfit hackers who would block the open exchange of ideas.” The exchange of their ideas, that is. At least the freestyle amateur TV broadcasters had picked up a boost from the brief blackout of official TV.
Whenever I saw the DTV news these days, I had an intense desire to cryp the GoMotion ant lion code, find a loophole, and show the hole to the GoMotion ants in cyberspace-but no, Jerzy, no.
I couldn’t live at home anymore, and Gretchen didn’t want me to move in permanently, so Thursday evening after my first full day’s work at West West, I took a roundabout route up through the Santa Cruz mountains to Queue Harmaline’s house.
Queue and Keith lived near Boulder Creek, on a steep hillside surrounded by giant redwoods. They had a hot tub and a samadhi flotation tank. Their home was like a coral reef or a beehive: a congeries, an un-architected wad of rooms plastered to the steep redwood hillside. They always needed money, and I knew that they would have a room to rent to me.
Queue had a brace on her knee because she’d recently made the error of going skiing while she was rushing on a mighty LSD run. “I should just trip in the samadhi tank,” she told me with a tinkling giggle, “but you wake up a day later and you feel like Dracula.” She had long glossy black hair that tended to split and hang in a spitty way over her face and mouth when she talked about psychedelics. “I’ve learned not to do anything that involves metal or electricity when I’m on acid, ’cause I have no way of knowing what I might get into. And now I know not to go skiing. Sure we can rent a room to you. If you behave.” She batted her eyes at me.
Though Queue always professed absolute faithfulness to Keith, she was a big flirt and I was happy to flirt with her. Her head was very round. She had the perky cute features of a brunette ingenue. Her odd laugh was intoxicating, and she wore gypsy amounts of jewelry, with a descending scale of nine gold hoops arranged along the rim of each of her ears.
“So how does it feel to be a big media star, Jerzy? You’ve invented a whole new order of life. It’s magic.” We were sitting in her kitchen drinking herbal tea.
“It’s not magic, Queue,” I sighed. “It’s science. I don’t think about transcendence or the One anymore.”
“But there has to be some mystery to help get us through these dreary times. We need it. If we didn’t need it so much, why did your ants try to kill TV? They’re a higher force for New Mystery.”
“Everything computers do is science, Queue. Logic. There’s no mystery to it at all.” I was tired and drained from the day’s hacking.
“You hide behind your preppy clothes and your sleepy expression,” cried Queue. “Come on! Be interesting!”
“These aren’t supposed to be preppy clothes,” I said, looking down at my garb. I was wearing a red rayon shirt covered with UFOs, some short white canvas shorts, yellow socks with a white section map of Death Valley, and my Birkenstocks.
“You don’t fool me, Jerzy. You’re as tidy as a little boy going to a birthday party. You yuppie. Come on and say something interesting or I won’t rent you the room!”
“Interesting.” My whole life was so interesting that I could hardly stand it-yet now, under Queue’s scrutiny, I realized that I rarely ever did talk about what it was that I found so interesting about hacking robots in cyberspace. More often than not, I let the people I was talking to divert conversations up their own creeks; I’d just paddle along and dream behind my sleepy expression. But if anyone actually asked, I could still talk.
“Okay, I’ll tell you some random things that are interesting. Last time I was in cyberspace the GoMotion ants took me out into the fourth dimension and put me into a gangster movie with a guy who looked like Death. Instead of a mouth he had a big steel zipper with a padlock. His name was Hex DEF6. That’s a hexadecimal number which is-” I paused and pulled out a slip of paper where I’d written this information down, “1101 1110 1111 0110 in binary and 57,078 in base ten. I have no idea what it means, except that if you leave the last zero off the binary version you get a sym-metric bit-string. Not interesting? How about this: The night the ants got loose, I was over on the east side trying to fuck a Vietnamese girl called Nga Vo.“
“Are you hard up?”
“Dig it, Queue, I’m not hard up, I’ve got myself a cashmere yuppie mommy. Her name is Gretchen. She’s a mortgage insurance broker.”
“How many children does Gretchen have?”
“None, as far as I know. I think of her as a mommy because she reminds me of the big dazed whitebread American mothers some of the kids at school had when I was small. Dreamy, slow-moving women with kind smiles. And just that soft hint of a double chin, you know?”
“Ugh! I don’t want to hear you talk about women, Jerzy. It’s so sexist and disgusting and-ugh! Can’t you tell me more about your computer adventures?”
“Queue, you got no inkling.” I took a deep breath and smiled. Keith was down in the basement making some tapes. “Talking openly like this gets me high. In cyberspace I sat on the back of an ant that found me in Nordstrom’s, and the ant shrank me down small and we crawled out a hole to the Antland of Fnoor. I guess that was a New Mystery. If I can get a cyberdeck up here, maybe I’ll take you there.”
“Do it!” Queue exclaimed. “But it has to be on the sly. You’re a computer criminal, Jerzy. I’m not going to dial up the Fibernet and ask them for a cyberspace account and then have everyone see Jerzy Rugby come out of my registered memory node.”
I thought for a minute. “Any good phreak or cryp would find a way. Maybe… maybe I could use the Animata’s satellite dish.”
“Your car has a dish?”
“It has a titanium-doped electronic Fresnel lens in the moonroof. My map machine uses the lens to pick up on navigational satellites.”
“Okay, this is starting to be interesting.”
“Can you let me have a little of your pot now, Queue?”
I got into a rhythm of commuting from Queue’s to West West every morning and working all day in my cubicle in the West West programmer pit two cells away from Russ Zwerg. Most nights I’d sit out on the deck with Queue and Keith and get high.
Carol? I saw her the next weekend, when I hired some movers to clear us out of Tangle Way. Carol, Tom, and Ida were there to help pack and sort.
The idea was to move some stuff to Carol and Hiroshi’s apartment, and some to a rented space in Crocker’s Lockers. It was the first time I’d seen Carol since the night the GoMotion ants got loose. She confronted me down in the kitchen, out of earshot from the kids and the movers.
“So you’re living with Queue? I guess that means you’re stoned all the time?” Carol didn’t particularly like
