drugs or drug culture, and she and Queue had never hit it off. As Carol once put it: “Queue thinks I’m corny and obvious, but she doesn’t realize that I think she’s corny and obvious.”
“No, Carol, I’m not stoned all the time,” I said defensively. “I’m hacking my brains out for West West is what I’m doing.”
“I’ll bet. What does Keith have to say about your moving in? Are they married?”
“He thinks it’s fine. Carol, all I’m doing is renting a room. I am not sleeping with Queue. She’s very committed to Keith. And no, they’re not married.”
“That’s because Keith doesn’t have an income. Queue looks out for number one. I bet she tries to marry you, Jerzy. She’s had her eye on you ever since you got the good job at GoMotion.” In imitation of Queue, Carol opened her eyes wide, threw up her hands, and rocked from side to side to simper, “Oh, Jerzy, you’re so smart and wonderful!”
“Give it up, Carol,” I snapped. “How can you be jealous when you’ve already left me for another man? It’s not logical.” Unexpectedly my voice cracked. “I can’t live alone, you know.”
Carol gave me a sudden, frank look, her eyes roving over every contour of my face. She was on the verge of tears. “Are we making a big mistake, Jerzy?” From upstairs came the heavy sounds of the movers. “Don’t you still want me?”
I silently embraced her, and the kids found us there like that. “Woo-woo,” they said, softly, hopefully. Carol and I broke the clinch and got back to the details of the move.
Outside, the reporters were on us like meat bees at a barbecue. I phoned Stu to come and make a statement to them. I stood by his side as they filmed us. Stu spoke slowly and with conviction. He was acting like a good lawyer, like a stand-up guy.
“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen of the press. My name is Stuart Koblenz, and I am Jerzy Rugby’s attorney.
“GoMotion Incorporated has chosen to try and make Jerzy Rugby the scapegoat for their own industrial accident. Mr. Rugby will enter pleas of innocent to all the charges placed against him. We are preparing vigorously for the trial. For obvious legal reasons, Mr. Rugby is unable to answer questions at this time.
“The fact that Mr. Rugby is moving out of this house today is a direct result of the continuing media harassment of this innocent man. I would strongly request that the press please respect the privacy of Mr. Rugby and his family in the weeks to come. Thank you.”
After this, none of us would say anything at all to the reporters, and they pretty much pulled back, though a few of them followed the moving van to get footage of Crocker’s Lockers and of Carol and Hiroshi’s apartment complex.
Under the terms of my bail, I’d had to tell the court about moving to Queue’s and, of course, as soon as the court entered it into their machine, all the Bay Area cryps could grok my new address. Most days a car or two would tail me both ways of my commute between West West and Queue’s-sometimes reporters, other times cops or dicks or industrial agents. Queue’s house was up off a locked private road which gave me some privacy there, and West West had a gated entrance as well.
Normally the cars that followed me would melt away at the gates, but the Monday evening after we’d moved out of Tangle Way, a guy jumped out of his car and headed for me while I was opening the gate.
“Jerzy!”
Our car engines were off and we were alone in the quiet under the redwoods. Wind soughed high in the branches above. The asphalt was thickly scattered with brown pine needles, and dappled with gold patches of setting sun. The person who’d called to me was a twenty-year-old boy with shoulder-length brown hair in rasta tangles; he was bouncy and skinny, with thin lips pulled back in an expression that was not quite a smile. He walked toward me. His hands were empty, but an odd little shape trailed along the pavement after him like a mascot. A toy animal? There was no time to look closer. I focused my attention back on the boy.
“What do you want?” I challenged.
“That’s awesome that you’re working for West West, cuz,” he said in a soft, trailing-off twang. He was right in front of me. The open Animata door was just behind me. I watched the boy’s big hands and feet closely for any sign of an attack. Something bumped against my foot.
I looked down: the boy’s mascot was a motorized toy truck with some circuit boards in its back. The truck had the head of a rubber cow glued to its front, and this is what was nudging me.
“Am I Hex DEF6 yet?” drawled the boy, and waggled his eyebrows like Bugs Bunny imitating Groucho Marx. He raised one hand and made a gesture of tapping ashes off an invisible cigar. “Big business. I’m most hellacious with family video.”
“You little creep.” I thought of the tortured cyberspace session I’d spent writhingly watching myself and my loved ones being tortured and killed. They’d pasted our faces into slasher movies and war footage-my mind kept coming back to the scene of Sorrel and Tom running down a bombed road in Vietnam, all their clothes burned off by napalm, Sorrel screaming and Tom’s mouth twisted into an unbearable dog bone of anguish. And the scene with Ida sobbing over my disemboweled corpse while the killer crept up behind her-I surged forward and got my hands around the boy’s neck. “I’ll kill you.”
Bruisingly he knocked my arms away and sprang back. “No harm, schoolmarm. It’s only software. Like the GoMotion ants.”
“Then the threats weren’t real?”
“I wouldn’t say that either. There’s always fireworks with a Chinese Dragon. You better deliver the goods for West West, Jerzy.”
“You work for West West?”
“No, bro.” The little robot truck had retreated to a safe distance when the boy and I had grappled, but now it came nosing up close to me again. It rose up and down on its tires, bucking like a low-rider and then actually jumping a couple of inches off the ground. It was cute, with the cow’s head and everything, but maybe there was like a hypodermic dart gun inside one of those soft rubber horns, a dart gun loaded with bio-hacker brainscramble. Not wanting to find out, I kicked hard at the side of the mascot. It dodged me and skittered away. I took the opportunity to hop back into my car and close the door.
“Come see me in cyberspace if you need any phreaking done,” said the boy. “That’s all I wanted to say. And don’t forget-don’t forget Hex DEF6.” Even though he was bareheaded, he made a hat-doffing gesture appropriate for a ten-gallon hat.
“Get out of here, you Texas prick.” I reached into my glove compartment as if I had something in there.
“I’m gone.” He drove off, and I went on up to Queue’s. Keith was sitting on the deck staring up at the trees. He was a peaceful person: big, healthy, and always high. We did two quick bowls of Queue’s bud.
“Hey, Keith, do you know where I could get a pistol?” I asked as the rush settled over me.
“Statistically, a gun is most likely to kill its owner or a member of the owner’s family,” said Keith mildly. “So why would you want one? Guns are bad karma.”
“A kid was threatening me down at the gate,” I explained. “He had sort of a mechanical cow. A little one.”
“What did the little cow do to you?”
“It just rolled around, but I felt like it was getting ready to attack me. Maybe it had a needle inside its horn. I wish I could have shot it.”
“I think that if you shot off a gun, the cops would revoke your bail, Jerzy. Why don’t I give you a staff instead.” Keith disappeared into the warren of the house and emerged with a thick, ornately carved redwood stick. “I made this. See the sacred energy symbols that spiral up around it? Keep it with you in your car.”
So instead of a gun I got a sacred staff.
Well that’s enough talk about the real world; now it’s time to talk about hacking.
For the longest time, the Kwirkey/SuperC logjam would not yield. West West was committed to using Kwirkey, which was the creation of one of Seven Lucky’s seven Taiwanese founders. And most of my coding experience for GoMotion was in SuperC, and all the Veep code which the West West cryps had copied was SuperC as well. But Russ Zwerg was working on the interpreter, or had one running, or was about to have one ready, wasn’t he?
On the surface, it seemed that the languages were easily interconvertible; it was just a matter of writing an automatic interpreter that knows that “A + B” in SuperC is “(+ A B)” in Kwirkey, and other stupid shit like that. Yet
