fnoor.
The rotating fnoor changed size irregularly; at a moment when it looked much bigger than me, I sprang forward and landed on it. I ran across the faces, which flipped out under me. I still had seen no ants. Finally I came to a kind of doorway in the dense angles of the fnoor; I squeezed through it and, as before, the fnoor turned into a solid model that lay all around me.
A weirdly shifting corridor stretched out ahead. I heard a faint chirping sound. I inched forward cautiously, but suddenly the corridor turned inside out and dumped me into a round room that was filled with-ants?
Not ants, not exactly, no. The creatures racing about in the round room were shaped like Perky Pats and Dexters, like Walts and Scooters and Squidboys. I flashed on the sickening realization that all the time I’d been evolving better Squidboys and more difficult Christensens at West West, the ants had been there in the background, using the process to make their own code even better. One of the Perky Pats gave me the finger.
I guess I must have tapped five-nine-two-six for the stunglasses pass-through then, but I don’t remember doing it. All I remember is that I was looking up at the ceiling of my bedroom with everything radiating off optical echoes of itself, everything receding and surrounded by memory images. The beams in the ceiling were covered with crawling colored lights, and my ears were filled with a resonant flutter. My stomach cramped and my bowels turned to water, I jumped out of bed and rushed to the toilet. I shit out a big nasty wet mess; it seemed to keep coming forever. When I was through, I stood up and looked in the mirror. I didn’t see stunglasses on my face; all I saw was an aging guy with severe diarrhea.
When I walked back to my bedroom, something rushed out at me from the left side of my field of vision. It was a cross between an ant, a face, a 3-D Mandelbrot set, and-oh, a furnace-stove made of blue and white tiles. It was way fast. It said some nonsense phrase like, “Beetlejuice monkey!” and I murmured, “Beetlejuice monkey?” to myself, trying to assimilate, and then the creature sped up a thousand times and sneered, “Nah, Beetlejuice monkey!” and I tried to relate, and the creature went faster, and it and I went into a hideous hebephrenic thought loop as the flutter in my ears sped higher and higher. The mandible-snout Beetlejuice Monkey was mocking and aggressive, it was totally dissing my thought speed, it was trying to dominate and show me where it’s really at-it did unbelievable shit like counting from one to one quadrillion. Out loud and by ones. It was way, way fast.
At some point in this psycho nightmare I decided the only way to stop the Beetlejuice Monkey was to kill it. I lunged forward with my velvet clown hands sticking out before me, and I grabbed the creature at its narrowest part. I began squeezing, and it was struggling and hitting back at me, and then someone grabbed me from behind and jerked at me, and then there was a wrenching at my face and everything got slow and different.
Keith was holding me in a full nelson.
“Jerzy! Jerzy! What’s going on? We just got home. What are you doing, man? What did you do to your chick?”
Gretchen was squeezed back against the wall, her face all blue, her dear face a frozen dead mask of horror. Her cold dead tongue was sticking out between jaws that were open in a wide death-agony rictus; it was poor Gretchen’s last tongue-face. I’d killed her. My diarrhea was all over my legs and all over the bed.
“You’re going to die for this, Jerzy,” screamed Queue, pushing past Keith and shoving her face up against mine. “You’re going to get the gas chamber and go to hell!”
I cringed back from the hideousness of what I’d done; I just couldn’t deal. I wanted to be catatonic. I fell back against my shit-covered bed and merged into the Beetlejuice Monkey.
NINE
Inthe morning i woke soft and sweet, my mind a blank. Before opening my eyes, I happened to rub my hand up against my head and I felt the headset. I pushed it off, opened my eyes, and looked around as the horrible memories came flooding back to me.
Beautiful unharmed naked Gretchen was in bed with me. I hadn’t strangled her. I lifted up the sheet and looked down. There was no diarrhea. Had everything after Perky Pat’s giving me the finger been a phreak burn? What had I said to Gretchen and Keith-what had they seen me do?
“Keith,” I called, hurrying naked down the spiral staircase from the aerie I rented. “Hey, Keith!” I was ashamed to hear how my voice shook. My stomach looked fat and vulnerable. The living room and the kitchen were empty and the house was utterly quiet. Presumably they were still asleep in their bedroom downstairs. Or maybe they’d never come home at all. Maybe that thing about Keith shaking me had been part of the dark dream.
“Keith? Queue?” I walked halfway down the stairs from the living room to the next lower level. “Keith?” At the bottom of the stairs I opened the door to Keith and Queue’s bedroom. The messy room was cool and empty. No one had slept here last night.
I ran back up the stairs to the living room and back up the spiral staircase to my room. Gretchen was on the bed with the sheet wrapped around her, sitting there looking out the window at the beautiful fog and sun in the redwoods.
“Why were you yelling? God, you’re uptight. You woke me.”
“I… Did I do anything funny last night?”
“You did lots of things that were funny,” laughed Gretchen. “Now get back in bed so we can cuddle. What are you stressing for? You’re all red!”
I saw Riscky’s headset lying on the floor. It was still live, with images playing inside it. I wanted to stomp and crush the headset, but I was barefoot. Instead I tapped three-one-four-one (how-I-need-a) on the right temple to turn off the satanic engine.
I lay down on the bed. Gretchen spread the sheet over both of us and spooned herself against my back.
“Was I yelling last night?” I asked.
“If you were, I slept right through it. Pot and good sex puts me totally to sleep.”
“After you went to sleep, I put on my new cyberspace headset and I had-I had a terrible experience. I thought you were dead. I thought I choked you. I thought I had diarrhea in the bed.”
“Were you with the ants?”
“Yes. Only now they look like robots and people. They’re much much much faster than they used to be.”
“Jerzy, why do you fry your brain?” Gretchen sounded mad. “It’s like you don’t begin to realize-” She shook her head. “The ants are shit, Jerzy. The ants suck.”
“Nice talk for a mortgage insurance broker.” Thank God I had this warm real woman with me. “I love you, Gretchen. I’m glad you’re here. I’m so scared about everything.”
“About your trial starting tomorrow?”
“And about the ants. And about this latest burn. I don’t think there was a phreak behind this one. I think the ants did it to me themselves.”
“Did you do something to bother the ants?”
“Well, yes, I went into their nest. The Antland of Fnoor, I call it.”
“So don’t go there again. Don’t go into cyberspace at all.”
“And I’m worried about what the ants might do to the new robots. We copied a GoMotion ant lion into the new robot code, but these cyberspace ants I saw last night-I think they’ve been sitting in the machines at West West and watching me create the code. They were imitating Squidboy and even Perky Pat. If there’s a loophole in my code, the cyberspace ants are going to find it. The new robots might not be safe to use.”
“You should tell GoMotion and West West. Get your lawyer to fax them a letter so that if something new goes wrong you’ll have a defense.”
“That’s a good idea.”
We ate some yogurt and granola from Keith and Queue’s kitchen. Instead of crushing my headset, I put it and the gloves into my car’s trunk. And then I drove Gretchen to her apartment.
“See you again tonight, Jerzy?”
“I’m not sure. I’ll call you.”
“Stay away from the ants!”
