“Jerzy! You made it! Come on in.”
“Hi, Roger.”
“Do you need anything else, Mr. Coolidge?” asked Tonio.
“I don’t think so, Tonio. Do you need anything, Jerzy?”
“How would I know? I barely know where I am. Can I sleep here?”
“Of course,” said Roger. “You’re my guest. So, yes, that’s all, Tonio. I’ll call you in the morning.” Tonio splashed back down the path to the driveway, and the door locked itself behind him.
All the floors in Roger’s house were dusty plywood; he’d stripped away whatever had been on them before. I’d expected that Roger would be living rich, but no, he was living weird. “Kay is back in California just now,” said Roger, referring to his absent wife. “Would you like a tour?” It didn’t occur to him to offer me food or drink.
“I’d like to talk first.”
“Fine.” Roger wore an inoffensive, even subservient, expression. On things that didn’t matter to him he played the spineless jellyfish but-as I knew from experience-when it came to something he did care about, he was like a saber-tooth tiger.
He led me from the entrance hall into the living room, pausing to point out a tiled structure the size of a refrigerator. “Look at this,” said Roger. “This is a Swiss ceramic stove.”
The stove was nicely tiled in blue and white; some of the tiles had flowers painted on them. My feet were cold and wet, but even so the stove looked anything but cozy-to me it looked like the phreaked-out Beetlejuice Monkey thing I’d seen the last time I went after the cyberspace ants. The Beetlejuice Monkey had been a cross between a Mandelbrot set, an ant and-I felt sure of it now-Roger’s stove. But why? I reached out and touched the stove; it was stone-cold.
About half the wallpaper had been stripped off the living room walls. Set into a jagged hole in the wall near the stove was an uncased computer with a keyboard. The fit was bad enough that I could see the computer’s chips and wires. A nice molding for it would come later, after the wallpaper got fixed.
“That’s my house computer,” said Roger. “It controls the heat, lights, locks, shutters, and so on. I had to put in fifty-seven different servo motors for it. What an interesting hack that was!”
I walked across the room and looked out the living room’s big window. It showed trees and the road that led back down to Saint-Cergue, though with the rain, I could only see a hundred meters before the road melted into mist.
“When it’s clear, you can see Lake Geneva with sailboats on it,” said Roger. “And when it’s very clear, you can see Alps on the other side of the lake. But you said you want to talk. Let’s go into my study.”
The light in the study came on automatically when we entered. The room was as I’d seen it last night in cyberspace. Plywood floor, gray drywall walls with white plaster at the seams, and a window that looked out onto a meadow sloping uphill. A long, filled-in dirt trench scarred one side of the meadow. There was a closed-circuit TV- monitor and a cyberspace deck on the desk. The monitor was tuned to a view of Roger’s empty driveway. Roger sat down in his comfortable armchair; there was a folding plastic chair for me in the corner next to a cardboard box of random home repair tools. I dragged the chair over to sit near Roger.
“This property is very interesting,” said Roger. He was so rich that all the people he ever talked to agreed with him. This gave him license to play the happy prattling boy, babbling on about whatever his current obsession might be, confident that he would be listened to and taken seriously. “The person who lived here before me was a manufacturer of plastics compression-molding equipment. Donar Kupp. He died last year. He patented a method for incorporating three-dimensional electronic circuits into solid lumps of thermosetting imipolex resin. Smart beads. They’re amazing artifacts-I have one around here someplace, it looks like a fly in amber. A very gnarly fly, mind you.” Roger chuckled happily. “All the major pipeline companies use Kupp’s smart beads to monitor fluid flow, and the French riot police use the beads for smart nonlethal bullets.” I’d never read about any of this, but, as usual, Roger knew it all. “Kupp retired here five years ago, and he fixed up the other building-the one by the driveway-he fixed it up like a factory. He wanted to expand on his circuit inclusion technique. Since thermoset imipolex is a semiconductor, he found it possible to grow diode and triode transistors right into-”
“Hey, come on, Roger,” I interrupted. “Let’s talk about the ants. Let’s talk about me being fired and framed and phreaked out of my mind. Why did you do it, Roger? What’s all this been for?”
Roger paused and gazed at me in that blank, dreamy, slightly irritated way of his. “All this has been for better robots,” he said presently. “You did such a good job on the Veep for GoMotion that I wanted you to go to West West and have a second shot at robotics programming. I want to breed the robots, you see, so I needed to have two parents that were different. The next generation of robots could be quite a surprise.”
“You want to breed the robots?”
“That’s the future, Jerzy, it’s manifest destiny. The robots need to breed and evolve. They need to self- replicate. This is about artificial life, for crying in the sink.”
“You want the robots to build more robots? What if they take over the Earth?” I asked.
“I don’t particularly want them to stay on the Earth,” said Roger impatiently. “Robots aren’t meant to be our slaves. Who in his right mind wants a slave anyway? The robots are meant to evolve, to take the torch from us and to grow beyond what we’ve done. We should send robots to the Moon. If you make a robot small enough, it can stand an awful lot of acceleration. Launching a capsule of robots with an electromagnetic railgun might work. I’ve been trying to talk to NASA about this, but so far I’ve only been talking to idiots.”
I shook my head. Space travel was one of Roger’s hobbyhorses-and no way was I about to gallop off on it with him. “Please don’t let’s change the subject, Roger. We’re talking about what you’ve been doing to me. How do the ants fit into the picture? Why did you let them ruin television?”
“I thought you’d be happy. Aren’t you the one who’s always saying he hates TV?”
“Sure, but when you released the ants, you stuck me with the blame. How did you get Studly to do that thing with the Fibernet anyway?”
“I was driving him,” said Roger, smiling slyly. You almost had to love the guy.
“Telerobotics? I thought you were in Switzerland by then!”
“I was, but that doesn’t matter. I used a cyberspace telerobotic interface. My signal would have been too weak, but Vinh Vo was carrying a signal-amplifying transponder in the back of his panel truck. When I heard you were trying to date Nga Vo, I did a data search and found Vinh as a relevant sleazebag. He worked out perfectly.”
“Oh God.” I was struggling to take it all in. “It was you who killed the dog?”
“Well, that was an accident. Driving Studly was like the world’s best arcade game, but it was the first time I’d played.”
“But why pin the ant release on me?”
“You were handy. And it made better sense than letting GoMotion catch the blame! I own a million shares of GoMotion stock. When the stock goes down a point, I lose a million dollars. I had to release the ants so that they’d get out into more environments and evolve faster. I mean, why do you think our robot code worked so well in the first place?”
The heavy rain outside was drumming on the roof and splashing into the puddles. “The robot code?” I said. “It worked well because I wrote good algorithms that I tweaked with genetic evolution.”
Roger cocked his head and stared at me with quizzical annoyance.
“Oh yeah,” I added, “there were also all the basic subroutines you wrote. Your awesome ROBOT. LIB code. I guess nothing would have worked without them. Without ROBOT. LIB the programs wouldn’t have been fast enough to use.”
“They would have sucked wind,” said Roger. “And, guess what, I didn’t write ROBOT. LIB. The GoMotion ants wrote ROBOT. LIB. I wrote the code that wrote the code. That’s the main thing the ants were for. Didn’t you ever realize that?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head in wonder. When I’d started on at GoMotion, Roger had never gotten around to giving me a full explanation of what we were up to. He’d just turned me over to Jeff Pear and to Pear’s deadlines. “But if the ants are in ROBOT. LIB, why don’t they take over and ruin the robots like they ruined television?”
“The ants aren’t in ROBOT. LIB, they just wrote it,” said Roger. “As for the ants taking over the Y9707-chip robots-well, they haven’t been able to so far because of the GoMotion ant lion. The ant lion has a magic bullet that kills ants. It’s a special instruction that stops them dead in their tracks; it fossilizes them. It’s like Raid or Black Flag.”
