“I put a bit-for-bit copy of an ant lion into the Adze code,” I said, “but the ant lion is so compressed and encrypted that I still have no idea how it works. What is the magic bullet?”
“Can’t you guess? It’ll be more fun for you if you guess. I love to guess.”
My mind felt slow and sludgy. My feet were cold. Instead of answering, I sullenly looked away. Outside it was still raining.
“Can I have the chips now, Jerzy?” said Roger after awhile.
“What chips?”
“The four Y9707-EXs that you have in your satchel. I’ll give you, oh, eighty thousand dollars for them. Eighty thousand dollars for the chips and for your goodwill. I mean it.”
“When would I get paid?”
“Right away.” Roger stood up and pulled open the top drawer of his desk. “I have your money right here.” He laid it out next to the cyberdeck, eight packets of hundred-dollar bills, each packet with a wrapper band saying $10,000.
“You’re not planning to kill me are you?” I asked nervously.
“Of course not, Jerzy. In fact I’m hoping you can stay here a while and work with me. You’re a fellow maniac!”
I took the packet of chips out of my black satchel and handed it to Roger. He stood aside and gestured at the money. I stuffed the sheaves of dollars into my satchel. They barely fit.
Roger was peering at the chips. “If Vinh Vo didn’t garble my instructions, these should be better for my purposes-these are ant-designed chips that I had one of Vinh’s contacts make at National Semiconductor.” He smiled up at me. “They’re supposed to run twice as fast-and, what’s even more important, they don’t support the ant lion. The ants will be able to get into these new robots and party.” He pocketed the chips and led me out of his study. “Now for the tour!”
First Roger showed me the rest of his house’s ugly, stripped rooms, with plywood, drywall and broken tiles everywhere. The house computer turned the lights on and off as we moved around. At the end of a hall off the kitchen, there was a turbid swimming pool festering under a slanting roof of translucent corrugated plastic. There was raw bare dirt around the pool, and the door to the pool room was off its hinges for repair. It seemed as if Donar Kupp had been as slow with home improvements as Roger. In the basement was a furnace and boiler whose overdesigned Swiss plumbing fascinated Roger-geekin’ engineer that he was.
Back upstairs, we found two beat-up folding umbrellas and splashed down the path to the windowless building Roger called his factory. My feet got soaked all over again.
Even more so than in the house, everything was unfinished and raw in the factory. The floors and walls were bare concrete. On the ground floor there was a ceiling crane and a deep cistern well with a concrete cover over it. There were a bunch of barrels and cans filled with different kinds of resins and solvents for making plastics, and the rest of the floor was covered with packed cardboard boxes of Roger’s stuff.
“We have six hundred boxes all marked Household Goods,” said Roger. “It’s like a treasure hunt, only every box you open has something you’ve seen before.”
He took me down the concrete stairs to the basement of the factory and showed me another furnace and boiler. He said this furnace could heat a whole town. There was a huge, frightening electrical board with the fuses the size of cannon shells. We got into a freight elevator that ran from the basement to the ground floor to the factory’s second floor.
“There’s no stairs to the second floor,” said Roger, “and no windows up there. Donar Kupp was intensely paranoid.” As the elevator inched up to the second floor, Roger pointed at a little handle marked ALARM. “Try turning that, Jerzy.” The little handle turned easily, making a small ringing sound behind the wall of the elevator. “It’s nothing but a bicycle bell!” said Roger, shaking his head. “I don’t like to use the elevator when I’m here alone. To make it even more dangerous, the fuse box for the elevator is on the second floor where nobody can reach it if the elevator breaks! I need to automate the factory with a central computer like I did my house.”
We eased to a stop on the second floor and the elevator doors opened onto a huge room with laboratory benches along the far walls. The area near the elevator was packed with stained industrial machinery-plastics compression molders and the like. In the open middle of the room were two robots looking at us. They moved toward us.
“I named them Walt and Perky Pat,” said Roger devilishly. “I was able to patch in some pieces of the Walt and Perky Pat code you and the ants evolved in the Our American Homes at West West.” He raised his voice to address the robots. “Walt and Perky Pat, this is my friend Jerzy Rugby. He’ll be working here with us for awhile.”
Walt, who was a two-armed Veep, wheeled forward and held out his humanoid hand for me to shake. “Hello, Walt,” I said. Now Perky Pat, a three-armed Adze, came forward too, holding out her hand-shaped manipulator. “Hello, Perky Pat.” I shook both their hands.
“Hello, Jerzy,” they said, not quite in unison. Perky Pat’s voice was higher than Walt’s.
“Roger told us about you, Jerzy,” continued Perky Pat. “He said you helped him design our programs.”
“That’s right,” I said. “First I worked at GoMotion and then I worked at West West. How old are you, Perky Pat?”
“Roger and Walt put me together three days ago. I’m one of the first kits West West shipped.”
“I’m a month old,” volunteered Walt. “Roger built me on May first.”
“That’s nice,” I said. “Roger tells me that you two are supposed to self-replicate.”
“Yes, Jerzy,” said Perky Pat. “Roger wants us to reproduce by building new robots without human help.”
“I know how,” said Walt confidently. “And instead of putting the standard kit software on our children, we’ll patch together combinations of our own programs.”
“We’ve been casting some of the parts ourselves,” said Perky Pat. “Soon we’ll be able to make everything except the chips. And Roger says that by next year we’ll be able to make the chips too.”
“Yes, we do plastics,” said Roger, gesturing toward the big, smelly plastics machines. “These were Donar Kupp’s, Jerzy; they’re linked into a single system driven by standard industrial microcode. The only catch is that the documentation for the system was handwritten by Kupp in German. But I got GoMotion to send me a German language module for Walt. And now he understands the manual.”
“ Ja,” said Walt proudly. “ Ich verstehe.”
“Can you run the machine, Walt?” I asked..
“ Ja, ja. Es geht gam gut.”
“Talk English, Walt,” reprimanded Roger. “And show Jerzy some of the pieces you’ve made.”
“I’ll get them,” said Perky Pat. These robots were eager as Santa’s elves.
Perky Pat darted across the lab and came back with something in each of her three hands. “This is a leg strut we made. And this is a panel of the body. And this here, this is an imipolex resin bead with an electronic circuit in it.”
“Let me see that!” said Roger. “I didn’t know you’d made one of those already.”
Perky Pat handed him the teardrop-shaped bead of hard, shiny plastic. Roger held it up, peered at it, then passed it to me. The bead was yellowish and transparent. Inside it was the dark filigree of an electronic circuit. Some input/output wires bristled from the pointed end of the bead.
“How did you figure out how to make it?” asked Roger.
“The basic recipe was in Kupp’s notes,” said Walt. “And Perky Pat came up with some modifications.”
“I don’t get what it’s for,” I said. “The Veep and the Adze don’t use any parts like this.”
“I’m not sure what it’s for,” said Perky Pat. “The cyberspace ants told me to make it, but the ant lion on my chip keeps me from understanding why. I hate the ant lion.”
“Creativity,” said Roger. “Initiative. A yearning for freedom. Not bad, eh Jerzy?” He drew out the pack of four new chips. “These chips are just what we’ve been waiting for, Walt and Perky Pat. They don’t support the ant lions, and they run faster! Let’s try ’em out. Walt, could you please turn yourself off?”
“Okay, Roger. But will I lose memory?”
“No, I don’t think so. Not unless the new chip malfunctions.”
Stoic Walt opened the manual controls door in his side and flipped his power switch to Off. His body gave a hydraulic sigh as it settled down onto its folded legs with its hands dangling limply. Roger used a screwdriver to open the access panel on Walt’s other side. He pulled Walt’s old Y9707 chip out of its multipin socket and snugged
