“Give me back that headset, brat!” came Tom’s voice.
There was the sound of a brief struggle, and then Tom was back in control. The black velvet clown looked up at the tools. “I think I see a rolled-up map,” said Tom.
Tom was good at cyberspace games. With wonderful fluidity, he leapt up and snagged the map before it could fly out of reach. He rolled it out flat on a table and I peered over his shoulder.
The map was like a window looking onto a three-dimensional wireframe model of Roger’s castle.
“Show me the path from here to the ant lab,” said Tom to the map.
A noodle of pale green light appeared in the image. Tom held up the map and moved it around, looking in at the three-dimensional image from various angles.
“Just hold on to my foot,” said Tom finally. I crouched down and latched on to him.
“Close tools,” I said, to make the cloud of icons disappear. The rolled-up map remained in Tom’s hand.
Tom flew forward and darted through one of the doors. We wriggled about in dark passageways for awhile, with rats and goblins scattering at our approach-the goblins were short, fat-bellied creatures with fang teeth and heads like jack-o’-lanterns. On we flew, turning left and right, up and down-Tom navigated rapidly and with confidence.
And then we were in a room with a black table and three glassed-in walls. Each of the three windows looked out onto a cyberspace ant colony. The first window showed a sprawling landscape of etched circuitry, the second showed the Antland of Fnoor, and the third window opened onto a scale model of an enormous dome-covered factory. Each colony was boiling with activity. As usual the ants were busy practicing, busy getting better at what they did.
The ants in the first colony were designing computer chip circuitry and microcode. Their world was a huge flat motherboard intricately chased with filigreed coppery lines. The ants looked like the tools, components, and wires used for circuit design. They were, variously, switches and logic gates plugged into the circuit, soldering irons that moved connections this way and that, jumper wires that made distant connections, and code-packets that tested the system’s logic. These were the guys who had developed ROBOT. LIB and the design for the Y9707- EX.
The ants in the Antland of Fnoor looked like tiny robots and tiny members of the Christensen family-just like during my phreakout. Seeing such a mass of them made me itchy and uncomfortable. I found myself unconsciously flicking my fingers, as if to get ants off me. One difference was that now some of the robots were of the new four- armed variety that I’d just seen on the monitor display of Roger’s factory. But a bigger, more frightening, difference was that the little models of four-armed robots seemed to be deliberately causing as much harm as possible to the other robots and to the Christensens. The evolution of the ants’ and robots’ behavior had taken a sinister turn with the designing of this new generation of robots. They were as murderous and as implacable as an army of skeletons in a medieval painting of the Triumph of Death. Talk about emergent behavior! Roger had put in one mutation too many, poor guy.
The ants in the third colony looked like four-armed robots and plastic ants. All the Veeps and Adzes had been eliminated from this world. The robots were racing up and down the narrow aisles of their factory, stiffly swinging their quadruple arms. Some of them worked frantically at tiny plastics machines that cranked out the tiny models of the plastic ants. And the virtual plastic ants-what were they up to? Off to one side of the factory, I noticed a row of Our American Homes with small Christensen models in them. The cramped little homes made me think of the shantytown dwellings of impoverished factory workers. Over and over, the plastic ants would surge into these homes and tear the occupants limb from limb. Then four of the plastic ants would take on the forms of Perky Pat and her family, and the others would practice killing them again.
I had to turn them off! Next to each of the three windows was a board of controls with an On/Off switch at the top. I pressed Off on the Antland of Fnoor’s board, and two additional buttons appeared above the On/Off switch. The new buttons were marked 0 and 1.
“Please enter the binary digits of the halt code,” said a voice.
“The code is Hex DEF6,” I said.
“Please enter the binary digits of the halt code,” repeated the voice.
“What’s the binary for that number, Da?” asked Tom.
“I don’t exactly remember, but I can figure it out,” I said. “I’ll think aloud so you and Ida know too. ‘Hex’ means ‘base sixteen’ and the base sixteen numerals are 0-1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-A-B-C-D-E-F. A through F stand for ten through fifteen. What’s D? I always think: D is an unlucky grade, and D is thirteen. So DEF6 is thirteen-fourteen- fifteen-six. Now all I have to do is turn those four numbers into binary. Thirteen is eight plus four plus one. An eight, a four, no two, a one: 1-1-0-1. Fourteen is one higher; add one and carry one to get: 1-1-1-0. Fifteen is 1-1-1-1. Six is no eight, a four, a two, no one: 0-1-1-0. So all right.”
I put my hand up to the pair of buttons and slowly entered the bits, thirteen-fourteen-fifteen-six in binary: 1101 1110 1111 0110
The little figures in the Antland of Fnoor stopped moving-all of them. But the ants in the other two colonies became wildly agitated. The great motherboard flashed with desperate signals, and the factory colony boiled with activity.
“Quick, Tom,” I shouted. “You stop the motherboard, and I’ll stop the factory!”
We keyed in the numbers as fast as possible. Riscky’s phreak deck must have had clear-channel satellite access, because there didn’t seem to be any lag in Tom’s transmissions from California to Switzerland. He beat me by half a second. By the time I keyed in my last four bits, the great motherboard colony was already dark and still.
But something bad and unexpected was happening in the factory colony. The plastic ants were swarming all over the window that looked in on them and now, somehow, some of the plastic ant images were out of the colony and in the ant lab with me! My piezopads buzzed as the ants tried to bite me, while I finished my key presses and killed the factory colony. But the handful of plastic ant icons that had escaped were still alive! Some kept on biting me, and the rest of them scuttled past me and off down the corridors of Roger’s dungeon maze.
Before Tom and I could even catch our breath, there was screeching from the tunnel, and a pack of angry goblins came running in to attack us. They’d been taken over by the escaped ants! One of them snatched the map from Tom’s hand and stuffed it into his mouth, chewing and swallowing like mad. The other goblins began tearing at our tuxedos.
“Oneone oh oneoneoneone oh oneoneoneone oh oneone oh!” screamed Tom.
The magic bullet worked once more: the goblins keeled over dead, along with the few plastic ant icons still loose in the ant lab with us.
“All right!” I whooped. “I think we got all of them!”
“Gimmie five!” said Tom.
“Did you kill the ants?” came Ida’s voice.
“Yeah!” said Tom. “Some of the ants escaped and got into orcs, but we killed the orcs too. Da’s spell works.”
“I want to try,” said Ida.
“No!” said Tom. “Get off me, grubber! Is there something else we have to do next, Da?”
“There’s a bunch of real plastic ants in the next building from where I physically am, Tom. They’re like robots. I doubt if the spell will work on them. We have to find a way to kill those ants, too.”
“How?”
“I think we might be able to take over the two big robots who are building them.” I stepped forward and nudged the dead goblin who had swallowed the map. “Can we cut this guy open?”
“I’ll jump on him,” said Tom.
Tom jumped and the contents of the goblin’s stomach spewed onto the floor. The map was a tattered, unreadable mess.
“Can you at least get us back to the entrance hall, Tom?” I asked anxiously. “I can’t remember all the turns we took.”
“I remember, old man,” said Tom. “Grab my foot.”
We flew back to the main hall, alert lest any remaining ant-possessed orc attack us. But if there were any more loose cyberspace ants, they were lying low.
“ Now you let me see!” came Ida’s voice. There was the sound of another tussle, and then Ida had control of
