and pictures. It had taken a few years for the transition to happen, but DTV was the only kind of television around anymore, and DTV chips were cheap.
Getting his ant simulations to run on DTV chips had been one of Roger’s unbelievable now-I-will-levitate hacks. But it worked great. Standing in the empty ant lab I looked at the wall of virtual screens snowing ants-this was all taking place in cyberspace, remember, so the ants’ DTV info was actually being routed into image- generation software that was being patched into the image which my goggles maintained. The ants looked more agitated than usual, and there seemed to be more of them.
All of a sudden something appeared in the ant lab with me, a figure that seemed to be Roger Coolidge in his usual tuxedo of gray pants and short-sleeved polyester shirt, looking at me in that moony, pop-eyed, passive- aggressive way he had.
“Hi, Roger,” I said, but now his body icon broke apart like soft diarrhea and turned into ants, all the ants from all the colonies loose in the ant lab with me, mad ants filling the room and seething in the multire-gime patterns of classical turbulence. My earphones blared skritchy chirping and my gloves’ touchpads pulsed a weird vibratory massage. I was hallucinating a sharp shit stink off the ants. I was retching. I tore off the headset and the gloves… or I thought I did.
Two things that could keep a user from taking off cyberspace equipment were “voodoo cyberspaces” and “the dark dream.”
A voodoo cyberspace had hypnotic flickering and rhythmic sound intended to numb or fascinate the user too much for him or her to want to leave. Voodoo cyberspaces were really a form of entertainment, not unlike commercials or music videos.
The ants were potentially good voodoo, much livelier and more realistically seething than any artificial lifeform I’d ever seen. Some kind of radically emergent breakthrough in their behavior had happened over the weekend; they were a whole new clade. Good voodoo, but way too intense just now.
I thought I took my headset off, and I thought I saw it lying on my desk. I touched myself, I was fine, I stood up and pushed back my chair, I turned and leaned down and grabbed hold of my power cord and yanked it and saw the plug pop out of the wall, and saw the lights on my computer go out, and saw the little images in the headset on the desk wink out, and then I turned and walked toward the door and out of nothingness something plucked at my temple. Out of thin air, something tugged at the side of my head.
It was the cable that led from my headset to the computer. I was still wearing the headset, I now realized. The ants had put me on the dark dream! I tore off the headset and the gloves.
The essence of the dark dream was to make you think you’d taken off the gloves and headset when really you hadn’t. It was like when your alarm clock goes off and you want to keep sleeping, so you dream you’ve woken up and gotten out of bed and turned off the alarm, and then you start dreaming that the continuing noise of the alarm is just something normal like traffic or a leaf blower or a backing truck’s beeper.
Right before I thought I’d taken off my headset, the dark dream had shown me a perfectly taped and enhanced image of it happening, synced to my movements. It had tricked my hand-eye feedback loop, and like some defective robot, I’d failed to “physically acquire” the headset before I “took it off.”
You probably think you’d never make a mistake like that, but just try perturbing your mouth-ear feedback loop with, say, a half-second delay. Read a sentence and heaheare ahhself reareading try pt-pt-ry to
… When effects lag too far behind your actions, you enter a blithering state of confusion which cyberspace engineers call feebdack, with “feeb” as in “feebleminded.”
I jerked my power cord out of the wall. In the dark dream, I’d gotten hold of it all right, but the cord was way longer than the dark dream had shown me, the cord had two coiled loops of slack under my desk and all I’d done was to straighten out a loop’s worth while the dark dream showed the plug popping out of the wall and made the sound of the plug bouncing off the floor.
I ran down to the kitchen and got a drink of water just to feel something real, then ran back and made sure my machine was really off, grabbed my wallet, took my rack of backup CDs, stepped out of the house and, thank God, Nature was there. No machine’s dark dream could hack the whole world.
TWO
Out in the world, it was half past eleven o’clock of a Monday morning, and there was a trail of real ants running across the porch step where Susan Poker had stood. I sat down next to them, catching my breath. Have you ever studied an ant closely? I sure have.
Front to rear, an ant’s body has four parts: the head, the alitrunk, the petiole, and the gaster.
The head bears a pair of large hooked mandibles which have serrations that fit together like teeth. The mouth itself is a complex structure with two small pairs of feelers or palps, though you can’t see the palps when the mouth is closed. The ant’s two big antennae sprout right above the mouth, about where you might expect a nose to be, and the ant’s great compound eyes are on either side of its head, posterior to the antennae. Most of an ant’s “facial expression” comes from the way it holds its antennae. Each antenna is like a pennant on a stick; the “stick” is a long segment called a scape, and coming off the tip of the scape is a segmented “pennant” of eleven funiculi. When an ant is running along, it holds its scapes forward with the funiculi pressed down to smell out the territory. When an ant is alarmed, it holds its antennae up like a hunting dog’s ears.
The alitrunk is the ant’s walking machine: it’s an intricate structure bearing three pairs of legs. Each leg has a thigh and shin, and attached to each shin is a thing like a foot, consisting of one long segment followed by four small segments and a terminal claw. The ants have wicked spurs near the back ends of their feet.
The petiole is small spacer segment between the alitrunk and the gaster, fitted in as neatly as the seat on a motorcycle. The petiole serves as a universal joint.
After the intricate machineries of the ant’s mouth and legs, the gaster is a cheerful bit of comic relief; nothing more than a fat, elegantly shaped butt with a stinger and a cloaca serving as the gateway for the earth, air, fire, and water of the ant’s excretion, smell signals, poison, and reproduction. Not that the gaster is a featureless balloon; no, if you look carefully, you’ll see that the gaster is structured like a plant bud or a pinecone, it’s made up of a series of overlapping plates capable of sliding enough so that the gaster can bend quite a bit.
The gaster contains glands that secrete poison. In order to repel enemies, some ants rear back and squirt out jets of poison. For closer infighting, ants inflict stab wounds with their poison-smeared stingers. Ant poison is a mixture of formic acid, neurotoxins, and histamines.
Ants’ gasters also secrete pheromones, or so-called semiochemicals. These chemical signals can express alarm, a recruitment call, or a desire to exchange oral and anal liquid; pheromones tag the smells of nest-mates and the members of the various castes; judicious sprays of pheromones serve as trail markers and as territorial boundaries.
Ants are cool. The motion of a trail is continuous as water flowing, but if you watch one particular ant, you’ll see that she (the only male ants are the winged ones that appear for mating flights) does not, on the average, follow the main line of the trail she’s moving along. Instead she meanders back and forth across the trail, occasionally breaking into fresh territory and then turning back. She rubs antennae with every sister she encounters. “Seen anything new?” “What’s up?” “How do you feel?” “How’re things back in the nest?” “Found any food?” “Which way are you headed?”
Back East, when I lived in a small Virginia town called Killeville, people had been like that, too, male or female, always stopping to chat and rub antennae. No way in CA. In California we drove around in our cars instead of rubbing antennae like ants. Rush, drive, work, and buy-with a cold smile and a hard laugh, a snarl and The Finger, with a shrug and a higher fence.
I put my rack of backup CDs in the trunk of my car. The backup was only a week old, so once the ants had been flushed out of my system I could start over. All my source code and programming tools were in there.
I figured the best thing to do right now would be to drive up to GoMotion and find out what had actually happened. On the other hand, it was a forty-minute commute each way, and I was going to have to do it again for Jeff Pear’s weekly meeting on Wednesday-day after tomorrow. And, it occurred to me, if Coolidge was going to play
