tricks on me, why should I be in such a big hurry to report back in at his company? I decided to take the day off… but to do what? I stood there near my car, thinking and looking around.
My house’s front yard was five steep feet of tough dirt with wizened shrubs. The street was Tangle Way, a looping blacktop two-laner that ran uphill and eventually back down. Our hill was called Polvo Para Hor-near, a needlessly complicated name that at least wasn’t religious, so far as I knew. There were so many Spanish and Catholic names in California that I felt like an immigrant and an atheist.
Numerous dead-end roadlets branched off of Tangle Way. Next to my house was the tiniest of traffic’s capillaries, a dirt alley that led to one last house perched on the edge of the eternally dry gully behind my home. Old Mr. and Mrs. Toth lived there. Mrs. Toth was a New Age healer. She had a massage table in her front hall and she talked about the supernatural in a cozy apple-cheeked way.
Shortly after we’d moved in, Mrs. Toth had found out I’d been a math professor back East. She talked me into giving a talk to her “realization group,” which met monthly in the community center. I’d spoken on synchronicity and Hilbert Space, an old interest of mine from grad school days. A few members of Mrs. Toth’s group had been angered by my insistence that coincidences are explicitly not subject to control by human will. But in my opinion, the Beyond is out of our control, and ESP is a pipe dream for the powerless, an opiate pernicious as politics and TV.
Across the alley from my house was a heavily weathered Victorian inhabited by Krystle Kattle and her ratty Mom. The family had been there for decades; they were poor, and had always been poor, which made them a highly singular anomaly among Los Perros homeowners. The most striking feature of their blasted, filth-strewn lot was a parallelopiped-shaped garage whose angles were in the process of being slowly but radically sheared by the expanding girth of a hyperthyroid eucalyptus tree rooted in the lot between the Kattles and the Toths.
Krystle worked in a Western store selling boots, saddles, and fringed leather vests. She had a sometime boyfriend who wanted to be a biker. He was blond with a well-built steroid body. He, Krystle, Carol, and I had gotten drunk together on the lees of a keg left over from our housewarming party. Carol and I hadn’t realized yet that in California you don’t do casual things with strangers.
There were too many strangers. Now that I’d settled in, I always treated Krystle like a stranger, and I would never have spoken to a group like Mrs. Toth’s. I was too busy, and I never had fun.
I decided that I should have some fun, that I should smoke some marijuana.
The house with the eucalyptus-the house between the Kattles and the Toths-was rented by Dirk Blanda, founder of Dirk Blanda’s Personography, the bodymap-ping shop who’d made my tuxedo. Dirk often had some weed. I strolled over there to see if he’d get me high.
But Dirk wasn’t home; his house echoed hollowly with the banging of the knocker. I went dejectedly back inside my house and looked through the packs of matches on my bedroom dresser; sometimes a match-book would have an old roach tucked into the back. But I’d already searched the matches and scraped my drawer bottoms on my last free day, a couple of weeks ago, and there was no dope to be found. Not a roach in the house, not even a pinner.
Studly came into the bedroom, and it occurred to me that while I’d been on the dark dream, the ants would have had time to go across the radio link and to infect Studly. He acted like he was quietly dusting my furniture, but his photocell eyes seemed to glint evilly, and I had the feeling he was edging over to me. But surely this was only paranoia. Instead of turning Studly off, I spoke to him.
“Studly.”
“Yes, Jerzy?” Studly had a pleasant voice thanks to his Talkboy chip.
“Do you know anything about the ants?”
“Last week, I put Grants For Ants ant poison packages near all the doors as instructed. I have not seen any ants in our house today.”
“I mean ants inside my computer.”
“Why do you say there are ants inside your computer, Jerzy?”
“I saw them in my cyberspace goggles. They’re like a computer virus. Have they infected you, Studly? Do you feel normal?”
“My activation levels are all within the customary ranges. Do you think the ants have infected me?”
“I guess not. Go to living room and wait for me there. Stay idle.”
“I can dig it.”
When I had nothing better to do, I was always programming new catch phrases and response tricks into Studly, which made talking to him mildly entertaining.
“Was there anything else, Studly?”
“Yesterday you were talking to yourself and you said I want Carol back, Jerzy. Can you comment on that?”
This seemingly thoughtful hedge was from the dinosaur days of artificial intelligence programming. You have your device keep a list of all the things it hears you say and then every so often the device builds a sentence of the form: Why did you say (quote-past-statement), (user-name)? It was a cheap trick, but it set me off, just like it was supposed to.
“I do want Carol back, Studly. But I’m also glad she’s gone. We were fighting all the time, don’t you remember? Are you going to be like the kids and keep trying to get us back together? Face it Studly, you’re a poor robot from a broken home. Go on into the living room and stay out of trouble now, will you?”
The Studster went.
It was so quiet in my big, empty house. I wandered back into my machine room. My unplugged computer was dark and silent. I pulled my phone jack out of the computer and plugged it directly into a Fibernet wall plug. Hallelujah, a dial tone.
I got out my address book. I sometimes scored pot from a hippie woman my age named Queue Harmaline. She and her permanent boyfriend Keith lived among redwoods on the wet western slopes of the Santa Cruz mountains. Queue and Keith made a living producing digitized tapes and films of various hip events. Queue usually had a good stash of primo sinsemilla. Although she was not a dealer, if I begged hard enough, she could normally be prevailed upon to sell me a bit of her hoard.
Since Queue wasn’t really interested in selling off her pot to me, the price was high, but a quarter ounce of the stuff was strong enough to last me for months, unless I got reckless. Also, I always enjoyed having a chance to visit with Queue. She was slim and dark and hip and she laughed a lot.
It was important to call in advance if I wanted to try to get pot from her. Queue hated to go into her stash with anyone around. Once I’d shown up without warning and she gave me a tongue-lashing and then subjected me to a forty-minute wait while she did four other things at once. Finally, after taking $160 off me, she’d put me outside on the deck while she scampered up and down the three levels of her house like a squirrel, pausing here, pausing there, so that finally I could make no estimate of where in the house she found the anorexic rolled-up baggie she ultimately granted me. That’s how I’d learned always to call.
More often than not, Queue and Keith let their scratchy answering machine take messages they never listened to, but today, for a wonder, Queue was right there.
“Media Molecules.” That’s what she called her tape business.
“Hi, Queue, this is Jerzy. I wonder if I could score a tape off you today.” One of anything was our code word for a quarter ounce.
“Mm-hmm. The usual. How come you never call unless you want something, Jerzy? And what about you and Carol?”,
“She hasn’t come back.”
“Didn’t you say you and Carol were going to try counseling?”
“It didn’t work. It made things worse. The counselor was a woman, and Carol thought she was taking my side. The concept is that the counselor is a neutral referee, right, and you can both say anything you want, but then when she asks follow-up questions you can tell whose story she’s buying into. The counselor bought into my story even though I’m wrong.”
“Why are you always so down on yourself, Jerzy?”
“I had an unhappy childhood. My wife hates me. And I’ve sold my soul to the machines.” I always felt like I could say just about anything to Queue. Her ready laughter was a stifled chirp phasing into a tinkling giggle.
“How’s your big job at GoMotion? Is that still happening?”
“We’re designing a line of personal robots in cyberspace. It’ll be called the Veep. We made a prototype of the
