Now we arced out to the far side of the great hollow Magic Shell and sailed into a blank unrented space between a video store and a stockbroker. My ant landed firmly on the floor, cushioning the landing with a springlike bouncing of her legs. (Now that I was in such an intimate relation with this ant, I could no longer regard her as a generic it!)
She paced across the floor, the chitin hinges of her alitrunk meshing perfectly. The “floor” we were walking on was actually the inside surface of the great faceted sphere that made up Magic Shell Mall; the mall’s simulated physics had its gravity vectors all pointing out radially from the sphere’s center.
My ant crawled along an edge of one of the floor’s polygons until she got to a corner where several edges met-this was a vertex of the mall’s sphere. The vertex was an awkward bit of geometry where the tips of three lozenge-shaped quadrilaterals met the points of five narrow triangles. As we neared the corner we began to shrink.
Yes, we shrank. Keep in mind that one’s cyberspace body was nothing more than a pure geometry of vertex coordinates, edge lines, and face shadings. The ant led the shrinking; her size went from camel to pony to hog to dog to possum to lobster to roach to sowbug to ant on down to the size of the teensy-tiniest pissant you ever saw.
All this time I remained astride the ant’s gaster. The shrinking of my geometry lagged a bit behind the ant’s shrinkage, so that my arms seemed always to be long tapering cones affixed to the front slope of her dwindling gaster. As I shrank, my angle of vision widened, and the video store’s blank sidewall seemed to tower above the ant and me. Still we headed toward the corner where the five triangles met the three lozenges.
Because of computational round off errors, the geometry of the corner was imperfect: the corner had a pinhole at its center. When we’d finished shrinking, we were small enough to crawl through the hole. There were a lot of pissants on the other side. My ant touched her feelers to the feelers of each of the other ants she met. When the other ants noticed me, they showed their surprise by sharply jerking their gasters upward, which is how an ant chirps. The stiff back edge of the petiole scrapes against a washboardlike membrane on the front of the gaster. The process is called stridulation, and is similar to the way the grasshopper saws his legs against his body to sing a summer song.
So here I was in a cyberspace ant crack. Beyond the wary pissants floated an odd, drifting piece of geometry, an “impossible” self-reversing figure of the type that graphics hackers call fnoor.
The piece of fnoor was of wildly ambiguous size. Relative to my tiny dimensions, the fnoor first seemed to be the size of my Animata, but a moment later it loomed as large as the pyramidal Transamerica building, and a moment after that it seemed no bigger than a sinsemilla roach. The fnoor was a clump of one-sided plane faces that seemed haphazardly to pop in and out of existence as the clump rotated. The fnoor’s vertices and edges were indexed in such a way that the faces failed to join up in a coherent way. There was no consistent distinction between inside and outside, leading to a complete failure of the conventional cyberspace illusion that you are looking at a perspective view of an object in three-dimensional space.
My ant leapt right onto the piece of fnoor. She ran this way and that, feeling about with her antennae, seeming almost to be flipping the faces with her nimble feet. It was as if we were running forward, yet the same piece of fnoor kept being underfoot. Finally my ant found the spot she was looking for, a crazy funhouse door in the fnoor. Bending herself nearly double at the petiole, the ant squeezed herself and me through the aperture. Now we were inside the fnoor, and ants were everywhere. We were in an anthill.
Instead of being made of incorrectly hinged plane segments, the interior of the moor was a true solid model, pieced together from filled regions of three-dimensional space. Here, as on the fnoor’s surface, the component pieces were hooked up inconsistently, so that-this is hard to describe-the inside/outside, left/right, up/down, and front/back orientation of each of the component space pieces was being continuously redefined. Naturally my ant headed for the very heart of this agglomeration of weirdness.
What was I thinking all this time? Why didn’t I just say, “Help,” so that Studly would unplug my machine?
Although what I was seeing was terrifying and bizarre, I felt confident that it was not really dangerous to me. Nothing in cyberspace is dangerous-unless you’re a sensation-hungry cretin who buys things like boxing game peripherals that punch you in the ribs. I’ve heard that there are even black market peripherals capable of stabbing or shooting the user; these to be used in moronic macho cyberduels. No violent peripherals for me!
No, no-I was in no physical danger from cyberspace events, but what about the old tradition that “certain sights can destroy a man’s mind”? Well, what with years of math and pot and hacking behind me, I felt that by now my mind was a pretty tough nut to crack. So, no, I wasn’t scared of what the ant would show me. My problem, as I’ve been harping on, was loneliness. The ant was taking me somewhere; therefore, I was less lonely.
As we moved about the ant-filled corridors of the insanely shifting fnoor, I realized that this entire structure was in fact four-dimensional. Once I had this key insight, the fnoor’s motions began to make sense. And I realized that there was a logical reason why the rogue ants had made their nest four-dimensionaclass="underline" to make it harder to find. Four-dimensional things can appear quite small with respect to our normal space. The spatial cross section of a hyperobject is merely the tip of an iceberg of additional geometry that sticks out into hyperspace.
My ant pressed forward until we found ourselves in a large, roughly spherical chamber. Though the fnoor walls and spaces were shifting as ever, the space inside the chamber remained untouched; it was like the eye of a hurricane. Crouched in the center was the queen herself, a plump, golden ant with a gaster distended to a hundred times the normal ant size, a gaster like a hollow golden shrimp-shaped puff earring. Worker ants kept running up to the queen and regurgitating food for her. At first I couldn’t make out the nature of the food units-flat rectangular slips-but then I realized these were pieces of simmie-paper bearing the addresses of unused memory locations the ants had found. I briefly wondered if the ants were still working on using up the DTV chips of my cyberdeck’s video display, or if they were already busy colonizing someone else’s chips.
The queen devoured each new memory address one hexadecimal digit at a time, chomping her way down the numbered slips, raising her front legs up in tremulous ant excitement as the figures went down. After each new address, the queen’s gaster shuddered, and out popped a white, comma-shaped ant larva, which was then gently seized by the jaws of a worker and borne away.
To my horror, my ant went right up to the ant queen and crouched there so that the queen could feel me all over with her antennae. She raised her front legs and opened her mouth as if to byte my head off. I screamed incoherently, but then we were past the queen and farther on our way, following one of the ants that carried a new larva.
We visited the ant nursery next, the place where the twitching ant larvae lay during maturation. I recalled Roger’s having told me that after the queen would issue an ant its memory space and its program code, the new ant still needed to do a certain amount of internal housekeeping to tune in on the specific numerical value of its memory address, to adjust to the special hardware quirks of the DTV chip it found itself on, and to patch over any glitches caused by the deliberate mutation of bits. Until all of these problems had been worked out-which could take as long as several hours of computation time, an ant’s little simmie-body took the form of a larva instead of an ant.