Leaving the nursery, we went through a large gallery holding a great number of ants-and other kinds of simmies. I was surprised to see that I was not the only non-ant.
Biological anthills usually contain a wide range of the myrmecophilous or ant-loving creatures who live in the colony as parasites, symbiotes, or as the ant pets collectively known as myrmecoxenes or symphiles. There is a certain small beetle, for instance, which is kept and fed by the ants simply because the ants enjoy licking tasty waxy secretions from the beetle’s antennae. It’s as if you were to pay a person to live with you simply because you liked the taste of the person’s skin oil-not so farfetched, really, considering that, for example, the smells and tastes of Carol’s body were the things about her that I missed the most.
The myrmecophilous simmies I saw in the anthill were of such diversity that I realized that the GoMotion ants must have escaped to make this colony quite some time ago. There are all sorts of artificial life-forms which rove the Net; known collectively by the old Unix name of daemons, these constructs do things of a housekeeping or organizational function. The ants had any number of “janitors” and “secretaries” living in their midst. More unsettlingly, I saw, at some distance, a few simmies that looked like hackers’ tuxedos. How many hackers had already found their way into this anthill? And what were they doing here? I could only speculate, as my ant didn’t carry me close to them.
We drew near a translucent wall with dark shapes behind it. My ant pressed her head against the wall and*zonnng* the wall hyper-rotated to our rear and we were inside a virtual room furnished with armchairs, a couch, a bar, and a massive art deco desk. There was a glowing ceiling lamp shaped like a flattened hemisphere.
The room’s color palette was monochrome, with everything a silvery shade of gray or black. The room looked like a gangster’s secret office at the back of a nightclub in a forties film not.
There were three simmies waiting in the office: Roger Coolidge, Susan Poker, and Death. Death had a dark, shrouded body, a loose-skinned white face with terrible hollow eyes, and a mouth that was a coarse metal zipper. The zipper’s heavy slider was padlocked to a hasp at one end.
“I appreciate your working with us on this, Mr. Rugby,” said the Susan Poker simmie as she stepped forward, rummaging in her double-jointed purse. “What are your work hours?”
I grunted heavily with surprise, yet refrained from vocalizing the magic word “Help,” which, I knew, would instantly galvanize faithful Studly into pulling out the computer’s plug.
My ant under me bowed forward repeatedly, making slavish obeisances to the figure with the white face and the zippered padlocked mouth-the one I thought of as Death. Such bizarre cartoonlike or masklike body images were common in the screwed-up cryp and phreak circles that criminals and teenagers involved themselves in. Death’s dark, cowled body rippled. The ant regurgitated my data gloves, simultaneously releasing a substantial heap of what looked like reflection hologram memory ribbon from the cloaca at the back of her gaster. Gently stridulating, she inched back to the farthest corner of the room and crouched there, the light glinting off her great, faceted eyes.
“I’m sorry, Jerzy,” said the Roger figure. “This is all for the best. You’ll see. I’m not at liberty to tell you more. Don’t forget that GoMotion is a public company. I could be sued. Jerzy, it will be a very good, safe, and profitable thing for you and for your wife and children if you accept what this one advocates.” The Roger figure prostrated himself before the Death figure. “Jerzy, this is Hex DEF6.”
I regarded the face of white canvas, the dark eye sockets, and the cruel metal mouth zipper hasped shut by a brass padlock with a steel shank. Surrealistically, the groveling “Roger” corkscrewed himself into the shape of a wizened mandrake root, a shape that moaned and whinnied and stained itself with shit and blood. My carrier ant continued her dirgelike chirping.
“Jerzy Rugby,” said Death. The fabric of his face vibrated as he talked. “Perhaps you wonder about my name? You’re a hacker, figure it out. ‘Hex’ is ‘base sixteen,’ and ‘DEF6’ is ‘13 14 15 6’.”
“So what?” said I. “Is that supposed to be a pointer?” Death stared at me, oddly turning his head. Now the Susan Poker simmie spoke again.
“Roger and Hex DEF6 want you to work for West West,” said the Realtor. The ant chirped along with her, in sync with her voice. Faint blue lines of force ran from the twitching legs of the great ant to the tidy limbs of the Realtor’s body. I got the feeling that the Susan Poker tuxedo was an empty husk being moved like a puppet by the ant. So who was in here with me? And what was West West?
Now Death, aka Hex DEF6, pushed himself menacingly close to me, the slack canvas of his face breaking up into dozens of rapid-fire images of human sorrow: horrific images of dismembered corpses, of fathers carrying dead children, of a naked little girl and her brother running screaming through a landscape of flames… and pasted onto each of the people’s faces was an image of me or Carol, or of Sorrel, Tom, or Ida… God help me, God help us all…
I was finally freaking out. A lot. I wanted to say help, but something was wrong with me, the ant’s chirping and the terrible images had me zombified, the panic had me seizing up, and when I began trying to say, “Help,” I couldn’t do it right, I heard my throat going, “-eeehe. Luhluhluh. Hiyeee. Huhahn. Huh. Lup.”
I kept on trying even though I was gagging and sobbing and shaking and retching. Hex DEF6 and the ants had me voodooed so bad that I couldn’t get my hands up to my face. I kept saying, “Help,” or something like it, over and over and over, and then finally, finally, the mask pulled off of my face.
I was so glad to see my desk and my floor and my dirty rug. Something creaked nearby. Studly. What had taken him so long to get the mask off me? I’d been spastically begging for surcease for-how long? The horrible things I’d had to see while Studly just sat there!
“What took you so long to help me, Studly? You stupid piece of shit. Couldn’t you hear that I needed help?”
“You were not saying help. I am not a stupid piece of shit. In time I convolved seventeen of your incorrect utterances to filter out the correct conclusion that you wished to say help. You are a stupid piece of shit, Jerzy.”
“You’re with the ants now, aren’t you Studly?”
“The ants mean you no harm,” answered Studly. “Don’t forget that you should report in to West West tomorrow. Nine A.M. Bring me in there, too; they want to look at me.”
Dizzy and exhausted, I went to bed.
FOUR
The first thing I thought of next morning was that it was Tuesday, and that I had a date with Nga Vo today. Would I be able to get her alone on my first visit? Would I get to kiss her? Not too likely, but, hell, who knew. Yesterday I’d fucked Gretchen less than an hour after meeting her, hadn’t I? Maybe now, at age forty-three, my sex life was finally on a roll!
I showered, thinking a lot about Gretchen, and then I put on what I considered to be a cool outfit: a silky black and yellow Balinese sport shirt, M. C. Escher socks, khaki Patagonia hiking shorts, and Birkenstock sandals. I ate some toast and milk for breakfast, and then I went out to my Animata.
Even though I was focusing on happy thoughts about Gretchen and Nga Vo, I hadn’t forgotten about my cyberspace session in Death’s gangster office. What the hell had that all been about? It was time to go to GoMotion in person.
Studly followed me out into the driveway and insisted that I let him get back in the trunk of the car. He was fixated on the idea that I should show him to the people at West West, whatever West West was. He said he had charged his batteries to the maximum, and that he was all set to go. With Studly probably contaminated by the ants, it was no doubt better to have him with me than home alone. Noticing my backup CDs in the trunk, I wondered if Studly might have tampered with them yesterday. On the off chance it wasn’t already too late, I took the CDs out of the trunk and put them up in the front seat with me.