“The less work, the better,” chuckled Ben. “But Janelle may want to pick your brain about the Veep specs.”
“That’s right,” said Janelle. “Ben tells me you did a lot of good work at GoMotion. We’re just getting the Adze campaign ready, and we need to know what GoMotion is going to say their Veep can do.”
I told her, and then she brought up a different topic. “Ben says you adapted some a-life algorithms to make Roarworld work better. West West has a line of games. I think a lot of games could benefit from having smarter thingies to fight against.”
“How do you know what I did with Roarworld?” I asked them.
Ben waved the question aside. “Oh, we’ve done our homework on you, Jerzy. The thing that interests us is that you’re good at using a-life to evolve better algorithms for robots programmed in SuperC.” I nodded. “Up till now, we’ve been writing our Adze software in a Seven Lucky proprietary language called Kwirkey. One of Seven Lucky’s founders invented it for his thesis I at the Computer University of Taiwan. Kwirkey is a Lisp-parser that sits on top of a Forth interpreter.“
I sighed heavily. “Look, Ben, I want to use a real language, not a Lisp language. A language with documentation and support would be nice, too; a language familiar to more people than like thirteen Taiwanese graduate students? Can’t I keep working with SuperC?”
“No problem,” drawled Brie. “We just finished building a SuperC compiler out of Kwirkey. Or maybe… maybe we built a Kwirkey interpreter out of SuperC? I can never remember. Russ Zwerg will tell you all about it when you meet him.” As he said the name “Russ Zwerg,” a fleeting ripple of what might almost have been stress crossed Ben’s calm features. He rose to his feet and waved me toward the door. “Before we do Russ, let’s talk to Sun Tam.”
Brie led me across the pit and around an unexpected corner into a large gray room, very airless. The room held two Sphex workstations, each with a three-foot by three-foot Abbott wafer as its display device. An Abbott wafer was a big stiff flat rectangular computer screen made of a plastic sandwich holding a lithographed nanometal grid and a few precious drops of liquid rho-dopsin. The design was a bit like the cheap liquid crystal “mood rings” they used to have. The metal grid inside an Abbott wafer could control the rhodopsin’s colors with pinpoint precision.
Two cheerful computer jocks named Jack and Jill were hunched over one of the Sphexes, busy cutting and pasting together great, ungainly blocks of Kwirkey code. The program management software they were using had cyberspace visuals that made it look as if their busy, gloved hands were wielding a chain saw and an arc welder. The Sphexes were designed for teamwork and had eight Spandex control gloves apiece. As soon as a user donned a glove, the glove knew if it was a left or a right.
Jack and Jill spoke to each other in weird cryptic slang, and I had no idea what they were doing. Jack had bull-like shoulders and flat, colorless eyes. Jill was tall and sinewy with a crown of brown curls.
At the controls of the other Sphex was Sun Tam, who looked up and greeted us. He had a chinless head the shape of a parsnip. A native of Santa Clara County, Sun spoke with the pure, affectless, short-voweled accent of the Valley.
“Good to have you here, Jerzy. I’ve heard about your work on the Veep for GoMotion, and about your and Roger Coolidge’s work with artificial evolution. That’s what we need for the Adze. An explosion of intelligence. Do you still have that prototype Veep you were keeping at home?”
“Uh, yes, I do. GoMotion doesn’t want him back.” I could have gone outside and gotten Studly right out of my car, but I had the feeling that Studly was probably infected by the ants, and I didn’t want ants screwing things up on the West West system before I could even get started. Also I was starting to get annoyed at these people.
“You should definitely bring your Veep in for us to look at,” insisted Ben.
“Maybe I don’t want to!” I cried. “And how come everyone here knows so much about what’s been going on at GoMotion?”
“West West’s intelligence gathering is very proactive,” said Ben. “And-speak of the devil-here’s our star cryp himself.” A tall blond boy with a mod Julius Caesar haircut had just appeared, wanting to know how soon we’d be through using the Sphex. He wore mirror-coated contact lenses, which gave him a steely, impenetrable air.
“Give us another fifteen minutes,” said Ben. “We need to get the new guy logged on. Jerzy, this is Sketchy Albedo. Sketchy, meet Jerzy.”
Unlike a normal hacker, Sketchy was wearing punk clothes; skintight black-and-red op-art-checkered pants and a long-sleeved black shirt. His shoes were black suede high-tops. He favored me with a languid wave of his hand. “Don’t take too long.”
In the Valley these days, phreaks were youths who cobbled together their own approximation of a decent cyberspace deck and used it for weird cyberspace pranks. Cryps were phreaks who’d turned professional and gone into the employ of companies involved in industrial espionage. If you broke into some company’s machines often enough, they were likely to hire you as a cryp to break into other companies, or they might use you as a security consultant to keep out the other cryps. It was a vicious circle-the cryps’ security-cracking escapades created a demand for the services they could provide.
Trevor Sinclair of GoMotion was a cryp and I liked him a lot, but in principle, I didn’t like phreaks and cryps. I hated for people to use my code without giving me credit. Thanks to the cryps, I had to choose between obsessive security and being ripped off. The airs that some cryps give themselves annoyed me as well-they acted so hip and smart about their stolen information, and often they didn’t understand any of it at all. Now that the ants had whipped my system to shit, I liked phreaks and cryps less than ever.
So now, meeting West West’s star cryp, I found myself acting silly and aggressive. “Golly, Mithter Thkitsth,” I lisped, making sure a few drops of spit flew out of my mouth, “Are you gonna do thome thecwet thpy thtuff? Can I watch? Huh? Can I, can I, can I, huuuuuh?‘’
“Bithead,” said Sketchy and made strange wiggly gestures with his hands, as if casting a hex on me. “I don’t know why they hired you, Jerzy. I’ve already downloaded all of your GoMotion code.”
“Sure you have,” I snapped. “Only you don’t know how to read it. And you never will. Spyboy.”
“Hey, hey,” broke in Ben Brie. “Chill out, gentlemen.”
“Let me know when the old fart finishes his golf cart ride,” said Sketchy, stalking out of the room.
“Has he really been crypping down my GoMotion code from West West?” I demanded. My heart was beating fast and my face was flushed. I was badly rattled. Old fart? Well, I was forty-three, and certainly older than anyone I’d met so far at West West-with the possible exception of Otto Gyorgyi, who really was an old fart.
“It’s a damn good thing he crypped your code,” said Ben Brie. “What with you off the Net and your home system thrashed.” Not that I’d told him my home system was thrashed. These guys were total cryps and pirates. Was there anything about me they didn’t know?
“West West should spend some money on individual decks,” interrupted Sun Tam, impatiently filliping a fingernail against the beige crinkle-finish sheet metal housing of the Sphex. It was Sun’s style, I would learn, to propose concrete physical solutions to disagreements. “Why should we fight over these two machines every single day? On the street you could get six individual decks for the price of a Sphex. With enough machines, we could all be working at home, Ben. The commute is also a cause of stress, for that matter. The daily grind.”
Clearly Ben had heard this many times before. “These two Sphexes are top of the line,” he insisted. “Check it out, Jerzy.” He picked up a sensor bead and clipped it to a piece of hair on the top of my head.