I sat there numb with worry for about half an hour, and then two San Jose cops showed up to take me downtown. The San Jose police station was a six-story beige building on First Street near Route 880. The press had gotten wind of my arrest, and there was a crowd of reporters outside the police station. They snapped pictures of me and yelled questions: “Can you make a statement?” “Why did you do it?” “When will television be restored to normal?” “What are your demands?”
I had a big San Jose cop on either side of me, and they dragged me past the reporters fast. Inside the building they brought me to a fourth-floor office with a man in a suit. All this time I was still wearing plastic handcuffs. I waited standing between the cops while the man finished talking on the phone.
“Uh-huh. He just got here. Five-eleven, 180 pounds, long brown hair, wire and horn-rim glasses, wearing short pants, argyle socks, Birkenstock sandals, and a colorful sport shirt? Check. Thank you, Mr. Pear. I’ll be expecting the fax. And please let us know if you have to leave town; we may need for you to make a deposition in person before the indictment.” He hung up and looked at me and the cops.
“Jerzy Rugby. I’m Captain Austin of the computer crime squad. You can uncuff him, officers. Thank you. Yes, you can go, though I’d like for one of you to wait outside. We won’t be too long. Thank you. Now then, Mr. Rugby, I’ve just been in contact with your former manager at GoMotion Inc., a Mr. Jeffrey Pear?”
“What is it that I’m charged with?”
“You have been read your rights, yes? Fine. We may still reformulate the charges. That’s one of the issues that we need to talk about before the D.A. takes this to the grand jury this afternoon. Your warrant of record is for criminal trespass, computer intrusion, and extreme cruelty to animals. Three state felony charges, with a possible maximum total sentence of fifteen years. And the feds want a crack at you, too. The federal prosecutor is getting a whole bouquet of different charges ready. How does treason sound? I have it on the best authority that the president of the United States wants your butt in jail for life. His exact words. The president likes TV. Jerzy, do you realize that under federal law treason is a capital crime?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I want to call a lawyer.”
“Certainly. You will be given the opportunity to call a lawyer. But first I’d like to have just a little background while I finish booking you. Jeffrey Pear says you were fired from GoMotion for breaking the security of-” Captain Austin glanced at the notepad on his desk, “-an artificial life experiment modeled on an ant colony. He further said that you had so contaminated your computer and a prototype GoMotion robot that these hardware items were given to you as part of your written severance agreement.”
“That’s not what happened at all. And I have not received any written severance agreement.”
“Fine. I’m very eager to hear your story. But just let me fill you in a bit more on our current picture of things. A man and a robot answering to the description of you and-is it Studly?”
“That is the name of my robot, yes.”
“A man and a robot resembling you and Studly were reported to have been in an altercation with a Jose Ruiz of 5782 White Road yesterday afternoon. The man’s dog was killed, and the Fibernet cable to his house was cut. Shortly after the cable was cut, a computer virus infected all of the digital compression hardware at Fibernet San Jose and bounced out to the chips of all the active TV sets in San Jose. Worse than that, the virus worked its way upstream from Fibernet San Jose into the local TV station studios and got into their DTV compression chips as well. Shortly after that, the virus went out with San Jose news feeds over the satellite links and infested the studios of every digital TV station and cable service in the world. For the moment there’s damn near no television. Do you have a reaction to that?“
I knew better than to reveal my true feelings of triumph and awe. “I suppose that’s very inconvenient for many people. But it’s certainly not my fault.”
“Do you admit that you were at 5782 White Road yesterday?”
“I don’t admit anything.”
“Jerzy, I’d like to make it easy for you. You seem like an intelligent man. You can work with me or you can work against me. And if you work against me you’re going to spend a long time in jail. You might even get the death penalty. You don’t want to die in jail, do you, Jerzy?” I shook my head and Captain Austin smiled. “So help me out a little. I’m trying to understand what happened. Jeffrey Pear says it’s all your fault, but maybe he’s not giving me the straight story. What happened at GoMotion? Why were you fired? Pear says it was simply a matter of incompetence.” Captain Austin paused and looked at his pad again. “Pear says, ‘Jerzy Rugby doesn’t know a function pointer from a linked list.’ He says you ripped off some experimental virus-like software and deliberately used it to blank out television so as to give GoMotion a black eye. Would you call that an accurate account?”
“Hell no!” I flared. “What Pear says is total bullshit. Look-if you really want to know about the GoMotion ants, ask Roger Coolidge. I bet Pear didn’t mention him to you. Roger Coolidge is the founder of GoMotion. He left for Switzerland Monday night. Roger built the GoMotion ants before I even started working there. I used to talk to him about his design, but he called the shots. The ants were Roger’s experiment with artificial life. They were meant to be like living, self-improving pieces of DTV display code. Roger Coolidge is the one who set the ants loose. He e-mailed an eggcase of them to my deck, took off for Switzerland, and then had Jeff Pear fire me. It’s a total setup. I’m just a patsy.“
“That’s very helpful, Jerzy. Why don’t I call in a stenographer to take down your story. It would be a good thing to get your side on record.”
The captain’s voice had taken on a soothing, caressing tone. The captain was my friend. It would be so great to sit here and tell him my side of the story without worrying about silly legalistic things like my Miranda rights… at least maybe that’s what I was supposed to think. But I wasn’t a kid anymore. I’d pleaded guilty to pot possession for a two hundred dollar fine once in my twenties, and it had cost me thousands and thousands of dollars in job rejections and increased insurance premiums over many many years. No, the police are not your friends.
“I want to talk to a lawyer.” I crossed my arms and leaned back in my chair.
“Go ahead.” He pushed his phone across his desk. “You can make one call. One seven-digit number. No phone phreaking.”
As if being a serious hacker were the same as being a cryp all hot to dial into the weapons division of Livermore Labs, or an anarchist bent on bringing down the phone system. Though, heh, in the government’s eyes I was a terrorist who’d done something even worse. I’d blanked out digital TV: treason?
I took the phone and, come to think of it, I didn’t actually know any lawyers in California. Carol had said she was going to talk to a lawyer today about child support payments, but she hadn’t told me his or her name, not that I’d want to talk to Carol’s lawyer. Instead of calling a lawyer, I should call someone who could really help me. Not GoMotion, certainly, but-why not West West? No doubt they were ecstatic over the bad publicity the ants were bringing to GoMotion. I pulled Ben Brie’s business card out of my wallet and dialed his number.
“Ben Brie speaking.”
“Ben, it’s Jerzy Rugby. Something’s come up. I’ve been arrested.”
“Does that mean you’ll be late to work?” He chuckled softly. “Are you in for something juicy?” His sarcastic drawl was wonderful to hear.