“It’s not magic, Queue,” I sighed. “It’s science. I don’t think about transcendence or the One anymore.”
“But there has to be some mystery to help get us through these dreary times. We need it. If we didn’t need it so much, why did your ants try to kill TV? They’re a higher force for New Mystery.”
“Everything computers do is science, Queue. Logic. There’s no mystery to it at all.” I was tired and drained from the day’s hacking.
“You hide behind your preppy clothes and your sleepy expression,” cried Queue. “Come on! Be interesting!”
“These aren’t supposed to be preppy clothes,” I said, looking down at my garb. I was wearing a red rayon shirt covered with UFOs, some short white canvas shorts, yellow socks with a white section map of Death Valley, and my Birkenstocks.
“You don’t fool me, Jerzy. You’re as tidy as a little boy going to a birthday party. You yuppie. Come on and say something interesting or I won’t rent you the room!”
“Interesting.” My whole life was so interesting that I could hardly stand it-yet now, under Queue’s scrutiny, I realized that I rarely ever did talk about what it was that I found so interesting about hacking robots in cyberspace. More often than not, I let the people I was talking to divert conversations up their own creeks; I’d just paddle along and dream behind my sleepy expression. But if anyone actually asked, I could still talk.
“Okay, I’ll tell you some random things that are interesting. Last time I was in cyberspace the GoMotion ants took me out into the fourth dimension and put me into a gangster movie with a guy who looked like Death. Instead of a mouth he had a big steel zipper with a padlock. His name was Hex DEF6. That’s a hexadecimal number which is-” I paused and pulled out a slip of paper where I’d written this information down, “1101 1110 1111 0110 in binary and 57,078 in base ten. I have no idea what it means, except that if you leave the last zero off the binary version you get a sym-metric bit-string. Not interesting? How about this: The night the ants got loose, I was over on the east side trying to fuck a Vietnamese girl called Nga Vo.“
“Are you hard up?”
“Dig it, Queue, I’m not hard up, I’ve got myself a cashmere yuppie mommy. Her name is Gretchen. She’s a mortgage insurance broker.”
“How many children does Gretchen have?”
“None, as far as I know. I think of her as a mommy because she reminds me of the big dazed whitebread American mothers some of the kids at school had when I was small. Dreamy, slow-moving women with kind smiles. And just that soft hint of a double chin, you know?”
“Ugh! I don’t want to hear you talk about women, Jerzy. It’s so sexist and disgusting and-ugh! Can’t you tell me more about your computer adventures?”
“Queue, you got no inkling.” I took a deep breath and smiled. Keith was down in the basement making some tapes. “Talking openly like this gets me high. In cyberspace I sat on the back of an ant that found me in Nordstrom’s, and the ant shrank me down small and we crawled out a hole to the Antland of Fnoor. I guess that was a New Mystery. If I can get a cyberdeck up here, maybe I’ll take you there.”
“Do it!” Queue exclaimed. “But it has to be on the sly. You’re a computer criminal, Jerzy. I’m not going to dial up the Fibernet and ask them for a cyberspace account and then have everyone see Jerzy Rugby come out of my registered memory node.”
I thought for a minute. “Any good phreak or cryp would find a way. Maybe… maybe I could use the Animata’s satellite dish.”
“Your car has a dish?”
“It has a titanium-doped electronic Fresnel lens in the moonroof. My map machine uses the lens to pick up on navigational satellites.”
“Okay, this is starting to be interesting.”
“Can you let me have a little of your pot now, Queue?”
I got into a rhythm of commuting from Queue’s to West West every morning and working all day in my cubicle in the West West programmer pit two cells away from Russ Zwerg. Most nights I’d sit out on the deck with Queue and Keith and get high.
Carol? I saw her the next weekend, when I hired some movers to clear us out of Tangle Way. Carol, Tom, and Ida were there to help pack and sort.
The idea was to move some stuff to Carol and Hiroshi’s apartment, and some to a rented space in Crocker’s Lockers. It was the first time I’d seen Carol since the night the GoMotion ants got loose. She confronted me down in the kitchen, out of earshot from the kids and the movers.
“So you’re living with Queue? I guess that means you’re stoned all the time?” Carol didn’t particularly like drugs or drug culture, and she and Queue had never hit it off. As Carol once put it: “Queue thinks I’m corny and obvious, but she doesn’t realize that I think she’s corny and obvious.”
“No, Carol, I’m not stoned all the time,” I said defensively. “I’m hacking my brains out for West West is what I’m doing.”
“I’ll bet. What does Keith have to say about your moving in? Are they married?”
“He thinks it’s fine. Carol, all I’m doing is renting a room. I am not sleeping with Queue. She’s very committed to Keith. And no, they’re not married.”
“That’s because Keith doesn’t have an income. Queue looks out for number one. I bet she tries to marry you, Jerzy. She’s had her eye on you ever since you got the good job at GoMotion.” In imitation of Queue, Carol opened her eyes wide, threw up her hands, and rocked from side to side to simper, “Oh, Jerzy, you’re so smart and wonderful!”
“Give it up, Carol,” I snapped. “How can you be jealous when you’ve already left me for another man? It’s not logical.” Unexpectedly my voice cracked. “I can’t live alone, you know.”
Carol gave me a sudden, frank look, her eyes roving over every contour of my face. She was on the verge of tears. “Are we making a big mistake, Jerzy?” From upstairs came the heavy sounds of the movers. “Don’t you still want me?”
I silently embraced her, and the kids found us there like that. “Woo-woo,” they said, softly, hopefully. Carol and I broke the clinch and got back to the details of the move.
Outside, the reporters were on us like meat bees at a barbecue. I phoned Stu to come and make a statement to them. I stood by his side as they filmed us. Stu spoke slowly and with conviction. He was acting like a good lawyer, like a stand-up guy.
“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen of the press. My name is Stuart Koblenz, and I am Jerzy Rugby’s attorney.
“GoMotion Incorporated has chosen to try and make Jerzy Rugby the scapegoat for their own industrial accident. Mr. Rugby will enter pleas of innocent to all the charges placed against him. We are preparing vigorously for the trial. For obvious legal reasons, Mr. Rugby is unable to answer questions at this time.
“The fact that Mr. Rugby is moving out of this house today is a direct result of the continuing media harassment of this innocent man. I would strongly request that the press please respect the privacy of Mr. Rugby and his family in the weeks to come. Thank you.”
After this, none of us would say anything at all to the reporters, and they pretty much pulled back, though a few of them followed the moving van to get footage of Crocker’s Lockers and of Carol and Hiroshi’s apartment complex.
Under the terms of my bail, I’d had to tell the court about moving to Queue’s and, of course, as soon as the court entered it into their machine, all the Bay Area cryps could grok my new address. Most days a car or two would tail me both ways of my commute between West West and Queue’s-sometimes reporters, other times cops or dicks or industrial agents. Queue’s house was up off a locked private road which gave me some privacy there, and West West had a gated entrance as well.
Normally the cars that followed me would melt away at the gates, but the Monday evening after we’d moved out of Tangle Way, a guy jumped out of his car and headed for me while I was opening the gate.