“Hey, come on, Roger,” I interrupted. “Let’s talk about the ants. Let’s talk about me being fired and framed and phreaked out of my mind. Why did you do it, Roger? What’s all this been for?”
Roger paused and gazed at me in that blank, dreamy, slightly irritated way of his. “All this has been for better robots,” he said presently. “You did such a good job on the Veep for GoMotion that I wanted you to go to West West and have a second shot at robotics programming. I want to breed the robots, you see, so I needed to have two parents that were different. The next generation of robots could be quite a surprise.”
“You want to breed the robots?”
“That’s the future, Jerzy, it’s manifest destiny. The robots need to breed and evolve. They need to self-replicate. This is about artificial life, for crying in the sink.”
“You want the robots to build more robots? What if they take over the Earth?” I asked.
“I don’t particularly want them to stay on the Earth,” said Roger impatiently. “Robots aren’t meant to be our slaves. Who in his right mind wants a slave anyway? The robots are meant to evolve, to take the torch from us and to grow beyond what we’ve done. We should send robots to the Moon. If you make a robot small enough, it can stand an awful lot of acceleration. Launching a capsule of robots with an electromagnetic railgun might work. I’ve been trying to talk to NASA about this, but so far I’ve only been talking to idiots.”
I shook my head. Space travel was one of Roger’s hobbyhorses-and no way was I about to gallop off on it with him. “Please don’t let’s change the subject, Roger. We’re talking about what you’ve been doing to me. How do the ants fit into the picture? Why did you let them ruin television?”
“I thought you’d be happy. Aren’t you the one who’s always saying he hates TV?”
“Sure, but when you released the ants, you stuck me with the blame. How did you get Studly to do that thing with the Fibernet anyway?”
“I was driving him,” said Roger, smiling slyly. You almost had to love the guy.
“Telerobotics? I thought you were in Switzerland by then!”
“I was, but that doesn’t matter. I used a cyberspace telerobotic interface. My signal would have been too weak, but Vinh Vo was carrying a signal-amplifying transponder in the back of his panel truck. When I heard you were trying to date Nga Vo, I did a data search and found Vinh as a relevant sleazebag. He worked out perfectly.”
“Oh God.” I was struggling to take it all in. “It was you who killed the dog?”
“Well, that was an accident. Driving Studly was like the world’s best arcade game, but it was the first time I’d played.”
“But why pin the ant release on me?”
“You were handy. And it made better sense than letting GoMotion catch the blame! I own a million shares of GoMotion stock. When the stock goes down a point, I lose a million dollars. I had to release the ants so that they’d get out into more environments and evolve faster. I mean, why do you think our robot code worked so well in the first place?”
The heavy rain outside was drumming on the roof and splashing into the puddles. “The robot code?” I said. “It worked well because I wrote good algorithms that I tweaked with genetic evolution.”
Roger cocked his head and stared at me with quizzical annoyance.
“Oh yeah,” I added, “there were also all the basic subroutines you wrote. Your awesome ROBOT. LIB code. I guess nothing would have worked without them. Without ROBOT. LIB the programs wouldn’t have been fast enough to use.”
“They would have sucked wind,” said Roger. “And, guess what, I didn’t write ROBOT. LIB. The GoMotion ants wrote ROBOT. LIB. I wrote the code that wrote the code. That’s the main thing the ants were for. Didn’t you ever realize that?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head in wonder. When I’d started on at GoMotion, Roger had never gotten around to giving me a full explanation of what we were up to. He’d just turned me over to Jeff Pear and to Pear’s deadlines. “But if the ants are in ROBOT. LIB, why don’t they take over and ruin the robots like they ruined television?”
“The ants aren’t in ROBOT. LIB, they just wrote it,” said Roger. “As for the ants taking over the Y9707-chip robots-well, they haven’t been able to so far because of the GoMotion ant lion. The ant lion has a magic bullet that kills ants. It’s a special instruction that stops them dead in their tracks; it fossilizes them. It’s like Raid or Black Flag.”
“I put a bit-for-bit copy of an ant lion into the Adze code,” I said, “but the ant lion is so compressed and encrypted that I still have no idea how it works. What is the magic bullet?”
“Can’t you guess? It’ll be more fun for you if you guess. I love to guess.”
My mind felt slow and sludgy. My feet were cold. Instead of answering, I sullenly looked away. Outside it was still raining.
“Can I have the chips now, Jerzy?” said Roger after awhile.
“What chips?”
“The four Y9707-EXs that you have in your satchel. I’ll give you, oh, eighty thousand dollars for them. Eighty thousand dollars for the chips and for your goodwill. I mean it.”
“When would I get paid?”
“Right away.” Roger stood up and pulled open the top drawer of his desk. “I have your money right here.” He laid it out next to the cyberdeck, eight packets of hundred-dollar bills, each packet with a wrapper band saying $10,000.
“You’re not planning to kill me are you?” I asked nervously.
“Of course not, Jerzy. In fact I’m hoping you can stay here a while and work with me. You’re a fellow maniac!”
I took the packet of chips out of my black satchel and handed it to Roger. He stood aside and gestured at the money. I stuffed the sheaves of dollars into my satchel. They barely fit.
Roger was peering at the chips. “If Vinh Vo didn’t garble my instructions, these should be better for my purposes-these are ant-designed chips that I had one of Vinh’s contacts make at National Semiconductor.” He smiled up at me. “They’re supposed to run twice as fast-and, what’s even more important, they don’t support the ant lion. The ants will be able to get into these new robots and party.” He pocketed the chips and led me out of his study. “Now for the tour!”
First Roger showed me the rest of his house’s ugly, stripped rooms, with plywood, drywall and broken tiles everywhere. The house computer turned the lights on and off as we moved around. At the end of a hall off the kitchen, there was a turbid swimming pool festering under a slanting roof of translucent corrugated plastic. There was raw bare dirt around the pool, and the door to the pool room was off its hinges for repair. It seemed as if Donar Kupp had been as slow with home improvements as Roger. In the basement was a furnace and boiler whose overdesigned Swiss plumbing fascinated Roger-geekin’ engineer that he was.
Back upstairs, we found two beat-up folding umbrellas and splashed down the path to the windowless building Roger called his factory. My feet got soaked all over again.
Even more so than in the house, everything was unfinished and raw in the factory. The floors and walls were bare concrete. On the ground floor there was a ceiling crane and a deep cistern well with a concrete cover over it. There were a bunch of barrels and cans filled with different kinds of resins and solvents for making plastics, and the rest of the floor was covered with packed cardboard boxes of Roger’s stuff.
“We have six hundred boxes all marked Household Goods,” said Roger. “It’s like a treasure hunt, only every box you open has something you’ve seen before.”
He took me down the concrete stairs to the basement of the factory and showed me another furnace and boiler. He said this furnace could heat a whole town. There was a huge, frightening electrical board with the fuses the size of cannon shells. We got into a freight elevator that ran from the basement to the ground floor to the factory’s second floor.