The Hacker and the Ants Read Free

was a shared vision of the Net as a physical space.
    My illusion of being able to step right into cyberspace was made convincing by my headset’s most excellent electronic lenses. The lenses were lumps of optical glass with funky-looking patches of plastic glued to them. The patches were rhodopsin-doped limpware goodies that worked as endlessly tweakable color monitors, labile as the chromatophores of a squid. The lenses’ glass bent way around on the sides, creating peripheral vision and eyeball kicks from the anamorphic edge-scrunched images my computer made.
    Whenever I put on the gloves and the headset, it was like being in a different room, an invisible secret room of
my house: my virtual office. When I talked or made gestures in my virtual office, my computer interpreted me and executed my commands. The “pulling wires out of the phone” gesture for instance, caused my computer to shunt all my incoming phone calls to an answering machine.
    My virtual office could look like almost anything—it could be a palace, an igloo, or a bubble in the deep blue sea. As it happened, I was using the default office pattern which came with my cyberspace software. The default office was really two-thirds of an office: it had one wall missing and no ceiling. One of the remaining walls was for doors to Net locations I often visited, and the other two walls were covered with pictures and documents that I either liked or needed to remember. Over my walls and in the far background I would see whatever landscape I was currently hottest for—in those days it was a swamp with simmies that looked like dinosaurs and pterodactyls. It was called Roarworld; I’d gotten it off the Net.
    Each of the simmies in the Roarworld program had a bunch of software stubs to which the user could attach his/her own pieces of code, thus tailoring the Roarworld simmies’ appearance and behavior. If you preferred it, you could have the Roarworld creatures look like lions and tigers, or sharks and dolphins, but to my mind the dinosaur graphics were by far the best. To make the simulation livelier, I’d linked the dinosaurs’ legs to copies of Studly’s control-feedback walking algorithms. My dinosaurs chased after each other really well. When I toggled on the mighty Roarworld sound module, it was more than awesome. GAH-ROOOOONT !
    My virtual desk had a simmie keyboard and a mound of flat simmies of sheets of paper: letters and programs I was currently working on. If I wanted to revise a document, I just picked up its simmie, positioned it over
the virtual keyboard, and typed away. My simmie keyboard was so sensitively tuned to my glove outputs that I only needed to wiggle the tips of my fingers.
    When I was typing, an outside observer would have seen me madly twitching my fingers in the air. I’d gotten rid of my mechanical keyboard because I’d reconfigured my simmie keyboard to the point where it didn’t closely match the dumbly obstinate geometry of the mechanical board.
    Even though I typed in thin air, it felt as though I was touching something, for my gloves had tactile feedback. Woven in with the Spandex were special piezoplastic touchpads that could swell up and press against my hand. The touchpads on my fingertips pulsed each time I pushed down on a virtual key.
    It was marvelous, but sometimes my hands missed the physical support of a keyboard. When I would hack a lot, my forearms would hurt and my thumbs and pinkies would get numb. I sometimes worried about getting carpal tunnel syndrome and losing my ability to type. For a hacker this would be like a trumpeter losing his or her lips. I kept meaning to get a wedge of malleable plastic in the shape of a keyboard. It was easy to get them, like at Fry’s Electronics in Sunnyvale; they were called feely-blank keyboards.
    You could get all sorts of feely-blank accessories for cyberspace, and yes, dear horn-dog, there were even male/female feely-blank