The Hacker and the Ants Read Free Page A

love-dolls, complete with hinged limbs and cunningly engineered touchpads. The love-dolls came with get-down simmie software to show images that matched the doll’s motions. If you wanted to spend a little more money, you could go to a porno web site for a live person who’d puppeteer your doll through all manner of erotic outrages. But I hadn’t looked extensively into the details of cybersex; when you were hacking
as much as I did, you didn’t want to be near a computer in your free time.
    The two feely-blank things I actually owned were a potter’s wheel and a weighted golf club handle which Carol had given me last Christmas. The club handle was short—so that I didn’t smash everything around me while working my way down, say, the fabulous second oceanside hole of the Toshiba Cyberspace Pebble Beach. The clever thing about the feely-blank golf club was that the tip held a gyroscope which did a cyberized jiggly-doo right when I would hit the virtual ball—giving me the shock of contact.
    The potter’s wheel was for Carol, and for awhile she had enjoyed using it. It was like a regular electric wheel, except that it had a permanent “lump of clay” which was made of firm, malleable titaniplast putty. They used the same stuff for the feely-blank keyboards; you could mold and remold it to any shape you wanted, and it never got brittle. I’d kept all the virtual pots Carol made in a file somewhere.
    Anyway, I kept meaning to go get a fake keyboard, but physically going places and buying material objects for my computer was not something I was into. I mean walking into a place like Fry’s Electronics was always a downer, everyone sucking down Jolt Colas and munching candy bars, no women in sight, just males—pitiful bewildered larvae from under a rock, or pompous bearded lawn-dwarves with tenor voices, or square-forehead Frankenstein monsters, or sweaty strivers with no fingernails—lumps and losers to a man. How had I ended up associated with this class of people? Oh well , as the California kids would say when something not particularly desirable happened. Oh well!
    The two neatest things in my virtual office were my Lorenz attractor and my dollhouse. The Lorenz attractor
was a floating dynamical system consisting of orbiting three-dimensional icons, little simmie images that represented pieces of information and the various things my computer could do. The icons tumbled along taffy trajectories that knotted into a roller coaster pair of floppy ears with a chaotic, figure eight intersection. If I liked, I could make myself small and ride around on the Lorenz attractor in a painless demolition derby with my files. It was a fun way to mull things over.
    My dollhouse was a special miniature cyberspace model of my house that I’d once made as a Christmas present for little Ida. She’d never actually played with it that much—one reason being that I was hardly ever willing to let anyone else use my gloves and headset. I needed them all the time for all the work I had to do—always too much work!
    I’d tweaked my real house’s alarm system so that if anyone touched a door or window, the corresponding door or window would light up on the dollhouse. I had little models of myself and my family members inside my dollhouse. Actually my wife and three children shouldn’t have been in the dollhouse at all anymore, as they no longer lived here, but it would have made me too sad and lonely to erase them. In my dollhouse, my wife was in the kitchen and my kids were lying on their stomachs in the living room doing homework and watching a tiny digital TV. If they’d actually been in my house, moving from room to room, the little simmie-dolls that represented them would have moved around too. My house was smart enough always to know who was in which room. The little virtual TV was hooked into the Fibernet system; sometimes I would make myself small and