The Hacker and the Ants by Rudy Rucker Read Free Book Online Page A

want Carol back, Studly. But I’m also glad she’s gone. We were fighting all the time, don’t you remember? Are you going to be like the kids and keep trying to get us back together? Face it Studly, you’re a poor robot
from a broken home. Go on into the living room and stay out of trouble now, will you?”
    The Studster went.
    It was so quiet in my big, empty house. I wandered back into my machine room. My unplugged computer was dark and silent. I pulled my phone jack out of the computer and plugged it directly into a Fibernet wall plug. Hallelujah, a dial tone.
    I got out my address book. I sometimes scored pot from a hippie woman my age named Queue Harmaline. She and her permanent boyfriend Keith lived among redwoods on the wet western slopes of the Santa Cruz mountains. Queue and Keith made a living producing digitized tapes and films of various hip events. Queue usually had a good stash of primo sinsemilla. Although she was not a dealer, if I begged hard enough, she could normally be prevailed upon to sell me a bit of her hoard.
    Since Queue wasn’t really interested in selling off her pot to me, the price was high, but a quarter ounce of the stuff was strong enough to last me for months, unless I got reckless. Also, I always enjoyed having a chance to visit with Queue. She was slim and dark and hip and she laughed a lot.
    It was important to call in advance if I wanted to try to get pot from her. Queue hated to go into her stash with anyone around. Once I’d shown up without warning and she gave me a tongue-lashing and then subjected me to a forty-minute wait while she did four other things at once. Finally, after taking $160 off me, she’d put me outside on the deck while she scampered up and down the three levels of her house like a squirrel, pausing here, pausing there, so that finally I could make no estimate of where in the house she found the anorexic rolled-up baggie she ultimately granted me. That’s how I’d learned always to call.

    More often than not, Queue and Keith let their scratchy answering machine take messages they never listened to, but today, for a wonder, Queue was right there.
    â€œMedia Molecules.” That’s what she called her tape business.
    â€œHi, Queue, this is Jerzy. I wonder if I could score a tape off you today.” One of anything was our code word for a quarter ounce.
    â€œMm-hmm. The usual. How come you never call unless you want something, Jerzy? And what about you and Carol?”
    â€œShe hasn’t come back.”
    â€œDidn’t you say you and Carol were going to try counseling?”
    â€œIt didn’t work. It made things worse. The counselor was a woman, and Carol thought she was taking my side. The concept is that the counselor is a neutral referee, right, and you can both say anything you want, but then when she asks follow-up questions you can tell whose story she’s buying into. The counselor bought into my story even though I’m wrong.”
    â€œWhy are you always so down on yourself, Jerzy?”
    â€œI had an unhappy childhood. My wife hates me. And I’ve sold my soul to the machines.” I always felt like I could say just about anything to Queue. Her ready laughter was a stifled chirp phasing into a tinkling giggle.
    â€œHow’s your big job at GoMotion? Is that still happening?”
    â€œWe’re designing a line of personal robots in cyberspace. It’ll be called the Veep. We made a prototype of the first one, and it cleans my house. But now my computer’s messed up. Something really strange happened today. You don’t know about the dark dream , do you, Queue? It’s when you think you’ve left cyberspace and
you’re still in it. That happened to me today.”
    â€œOn the computer? Was it fun? I’ve had things like that happen to me with . . . in certain situations. Levels of reality?” She was talking about psychedelics, but she never ever