The Hacker and the Ants by Rudy Rucker

seventeen small unclassified objects. Perhaps one or several of them is a roach.”
    Studly’s nest was a corner of a basement room off the
kitchen. There was a wall socket where he recharged his batteries; and there were tools, parts, and lubricants so he could routinely service himself. Studly plugged in and topped up his power supply while I looked things over. There was a little shelf in Studly’s nest where he put unusual things that he picked up around the house. Buttons, a hairpin, a ticket stub, a baby tooth, but no roaches. Oh well!
    â€œHey, Studly, let’s go upstairs and look at the ants.”
    â€œI can dig it.”
    I led Studly up to my computer room. My display screen was still dark with images of ants, busy GoMotion ants weaving the figures of their asymmetrical rounds. Were they waiting for me?
    The noise drifting out of the speakers in the headset was sweeter than it had been before, almost musical.
    â€œWhy did you try to keep me in there?” I rhetorically asked the ants. “What do you want to show me?”
    I picked up the headset.
    â€œStudly, will you stay here and keep an eye on me while I’m wearing the phones?”
    â€œI will watch you.”
    â€œSit near the plug to the computer there, and if I say ‘Help’, then you pull the plug out of the wall and take the goggles off of my head, okay?”
    â€œNo problem, Jerzy.”
    I put on the gloves and headset and reentered cyberspace. The cloud of ants surrounded me, thick as smoke and shot with twisting lines of color. Instead of trying to back out, I pointed my finger and flew forward. Bingo. I was out of the ant cloud and able to see that Gretchen had moved my viewpoint to the sportswear section of the virtual Nordstrom’s department store—a fabulous structure CAD-crafted to resemble a huge Victorian crystal palace of lacy ironwork and frosted glass.

    A few other customers were visible, and my body was visible as well. Mass market virtual stores like Nordstrom’s require their shoppers to have visible body icons, not only to discourage perverts and snoopers, but also because people shop more recklessly when they feel themselves to be part of a crowd. The store was open and airy: instead of long racks and shaky stacks of clothing in every size, there were small, tasteful displays with a few copies of each available style. The virtual garments were freely adjustable through the full ranges of their currently available colors and sizes. Once you’d decided on something, you’d tell a clerk, and the physical garment would be mailed to your house.
    Handsome mannequins danced in place, modeling the wares. “I’m a California Girl!” said the nearest mannequin every so often. “California.” She was modeling a thin shell formal wet suit. “Are you a California Girl?” That was all she ever said, but sometimes she said it slow, and sometimes she said it fast; the rates were no doubt driven by the Poincaré sampling of a chaotic attractor. A one- or two-dimensional attractor suffices for something as simple as the scheduling of a time series, but the asynchronous motions of the mannequin’s body were at least seven-dimensional, and the attractor underlying the marvelously plastic play of her facial expressions could have involved as many as thirteen variables.
    Delicate, decorative struts stretched from one side of the great hall to the other. In this cyberspace world of pure geometry, the struts needed bear no physical tension, so they were free to meander vinelike in and out of straight-line true. Their surfaces bore spiral patterns with a passing resemblance to bark. With an unpleasant shock, I noticed a rapid file of small ants wending their way down the strut nearest to me. At a certain point, they jumped clear of the strut to join the ant cloud that had
blocked my vision before, a cloud that was raggedly expanding—presumably in search of