The Hacker and the Ants by Rudy Rucker Page A

me.
    The GoMotion ants could walk through the “air” of cyberspace as easily as along the surfaces of cyberspace objects. If they generally preferred walking on surfaces, it was because it was easier for them to find each others’ trails on the two dimensions of a surface. On a surface, nearly every pair of lines intersects, but in space, intersecting lines are the exception rather than the rule.
    Roger had designed the GoMotion ant software so that the ants tended to pay more attention to their immediate neighborhood. In principle, the ants could have looked and seen that my tuxedo had moved about ten feet down the aisle from them. But their software architecture preferred to have them search for my tuxedo by the traditional myrmecine expedient of blindly milling about. In French, the word for ant is fourmi, and the word for the milling of ants is fourmillement. By extension, fourmillement can also refer to the tingling, pins-and-needles sensation one gets when one’s foot falls asleep. Have I mentioned that I used to be a professor?
    The seething little pests reminded me of the miniature ants I’d found beneath the base of a broken toilet in the first apartment Carol and I had shared—already more than twenty years ago? We’d called them pissants, and that’s how I thought of these little guys: obnoxious pissants who were after my tuxedo.
    Instead of laying down trails of pheromones and formic acid, the GoMotion ants left gappy ribbons made of colored polygons. With each step forward, each ant excreted a new polygon—as if it were building a path of tiny stepping-stones—and each time an ant added a polygon to the head of its ribbon trail, a polygon would disappear from the trail’s tail. In this way, a moving GoMotion ant’s trail always consisted of the same number of polygons;
the default value depending on the particular DTV chip the ant’s computation was running on. Different ants used different combinations of shape and color for their trail tiles at different times; the resulting trail patterns served to pass information to other ants.
    The nearby pissants’ trails were three or four feet in length, and several of them were coming close to blundering into me. I moved farther on down the aisle, passing two other shoppers’ body icons. No ants were bothering them—it seemed that the ants were only interested in me. Could the other shoppers even see them?
    I tapped the shoulder of a woman in shorts. She had her body tuxedo’s skin programmed to look like reflective bronze. “Excuse me,” I said, “can I ask you a question about this store?”
    â€œI’m not a clerk.” Many Californians tended not to be very friendly. First of all they were too busy, and secondly there were so many druggies, psychos, and con artists that everyone was cautious.
    â€œOh, that’s all right. I was just wondering—” I gestured over my shoulder at the cloud of pissants back down the aisle. “Do you see something odd there? Do you see a cloud of ants?”
    â€œAnts?”
    â€œYes!” I strode back a few paces and plucked one of them out of the air, holding its struggling little form tight in my buzzing touchpads. “Look at this!” I said, hurrying back to the woman with my hand held high. “Wouldn’t you call this an ant?”
    â€œUhhh, sorry!” said the woman shortly, not even trying very hard to look. “I . . . I guess my eyesight’s not that good.” She turned and walked off as fast as she could.
    I peered closer at the little ant. It was most definitely a GoMotion ant; its curves were as familiar to me as the contours of Carol’s face. Roger had hacked our intricate
CAD ant models himself, fitting our shapes to official E.O. Wilson entomological data. He’d used spline curves, Bezier surfaces, Koons patches, nurbs—whatever it took. And then he’d taken GoMotion’s