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

we reached the sun porch. “Were you and the wife into bondage?” She laughed softly and took a sip of her wine.
    â€œI work in virtual reality,” I told her. “Cyberspace?”
    Gretchen looked enthusiastic. Cyberspace was big again, getting more popular every day. “That’s great! Can I try?”
    A wave of hominess engulfed me. I stepped forward and put my arms around her. “Sure you can try it,” said I. “Everything I own is yours, Gretchen in Wonderland.”
    â€œHow sweet.”
    We put down our wineglasses and I took her in my arms. Gretchen cocked her head and kissed me full on. Her mouth tasted cool and good. We made our way to the bed and lay down. Her sweater and skirt came off easily. She wore silky skin-colored underwear, and that came off easily too. I kissed her breasts and then I put on a rubber and we fucked. She wrapped her legs around my waist and moaned really loud, which made me feel great. She even said my name: “Jerzy, Jerzy, oh Jerzy!” All right.
    After we came, we wandered naked into the sun porch. My windows looked out on pure nature: the live oaks and eucalypti of the dry gully behind the house. There were squirrels and birds. Standing there naked with Gretchen it felt like we were Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Sometimes Carol and I had stood here like this.
    â€œI still want to see cyberspace,” said Gretchen, brushing my arm with the tip of a tit.

    â€œOne thing,” I cautioned. “I got a kind of infection in my machine this morning, a thing like a computer virus. We call them ants. It’s possible they might make it . . . malfunction.”
    â€œAre you going to show me cyberspace or not?” demanded Gretchen.
    â€œOh, sure, I guess it’s okay,” said I, unable to resist finding out if this were true.
    I turned on the computer and Gretchen watched me type in my cyberspace access code. Then I helped her don the gloves and headset. She sat in my desk chair, turning her head this way and that, while my desk monitor showed what she was seeing. I was ready to pull the plug if anything was weird, but so far everything looked normal. Gretchen was in my virtual office with Roarworld in the background.
    â€œDinosaurs!” exclaimed Gretchen in the too-loud voice of a person wearing earphones. “This is wonderful, Jerzy. Can I move around?”
    I took her hand in mine and pushed the fingers into a pointing position. With my other hand I nodded her head to make her start flying. The screen images zoomed among the dinosaurs. I closed her fingers into a fist to make the motion stop. Gretchen understood and began flying around at will. Roarworld is quite shallow: its depth axis wraps after forty feet, meaning that if you fly forty feet deep into Roarworld, you find yourself back where you started. After she’d figured this out, Gretchen focused back on my virtual office.
    It was fun to stand back and watch this naked, goggled woman sitting in my desk chair and moving her hands and head so oddly as she explored the invisible office that is layered over my sun porch. I kept a close eye on the screen, watching for any return of the ants—but there was no sign of them. Maybe the ant explosion
was confined to the room at the end of the hall at GoMotion. But why had the ants put me on the dark dream; and how had they done it so easily?
    As well as a door to GoMotion, my virtual office had a door to the Bay Area Netport. The Netport door was round and was patterned with the light gray-and-green yin-yang that was the Bay Area Netport logo. Gretchen flew on in there as I watched along on my computer’s screen.
    Some nostalgic, displaced hacker had designed the Bay Area Netport to look like the waiting room of Grand Central Station in New York City. This cavernous simmie was programmed to be gravity-free, and you would see people’s body images floating around all over the mock steam-age space.