The Hacker and the Ants Read Online Free PDF Page B

draped over a high plinth, ruminatively fondling the magic wand which he used instead of a mouse or a keyboard. Seeing me, he made a series of mystical passes with his hands. Simmies of lizards chased each other up and down the sides of the granite blocks.
    â€œThought for the day,” said Trevor. “How many light bulbs does it take to change a light bulb?”
    â€œ,” I said, or mimed, rather.
    â€œAw, Jerzy, you’ve heard it before!”
    â€œYou’ve told it before. But listen: there’s a loose ant in my system.”

    â€œOw,” said Trevor, and contorted his face into a hideous Punch-and-Judy grimace that grew and turned into the gargoyle at Notre Dame, into a cubic Julia set, and then into a cataclysmic explosion of knobby 3-D paisley. One of the fun things about talking to Trevor in cyberspace was that he made such great “faces.” The paisleys spermed off, Trevor’s normal body image returned, and his voice resumed.
    â€œLet’s assume the worst hasn’t happened. Let’s assume the ants haven’t crawled out over the whole Net. I think that’s a reasonable supposition, or we’d be seeing ants right now.”
    â€œOkay,” I said. “But how can they be loose on just my machine?”
    â€œIf the ants can slave your display and drive your graphics output, that means they’ve established a network pseudonode with your IP address,” said Trevor. “A virtual back-end server.”
    Half the time I didn’t know what Trevor was talking about. But there was never any use in asking, because he would just come back with more of the same. When talking to Trevor, the only way to proceed was to keep plowing forward. “So how do you think the ants got on my machine?”
    Trevor made a gesture with his wand, and a scrolling screen of system log info appeared next to him. He laid his forefinger along the side of his nose and studied the list. “I rather strongly suspect you’ve been hosed by the Founder himself,” he said finally, with a bemused chuckle. “Roger Coolidge has been acting weird. More weird. He’s been talking about an ant eggcase. His idea was to compile a virtual ant server, tar the binary with a bunch of self-reproducing ant programs, and compress the whole viral mess into a self-extracting program that fits inside a user’s boot script. The log entries show that
Roger accessed your boot script sometime last night. Some might call it an honor, Jerzy.”
    As well as working on the a-life evolution of better programs for the Veep, I’d been working with Roger and his electronic ants. Roger’s interest in the ants had a different slant than mine. I liked artificial life because—like real living systems—a-life programs could do unexpected and beautiful things. The individual programs were what tended to capture my interest. Roger was more pragmatic. He said he was interested in using the GoMotion ants to model the dynamics of actual computer processes. When he did talk about science, he talked about things like species extinction and punctuated equilibria. In his home he had a large collection of expensive fossils that his wife had collected. The viruslike aspect of artificial life was also something that Roger had always found itchily fascinating.
    I pointed my finger and flew through the wall of the ant lab at the end of the hall. The wall was made of industrial-strength cryp repellent updated daily by Trevor. Roger, Trevor, and I were the only people who could get into the ant lab. I expected to find Roger Coolidge’s body image in there, but for now Roger wasn’t there.
    We’d been maintaining the cyberspace model of the ant lab so that it looked like a real bio lab, with a big black workbench, another bench full of tools, and a wall lined with cultures. We’d found that the most entertaining way to look at the ants was to let each colony drive a DTV