Transreal Cyberpunk (24 page)

The ants tasted of the droplets—and found them good. The trails on the floor thickened as ants seethed out of the TV, so many ants that the trails looked like glittering syrup.

Not wanting to admit defeat, Jayson began stomping the ants. “My essences drew ‘em out of hiding. This way we can wipe them out!” One of the old pine floorboards gave a loud crack and split along its length.

“Jayson!”

“Dog, you got so many ants that they gotta be living under your house. You got some serious Los Angeles ants here, man, you got atomic mutant ants like those giant ants in
Them
. We rip up these crappy old floorboards, napalm those little suckers with flaming moth-balls, then float in some plywood and throw down a cheap carpet. Presto, problem solved.”

“Save the pyro stunts for Burning Man, Jayson. You’re not wrecking my vintage floor.”

Jayson knelt and peered through the broken board, getting the ant’s-eye view. “That’s a great movie,
Them
, it’s got those classic rubber-model bug effects. None of your digital crap.”

“Digital is not crap,” said Stefan with dignity. “Digital is everything. The world is made of ten-dimensional loops of digital cosmic string.”

“Sure, sure, but
Bug’s Life
and
Antz
were totally lame compared to
Them
.”

“That’s because they didn’t use giant ants,” said Stefan. “Certain intellectual lightweights have this wimpy notion that giant ants are physically impossible! Merely because the weight-to-strength ratio scales nonlinearly. But there’s so many loopholes. Like negatively curved space, man, or higher dimensions. Lots of elbow room in hyperspace! String theory says there are six extra dimensions of spacetime too small for humans to see. The Calabi-Yau vermin dimensions.”

“You really know some wack stuff, dog,” said Jayson, vindictively mashing ants with his thumb. “If these ants have got their own goddamn dimensions, all the more reason to rip up this floor and pour gallons of burning gasoline into their hive.”

“Their nest is not under my house,” insisted Stefan. “There’s got to be some modern cyber-method to track ants to their true lair. Like if I could laser-scan them, or Google-map them. That would rock.”

“Stefan, why did you even call me if you want to talk that kind of crap? It’s not like ants have anti-theft labels.”

“Hey, that’s it!” exclaimed Stefan. “I’ve got smart dust, man. I’ve got a whole bag of smart dust in my bedroom.”

Jayson grinned loonily and made snorting noises. “Smart dust? Throw down some lines, dog!”

“I do not speak of mere drugs,” said Stefan loftily, “I’m talking RFID! Radio frequency ID chips. My smart dust comes out of a lab in Berkeley. You can ping these teensy ID tags with radio, and they give off an ID number. They’re computer chips, but they’re so much smaller than ants that they’re like ant cell phones. Smaller than that, even. Smart dust is like ant pretzel nuggets.”

Stefan fetched Jayson a promotional sheet from a heap of tech-conference swag. The glossy ad showed one single ant towering over one single chip of smart dust. The chip was a knitted trackwork of logic circuits, pretty much like any normal computer chip, but the ant standing over it was an armored Godzilla with eyes like hubcaps and feelers big as sewer pipes.

“Whoah,” said Jayson. “I’d love to see an ant that big.” He drew out his multitool and kinked at a shiny length of his hobby wire.

Stefan rooted through his tangled electronic gear. “Here it is: just what we need. We’ll mix this bag of smart-dust with your super-attractive ant repellents, and all the ants will swallow that stuff whole. Luring ants with high-tech bait—that’s just like when we did our art installations at Burning Man, back in the day!”

“Yep, those naked hippies were drawn to our tech wizardry like ants to sugar,” Jayson concurred. “I’d always get laid right away, but you were obsessed with keeping the demo running.”

“I need to change,” admitted Stefan.

The ants gathered rapidly around the bait, climbing on top of each other in their eagerness to feed. Stefan squatted to stare. “Wow, we’re drawing a matinee crowd!”

“Yeah, we got a big pop hit,” observed Jayson. The diverse crowd of ants included little foragers, big-jawed soldiers, curvaceous nurses, boxy undertakers…

Stefan pointed. “That one’s big as a rubber beetle! She must be a queen or something!”

“Squash her first,” said Jayson, plucking a rumpled pack of cigarettes from his pants pocket.

“I’m gonna capture her! A specimen like this belongs in a science museum.” Stefan hopped up and fetched nonconductive plastic tweezers from his electronics toolbox.

But when he leaned in to clutch the biggest ant with the tools of science—
whoa
, the ant shrank to a pencil-dot and disappeared into the floor boards.

“Feeling very strange!” exclaimed Stefan. “Did you see?”

“These ants are shifty mofos; I don’t like ‘em,” said Jayson, lighting his cigarette. He dialed up his lighter’s flame to make a small blow-torch. “These website-eaters must have swallowed some chips by now. Tea party’s over, girls.”

Scorched by Jayson’s lighter flame, the ants milled, panicked and dispersed.

Stefan’s smart-dust scanner was the size of a pen, with a wireless connection to his laptop. Most of the dust was still half-glued on the floor, so it was hard to find a clear signal. Stefan tapped eagerly at his laptop’s keyboard, tweaking the scanner. Enthralled by discovery, he’d forgotten all the pain in his wrists.

The smart-dust signals were vanishing through the walls of his apartment. With some bloodhound-style electronic tracking, Stefan found that the signals converged onto a winding ant highway running through his sun-baked yard.

“See, Jayson, those ants don’t live anywhere near my house.”

“I’ll bring the gasoline,” said Jayson, opening the last Mexican beer. “I saw a five gallon can in your garage by the leafblower.”

They followed the signals up Mr. Noor’s long driveway, the gas sloshing in Jayson’s rusty can. The ants were moving with astounding speed, as if they’d mounted tiny broom-sticks.

“I don’t like leaving my bike,” said Jayson after a bit. “No way these are the same ants that were in your house.”

“Smart dust don’t lie, compadre.”

They arrived at an overgrown pull-off near the gate; Stefan passed it every day. He’d never thought to stop there before, for the spot was bristling with angry yucca and prickly-pear. The trail of cybernetically tagged ants led under a forbidding tangle of dusty cactus, disappearing into a crooked little groove, a mini-arroyo where the fault-tortured dirt of LA had cracked wide open.

A wind-blown newspaper dangled from the spine of an ancient yucca.

Jayson plucked the paper loose. “This might be handy for tinder… Hey, whoa! Look how old this thing is!”

The newspaper dated from 1942; the lead story was about the “zoot suit riots” pitting Latino teens against US sailors on liberty.

“Duck-tail haircuts,” murmured Jayson, skimming the article. “I could make a historical zoot suit. This paper is great. I can sell this as memorabilia. There might be a whole trove of old paper under that cactus. Let’s hold off on the flaming gasoline attack.”

Stefan stared at his laptop. His smart-dusted ant signals were vanishing as fast as movie popcorn. “They’re running straight into that crack in the ground. And then their signals just vanish.”

“Must be some kinda sink hole,” said Jayson. He hunkered down and accurately pitched his empty beer bottle at the crack under the cactus.

The brown Mexican glass bloated like a soap bubble, shrank to the size of a pinhead and disappeared.

“Okay,” said Jayson slowly. “That’s pretty well torn it.”

“It’s…that’s…wow, it’s a localized domain of scale recalibration,” said Stefan. “You get that kind of Calabi-Yau effect from a warping of the seventh dimension. You wait here, Jayson. I’m gonna walk right in there. I know how to handle these things.”

Clutching his laptop, Stefan ventured forward towards the mysterious furrow. He took a step, two, three. Enormous mammoth-ear blobs of prickly pear cast a weird shade over his computer screen.

Suddenly five enormous fleshy sausages seized his chest with crushing force. He gasped and dropped his laptop. He was yanked backward with blinding speed, then somehow found himself tumbling into Jayson, sending the two of them sprawling on the dry, cracked dirt.

“You shrank, man,” Jayson complained, rising and dusting his cargo shorts. “You shrank right to the size of a hobbit. You were the size of Hello friggin’ Kitty.”

“Where’s my computer?”

“You see that little gray matchbook down there? That’s your Dell, dude.”

“I’m getting it.” Stefan darted in, shrinking as he went. He grabbed his laptop and hurried back out.

“Brave man,” said Jayson, patting Stefan’s shoulder. “How about this for an idea. Instead of walking into that crack, we get my Indian and ride into it.”

Stefan considered this, “You really want to risk your precious bike? At this point, it’s all you’ve got left.”

Jayson mulled this perhaps unkind remark, and decided to come clean. “Look, I didn’t want to tell you this before, because I’d knew you’d get all uptight, but Lester hid one of those satellite locator gizmos inside my Indian’s engine block. That’s what he told me on the phone. So if he really filed a stolen vehicle report…”

A police helicopter was laboring heavily over the valley. In LA, the cop choppers were always up there. At four AM, above a howl of sirens, you could see them scorching the dark alleys of Hollywood with massive beams of light, like premieres in reverse.

“So I say we ride my bike into this crack in the ground,” continued Jayson. “And then we ride off the radio spectrum, just like the ants did. The vehicle disappears. Plus, then we’ve got some wheels. It’s win-win.”

“Brilliant,” said Stefan, nodding his head. “Let’s hurry.”

They left the gas can where it was, and ran back to the garage. Jayson kicked his reluctant hog into function. There was room to spare for Stefan behind Jayson on the Indian’s enormous seat, which had been built for the generous cop-butts of a simpler era.

They roared up the driveway to the pullout and paused to top up the motorcycle’s tank from the can of gas, Jayson recklessly smoking a cigarette all the while.

“I’m, uh, having a moment of hesitation,” Stefan confessed when they were back on the seat. “Can two men on a motorcycle possibly fit under a cactus?” He fumbled at his laptop. “I’m thinking maybe some calculations or some Google research would be—”

The rest of his words were lost in the roar of a police helicopter sweeping low over the ridge.

Jayson torqued the throttle and did a wheelie straight towards the bristling chaparral.

Part 2

With the sinister ease of fishline unsnarling, the prickly pear grew to enormous size overhead. The groove in the ground rose up on both sides like a frozen tsunami, then segued into a commodious canyon—a peaceful, timeless place with steep reddish sides and a sweet, grassy floor.

Jayson eased back on the throttle. The canyon cliffs had a certain swoony quality, like a paint-by-numbers canvas done by someone short of oils. The canyon’s air was luminous, glowing from within.

Little houses dotted the bucolic valley floor, in rows and clusters. There were fields of corn, chickens in the yards, oranges, and here and there, thriving patches of marijuana.

A dry river snaked along the valley. Livestock grazed the uncertain terrain of the higher slopes, which featured particularly vertiginous, eye-hurting angles. The grazing animals might have been cows and horses—maybe even antelopes and bison.

Up above the slopes the sun was scudding across the sky like a windblown balloon. Jayson braked the bike and cut the engine. “Okay. Okay. What the hell is that up there?”

“That’s the sun, Jayson.”

“It’s falling out of the sky?”

“No, man. Any space warp is a time warp as well. I’d say one minute here in this valley of the ants is about the same as an hour in the workadaddy outer world.” Stefan cocked his head, staring at the racing sun, his eyes as bright as an excited bird’s. “The deeper we go in, the faster the outer world’s time rushes by. We’ll be like a couple of Rip van Winkles.”

Jayson threw back his head and laughed. “So by now those cops have given up and flown home!” He whooped again, as if recklessly trying to project his voice from the tiny ant crack beneath the cactuses off Mr. Noor’s drive. “Kiss my ass, Lester!”

“I have to analyze this situation scientifically,” said Stefan, growing fretful. “It’s counterintuitive for time to run slower here than in the world outside. That’s unexpected. Because usually small things are faster than large ones. Twitchy mice, sluggish elephants. But, oh, I see now, if the component strings of spacetime are
left
-handed seven-dimensional helices, then—”

“Then we’re free men,” said Jayson, kick-starting his bike with a roar. “Let’s see if I can find us the local Fatburger. That baloney of yours left a bad taste in my mouth.”