The Hacker and the Ants by Rudy Rucker

year’s necklace.
    A crowd of people in Spandex stood in front of the Los Perros Coffee Roasting Company, taking the air and enjoying each other’s company, some of them planning or returning from a jog along the Dammit Trail that leads up along Route 17 to the all but dry Hidalgo Reservoir.
    When Carol and I moved to California, I was an unemployed mathematics professor, and I’d felt a disenfranchised academic mouse’s contempt for the Los Perros yuppies with their good cars, fit bodies, and standoffish demeanor.
    Cars? My maroon Chevy Caprice whale wagon had been a damned fine car back in Killeville, Virginia, where Carol and I bought it used for $8,000. It was the only car we’d brought across the country with us, but in Los Perros, the whale hadn’t been any kind of a car to be proud of at all. We’d darted our heads around spotting BMWs, Mercedes, Porsches, even Ferraris and Lamborghinis, cars insanely out of our price range. For our second car we came up with $4K and bought a six-year-old Honda Accord, thinking at least now we’re fuel efficient! Then I’d gotten the GoMotion job and the Animata.
    Yes, instead of remaining angry embittered losers, Carol and I had gotten job skills and turned that shit
around. We’d gotten the bucks and become Californian and had no problems with drinking coffee at the Los Perros Coffee Roasting Company. It wasn’t snooty in there, it was civilized and practical—in the manner of a European cafe and in the manner of a McDonald’s—in the California manner, in short, and Carol and I were now at ease there. We were Californians: fit, in a hurry, making good bread, and with serious problems that we were beginning to try to learn to deal with.
    The light was red, and I sat there in my Animata, with my windows and sunroof open, looking at all the beautiful women. I had a severe horn. It had been five weeks. Things change when you go so long without the cheering contact of another human’s fluids and skin. Crossing the street were a pair of twin young mothers pushing identical light blue strollers, each stroller holding a pair of twins. Six people! Were they models, come to profit in California? Mentally I selected a cube of space around one of the women, deleted her from the street, and inserted her into my head’s own seraglio, nude and chatty.
    A joyfully chic Latina woman with a high-fashion straw hat crossed next. She gazed at me evenly, smiled—and kept walking, right into the Roasting and right out of my life. In California you often see people that you never see again.
    Here came a girl in stiff, poured-on jeans, her fluffy mass of combed curly hair formed into a huge ponytail resting on her back. With a barrette at either end, her ponytail had the shape of a great, thick jouncing cigar, which contrasted nicely with the sharply cut lines of her hips in their covering of thick, furrowed denim.
    A plucky nineteen-year-old with dark eyebrows and a clean-cut nose appeared with two friends. Her mouth was lively, seductive and ironic, with narrow dark lips, crisply edged.

    Right outside my car window sat a woman on the wide wall of the planter before the Roasting’s storefront. She wore a tasteful sweater of large argyle diamonds, her bell of hair was streaked and set just so, her soft face was womanly, yet childishly pert—I guessed she was a dissipated California Girl who had divorced or never married. She looked like Carol, only more symmetrical, ten years younger and ten pounds lighter. Suddenly I realized she was staring back at me. The light changed. Behind me was a Mercedes driven by a blond-bobbed woman in white silk, diamonds, and gold.
    Turning the corner onto Santa Ynez Avenue, who should I see before the office of Welsh & Tayke Realty but Susan Poker, animatedly talking to a stocky woman with a portable phone and a black leather purse yet larger than Susan Poker’s. The stocky woman had shiny skin,