Stefan Oertel pulled a long strand of salami rind from his teeth. He stared deep into wonderland.
Look at that program go! Flexible vectors swarming in ten-dimensional hyperspace! String theory simulation! Under those colored gouts of special effects, this, at last, was real science!
Stefan munched more of his sandwich and plucked up an old cell phone, one of the ten thousand such units that he’d assembled into a home supercomputer. “Twine dimension seven!” he mumbled around the lunchmeat. “Loop dimension eight!”
The screen continued its eye-warping pastel shapes. Stefan’s ultracluster of hacked cell phones was searching Calabi-Yau string theory geometries. The tangling cosmic strings wove gorgeous, abrupt Necker-cube reversals and inversions. His program’s output was visually brilliant. And, thus far, useless to anybody. But maybe his latest settings were precisely the right ones and the One True String Theory was about to be unveiled—
“Loop dimension eight,” he repeated.
Unfortunately his system seemed to be ignoring his orders. There might be something wrong with the particular phone he was holding—these phones were, after all, junkers that Stefan’s pal Jayson Rubio had skimmed from the vast garbage dumps of Los Angeles. Jayson was a junk-hound of the first order.
Ten thousand networked cell phones had given Stefan serious, number-crunching heavy muscle. He needed them to search the staggeringly large state space of all possible string theories. The powerful Unix and RAM chips inside the phones were in constant wireless communication with each other. He kept their ten thousand batteries charged with induction magnets. The whole sprawling shebang was nested in sets of brightly colored plastic laundry baskets. Stefan dug the eco-fresh beauty of this abracadabra: he’d transformed a waste-disposal mess into a post-Einsteinian theory-incubator.
Stefan had earned his programming skills the hard way: years of labor in the machine-buzzing dungeons of Hollywood. And he’d paid a price: alienated parents in distant Topeka, no wife, no kids, and his best coder pals were just email addresses. Furthermore, typing all that computer graphics code had afflicted him with a burning case of carpal tunnel syndrome, which was why he preferred yelling his line-commands into phones. Cell phones had kick-ass voice-recognition capabilities.
Stefan dipped into a brimming pink laundry basket and snagged a fresher phone, an early-nineties model with a flapping, half-broken jaw.
“Greetings, wizard!” the phone chirped, showing that it was good to go.
“Twine dimension seven, dammit! Loop dimension eight.”
The system was still ignoring him. Now Stefan was worried. Was the TV’s wireless chip down? That shouldn’t happen. The giant digital flat-screen was new. And, yes, the phones were old junk, but with so many of them in his ultracluster it didn’t matter if a few dozen went dead.
He tried another phone and another. Crisis was at hand.
The monster screen flickered and skewed. To his deep horror, the speakers emitted a poisoned death-rattle, prolonged and sizzling and terrible, like the hissing of the Wicked Witch of the West as she dissolved in a puddle of stage-magic.
The flat screen went black. Worse yet, the TV began to smell, a pricey, burnt-meat, molten-plastic odor that any programmer knew as bad juju. Stefan bolted from his armchair and knelt to peer through the ventilation slots.
And there he saw—oh please no—the ants. Ants had always infested Stefan’s rental house. Whenever the local droughts got bad, the ants arrived in hordes, trooping out of the thick Mulholland brush, waving their feelers for water. Stefan’s decaying cottage had leaky old plumbing. His home was an ant oasis.
He’d never seen the ants in such numbers. Perhaps the frenzied wireless signals from his massive mounds of cell phones had upset them somehow? There were thousands of ants inside his TV, a dark stream of them wending through the overheated circuit cards like the winding Los Angeles River in its man-made canyons of graffiti-bombed cement. The ants were eating the resin off the cards; they were gorging themselves on his TV’s guts like six-legged Cub Scouts eating molten s’mores.
Stefan groaned and collapsed back into his overstuffed leather armchair. The gorgeous TV was a write-off, but all was not yet lost. The latest state of his system was still stored in his network of cell phones.
He reached for his sandwich, wincing at a stab of pain in his wrist.
The sandwich was boiling with ants. And then he felt insectile tickling at his neck. He jumped to his feet, banged open the door of his leaky bathroom, and hastily fetched up an abandoned comb. He managed to tease three jolly ants from his strawy hair, which was dyed in a fading splendor of day-glo orange and traffic-cone red.
Before he’d moved into this old house, Stefan hadn’t realized that most everybody in L.A. had an ant story to tell. Stefan had the ants pretty badly, but nobody sympathized with him. Whenever he reached out to others with his private burden of tales, they would snidely one-up him with amazing ant-gripes all their own: ants that ate dog food, ants that ate dogs, ants that carried off children.
Compared to the heroic ant woes of other Angelenos, Stefan’s ant problems seemed mild and low-key. His ants were waxy, rubbery-looking little critters, conspicuously multi-ethnic in fine L.A. style, of every shape and every shade of black, brown, red, and yellow. Stefan had them figured for a multi-caste sugar-ant species. They emerged from the tiniest possible cracks, and they adored sweet, sticky stuff.
Stefan bent over the rusty sink and splashed cold water on his unshaven face. He’d done FX for fantasy movies that had won Oscars and enchanted millions of people on six continents. But now, here he stood: wrists wrecked, vermin-infested, no job, no girlfriend, neck-deep in code for a ten-dimensional string-theory simulation with no commercial potential.
Kind of punk and cool, in a way. It sure beat commuting on the hellish L.A. freeways. He was free of servitude. And he definitely had a strong feeling that the very last tweak he’d suggested for his Calabi-Yau search program was the big winner.
Just three months ago, he’d been ignoring his growing wrist pains while writing commercial FX code for Square Root of Not. The outfit was a cutting-edge Venice Beach graphics shop that crafted custom virtual-physics algorithms for movies and the gaming trade.
Of course, Stefan’s true interest, dating way back to college, had always been physics, in particular the Holy Grail of finding the correct version of string theory. Pursuing the awesome fantasy of supersymmetric quantum string manifolds felt vastly finer and nobler than crassly tweaking toy worlds. The Hollywood FX work paid a lot, yes, but it made Stefan a beautician for robots, laboring to give animated characters better hair, shinier teeth, and bouncier boobs. String theorists, on the other hand, were the masters of a conceptual universe.
Though the pace of work had nearly killed him, Stefan had had a good run at Square Root of Not. Their four-person shop had the best fire-and-algebra in Los Angeles, seriously freaky tech chops that lay far beyond the ken of Disney-Pixar and Time-Warner. The Square Rooters’ primary client, the anchor-store in the mall of their dreams, had been Eyes Only, a big post-production lab on the Strip.
But Eyes Only had blundered into a legal tar pit. All too typical: the suits always imagined it was cheaper to litigate than to innovate. Disney’s Giant Mouse was crushing the copyrighted landscape with the tread of a mastodon.
Stefan hadn’t followed the sorry details; the darkside hacking conducted in Hollywood courtrooms wasn’t his idea of entertainment. Bottom line: rather than watching their lives tick away in court, the Square Rooters had taken the offered settlement, and had divvied up cash that would otherwise go to lawyers.
Their pay-off had been less than expected, but all four Square Rooters had been worn down by the grueling crunch cycles anyway. Liberated and well-heeled, each Square Root partner had some special spiritual bliss to follow. Lead programmer Marc Geary was puffing soufflés at a chef school in Santa Monica. Speaker-to-lawyers Emily Yu was about to sail to Tahiti on an old yacht she’d bought off Craig’s List. Handyman Jayson Rubio was roaring around the endless loops of L.A.’s freeways on a vintage red Indian Chief motorcycle. As for Stefan—Stefan was sinking his cash into his living expenses and his home-made ultracluster supercomputer. Finally, freedom and joy. Elite string-theory instead of phony Hollywood rubber physics.
Some days the physics work got Stefan so excited that he could think of nothing else. Just yesterday, when he’d been feeling especially manic about his code, doll-faced Emily Yu had phoned him with a shy offer to come along on her South Seas adventure. Idiotically, Stefan had blown her off. He’d overlooked a golden chance at romance. Instead of hooking up, he’d geeked out.
Today he was nagged by the sense that he should call Emily back. Emily was smart and decent, just his type. But—the thing was—he couldn’t possibly think about Emily without also thinking about work. Those years of servitude were something he wanted to forget. In any case, right this minute he was for sure too busy to call Emily, what with all these friggin’ ants.
Stefan glared at his unshaven clown-haired visage in the mirror. He knew in his heart that he was being stupid. How many more women were likely to ask for face-time with him? He’d never get another such offer from kind-hearted Emily Yu. There were a million pretty women in L.A., but never a lot of Emilys. Call her now, Stefan, call her. Do it. You have ten thousand phones in here. Call.
All right, in a minute, but first he’d call his landlord about the ants.
Back in his living room, long tendrils of ants were spreading out from the TV. Amazingly tiny ants: they looked no bigger than pixels, and their jagged ant-trails were as thin as hairline cracks. They were heading for the laundry baskets.
“Not my cell phones, you little bastards,” cried Stefan, hauling his baskets outside to the dilapidated porch.
He found a phone that seemed to hold a charge.
“Call Mr. Noor,” Stefan instructed. He’d cloned a single phone account across all ten thousand of his phones.
He heard ringing, and then his landlord’s dry, emotionless voice.
“This is Stefan Oertel, Mr. Noor. From the cottage in the back of your estate? I’m being invaded by ants. I need an exterminator right now.”
“Hyperio,” said Mr. Noor. “You tell Hyperio, he fixes that.” This was Mr. Noor’s usual response. Unfortunately Mr. Noor’s handyman Hyperio was some kind of illegal, who appeared maybe once a month. Stefan had seen Hyperio just the other day, trimming the bushes and hand-rolling cigarettes. This meant that the ants would rampage unchallenged for weeks.
“Does Hyperio have a telephone?” asked Stefan. “Does he even have a last name?”
“Use poison spray,” said Mr. Noor shortly. “I’m very busy now.” Mr. Noor was always on the phone to rich friends in the distant Middle East. End of call.
Stefan snorted and squared his shoulders. The ant-war was up to him.
He found his cyber-tool kit and extracted the coil of a flexible flashlight. He poked his instrument through the slots in the back of his TV. The ants had settled right in there, ambitious and adaptable, like childless lawyers lofting-out a downtown high-rise. In the sharp-edged shadows lurked a sugar ant as big as a cockroach. The huge ant was tugging at something. A curly bit of wire, maybe. For a crazy, impossible instant the ant looked as big as a hamster.
Stefan rocked back on his heels. These ants were blowing his mind; they were dancing on the surface of his brain. He was losing it. It was very bad for him to be deprived of a computer. He needed some help right away.
“Call Jayson,” he told his phone.
Although Jayson Rubio sometimes worked Stefan’s nerves, the two of them had a true and lasting bond. During each year they’d spent at Square Root of Not, they’d ventured to Burning Man together, displaying their special-FX wizardry to the festival crowds in the desert.
Both of them had all-devouring hobbies: Stefan’s was string theory; Jayson’s was memorabilia. Since leaving the FX company, Jayson had started his own little online business, marketing Renaissance-Faire-type costume gear that he made. Stefan maintained Jayson’s website.
Jayson was old-school, very analog. At Square Root of Not, he’d been the go-to guy for everything physical: stringing power cables, putting up drywall, sanding the floors, fixing the plumbing. As a fix-it wizard, Jayson was a human tornado. He always carried a sheathed multitool on his belt: knives, pliers, wrench, saw, scissors, cutters, strippers, punchers, pokers, rippers, pounders, and more. Jayson never lacked for options.
The phone was successfully ringing. Now that Stefan was in a jam, a jam full of sugar-ants, good old Jayson would pitch in.
“Stefan!” shouted Jayson, answering. “Call me back later.”
“No no no, listen to me,” Stefan babbled. “Ants are eating my hardware!”
Someone else was angrily yelling at Jayson in the background. Jayson had a fetish about holding his cell phone at arm’s length, so that the powerful microwave phone-rays wouldn’t foment a brain tumor. Whenever you called Jayson Rubio, you weren’t calling an individual, you were calling an environment.
Jayson’s current environment featured an echoing garage roar of biker engines and snarling heavy-metal music. “What? Not one more dime!” Jayson was barking. “Your ad said ‘runs great,’ it didn’t say ‘skips gears! ’ Are you waving that tire-iron at me, you friggin’ grease monkey? What? Sure, go ahead, call the cops, Lester! I love the L.A. cops!”
Stefan heard more angry demands, and finally the roaring of a motorcycle. The engine noise rose to a crescendo, then it smoothed down. “Stefan, dog,” said Jayson at last, wind whipping past his phone. “You still there?”
Stefan explained about the ants.
“Ant-man on the way!” Jayson soothed over the ragged pounding of his motorbike. “Don’t even think about poison bug bombs! Bad chemical karma is never the path.”
Stefan hung up. His mood had brightened. What the hell, he would fix his system somehow. He’d buy a new TV. The basic program was still in the cell-phone memory chips, also his very last tweak: twine dimension seven, loop dimension eight. For sure that had been the key to the One True String Theory. The One True String Theory was worth every sacrifice he had ever made. Cosmic strings were the key to an endless free source of non-polluting energy. His noble work would be a boon to all mankind.
Stefan wandered outside. It was another ruthlessly sunny June day, the sky blank and blue. The dry hills around Mr. Noor’s estate were yellow, with scrubby olive-green oak and laurel trees. Stefan felt glad to be out of the house and away from his crippled hardware. Why did he labor indoors when he lived in California? That was crazy. Comprehending nature was, after all, the end goal of physics. Why not skip the middleman? Why not go out in nature and comprehend it in the raw?
Maybe the ants were grateful to him for discovering the One True String Theory. In return, the ants had come to teach him a finer way of life. The ants were prodding him to recast his research goals. Maybe, in particular, he could search for a woman to live with? That search was well-known to be solvable in linear time.
He would phone Emily Yu before tonight. Of course he would. How hard could that be? His friend Jayson always seemed to have a partner on his arm, often boozy and tattooed, but undeniably female. All Stefan needed to do was to reach out at a human level. Here he was, unemployed yet still feverishly programming, like the cartoon coyote who skids off a cliff, spinning his legs in mid-air, until finally realizing that, sigh, it’s time for that long tumble into the canyon.
Overhead the leaves on a eucalyptus tree shimmered in the hot breeze. Universal computation was everywhere. Behind the façades of everyday life were deep, knotted tangles of meaning. Yes, yes. . . .
Jayson’s sturdy red Indian motorcycle putted up the hill and into view, all 1950s curves and streamlining, with a low-skirted rear fender. A beautiful old machine, with Jayson happy on it.
Jayson shed his dusty carapace of helmet and jacket. He wore ragged denim cargo shorts, black engineer’s boots, and a black T-shirt bearing a garish cartoon image of a carnivorous Mayan god. Jayson’s brawny arms had sleeve-like tribal tattoos under intricate chain mail wristbands. Jayson wove the chain-mail in his idle moments, frenetically knitting away with pliers. Jayson’s freaky metal wristbands were the best-selling items on his website. They were beloved by fantasy gamers and Society for Creative Anachronism types.
Stefan offered a cheery wave and hello, but Jayson raised a hand and hauled his phone from his shorts pocket. He listened at arm’s length to the tinny bleating of the speaker, lost his temper and began to rage. “Huh? You reported it stolen? So try and find me, Lester! I got no fixed address! You’ve got a what? Back off, man, or you’re never gonna get your money!” Angrily Jayson snapped shut his phone.
“A little trouble with your hog?” said Stefan delicately.
“Aw, that Lester,” said Jayson, staring uneasily at his precious red bike. “Nasty old biker, long gray ponytail down his back . . . Lester’s a crook! He sold me a sick Indian, what it is. A beauty, a rare antique, a New York cop bike with all the original paint . . . but it shifts rough. On paper I still owe him . . . but if he won’t fix my bike our contract is void. No way he’s calling the cops.”
Reassured by his own bravado, Jayson grinned and drew a crumpled paper sack from his pants pocket. “Next topic. Your ants are history. I brought ant aromatherapy.”
“Didn’t you used to have a big tow-trailer for your bike?” said Stefan, studying his friend. “That had all your stuff in it, didn’t it?”
A pained scowl furrowed Jayson’s bearded face. “Lupe says she’s throwing me out. My trailer’s locked in her garage in Pasadena until I pay back rent. It’s always money, money, money with her. Man, I hate gated communities. Like, why put yourself into a jail?”
“You were pretty serious about Lupe. You told me she was the best woman you ever dated. You said you loved her.”
Jayson winced. “Forget Lupe. Forget my stuff. The world’s full of stuff. What’s the difference who has what?”
“I like where your head’s at,” said Stefan, feeling empathy for his companion. “Material possessions are mere illusions. Everything we see here, everything we think we own, it all emerges from the knotting and unknotting of a hexadecillion loops of cosmic string.”
It was Jayson’s turn to offer a pitying look. “Still at that, huh?”
“Jayse, I’m just a few ticks of the clock away from the One True String Theory. In fact I think maybe . . . I think maybe I already found it. I found the truth exactly when those ants showed up to eat my system. So if I can just publish my science findings in a reputable journal—who knows! It could lead to golf-ball-sized personal suns!”
“Yeah, bro, it’s all about the universal Celtic weave,” said Jayson. He brandished the chain-mail of his hand-made wristlets, beautifully patterned, with loops in four or five different sizes. Then his indulgent smile faded; he twisted his head uneasily. “Do you, um, just hear a helicopter over the valley? Let’s hide my bike in your garage. Just in case Lester really did file a report. Those ghetto-birds are hell on stolen vehicles.”
“Why don’t you just pay the man?” asked Stefan as they wheeled the fine old machine into his tiny, cluttered garage. “This is a beautiful bike. Heavily macho.”
Jayson grunted. “Thing is, I spent my Square Root of Not money on primo collectibles. Sci-fi costumes that I picked right off the studio set. They’re in my trailer, locked up in Lupe’s damn garage. But really, that’s okay, because all I need to do is flip those costumes for a profit on my website. Then I can make good on Lupe’s rent, and get at the costumes, and also pay off the motorcycle. See, it goes round and round. Loop-like.” Another cloud crossed Jayson’s face. “My website’s still okay, right? Inside your big computer?”
“Your site is down. Like I’ve been telling you—the ants ate a crucial part of my system. Your website still exists.” Stefan waved his hands. “It’s distributed across the memory chips of ten thousand cell phones. In terms of customer service, though, your website’s a lost world.”
“I hate computers.”
“They love you.”
“I hate ants.”
“That’s what I want to hear,” said Stefan. “Let’s go get ’em, big guy.” He led his friend inside.
They knelt and peered inside the TV, using the flexible light-wand.
“Hey, I’ve seen lots worse,” grunted Jayson in typical L.A. style. “Your ants are practically too small to see!”
“They come in all sizes, man. I saw one as big as, I dunno, as big as a miniature dachshund.”
“Get a grip,” advised Jayson, and the irony of this insult, coming from him, cheered Stefan no end. Yes, he was having a bad ants-in-your-hair day, but compared to Jayson, he was the picture of bourgeois respectability. He had money in the bank, a roof, and a bed. For all his swagger, Jayson was practically living in a dumpster. But—Jayson didn’t even care. Jayson wasn’t daunted, not a bit. Stefan could learn from him.
Jayson was staring at Stefan’s cracked leather armchair. “You gonna finish that sandwich? Is that baloney organic?”
“It’s salami,” said Stefan. “I’ll get you a bottle of beer.”
Jayson wolfed down the ant-teeming sandwich in three bites. “Tastes like dill pickles.”
“That would be the formic acid.”
Jayson chugged the whole bottle of Mexican beer and fetched himself another. He then focused his professional attention on the four little glass phials he’d brought, deftly unlimbering his multitool and twisting off the screw-tops. Jayson loved using his pliers.
“Eucalyptus, peppermint, cinnamon, and verbena,” intoned Jayson. He dribbled reeking herbal essences on the floor around the television. “Organic, non-toxic, all-natural, ants hate it. This potion never fails.”
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 blowtorch. “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 about 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 leaf-blower.”
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 broomsticks.
“I don’t like leaving my bike,” said Jayson. “There’s no way those ants could have run this far.”
“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 cybernetic ant trail led under a forbidding tangle of dusty cactus, disappearing into a crooked little groove, a mini-arroyo where the fault-tortured dirt of L.A. 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 sinkhole,” said Jayson. He hunkered down and accurately pitched his empty beer bottle 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. 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 L.A., 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 toward the bristling wall of chaparral. …
