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chip to create its image.
    Before going on, I have to explain about DTV, or digital television . The old analog TV standard had been known as NTSC. For years hackers had bitched that “NTSC” should stand for “Never Twice Same Color,” meaning that the old images had a radically inexact relationship to the signals. At first, people had thought
the next video standard would be a more detailed picture carried by a fatter analog signal. But the proposed analog signals started getting so fat that manufacturers had to invent ways to compress them. And then all of a sudden the compression algorithms had gotten so good that it had become possible to think in terms of using a digital signal for TV instead.
    The difference between DTV and regular television was like the difference between CDs and the old LP records. You coded the information as zeroes and ones instead of as a wavering line. It took a shitload of bits to code a whole TV show, but if you had good enough data compression it turned out to be more efficient than broadcasting in analog. The only catch was that a DTV signal didn’t look like anything on old television sets. To pick up DTV, your set had to have a DTV chip that could decompress the data and turn it back into uncompressed sound and pictures. It had taken a few years for the transition to happen, but DTV was the only kind of television around anymore, and DTV chips were cheap.
    Getting his ant simulations to run on DTV chips had been one of Roger’s unbelievable now-I-will-levitate hacks. But it worked great. Standing in the empty ant lab I looked at the wall of virtual screens showing ants—this was all taking place in cyberspace, remember, so the ants’ DTV info was actually being routed into image-generation software that was being patched into the image which my goggles maintained. The ants looked more agitated than usual, and there seemed to be more of them.
    All of a sudden something appeared in the ant lab with me, a figure that seemed to be Roger Coolidge in his usual tuxedo of gray pants and short-sleeved polyester shirt, looking at me in that moony, pop-eyed, passive-aggressive way he had.
    â€œHi, Roger,” I said, but now his body icon broke apart
like soft diarrhea and turned into ants, all the ants from all the colonies loose in the ant lab with me, mad ants filling the room and seething in the multiregime patterns of classical turbulence. My earphones blared skritchy chirping and my gloves’ touchpads pulsed a weird vibratory massage. I was hallucinating a sharp shit stink off the ants. I was retching. I tore off the headset and the gloves . . .or I thought I did.
    Two things that could keep a user from taking off cyberspace equipment were “voodoo cyberspaces” and “the dark dream.”
    A voodoo cyberspace had hypnotic flickering and rhythmic sound intended to numb or fascinate the user too much for him or her to want to leave. Voodoo cyberspaces were really a form of entertainment, not unlike commercials or music videos.
    The ants were potentially good voodoo, much livelier and more realistically seething than any artificial life-form I’d ever seen. Some kind of radically emergent breakthrough in their behavior had happened over the weekend; they were a whole new clade. Good voodoo, but way too intense just now.
    I thought I took my headset off, and I thought I saw it lying on my desk. I touched myself, I was fine, I stood up and pushed back my chair, I turned and leaned down and grabbed hold of my power cord and yanked it and saw the plug pop out of the wall, and saw the lights on my computer go out, and saw the little images in the headset on the desk wink out, and then I turned and walked toward the door and out of nothingness something plucked at my temple. Out of thin air, something tugged at the side of my head.
    It was the cable that led from my headset to the computer. I was still wearing the headset, I now realized. The ants