The Hacker and the Ants by Rudy Rucker

gravity vectors all pointing out radially from the sphere’s center.
    My ant crawled along an edge of one of the floor’s polygons until she got to a corner where several edges met—this was a vertex of the mall’s sphere. The vertex was an awkward bit of geometry where the tips of three lozenge-shaped quadrilaterals met the points of five narrow triangles. As we neared the corner we began to shrink.
    Yes, we shrank. Keep in mind that one’s cyberspace body was nothing more than a pure geometry of vertex coordinates, edge lines, and face shadings. The ant led the shrinking; her size went from camel to pony to hog to dog to possum to lobster to roach to sowbug to ant on down to the size of the teensy-tiniest pissant you ever saw.
    All this time I remained astride the ant’s gaster. The shrinking of my geometry lagged a bit behind the ant’s shrinkage, so that my arms seemed always to be long tapering cones affixed to the front slope of her dwindling gaster. As I shrank, my angle of vision widened, and the video store’s blank sidewall seemed to tower above the ant and me. Still we headed toward the corner where the five triangles met the three lozenges.
    Because of computational round-off errors, the geometry of the corner was imperfect: the corner had a pinhole at its center. When we’d finished shrinking, we were small enough to crawl through the hole. There were a lot of pissants on the other side. My ant touched her feelers to the feelers of each of the other ants she met. When the
other ants noticed me, they showed their surprise by sharply jerking their gasters upward, which is how an ant chirps. The stiff back edge of the petiole scrapes against a washboardlike membrane on the front of the gaster. The process is called stridulation , and is similar to the way the grasshopper saws his legs against his body to sing a summer song.
    So here I was in a cyberspace ant crack. Beyond the wary pissants floated an odd, drifting piece of geometry, an “impossible” self-reversing figure of the type that graphics hackers call fnoor.
    The piece of fnoor was of wildly ambiguous size. Relative to my tiny dimensions, the fnoor first seemed to be the size of my Animata, but a moment later it loomed as large as the pyramidal Transamerica building, and a moment after that it seemed no bigger than a sinsemilla roach. The fnoor was a clump of one-sided plane faces that seemed haphazardly to pop in and out of existence as the clump rotated. The fnoor’s vertices and edges were indexed in such a way that the faces failed to join up in a coherent fashion. There was no consistent distinction between inside and outside, leading to a complete failure of the conventional cyberspace illusion that you are looking at a perspective view of an object in three-dimensional space.
    My ant leapt right onto the piece of fnoor. It was bigger than us after all. The ant ran this way and that, feeling about with her antennae, seeming almost to be flipping the faces with her nimble feet. It was as if we were running forward, yet the same piece of fnoor kept being underfoot. Finally my ant found the spot she was looking for, a crazy funhouse door in the fnoor. Bending herself nearly double at the petiole, the ant squeezed herself and me through the aperture. Now we were inside the fnoor, and ants were everywhere. We were in an anthill.

    Instead of being made of incorrectly hinged plane segments, the interior of the fnoor was a true solid model, pieced together from filled regions of three-dimensional space. Here, as on the fnoor’s surface, the component pieces were hooked up inconsistently, so that—this is hard to describe—the inside/outside, left/right, up/down, and front/back orientation of each of the component space pieces was being continuously redefined. Naturally my ant headed for the very heart of this agglomeration of weirdness.
    What was I thinking all this time? Why didn’t I just say,