The Hacker and the Ants by Rudy Rucker

Revered as one of the Godfathers of the "Cyberpunk" literary movement, author Rudy Rucker is an American original - a seriously daffy sf innovator whose irrepressible imagination truly knows no bounds. And now the man who the San Francisco Chronicle says "has always displayed a taste for the goofily outlandish" climbs to bold new heights of plausible absurdity - with an unorthodox tale of cyber-conspiracy and virtual infestation. When he's not butting heads with his soon-to-be-ex-wife or barring realtors from his door, 40-something Silicon Valley computer programmer Jerzy Rugby is neck-deep in "The Great Work" - aiding GoMotion Unlimited in its quest to bring truly intelligent robots into existence. He spends his days blissfully hacking away in cyberspace - a virtually real combination office, lab and funhouse testing area for his a.i. creations. And everything seems copacetic - until an ant gets in the ointment. Lots of ants, actually, millions and millions of them - strange viral pests appearing from out of nowhere to wreak havoc throughout the shared computer network. And when Jerzy's not-so-faithful robotic companion Studly feeds the ever-multiplying infection into the TV cable lines, thereby invading the homes of Mr. and Mrs. Ordinary America, innocent hacker Rugby is suddenly Public Enemy #1 - wanted by a very angry government for sabotage, computer crime...and treason. But Jerzy Rugby is nobody's patsy. And before he takes a long, hard fall, he's going to get to the bottom of the computer-generated insectile plague - even if it means confronting Death himself, aka Hex DEF6, in a cyberspacial backroom in the Antland of Fnoor.