Cyberpunk

A novel by Bruce Bethke

Okay, so it’s morning. Sparrows are arguing in the dwarf maples outside my bedroom window. Metallic coughs and sputters echo down the street; old man Xiang must have scored some pirate gasoline and tried to start his Mercedes again. Skateboard wheels grind and clatter on cracked pavement. Boombox music Doppler-shifts as a squad of middle school AnnoyBoys roll past.

Ah, the sounds of Spring.

Closer by, I flag soft noises filtering up from the kitchen: Mr. HotBrew wheezing through another load of caffix. The pop and crinkle of yummy shrinkwrap being split and peeled. Solid thunk of the microwave oven door slamming closed, chaining into the bleats, chimes and choppy vosynthed th-an-k-yo-us of someone doing the program job on breakfast.

Someone? Mom, for sure. Like, nuking embalmed meadow muffins is her domestic duty. Dad only cooks raw things that can be immolated on the hibachi. I listen closer, hear her cheerful mindless morning babble and him making with the occasional simian grunt in acknol, or maybe they aren’t even talking to each other. Once Mom gives the appliances a start they can do a pretty fair sim of a no-brain conversation all by themselves.

I roll over. Brush the long black hair back from my face. Get my left eye open and find the bedside clock.

6:53.

Okay, so it’s not morning. Not official, not yet. School day rules: true morning doesn’t start until0/ 7:0/0/ :0/0/ , exact. I scrunch the covers up around my cheeks, snuggle a little deeper in the comfty warm, work at getting both eyes open.

Jerky little holo of a space shuttle comes out from behind the left edge of the clock. Chick. Chick. Chick. Stubby white wings flash as the ugly blunt thing banks to pass in front. Chick. Chick. Numbers change. 6:54.

I hate that clock.

I mean, when I was a twelve, I thought that clock was total derzky. Cooler than utter cool. The penultimax: A foot-high lump of jagged blue-filled Lucite, numbers gleaming like molten silver poured on a glacier, orbited forever by a Classic Shuttle. Every five minutes the cargo doors open and a satellite does the deploy. Every hour on the hour the ‘nauts come out for a little space spindance.

Shuttle swings around the right side of the clock. Chick. Chick.

Stupid thing. Not even a decent interfill routine, just a little white brick moving in one-second jerks. A couple months back me and Georgie tried to hack the video PROMs, reprogram it to do the Challenger every hour on the hour. Turned out the imager wasn’t a holosynth at all, just a glob of brainless plastic and a couple hundred laser diodes squirting canned stillframes.

Chick. The shuttle vanishes behind the right edge of the clock. Gone for thirty seconds.

I lie there, looking at the clock, and mindlock once more on just how Dad the thing truly is. I mean, I can almost see the motivationals hanging off it like slimey, sticky strings: “Is good for you, Mikey. Think space, Mikey. Science is future, honorable son. Being gifted is not enough; you must study ‘til eyes bleed, claw way through Examination Hell, and perhaps one day if you are extra special good just maybe you get to go Up!” Yeah, up. To the High Pacific. Get a Brown Nose in nemawashi— the Nipponese art of kissing butt—and become a deck wiper on the Nakamura industrial platform. Or maybe the PanEuros will decide they need some good public relations, let us and the Soviets kill a few more people trying to get to Mars again. Boy oh boy.

When you’re 13.75 years old and almost a sophomore in high school, you start to think about these things.

Outside my window, old man Xiang’s car door creaks open with a rusty squeal, slams shut with a sharp krummp. The sparrows explode in a flutter of stubby wings and terrified cheeping, fly off chased by a boiling stream of Chinese obscenities. I hear a deep grunt and the scrape of shoes on pavement as he gets behind the car, starts pushing.

Shuttle comes back out from behind the clock. Chick. Chick. Cargo doors pop open, in prep for the 6:55 satellite deploy. I roll over, pull a pillow onto my head, try to find another minute or two of sleep.

No good. There’s light seeping in; not much, but enough to show that I’m lying between Voyager sheets and pillowcases. Wearing dorky NASA Commander AmericaTM cosmo-jammies (only ‘cause all my other nightclothes are in the wash, honest). Close my eyes, and I can still see Mom and Dad smiling stupid at me as I tear open the Christmas wrap, recognize the dumb fake roboto and cyberlightpipe pattern and start to gag, then scratch my true response and give them what they want to hear: “Geez, Mom, these are real neat!” Almost said far out and groovy, but figured that’d tip them off.

Rayno explained it to me real good once, how Olders brains are stuck in a kind of wishful self-sim’d past. Like, his bio-dad used to build model privatecars. Whenever his mom kicked him out for the weekend he’d go over to his bio-dad’s, get bored to death and halfway back again hearing about Chryslers, Lincolns. Wasn’t ‘til he was fifteen years old that he finally met his bio-grandfather, learned that the family’s true last privatecar was a brainless little 3-cylinder Latka.

Chime. Downstairs, the microwave announces that breakfast is ready. The oven door opens with a sproing. Mom says something cheerful as she slaps the foodpods on the table; Dad rustles his faxsheets and grumbles something low in reply. I make a tunnel out of my pillow, peek at the clock. 6:57.

Nope. Still isn’t morning.

Anyway, that’s where Rayno’s bio-dad’s brain got stuck. Georgie’s old man scrounges parts, rebuilds obsolete American computers, never stops ranting about how great they really were and it’s all Management and Wall Street’s fault that the domestic industry is dead. My Dad’s too busy to build/rebuild anything, what with his job and his first wife’s grownup kids, so he buys me space shuttle clocks. Flying model Saturn- Five’s. Apollo Hi-Lites video singles. A full-bandwidth membership in AstraNet and a Nitachi telescope.

A telescope? Hey, this is Dad we’re talking about! No mere hunk of glass could be half expensive enough for the trophy son of David Richard Harris, Fuji-DynaRand’s Fuku Shacho of Marketing (American). He bought me a zillion-power CCD-retinated fused-silicate photon amplification device with all the optional everythings. Set it on this monster tripod out on the deck—looks like Mung the Magnificent’s fritzin’ Interplanetary Death Cannon—and every night when he’s in town and not working late we have to go out there, burn our ten minutes of Quality Time shivering in the cold and damp and trying to spot something educational.

Of course, being Dad, he’s also got to shut off the programmables and insist on using the dumb manual controls. Meaning most nights we wind up looking at cloud projos, comm satellites, wreckage from the Freedom, and other stuff that might be stars or planets but he’s never real sure which. Then he swings the ‘scope around to point at the Fuji- DynaRand platform, hanging there fat and low in geosync like a big green ‘n’ gold corporate logo—which, thanks to a gigundo holo laser on the platform, is just exactly what it does look like through the ‘scope— and he launches into the standard lecture about why I should want to Go Up.

Smile? Yup, I can feel a true smile coming on. No doubt about it, I’m going to wake up this morning with a smile, ‘cause right now I’m thinking deep about Dad, and the Death Cannon, and Dad’s library of standard lectures. Last winter, when he was out of town for a week, me and Georgie started putzing with the telescope’s brainbox. Discovered we could run a lightfiber from my bedroom to the deck, patch the Death Cannon straight into MoJo —my Miko-Gyoja 260/0/ /ex supermicro—and auto-aim the thing just by clicking on stuff from the encyclopedia. Pipe the images to any screen in the HouseSys, or better yet, compress ‘em, save ‘em, and look at them “later.”

When I showed Dad what we’d done, his reaction was classic. First, that little vein on the side of his forehead started throbbing. Then, his face shifted down to this deep magenta beet-look, and I thought sure he was gonna blow all his new heartgaskets.

And then, running on pure improv and with absolute no rehearsal at all, he proceeded to coredump a truly marvelous all-new version of his famous lecture, That’s What’s Wrong With You Damned Kids. Brilliant performance. There are fathers and there are bio-parents; there are Olders and even a few dads; but only my old man can be so total, utter Dad.

Solid proof that I’m a mutant, you ask me.

A burst of static. A crackle, a buzz or two, and then the clock speaks up in that stupid pseudo space-radio voice it uses: “Good morning, captain. Rise and shine. --crackle— It’s oh-seven-hundred — pssht— and you are go for throttle up.” I cop a glance at the clock, flag that the cargo doors are open and seven little ‘nauts are out, spinning on their head buckets.

Okay, it’s true morning, at last, official. No avoiding it any longer. I roll over onto my back, flip the pillow off my face, hear it land somewhere with a flumpf but it doesn’t sound like it’s hit anything breakable. I brush the hair back from my face again, take a deep breath: standard morning smells are percolating up the stairs. De-licious hot microwaved plastic. Yummy bitter fresh-brewed caffix. True inspiring yeasty reek of irradiated sugar-glazed pastryoid. I sit up in bed, yawn, open both eyes at the same time, and finally, turn to my desk.

MoJo is black, silent. Dead.

In a nano I’m total awake. Covers fly everywhere as I roll off the bed, hit the floor barefoot, kick aside the dirty clothes and bounce to my desk. Already in my head I’m pleading as my fingers zip over the cables, testing, tugging, tweaking. Geez, don’t let this be the Sikh Ambush virus again! I’m just about to crack open MoJo’s CityLink box when I flag the Gyoja Gerbil is tottering, vague and dim, across the flatscreen. He turns slow, mouths some silent words, then bows deep and whacks the gong with his walking stick. No sound. A faint, dark dialog box pops open and my morning news start to scroll in, utter quiet and almost unreadable.

Oh. That’s right; I forgot. I was up late last night, studying Death Cannon coordinates F0/140/ A22 15FF—Meghan Gianelli’s bedroom window—and I turned the sound and contrast way down. Sighing relief, I spin them back up to normal, plop down in my chair, and re-exec the boot script.

The Gyoja Gerbil winks out a mo, winks back in, and bows again.

“Good morning, Mikhail Harris,” he starts over. Inward, I shudder. Only Mom and my Miko-Gyoja 260/0/ /ex still call me Mikhail. Mom I can’t do anything about, but one of these days me and Georgie are going to have to reburn the boot ROMs and grease the gerbil.

“Now checking CityNet mail for you,” the Gyoja says. He closes his eyes, like he’s concentrating; I bite my lip and tough it out. Just six more ROM commands to execute before the rodent surrenders control. Just six more, unless...

The Gyoja Gerbil frowns, freezes. A flashing red-border dialog box pops open; a hardware interrupt, generated by the CityLink deep security program. Warning! it says. Possible buffer contamination! I acknol the alert, bang into the hex monitor, dump out the contents of the flytrap and look it over.

No big deal. Two Dark Avenger viruses, one Holland Girl, an idiotsimple Gobbler and a mess of raw data that’s probably an adfax that got sent to me by mistake. Typical CityNet wildlife. For a mo, I hesitate.

Maybe...?

Nah. Nice that the rodent was interrupted, but I don’t dare try to look for a way around him with a copy of Dark Avenger in the CityLink.

I flush the buffer, and a nano later the Gyoja has seized control again.

“Now checking CityNet mail for you,” he says.

Huh? That’s odd. The samurai rat doesn’t repeat himself, usual. I lean close, watch real careful.

“I have found these messages waiting for you, Honorable Harrissan,” he says, and he opens a window between his hands like he’s pulling open a scroll. I start to read the first line.

The top of the window slips out of the gerbil’s grip, slams shut on his right hand. Arterial blood jets bright red as little hairy fingers are lopped off neat, go tumbling down to the bottom of the screen.

What?

“Now checking CityNet mail for you,” he says again, then freezes.

Jerks back to the start. “Now checking—” Freeze. Restart. “Now ch—”

Freeze.

I pounce on the keyboard, start banging out interrupts. Oh no, it is the Sikh Ambush virus! Break. Nothing. Ctrl-C. Nothing. Option E. Nothing.

“Now—,” he starts. Freeze.

Ctrl-Alt-right fist.

“Ch--ch--ch--”

Desperate and frantic, I take a deep breath, then stab my thumb down on the warmstart reboot button. The Gyoja Gerbil’s head explodes, blood and brains and teeth spraying truly gross all over the flatscreen.

Golly. It’s never done that before. Feeling just a little stunned, I sag back in my chair, put my chin in my left hand, and start wondering just what the Hell kind of virus I picked up this time. And why my flytrap didn’t catch it. And what it’s going to do to MoJo. I don’t have to wonder for long; two little cartoon men in white uniforms—nobody out of any of my programs, I’m sure— shuffle out onto the screen, one pushing a garbage can on squeaky wheels, the other carrying a big shovel. They stop, shake their heads and tsk-tsk at the mess, then shovel what’s left of the gerbil into the trash can and amble off. The flatscreen blanks.

I give it five seconds. Ten seconds. I’m reaching for the manual reset button when a new character darts out onto the screen. This one’s a robopunk—a real techno looking ‘bot with a blue chrome mohawk—and he stops centerscreen, looks around furtive, then whips out a can of spray paint and leaves me a hot green message: CRACKERS BUDDY-BOO 8ER Oh, shiite.

The ‘bot vanishes. The message hangs there a mo, doing the slow fade. “Damn,” I say, quiet. Then a little more aggressive. “Damn!” I look around as if afraid someone’s looking over my shoulder, turn back to MoJo, and kick the leg of my desk. “Oh, damn!” The message finishes its fade and I jerk into action, bouncing up out of my chair, punching power switches, yanking cables. CityLink box switched off and unplugged. NetLine yanked, on both ends. HouseFiber unplugged.

“Damn, damn, damn!” I hesitate a mo over MoJo’s master power switch. It’s been almost two years since the last time I shut him off utter cold.

I scowl, and hit the switch. Then I yank the power cord for good measure.

It wasn’t a virus, it was a message from Rayno. He caught somebody else poking around in OurNet. And if that’s true/true, I’m in trouble so deep I need a snorkel.

Chapter 0/1

Soon as I’d finished with the total disconnect, I tore off my cosmojammies and threw them in the corner, grabbed my blue spatterzag jumpsuit off the floor and zipped it on, then dug out my blitz yellow hightops from under the bed and laced them up loose. Subroutining off to the bathroom for a mo to flush my bladder buffer and run a brush across my teeth, I popped back into my bedroom, threw my video slate and a couple textbook ROMs into my backpack, and hit the stairs flying.

Mom and Dad were still at breakfast when I bounced into the kitchen. “Good Morning, Mikhail,” said Mom with a smile. “You were up so late last night I thought I wouldn’t see you before you caught your tram.”

“Had a tough program to crack,” I lied.

“Well,” she said, “now you can sit down and have a decent breakfast.” She turned around to pull another pod of steaming muffinoids out of the microwave and slap them down on the table.

“If you’d do your schoolwork when you’re supposed to, you wouldn’t have to cram at the end of the semester,” Dad growled from behind his caffix and faxsheet. I sloshed some juice in a plastic glass, gulped it down, and started for the door.

“What?” Mom asked. “That’s all the breakfast you’re going to have?”

“Haven’t got time,” I said. “Gotta get to school early to see if the program checks.” Bobbing around her, I faked a dribble, lobbed the empty glass into the sink. Two points.

She looked at me, shook her head, and took a slow step forward like she was going to block me. “You’re not going to school dressed like that, I hope?”

“Aw, Mom.” Ducking back around the table, I grabbed a muffin— rice bran, sawdust and rabbit raisin, I think.

“I mean, look at you, you’re nothing but a mass of wrinkles. Where did you find that jumpsuit anyway, in the laundry hamper?”

“No, Mom.” Faking a step back towards the hall door, I stuffed the muffin into my backpack and velcroed the pouch.

She followed the feint. “And what about your hair? I don’t mind if you wear it long, but honestly Mikhail, it looks like there’s something nesting in it.”

Dad lowered his faxsheet long enough to peer over the top edge.

“Kid needs a flea bath and a haircut, if you ask me.” Oh, perfect, Dad. Just the exact reaction I wanted. That’s why I got the horsemane style! Mom turned on Dad and spoke to quiet him—ragging on me before school is her job—but I didn’t hear the rest ‘cause I’d seen my opening, taken it, and was already out the door and halfway across the porch.

“Don’t forget to boot Muffy!” Mom yelled after me.

Hand on the outside doorknob, I stopped, turned around. “Yes, mother.” Taking a quick scan around, I spotted Mom’s Mutt lying in the corner, curled up around the battery charger. Oh, I wanted to boot that dog all right! But then, foot cocked, I remembered Muffy was a lot heavier than it looked and decided I didn’t need the pain. So I bent over, lifted the dog’s stubby little tail, and unplugged the power feed.

“Arf,” Muffy said. It stood up and began twitching through its servo diagnostics. I gave the charger cord a sharp yank, watched it retract.

“Arf,” Muffy said again, and it began toddling towards the kitchen. I turned around, gave one last fleeting thought to the cheery mind image of Muffy being drop-kicked into the mock oranges, and then zipped out the door.

I caught the transys for school, just in case Mom and Dad were watching. Two blocks down the line I got off and caught the northbound tram, and then I started off on a big loop that kept me off the routes Mom and Dad used to get to work and took me back past home and in the complete opposite direction from school. Half an hour and six transfers later I came whipping into Buddy’s All-Nite Burgers. Rayno was sitting in our booth, glaring into his caffix. It was0/ 7:55:23 and I’d beat Georgie and Lisa there.

“What’s on line?” I asked as I dropped into my seat, across from Rayno. He just looked up at me, eyes piercing blue through his fine, white-blond eyebrows, and I knew better than to ask again.

I sat down. I shut up. Whatever it was had to be important, to make it worth dumping MoJo like that, but there was no point trying to talk to Rayno when he was clammed, so I locked eyes on him. He went back to looking at his caffix, taking the occasional sip. For a mo I had this crazy idea he was being too derzky to talk just ‘cause he wanted me to flag his new hair. This week it was bleached Utter Aryan White, side-shaved, and stiffed out into The Wedge. Geez, it did look sharp! Of course it did. Rayno always looked sharp. Rayno was seventeen, and a junior. He wore scruff black leather and flash plastic; he kept his style current to the nanosecond and cranked to the max. Rayno was derzky realitized.

But after a minute or so I realized he wasn’t being derzky, he was being too pissed to talk. Which was reassuring, in a way, given how worried he had me, but watching it got old real fast so I craned my neck, looked over the booth divider, gave Buddy’s the quick scan. Nope, nobody else interesting in the place. Somebody back in the kitchen must have flagged me when I stuck my head up, though, ‘cause as soon as I was back down solid in my seat the little trademark snatch of fifties music swooped by, stereo shifting to a focus at the wall end of the table, and the foot-high holo of Buddy McFry came jitterbugging out from behind the napkin dispenser.

“Good morning and welcome to Buddy’s!” the holo said, all bright and enthusiastic, looking just dweeby as could be in his peaked cap, white shirt, pegged chinos and penny loafers. “Today’s breakfast special is two genuine high-cholesterol eggs fried in bacon fat, two strips of real hickory-smoked bacon, and a cup of our world famous double-caffeine coffee! Sure, it’s unhealthy and ecologically unsound, but don’t you deserve a little guilty pleasure today?” The holo grinned, danced to a stop; pulled a pencil out from behind his ear and a pad out of his back pocket, set pencil point to paper, and froze. The pseudosax hit a peak and the music stopped.

The holo wasn’t true interactive, of course. It was just waiting for me to say something that it could compress, stick in the fryboy’s voicemail queue. I checked my watch. Ten. Eleven. Twelve...

At fifteen seconds, the program timed out. The music started up again. The holo lifted the pencil off the order pad and shook his head.

“Well I can see that you’re not interested in today’s special. Would you like to see a menu, or are you ready to order now?” Again, the music peaked and died. The little dork froze, grinning.

This time it took twenty seconds to time out, and then the holo stayed frozen. Instead, a realtime voice from an actual human came through, raspy. “Look kid, you sit in the booth, there’s a two-dollar minimum. So you gonna order or what?” Rayno cracked out of his big silence. “We are waiting for the rest of our party,” he said, in a great low and sullen. “We will order then. In the meantime, don’t ‘bug’ us, ‘man’.”

There was a lag of a coupla seconds, then the music started up again.

“Oh, you need more time to think?” the holo said cheerful, as it started to dance back towards the napkin dispenser. “Okay, I’ll be back—”

Rayno closed his eyes, tilted his head back, raised his voice. “And lose the goddam holo!” Buddy McFry vanished. Rayno went back to scowling at his caffix.

I decided to see how long it’d take him to time out. At0/ 8:0/0/ :20/ Lisa zagged in, her lank blonde hair swinging in lazy circles, her feet moving in that slow, twitchy walk that meant she had her earcorks in and tuned for music. She was wearing her mirrored contacts today, which gave her eyes a truly appropriate utter vacant look; Lisa is Rayno’s girl, or at least she hopes she is. I can see why.

Rayno’s seventeen, and a junior—a year older than Georgie, two years and a grade up on Lisa. And where Georgie tends to fat and a touch of dweebism, like most true cyberpunks (and little Mikey Harris just ain’t in the game, no matter how gifted his headworks are supposed to be), Rayno is the Master Controller of our little gang and he has looks and style to burn.

So, no surprise Lisa’s got it locked for him. Every move she makes says she’s begging for it, but he’s too robo, too tough to notice. He dances with himself; he won’t even touch her. She bopped over to the booth and slid into her seat next to Rayno, trying hard to get a thigh under his hand. He just put both hands on his caffix cup and didn’t give her so much as a blink.

For a flicker, Lisa looked miserable. There she was, wearing her best white tatterblouse and no bra, and she couldn’t even get Rayno to look at her. I’m not so good at robo yet so I copped a quick, guilty peek down her cleavage, but it’s certified Boolean true/true she wasn’t flashing that skin for me. Basic rules of the game: Sharp haircut beats 160/ IQ.

Those who can’t play, heckle. I opened my mouth to tell her she’d make more progress on Rayno if she had a cleavage to show off, first, but killed my words in the output queue. Her fingernails were getting long and nasty and that green nailpolish looked toxic.

Then the DJ in her head zapped out another tune and her miserable look flickered off. She went back to face dancing. Never even noticed it when the little trademark sample of fifties music swooped by and Buddy McFry came dancing on out from behind the napkin dispenser.

“Good morning and welcome to Buddy’s!” the holo started.

“We are still waiting for our fourth,” Rayno growled, low and sullen. You’d of thought he said I love you forever, the way Lisa’s eyes lit up. Buddy McFry zapped off in mid-step.

Rayno went back to glaring into his caffix. Lisa took over the job of locking eyes on him. I watched her watch him watch his caffix for a while, Rayno looking like a warped black mantis in her mirrored pinball eyes, and couldn’t decide if I should yawn or puke, she was being so uncool and glandular.

Georgie still wasn’t there at 8:0/ 5:0/0/ . Rayno checked his watch one more time, then finally looked up. “Hellgate’s been cracked,” he said, soft.

I swore. Georgie and I’d spent a lot of time working up a truly wicked secure for Hellgate. It was the sole entry point to OurNet, and we had some real strong reasons for wanting to keep that little piece of the virtual universe ultra-private.

Not from other cyberkids. They were just minor-league nuisances.

We could deal with them. It was our parents we were worried about: They would truly smoke their motherboards if they ever found out what we were really up to, and now a parent—or somebody with no finesse, anyway—was messing with OurNet.

“Georgie’s old man?” I asked.

“Looks that way.”

I swore again. It figured. Most of OurNet was virtual; not real hardware at all. The only absolute physical piece, and therefore the only real vulnerable point, was Hellgate.

Which also happened to be Georgie’s old man’s Honeywell-Bull office system.

For a mo I felt hot, angry. Why couldn’t Georgie’s old man keep his big nose out of our business? He’s the one who gave me and Georgie a partition of the Bull in the first place! He’s the one who kept saying that when he was a kid he was a hacker or a phreaker or whatever the chipheads who were too lame to be NuWavers called themselves, and ‘cause of that he understands us and wants to guide us. For chrissakes, he was the one who had us crack the copy protect on MegaCAD so he could sell it bootleg!

Isn’t that just like an Older? To tell you something is your private space, then go snooping through your drawers when he thinks you’re not looking? It’s just so utter Dad. I was still working through the fuming mad and clenching teeth routine when Lisa quit face dancing and spoke. Surprise. She wasn’t brain-dead after all, she just looked that way.

“Any idea oh, how far in he got?” When Lisa has her earcorks in she talks in beat.

Rayno looked through her, at the front door. Georgie’d just walked in. “We’re gonna find out,” Rayno said. Georgie was coming in smiling, but when he flicked his hornrimmed videoshades to transparent and saw that look in Rayno’s eyes, his legs snapped into slow and feeble mode.

Dragging his reluctant chubby carcass up to the booth, he unzipped his Weathered EarthTones windbreaker, pushed his videoshades back up his nose (they tended to slide down), and sat down next to me like the seat might be booby-trapped. “Good Morning Georgie,” Rayno said, smiling like a shark.

“I didn’t glitch,” Georgie whined. “I didn’t tell him anything.”

“Then how the Hell did he do it?”

“You know how he is, he’s weird. He likes puzzles.” Georgie ran a hand through his frizzy brown hair and looked to me for backup, but I didn’t particularly want to get between Rayno and somebody he was pissed at. “That’s how come I was late. He was trying to weasel more out of me, but I didn’t tell him a thing. I think he never made it out the back side of Hellgate. He didn’t ask about the Big One.”

Rayno actually sat back, pointed at us all, and smiled sly and toothy.

“You kids.” He looked down, shook his head, let out a little half laugh like it was real funny. “Oh, you kids. You just don’t know how lucky you are. I was in OurNet late last night and flagged somebody who didn’t know the passwords was dicking around with the gatekeeper. I put in a new blind alley in Hellgate and ringed it with killer crashpoints. By the time your old man figures out how to get through them, well...”

I sighed relief. See what I mean about being derzky? All the dark looks and danger words were just for style. We’d been outlooped again; Rayno had total control all along.

BAM! He slammed a fist down on the table. “But dammit, Georgie!” Rayno lunged halfway across the table, grabbed Georgie by the lapels and sent his videoshades flying, pushed a tight fist right under his nose.

“From now on, you keep a closer watch on your old man!” For a few flickers there Georgie looked genuine terrified, like he thought Rayno was going to rip his throat out with his bare teeth or something.

I guess that was the effect Rayno wanted to achieve. He let Georgie sweat a mo more, then relaxed, smiled, pushed Georgie back into his seat and began straightening his windbreaker, brushing imaginary dust off his shoulders, picking up his shades and putting them back on his face.

The little trademark sample of fifties music swooped in, stereo shifting to a focus at the wall end of the table. The foot-high holo of Buddy McFry came jitterbugging out from behind the napkin dispenser.

“Good morning and welcome to Buddy’s!” it said, all bright and enthusiastic. Lisa unsnapped a teardrop crystal prism from one of her necklaces, held it in front of the laser diode, and Buddy McFry shattered into a couple hundred polychromic body fragments, all twitching in perfect sync. We waited ‘til the holo stopped jabbering, then Rayno bought us drinks and raisin pie all the way around. Lisa asked for a Cherry Coke, saying it was symbolic and she hoped to move up to straight cola soon. Georgie and I ordered caffix, just like Rayno.

God, that stuff tastes awful. I added about a ton of sugar and CreamesseTM and wound up not drinking it anyway. We talked and laughed and joked through breakfast—I dunno, not really about anything, just having a good time. Then the cups and plates were cleared away, and Rayno looked around, smiled wicked, and started to give his black jacket the slow unzip.

Lisa’s eyes got big as saucers. I swear, by the time he stopped with the zipper and started with the slow reach inside she was drooling.

“Kids,” he said quiet, “it is time for some serious fun.” One last furtive look around, and then he whipped out— His Zeilemann Nova 30/0/ microportable. “Summer vacation starts now!”

I still drop a bit when I think about that computer—Geez, it was a beauty! The standard Nova is a pretty hot box to start with, but we’d spent so much time reworking Rayno’s it was practically custom from the motherboard up. Not at all like those stupid DynaBooks they give you in school—those things are basically dumb color flatscreens with ROM jacks and scrolling buttons—no, Rayno’s Nova was one truly ace box. Hi-baud, rammed and rommed, total ported; with the wafer display and keyboard wings it folded down to about the size of a vidcassette. I’d have given an ear to have one like it. We’d kludged up a full set of metal and lightpipe jacks for it and used Georgie’s old man’s chipburner to tuck some special tricks in ROM, and there wasn’t a system in the city it couldn’t talk to. About the only thing it didn’t have was a Cellular CityLink.

But hey, with PhoneCo jacks everywhere, who needs that? Lisa undid one of her necklaces—the one that was really a twisted-pair modem wire—Rayno plugged the wire into the booth jack and faxed for a smartcab, and we piled out of Buddy’s. No more riding the transys for us; we were going in style! The smartcab rolled up, fat little tires hissing on the pavement, electric motor thrumming, and we hopped in. (Lisa got herself squeezed tight against Rayno, of course, and I got stuck in the jump seat, as usual.) Georgie cracked open the maintenance panel on the smartcab’s dim little brainbox. Lisa took off another one of her necklaces—the one that was really a lightfiber—and handed it Rayno, and he hacked deep into the smartcab’s brain and charged the ride off to some law company. With the radio blasting out some good loud ‘lectrocrack music—WZAZ, same station as was playing in Lisa’s head—we cruised all over Eastside, hanging out the windows and howling like crispy-fried chemheads.

Taking a swing by Lincoln Park, we did a good laugh on the McPunks hanging out in front of You Know Where. (Sure, we might look something like them, but there’s this thing called status, y’know?

We are punks with brains.) Then, on a dare, Rayno locked up the windows and redirected us through Lowertown, and we did another good laugh on all the boxpeople, MediMaints, and Class 2 Minimum Services citizens hanging out down there. Almost bagged an old black wino who was lying in the street, too, but Lisa swore he was dead already.

Chapter 0/ 2

Riding the boulevards got stale after awhile, so we rerouted to the library. We do a lot of our fun at the library, ‘cause nobody ever bothers us there. Nobody ever goes there. We sent the smartcab, still on the law company account, to hunt for a nonexistent pickup on Westside, and walked up the steps. Getting past the guards and the librarians was just a matter of flashing some ID, and then we zipped off into the stacks.

Now, you’ve got to ID away your life to use an actual libsys terminal—which isn’t worth half a real scare when you have fudged ID, like we do—and they have this Big Brother program, tracks and analyzes everything everybody does online down to the least significant bit. But Big Brother has trouble getting a solid location on anything that isn’t a legit libsys terminal, and the librarians move their terms around a lot, so they’ve got open lightpipe ports all over the building. We found an unused, unwatched node up in the dusty old third-floor State History room, and me and Georgie kept watch while Lisa undid her third necklace—the one that was really a braided wideband lightpipe —and Rayno got hooked up and jacked in.

Why go to all this trouble to find a lightpipe port? Why not just use a common garden-variety PhoneCo jack—say, the cellular fax port in the smartcab, for instance? Well, we could, but there’s this thing called bandwidth. If the libsys hooks you into the Great Data River, then connecting through the PhoneCo is like pissing through a pipette. Slow, and I’m told, excruciating painful.

Rayno finished patching in the last of the fibers and booted up.

“Link me up,” he said, handing me the Nova. We don’t have a stored exefile yet for linking, so Rayno gives me the fast and tricky jobs.

Through the data river I got us out of the libsys and into CityNet.

Now, Olders will never understand. They’re still hooked on the hardware paradigm; sequential programs, running on single brains in big boxes, and maybe if you’re a real forward-thinking Older you’ll use a network to transmit the results to another big single brain. Me, I can get the same effect from a hundred little parallel tasks all running in background in a hundred different places, once I tie them together. It’s this bandwidth thing again; the secret is to get onto a wide enough part of a good net, and then there’s only a couple nanosecond difference between running tasks on parallel processors inside the same box and running them on discrete computers miles apart. Long as your programs can talk to each other now and then...

Nearly every computer in the world has a datalink port. CityNet is a great communications system. The pirate commware in Rayno’s Nova let me setup my links clean and fast so nobody flags us. Put it all together; 256 trojan horse programs buried all over CityNet, with a secret code to let them communicate—don’t think of OurNet as a network as in NovaLAN, think network as in spies— And you wind up with a virtual machine 25 miles across. If you lose a few nanoseconds owing to the speed of light, no big deal. Just throw another hundred processors at the problem.

Meaning, from the libsys, I chained into CityNet. From CityNet, I dialed up Georgie’s old man’s office computer and logged in. Switching into our private partition, I knocked on Hellgate and got stopped cold, but only for a mo. After all, I wrote half of Hellgate. Oh, for a few nanos I played the game and dueled wits with the gatekeeper, but that got boring fast so I said to hell with it, punched a hole through the application floor, dropped down and started bypassing secures on the object level. While I was down in the cellar I took a few seconds to check out the guts of Rayno’s new blind alley. Cute, but more scary-looking than actual dangerous.

Half a minute later I was back up on the other side of Hellgate and into the OurNet control files. Next step was to invoke +Ultra—the decryption program—and then plunge back into CityNet and run around waking up trojan horses.

When everything was activated, I handed the Nova back to Rayno.

“Well, let’s do some fun,” he said. “Any requests?” Georgie wanted to do something annoying to get even with his old man, and I had a new concept I was itching to try out, but Lisa’s eyes lit up ‘cause Rayno turned to her, first.

She sang, “I wanna burn Lewis, burn Lewis.”

“Oh fritz.” Georgie complained. “You did that last week.” “He gave me another F on a theme!” She was so mad about it, she missed the beat.

“I never get F’s. If you’d read books once in a—” “Georgie,” Rayno said softly, “Lisa’s on line.” That settled that.

Lisa’s eyes were absolutely glowing.

With Rayno’s help, Lisa got back up to normal CityNet level and charged a couple hundred overdue books to Lewis’ libsys account. Then she ordered the complete Encyclopedia Britannica queued up to start zapping out whenever Lewis turned on his office telecopier. Lisa could be nasty, but she was kinda short on style.

I got next turn. Georgie and Lisa kept watch while I took over the Nova. Rayno looked over my shoulder. “Something new this week?”

“Airline reservations. I was with my Dad two weeks ago when he set up a business trip, and flagged on maybe getting some fun. I scanned the ticket clerk real careful and picked up a few of her access codes.”

“Okay, show me what you can do.”

Right. OurNet, to CityNet, to the front door of Alegis. I knocked. It answered. Getting inside was so easy that I just wiped a couple of reservations first, to see if there were any bells or whistles.

None. No source checks, no lockwords, no confirm codes. I erased a couple dozen people without so much as an You Sure About That?

(Y/N). “Geez,” I said, “there’s no deep secures at all!”

Rayno grinned. “I keep telling you, Olders are even dumber than they look. Georgie? Lisa? C’mon over here and see what we’re running.”

Georgie was real curious and asked lots of questions, but Lisa just looked bored, snapped her gum, and tried to dance in closer to Rayno.

Then Rayno said, “Time to get off Sesame Street. Purge a flight.”

I did. It was simple as a save. I punched a few keys, entered, and an entire plane disappeared from all the reservation files. Boy, they’d be surprised when they showed up at the airport. I started purging down the line, but Rayno interrupted.

“Maybe there’s no deep secures, but clean out a whole block of their data space and it’ll stand out. Watch this.” He took the Nova from me and cooked up a little worm in RAM that hunted down and wiped every flight that departed at 17:07, from now ‘til NukeDay or they found the worm, whichever came first. “That’s how you do these things without waving a flag.” He pressed ENTER, and it was running wild and free.

“That’s sharp,” Georgie chipped in, to me. “Mike, you’re a genius.

Where do you get these ideas?” Rayno got a real funny look in his eyes.

“My turn,” Rayno said, exiting the airline system.

“What be next in this here stack?” Lisa chanted.

“Yeah, I mean, after garbaging the airlines ... “ Georgie didn’t realize he was supposed to shut up.

“Georgie, Mike,” Rayno hissed. “Keep watch!” Soft, he added, “It’s time to run The Big One.”

“You sure?” I asked. “Rayno, I don’t think it’s ready.”

“I’m ready.” Georgie got whiney. “We’re gonna get in big trouble—” “Wimp,” spat Rayno. Georgie shut up.

Me and Georgie had been working on The Big One for over two months, penetrating systems and burying moles, but I still didn’t feel real solid about it. It almost made a clean if/then/else. If The Big One worked/then we’d be rich/ else ... it was the else part I didn’t have down. Georgie and me took up lookout while Rayno got down to business.

He got back into CityNet, called the cracker exefile out of its hiding place, and poked it into Merchant’s Bank & Trust. I’d gotten into them the old-fashioned way, through the PhoneCo port, but never messed with their accounts, just did it to see if I could do it. My tarbaby had been sitting in their system for about three weeks now and nothing was stuck to it, so apparently they’d never noticed it. Rayno thought it would be real poetic to use one bank mainframe to penetrate the secures on another bank mainframe.

While he was making with the fine-tuning and last-minute dinks to the cracker, I heard walking nearby and took a closer look. It was just some old brown underclasser looking for a warm and quiet place to sleep. Rayno was finished linking the cracker to OurNet by the time I got back. “Okay kids,” he said, smiling cocky, “it’s showtime!” He looked around to make sure we were all watching him, then held up the Nova and punched the ENTER key.

That was it. I stared hard at the display, waiting to see what the else part of our if/then program was gonna be. Rayno figured it’d take about ninety seconds.

The Big One, y’see, was all Rayno’s idea. He’d heard about some kids in Sherman Oaks who almost got away with a five million dollar electronic fund transfer; they’d created an imaginary company, cut a bank-to-bank wire draft, and hadn’t hit a major hangup moving the five mil around until they tried to dump it into a personal savings account with a 40-dollar balance. That’s when all the flags went up.

Rayno’s subtle; Rayno’s smart. We weren’t going to be greedy, we were just going to EFT fifty K. And it wasn’t going to look real strange, ‘cause it got strained through some legitimate accounts before we split it out to twenty dummies.

If it worked.

The display blanked, flickered, and showed: TRANSACTION COMPLETED. HAVE A NICE DAY. I started to shout, but remembered I was in a library. Georgie looked less terrified. Lisa looked like she was going to tear Rayno’s pants off right then and there.

Rayno just cracked his little half smile, and started exiting.

“Funtime’s over, kids.”

“I didn’t get a turn,” Georgie mumbled.

Rayno was out of all the nets and powering down. He turned, slow, and looked at Georgie through those eyebrows of his. “You are still on The List.”

Georgie swallowed it ‘cause there was nothing else he could do.

Rayno folded up the computer and tucked it back inside his jacket.

We got a smartcab from the queue outside the library and went off to some taco place Lisa picked for lunch. Georgie got this idea about chip-switching the smartcab’s brain so the next customer would have a real state fair ride, but Rayno wouldn’t let him do it. Rayno wouldn’t talk to him, either, so Georgie opaqued his videoshades, jacked into the cab’s broadcast television receiver, and tuned us out for a good sulk.

Chapter 0/ 3 After lunch Lisa wanted to go hang out at the mall, but I talked them into heading over to Martin’s Micros instead. It’s is a grubbish little shop in a crummy part of UpperEast, deep in the heart of whitest Butthole Skinhead territory, but it’s also one of my favorite places to hang out. Martin is the only Older I know who can really work a computer without blowing out his headchips, and he never talks down to me, and he never tells me to keep my hands off anything. In fact, Martin’s been real happy to see all of us, ever since Rayno bought that $3000 animation package for Lisa the month she thought she wanted to be a DynaBook novelist if she ever grew up.

Rayno faxed ahead from the smartcab that we were coming, so we had to stand out on the sidewalk for only a few seconds before the outside lock buzzed. We stepped into the security entryway. The outside door clanged shut, the power lock snicked home, and the safety scanner gave us a quick sweep. It must have been programmed to recognize cool, ‘cause then the inside door slid open with a starship squeak and we were allowed into the store.

I love the feel of Martin’s Micros. It’s a funky, dim-’n’-cluttered kind of place: heavy square gear piled in haphazard clutters on the floor, making it a true challenge to move in any straight line; big tin racks of old half-dead Cyberspace decks and i786 motherboards reaching right up to the ceiling; light filtering in low and angular through the vertical slits in the front window ghetto armor. When I’m in Martin’s I always get this feeling that if I can just look in the right corner or blow the dust off the right old circuit board, I’ll find some incredible treasure—or maybe a couple of cackling cybergremlins tearing the legs off screaming IC chips and munching on their silicon hearts. Georgie says going into Martin’s Micros is kind of like poking around in the ultimate techie grandparent’s attic, and he should know, he’s got three living grandfathers.

We threaded into the store, stepping gingerish around the floor junk, pausing now and again to poke at some particular interesting piece of wreckage on the shelves like maybe to see if it was alive and would bite.

By and by, we made it to the island of light way in the back of the store.

Martin was sitting there, in front of his customized hodgepodge monster of a personal workstation, hulking over the keyboard. He sort of looked up. “Oh, hiya Mikey. Lisa, Georgie. Rayno.” We all nodded, not smiling, not looking right at him, being total derzky. “Nice to see you again.” He frowned at the screen, punched in something else, then really looked up. “What can I do for you today?”

“Just looking,” Rayno said.

“Well, that’s free.” Martin turned back to the tube, poked a few more keys. “Damn.” he said to the terminal. “What’s the problem?” Lisa asked.

“The problem is me,” Martin said. “I got this vertical package I’m ‘sposed to be customizing for a client, but it keeps dying the hot photon death and I can’t grok where it’s at.” Martin talks funny, sometimes.

“You mean it nukes itself?” George asked.

“Yeah.” Martin dug his thick fingers into his bushy black beard and gave his chin a good scratch. “But not in the way I expect. I mean, it had this really aggressive copy protect, y’know? Whenever you logged into CityNet it sent off a little agent program that sniffed around, looked for other copies of itself. If the agent found another copy with the same serial number it came back, encrypted your system files, and then phoned the FBI copyright hotline.”

Martin stopped scratching, sudden, and made with a wide, toothy smile. “Which is all perfectly correct and legal software behavior, of course. My client just needs to keep a—uh, offsite backup of the software. Yeah.”

We all nodded. Offsite backup. Yep. Sure. Darned if I don’t keep a few of those myself.

Martin turned back to his workstation, took his hand out of his beard, laid it on the CityLink box. “I finally beat the copy protect by trapping the agent in a null buffer and flushing it to the Phantom Zone.

But now I’m trying to make some other mods to the software, and nothing I do seems to work.” He turned, looked at me, his thick bushy eyebrows all knitted together in a frown. “Mikey, you don’t suppose they put some kind of fascist code integrity checker in there, do you?”

Rayno pushed in between me and Martin. “Rewind. Let’s start from the beginning. What’s this thing supposed to do?”

Martin looked at Rayno and shrugged. “You really want to know?

It’s boring as public television.” Rayno nodded.

Martin nodded, too. “Okay.” He turned back to his workstation and started closing down files and popping up windows. “Kids, what we’ve got here is a complete real estate investment forecasting system. The whole future-values-in-current-dollars bit: Depreciation, inflation, amortization, cost of running-dog capital, rehab incentives, tax credit recapture--”

“Interrupt,” Rayno said. “You’re right; let’s skip that. What’re the code objects? What numbers crunch?”

Martin started to explain, and something clicked in my head. Rayno said to me, “This looks like your kind of work.” Martin found his cane, levered his three hundred pounds of fat out of the squeaky chair, and looked real relieved as I dropped down in front of the keyboard. I killed his windows program, scrolled into the pure source, and started getting a firm mindlock on the flow concept. Once I had the elemental things visualized kind of, I scanned his modification parameters, compared them to the original object definitions, and let my neurons free associate.

Ah. Now it was clear. Martin’d only made a few mistakes. Anybody could have; from the looks of the object code, the original author was a total dutz, with only a vague fuzzy of what he was trying to accomplish.

Half the hooks on the two key objects were all wrong. Even if Martin’s code mods had been perfect, they still wouldn’t have worked. I banged into the system library, haywired the object defs so they behaved sort of right, then went back into Martin’s executable and started keying in code patches off the top of my head.

“Will you look at that?” Martin asked.

I didn’t answer ‘cause I was thinking in object-oriented language.

Ten minutes later I had his core mod in, linked, and romping through the test data sets. It worked perfect, of course.

“I just can’t believe that kid,” Martin said. “He can hack object code easier than I can talk.”

My voice started to come back. “Nothing to it,” I croaked.

“Maybe not for you, Mikey. I knew a kid who grew up speaking Arabic, used to say the same thing.” He shook his head, tugged his beard, looked me in the face, and smiled. “Anyhow, thanks loads, man. I don’t know how to ... “ He snapped his fingers. “Say, I just got something in the other day, I bet you’d be really interested in.” I found my feet and got up out of the chair. He hobbled over to the flyspecked glass display case, pushed aside a pile of old GridPads and ‘Roo PCs, and pulled out a small, flat, black plastic case. “I’ve gotta tell you, Mikey, this was a real find. Most of what comes in here is just old junk, but this you won’t believe. The latest word in microportables.” He set the little case on the counter. “Mikey Harris, may I present— “The Zeilemann Starfire 600.” I dropped a bit! Then I ballsed up enough to touch it. I flipped up the wafer display, opened the keyboard wings, ran my fingers over the touch pads, and I just wanted it so bad, right then and there! “It’s smart,” Martin said. “Rammed, rommed, fully metal and lightpipe ported; a videoshade jack for your friend there—,” he nodded at Georgie. “Even has bubble memory, too, so you won’t have to muck around with that chipburner.”

My God, it was beautiful!

Rayno leaned on the counter, gave the Starfire a cold, cold look.

“My 300 is still faster,” he said.

“It should be,” Martin said. “You customized it half to death. But the 600 is nearly as fast, and it’s stock, and it lists for $1200 new. I figure you must have spent around 4K upgrading yours.”

I got my breath back. “Can I try it out?” I asked. Martin waddled back over to his workstation, plugged a lightfiber into his patch bay, and threw the coil of plastic at me. I jacked in, booted up, linked through to CityNet. Took a cruise up to the Northside repeater and logged into FIDOnet.

It worked great. Clean, quiet, accurate; so maybe it was a few nanos slower than Rayno’s Nova, I couldn’t tell the difference. “Rayno, this thing is the max!” I looked at Martin. “Can we work out some kind of ...

?” Martin looked back to his terminal, where the real estate program was still running data tests without a glitch.

“I been thinking about that, Mike. You’re a minor dependent of an employed Class-One citizen, so I can’t legally hire you.” He tugged on his beard and rolled his tongue around his mouth. “But I’m hitting that client for some pretty heavy bread on the customizing fees, and it doesn’t seem fair to me to make you pay full list.” He looked at the Starfire again, and got his squinty, appraising look.

“On the other hand, that Starfire you’re holding is a, uh, demo model. Factory new, but it, uh, doesn’t have a serial number plate.” He chewed on his left index finger for a bit, then stopped, sudden, and made with a wide and toothy smile.

“Of course, you and I both know that that doesn’t mean a thing, but some of my other clients might get a little, uh, nervous about that machine. So—,” he went back to chewing on his index finger, and giving the Starfire a worried look. He looked at me.

He smiled.

“So tell you what, Mikey! You be my consultant on, say, seven more projects like this, and it’s yours! What d’ya think? Sound like a good deal to you?”

Before I could shout yes, Rayno pushed in between me and Martin. “I’ll buy it. List price.” He flicked a charge card out of his breast pocket.

Martin’s jaw dropped. “Well, what’re you waiting for? My plastic’s clean.”

“Charge it? At list? But I—uh, I owe Mike one.” “List price. And here,” Rayno grabbed some piece of junk that Georgie was futzing with and slapped it down on the counter. “Include this. Write it up as miscellaneous used gear. That way you don’t have to report any serial numbers.”

Martin smiled. If I didn’t know him better, I’d swear it was major relief. “Okay, Rayno.” He took the card and ran it through his magreader. A few seconds later the reader made with a pleasant little chime and a few measures of We’re In The Money. “It’s approved,” Martin said, an even bigger smile on his face. He punched up the sale and started laughing. “Honestly, I don’t know where you kids get this kind of money.”

“We rob banks,” Rayno said. Martin froze a mo, looked dead straight at Rayno, then broke up and started laughing so hard he cried.

Rayno picked up on the laugh; he’s got a great Vincent Price kind of evil laugh that he uses sometimes, especially when he’s fangs-out smiling.

Lisa followed Rayno. Me and Georgie looked at each other for a mo, not real sure what it was we were laughing at but figuring we should at least act like we knew, and then jumped in together.

Still laughing, Rayno used the Starfire to fax for a smartcab. Then he logged out, disconnected, folded up the Starfire and headed for the door.

Laughing, we followed. Laughing, Martin waved goodbye. The smartcab rolled up; we opened the outside security door and stepped out.

Rayno stopped laughing. Then he handed the Starfire to me. “Here.

Enjoy.”

“Thanks Rayno. But—but I coulda made the deal myself.”

“Happy Birthday, Mike.”

“Rayno, my birthday is in August.”

He looked at me through his eyebrows, cold and truly utter serious.

“Let’s get one thing straight. You work for me.” The smartcab chirped for our attention. We piled in. It was near school endtime, so we routed direct back to Buddy’s. On the way, in the smartcab, Georgie took my Starfire, gently opened the back of the case, and scanned the board. “We could swap out the 4166-8,” he said, “replace it real easy with a 42C816. That’d just about double your throughput speed.”

“Leave it stock,” Rayno said.

We split up at Buddy’s, and I took the transys home. I was lucky, ‘cause Mom and Dad weren’t there and I could zip right upstairs and hide the Starfire in my closet. I wish I had cool parents, like Rayno does.

His dad’s never there, and his mom never asks him any dumb questions.

I’d just finished up putting MoJo back together when Mom came home and asked how school was. I didn’t have to say much, ‘cause just then the stove said that dinner was ready and she started setting the table. Dad came home fifteen minutes later and we started eating.

Halfway through dinner, the phone chirped.

Chapter 0/ 4

I jumped up and answered the phone. It was Georgie’s old man, and he wanted to talk to my Dad. I gave Dad the phone and tried to overhear, but he took it into the next room and started talking real quiet. I got unhungry. I never liked tofu, anyway.

Dad didn’t stay quiet for long. “He what? Well thank you for telling me! I’m going to get to the bottom of this right now!” He came stomping back into the kitchen and slammed the phone into its cradle.

“Who was that, honey?” Mom asked, sweet.

“Bob Hansen. Georgie’s father. Mike and Georgie were hanging around with that punk Rayno again!” He snapped around to look at me.

I’d almost made it out the kitchen door. “Mikhail! Did you cut school today?”

Dad called me Mikhail? Uh-oh...

I tried to talk confident. I think the tofu had my throat all clogged up. “No. No, of course not.”

“Then how come Mr. Hansen saw you coming out of the downtown library?”

I started to hang. “I—I got a pass. I was down there doing some extra research.”

“For what class?”

I froze.

“Come on, Mikhail. What were you studying?” Damn! I wish I could be totally slick, totally smart, like Rayno. He’d know the right thing to say. He could speak the pravda without sweating.

But this was my Dad, and he was putting the heavy clamp on me, and all my input and output interrupts were colliding and the words in my head were turning into a truly enormous mess. I locked up solid—like I always do when Dad starts yelling.

“Honey,” Mom said, “aren’t you being a bit hasty? I’m sure there’s a perfectly good explanation.”

“Sweetheart, Bob was looking over some programs that Georgie and Mikhail put in his computer. He says he thinks they’re doing something illegal. He says it looks like they are tampering with a bank.” “Our Mikey? I’m sorry, David, but this must be some kind of bad joke.”

Dad locked a glare on her. That vein on the side of his forehead started throbbing again. His face shifted down to that deep red beet-look, and he took a deep, deep breath.

I saw my opening and started to slide for the door.

“Sherri, you airheaded nitwit, this is serious!” He spun, lunged, grabbed me by the back of the collar. Didn’t think the old guy could move that fast. “Mikhail Arthur Harris! What have you been doing with that computer? What was that program in Hansen’s system? Answer me!

What have you been doing?”

My eyes felt hot, teary. My face muscles went all tight and twisty and I pouted so hard it hurt. “It’s none of your business!” I screamed. “Keep your nose out of things you’ll never understand, you obsolete old relic!” The tears felt like hot burning blood pouring down my cheeks.

“That does it,” Dad said, his voice as cold and calm as death. “I don’t know what’s wrong with this damn kid of yours, but I know that thing upstairs sure as hell isn’t helping.” I blinked the tears out of my eyes long enough to see he was building up to a boiling thunderhead, but before I could get control enough to move he broke loose and went storming up to my room. I tried to get ahead of him all the way up the stairs and just got my hands stepped on. Mom came fluttering up behind as he was yanking the power cables on my Miko-Gyoja.

“Now honey,” Mom said. “Don’t you think you’re being a bit harsh?

He needs that for his homework, don’t you, Mikey?”

Dad’s voice was a low, gruff thing that barely got out through clenched teeth. “I’m tired of hearing you make excuses for your son, Sherri. I mean it.” He unplugged the CityLink.

“But honey, he’s just a boy. I’m sure it was just a prank.”

With a grunt, Dad picked up all of MoJo, ripping the Death Cannon fiber right out of its socket. “Somehow Audrey managed to raise three kids without any pranks like this.” Incredible. For the first time in my entire life, I saw fire flash in my Mom’s eyes. “Audrey?” You could practically see her hackles go up and the claws come out. “Audrey? Look here, honey, I am sick unto goddam death of being compared to Audrey! Ever since the day we got married it’s been ‘Audrey did this’ and ‘Audrey could do that.’ If she was so goddam perfect why did you ever leave her for me?” Dad froze. Rigid. Furious. For a mo there I thought sure he was going to break MoJo in half right over Mom’s head.

The moment passed. Cussing silent, Dad shouldered past her and started clomping down the steps. “I mean it!” he yelled up the stairwell.

“This damned thing goes in the basement, and tomorrow I’m calling CityNet and getting his private line ripped out! If he has any schoolwork he needs to do on computer he can damn well use the one in the den, where I can watch him!”

I locked eyes on Mom. She was looking down at her hands, her face screwed in a tight knot, tears leaking in slow trickles down the sides of her cheeks. C’mon, Mom. Look up. Look at me. This’d be a good time to give your son some true backup, mom.

She broke, turned, went chasing Dad down the steps. “Honey?” she called out, all plaintive little girl. “Honey, I’m sorry. I don’t know what got into me. Maybe you’re right.”

Oh, fritzing terrific. Good show, Mom. I slammed my bedroom door and locked it. “Go ahead and sulk!” I heard Dad’s shout come filtering up from the basement. “It won’t do you any good!”

One last flash of anger: I crushed the model Saturn V like the paper tube it was, and threw some pillows around ‘til I didn’t feel like breaking anything else. Then I picked up my CityLink box from where from where Dad had thrown it, spliced together a working NetLine fiber from the pieces on the floor, and went to the closet and hauled out my Starfire.

I’d watched over Dad’s shoulders often enough to know his account numbers and access codes. It usually took a few days for the links to break apart after one of our fun runs. I didn’t really need OurNet; most of the trojan horses would still be active. I jacked in, got on line, and got down to business. It took about half an hour.

My HouseFiber was out—in pieces all over the floor, to be honest— but I could backlink to Dad’s computer through CityNet. Like I expected, he was down in the den, using his computer to scan my school records.

Fine. He wouldn’t find out anything. Rayno’d showed us how to fix school records, oh, five—six months ago, at least. I gave Dad a minute to flounder around, then crashed in and sent a new message to his vid display.

“Dad,” it said, “there’s going to be some changes around here.”

It took a few seconds to sink in. I got up and made sure the door was locked real solid, but I still got almost half a scare when he came thudding up the stairs. The old relic sounded like a fritzing herd of elephants.

“MIKHAIL!” He slammed into the door. “Open this! Now!”

“No.”

“If you don’t open this door before I count to ten, I’m going to break it down! One!”

“Before you do that—”

“Two!”

“Better call your bank.”

“Three!”

“H320-5127-01R.” That was his checking account access code. He went silent for a couple seconds.

“Young man, I don’t know what you’re trying to pull—”

“I’m not trying anything. It’s done already.”

Mom came padding tentative up the stairs and asked, soft, “What’s going on, honey?”

“Shut up, Sherri.” His voice dropped down to a strained normal/quiet. “What did you do, Mikhail?”

“Outlooped you. Disappeared you. Buried you.”

“You mean, you got into the bank computer and erased my checking account?”

“Savings and mortgage on the house, too.”

“Oh my God ... “

Mom said, “He’s just angry, David. Give him time to cool off.

Mikey, you wouldn’t really do that to us, would you?” “Then I accessed Fuji-DynaRand,” I said. “Wiped your job. Your pension. I got into your plastic, too.”

“He couldn’t have, David. Could he?”

“Mikhail!” He hit the door. I jumped back; I’d definitely heard wood splinter around the lock. “I am going to wring your scrawny neck!” “Wait!” I shouted back. “I copied all your files before I purged!

There is a way to recover!”

He let up hammering on the door, and struggled to talk calm. “Give me the copies right now and I’ll just forget that this ever happened.”

“I can’t. I mean, I did backups into other systems. And I encrypted the files and hid them where only I know how to access.”

There was quiet. No, in a nano I realized it wasn’t quiet, it was Mom and Dad talking real soft. I eared up to the door but all I caught was Mom saying ‘why not?’ and Dad saying, ‘but what if he is telling the truth?’ “Okay, Mikhail,” Dad said at last, “what do you want?”

I locked up. It was an embarasser; what did I want? I hadn’t thought that far ahead. Me, caught without a program! I dropped half a laugh, then tried to think. I mean, there was nothing they could get me I couldn’t get myself, or with Rayno’s help. Rayno! I wanted to get in touch with him, is what I wanted. I’d pulled this whole thing off without Rayno!

I decided then it’d probably be better if my Dad didn’t know about the Starfire, so I told him the first thing I wanted was my Miko-Gyoja back. It took a long time for him to clump down to the basement and get it. He stopped at his term in the den, first, to scan if I’d really purged him.

He was real subdued when he brought MoJo back up.

I kept processing, but by the time he got back I still hadn’t come up with anything more than I wanted them to leave me alone and stop telling me what to do. I got MoJo back into my room without being pulped, locked the door, and got my system more or less back together.

Then I booted up, got on line, and gave Dad his job back.

Next I tried to log into OurNet, but Georgie’s old man had taken the no-style approach to shutting us down. The line was radio silence dead.

Fine. There were other bulletin boards we sometimes used. I left flags and messages all over the place for Rayno and Georgie to call me, then stayed up half the night playing the Battle of Peshawar just to make sure Dad didn’t try anything. My mind wasn’t on the game, though. The towelheads were winning this time, so I had to withdraw my surviving T-72s and nuke the city.

Chapter 0/ 5

“...mmmmf mmm mmmumble mumble mmf. --crackle— mumble oh-seven-hundred —pssht— and you are go for throttle up.” Dim, slow, somewhere back in the vacant gray chasms of my mindspace, I flagged it was morning. That, and I’d had a rough night: wasn’t sure quite how, though. The memories were swimming around all vague and elusive like ornamental crystal cybercarp in a black garden pond. Every now and then one got near the surface and I caught the murky flash of light off green glass scales...

Oh yeah, that’s right. I remembered now. It was the giant radioactive spiders again. The mutant tarantulas of Arachnus had escaped from their partition, crawled into my Battle of Peshawar folder. The Indian 3rd Armoured tangled with them just outside of Amritsar—which was great, took a lot of pressure off my eastern front—but the last thing I remembered, I’d just parked my T-72 in front of Martin’s Micros and was getting out to feed the parking meter when I got jumped by a Vijayanta main battle tank with eight legs and spinnerets. Now I was all trussed up in giant cobwebs and lying on a shelf in the Spider King’s larder...

Okay Mikey, no problem. We’ve gotten out of this trap before. Just need to focus, is all. I allocated another mo for resting up, then rubbed my magic ring twice, took a few quick breaths and— Mmph! Good, I felt the webbing give a little on my left side.

Another try before the spell fades? Right; one, two— Urgh! My left hand broke free. Slow, clumsy, I dragged it up to my face and starting brushing at the sticky silk and gunk that covered my eyes.

Bad news. There weren’t any cobwebs. There wasn’t anything in my face at all, ‘side from blankets and my own hair. Which meant the whole bit about the giant spider attack was all just a dream.

And the part about erasing Dad was the reality.

Okay Mikey, too late to try for an undo. May as well boot up and see where we saved the game last night. I got my eyes open—first the right one, then the left one, then both at the same time—and took a look out the window. At gray skies. Clouds hanging low and threatening rain. A couple depressed little sparrows, feathers all puffed up and necks pulled short, clinging tight to the dwarf maple branches like the borderline drizzle had them too bummed to fly.

Bleah.

Rolling over, I got a solid locate on my feet, finished kicking them free from the blankets, migrated them down to the floor. Sitting up, I started with the rubbing eyes and I-could-swallow-an-ostrich-egg-whole yawns.

By and by, my brain came back online and I looked across the room.

MoJo was alive, bright, awake. The Gyoja Gerbil was standing there onscreen, stupid little rat-toothed smile on his face, next to a shimmering, vibrating, silent yellow gong. Oh, that’s right, I’d forgotten, I’d turned the sound down last night, right about the time I’d thrown my last eight Backfire bombers against the Indian infantry. That cluster bomb sound effect did tend to get noisy. One last yawn, and then I got out of bed and shuffled over to my desk.

Parts of the boot script keyed off the keyboard interrupt. I spun the volume up, laid hands upon MoJo, and the Gyoja Gerbil broke out of his wait loop. “Good morning, Mikhail Harris,” he said as he bowed deep.

“Now checking CityNet mail for you.” He closed his eyes, like he was concentrating. There were definite times when I wished the Miko-Gyoja 260/0/ /ex used a plain dumb ticking-timebomb icon, like normal hardware.

The gerbil frowned, and froze. A flashing red-border dialog box popped open: Warning! Possible buffer contamination!

Idiot machine. Of course there’s buffer contamination. There’s always buffer contamination. This is CityNet, for chrissakes; the day I don’t have a virus in the flytrap is the day I start to worry, ‘cause it means I’ve caught something that knows how to bypass a flytrap.

I tapped the flush button. The gerbil bowed again, then spoke. “I have found these messages waiting for you, Honorable Harris-san.” He opened a window between his hands, like he was pulling open a scroll.

I scanned down the list. Hmm. Junk mail. More junk mail. Uh oh, a message from CityNet Admin about—scratch that, just some real official-looking junkmail. Today’s fashion forecast: Gritty 2nd Classer Realism in the morning changing to candy-coated Nineties Nostalgia by late afternoon. A couple notes from the Battle of Peshawar SIG; these I piped to a temporary folder and flagged for later reference.

Nothing even slightly like a mention of the Big One, which was a good sign. But also nothing from Georgie or Rayno, which could be bad.

Real bad.

Nervous, I banged out of the mail program, slipped out to CityNet proper, and rode the stream up to the Northside repeater and started poking around the bulletin boards.

Nothing. No new postings from Georgie. No new messages from Rayno. Not even a howdy-do from Nanker Phelge, the pseudonym we used when we were breaking into other people’s threads and being either subtle, funny, or devil’s-lawyer annoying.

I decided to hope the deadzone quiet just meant it was still too early in the morning for Georgie and Rayno, and logged out.

For a mo I gave some serious thought to changing my socks and underwear, but nah, I’d have to take off my blue spatterzag jumpsuit to do that, and the jumpsuit was just starting to get that good wrinkled ‘n’ baggy look. So I pulled on my blitz yellow hightops—didn’t even bother to tie ‘em—and clumped over to the stairs.

Mom and Dad were still in the kitchen, talking real low. Soon’s they heard my feet coming down the stairs they clammed. I plodded down the stairs, did the bleary trudge into the kitchen, flashed around a big yawning smile as I dropped into my chair. “G’morning, Mom.” No response. “G’morning, Dad.” Dad lifted his faxsheet a little higher, blocking off eye contact.

Okay, I could play this game as long as they could. “Great weather, innit?” No response. And now that I flagged it, no plate on the table for me, either. “Geez, a day like this, a growing boy needs a good breakfast, y’know?” I heard a slurp from behind the faxsheet, then the clink of cup landing on saucer.

I looked at Mom.

She looked down at her watch.

I smiled at Mom. She took a bite out of her sweetroll and followed it with a gulp of caffix.

Hmm. This was turning out to be a tougher crack than I expected.

Still, if my experience with the nets counted for anything, it showed that the bigger the stonewall, the more likely it was there was a back door.

Provided, of course, that I was willing to try something stupid enough to find it.

I turned to the self-supporting faxsheet at the right end of the table, allocated a mo to studying the fingers that peeked around the edges.

Yep, I had 95-percent confidence those were Dad’s fingers. The big, heavy, gold wedding ring looked kind of familiar.

“Y’know, Dad,” I said, casual. “I been thinking, there really isn’t a whole lot more I can learn at school. I mean, the teachers are all truly lame, y’know?”

No response.

I took a quiet deep breath, screwed myself up to output the next line, toggled to blurt mode. “So I was thinking, why don’t I take the next couple days off? Sort of give my brain a rest, y’know?”

Incredible. No words. No gasps. I was sure that statement would’ve gotten me some whitened knuckles, minimum, but he didn’t so much as rustle the faxsheet. I was still looking amazed at him, trying to think of something else that’d top that line, when his smartcab rolled up out front and started bleating.

The faxsheet collapsed in on itself and leaped onto the table. Dad jumped up like his chair was on fire, snarfed one more slurp of his caffix, grabbed his briefcase. “Oops. Gotta go, sweetheart.” Mom and Dad traded quick dry kisses as he darted out the door.

“See you tonight, honey,” Mom said.

“See you tonight, honey,” I echoed, sarcastic to the max.

No response. For just a mo I started to wonder if maybe I was dead, a ghost—involuntary, my right hand started spidering over to check my left wrist for pulse—then I decided no, that was stupid, paranoid, and ridiculous. Mom and Dad were just trying to be too derzky to notice me, was all.

Which chained into a true smile. With Dad gone, this was going to be so easy. Whatever else Mom had going for her, she was total incapable of keeping derzky. I allocated a minute to studying her, mapping out just the exact perfect approach path to blow her cool wide open.

Before I could say anything, she checked her watch again, clucked her tongue, stood up. “Well, well, look at the time.” Scooping up the cups and plates, she stacked them in the sink, wiped her hands on the towel, and was out the door. I heard her umbrella sproing open and the screen door bang shut.

Well I’ll be glitched. She’d gotten away. And they truly had shut up and left me alone.

I was still working out the permutations on this when the porch door creaked open a few inches and four heavy little feet came shuffling into the kitchen. “Arf,” said Muffy. “Arf arf.” It waddled over to Mom’s empty chair, sat up on its hindquarters, raised its front paws to beg. “Arf.

Arf arf.”

It was a tricky shot—short, high and arcing—but I beaned the little sucker with a wax apple from the fruit bowl. “Arf arf arf,” it said, excited. The red vinyl tongue rolled out of its smiling, dry mouth. Its little vestigial tail started thumping a mile a minute on the floor.

Idiot machine. No brains at all, just patterned responses. Couldn’t even tell the difference between a loving pat on the head and a major klonk from a ...

Sudden, I knew what I was going to do with this ugly, cloudy day.

Breakfast was a couple microwave pizza muffins and a pouch of GrapeOla Cola. Then I put my back into it, started rearranging the kitchen furniture. Together, me and Muffy had endless—well, minutes anyway—of fun. I’d move a chair, and start calling. “Here, Muffy.

Heeere, Muffy!”

“Arf. Arf arf.” Waddle waddle waddle waddle KLONK! It’d back up two steps, shake its head, turn 90 degrees and resume waddling.

I’d move the chair. KLONK!

This lasted maybe an hour, Muffy trying to learn the floor map and me changing it with every collision, until at last Muffy’s poor little RAM chips were just so garbaged with conflicting data that it wouldn’t move. Instead, it backed itself into a corner, drooped its ears and stubby little tail, and started up with this real obnoxious sawtooth whine.

Okay, I’d had enough fun in the kitchen. I moved all the furniture back to where it was when I started, stepped into the dining room, started to call again. “Here, Muffy. Heeere, Muffy!”

The thing’s ears perked up. Its head tilted up and started moving side to side, like it could truly see something with those round, glassy, blind eyes. (Actual, the head movement was part of its sound-locating routine, more like a radar, really.) “Heeeere, Muffy!” I moved a magazine rack into the doorway.

Muffy beelined for the porch, backed itself onto the prongs of its battery charger, and shut down.

Hmm. Maybe it was smarter than I thought.

With the doggoid out of action, I committed some serious brains to the problem of what I wanted to do next. The answer came on me cold and sudden: Dad’s computer.

Sure, he’d let me use it for schoolwork once in a while. He’d even had me install software for him, once or twice. But he was always there to watch over my shoulder, and there was one partition on his optical drive he’d absolute forbidden me to ever poke around in.

Which was not unlike putting a Do Not Open Until Xmas tag on it, y’know?

One more look out the front door to make sure Mom and Dad’d truly left for work, then I strolled casual over to the den—looked around quick to be absolute utter positive I was alone in the house—slid the door open and slipped in. Dad’s computer was sitting there on the sidetable, silent, inert.

Dumb.

It was a Fuji-DynaRand box, of course; a big, ugly, square industrial kind of thing, ‘bout six times as large as it really needed to be. The Ultra Executive PowerMate 5000, or something like that: with a big oldfashioned CRT tube sitting on a swivel stand on the top, a nine-zillion button keyboard like something out of a jet fighter cockpit sprawled out in front, and this great big multi-switch—I don’t know, mouse doesn’t seem right. Had to be a rat, at least. Maybe a woodchuck. I think Fuji- DynaRand builds these things to government spec. Soviet government spec.

Slow, quiet, like it could hear me, I tiptoed into the den and snuck up on Dad’s computer. It was a weird, weird feeling. Like I was alone in church and about to crap on the altar or something. I was almost afraid to touch it. A last, quick look behind me—yes, yes, I was alone, dammit—and then I laid a hand on the keyboard.

The spell broke. It was at least somewhat like a real computer, and I was without doubt Mikey Harris, Def Cyberpunk. I dragged over a chair, cracked my knuckles, dove in— To a dry swimming pool. Dad’s Ultra Executive PowerMate 5000 really was dead. Nothing happened when I banged in the screen restore command; nothing happened I smooshed down the function keys. I took a quick tour of the faceplate, trying to remember where the status LEDs were, and found the problem in a mo. Dad hadn’t just put his computer to sleep; he’d shut it down cold. I groped around the sides of the case until I found the power switch, flipped it.

Nothing happened.

I traced the power cable back to the surge protector. It claimed to be working, but I hit the breaker reset anyway. The LEDs flickered; in a little plastic voice the surge protector said, “Working.” I climbed out from under the table and checked Dad’s computer again. It was still dead. But this time I noticed the empty fuse holder sitting in the paperclip cup.

Took me about fifteen minutes to plod down to the basement, dig out a replacement fuse, install it. When I got done and hit the power switch, though, I was rewarded with a real satisfying flicker-flash of LEDs, a pleasant whir of cooling fan, a ratchety noise from the optical drive, and— FDIX ERR: 01FF AA00 0000 DEV NOT MTD The hell? Dad couldn’t have. He wouldn’t have. I fumbled with the latch on the drive door ‘til I remembered how to spring it. The optical media slot was empty.

Dad had. He’d secured his computer in the most crude, effective way; taken the mass storage disk right out. And I knew Dad well enough to bet my soul that that laser disk was sitting safe, secure, and totally untouchable in his briefcase. Ninety-nine percent probable I could turn the den upside down and shake it and still never find that disk. Still, I did the search. I had to. Then, when the missing laser disk proved truly missing, I shut everything off, crawled back under the table, and unscrewed the power fuse. No point in advertising that I’d been messing with Dad’s machine—if for no other reason than I didn’t want him to know he’d beat me so easy. I took one last careful look around, made sure that everything was back exact where I’d found it. I was just stepping out of the den and easing the door shut when the voicephone in the kitchen started chirping.

Whoever it was, they hung up before I could get to it and answer.

Chapter 0/ 6

The rest of the morning ran about the same. I wasted another half hour or so just rattling around downstairs, channel surfing on the TV and trying to find something interesting to do. But there was nothing on the tube worth the effort of watching and the weather outside had changed from cloudy, cool and misty to cloudy, hot and muggy. So I cycled through a few more ideas, all of which went flat almost soon’s I thought of them, then punctured another pouch of GrapeOla Cola and trudged back upstairs. The Gyoja Gerbil was sitting there waiting for me there with a whole new batch of CityNet mail.

Correction: CityNet junkmail. Still no fallout from CityNet Admin after yesterday’s little fun, good; still no sign of life from either Georgie or Rayno, bad. I skimmed the rest of my mail, trashed it all, then reopened the folder I’d packed with messages from the Battle of Peshawar SIG and settled down for some serious reading.

Even that went poor, though. Nothing worthwhile in the SIG mail; no playing hints, no character sets, no software hacks to let me change the game params. Just a whole lot of invites to join network gaming groups and, while I truly love to play Peshawar single-user, I absolute hate to play it group.

Why? Well, it’s like this. Battle of Peshawar is a historical roleplaying game, set in central Asia during the Breakup Wars. Only it’s really more like about six different games, depending on the role you choose. Like you can play the MIG pilot or the tank commander, and then it’s a real neat arcade-style shoot’em up where you go around blasting things into slag until you either run out of fuel, run out of ammo, or run into something that blows you to insignificant bits. Which, by the way, you always do.

After arcade-level, the stakes go up. You can play the company or division commander, and start looking more at the map and worrying about things like advance and supply lines. Or you can play the Army Group commander, in which case you have to really trust your division commanders and start thinking about things like interservice coordination and keeping comm with Moscow open. You can even play the big guy in Moscow and sweat over the whole geopolitical business, like for example if your tanks push too far into northern India the Poles might try to retake Byelorussia again, or the ChiComms might come busting out of Sinkiang and flatten Alma-Ata.

And that’s the whole problem with playing Peshawar on net. When I play single-user, I can be anybody. The computer plays all the other parts, competent, no surprises, and I am the random factor. If it’s going bad, I can go nuclear whenever I feel like quitting. If it’s going good, I can keep saving game a mo before total death and keep the stalemate running almost forever.

When I play on net—at least, when I play with any of the good net groups, the ones that keep player stats offline where I can’t fix my numbers—little Mikey Harris is just one more minor factor who most times ends up playing a tank platoon. Maybe if I’m real lucky I’ll get command of an armored company, but in net Peshawar, at least, it seems the primary job at my level is to get killed carrying out stupid orders from higher up. Once— once, I racked up enough points to make general in the Central Asia Army Group, only to have the klutz running the Turkestani Group open up a hot western front with Iran.

Ten moves later the Iranians had rolled clear up to Gur’yev, taken all the Caspian Sea oil reserves, and cut both the Krasnovodsk and Aral’sk railroads. Leaving my armored companies fifty kilometers outside of Peshawar with full magazines and absolute bone dry fuel tanks. Sometimes I think the whole point of network role-playing Peshawar is to keep the young players from getting enough experience points to steal the good roles from the old clods who run the game. Not unlike school, at that.

By noon I’d bounced around CityNet enough to be bored. I’d hit all the bulletin boards I felt like hitting; nothing caught my interest. I’d tried my hand at a new hack—the University Medical Center database. There are four universal passwords that are the mark of truly sloppy system security: TEST, ADMIN, XYZZY, and the one that cracked me into MedBase, KEN SENT ME. That’s when I logged out. Anything that easy to hack obvious wasn’t worth the effort to do it. For lunch I went downstairs and zapped a couple krillburgers and some Tater Crispins.

The voicephone rang while I was nuking the foodlike products; this time I caught it on the third chirp, but whoever it was, they hung up soon as I said, “Hi.”

Oh, well. Maybe some phonepunk’d figured out a new way to bypass our prank call interceptor. I shrugged, hit the disconnect button.

Then decided, as long as I had the phone in my hand, I might as well call Mom and Dad and see if they were talking to me yet. Wiping the tater grease off my fingers and the handset, I carried the cordless over to the table and punched in the direct number for Fuji-DynaRand’s call-routing system.

Mom and Dad both work for Fuji-DynaRand, y’see; same building complex, in fact. They ride to work separate ‘cause Dad, being a Fuku Shacho, gets a private company smartcab, while Mom, being just an Administrative Facilitator (or is it Facilities Administrator?), has to take the company trampool. Least that’s the way Mom explains it, and she seems to think it makes sense. The way Mom also explains it, she used to be Dad’s Personal Facilitator, but after he divorced his first wife to marry her she had to transfer to a different division. All of which, I guess, has something to do with why Dad keeps insisting that that breathy-voiced “Faun” who intercepts his phone calls is just a sim’d figment of the voicemail system.

If she is, she’s the closest thing to an AI I’ve ever run into.

Whenever I ask Dad about that he just laughs and says she has no true intelligence—then Mom scowls at him and says she can believe that— but I keep wanting to try a Turing test on Faun all the same. ‘Course, if she is human, all that’ll prove is that she’s an airhead.

But anyway, all my calls to Dad’s line got the instant route to Faun again, which wasn’t much of a surprise knowing Dad can program his phone to lateral off calls from certain numbers. When I couldn’t get through to Mom, though, that was kind of an eye-opener. I initiated a hope that maybe they were doing a nice lunch together and decided to bop out to the porch and check up on Muffy.

I swear, when I lifted its tail to check the charger prong, the thing growled at me.

# After lunch, I at last hit on a worthwhile project. Splicing together a working lightpipe from what was left of the Death Cannon fiber, I patched the Starfire direct into MoJo and commenced with the big download. All my pirate commware; all my favorite tricks and treats programs. Most of Peshawar, though I had to scratch the arcade mode ‘cause the graphics looked truly terrible on that waferscreen. The Meghan Gianelli freezeframes looked truly terrible, too, all verticalcompressed and bloaty, but I managed to find memory space for my four favorites anyway.

Around 2:00, I heard a heavy throbbing outside and took a look out my bedroom window. It was just some big ugly green privatecar with blackfilm windows cruising down the street, slow; a diesel, from the sound of it. Which struck me as odd: we don’t get many petrol-burners this far off the expresswa— Jesus H. Christ! A big dark car cruising by slow? What the Hell have I stirred up, the KGB? The IRS? Heart thumping hard, back against the wall, I cautious edged up to the window and peeked out again.

The car was gone, down the block, around the corner. Laughing silent at myself for being such a total paranoid, I went back to the big download.

Around 3:30, the voicephone started chirping again. By this time it’d gone past starting to get and become full adult phase annoying, so I tried to say to Hell with it and let it ring. But whoever was on the line let it go on, and on, and on, until at last I decided to play the chump and go for it one last time. I checked to make sure the process I was running would be okay by itself, trudged out to the hall, picked up the voicephone, and cranked up my best guttural surl. “Yeah?” Nothing. Dead air; just another prank call. I was doing the windup to slamdunk the phone back in its cradle when something caught my ear. It didn’t sound right, for a blank line. I listened closer: sounded like heavy breathing.

I raised my voice. “Hello? Who is this?”

No, not heavy breathing. Sobbing. “Who are you? Why do you keep calling?”

A sniffle, a plaintive little whimper.

The bit flipped in my head. “Mom?”

Click. Then dial tone.

Had to be Mom. Had to be. I quick punched in her work number, but the Fuji-DynaRand phone system intercepted my call and routed it off to voicemail Twilight Zone.

Oh well, I’d figure this out when she came home. I went back into my room, plopped into my chair, and got back to work.

# I was just finishing up with the download when Mom’s tram came rumbling up out front. I snapped the lightfiber apart, stashed the Starfire in my closet, hurried downstairs to meet her at the door. She just pushed right past me; wouldn’t talk to me, wouldn’t look at me. I tried to follow her, but she plowed straight into her bedroom and slammed the door. I watched for a while, wondering whether I should barge in, stand out in the hall and try to talk through the door, or what. Then I flagged there was no light coming through the crack under the door.

Weird city. She was sitting in her room, in the dark, crying. Which was not something I had a whole lot of experience dealing with.

Dad came home around five, and Mom finally came out of her room. Supper was another utter silent deal, both of them passing dishes around me like I wasn’t there and absolute refusing to make eye contact with me. They let me have a plate, though, which was a promising sign.

But after supper Mom and Dad retreated into the den, shut the door, started talking. I eared up to the door, but all I caught was the occasional sob from Mom and a basic low angry rumble from Dad.

Fine. The big ignore was getting real old. I went upstairs, slammed the door of my room, booted MoJo. Soon’s I hit CityNet I flagged that Rayno had been online—at last!—and left me a remark on when and where to find him. Along about eight, I finally got him online and in chat mode, and he told me Georgie was getting trashed and very probable heading for permanent downtime. So, just to restore some cool, I started telling him all about how I’d erased my old man— He interrupted, cut me off. Said he was real extreme busy at the moment, but we should get together offline to talk about it later. We traded a few ideas on times, locations; finally settled on 22:00 at Buddy’s. Then he terminated the chat, and I logged out of CityNet and checked my realtime interface.

Omigod, it was after nine already. I had bare time enough to drag a comb through my hair, get my cuffs rolled up just right, jump into my sneakers and wrap up in my blitz yellow MaxPockets windbreaker.

Almost as an afterthought, I grabbed the Starfire out of the closet and slipped it into the inside groin pocket of my jumpsuit.

Hey, I was a member, now. Maybe my parents wouldn’t buy me scruff leather, and maybe my hair would never be halfways as good as Rayno’s, but I could pack some power. Mom was in the kitchen, kleenexing the runny mascara from her puffy red eyes, when I came bouncing down the stairs. “Mikey! Where are you going?”

“Gotta zip, Mom. Gotta meet some friends.” I hurdled Muffy and went linear for the door.

“But honey, it’s so late.” She darted a glance into the dining room, like she wasn’t sure if she should call for Dad.

“No sweat, Mom. I’ll be back before curfew.” I kicked the screen door open and charged outside. The night was dark and muggy and breathless.

Mom followed out onto the steps. “Mikey, come back! There’s something—” I took off running down the street.

I lucked out. A tram was just pulling up to the corner when I got there. I jumped on, zipped my pass through the magreader, found a nice seat by the window. When we rolled back past the house Mom and Dad were out on the front lawn, whipping up into what looked to be a real good argument. I gave them a smile and a little half-wave. Dad came running out into the the street, shaking his fist and shouting something at me, but I couldn’t hear ‘cause the window was sealed. So I just smiled at him.

I love airconditioning. # The tram rolled up to the corner near Buddy’s; the door opened with a little pssht. I stepped out, cool and slow, and started to walk casual up the street. It was a beautiful night for a walk: warm, muggy, not a breath of wind. No stars I could see over the streetlights and neon; no moon, just a diffuse red glow reflecting off the low clouds over the city, broken by a few laser-green cloud projos. No Fuji-DynaRand platform beacon shining down on me like the All-Seeing Eye of God.

Off on the horizon, heat lightning played hidden and silent in the folds of distant thunderheads.

The sidewalk wasn’t empty, of course. The usuals were there: a clot of blue-mohawked McPunks, talking tough and staring squinty over their shoulders at the squad of Asphalt Surfers halfway down the block.

Four or five heavy-painted pickup girls, smelling like my Grandma Jessica’s perfume collection on a bad day, patrolling their ten feet of sidewalk space and keeping jealous eyes on the competition. A drooler, wearing a long coat that from the smell doubled as a urinal, sitting in a dark doorway, caressing a paper-bagged bottle. Two real overdressed and nervous Olders, standing by a smartcab pickup point, looking around themselves like they’d stumbled into the slums of Calcutta or something.

Fine. They could be nervous. Me, I had a Starfire down in my groin pocket, cold, heavy, and reassuring. C’mon, you Cool Jerks, you Rollerbladers, you lame ChemieCrispies!. I’m packing true power now!

You mess wif’ me and I be annihilatin’ you! Confident, total derzky, I flipped open the door and strolled into Buddy’s. Rayno was there already, sitting in our booth, watching the door.

He was not smiling.

Okay, something had him pissed. So what’s new? I bopped over to the booth, plunked into my seat, fired off a broad grin. He looked at me through his eyebrows. Frowned. Looked down, and tried a sip of his caffix. “What’s on line?” I asked, bright and enthusiastic. He just scowled at me some more.

“I thought I could depend on you,” he said at last.

I cocked my head, looked at him weird. This was not what I was expecting.

“Mikey,” he said after another sip, “we have a major league problem. You have put us people in a state of serious risk.”

It was me he was pissed at? I bogged a mo, then found my voice. “Huh? Rewind. Rayno, what are you talking about?”

He looked down, took another sip of his caffix. “You know how Georgie’s old man cracked OurNet?” he said, soft. “Hung a buffered line printer on his Honeywell-Bull. Echoed your CityNet online session direct to paper. Got a byte-for-byte copy of everything we did.

Gatekeeper passwords. Trojan horse addresses. Activity committments.

Everything.”

I scowled too, and shook my head. “Oh Rayno, that’s—that’s pathetic. I mean, talk about style, total lack of.” Rayno looked at me, and his eyes were hot skewers. “You miss the point, Mikey. Who cares about style now? He’s bagged us.” He paused, touched his cup but didn’t drink, then looked at me again. “You promised me this could never happen. You told me never in a million years could he crack the secures on OurNet. I believed you, Mikey. I trusted you.”

Suddenly, my voice was a choked sputter. Rayno was being so unfair. I mean, how could he expect me to bulletproof us against something that dumb? Rayno sighed, and gave me a sad smile. “Face it, Mikey, you porked up bigtime. Your ass is dogfood now. Question is, what are you gonna do to protect the rest of us?” I was still trying to find an answer for that when he drained his caffix cup, sat up straight, and toggled to normal voice. “And now, you can do me a big favor and beat it.” He leaned back in his seat, looked away, made it clear that the audience was over.