Cyberpunk 1.0
(BETA)
A novel by
Bruce Bethke
©1998 Bruce Bethke
All Rights Reserved
This version ©1998 Bruce Bethke. All Rights Reserved.
Portions of this work have been previously published in different formats. This
work incorporates material copyrighted in 1980, 1982, 1988, and 1989 by
Bruce Bethke.
Inquiries regarding publication and/or subsidiary rights to this material should
be directed to:
Ashley D. Grayson
Ashley Grayson Literary Agency
1342 18th Street
San Pedro, CA 90732
(310) 548-4672
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any persons, living, dead, or
undead (“We prefer the term transmortal”), is purely accidental.
Cyberpunk 1.0 1
©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke
0/ 0/ : Warmstart
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
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©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke
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.
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©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke
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
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©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke
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
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©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke
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
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©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke
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.
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©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke
“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
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©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke
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.
Cyberpunk 1.0 9
©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke
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?”
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©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke
“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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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 libs