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Rough Draft 6.17.99

A novel by Bruce Bethke

Ashley Grayson Literary Agency

1342 18th Street

San Pedro, CA 90732

Voice: (310) 548-4672

Fax: (310) 831-0036

Email: agrayson1@aol.com

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This book is a work of fiction. The governmental agencies depicted in this novel are intended to represent no

agencies or offices now in existence or expected to exist in the foreseeable future. In particular, this novel

concerns the actions of the Federal Department of Investigation, which should not be construed as a literary

stand-in for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The real agency is the FBI: this book concerns the FDI. The

characters in this book are entirely fictitious and their words and actions should not be construed as a reflection

on the behavior or character of the heroic men and women of American law enforcement. Above all, under no

circumstances should the inquisitive reader attempt to substitute the letters FBI for FDI in any Internet URL or

Web page address that may be depicted in this book.

Well, okay, if you really want to try it, it's your ass...

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TO: ALL FDI REGIONAL & FIELD OFFICES

FROM: DIRECTOR, INTERNET SECURITY DIVISION

DATE: 15 JUNE 2010

RE: UNSOLVED CASE REMINDER

PRIORITY: URGENT

All officers and special agents are reminded to be on

the lookout for JACK BURROUGHS (aka MAX_KOOL), still

wanted in connection with repeated serious violations

of the Corporate Data Privacy, Internet Non-Violence

and Decency, and Federal Embarassing Data Secrecy acts

committed during the period of May - June 2005. Subject

is a Caucasian-American male, at present age 28, and an

accomplished computer expert with a long record of

antisocial attitudes and behaviors. His last known

location was Hawaii, although this intelligence is now

more than three years old and is no longer deemed 100-

percent reliable.

Any suspected sighting of Burroughs should be reported

immediately to the FDI National Computer Crime Center

at http://www.fdi.gov/compcrim.htm.

DO NOT, REPEAT, DO NOT forward leads or information to

the National Infrastructure Protection Agency! Dammit

people, this is an FDI case, and we will crack it

without any more help from those smug bastards at NIPA!

That's all we need is for Director Jackson to come

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walking into the next Senate appropriations hearing

with... oh my, this thing is transcribing everything I

say, isn't it? Um... strike that. Begin new paragraph,

emphasis on, all caps.

Burroughs is a known associate of JOSEPH LEMAT (aka

alt.conspiracy.nutcase that Burroughs, LeMat, and

Andersson have either joined or been executed by SCARW,

the Secret Cabal that Actually Rules the World. Our

liaison at OSS assures us no such organization actually

exists, for if it did, Secret Cabal that Actually Rules

the Earth would make for a far better acronym.

Finally, a special advisory to all FDI personnel within

driving distance of Quantico: c'mon, people, we're a

multi-billion-dollar Federal agency. Let's coordinate

the department picnic this year, okay? Last year we

wound up with enough potato salad to feed Georgetown

and not one bottle of ketchup. Surely there is room for

improvement, no?

Regards,

DIR-INTSEC

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When I was about five years old and first learning to ride a

bicycle, my father gave me some advice. He said, "Son, never

worry about where you've been. It's where you're going that

knocks your front teeth out."

With that thought firmly fixed in mind---it's either that or

Dad's one other piece of worthwhile advice, which was, "Never bet

on a horse named Lucky"---we can discard all that has gone before,

and begin in one bright, shining, omniscient and retrospective

moment:

The Earth hangs like a big blue aggie marble in the silent

vastness of space, a fragile island of life and liquid water in

the cold, unforgiving, and for all practical purposes infinite

cosmos.

But that's not my problem.

In London it's already one o'clock in the morning of the next

day, and a pack of knuckle-dragging Aryan skinheads have just

finished kicking the tar out of an aging Pakistani shopkeeper in a

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deserted tube station. As he lies there on the cold concrete

platform, coughing sticky bubbles of bright blood and drifting in

and out of consciousness, he wonders: What's wrong with the

security cameras? Where are the Police? He doesn't know that two

vagrants have built a fire under a Thames River bridge, in the

process accidentally melting through a main fibre-optic trunk

line and knocking out all police surveillance west of Bermondsey.

But again, that's not my problem.

In central Brazil it's 10 P.M., and the panic-stricken

Voortanga'en colony in the Amazonian rain forest has once again

turned its main bioreceptor towards Gamma Virginis. At last, from

the home world, comes the message the colonists have waited more

than a thousand years anxious to hear: the Colonial Office has

reviewed their report on the dangerous bipedal anthropoids

running riot on this world, and funding for a relief expedition

has been authorized. As the signal fades into the background hiss

of interstellar hydrogen, the colonists spread their stillia and

exude a collective aspiration of relief. (As if, being a lungless

group-mind, they could do anything else.) Now it's just a matter

of hanging on for the five or six millennia it will take their war

fleet to arrive, then---payback!

But amazingly enough, this is also not my problem.

In Dallas it's 7 P.M., and the President of the United States

is sitting in a blast-shielded lavatory in the basement of the

Texas White House, fondling the briefcase that contains his

missile launch codes and wondering what's the point of having all

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these nuclear weapons if he never gets to use them. In Pasadena

it's 5 P.M., and the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab has once again

intercepted the Voortanga'en transmission and misclassified it as

unintelligible random noise. In the Gulf of Alaska it's 4 P.M.,

and a pod of bottlenose dolphins are urgently but unsuccessfully

trying to explain to the fisherhumans who've kidnapped their

relatives that mackerel are hard to find these days and they need

more time to come up with the ransom.

But again, all of these things are not my problem.

Instead, let us focus in on a few tiny bits of volcanic rock

jutting out of the blue Pacific, just east of the International

Date Line and a hair south of the Tropic of Skin Cancer. To be

specific, let's look down on Maui---on the south coast, at the end

of Highway 31, where the Wailea Shores run into the Puu Olai lava

fields. There---Ahihi Bay---that tiny brown speck, floating on a

red-and-white-striped surfboard, about two hundred yards

offshore: that's me. And if you were to break open the glove

compartment of my car on the beach, and dig through the avalanche

of fast-food napkins, misfolded roadmaps, and paper-wrapped

beverage straws, you'd find a wallet full of carefully forged ID

cards that claim my name is Bob Sanders.

But instead of pursuing this topic further at this time,

please allow me to redirect your attention to another point about

a quarter-mile due south. There, that long, dark, ominous shape,

knifing slowly through the shallow water. That is a fifteen-footlong

tiger shark.

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And it's about 3 P.M., local time, and in just slightly over

two minutes, that shark is very definitely going to become my

problem.

Let the realtime begin.

#

It was a beautiful day for daydreaming.

And a piss-poor one for surfing.

Not surprising, that. The two activities are pretty much

mutually exclusive. I mean, usually the business of surfing is

way intense. Like, totally Zen. I mean like, you start with the

daydreaming thing while you’ve got your stick up there on the lip

of a serious curl, and next thing you know you are playing harbor

dredge and sucking up a major faceful of kelp and sand.

But not on this day.

No, this day could have been spec’d out by the Tourism Board.

An air temp in the mid 80's; a warm and gentle offshore breeze

sifting slowly through the palm trees on the beach and whispering

softly of hibiscus and plumeria; a low and gentle swell rolling

into the bay from the northwest, with just enough energy to make

the little breakers run in laughing ripples and long, rolling

sweeps along the gently curving picture-postcard-perfect white

sand shoreline.

And not one damned wave worth the effort of pretending to

ride.

I didn’t mind. Honest.

The Serious Surfer Dudes would have minded. That, and they

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would have given me an extra ration of crap for being out at all.

"A day like this," one of them would be sure to say, "is fit only

for kooks and haoles." And then some sun-bronzed dolt with the

body of a Greek god and the brains of a meatloaf would be almost

sure to quote the legendary Mark Foo at

me:

"If you want to feel the

ultimate thrill, you have

to be willing to pay the

ultimate price."

But of course the Serious Surfers Dudes weren't there that

day, because they all thought Foo's "ultimate price" was a cryptic

reference to tickets on Air Aloha, and they'd all packed their

quivers and jetted off to Oahu, to chase monster curls on the

North Shore. Whereas the legendary Mark Foo had actually meant

something quite different...

Which is why the legendary Mark Foo's ashes are now scattered

on the waters of the equally legendary Waimea Bay, and why yours

truly, the totally non-legendary Bob Sanders, is content to kook

around a nearly deserted Ahihi Bay, just splashing his bare brown

toes in the sweet blue Pacific and soaking up that gorgeous

Hawaiian summer sun. For as Surfboy Sanders has been known to

say, at least three times weekly:

"A bad day of surfing still beats Hell out of a

good day at work."

An old Hawaiian word which

originally meant simply foreigner, but

which now has a perjorative value

comparable to the Japanese gaijin or

Ebonic whitey.

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Damn right. I liked being Bob Sanders. And on this

particular lazy, sunny, summer afternoon, I was deeply into the

mode of soaking up sun and thinking about why.

There was my new job, for starters. It was a nice, mindless,

undemanding gig at a totally unimportant third-rate tourist

hotel. Plenty of free time to flirt with the local wahines, or

more importantly, surf. Three or four decent sticks in my quiver

(depending on whether you counted my Aipa Stinger as a functional

surfboard or a novel wall decoration), including this really

really nice Merrick Thruster I happened to be sitting on at the

moment, which I'd bought for a moldly old Don Ho song off some

schmuck mainlander who'd come out here and suddenly realized he

wanted a brand-new Parmenter Keelfin. (And then he bought one, at

Kahului prices, yike! Not that it helped his surfing any: he'd

have done just as well with an old balsa longboard, or for that

matter, with a redwood picnic table with the legs sawn off.)

But I digress.

It was a good day for digressing.

Ergo, I continued with the smug inventory of my new life.

Sickeningly positive attitude? Check. Obnoxiously healthy diet?

Check. Zero consumer debt? Cash only, tee hee. The sort of

broad chest and deep-fried dark brown skin that'd get me

suspicious looks and poor service in any Denny’s restaurant back

home in---where was that miserable, frigid place I'd originally

come from? Minnesnowta?

I dunno. It was all starting to look like freeze-frames from

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someone else's life, now. For here, in this perfect moment, this

boy Sanders is possessed of a deep, clear, nearly Zen happiness.

When I am on my board, on the water, I am brother to the wind, the

waves, the sea--

And the sharks. Mustn't forget the sharks. The really big

ones churn the water when they pass. If you spend a lot of time

in the ocean, and you're really tuned in to it, and you happen to

be sitting on a floating chip of urethane foam with your bare feet

dangling in the water, you can actually feel the subtle change in

temperature gradient when a big one swims by underneath you.

At a little after 3 P.M., on the sunny afternoon of June 23,

2010, I felt it.

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What To DoIf You Believe You Are

Intruding on the Personal

Space of a Shark.

Step Don’t panic! Sharks are naturally inquisitive, and

your newfound aquatic friend may simply be

curious. So don’t shout or thrash the water.

Instead, slowly and calmly grasp your surfboard

with both hands, then tuck your feet up under

your butt, just as tight as they can possibly go.

Next, look down into the water around you, and

try to determine which species you are dealing

with. Great Whites have gotten a bad rap over the

years and are neither as numerous nor as vicious

as some uninformed people would have you

believe. Whitetips are almost close to completely

harmless. Reef Grays can be unpredictable, but

they are also territorial, and if you can locate their

“home turf” and vacate it, they generally won’t

follow you.

Step

1.

2.

Step We hope your shark encounter will be fun and

educational and leave you with a lasting appreciation

for these magnificent creatures. But if it does

go less than perfectly, remember: direct pressure

almost always stops arterial bleeding.

3.

Published as a public service by:

People for Ethical Shark Treatment

www.chompchomp.org

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The dorsal fin broke the surface about twenty yards away from

me. It was circling me slowly, propelling itself with lazy

strokes of its long, tapered tail. The shark didn't seem to be

motivated to eat me immediately, which was good, but it wasn't

going on its fishy way, either, which would have been better. I

had plenty of time to size it up.

Length? About fifteen feet, which made it a monster. Color?

A mottled brownish-gray. Head shape? Wide, with a blunt snout...

Oh, sweet bungee-jumping Jesus. It was a tiger shark.

Tiger sharks suck.

Okay, if you want to get technical about it, remoras suck;

tigers bite. And what, the casually interested observer might

ask, do they bite?

People for Ethical Shark Treatment

CONFIDENTIAL MEMO

TO: Don Beckham, President, PEST

FROM: Rob DuPre, Chair, Fund-Raising

DATE: 3/16/05

RE: Kaneohe Shark Petting Zoo

Don, look, I know we’ve been through this

a million times, and I know I’ve been

voted down. And yes, I understand that the

tourists go gah-gah over licensed Disney

characters.

But seriously: Captain Hook as the mascot

for our shark petting zoo? I mean, call

it a hunch, but I think we’re talking

major wrong message here.

Worried,

RD

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Name it. Fish, sea turtles, porpoises, aquatic birds;

basically anything smaller and slower-moving than the shark, and

sometimes anything larger, too. I once saw a fibreglas catamaran

hull a tiger had decided to try for taste. Left a big hole.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention.

They're especially fond of surfer al fresco.

#

- INDEX, in the space of heartbeats -

Q. Do you often see tiger sharks on the surface in the daytime?

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And I was the target of a fifteen-foot-long organic torpedo.

With teeth.

They say your life flashes before your eyes in moments like

this. What I saw instead was an old rerun of Flipper, the one

where he saves Chip and Sandy by butting the shark in the gills. I

mean, hey, I had to see something, and as Jack Burroughs I'd never

had a life. As Bob Sanders I did have a life, and a pretty darn

good one at that, but it hadn't been long enough to make even a

coming-attractions trailer, much less a movie.

Somewhere in there, far too late, my forebrain finally got a

wake-up call through to my voluntary nervous system and I lunged

forward, to drive my arms deep into the water and start paddling

like a palmetto bug in a bucket of pool chlorine. A small wave

stole up behind me, then, and added a touch of desperately needed

speed, but the shark saw my movement and readjusted its attack

vector. I suppose if I'd been really thinking I could have tried

something tricksy, like slipping off my ankle leash, bailing off

the board, and hoping that the shark was homing in on it, not me.

But there wasn't even that much time to think.

The onrushing monster broached the surface about thirty feet

away, just exactly like a happy baby humpback whale. I saw those

ancient, pitiless, gimlet eyes staring at me; watched in

sickening horror as that gaping maw opened wide and the beast

closed those final, deadly, yards---

Hydroplaning on its pectoral fins? What the Hell?

I stopped paddling. Sat up straight on my board, staring at

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that incredibly weird sight. The shark's mouth was continuing to

open wider, as its head rose higher out of the water, and it

dumped its forward velocity into a great, sloshing, bow wave...

Five feet away from me the shark came to a dead stop, nose

pointed straight up at the sky, tail almost touching the sandy

bottom, bobbing gently on the swell. I sidled over the bow wave

as it surged past, then backpaddled to slow my forward momentum,

and put my feet down to kill my drift. From the back edge of its

gills forward, the shark's head was completely out of the water.

And still, the mouth continued to open wider. The upper jaw

began to bend, too, in blatant defiance of known anatomy, until at

last the mouth was an impossible, flat, perfectly circular

opening, lined with a fringe of jagged teeth.

The gills vented water, then snapped shut. There was a kiss

of compressed air, a high-pitched electrical whine, and the

sticky, sucky, whoopee-cushion sound of complicated rubber

gaskets unsealing. A human head popped up in the shark's mouth.

It looked at me.

It spoke.

"Hey, aren't you Max Kool, the guy who wrote Silicon Jungle?"

Oh please, God. Not him. Not here. Not now...

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The human head in the shark’s mouth cocked slightly to one

side: probably squinting at me, although it was hard to tell

through those mirrorshades. The sunglasses seemed to be held in

place by tiny silver bolts threaded through eyebrow and cheekbone

piercings, and the top of the head sported a mohawk’s crest of

either hair or well-chewed saltwater taffy, in a shade of orange

not often found in nature. The mohawk was counterbalanced by a

thin wisp of greenish-purple billy goat's beard on the chin.

Ah. Male, then, unless female facial hair was back in

fashion on the mainland. The hair and beard were both somewhat

matted down by the cramped and damp quarters inside the

microsub-disguised-as-a-shark, and whatever stealth value the

ship may have once possessed was no doubt entirely negated by the

sheer mass of metal the guy had piercing his ears, lips, eyebrows,

and nose. There were two parallel lines of fake IC chips studded

along the sides of his head, halfway between ear and mohawk; the

chipsets were joined by a complicated tracery of pale blue tattoos

that I abruptly realized were supposed to resemble printed

circuits, and which trailed off down the back of the guy's neck.

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Okay, I could name the fashion modality. TotalTekno is what

the trendy magazines called it. Me, I thought Frankenstein: The

Next Generation got the concept better.

We bobbed over another swell or two together, while I tried

to sort out what I was feeling. Relief? No. Apprehension? No.

It was more of an itchy, emotional rash, which I vaguely

remembered from my previous life as a corporate drone...

Oh yes, that was it. Annoyance.

The head in the fish grew impatient. "Come on, don't play

coy with me. I've had people watching you for weeks. You are Max

Kool! Or should I say---" He paused, for painfully obvious

dramatic effect.

"Jack Burroughs!"

I shook my head. "So solly. No habla Inglis."

The face frowned. "Save it, chum. I've found your little

autobiography out on the Net. Everyone has. Not much of a

disappearance there, eh Jack? I mean, why not post your bleedin'

pager number while you were at it?"

I shook my head again, and cupped a hand around my left ear.

"Vas? Ich kann nicht sie verstehen."

"And that name, for chrissakes. A. A. Milne, innit? 'Winnie

the Pooh lived in the Hundred Acre Wood, under the name of

Sanders.' Was that your idea?"

I gave up trying to act ignorant, and resorted to the sort of

ignorance that comes to me naturally. "Hello, Hotwire." I blew

out a heavy, resigned sigh that lifted the damp hair off my

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forehead. "That's the real you, isn't it?"

The face split into a broad grin, with just the faintest

tinny chiming of lip jewelry. "In the flesh and sand, Jack! But

hey, I go by the handle of Firmware now!"

I nodded. Firmware. It figured. I sighed again. "How long

has it been? Four years? And now you've come all this way, and

spent all this time," I paused, to bob over the crest of another

small wave, and cop another look at his shark-sub, "and all that

money, just to track me down again. Why?"

Firmware's grin subsided into a sly smile. "Would you

believe, I'm here to rescue you?"

I leaned back, and spread my arms in a gesture that took in

the sea, the surf, and sun and everything. "Do I look like I want

to be rescued?"

Firmware kept smiling. "Then how about I'm Silicon Orpheus,

here to bring Max Kool back from the dead?"

I pursed my lips, and shook my head. "Don't bother. Won't

happen. Max Kool is dead, and he plans to stay that way."

"Are you sure?"

I looked Firmware right square in the mirrorshades and

nodded with all the conviction I could muster. "Yes, absolutely.

Max Kool was a major pain in the ass, and being him made a

shambles of my realtime life. I don't miss him one bit."

"Not even a little?"

"Nope."

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"But surely there are times, late at night, when you lie

awake in the stale night heat and realize that it's midnight

somewhere, and the Net is calling out to you in a seductive

whisper as it speaks in dreams of lambent fire---"

I splashed some water in his face to snap him out of it. He

sputtered and shook his head. When I had his attention again, I

asked, "You write that line yourself?"

He nodded quickly. "Yes!"

"Thought so. It sucked."

His smile switched off with an audible ping. "Well,

actually---"

"Look," I said, interrupting. "Hotwire, or Firmware, or

VegeMatic, or whatever the hell you want to call yourself these

days; I did it, and it was fun, but now it's over. I've been

offline for four years, and I'm happy. I don't even own a pocket

calculator now."

Firmware looked crestfallen. Literally. "But Jack---"

"This," I grabbed the rails of my Merrick Thruster, "this is

what I'm about, now. I surf reality."

Firmware shook his head. "But---"

"I mean, listen to me. I can talk normal now. No more of

those nested parentheticals inside parentheticals---"

"Those were cool," Firmware demurred. "It was like trying to

solve an algebraic expression, to figure out what the Hell you

were saying."

I shook my head. "I don't do that no more."

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He looked at me, raw shock playing on the portions of his

face that were visible. "What about your infonuggets?"

I shook my head again. "Don't need

'em, dude."

Firmware stared at me, and his mouth

fell open in a pained gasp. "Aw, man, those were your trademark!"

He looked at me a moment longer, then set his fuzzy little chin in

some sort of resolve. "That settles it. I have got to bring the

old Jack Burroughs back! Man, the world needs you!"

I pulled together all the contempt I had handy and dumped it

all into one devastatingly Stallonesque sneer. "Buddy, as far as

I’m concerned the world can go fuck itself, in alphabetical order,

starting with---"

Actually, I didn't have all that much contempt bottled up,

and it petered out halfway through the idea.

"---the Amazon basin," I finished, rather lamely.

Firmware looked up at me. From the rapid twitching of the

skin around his eyes, I guessed he was blinking. "That made

absolutely no sense," he observed.

I shrugged. "Yeah, well..."

"Look, Jack," he said, "as a friend, I've got to tell you,

this exile has not been kind to you. You've lost your edge."

I shrugged again. "But I'm happy."

"A happy doormat it still a doormat. Look, what you need is

a challenge."

"I'm well-adjusted," I pointed out.

Okay, so I lied to Firmware. Sue me.

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"So's a hamster when he's in his exercise wheel. But you, my

friend, are destined for something bigger."

"My diet is ninety-percent papaya and avocado," I protested.

Firmware paused, and considered me. "Jack?" he said, and

there was something in the way he smiled at me then that made my

blood run cold and all the little vestigial hairs on the small of

my back stand at rigid attention. Oh no, he couldn't; he

wouldn't---"

"What," he said, still smiling like a real-estate agent, "if

I were to tell you that I really came all this way for just one

reason: to make you an offer---"

"That I can't refuse?" I blurted out. "Been there, done

that, read my lips: No! There, I just refused."

Firmware cocked his head in the other direction, and from the

torsional stress around his cheekbone piercings I guessed he was

narrowing his eyes. "Don't be so hasty, Jack. There's something

else you need to know. Cyberpunk is mainstream, now."

I shuddered. "Oh? And here I heard it was dead."

"Dead, mainstream: what's the diff? I mean, when Days of Our

Lives can run a six-week subplot about Fernando using VR goggles

to spy on Victoria while she's having an affair with Lance---"

"Okay," I said, fighting down a series of dry heaves. "I get

the picture."

"No, you don't," he said, still in that slimey voice. "Like

I said, cyberpunk is mainstream now---and Max Kool is famous!"

A cold chill shot through me, which was pretty remarkable

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when you consider that it was 80-plus degrees and the ocean was

like salty bathwater. "Really?" I said nervously. "I thought he

was notorious."

"Famous, notorious: again, what's the diff?" Firmware

smiled, and shook his head. "Y'know, so many people downloaded

that little online autobio of yours that Darvon Schnitzel even

reviewed it for Kirkus."

That, I must confess, got me right square in the ego. "No

kidding? What did he say?"

"That it was either brilliantly post-deconstructionist or

just plain awful, he couldn't decide."

My ego experienced explosive detumescence. I scratched my

head. "Post-deconstructionist?"

Firmware shrugged. "I think it's kind of like

post-literate, only different."

We bobbed over another swell together, while my ego fell back

to regroup and Firmware pondered semiotic literary theory.

"My point," he said at last, "is that Max Kool has become the

quintessential post-modern cybercounterculture antihero. There

are people out there who say that you are the guy who took down

BritTel for that week last January, and you did it with just two

trunk calls and an Oscar Mayer weiner whistle."

I finished sorting through his stack of verbal qualifiers

and started to laugh. "Oh, I get it now. You wanted me to admit

I was involved in that mess. But, hey, even if I was---which I

was not---I’m not nearly stupid enough to claim credit for it."

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Firmware chuckled with me. "Of course not. The whole idea

is patently absurd. Anyone who's ever had to use BritTel knows

what a tottering wreck the thing is; they probably just lost

another backbone packet switcher and didn't want to have to admit

to how crappy their hardware infrastructure is, so they cooked up

that story about being attacked by 'a rogue gang of international

cyberterrorists.'"

Firmware's expression took a sudden sharp turn towards the

deadly serious. "But, Jack: if those are the sorts of rumors that

are being made up about you, don't you think it's time you go back

and tell the whole world the truth?"

I thought it over for---oh, two seconds, at least. "No.

Never. Bad idea."

"Not even if it means becoming the King of Heaven?"

Well, well, whadaya know: Firmware had succeeded in

surprising me after all, and even in getting me to smile for a

picosecond. "What, that place still exists? Geez, I expected the

NetCops to shut it down years ago."

Firmware went back to his disturbing real-estate agent's

smile, as we bobbed over another small swell, and I took a quick

look out to sea. Hmm, there, and maybe three hundred yards off...

"Oh, the NetCops found Heaven, all right," Firmware said

lightly. "But they're not quite as dim as you seem to think.

Instead of shutting the site down, they put a counter on the gate

and started keeping track of who was going in and out.

Eventually, they even planted informants in the joint."

hc_2.0/brbethke/24

My general muddle of emotions took a sudden wrenching twist

towards the paranoiac. Heaven was the illegal online virtual

reality nightclub where I'd first met Firmware, back when I was

Max_Kool and he was calling himself Hotwire. Did what he was

telling me now mean that back then...?

"At first," Firmware prattled on, not noticing my reaction,

"the NetCops stuck to taking notes, and turning up the occasional

clod of interesting dirt. For example, did you know that

Rapmastah MC Ruthless is actually the son of the founder of the

New Jersey Aryan Christian Militia?"

I didn't answer. My thoughts were whirling like a bullfrog

in a blender.

Firmware timed out on waiting for a response from me, and

went on. "Well, that's not important now. The important thing

is, everything was rolling along just fine, nothing remarkable,

until the day your little autobiography file hit the Net. Then..."

Firmware paused, and grinned.

"Then, we're talking batshit berserk! Forty thousand hits

the first hour! People waiting in the queue for two days just to

get in and be seen there! By the end of the week your favorite

pirate chat room was number one with a bullet on the Peter's

Picks, Flyman's Finds, VirWorld TopTen, and Websight Hot Hundred

lists! The InfoMall sysops were going stark drooling bug-eyed

nuts!"

I finished my turmoil of thinking and reached something that

felt somewhat like a decision. With a quick splash or two I

hc_2.0/brbethke/25

flipped the nose of my board around and pointed it right down the

shark's throat. Seen from the front at eye level, a Merrick

Thruster can look pretty intimidating, provided you don't know it

weighs just six pounds and is mostly plastic foam.

"Who are you?" I demanded, in my best clench-jawed guttural

growl. "A NetCop?"

Firmware's smile faltered slightly, as he tried to shy away

from the point of the board. "No, Jack. Honest. I'm one of your

biggest fans."

I puffed up my chest and brought my hands forward, as if

ready to dig them into the water and deliver a sudden, lethal,

pelvic thrust. "Who do you work for?

The FDI? The CIA?"

Firmware gulped, and what was left

of his smile vanished. "Really?" he

asked. I nodded, with the fierce and deadly serious glare I

usually saved for tourist kids I caught throwing ice in the

jacuzzi. Then I leaned forward, glowering like Michael Dorn, and

tensed my pecs. Firmware's already-pale face finished blanching

the rest of the way to dead-fish-belly white, and he tried to lick

his lips but got a tongue stud caught on a lip loop.

"Megasoft Edutainment," he said at last, when he finally got

his mouth hardware sorted out. "I'm Byron Cuivre-Boule, the

Marketing Communications Manager."

My chest deflated like a punctured whoopee cushion and my

hands dropped limply to my sides. "Huh?"

What, and risk dinging the nose of my

board? Are you nuts?

hc_2.0/brbethke/26

"The InfoMall didn't know how to handle all the Net traffic

Heaven was generating. So they sold it to us."

I repeated my earlier observation, this time with wrinkled

nose. "Huh? Sold? But---but that was a pirate room!"

From wherever it'd gone, Firmware's horribly ingratiating

smile popped back with a vengeance. "YES! And do you know what

kind of demographic it drew?!"

I was still sputtering fragments. "But--- how---"

Firmware shook his head in a friendly, genial, paternal,

Brian Dennehy sort of way. "Shouldn't go leaving your VRML source

code lying around where just anyone can find it, Jack. It was a

piece of cake of us to reverse-engineer Heaven and turn it into

something marketable."

I downsized my vocabulary to blubbering. "Bu---"

"Not to mention copyrightable, and licensable. And now,

thanks to you, my friend, Megasoft Edutainment Group has

exclusive rights to the family recreational franchise for the

21st Century!"

All the emotion I had left went into one word. "WHAT?"

"VR HEAVEN DOT COMTM!" Firmware crowed. "The ultimate

synthesis of prepackaged theme park reality and multimedia

entertainment! We are opening up VR Heaven Dot Com nightclubs in

every major shopping mall on the planet! You can pop-in through

the Net; you can drop in for food and adult beverages and rent

your VR gear there. It's a nightclub where the fun never stops,

because it's always midnight somewhere, and you can forget cover

hc_2.0/brbethke/27

charges, because we bill by the minute just for soaking up the

ambience! And Jack, we owe it all to you!"

He paused, grinning at me expectantly.

I looked away, out to sea, as we rose and fell on another

swell. There, and barely a hundred yards off, now.

I turned to look at Firmware again. He was still grinning at

me. Not a clue...

"So," I said, smiling gently. "Then you're here to give me

my royalty check?"

Firmware's smile switched off with an audible click. "Er,

not exactly. There were some, uh, issues with the IPO. And the

shareholders, Jack, well---"

"Then tell you what: why don’t you just fuck off?"

I imagine stunned steers in slaughterhouses have about the

same facial expression as Firmware had in that moment. I flipped

the nose of my board around with a quick splash and aimed for the

beach.

A second or five later, Firmware began to recover. "Hey,

it’s not like you and Bret and Captain Crash copyrighted your code

or anything."

"It was an illegal room, dipshit."

"And you didn’t exactly stick around to defend your

intellectual property rights."

"We were on the run from the law, asshole." I wasted a

glance on him. His face was showing the early warning signs of

panic.

hc_2.0/brbethke/28

"Now, just hold on a minute, Jack. You haven’t heard my

offer." He looked down; all sorts of mechanical noises started to

come from inside the shark as he apparently tried to power it up

again. I took a look out to sea, as we crested the next swell.

There, definitely, at fifty yards and closing.

Firmware's voice shot up an excited octave. "All we want you

to do is lurk! I told you, cyberpunk is mainstream now, and Max

Kool is a legend! There are at least fifteen half-assed copies of

you running around the Net these days, but if we can get out word

that the original Max Kool hangs exclusively at VR HeavenTM---"

One last look behind me; thirty yards. I levered forward and

stretched out prone on my board.

"It's a classic whisper campaign, Jack! First we spread more

wild rumors about you, to build your rep! Then in two months you

come out of hiding to judge the Gunnar LeMat Look-Alike Contest

and Memorial Splatball Tournament at VR HeavenTM\San Francisco!

We stage an arrest for the international newsmedia; you get sprung

on bail and skip the country. Then we set you up on a villa in

the south of France, just like Michael Jackson!"

I cleared my mind, put my arms in the water, and focused on

what my hands and inner ears were telling me. No, not this

wave...

"Then, we're talking product endorsements! Infommercials!

A made-for-cable movie of your life! There is a goddam fortune

out there, just waiting for the original Max Kool, and all you

have to do is step up to the plate!"

hc_2.0/brbethke/29

Another sort of noise came out of the shark then; a bubbling

hiss I guessed as a venting ballast tank. For a moment I wondered

if Firmware knew something so retro as how to swim.

Then I caught the incoming message from my fingers and toes:

an upwelling of cold water; a shift in balance. Ah yes, this was

the one good wave I'd been waiting for all day. I threw my arms

and shoulders into a strong, deep, butterfly stroke.

"Jack!" Firmware screamed, somewhere rapidly receding behind

me. "We can get you on talk shows! World-wide chat sessions!

Why, the t-shirt rights alone could be worth millions!"

With a deep, throaty, rumble, the wave rolled up behind me,

and I bounced up to kneeling position and kept stroking. I felt

the lift, the power, the increasing speed. Iopened my eyes and

got to my feet.

"Jaaaaaaaaack!" Firmware's voice was little more than an

anguished wail in the distance now. "You can meet beautiful

women!"

Sigh.

If I were an active duty Christian, I probably would have

looked over my shoulder then and shouted out something really

pithy, like, "Get thee behind me!" But instead, I’d become a

devoted practitioner of Beachboy Zen.

Catch a wave, and you're sitting on top of the world.

hc_2.0/brbethke/30

Life is full of difficult decisions. This wasn't one of

them. I rode the wave until it broke, and then---well, I could

either kick out, paddle back, and pick up where I left off with

Firmware, or else I could bail for the beach and call it a day.

I bailed.

What the hell, I was supposed to be working the four-tomidnight

shift at the hotel this week, anyway. No harm in going

in to work a little---shudder!---early. And besides, that run-in

with Firmware had me feeling just a touch uneasy.

Okay, acid-dipped-raw-nerve-endings raw honesty time. It

had my stomach doing double-axels with a backflip.

I mean, yeah, sure, I could accept, in an intellectual sor