Cyberpunk (20 page)

“Oh.” Then his face went bright again. “Still, feel free to browse, if

you want to. I’ve gotten some of my best ideas by accident, by

stumbling across them while looking for something else.”

“Thank you, sir.” I opened the rulebook and started pretending to

read. Lewellyn hung around for a mo, then wandered back to where I’d

found him. When I figured I’d been reading long enough to convince

Mr. Lewellyn, I started doing a furtive scan of the room. No net jacks

anywhere I could see; no nodes, no term plugs, not even a crummy

dataphone port.

I guess I wasn’t doing too good at furtive. “Is there something you

need?” Lewellyn asked, from across the room.

What the hell, what did I have to lose? “Actual, sir—”

“Actual
ly
,” he corrected me. “Don’t you ever use adverbs?” He

shook his head. “I’m sorry. You were saying?”

I looked around the library again, then blurted it out. “I was

wondering if you had a LibSys terminal.”

Lewellyn laughed at some inside joke, then took off his glasses and

rubbed the bridge of his nose. “A LibSys! Son, I’m lucky to have

electric lights!” He laughed some more, then put his glasses back on.

“
Actual
, son, I do have a computer. It’s in the back room; would you like

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a look at it?”

Would I? Is the American Pope female?

I shrugged, and tried my best chill noncommit. “Oh, I guess so. If

it’s not too much of a pain.” Like, for sure. Understatement of the year.

Lewellyn smiled, and gave me a little gesture to follow. “C’mon.”

He led me over to a back room, unlocked the door, and turned on the

single bare-bulb overhead light. “There she is.”

The thing on the table had a keyboard at one end, which is how I

inferenced it was a computer. But there were wires all over the place,

and big weird boxes scattered around the table, and circuit boards with

chips the size of cockroaches just sitting naked to the world. For that

matter there was an old dumb-TV sitting in the middle of the whole

works. It looked like Georgie’s junk parts bin, without the bin.

I walked around the table, trying my best to be reverent. “Wow,” I

said. “You build this thing yourself?”

Lewellyn smiled, proud, and laid his big hand on the chassis. “This,

my boy, is an Apple II-Plus. You’re looking at a genuine piece of

American history, here. Why, back before the Nipponese Technology

Embargo...” I started to zone him out. Like, maximum yawn! Next he’d

be telling me about how the U.S. used to put up satellites without Soviet

boosters!

While he was nattering, I looked at the computer again and tried to

believe somebody’d actually paid real money for it. “Is this like, a kit or

something?” I interrupted Lewellyn. “Or are you fixing it? I mean,

Christ, it’s a mess!”

Lewellyn looked hurt. “It’s in good working condition,” he said,

defensive. “I just added a few extra cards to it, that’s all. Now it

overheats if I don’t take the top off.” He pulled the chair out. “Here, try

it out.”

I looked at him, dubious, but he looked so eager I just couldn’t turn

him down. “Okay.” Gingerish, I sat down and put my fingers on the

keyboard. “Now what?”

“Turn it on.”

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I looked around, and spotted a big white square labeled POWER in

the lower left corner of the keyboard. Gentle, I put a finger it. Nothing

happened. Okay, it wasn’t a touch switch.

I pushed it a little harder. Nothing continued to happen. “Think your

power switch is broke,” I told Lewellyn.

“Gotcha!” he laughed. “That’s the pilot light! Everyone makes that

mistake the first time!” He quieted down to a chuckle, and then pointed

to a power strip on the floor. “Use that. The original power switch broke

years ago.”

With my foot, I tapped the switch on the power strip, and all of a

sudden Frankenstein came to life! Lights flashed, the TV set flared on,

and something started grinding like a spoon in a garbage disposal. Good

Lord, I was working with a steam-powered PC!

Slow, the screen came up and glared at me in text so ultra-crude text

I could see each pixel: APPLE ][

After about a minute, I said, “Now what?”

“Press reset,” he said, as if it was total obvious. I looked around,

found a key marked RESET, and pushed it. Something I took to be a

login prompt appeared.

“Okay, I got it now,” I said. I entered my usual CityNet login.

Frankenstein answered, ?SYNTAX ERROR.

Okay, it didn’t like my user ID. I did a getuid.

?ILLEGAL DIRECT ERROR, it said.

Maybe it was my group ID. I tried getgid.

?ILLEGAL DIRECT ERROR, it repeated.

Something screwy was going on. I tried to grep the ID file; the

screen went nutzoid in low-res graphics, erased itself, and said

?SYNTAX ERROR.

This was getting serious. I went straight to adb, the operating system

debugger.

?SYNTAX ERROR, it said. But now it was showing only the

bottom four lines on the screen!

Lewellyn looked over my shoulder. “Having trouble, son?”

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I leaned back in the chair, ran my fingers through my stubbly hair,

and said, “You sure this thing is working?” He tilted his head back and

looked at the screen through the bottoms of his glasses.

Quiet, he said, “Son? What in God’s name is an ADB?”

A real ugly feel started to creep up my back. “What operating

system does the Apple II use, sir?”

He was still squinting at the screen through the bottoms of his

glasses. “You didn’t load the operating system. You’re still in BASIC.”

BASIC?
Oh fritzing great, the lang with training wheels!

“I think,” Lewellyn said soft, “we’d better start over.” He turned to a

shelf, and pulled out a flip-top box full of big plastic squares. “These are

floppy diskettes,” he told me. “You boot the operating system off

diskette.”

I sighed relief. For a moment there, I’d been afraid that the damn

antique stored data on clay tablets.

#

That afternoon, Lewellyn taught me all about floppy diskettes,

booting up, and PR# commands. When he wasn’t looking I slipped the

Starfire out of my pocket and plugged it into the power strip; I couldn’t

find anything to jack it into, but at least I got its batteries back up to full

charge.

I shot a couple hours building a rep with Lewellyn and pretending to

be impressed by his primitive cyberskills. Just before I left for evening

mess call, he took me into his deepest confidence and showed me a

diskette labelled “Space War,” then told me I was free to use his gear

any time.

Hey, just what I wanted: Unlimited access! Sure, Lewellyn was a

putz, and his equipment archaic to put it mild, but I had a place to hide

out and at least
one
older who knew which end of the keyboard to sit at!

The more I thought about it, the better I felt. Eight weeks to go, a

quiet place to hang out, a chance to get to know the Starfire. I figured I

could tolerate 8 more weeks—

And then, Operation Revenge. For a mo, I wondered if Dad realized

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what they were teaching me at the Academy. I was learning lots of really

useful things. He was going to be in
serious
trouble when I got back.

By the end of mess, I was smiling so big and feeling so good I didn’t

even remember what I’d had for dinner. In fact, I didn’t even mind it

when I got back to the bunkhouse and Scott put Angina Pectoris on his

boombox for the 5 X 10
14th
time!

Along about the 10
15th
time, though, I did start to get a little cranky.

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Chapter 0E

Starting in July, we got a big time thunderstorm every third morning

around 3 a.m., like clockwork. If I thought it was possible I’d swear the

Academy arranged the storms, just to make our lives miserable. One

week Payne pulled us out of lecture and sent us out to detassel a

cornfield: Four days of hot, dirty, work, and soon’s we got the damned

job done a big storm came through and stomped half the field flat. The

next week another serial was putting together a prefab bunkhouse: The

night after they got the last roof truss up a truly wicked storm came

along and took the roof right off again.

By the middle of month the trees were lush and green, the raspberry

bushes were tough as barb-wire, and the obstacle course had turned into

a monster truck mud bog. Payne just kept right on pushing us, all the

while shouting stuff about jungle warfare, but even he had to admit it

was ridiculous the morning we got down to the firing range and found

the guns under a foot of water. In the first evidence I ever saw of him

being even slightly human, he sent some divers down to unlock the

rifles, and thereafter we could fire standing up if we wanted to. (I

noticed my scores got definite worse, though.)

The pseudoschool went about the same as always. Lecture, battle,

analysis; lecture, battle, analysis. Lawrence Borec got totally into the

roleplay and somehow learned to save all his hostility for the game; I

found out in lecture one day he really was Macedonian. (“Not

Yugoslavian, dipshit,” he said. “Not Bulgarian, not Greek, and above all,

not
Serbian
.” Me being a Harris, from wherever it is that people named

Harris are from, I don’t understand this fossil nationalism business at

all.)

That explained the Macedonians. We Thebans, on the other hand,

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turned into the Poland of the Peloponnesian Wars and got real expert at

losing. Sometimes we lost dramatic, like the time we danced around

until we had perfect position on the Athenians, only to have the proctors

rule us too tired to keep fighting (that’s how Scott learned about the

fatigue factor). Other times we just got stomped into a wet, greasy smear

by the Spartans as they were on their way to fight somebody important.

One Monday Borec’s Macedonians formed an alliance with Deke

Luger’s Athenians and blew the Spartans right off the table, and that’s

how we learned that alliances were okay. The next day Scott cut a deal

with Borec, and in return for all our desserts for the rest of the week, the

Macedonians joined us in a half-hearted way on Wednesday and stabbed

us in the back and linked with the Athenians again on Friday.

“Alliances,” the proctor pointed out afterwards, “are based on mutual

advantage, and have nothing to do with whether you
like
your ally.”

I was starting to get
real
tired of listening to Mister Diplomacy’s

boombox.

The rules kept evolving, too. Supplies became a tangible on the