Cyberpunk (4 page)

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

Creamesse
TM
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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©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke

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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©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke

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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©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke

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

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©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke

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.”

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©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke

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