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

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

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

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

If it worked.

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

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

"Funtime's over, kids."

"I didn't get a turn," Georgie mumbled.23 Rayno was out of all the nets and powering down. He turned, slow, and looked at Georgie through those eyebrows of his. "You are still on The List."

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

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

We got a smartcab from the queue outside the library and went off to some taco place Lisa picked for lunch. Georgie got this idea about chip-switching the smartcab's brain so the next customer would have a real state fair ride, but Rayno wouldn't let him do it. Rayno wouldn't talk to him, either, so Georgie opaqued his videoshades, jacked into the cab's broadcast television receiver, and tuned us out for a good sulk.24

Chapter 0/ 3.

After lunch Lisa wanted to go hang out at the mall, but I talked them into heading over to Martin's Micros instead. It's is a grubbish little shop in a crummy part of UpperEast, deep in the heart of whitest b.u.t.thole Skinhead territory, but it's also one of my favorite places to hang out. Martin is the only Older I know who can really work a computer without blowing out his headchips, and he never talks down to me, and he never tells me to keep my hands off anything. In fact, Martin's been real happy to see all of us, ever since Rayno bought that $3000 animation package for Lisa the month she thought she wanted to be a DynaBook novelist if she ever grew up.

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

I love the feel of Martin's Micros. It's a funky, dim-'n'-cluttered kind of place: heavy square gear piled in haphazard clutters on the floor, making it a true challenge to move in any straight line; big tin racks of old half-dead Cybers.p.a.ce decks and i786 motherboards reaching right up to the ceiling; light filtering in low and angular through the vertical slits in the front window ghetto armor. When I'm in Martin's I always get this feeling that if I can just look in the right corner or blow the dust off the right old circuit board, I'll find some incredible treasure-or maybe a couple of cackling cybergremlins tearing the legs off screaming IC chips and munching on their silicon hearts. Georgie says going into Martin's Micros is kind of like poking around in the ultimate techie25 grandparent's attic, and he should know, he's got three living grandfathers.

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

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

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

"Just looking," Rayno said.

"Well, that's free." Martin turned back to the tube, poked a few more keys. "d.a.m.n." he said to the terminal.

"What's the problem?" Lisa asked.

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

"You mean it nukes itself?" George asked.

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

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

We all nodded. Offsite backup. Yep. Sure. Darned if I don't keep a few of those myself.26 Martin turned back to his workstation, took his hand out of his beard, laid it on the CityLink box. "I finally beat the copy protect by trapping the agent in a null buffer and flushing it to the Phantom Zone.

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

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

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

It's boring as public television." Rayno nodded.

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

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

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

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

Half the hooks on the two key objects were all wrong. Even if Martin's code mods had been perfect, they still wouldn't have worked. I banged into the system library, haywired the object defs so they behaved sort of27 right, then went back into Martin's executable and started keying in code patches off the top of my head.

"Will you look at that?" Martin asked.

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

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

"I just can't believe that kid," Martin said. "He can hack object code easier than I can talk."

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

"Maybe not for you, Mikey. I knew a kid who grew up speaking Arabic, used to say the same thing." He shook his head, tugged his beard, looked me in the face, and smiled. "Anyhow, thanks loads, man. I don't know how to ... " He snapped his fingers. "Say, I just got something in the other day, I bet you'd be really interested in." I found my feet and got up out of the chair. He hobbled over to the flyspecked gla.s.s display case, pushed aside a pile of old GridPads and 'Roo PCs, and pulled out a small, flat, black plastic case. "I've gotta tell you, Mikey, this was a real find. Most of what comes in here is just old junk, but this you won't believe. The latest word in microportables." He set the little case on the counter. "Mikey Harris, may I present- "The Zeilemann Starfire 600."

I dropped a bit! Then I b.a.l.l.sed up enough to touch it. I flipped up the wafer display, opened the keyboard wings, ran my fingers over the touch pads, and I just wanted it so bad, right then and there! "It's smart,"

Martin said. "Rammed, rommed, fully metal and lightpipe ported; a videoshade jack for your friend there-," he nodded at Georgie. "Even has bubble memory, too, so you won't have to muck around with that chipburner."

My G.o.d, it was beautiful!

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

"My 300 is still faster," he said.

"It should be," Martin said. "You customized it half to death. But the 600 is nearly as fast, and it's stock, and it lists for $1200 new. I28 figure you must have spent around 4K upgrading yours."

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

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

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

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

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

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

He smiled.

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

Before I could shout yes, Rayno pushed in between me and Martin.

"I'll buy it. List price." He flicked a charge card out of his breast pocket.

Martin's jaw dropped. "Well, what're you waiting for? My plastic's clean."29 "Charge it? At list? But I-uh, I owe Mike one."

"List price. And here," Rayno grabbed some piece of junk that Georgie was futzing with and slapped it down on the counter. "Include this. Write it up as miscellaneous used gear. That way you don't have to report any serial numbers."

Martin smiled. If I didn't know him better, I'd swear it was major relief. "Okay, Rayno." He took the card and ran it through his magreader. A few seconds later the reader made with a pleasant little chime and a few measures of We're In The Money. "It's approved,"

Martin said, an even bigger smile on his face. He punched up the sale and started laughing. "Honestly, I don't know where you kids get this kind of money."

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enjoy."

"Thanks Rayno. But-but I coulda made the deal myself."

"Happy Birthday, Mike."

"Rayno, my birthday is in August."

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

"Let's get one thing straight. You work for me."

The smartcab chirped for our attention. We piled in. It was near school endtime, so we routed direct back to Buddy's. On the way, in the smartcab, Georgie took my Starfire, gently opened the back of the case,30 and scanned the board. "We could swap out the 4166-8," he said, "replace it real easy with a 42C816. That'd just about double your throughput speed."

"Leave it stock," Rayno said.

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

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

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

Halfway through dinner, the phone chirped.31

Chapter 0/ 4.

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

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

"Who was that, honey?" Mom asked, sweet.

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

I'd almost made it out the kitchen door. "Mikhail! Did you cut school today?"

Dad called me Mikhail? Uh-oh...

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

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

I started to hang. "I-I got a pa.s.s. I was down there doing some extra research."

"For what cla.s.s?"

I froze.

"Come on, Mikhail. What were you studying?"

d.a.m.n! I wish I could be totally slick, totally smart, like Rayno. He'd know the right thing to say. He could speak the pravda without sweating.