03/05/42 00:13:57
The SPCB has her on a table in Lab 323-Mechanical Forensics, which is a nice way of saying that this is where they take the robots apart when they're looking for clues. It's a cross between a machine shop and a mortuary: drawers full of neatly labeled limbs and heads, skin samples from all the major manufacturers, microscopes and oscilloscopes and DNA trace-dust. Staffers call 323 the Take & Break.
She's laid out on a pair of waldo tables. Table one has her arms, legs, and torso. They've popped the fingers off her hands.

"Damn," Roddy says. Roddy's our assembly guy. We had wanted to get her out Sunday night, but Roddy works at Cybertronics, and the whole Loki thing put them into a total lockdown mode for days. Now they're moving to a new domain. This is the first chance Roddy has had to sneak out the peep-proof line from home and join us. Physically he's in Jersey, but I can practically feel him jostling my shoulder.

"What's the problem?" GK says.

"Only five fingers on the table."

"What are we missing?"

"Um… Both thumbs, both index fingers, and the pinkie on the right hand. Where the hell are they?"

"Evidence bags somewhere in the lab." I'm the SPCB expert. "Let's see what we can find." I work the room security cameras around and direct them to the drawer with the spare fingers. "Tracy? Can you reach?"

A waldo arm swings out, drops, and hooks around the drawer handle. Tracy just finished a surgery residency at John's Hopkins down in Frederick. She could carve the Declaration of Independence on a mosquito wing with a good set of surgical waldos. Touch like you wouldn't believe. She's really nice but she's always tired, and of course we keep her working nights.

Exhaustion is always a problem. Out there, the Great Fearful Public always talks as if we were an army of omnipotent computer-god-terrorists, with infinite supplies of money and man-power. In fact, for most of my gigs, anyway, all you've got is three or four people with a couple more maybe in support, and everybody constantly running out of time. We burn sleep and imagination to cover what we lack in people and funds.

Tracy rummages through the drawer, sliding the magnification on the waldo up and down so Roddy can see enough detail to get make and model information. "One Belladerma thumb, and a decent one of ours, a '41 series. Two okay index fingers, but the pinkie is a problem. There's a Krupgruppe here, a medium-force high-wear model. Waitress, probably, or maybe Schoolbus Driver. Something in that range. The lady isn't going to like it. Almost an order of magnitude fewer nerve sensors than she's used to."

"Flip view to Table 2," GK whispers. I swap security eyes so we can see Venus' head lying on the brushed steel table. Her eyes and ears have been placed neatly under her jaw. The back of her head has been popped open, and her cpu is sitting stolidly next to where her left ear should be. "Beggars can't be choosers," GK says.

Cold truth.

GK has done the night's most difficult hack (if you don't count getting into the SPCB) by lifting the Belladerma technical manual. Roddy drifts out of the conversation for a minute as he and his familiar break it down together. Tracy brings the number of fingers on the table up to ten.

Tomorrow is Regatta Day at school. Parker, who I've had for Meat Games since I was a sophomore, made a point of staring at me when he told us all to get plenty of sleep tonight. I have been a grave disappointment to him over the last three years, and tomorrow looks to be no different.

18/10/39

I have discovered the pleasures of credit-tracking. Sometimes I do it to strangers-just make up a UAN and start following it through the sphere, trying to build a picture of the person from what they buy and where. Monthly NYFA pass, lunch at the Stock Market Dive, (an underwater deli in what used to be the 4th floor of the Goldman Sachs building) a pair of size large sheer stockings from Élan on the way home: you have your basic corporate Wall Street player, maybe a woman of 60 trying to recapture 50-which GK says is what 29 used to be.

Then the credit line pays for XL Hair Rem. (back) at Peekaboo Transformations, and you realize maybe you've put thing whole puzzle together wrong.

More often I follow family members. It's kind of like being a guardian angel: I hover there in the background, watching over them. Dad, for instance, tends to under-tip, which I fix whenever I can. (I know what we've got in the bank, and we can afford it.) I used to think he wasn't good at the math, (he's in advertising) but I finally realized he was just cheap. That was kind of disillusioning, but his folks came through the worst of the Warming, and they programmed him with that whole Fear of Poverty thing. He'd save string if Mom let him. I can't help rolling my eyes when he starts telling about how grandma and grandpa had to eat nothing but gull eggs and seaweed for a month, but the fact is there are programs running in all of us we don't even notice.

So anyway I'm following Mom one day. She's on a business trip to Washington (she goes down there at least once a month). I'm riding two rails behind her: expense account credit, and her personal line. Mom's ridiculously honest about what she bills to the Bureau. She checks in, she spends the night, and she orders breakfast. Twice.

There's the kicker. One room service breakfast on the expense account. One on her personal line.

And I realize there's a program running I never saw. A whole puzzle I had put together wrong.

03/05/42 00:39:14

Tracy slides a scoping needle into Venus' brain and everybody goes quiet, waiting for the readout.

The ping-back looks Kansas under snow.

"Dammit!" Roddy says. "There's probably a drill-bit coming through my firewall at this instant, ECM is on everybody's ass, and we're still too goddam late."

"Hang on," I say. "Let me check something out." The evidence banks-a more obvious target than the waldo control systems-have a lot of black ice on them, but under the circumstances, we don't have a lot of choices. I do a panel shatter and trace the slit I tagged here a few weeks ago. Hacking is a lot like stage magic: most of the tricks that really wow the audience depend on a lot of tedious advance work and some special props. I have had a little parasite running under camouflage on the evidence banks for months now, whose only job is to watch for gaps and wrinkles during reformats and other data-cleaning operations, and just slide in a shim to keep them from closing.

"I thought you said it was almost impossible to get in there without leaving a fingerprint," GK says.

"Key word being 'almost.'"

"You sure nobody will find it?"

"No."

"Then-"

"It won't be my fingerprint. Look, after May 6, this is not the spot they're looking for trouble. They have A,R,I on the brain, and that's good, because they won't be looking here."

"They will if we get her out."

"True. But they'll have to be very good on clock-back fixes to see the rabbit-hole, which they aren't. And if they do, like I said, it won't be my fingerprint. I'll use an agent profile and let her explain it to her superiors. Except…."

"What is it?"

"Son of a bitch," I say, dusting the file. "Somebody's been here already."

"What!"

I run down the time stamps. "Somebody's already cleaned the clock. She's been deleted from March 1st onward. It's supposed to look like a malfunction. Organic damage, you know, like maybe they dropped her with EMP when they brought her in or something, but the fade-out's faked. Somebody got into the file before us and wiped her."

"Covering up the murder," Tracy says.

"And any reprogramming that happened in the week before it too," says GK.

"It's not a very good job of covering. Probably someone in a rush. Anyone who could hack into the SPCB would know to do a better cover job. I think a staffer did this." The sweep patterns are visible to the naked eye once I lay them out in a tamper graph for GK. "Boy, if they're going to get into the habit of sabotaging their own records, they ought to hire me. I could do a way better job."

Tracy slips the needle out of the brain on Table 2. "You're a spooky kid, RK."

I'd like it to be a compliment, but I get the feeling she's mostly thinking how glad she is that I'm not her little brother.

"It's just the moves that are spooky," GK says laughing. "Other than that, he's just your regular boy genius, aren't you, Dwayne?"

"Don't call me Dwayne." I might have snapped a little.

It's not like I'm as lame as the Vegetable From Hell (and for the record-books, it took me three hours to run the obstacle course. The Declaration puzzle stopped me cold for two thirds of that. I must have dozed off in Civics or something. On the other hand, I had the business puzzle in four minutes flat. Once you put a search together on Exodus and Critic, for the same time period as the other Ancient puzzle, it's pretty easy to see where a guy like Beelzebub is going to go when the answer is on the very first results page.)

Anyhow, about my name. I admit the hacker mystique thing is kind of juvenile, but if you want my best work, don't screw with my head. Nothing significantly cold ever got cracked by a guy named Dwayne.

05/01/40
His name was Bryce Watson and he worked in the Bureau's Washington PR department. He was 1.88 meters tall, ninety kilos, and a sharp dresser.

Okay, I knew more than that.

I raped that bastard's files. I knew his shoe size, hat size, vision rating (20/30), driver's license and traffic ticket history (four tickets, all parking violations, one accident declared no-fault, requiring $3215.63 to repair.) I changed his elementary school grades to all Fs. When he went to the doctor for his yearly physical, I changed the record so the doctor wouldn't catch his high blood pressure, which was wrong, not to mention outrageously illegal, but I was so mad I had to do something.

I broke his security system and looped it so nobody could ever find footage of my mom in his apartment.

My dad, all unaware, started tipping like a prince. For the next six months he got the best service of his pathetic life.

The things that do not kill us make us strong, GK says. The whole awful business with my mom taught me a critical lesson. If you take as many IQ tests as I have in my life, you learn that a lot of puzzles can't be solved by research. You have to learn to flip the way you look at things, like that picture of two faces that suddenly becomes a cup. Figure-ground reversals. The first time it happens to you in real life, it's sickening. Your whole world turns inside-out, and everything you thought you knew is wrong.

Chess is my game. It's a classic example of a self-fulfilling prophecy. You figure out pretty young that you're smart, you look around to see what smart kids do, you find out that smart kids are supposed to play chess. By the time I realized that this was hopelessly geeky and stereotypical, I loved the game. It's a kind of problem in spatial calculus, a moving equation which always has a solution at the end.

Mom likes Go. She says it's a much more subtle game. She's probably right-fifty years after they built chess programs that could beat a grandmaster, Go programs were still getting their asses kicked. Wu wei was based on Go, somebody told me, and that's one of the few decent games made this century that wasn't designed by an AI.

So anyway by the time I got to high school I was exactly the kind of math-and-programming kid you'd expect, only with enough sense to catch on to the fact that girls are not biologically wired to go for guys with Really Big Processors. They can't help it, really: it's another program cut into the wetware by 250 million years of evolution.

I read somewhere that sexual maturity is the beginning of the end for neural flexibility. I totally believe this. I don't think I was ever smarter than I was at fourteen; the whole addition of women to the universe has been a massive distraction. Once I figured out that the Chess and Algebra thing wasn't going to cut it-(insert quick visual of Dad making up one of his endless budget diagrams, cross-cut with rumpled bed sheets from a hotel room in DC)-I thought I should try more of a Rebel look. Actually, I think I probably have a lot in common with the scary-looking tough kids who hang out behind the Meat Palace practicing beer bottle tattoos. We're both outside the mainstream, if you know what I mean. The trouble is, I seem more aware of this common ground than they do. They always look at me like they would really like to grab my thin neck and mash my face into a plastic shredder a few times for recycling.

Maybe when we're all older we'll be buddies. For the time being I give them a wide berth, and stick to doing my own thing.

I am very good at my own thing.

You know you have some moves when even GK is impressed. As much fun as I make of the SPCB, you need some serious warez to cut them up. You need nerves of braided ceramic, some really fluid math background, and a certain level of pure artistry. A ridiculously powerful rig helps too.

Failing that, it helps if your Mom works there and isn't too careful with her codes.

03/05/42 01:04:26

"OK, GK, I've got her ready to download."

"Good work, Dwayne. Tracy, have you got the thread in?"

"Hang on." Connecting the amount of optical thread you need to download an entire life is like sticking each individual hair into the tiny follicles on a doll's head. Asking Tracy to do it under intense time pressure with a stranger's commandeered waldo rig after a 24 hour resident's shift at a hospital was pretty ridiculous. Then again, pretty ridiculous was what we all signed up for.

I noticed I was wondering if Tracy was pretty and told myself to knock it off. The next couple of hours were not my part of the gig. I just had to keep the building snoozing, the alarms quiet and the security cams looping one peaceful scene after another while Tracy and Roddy put Venus together again.

Finally Tracy sighed, and the waldo arm swung back. "Okay."

I hesistated. "Do we want to go through and edit some stuff out? I'm guessing her life with that creep Basta got pretty ugly, and since she's already been edited…."

"Take too much time," Roddy said. "For god's sake, King, I keep telling you Cybertronics ECM is crawling all over the sphere these days."

"It's not our job to recut her life," GK said. "Just to give it back to her."

"OK," I said, and I flipped the switch. Light burst through the optical thread.

I am the resurrection and the life.

11/11/41

Mom and I are playing Go on a smart table in the forward lounge of the Baltimore-New York hoverferry, heading back from the GG's 90th wedding anniversary. The big ferry hums, rushing like a ghost over the diked expanse of the Jersey lowlands. We're up in front, where I always like to sit, close to the glass. At night you can't see much except for the pale reflections of the people around you, and the lurid gleam and twinkle coming from Rouge City way, far ahead.

I'm pretty sure I have Mom tapped out this time, but then she drops a stone and the whole board reverses on me. Suddenly she has three eyes and life everywhere, while the node I was just using to attack is gasping for air. "Damn it!"

I'm old enough she doesn't care if I swear anymore. Thinking back, it seems like it was usually Dad who wanted us to watch our language.

The board is a disaster. Technically I am actually a higher-ranked player than she is now, having cracked the top 50K, but I never beat her head to head. I look at the board a long time. Underneath us giant rotors are spinning; reeds and saltgrass blasted sideways by the fat pillow of stinking air the ferry puts out as it roars by. We can't hear any of that, of course: the soundproofing is immaculate.

I finally give up. "I think I'm trapped."

"Ninety years," Mom says casually. "Incredible. That's a long time to spend with one person."

This is kind of a bizarre non-sequitor. I glance up, and find her looking at me. And her face is terribly sad.

She knows I know.

We are both unbearably ashamed.

03/05/42 02:28:26

> We're going to put your eyes in now, Roddy says.
> Thank you.
> I'm sorry about the feet. They were the best ones they had.
> -"Having the fewest wants, I am nearest to the gods."

You can hear Roddy take a deep breath and mutter something about what the hell Belladerma thinks it's playing at these days.

> Whatever you say, honey.

He switches back to voice. "Okay, Tracy-ready? These are what she came off the line with; they should slot right in."

"I got a house in Baltimore, little Liza Jane." Tracy sings to herself when she's trying to concentrate. "Streetcar runs right by my door, little Liza Jane."

"You got that squirt from the Comp. Psych. Djinn?" GK asks.

"Loading as we speak," I said. "I don't want to be the security guard that tries to stop this lady from taking a walk."

"No violence!" Tracy says. "And don't tell me about broken eggs and omelettes, either. I don't want to do any more repairs tonight."

"Hey-Never start it, that's my motto," GK says.

The other half of the motto is, "But always finish it." She doesn't have to say that, though. We all know.

> Venus? Can you do a system check for me, honey?
> Of course.

"Roddy? Can you back her up on that, sweetie-yumyums?"
Tracy can be kind of sarcastic.

> Can you sit? Stand? Walk?

Venus gets off the table. She is incredibly beautiful and distant and sad. I can't imagine the kind of guy who would want to have sex with someone like that.

Dad says there are some women who make you want to rescue them. I suppose that's what got the engineer. Got him killed, in fact. For a second, out of nowhere, I feel so incredibly sorry for that guy.

Throwing his life away for this cold bitch who probably never really cared for him. I mean, he was just some dumb mid-level wage slave, living his ordinary boring life; this woman runs on a whole other platform entirely. That was his big mistake: getting mixed up with a woman he couldn't keep up with. The sort of woman you're never going to make happy.

"Dwayne? You have all the security? All the tapes and records covered?"

11/11/41

I have a bandana made of smart cloth tucked in my pants pocket that doubles as my portable. I've got everything there: the expense account reports, the hotel bills, the supposedly encrypted e-mails, the phone logs. Each and every little purchase carefully buried where Dad's careful budget wouldn't find it.

It feels as if every nerve in my body has rushed to my upper leg. It feels as if that bandana is going to burn a hole through my pocket.

Mom and I sit motionless. The ferry is motionless too. There's been some kind of crucial figure-ground reversal, and now it's the New Jersey landscape itself that's moving-pouring endlessly under us like a river while we sit there, frozen.

White stones and black tangled together on the board between us, trapping and escaping.

03/05/42
"I've got everything," I say. I take a deep breath, a spider deep in the heart of the SPCB, thanks to Mom's code. If, after all my sneaking, I happen to leave her fingerprint in the evidence banks, they will crucify her. No more Deputy Director gig.

No more trips to Washington.

11/11/41
"Well?"

03/05/42
Poor dumb bastard. Never even saw it coming.

11/11/41
I wonder if he knew he could never make her happy.
"Dwayne?"

03/05/42
"Set her free," I say.