Cyberpunk (5 page)

data space and it’ll stand out. Watch this.” He took the Nova from me

and cooked up a little worm in RAM that hunted down and wiped every

flight that departed at 17:07, from now ‘til NukeDay or they found the

worm, whichever came first. “
That’s
how you do these things without

waving a flag.” He pressed ENTER, and it was running wild and free.

“That’s sharp,” Georgie chipped in, to me. “Mike, you’re a genius.

Where do you get these ideas?” Rayno got a real funny look in his eyes.

“My turn,” Rayno said, exiting the airline system.

“What be next in this here stack?” Lisa chanted.

“Yeah, I mean, after garbaging the airlines ... “ Georgie didn’t

realize he was supposed to shut up.

“Georgie, Mike,” Rayno hissed. “Keep watch!” Soft, he added, “It’s

time to run The Big One.”

“You sure?” I asked. “Rayno, I don’t think it’s ready.”

“
I’m
ready.”

Georgie got whiney. “We’re gonna get in
big
trouble—”

“Wimp,” spat Rayno. Georgie shut up.

Me and Georgie had been working on The Big One for over two

months, penetrating systems and burying moles, but I still didn’t feel

real solid about it. It
almost
made a clean if/then/else.
If
The Big One

worked/
then
we’d be rich/
else
... it was the
else
part I didn’t have down.

Georgie and me took up lookout while Rayno got down to business.

He got back into CityNet, called the cracker exefile out of its hiding

place, and poked it into Merchant’s Bank & Trust. I’d gotten into them

the old-fashioned way, through the PhoneCo port, but never messed with

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©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke

their accounts, just did it to see if I could do it. My tarbaby had been

sitting in their system for about three weeks now and nothing was stuck

to it, so apparently they’d never noticed it. Rayno thought it would be

real poetic to use one bank mainframe to penetrate the secures on

another bank mainframe.

While he was making with the fine-tuning and last-minute dinks to

the cracker, I heard walking nearby and took a closer look. It was just

some old brown underclasser 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 cocky, “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.

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©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke

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.

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©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke

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

Butthole 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 Cyberspace 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 techie

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©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke

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. “
Damn
.” 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.

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©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke

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 associate.

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 of

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