Cyberpunk (8 page)

volume up, laid hands upon MoJo, and the Gyoja Gerbil broke out of his

wait loop. “Good morning, Mikhail Harris,” he said as he bowed deep.

“Now checking CityNet mail for you.” He closed his eyes, like he was

concentrating. There were definite times when I wished the Miko-Gyoja

260/0/ /ex used a plain dumb ticking-timebomb icon, like normal

hardware.

The gerbil frowned, and froze. A flashing red-border dialog box

popped open:
Warning! Possible buffer contamination!

Idiot machine. Of
course
there’s buffer contamination. There’s

always
buffer contamination. This is CityNet, for chrissakes; the day I

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©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke

don’t
have a virus in the flytrap is the day I start to worry, ‘cause it

means I’ve caught something that knows how to bypass a flytrap.

I tapped the flush button. The gerbil bowed again, then spoke. “I

have found these messages waiting for you, Honorable Harris-san.” He

opened a window between his hands, like he was pulling open a scroll.

I scanned down the list. Hmm. Junk mail. More junk mail. Uh oh, a

message from CityNet Admin about—scratch that, just some real

official-looking junkmail. Today’s fashion forecast: Gritty 2nd Classer

Realism in the morning changing to candy-coated Nineties Nostalgia by

late afternoon. A couple notes from the Battle of Peshawar SIG; these I

piped to a temporary folder and flagged for later reference.

Nothing even slightly like a mention of the Big One, which was a

good sign. But also nothing from Georgie or Rayno, which could be bad.

Real bad.

Nervous, I banged out of the mail program, slipped out to CityNet

proper, and rode the stream up to the Northside repeater and started

poking around the bulletin boards.

Nothing. No new postings from Georgie. No new messages from

Rayno. Not even a howdy-do from Nanker Phelge, the pseudonym we

used when we were breaking into other people’s threads and being either

subtle, funny, or devil’s-lawyer annoying.

I decided to hope the deadzone quiet just meant it was still too early

in the morning for Georgie and Rayno, and logged out.

For a mo I gave some serious thought to changing my socks and

underwear, but nah, I’d have to take off my blue spatterzag jumpsuit to

do that, and the jumpsuit was just starting to get that good wrinkled ‘n’

baggy look. So I pulled on my blitz yellow hightops—didn’t even bother

to tie ‘em—and clumped over to the stairs.

Mom and Dad were still in the kitchen, talking real low. Soon’s they

heard my feet coming down the stairs they clammed. I plodded down the

stairs, did the bleary trudge into the kitchen, flashed around a big

yawning smile as I dropped into my chair. “G’morning, Mom.” No

response. “G’morning, Dad.” Dad lifted his faxsheet a little higher,

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©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke

blocking off eye contact.

Okay, I could play this game as long as they could. “Great weather,

innit?” No response. And now that I flagged it, no plate on the table for

me, either. “Geez, a day like this, a growing boy needs a good breakfast,

y’know?” I heard a slurp from behind the faxsheet, then the clink of cup

landing on saucer.

I looked at Mom.

She looked down at her watch.

I
smiled
at Mom.

She took a bite out of her sweetroll and followed it with a gulp of

caffix.

Hmm. This was turning out to be a tougher crack than I expected.

Still, if my experience with the nets counted for anything, it showed that

the bigger the stonewall, the more likely it was there was a back door.

Provided, of course, that I was willing to try something
stupid
enough to

find it.

I turned to the self-supporting faxsheet at the right end of the table,

allocated a mo to studying the fingers that peeked around the edges.

Yep, I had 95-percent confidence those were Dad’s fingers. The big,

heavy, gold wedding ring looked kind of familiar.

“Y’know, Dad,” I said, casual. “I been thinking, there really isn’t a

whole lot more I can learn at school. I mean, the teachers are all truly

lame, y’know?”

No response.

I took a quiet deep breath, screwed myself up to output the next line,

toggled to blurt mode. “So I was thinking, why don’t I take the next

couple days off? Sort of give my brain a rest, y’know?”

Incredible. No words. No gasps. I was sure that statement would’ve

gotten me some whitened knuckles, minimum, but he didn’t so much as

rustle the faxsheet. I was still looking amazed at him, trying to think of

something else that’d top that line, when his smartcab rolled up out front

and started bleating.

The faxsheet collapsed in on itself and leaped onto the table. Dad

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©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke

jumped up like his chair was on fire, snarfed one more slurp of his

caffix, grabbed his briefcase. “Oops. Gotta go, sweetheart.” Mom and

Dad traded quick dry kisses as he darted out the door.

“See you tonight, honey,” Mom said.

“See you tonight, honey,” I echoed, sarcastic to the max.

No response. For just a mo I started to wonder if maybe I was dead,

a ghost—involuntary, my right hand started spidering over to check my

left wrist for pulse—then I decided no, that was stupid, paranoid, and

ridiculous. Mom and Dad were just trying to be too derzky to notice me,

was all.

Which chained into a true smile. With Dad gone, this was going to

be
so
easy. Whatever else Mom had going for her, she was total

incapable of keeping derzky. I allocated a minute to studying her,

mapping out just the exact perfect approach path to blow her cool wide

open.

Before I could say anything, she checked her watch again, clucked

her tongue, stood up. “Well, well, look at the time.” Scooping up the

cups and plates, she stacked them in the sink, wiped her hands on the

towel, and was out the door. I heard her umbrella sproing open and the

screen door bang shut.

Well I’ll be glitched. She’d gotten away. And they truly
had
shut up

and left me alone.

I was still working out the permutations on this when the porch door

creaked open a few inches and four heavy little feet came shuffling into

the kitchen. “Arf,” said Muffy. “Arf arf.” It waddled over to Mom’s

empty chair, sat up on its hindquarters, raised its front paws to beg. “Arf.

Arf arf.”

It was a tricky shot—short, high and arcing—but I beaned the little

sucker with a wax apple from the fruit bowl. “Arf arf arf,” it said,

excited. The red vinyl tongue rolled out of its smiling, dry mouth. Its

little vestigial tail started thumping a mile a minute on the floor.

Idiot machine. No brains at all, just patterned responses. Couldn’t

even tell the difference between a loving pat on the head and a major

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©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke

klonk from a ...

Sudden, I knew what I was going to do with this ugly, cloudy day.

Breakfast was a couple microwave pizza muffins and a pouch of

GrapeOla Cola. Then I put my back into it, started rearranging the

kitchen furniture. Together, me and Muffy had endless—well,
minutes

anyway—of fun. I’d move a chair, and start calling. “Here, Muffy.

Heeere, Muffy!”

“Arf. Arf arf.” Waddle waddle waddle waddle
KLONK!
It’d back up

two steps, shake its head, turn 90 degrees and resume waddling.

I’d move the chair.
KLONK!

This lasted maybe an hour, Muffy trying to learn the floor map and

me changing it with every collision, until at last Muffy’s poor little

RAM chips were just so garbaged with conflicting data that it wouldn’t

move. Instead, it backed itself into a corner, drooped its ears and stubby

little tail, and started up with this real obnoxious sawtooth whine.

Okay, I’d had enough fun in the kitchen. I moved all the furniture

back to where it was when I started, stepped into the dining room,

started to call again. “Here, Muffy. Heeere, Muffy!”

The thing’s ears perked up. Its head tilted up and started moving

side to side, like it could truly see something with those round, glassy,

blind eyes. (Actual, the head movement was part of its sound-locating

routine, more like a radar, really.) “Heeeere, Muffy!” I moved a

magazine rack into the doorway.

Muffy beelined for the porch, backed itself onto the prongs of its

battery charger, and shut down.

Hmm. Maybe it was smarter than I thought.

With the doggoid out of action, I committed some serious brains to

the problem of what I wanted to do next. The answer came on me cold

and sudden: Dad’s computer.

Sure, he’d let me use it for schoolwork once in a while. He’d even

had me install software for him, once or twice. But he was always there

to watch over my shoulder, and there was one partition on his optical

drive he’d absolute forbidden me to ever poke around in.

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©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke

Which was not unlike putting a
Do Not Open Until Xmas
tag on it,

y’know?

One more look out the front door to make sure Mom and Dad’d truly

left for work, then I strolled casual over to the den—looked around

quick to be absolute utter
positive
I was alone in the house—slid the

door open and slipped in. Dad’s computer was sitting there on the

sidetable, silent, inert.

Dumb.

It was a Fuji-DynaRand box, of course; a big, ugly, square industrial

kind of thing, ‘bout six times as large as it really needed to be. The Ultra

Executive PowerMate 5000, or something like that: with a big oldfashioned

CRT tube sitting on a swivel stand on the top, a nine-zillion

button keyboard like something out of a jet fighter cockpit sprawled out

in front, and this great big multi-switch—I don’t know, mouse doesn’t

seem right. Had to be a rat, at least. Maybe a woodchuck. I think Fuji-

DynaRand builds these things to government spec.
Soviet
government

spec.

Slow, quiet, like it could hear me, I tiptoed into the den and snuck

up on Dad’s computer. It was a weird,
weird
feeling. Like I was alone in

church and about to crap on the altar or something. I was almost afraid

to touch it. A last, quick look behind me—yes, yes, I was
alone
,

dammit—and then I laid a hand on the keyboard.

The spell broke. It was at least somewhat like a real computer, and I

was without doubt Mikey Harris, Def Cyberpunk. I dragged over a chair,

cracked my knuckles, dove in—

To a dry swimming pool. Dad’s Ultra Executive PowerMate 5000

really
was
dead. Nothing happened when I banged in the screen restore

command; nothing happened I smooshed down the function keys. I took

a quick tour of the faceplate, trying to remember where the status LEDs

were, and found the problem in a mo. Dad hadn’t just put his computer