Cyberpunk (9 page)

to sleep; he’d shut it down
cold
. I groped around the sides of the case

until I found the power switch, flipped it.

Nothing happened.

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©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke

I traced the power cable back to the surge protector. It claimed to be

working, but I hit the breaker reset anyway. The LEDs flickered; in a

little plastic voice the surge protector said, “Working.” I climbed out

from under the table and checked Dad’s computer again. It was still

dead. But this time I noticed the empty fuse holder sitting in the

paperclip cup.

Took me about fifteen minutes to plod down to the basement, dig

out a replacement fuse, install it. When I got done and hit the power

switch, though, I was rewarded with a real satisfying flicker-flash of

LEDs, a pleasant whir of cooling fan, a ratchety noise from the optical

drive, and—

FDIX ERR: 01FF AA00 0000 DEV NOT MTD

The
hell?
Dad couldn’t have. He wouldn’t have. I fumbled with the

latch on the drive door ‘til I remembered how to spring it. The optical

media slot was empty.

Dad
had
. He’d secured his computer in the most crude, effective

way; taken the mass storage disk right out. And I knew Dad well enough

to bet my soul that that laser disk was sitting safe, secure, and totally

untouchable in his briefcase. Ninety-nine percent probable I could turn

the den upside down and
shake
it and still never find that disk.

Still, I did the search. I had to. Then, when the missing laser disk

proved truly missing, I shut everything off, crawled back under the table,

and unscrewed the power fuse. No point in advertising that I’d been

messing with Dad’s machine—if for no other reason than I didn’t want

him to know he’d beat me so easy. I took one last careful look around,

made sure that everything was back exact where I’d found it. I was just

stepping out of the den and easing the door shut when the voicephone in

the kitchen started chirping.

Whoever it was, they hung up before I could get to it and answer.

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©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke

Chapter 0/ 6

The rest of the morning ran about the same. I wasted another half

hour or so just rattling around downstairs, channel surfing on the TV and

trying to find something interesting to do. But there was nothing on the

tube worth the effort of watching and the weather outside had changed

from cloudy, cool and misty to cloudy, hot and muggy. So I cycled

through a few more ideas, all of which went flat almost soon’s I thought

of them, then punctured another pouch of GrapeOla Cola and trudged

back upstairs. The Gyoja Gerbil was sitting there waiting for me there

with a whole new batch of CityNet mail.

Correction: CityNet
junk
mail. Still no fallout from CityNet Admin

after yesterday’s little fun, good; still no sign of life from either Georgie

or Rayno, bad. I skimmed the rest of my mail, trashed it all, then

reopened the folder I’d packed with messages from the Battle of

Peshawar SIG and settled down for some serious reading.

Even that went poor, though. Nothing worthwhile in the SIG mail;

no playing hints, no character sets, no software hacks to let me change

the game params. Just a whole lot of invites to join network gaming

groups and, while I truly love to play Peshawar single-user, I absolute

hate to play it group.

Why? Well, it’s like this.
Battle of Peshawar
is a historical roleplaying

game, set in central Asia during the Breakup Wars. Only it’s

really more like about six different games, depending on the role you

choose. Like you can play the MIG pilot or the tank commander, and

then it’s a real neat arcade-style shoot’em up where you go around

blasting things into slag until you either run out of fuel, run out of

ammo, or run into something that blows
you
to insignificant bits.

Which, by the way, you always do.

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©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke

After arcade-level, the stakes go up. You can play the company or

division commander, and start looking more at the map and worrying

about things like advance and supply lines. Or you can play the Army

Group commander, in which case you have to really trust your division

commanders and start thinking about things like interservice

coordination and keeping comm with Moscow open. You can even play

the big guy in Moscow and sweat over the whole geopolitical business,

like for example if your tanks push too far into northern India the Poles

might try to retake Byelorussia again, or the ChiComms might come

busting out of Sinkiang and flatten Alma-Ata.

And that’s the whole problem with playing Peshawar on net. When I

play single-user, I can be
anybody
. The computer plays all the other

parts, competent, no surprises, and
I
am the random factor. If it’s going

bad, I can go nuclear whenever I feel like quitting. If it’s going good, I

can keep saving game a mo before total death and keep the stalemate

running almost forever.

When I play on net—at least, when I play with any of the good net

groups, the ones that keep player stats offline where I can’t fix my

numbers—little Mikey Harris is just one more minor factor who most

times ends up playing a tank platoon. Maybe if I’m real lucky I’ll get

command of an armored company, but in net Peshawar, at least, it seems

the primary job at my level is to get killed carrying out stupid orders

from higher up. Once—
once
, I racked up enough points to make general

in the Central Asia Army Group, only to have the klutz running the

Turkestani Group open up a hot western front with Iran.

Ten moves later the Iranians had rolled clear up to Gur’yev, taken

all the Caspian Sea oil reserves, and cut both the Krasnovodsk and

Aral’sk railroads. Leaving my armored companies fifty kilometers

outside of Peshawar with full magazines and absolute bone dry fuel

tanks. Sometimes I think the whole point of network role-playing

Peshawar is to keep the young players from getting enough experience

points to steal the
good
roles from the old clods who run the game.

Not unlike school, at that.

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©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke

By noon I’d bounced around CityNet enough to be bored. I’d hit all

the bulletin boards I felt like hitting; nothing caught my interest. I’d tried

my hand at a new hack—the University Medical Center database. There

are four universal passwords that are the mark of truly sloppy system

security: TEST, ADMIN, XYZZY, and the one that cracked me into

MedBase, KEN SENT ME. That’s when I logged out. Anything that

easy to hack obvious wasn’t worth the effort to do it. For lunch I went

downstairs and zapped a couple krillburgers and some Tater Crispins.

The voicephone rang while I was nuking the foodlike products; this time

I caught it on the third chirp, but whoever it was, they hung up soon as I

said, “Hi.”

Oh, well. Maybe some phonepunk’d figured out a new way to

bypass our prank call interceptor. I shrugged, hit the disconnect button.

Then decided, as long as I had the phone in my hand, I might as well call

Mom and Dad and see if they were talking to me yet. Wiping the tater

grease off my fingers and the handset, I carried the cordless over to the

table and punched in the direct number for Fuji-DynaRand’s call-routing

system.

Mom and Dad both work for Fuji-DynaRand, y’see; same building

complex, in fact. They ride to work separate ‘cause Dad, being a Fuku

Shacho, gets a private company smartcab, while Mom, being just an

Administrative Facilitator (or is it Facilities Administrator?), has to take

the company trampool. Least that’s the way Mom explains it, and she

seems to think it makes sense. The way Mom also explains it, she used

to be Dad’s Personal Facilitator, but after he divorced his first wife to

marry her she had to transfer to a different division. All of which, I

guess, has something to do with why Dad keeps insisting that that

breathy-voiced “Faun” who intercepts his phone calls is just a sim’d

figment of the voicemail system.

If she is, she’s the closest thing to an AI I’ve ever run into.

Whenever I ask Dad about that he just laughs and says she has no true

intelligence—then Mom scowls at him and says she can believe that—

but I keep wanting to try a Turing test on Faun all the same. ‘Course, if

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©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke

she is human, all that’ll prove is that she’s an airhead.

But anyway, all my calls to Dad’s line got the instant route to Faun

again, which wasn’t much of a surprise knowing Dad can program his

phone to lateral off calls from certain numbers. When I couldn’t get

through to Mom, though, that was kind of an eye-opener. I initiated a

hope that maybe they were doing a nice lunch together and decided to

bop out to the porch and check up on Muffy.

I swear, when I lifted its tail to check the charger prong, the thing

growled
at me.

#

After lunch, I at last hit on a worthwhile project. Splicing together a

working lightpipe from what was left of the Death Cannon fiber, I

patched the Starfire direct into MoJo and commenced with the big

download. All my pirate commware; all my favorite tricks and treats

programs. Most of Peshawar, though I had to scratch the arcade mode

‘cause the graphics looked truly terrible on that waferscreen. The

Meghan Gianelli freezeframes looked truly terrible, too, all verticalcompressed

and bloaty, but I managed to find memory space for my four

favorites anyway.

Around 2:00, I heard a heavy throbbing outside and took a look out

my bedroom window. It was just some big ugly green privatecar with

blackfilm windows cruising down the street, slow; a diesel, from the

sound of it. Which struck me as odd: we don’t get many petrol-burners

this far off the expresswa—

Jesus H. Christ! A big dark car cruising by slow? What the Hell

have I stirred up, the KGB? The IRS?
Heart thumping hard, back against

the wall, I cautious edged up to the window and peeked out again.

The car was gone, down the block, around the corner. Laughing

silent at myself for being such a total paranoid, I went back to the big

download.

Around 3:30, the voicephone started chirping again. By this time it’d

gone past starting to get and become full adult phase annoying, so I tried

to say to Hell with it and let it ring. But whoever was on the line let it go

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©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke

on, and on, and
on
, until at last I decided to play the chump and go for it

one last time. I checked to make sure the process I was running would be

okay by itself, trudged out to the hall, picked up the voicephone, and

cranked up my best guttural surl. “
Yeah?
”