Hack (10 page)

Now that I had his attention, I again put the cursor in the middle of the board, and typed “Elmwood High School: Teaching Children How to Become Bureaucrats Since 1897,” and then quickly deleted it.

There was widespread laughter. This time, Logan’s cold stare could do nothing about it. A minute later, the bell sounded, and everybody got up to go. I stood up, turned, and nearly walked into someone.

“Excuse me,” said Zaqarwi, with a heavy accent.

“Sorry,” I said. I tried to make eye contact with him, without overdoing it. But he walked past, without any more comment. What was that? Had he just made contact? And what about his earlier conversation? Were they trying to drop me hints?

I felt like an amateur all of a sudden.

I followed Zaqarwi and his friend out of the classroom, out of the building, and down the steps. They met up with two other boys, and as I passed them, I heard a dozen words, one of which was “party.”

When I was out of earshot, I stopped, took my phone out, dialed directory enquiries, and found out that Gameworld was an amusement park on the other side of town—a good place for recruiting computer hackers, and getting recruited, too. I hadn’t heard about any party, but I made a mental note, and headed down the corridor, past my rented locker without a glance, and continued on to the cafeteria to get some lunch.

The dish of the day was lamb and vegetables, but since I ate real meals at home these days, I decided to go for a burger and fries. I lined up behind two girls who were about my age, or rather, David Johnson’s age. They were talking non-stop to a guy. I couldn’t avoid their conversation, which washed over me.

“Are you going to the party tonight?” said one girl.

“Yeah,” replied the guy. “Are you going?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“We’re not invited,” said the other girl.

“I am. Do you want to go with me?”

The girls looked at each other. Suddenly interested, I turned my head to look at the guy. He was wearing a striped sweater, with his T-shirt showing beneath, and black jeans, but, stiff as it looked, the girls didn’t seem to mind. What he was saying was interesting to me. I had been mulling over the idea of getting a girlfriend. “Do you want to go with me?” the guy had asked, just like that.

“Both of us?” said the second girl, dubiously.

“Why not? Me and Mickleson. You and Cassy.” The girls looked at each other.

“What do you think?” asked the guy. “Do you want to go?”

“Yeah,” said the girls, almost simultaneously. They got served and moved away. I found a table as far away from them as possible, and then sat and ate.

37

I hadn’t been there for long when a troop of girls sat across from me, and began talking about some program that had been on TV. I put the noise out of my mind, and thought about buying a phone and about when I would get the chance to use my new computer. That was the main problem. I had nowhere. No matter how hard I tried to think up something, I kept on hitting a wall.

My own room was out of the question, since I had no idea what level of surveillance the FBI had there. But it stood to reason that they would be intercepting any wireless communications. The public library had an Internet connection that I could quietly hijack, but it was too public for any clandestine work. Sooner or later, one of Philips’s men or Malik’s men would trail me there, and they’d easily be able to see what I was up to.

I considered several other options, such as using a motel room. But again, I knew that nothing would provide a safe place. Someone would always be waiting in the wings, ready to put their nose into my business the minute I started acting secretively or tried to sneak off. Then my Knight agenda would be discovered, and it would be over.

In the old days, I might have Svengali’d some wannabe hacker. There were always young kids hanging around the club, trying to be like the big hackers. They often had all the gear, and few skills. Had things been different, I’d have made friends with one. But I knew that I couldn’t trust any hackers—wannabes or otherwise.

Philips had no idea who was part of Malik’s group, which meant that I had no idea, either. Any one of them might be a stooge for Zaqarwi. Beside, crackers, lamers, and d00dz are often all ego. They talk too much. Like Knight, they belly up as soon as a cop pets them. I couldn’t trust them.

Did you ever see that film,
The Invisible Man
, about a scientist who wants to be left alone to complete his experiment, and the more he wants privacy, the less he is given? Eventually he goes nuts. That’s how I was beginning to feel. The All-Too-Visible Man, starring Karl Ripley as the crackpot computer scientist.

I finished my food, and then headed out. Wandering down a corridor, I suddenly realized that I had no idea where I was going. I stopped, fished out my class schedule, and took at look at it. In the old days, my class schedule had been simple: I skipped everything, especially computer class, and went hacking. But now I had to put up at least a pretence of being a normal student.

My next class was algebra in room B-12. I turned around to head toward room B-12, and stopped as I realized that I had no idea, apart from being on the first floor, where B-12 was. I walked to the stairwell, and looked up. It didn’t say A. It didn’t say anything. I walked back to the other end of the corridor, and found that that stairwell wasn’t marked either.

If Karl Ripley has X weeks to conduct a sting of Internet terrorists, and he
spends Y days wandering around the corridor looking for a classroom, how long will
it be before his life is flushed down the toilet?

I turned and headed down toward the offices, where they had a map of the whole building stuck on the wall, with a “you are here” for disoriented students, like myself.

I suddenly caught sight of a familiar girl’s face in the crowd—cute but odd, with dark hair and eyes, and kooky clothes. My eyes followed her, and as she passed me, I knew for sure that it was the girl that I had seen the night before, who had opened the door at eBay-thief’s house. She was a student at the school.

38

Immediately, an alarm bell went off in my head. Opportunity was walking quietly by. The idea was crazy. Philips wouldn’t buy it for a minute. But when I lined it up next to the rest of my options, the idea looked much better. I was going to Gameworld this weekend. Why not go with a girl? The feds would have to buy it.

This girl’s father was a small-time crook. She had petty larceny in her nature/nurture. A little bit of hacking going on at her house wouldn’t bother her, like it might bother some regular girl, whose parents were legit. Okay, so she dressed strangely, and had so much eyeliner on that she looked like she had spent the last week down a coal mine. But I wasn’t interested in an ornament; I wanted something useful.

A plan was forming in my imagination—not a very moral plan, but a plan all the same. I let it swirl around of its own accord for a while, and then came to the conclusion that pursuing the girlfriend angle was better than doing nothing.

The only bug in the code was that I had no idea of what to say to her. With older women, I was fine, because I was used to talking them into giving me their passwords. But with girls, it was different. They didn’t have that instinct for pitying losers—in fact, quite the opposite.

The girl walked into the cafeteria. I followed her, got in the line behind her, and ordered a second lunch. I watched her pay for a can of soda, and then go and sit at a table. She sipped the soda, which seems to be such a popular replacement for food among teenage girls, and I stood there, looking at her, when suddenly she lifted her head, and noticed me looking. Well, she had seen me watching her, and hadn’t bolted.

I may as well give it a try. I walked over.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi,” the girl said gloomily and cautiously.

“I don’t know if you remember me, but I bought a computer off your dad last night.”

“I remember you.”

“It’s a really good computer. I was wondering if your dad had a good phone for sale, too.”

The girl frowned, puzzled. It was a lame excuse, and I cringed a little while saying it. I mean, if her dad had a phone, it would be on eBay, with the rest of the stuff, right? The look she was giving me said as much.

“You’d have to ask him,” was the short reply.

“Okay,” I said. I turned to go, and then turned back.

“You don’t know where room B-12 is, do you? I just started here, and don’t know where anything is.”

“It’s upstairs.”

“I know. Where upstairs?”

“You go left out of here, go down the corridor, to the stairs, and then go up the stairs, and it’s up there.”

“Cool. Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.”

“So, are you going to the party tonight?” The girl’s expression changed subtly.

Her mouth got the slightest hint of a smile. I guess she had been half expecting some sort of a line from me.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Why am I not going to the party?”

“Yeah. Why not?”

39

“I’m not invited.” She said it kind of sarcastically. But at least she was still talking to me.

“I’m invited. Do you want to go?” The way I said it was like the guy I had just been listening to, real casual.

“I don’t even know you,” she replied, stressing the ‘know.’

I grinned a little. “There’ll be lots of people there. How much danger could you be in?” I was trying to keep it light.

She continued looking at me, but said nothing. At least she hadn’t run off. I’d give it one last go, and then concede defeat.

“What do you say? Do you want to go?”

“All right.”

“Cool. I’ll see you there tonight.” I turned to go, and then realized my mistake.

I hadn’t introduced myself. I didn’t even know her name.

“I’m David.”

“Grace.”

I walked out of the cafeteria feeling like a weight had been lifted off me. I had got the girl to go out with me, and I hadn’t had to exploit her maternal instincts. But even this small conversation had been uncomfortable, and it was clear to me that I had exhausted my knowledge of girls and mating rituals. I thought back: The last girl I’d spoken to in the real world had been the one waiting in the queue behind me at Computer Store. She had made small-talk about computers, I remembered, and it was only now, looking back, that I realized that she probably hadn’t been interested in talking about computer memory; she had been interested in talking to me. I guess I hadn’t thought about it at the time, being too wrapped up with whatever I was buying, making me officially a geek.

What next? I headed to the library, and found the index. They didn’t appear to have a reference manual on girls, so I asked the librarian.

“Do you have any books on dating?”

Two girls who were standing next to me snorted, and one covered her mouth, as if her amusement was improper. The librarian gave me a strange look, as if I had just made an inappropriate joke. I returned her stare, to let her know I wasn’t joking.

“No, we don’t,” she said. I gathered that the subject of dating girls had some sort of social customs surrounding it. But I had done time in a federal pen, and now lived with two feds. Teenage social protocols lose their edge after that.

I didn’t try to figure it out. I headed over to a spare Internet terminal, and searched for ‘girls, first date, how to.’ I got a million-and-one hits on ‘advanced pick-up techniques,’ but I wanted something a little more basic. Eventually, I found a site called Olivia’s Dating Tips, which covered things like ‘Where to go on a date.’ In other words, all the basic stuff that I had missed being so busy with electronic relationships, where you just ping somebody to get their attention.

But there was too much advice. Writers want to sell books, not pamphlets. The thicker the book, the more they can charge. That’s great for their bank balance, but it means that the eager student has to plough through reams of junk before they get to the important stuff. One of the biggest strides I ever made in my computing education was to avoid thick books. I picked out several pages that made sense, and then uploaded Olivia’s wisdom into my head. After a short hour, I had a simple crib sheet on dating.

That left only one problem: I had no idea whose party it was, or where it was, and I wasn’t invited. Okay, three problems.

40

By the time the last bell had rung, I had managed to find out where the party was. I biked home, stuck the bike in the garage, and then went into the kitchen, where Hannah appeared to be sanitizing the already spotless countertop.

“Hi,” Hannah said, smiling when she saw me. For a moment, I had that spooky feeling again that this was my real house—the one I had lived in as a little boy, and had never left. My parents had never split up, and we still lived in the suburbs. I got good grades, and had never met the police or the FBI. Sure.

“Hello,” I said, dumping my bag on the floor.

“How was your day?”

“Cool as dry ice.”

“Good. What did you do?”

“A whole lot of nothing.”

“You must have done something.”

I launched into a long, dry rendition of the tedious details of my dreary school day, explaining how I had been bored to death by a lecture on the superpower standoff of the past decades. I gave everything I could remember in excruciating detail. These rambling monologues were something I used to do with my own mother, and when it had finally dawned on her that I was being sarcastic, she would get very annoyed, and she’d start shouting at me.

But all Hannah did was smile.

“Sounds interesting,” she said dryly, and went back to cleaning. I went into the living room, picked up the remote, and flipped on the TV. The news was showing a celebrity who had changed her look for a new movie. I sat and listened to the monologue for ten seconds—which is my tolerance for celebrity culture—and then hungry for something to eat, I went into the kitchen.

“Are you making dinner?” I asked Hannah. She said something about sweet potatoes.

“I don’t like any sort of spread on foods,” I said. My mother, on the rare occasion she had cooked, had the habit of spreading something called margarine on food. Some magazine had said margarine was healthy, especially for growing kids, and my mother tried unsuccessfully to introduce it into my diet.