XGeneration 1: You Don't Know Me (3 page)

“Is something the matter?” Margaret asked.

“Nuh-uh,” Janis answered quickly.

Then why are you losing it?
She pressed her hand to her chest as if that could suppress the escalating thuds. Her body was reacting to his name, to the fact that he was behind them.
But why?
It wasn’t like her to freak out. If she were alone, she might have slapped herself.

The Prelude slowed toward the landscaped island and wooden sign that announced their neighborhood: OAKWOOD. Janis peeked into the passenger-side mirror in time to see the signal light on the green hatchback flashing. She imagined Mr. Leonard’s long, pale brow looming over the wheel, his yellow-tinted glasses tracking the turn into Oakwood. Tracking them, maybe.

Then, for no apparent reason, Janis imagined his lips holding a cigarette.

Only there was a reason.

Janis sat upright as if she
had
slapped herself, her thoughts sharpening to points. The experience last night. The dream-that-wasn’t-a-dream. In it, the red-orange tip of a cigarette had illuminated a pair of glasses. Yes, yes, she remembered that now. Someone had been watching. From the house behind theirs, the one on Oakwood’s main street, up ahead on the left.

The house where Mr. Leonard lived.

Janis peered beyond Margaret as they drew nearer the dark brown house. It stood two stories tall, its windows seeming to possess a disturbing sense of sight now, a disturbing
knowing
. The windows were bracketed by false shutters the color of old yellow teeth, the same color as the front door. Looking on them, Janis felt an acute ache inside her own jaw—and in her right side, for some reason. She jerked when the garage door gave a lurch. It ratcheted upward like a gaping mouth.

“Janis?”

Janis turned from her sister’s concerned face to peer into the passenger-side mirror again. She watched the Datsun slow, then angle sharply into the driveway and disappear from sight.

3

Scott Spruel’s glasses clicked against something. His eyes opened to a green-pixelated blur and his lungs to a broth of computer fumes tinged with B.O. He pushed himself from the computer screen—vertebrae popping in a line—until he met the chair’s felt backrest. Gasping, he swiveled toward the window.

All of the cars in his subdivision had a distinctive sound, a
signature
, and Scott had come to recognize the Prelude’s, to anticipate its return. He parted two of the blinds, as he had done that morning, but now peered onto a street cast in tea-colored light and steep shadows.

Cripes, how long have I been gone?

Before Scott could twist his watch right-side up, the Prelude was passing in front of his house, turning down the short street. It circled the cul-de-sac, tires swishing against the blacktop, and eased to a stop in front of the Graystones’. Seconds later, Janis stepped from the car, her hair still up in a ponytail, but her face now ruddy with sun. Scott imagined the warmth of the beach across her shoulders. He sat up straighter, his lips beginning to move:
Hi, Janis
.

Janis disappeared behind the car’s open trunk door and reappeared seconds later, canvas bag slung over her shoulder, soccer ball tucked inside her elbow. She backed toward the driveway and cocked a hip beneath the ball as she waited for Margaret to close up the car.

Enjoying your last day of freedom?
he asked.
Yeah, me too. Are you nervous about high school? Don’t be. They say it’s just like middle school… only astronomically harder.
Scott gritted his teeth.
(“Astronomically,” you dipshit? “Astronomically?”) And look on the bright side. We can count our remaining years of incarceration on one hand. Or, more precisely, on one of E.T.’s hands. With his… um… four fingers.

“God, you’re hopeless,” Scott muttered.

He drove his imaginary self away from Janis with a twelve-pronged flog.

Janis started up the semi-circular driveway, Margaret joining her. A cabbage palm centerpieced their front lawn, and Scott had to crane his neck to keep Janis in view. She paused on the steps of the front porch, her ponytail swishing as she looked around. Then she disappeared inside the house after Margaret.

When the Graystones’ porch light blinked on, Scott released the blinds. Another opportunity gone.

He sagged back toward his computer, picking at the handwritten notes piled in small drifts around the equipment on his desk. He fought to concentrate, his mind reeling from Janis’s entrance into his world, from her just as sudden removal. He selected a random scrap of graph paper and held it up to his glasses: ARPANet command lines he’d copped from a hacking board, nothing that was going to help him here. He tossed the paper aside. No, he was deeper in than that.

He blinked and read to the bottom of the screen:

.....

.....

- Open

WELCOME TO STLA-TAC – ARMY INFORMATION SYSTEMS COMMAND – ST. LOUIS

**FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY**

**TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED**

- Login?

>sys2428

- Password?

>ggt925

Scott looked over the keyboard, then back at the screen, his heartbeats climbing into his throat. This wasn’t some wimpy university system. He had gotten into plenty of those that summer, and not without risk. No, this was different, the stakes exponentially higher.

ARMY INFORMATION SYSTEMS COMMAND

And only one digit remained in the password, one decisive digit.

Scott swallowed the bitter bite of adrenaline. He had taken special care to mask his modem call through a series of innocuous 1-800 numbers. But this caller wasn’t acting innocuously, far from it. He was dialing into no-no land.

Once more, Scott closed his eyes and concentrated on the modem. A part of his mind—his consciousness, he supposed—began twining in on itself like copper filaments inside a tapering cable. The twists came sharper, tighter, his world constricting toward a suffocating darkness.

Hold on for a few more seconds.

His head felt like it was being crushed inside a compactor.

A few more seconds to… true… power…

At last he was forced through what felt like a pinpoint. He burst into a chaotic beyond.

Scott could still sense himself sitting at his desk, his fingers resting on the blocks of keys, but his immediate experience, his
reality
, was that of speed, of supercharged distances. He shot along the telecommunication lines, frames, and mechanical switches,
becoming
the connection: Gainesville to Jacksonville, then along a major trunk line to Atlanta. Within milliseconds, he was in the St. Louis area, cascading down local loops to the Army Information Systems Command, his latest and—if he succeeded—greatest hack.

The perfect job for Stiletto.

Of all his Dungeons & Dragons characters, Stiletto remained Scott’s guilty favorite. An 18th-level thief, Stiletto had a bad habit of getting into places he wasn’t supposed to get into and accessing things he wasn’t supposed to access. In one campaign, which had nearly come to blows with the other players, he’d hidden away their magical items and then ransomed them back for leadership. Craig and Chun refused to role-play with him for months after, but Scott didn’t see what the big deal was. He hadn’t kept their items, hadn’t pawned them for gold or platinum pieces. No, he’d only wanted to see whether he
could
do it—and with a pair of killer rolls on a twenty-sided die, he
had
.

Just like now. Scott only wanted to see whether he could, whether he could slip past Uncle Sam’s sentry, snoop around a little to prove he’d been there, and then leave for good. The campaign secure under his belt, nothing stolen or damaged, no one the wiser.

And that would be enough.

Scott concentrated, grounding himself in the electrical current. He imagined himself as Stiletto, crouched before a forbidden gate, peering into an elaborate locking mechanism. Data whizzed around him, passed through him. Scott owned a real lock-picking kit, something he’d sent away for the year before and then put into practice on every pin- and disc-tumbler system he could get his hands on. He imagined himself drawing the tools from his belt, inserting his favorite pick, listening, feeling…

Far away, Scott’s finger punched a key. He trained his thoughts on the modem, on “beaming out,” and in a shot, his consciousness returned to his body. The screen swam into focus.

And there it was:

-Password?

>ggt9251

His index finger hovered over the RETURN key, but Scott already knew. He didn’t need to press the key to find out. He was on the brink of breaking inside the information system for the United States Army.

The power!

“Scott?”

His knees banged the bottom of the desk, making the monitor flicker. “Cripes!” he cried, rubbing his thighs and turning toward the door. Inside the growing shaft of light loomed his mother’s barrel-sized silhouette. J.R., their toy poodle, stood beside her in a knitted dog sweater, rattling with nervous energy. Scott threw his hand to his brow as his mother flipped on the light switch, his heart still racing.

“Don’t you knock?” he muttered.

“What was that, mister?”

Scott’s throat constricted as he swallowed his words. She stared at him another moment, her eyes like black tacks, then nodded.
That’s what I thought
, said the nod. She shot her gaze around the room.

“Have you been in here all day?”

“No.” Scott walked his legs further under the desk where she wouldn’t see his pajama bottoms.

“Do you think Lee Iacocca got to where he is by shutting himself in a sty and playing games all day?”

Scott shrugged. He had no idea who Lee Iacocca was.

His mother shuffled sideways into the room, just far enough to hold out the cordless phone. Sweat glistened over her wrinkled nose. She had come from Jazzercise, he saw: powder-blue leotard, pink knitted legwarmers, matching headband. Her Reebok sneakers shone display-case white. The previous summer, it had been Weight Watchers and The Jane Fonda Workout. The summer before that, Richard Simmons and The Beverly Hills Diet. His mother didn’t embrace the latest health fads, Scott thought, she grappled them into submission.

“Wayne’s on the phone.” Her frown supplied the
again
. “And your father’s late bringing home dinner, but he’s on his way.”
Again
.

Scott took the phone. “Could you, um—would you please cut the light on the way out?”

His mother’s chest swelled as though she were going to say something more, maybe insist he clean his room—she’d been on him about it all summer—but she only huffed and turned. J.R. used the opportunity to squirt through the closing door without her seeing. He wasn’t allowed in the bedrooms and stood trembling, watching Scott with liquid eyes. “I won’t tell if you won’t,” Scott said, which set J.R.’s cotton-ball tail into a frenzy of beating.

When Scott lifted the phone to his ear, he felt his exhaustion. “Hey, Wayne.”

“Oh man, you missed a
killer
one.” Wayne’s first words always exploded from the receiver as if he couldn’t get them out quickly enough. “I dungeon-mastered the entire
Dragonlance
manual, and Craig and Chun gained a
ton
of experience points. They’re way beyond any of your characters, Scott-o. And I mean
way
beyond. Light years. It’s going to take four or five campaigns to even catch them, assuming they’re just sitting around on their asses.” He laughed his annoying, chopped laugh. “I guess you won’t be leading any more parties anytime soon. And you can forget about trying to steal their charmed boots again because—”

“I hacked Army Information.”

A low, buzzing silence grew on the line. Scott imagined Wayne’s fingers pausing over his threadbare mustache, mid-stroke.

“When?”

“This weekend. Just now. It’s why I skipped out on D&D.”

“Yeah, right.”

But Scott could hear the strain in Wayne’s voice, the deflating sense of his superiority.

“I’m looking at it, Wayne-o. Want a print-out?”

“How?”

Scott opened his mouth to answer, then paused.

Scott had met Wayne in the seventh grade while wandering through the gymnasium at the school’s annual science fair. He’d stopped in front of a tri-paneled display crookedly stenciled “Blue Boxing: The Future of Telephony.” Beneath the display sat a jerry-rigged circuit board and beside the circuit board, the smirking owner.

“Can that thing really make free calls anywhere in the world?” Scott asked. He had read about blue boxes in a science and technology magazine.

The smirker stroked the peach fuzz across his pursed upper lip like a prepubescent James Bond villain. “Meet me at the pay phones after school,” he replied, “and you’ll find out.”

Two things happened for Scott that day. He found a kindred spirit in Wayne, and the national phone network—“Ma Bell” before the January breakup—became an obsession, the sweating-in-your-sleep kind. Over the next several months, Scott memorized the network’s hierarchy, from the small local exchanges all the way to the Class 1s in cool-sounding places like White Plains, New York and San Bernardino, California. From phone phreaking, Wayne introduced him to the wonderful world of ARPANet and computer hacking.

Sometime in the eighth grade, Scott’s knowledge surpassed Wayne’s. Wayne, who had anointed himself high priest of the Creekside Middle School brainiacs (or nerd heap, depending on who you talked to), went ballistic, demanding Scott scrap every bit of info he’d ever supplied him. But by then, Scott knew most of the dial-up numbers and logins by heart. Some he had gotten from Wayne, others from party lines and hacker boards. The rest…

Well, the rest he had just started feeling.

“The boards,” Scott heard himself telling Wayne. J.R., fresh from rummaging through the closet, clambered onto Scott’s lap, and he cradled the dog against his bare stomach. “I got the login and password from a board.”

“No one’s dumb enough to post that kind of intel, not after the FBI crackdown. So let’s agree that you’re getting it off a message board is total crapola. What does that leave us?” Wayne began humming the Jeopardy theme song. “Oh, wait, wait, I know! You
felt
it.”