I might have told him that I was the king of my profession, the best of all pardoners, a genius hacker with the truly magic touch, who could slip into any computer ever designed and make it dance to my tune. Which would have been nothing more than the truth. But all I said was that he’d have to make up his own mind, that I couldn’t offer any affidavits or guarantees, that I was available if he wanted me and otherwise it was all the same to me if she preferred to stick with her TTD ticket. They went off and conferred for a couple of minutes. When they came back, he silently rolled up his sleeve and presented his implant to me. I keyed his credit balance: thirty thou or so, not bad. I transferred eight of it to my accounts, half to Seattle, the rest to Los Angeles. Then I took her wrist, which was about two of my fingers thick, and got into her implant and wrote her the pardon that would save her life. Just to be certain, I ran a double validation check on it. It’s always possible to stiff a customer unintentionally, though I’ve never done it. But I didn’t want this particular one to be my first.
“Go on,” I said. “Home. Your kids are waiting for their lunch.”
Her eyes glowed. “If I could only thank you somehow—”
“I’ve already banked my fee. Go. If you ever see me again, don’t say hello.”
“This will work?” the old man asked.
“You say you have friends who know things. Wait seven days, then tell the data bank that she’s lost her ticket. When you get the new one, ask your pals to decode it for you. You’ll see. It’ll be all right.”
I don’t think he believed me. I think he was more than half sure I had swindled him out of one fourth of his life’s savings, and I could see the hatred in his eyes. But that was his problem. In a week he’d find out that I really had saved his daughter-in-law’s life, and then he’d rush down to the Square to tell me how sorry he was that he had had such terrible feelings toward me. Only by then I’d be somewhere else, far away.
They shuffled out the east side of the park, pausing a couple of times to peer over their shoulders at me as if they thought I was going to transform them into pillars of salt the moment their backs were turned. Then they were gone.
I’d earned enough now to get me through the week I planned to spend in L.A. But I stuck around anyway, hoping for a little more. My mistake.
This one was Mr. Invisible, the sort of man you’d never notice in a crowd, gray on gray, thinning hair, mild bland apologetic smile. But his eyes had a shine. I forget whether he started talking first to me, or me to him, but pretty soon we were jockeying around trying to find out things about each other. He told me he was from Silver Lake. I gave him a blank look. How in hell am I supposed to know all the zillion L.A. neighborhoods? Said that he had come down here to see someone at the big government HQ on Figueroa Street. All right: probably an appeals case. I sensed a customer.
Then he wanted to know where I was from. Santa Monica? West L.A.? Something in my accent, I guess. “I’m a traveling man,” I said. “Hate to stay in one place.” True enough. I need to hack or I go crazy; if I did all my hacking in just one city I’d be virtually begging them to slap a trace on me sooner or later and that would be the end. I didn’t tell him any of that. “Came in from Utah last night. Wyoming before that.” Not true, either one. “Maybe on to New York, next.” He looked at me as if I’d said I was planning a voyage to the moon. People out here, they don’t go east a lot. These days most people don’t go anywhere.
Now he knew that I had wall-transit clearance, or else that I had some way of getting it when I wanted it. That was what he was looking to find out. In no time at all we were down to basics.
He said he had drawn a new ticket, six years at the salt-field reclamation site out back of Mono Lake. People die like mayflies out there. What he wanted was a transfer to something softer, like Operations & Maintenance, and it had to be within the walls, preferably in one of the districts out by the ocean where the air is cool and clear. I quoted him a price and he accepted without a quiver.
“Let’s have your wrist,” I said.
He held out his right hand, palm upward. His implant access was a pale yellow plaque, mounted in the usual place but rounder than the standard kind and of a slightly smoother texture. I didn’t see any great significance in that. As I had done maybe a thousand times before, I put my own arm over his, wrist to wrist, access to access. Our biocomputers made contact and instantly I knew that I was in trouble.
Human beings have been carrying biochip-based computers in their bodies for the last forty or fifty years or so—long before the Entity invasion, anyway—but for most people it’s just something they take for granted, like the vaccination mark on their thighs. They use them for the things they’re meant to be used for, and don’t give them a thought beyond that. The biocomputer’s just a commonplace tool for them, like a fork, like a shovel. You have to have the hacker sort of mentality to be willing to turn your biocomputer into something more. That’s why, when the Entities came and took us over and made us build walls around our cities, most people reacted just like sheep, letting themselves be herded inside and politely staying there. The only ones who can move around freely now— because we know how to manipulate the mainframes through which the Entities rule us—are the hackers. And there aren’t many of us. I could tell right away that I had hooked myself on to one now.
The moment we were in contact, he came at me like a storm.
The strength of his signal let me know I was up against something special, and that I’d been hustled. He hadn’t been trying to buy a pardon at all. What he was looking for was a duel. Mr. Macho behind the bland smile, out to show the new boy in town a few of his tricks.
No hacker had ever mastered me in a one-on-one anywhere. Not ever. I felt sorry for him, but not much.
He shot me a bunch of stuff, cryptic but easy, just by way of finding out my parameters. I caught it and stored it and laid an interrupt on him and took over the dialog. My turn to test him. I wanted him to begin to see who he was fooling around with. But just as I began to execute he put an interrupt on me. That was a new experience. I stared at him with some respect.
Usually any hacker anywhere will recognize my signal in the first thirty seconds, and that’ll be enough to finish the interchange. He’ll know that there’s no point in continuing. But this guy either wasn’t able to identify me or just didn’t care, and he came right back with his interrupt. Amazing. So was the stuff he began laying on me next.
He went right to work, really trying to scramble my architecture. Reams of stuff came flying at me up in the heavy megabyte zone.
—
I gave it right back to him, twice as hard.
—
He didn’t mind at all.
—
—
—
—
—
Mexican standoff. He was still smiling. Not even a trace of sweat on his forehead. Something eerie about him, something new and strange. This is some kind of borgmann hacker, I realized suddenly. He must be working for the Entities, roving the city, looking to make trouble for freelancers like me. Good as he was, and he was plenty good, I despised him. A hacker who had become a borgmann—now, that was truly disgusting. I wanted to short him. I wanted to burn him out, now. I had never hated anyone so much in my life.
I couldn’t do a thing with him.
I was baffled. I was the Data King, I was the Megabyte Monster. All my life I had floated back and forth across a world in chains, picking every lock I came across. And now this nobody was tying me in knots. Whatever I gave him, he parried; and what came back from him was getting increasingly bizarre. He was working with an algorithm I had never seen before and was having serious trouble solving. After a little while I couldn’t even figure out what he was doing to me, let alone what I was going to do to cancel it. It was getting so I could barely execute. He was forcing me inexorably toward a wetware crash.
“Who are you?” I yelled.
He laughed in my face.
