The old man gave Andy a long, deep, appraising look. Peasant shrewdness coming to the surface.
“How can we be sure you’ll do what you say you’ll do?” he asked.
Andy might have told him that he was the king of his profession, the best of all pardoners, a genius hacker with the truly magic touch. Who could slip into any data network there was and get it to dance to his tune. That would have been nothing more than the truth. But all he said was that the man would have to make up his own mind, that Andy couldn’t offer any affidavits or guarantees, that he was available if they wanted him and otherwise it was all the same to him if she preferred to stick with her TTD ticket.
They went off and conferred for a couple of minutes. When they came back, the old man silently rolled up his sleeve and presented his implant. Andy keyed his credit balance: thirty thou or so, not bad. He transferred eight of it to his accounts, half to Seattle, the rest to Honolulu. Then he took the woman’s wrist, which was about two of his fingers thick, and got into her implant and wrote her the pardon that would save her life.
“Go on,” Andy 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.”
He didn’t seem convinced. Andy suspected the man was more than half sure that he had just been swindled out of one fourth of his life’s savings. The hatred in his eyes was all too visible. But in a week he would find out that Andy really had saved his daughter-in-law’s life, and then he would rush down to the Square to tell Andy how sorry he was that he had had such terrible feelings toward him. Only by that time Andy expected to be somewhere else far away.
They shuffled out the east side of the park, pausing a couple of times to look back over their shoulders at Andy as if they thought he was going to transform them into pillars of salt the moment their backs were turned. Then they were gone.
In short order Andy had earned enough now to get him through his week in L.A. But he stuck around the park anyway, hoping for a little more. That proved to be a mistake.
The next customer was Little Mr. Invisible, the sort of man no one would ever notice in a crowd, gray on gray, thinning hair, mild bland apologetic smile. But his eyes had a shine. He and Andy struck up a conversation and very quickly they were jockeying around trying to find out things about each other. He told Andy he was from the Silver Lake neighborhood. That conveyed very little to Andy. Said that he had come down here to see someone at the big LACON building on Figueroa Street. All right: probably an appeals case. Andy smelled a deal.
Then the gray little man wanted to know where Andy was from—Santa Monica? West L.A.? Andy wondered if people had a different kind of accent on that side of town. “I’m a traveling man,” he said. “Hate to stay in one place.” True enough. “Came in from Utah last night. Wyoming before that.” Not true, either one. “Maybe on to New York, next.”
The little man looked at Andy as though he had said he was planning a voyage to Jupiter.
He knew now, though, that Andy had wall-transit clearance, or else that he had some way of getting it when he wanted it, or at least was willing to claim openly that he did. Which was as good as Andy’s advertising that he was something special. That was what the little man was looking to find out, obviously.
In no time at all they were down to basics.
The little gray man said that he had drawn a new labor ticket, six years at the salt-field reclamation site out back of Mono Lake. Bad news, bad, bad, bad. People died like mayflies out there, Andy had heard. What he wanted, naturally, 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 was cool and clear.
“Sure,” Andy said. “I can do that.”
Andy quoted him a price and the little man accepted without a quiver.
“Let’s have your wrist,” Andy said.
The little man 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. Andy didn’t see any great significance in that. As he had done so many times before, he put his own arm over the other’s, wrist to wrist, access to access.
Their biocomputers made contact.
The moment that they did, the little man came at him like a storm, and instantly Andy knew, from the strength of the signal that was hitting him, that he was up against something special and very possibly in trouble; that he had been hustled, in fact. This colorless little man hadn’t been trying to buy a pardon at all. What he had been looking for, Andy realized, was a data duel. Mr. Macho behind the bland smile, out to show the new boy in town a few of his tricks.
It was a long, long time since Andy had ever been involved in something like this. Dueling was adolescent stuff. But back in Andy’s dueling days no hacker had ever mastered him in a one-on-one anywhere. Not a one, ever. Nor was this one going to. Andy felt sorry for him, but not very much.
He shot Andy a bunch of fast stuff, cryptic but easy, just by way of finding out Andy’s parameters. Andy caught it and stored it and laid an interrupt on him and took over the dialog. His turn to do the testing, now. He wanted the other man to begin to see who he was fooling around with.
But just as Andy began to execute, the other man put an interrupt on him. That was a new experience. Andy stared at him with some respect.
Usually any hacker anywhere would recognize Andy’s signal in the first thirty seconds, and that would be enough to finish the interchange. He would know that there was no point in continuing. But this one either hadn’t been able to identify Andy or just didn’t care, and so he had come right back with his interrupt. Andy found that amazing. The stuff the little man began laying on Andy next was pretty amazing too.
He went right to work, energetically trying to scramble Andy’s architecture. Reams of stuff came flying at Andy up in the heavy megabyte zone.
—jspike. dbltag. nslice. dzcnt.
Andy gave it right back, twice as hard.
—maxfrq. minpau. spktot. jspike.
But the other hacker didn’t mind at all.
—maxdz. spktim. falter, nslice.
—frqsum. eburst.
—iburst.
—prebst.
—nobrst.
Mexican standoff. The gray little man was still smiling. Not even a trace of sweat on his forehead. There was something eerie about him, Andy thought, something new and strange.
This is some kind of borgmann hacker, he realized suddenly. Working for the Entities, roving the city, looking to make trouble for freelancers like me.
Good as the man was, and he was plenty good, Andy despised him for that. There was just enough Carmichael blood in his veins for Andy to know which side he was on in the Entity-human struggle. A borgmann— now, that was something truly disgusting. Using your hacking skills to help them—no. No. A filthy business. Andy wanted to short him. He wanted to burn him out. He had never hated anyone so much in his life.
But Andy couldn’t do a thing with him.
That baffled him. He was the Data King, he was the Megabyte Monster. All these years he had gone floating back and forth across a world in chains, blithely riding the data stream, picking every lock he came across. And now this nobody was tying him in knots. Whatever Andy gave him, he parried; and what came back from him was getting increasingly bizarre. The little man was working with an algorithm Andy had never seen before and was having major trouble solving. After a little while he couldn’t even figure out what was being done to him, let alone what he was going to do to cancel it. It was getting so he could barely execute. The little man was forcing him inexorably toward a wetware crash.
“Who the fuck are you?” Andy yelled, furious.
The little man laughed in Andy’s face.
