Arabesque nodded. “Yeah. It changes how we do business, ups the risks and the stakes. My God, you know what we can charge now?”
“Yeah, and end up like Terrel,” Mason muttered. “Serving five-to-ten for a so-called armed robbery—you just better be very careful what you carry in your toolkit now.”
There was a little silence, and then van Liesvelt said, “I was over on the Euronets when the news came through. I’d just told a couple of old friends there was no way the override would happen. It took me twenty minutes, realtime, to work my way back to home node. I thought I’d have to hit the safety before I found a way through the traffic.”
Cerise whistled under her breath. Twenty minutes in realtime, not the subjective time of the nets, was ridiculously long. Usually one could make one’s way from one side of the nets to the other—traveling twice around the world in the process—in that time.
“What in the world,” Mason said, “are we going to do now?”
“Do?” Arabesque fixed her with an angry stare. “Pretty much what we’ve always done, that’s what we’re going to do. Cracking was always illegal, don’t kid yourself, ’Wildah. We’ll just have to be more careful—and that’s all.”
“I don’t know,” Held said. “I think it’s different.” He shook his head. “Very different.”
Van Liesvelt nodded in morose agreement, and wiped beer out of his mustache. “I was wondering about Europe, heading there, I mean.”
“The real business—most of the real targets, real data, data worth money—is still in U.S. jurisdiction,” Helling said. “Or can claim it is. And they’ve explicitly overruled appealing to Amsterdam Conventions. It’s in the law.”
“Fuck,” van Liesvelt muttered, and took another swallow of his beer.
Cerise said, “I’m with Arabesque. We got to stick with it. What else can we do?”
“Go straight?” Helling murmured, with a curl of his lip.
Held laughed without humor, and Arabesque shook her head. Van Liesvelt said, “Not likely.”
Cerise allowed herself a sour smile, acknowledging the pun—the one thing they all had in common, besides the brainworm, was being gay—but it faded quickly. Going straight, moving out of the shadows into the bright lights of the legal world, the legal nets, would be difficult: they, none of them, had the corporate connections to become the sort of consultant that would let them go on paying their bills, and none of the other jobs that were open to freelancers were particularly challenging, or particularly well-paid. And corporate employment… Unconsciously her mouth twisted again as she tried to imagine herself, any of them, fitting into the polite, restrained world of the corporations. If any of them had been suited to the corporate life, he or she would already be part of it. The perks of a corporate job were too good, despite the risk of layoffs, to be passed up lightly.
The noise from the monitors changed, flared briefly, and then settled to a single voice. Cerise turned in surprise to see that the three monitors in her line of sight were now tuned to the same channel—so were they all, from the way Jerry Singlar’s voice coalesced out of the hubbub. Singlar was one of her least favorite anchors, an ex-cracker gone to the bright lights with a vengeance, a man who pretended to know and love the nets even as he proved he didn’t understand anything about them. She made a face, but did not look away. The others were looking at the monitors, too, not just at their table but all across the room, and the talk faded quickly, leaving only Singlar’s voice crackling out of the half-dozen speakers.
“—commentary. The override of the presidential veto of Evans-Tindale has brought consternation to the nets, a result not unexpected among those of us who have walked the nets for the past decade. Despite attempts at self-policing, the nets have long been a lawless place, a haven for a criminal minority as well as for the law- abiding majority. This situation has become impossible to tolerate, as the depredations of the so-called crackers, descendants of the criminal hackers of the twentieth century, have become the center of a criminal economy that rivals the Mafia in scope and enterprise.”
Arabesque made a rude noise, half laughter, half spitting, and Mason waved her to silence. Helling muttered something under his breath that sounded like, “I wish,” and Aledort laid a hand on his shoulder.
“This economy, which thrived only by the absence of law, has spawned a number of subcultures, all dangerous in their own right. But the most dangerous of these, the one that has caused the most talk and the one that the Evans-Tindale will do most to control, is that of the brainworm. These untested and potentially deadly implants—far more dangerous than the common dollie-slots, because the brainworm requires placing hardware in the brain itself—have contributed to the spread of the cracker culture by giving these hard-line criminals access to a new technology that is unbeatable by people equipped with only ordinary, and legal, implants.”
“Oh, bullshit,” Cerise said.
Held said, in the voice of a man making an old, and losing, argument, “The brainworm is legal in Europe, and there’s no more cracking from the Euronets. And people don’t die from installation there, either.”
“It figures,” Arabesque said, with suppressed fury, “it just figures they’d try to blame the worm.”
“It’s easier than writing intelligent laws,” Helling said.
“They have laws that make sense,” van Liesvelt said. “All they had to do was sign the Amsterdam Conventions…”
“Oh, shut up.” That was Johnny Winchester, weaving to his feet at the center of the room. He stumbled slightly, nearly overturning his table and tipping his beer so that it slopped over the edge of the glass to form a slowly spreading puddle on the tabletop. “Jerry’s right, if you people hadn’t brought in the worm, gone cracking with it, none of this would’ve happened.”
“Bullshit,” Cerise said again.
Arabesque said, “Dream on. They’ve been looking for an excuse to crack down for a hundred years.”
“Yeah, and you people gave it to them.” Winchester stared accusingly at them. Behind him, the spilled beer began to drip off the edge of his table.
“Fucking wireheads,” someone else said, from the darkness behind him.
“Hey, people,” Held said, voice dropping into his best street-doc register. “This hurts all of us.”
“And there are plenty of people cracking without the worm,” van Liesvelt said, not quite quietly enough.
There was an ambiguous murmur from the rest of the room, not agreement, not rejection, an undirected anger that made the back of Cerise’s neck prickle with sudden fear. She had heard that note before, on the streets when she was fifteen, running with the gangs, the sound of a group looking for a scapegoat; she had never thought to hear it here, among the people of the net, and never directed at herself. She looked around the room as though for the first time, seeing the majority of pale faces, male faces, sitting for the most part alone or in twos and threes: nothing like her own group, none of the easy realworld friendship. She had never before seen so many of the others together offline.
She looked back at the others, and saw Aledort leaning back a little, eyes narrowed. He had heard the same thing she had, and Aledort usually went armed.
Helling said, “Nobody’s going to wipe out cracking anyway. The multinationals pay too damn well.”
He had said the right thing, Cerise realized. There was a little ripple of scornful laughter, and, underneath it, the release of tension like a sigh. She took a deep breath, reached for her wine, and took a long drink without really tasting it. In the background, Singlar droned on, his voice alternately reproving and paternal by turns, but she determinedly ignored it, concentrating on the wine. She set the glass carefully back in its wet circle, wondering what she was going to do. Whatever else Evans-Tindale had done, it had broken the old community of the net, divided the old-style crackers, the ones who relied on the dollie-boxes, from the ones who used the brainworm— and was that the intention? she wondered suddenly. It would be more subtle than she would have expected from people who didn’t know the net—and conspiracy theories are usually wrong, she told herself sternly. The only certainty is that the nets have changed irrevocably. And Trouble is gone, my life changed with that as much as with the new law. The only question is, what to do now.
She took another deep breath, still looking at the glass of wine in its wet circle. Singlar’s voice rumbled on behind her, but she didn’t turn to look again at the monitors.
“—establish a new enforcement agency—something like the Texas Rangers, if you will, bringing law to the virtual frontier—”
Arabesque was right about one thing, though: it was going to be a lot harder to make a living cracking without ending up in a real jail. She would need new equipment, top-of-the-line machines to replace the old
