Cyberpunk (11 page)

Lear with couple sour-faced old guys in dark green uniforms. Man-

Mountain pinned me in a seat with a forearm across my chest until

Number 3 had my seatbelt latched. Shorty said something into his

walkie-talkie and slammed the hatch. The turbines lit up with a rising,

piercing, nail-in-the-ear whine. We rolled forward for a bit in jerks and

turns, then stopped.

Then acceleration like a big hand pushed me back deep into the seat

foam.

An hour later, two hours later, I don’t know: Too scared to try

talking (not that the guys in the green uniforms were answering,

anyway), flying through the night without a shadow of a word about

who these guys were or where they were taking me, the noise of the

engines like crazy dentist’s nanorobots drilling into my ears, I finally

fell into a nervous sleep. In my dream Dad was a fire-breathing cyborg

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dragon, and Mom kept politely asking him not to breath so
much
fire.

Georgie was there, blimping up and sprouting roots like an old potato,

and Lisa was slowly peeling off her tatterblouse. But I never got to see

what was underneath, ‘cause just then Rayno came crashing through the

front plate glass of Buddy’s with a whole squad of blackshirt Lucasfilm

cartoon Nazis ...

Somehow, though, I could never quite figure out whether he was

fighting them. Or
leading
them.

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©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke

Chapter 0/ 7

I woke up with an earache and numb hands. The numb hands part I

understood—soon’s I tried to stretch and yawn, and felt the tight plastic

cuffs biting into my soft, skinny wrists—but the other thing remained a

puzzler.
Earache?
The little inference engine in my head did a quickie

cold-boot:

CONDITION: Eardrums hurt

/because/ cabin pressure is rising

/because/ plane is losing altitude

/and/ plane is still in controlled flight

THEREFORE: We’re landing! I snapped full awake and pressed

face against window, looking for landmarks. It was a murky pastel false

dawn down there, and that made it hard to tell.

Meantime, the earache was getting fierce. I tried to swallow and pop

my ears, but my mouth was too dry. Maybe I could ask the gestapo for a

dixie of water? I scanned the two sitting up at the front of the cabin and

scratched the idea. From the crisp, serious look of their dark green

uniforms I guessed we weren’t going to Computer Camp.

So where
were
we going? I got a dry swallow down and the earache

backed off some, but I was still having trouble thinking clear. Cold,

tired, thirsty: the Starfire in my inside pocket digging into my belly like

a little plastic brick, my headchips seriously garbaged by that whole

scene outside Buddy’s. Just what the Hell had
happened
?

My hypothesis generator kicked into high gear and started to spin

out rough scenarios in my mind. Game #1: Rayno Turns Rat. He was

pissed at me, yeah, that was it. Rayno was
seriously
pissed at me, and

wanted to burn me truly bad, all because of old man Hansen’s dumb

stunt with the Honeywell. But Rayno was scared of me, too, ‘cause he

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knew how good I was, so he’d gone straight to preemptive nuclear. The

meeting at Buddy’s was all just a ploy, a smokescreen so I’d be looking

the other way when he set me up for—

For who? Nah, didn’t click; cooperating with authority—
any

authority—wasn’t Rayno’s style. Granted, he had motivation, and the

circumstantials were there. But if Rayno’d wanted to teach me a lesson,

he would’ve done something with a little more class, right?

Right?

The more I processed, the more that unanswered last question made

my stomach churn. So I scratched the first scenario and popped the next

one off my stack. Game #2: Paranoia. What if I was even better than I

thought? What if, pure accidental, my hacking around CityNet had

stirred up some real heavy attention —say, FBI, CIA, or the Cult of

Cthulhu or something? And now I was being disappeared to a secret

Army gulag where they were going to surgically remove my brain? And

I was going to spend the rest of my life as a mess of loose eyeballs and

brain tissue floating around in a big glass vat?

Oh,
cool
! I got a
great
twist in the gut from this one, ‘cause it was so

neat and total Krueger awful, but then the reality dampers slammed

down. Come on, Mikey, the government? Get serious. We’re talking

about people who couldn’t even find the Libyan Hacker Spies, and they

had an office listed in the Washington D.C. phone directory. No way the

government cybercops could’ve figured out what I was doing, much less

caught me doing it. Unless, of course, Georgie’s old man...

I looked around the plane again, scanned the nazis in the flat hats

and green sportcoats. Nah, didn’t checksum. What I’d done was break

CityNet rules. CityNet Admin would have sent city cops to pick me up,

and they would have kept me in town. Whoever was controlling this

game was into
serious
overkill.

Which logical chained to, Game #3: Dad’s Revenge. Okay, the

uniforms were rented. The lear was a Fuji-DynaRand company jet. This

was all some overblown scam Dad had cooked up; they were going to

fly me around for a while and scare the bejeezus out of me, then land

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right back where we started, and I’d be so relieved to be back I’d kiss

the ground and be the loyal and grateful son of House Harris

forevermore. Yeah, this was the sort of thing Dad would cook up. I

decided I might even let him think it’d worked, for a while.

Then a nervous voice in the back of my headspace started nagging

me, saying, “What if you’re wrong? What if this is really Game #4: Dad

Finally Pulls the Plug On Mikey?”

I argued the voice down. I mean, Dad couldn’t really be that pissed,

could he? I’d backed up all his files. It wasn’t like I’d truly
hurt
him or

nothing. Pressing nose against window again, I tried one more time to

get a confirm on where I was.

Bad news. My hometown is built in a valley. There’s a river, flows

right through the middle of it.

The place we were landing was built on a bay.

#

When the spinning in my head slowed up, I started to whip together

a program. Okay, somebody—didn’t matter who, I could verify the
who

part later—somebody had made me the site of a soon-to-be major-league

dump. This had me upset some and scared a lot, but most of all it made

me mad. I was gonna have to set up some maximum heavy duty

revenge, once I got out of this mess. Once I got out, I’d...

But first, I needed to crash the program in a truly bad way.

After processing some, I decided the best path was to assume that

everything I saw from here on was true/true. If it turned out this
was

some kind of mindgame Dad was playing with me, it’d still be worth

crashing out. I flashed for a mo on how Dad would squirm and sweat

while he was trying to explain to Mom how he’d lost her baby in some

strange city, and let out half a smile. Little Mikey Harris was declaring

war, and it made him feel a
lot
better.

So, next step? Orientation. I looked out the window again, tried to

make a best guess at where we were landing. The light was getting

better; the bay, I flagged, was more long and narrow that it’d looked at

first. It opened out to the sea at the far right end. We banked around for a

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turn, and I saw snowcapped mountains off in the distance.

For a nano I flashed on the time Martin’d shown me a geography

database some company was using to demo an artificial stupidity

program, and I wished I’d bothered to pirate it like he’d asked me to.

This was the
exact
sort of thing it was designed for. If only I had it in my

Starfire and my hands weren’t cuffed, I could—but never mind, I didn’t

and they were, so I couldn’t.

Still, I have some pretty fair smarts in my unaugmented head. This

was a rudimentary adventure problem, right?

The sun was rising behind us. It wasn’t easy with the cuffs on, but I

checked my watch. An0/ 8:17:40/ sunrise, in June? Okay, we were three

hours behind my hometown, which put us somewhere on the west coast.

We were landing at a seaport on a long, narrow bay, near some snowy

mountains, on the west coast. Nowhere came to mind immediate, so I

started to commit some serious brains to the problem. As we banked

around for our final approach I spotted SEATTLE painted on the roof of

a bowling alley and that saved me a lot of work.

Okay, next step was to spec out an escape routine. My first idea was

to wait until they took me inside the terminal building, then kick

someone in the kneecap and start shouting, “Help! They’re gonna make

me a homo!” Gay bashing was a popular team sport again, so with any

luck at all my keepers’d be so busy fighting off the Real Men they

wouldn’t be able to hang onto me. I’d wriggle away clean, zip over to a

McRefuge, tell ‘em I was an abused runaway. Tell ‘em my old man

liked to butter my buns, tell ‘em these guys were part of a nationwide

ring of ...

No good. I’d wind up doing three months’ observation in the Social

Disease lockup, and if I lived through that they’d hand me over to some

bleedyheart social worker. I’d almost rather give in to Dad.

I popped the next idea off the stack. Seattle’s a big town. It was sure

to have a CityNet, and a cyberpunk scene. I was zeroed out for cash or

plastic, but I did have my Starfire. If I could get loose for two minutes

and find an open node—somewhere in this airport there had to be an

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open node—I could jack in, make some local contacts, and burn in a

new set of friends
fast.
One of them’d reroute a smartcab for me; I’d get

out of the airport and get lost in the city, totally. Then, when I was sure

I’d shaken off the gestapo, I’d log onto NationNet and zap a fax to

Rayno. Rayno’d know what to do. He’d figure out a way to get me

home.

Assuming, of course, that he wasn’t the one who’d put me here in