Authors: Bruce Bethke
to sleep; he’d shut it down
cold
. I groped around the sides of the case
until I found the power switch, flipped it.
Nothing happened.
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©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke
I traced the power cable back to the surge protector. It claimed to be
working, but I hit the breaker reset anyway. The LEDs flickered; in a
little plastic voice the surge protector said, “Working.” I climbed out
from under the table and checked Dad’s computer again. It was still
dead. But this time I noticed the empty fuse holder sitting in the
paperclip cup.
Took me about fifteen minutes to plod down to the basement, dig
out a replacement fuse, install it. When I got done and hit the power
switch, though, I was rewarded with a real satisfying flicker-flash of
LEDs, a pleasant whir of cooling fan, a ratchety noise from the optical
drive, and—
FDIX ERR: 01FF AA00 0000 DEV NOT MTD
The
hell?
Dad couldn’t have. He wouldn’t have. I fumbled with the
latch on the drive door ‘til I remembered how to spring it. The optical
media slot was empty.
Dad
had
. He’d secured his computer in the most crude, effective
way; taken the mass storage disk right out. And I knew Dad well enough
to bet my soul that that laser disk was sitting safe, secure, and totally
untouchable in his briefcase. Ninety-nine percent probable I could turn
the den upside down and
shake
it and still never find that disk.
Still, I did the search. I had to. Then, when the missing laser disk
proved truly missing, I shut everything off, crawled back under the table,
and unscrewed the power fuse. No point in advertising that I’d been
messing with Dad’s machine—if for no other reason than I didn’t want
him to know he’d beat me so easy. I took one last careful look around,
made sure that everything was back exact where I’d found it. I was just
stepping out of the den and easing the door shut when the voicephone in
the kitchen started chirping.
Whoever it was, they hung up before I could get to it and answer.
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©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke
Chapter 0/ 6
The rest of the morning ran about the same. I wasted another half
hour or so just rattling around downstairs, channel surfing on the TV and
trying to find something interesting to do. But there was nothing on the
tube worth the effort of watching and the weather outside had changed
from cloudy, cool and misty to cloudy, hot and muggy. So I cycled
through a few more ideas, all of which went flat almost soon’s I thought
of them, then punctured another pouch of GrapeOla Cola and trudged
back upstairs. The Gyoja Gerbil was sitting there waiting for me there
with a whole new batch of CityNet mail.
Correction: CityNet
junk
mail. Still no fallout from CityNet Admin
after yesterday’s little fun, good; still no sign of life from either Georgie
or Rayno, bad. I skimmed the rest of my mail, trashed it all, then
reopened the folder I’d packed with messages from the Battle of
Peshawar SIG and settled down for some serious reading.
Even that went poor, though. Nothing worthwhile in the SIG mail;
no playing hints, no character sets, no software hacks to let me change
the game params. Just a whole lot of invites to join network gaming
groups and, while I truly love to play Peshawar single-user, I absolute
hate to play it group.
Why? Well, it’s like this.
Battle of Peshawar
is a historical roleplaying
game, set in central Asia during the Breakup Wars. Only it’s
really more like about six different games, depending on the role you
choose. Like you can play the MIG pilot or the tank commander, and
then it’s a real neat arcade-style shoot’em up where you go around
blasting things into slag until you either run out of fuel, run out of
ammo, or run into something that blows
you
to insignificant bits.
Which, by the way, you always do.
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After arcade-level, the stakes go up. You can play the company or
division commander, and start looking more at the map and worrying
about things like advance and supply lines. Or you can play the Army
Group commander, in which case you have to really trust your division
commanders and start thinking about things like interservice
coordination and keeping comm with Moscow open. You can even play
the big guy in Moscow and sweat over the whole geopolitical business,
like for example if your tanks push too far into northern India the Poles
might try to retake Byelorussia again, or the ChiComms might come
busting out of Sinkiang and flatten Alma-Ata.
And that’s the whole problem with playing Peshawar on net. When I
play single-user, I can be
anybody
. The computer plays all the other
parts, competent, no surprises, and
I
am the random factor. If it’s going
bad, I can go nuclear whenever I feel like quitting. If it’s going good, I
can keep saving game a mo before total death and keep the stalemate
running almost forever.
When I play on net—at least, when I play with any of the good net
groups, the ones that keep player stats offline where I can’t fix my
numbers—little Mikey Harris is just one more minor factor who most
times ends up playing a tank platoon. Maybe if I’m real lucky I’ll get
command of an armored company, but in net Peshawar, at least, it seems
the primary job at my level is to get killed carrying out stupid orders
from higher up. Once—
once
, I racked up enough points to make general
in the Central Asia Army Group, only to have the klutz running the
Turkestani Group open up a hot western front with Iran.
Ten moves later the Iranians had rolled clear up to Gur’yev, taken
all the Caspian Sea oil reserves, and cut both the Krasnovodsk and
Aral’sk railroads. Leaving my armored companies fifty kilometers
outside of Peshawar with full magazines and absolute bone dry fuel
tanks. Sometimes I think the whole point of network role-playing
Peshawar is to keep the young players from getting enough experience
points to steal the
good
roles from the old clods who run the game.
Not unlike school, at that.
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By noon I’d bounced around CityNet enough to be bored. I’d hit all
the bulletin boards I felt like hitting; nothing caught my interest. I’d tried
my hand at a new hack—the University Medical Center database. There
are four universal passwords that are the mark of truly sloppy system
security: TEST, ADMIN, XYZZY, and the one that cracked me into
MedBase, KEN SENT ME. That’s when I logged out. Anything that
easy to hack obvious wasn’t worth the effort to do it. For lunch I went
downstairs and zapped a couple krillburgers and some Tater Crispins.
The voicephone rang while I was nuking the foodlike products; this time
I caught it on the third chirp, but whoever it was, they hung up soon as I
said, “Hi.”
Oh, well. Maybe some phonepunk’d figured out a new way to
bypass our prank call interceptor. I shrugged, hit the disconnect button.
Then decided, as long as I had the phone in my hand, I might as well call
Mom and Dad and see if they were talking to me yet. Wiping the tater
grease off my fingers and the handset, I carried the cordless over to the
table and punched in the direct number for Fuji-DynaRand’s call-routing
system.
Mom and Dad both work for Fuji-DynaRand, y’see; same building
complex, in fact. They ride to work separate ‘cause Dad, being a Fuku
Shacho, gets a private company smartcab, while Mom, being just an
Administrative Facilitator (or is it Facilities Administrator?), has to take
the company trampool. Least that’s the way Mom explains it, and she
seems to think it makes sense. The way Mom also explains it, she used
to be Dad’s Personal Facilitator, but after he divorced his first wife to
marry her she had to transfer to a different division. All of which, I
guess, has something to do with why Dad keeps insisting that that
breathy-voiced “Faun” who intercepts his phone calls is just a sim’d
figment of the voicemail system.
If she is, she’s the closest thing to an AI I’ve ever run into.
Whenever I ask Dad about that he just laughs and says she has no true
intelligence—then Mom scowls at him and says she can believe that—
but I keep wanting to try a Turing test on Faun all the same. ‘Course, if
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she is human, all that’ll prove is that she’s an airhead.
But anyway, all my calls to Dad’s line got the instant route to Faun
again, which wasn’t much of a surprise knowing Dad can program his
phone to lateral off calls from certain numbers. When I couldn’t get
through to Mom, though, that was kind of an eye-opener. I initiated a
hope that maybe they were doing a nice lunch together and decided to
bop out to the porch and check up on Muffy.
I swear, when I lifted its tail to check the charger prong, the thing
growled
at me.
#
After lunch, I at last hit on a worthwhile project. Splicing together a
working lightpipe from what was left of the Death Cannon fiber, I
patched the Starfire direct into MoJo and commenced with the big
download. All my pirate commware; all my favorite tricks and treats
programs. Most of Peshawar, though I had to scratch the arcade mode
‘cause the graphics looked truly terrible on that waferscreen. The
Meghan Gianelli freezeframes looked truly terrible, too, all verticalcompressed
and bloaty, but I managed to find memory space for my four
favorites anyway.
Around 2:00, I heard a heavy throbbing outside and took a look out
my bedroom window. It was just some big ugly green privatecar with
blackfilm windows cruising down the street, slow; a diesel, from the
sound of it. Which struck me as odd: we don’t get many petrol-burners
this far off the expresswa—
Jesus H. Christ! A big dark car cruising by slow? What the Hell
have I stirred up, the KGB? The IRS?
Heart thumping hard, back against
the wall, I cautious edged up to the window and peeked out again.
The car was gone, down the block, around the corner. Laughing
silent at myself for being such a total paranoid, I went back to the big
download.
Around 3:30, the voicephone started chirping again. By this time it’d
gone past starting to get and become full adult phase annoying, so I tried
to say to Hell with it and let it ring. But whoever was on the line let it go
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on, and on, and
on
, until at last I decided to play the chump and go for it
one last time. I checked to make sure the process I was running would be
okay by itself, trudged out to the hall, picked up the voicephone, and
cranked up my best guttural surl. “
Yeah?
”