Greener Pastures was in Chinatown, Fede was disappointed to discover. The stink of real chickens and MSG-derived carbonated sodas filled the air, undercut with the sweet-salty reek of the grey water sewer systems set not-far-enough under the street drains. Chinatown had been targeted for unproven water recycling programs like a lot of the cheaper burbs, sold a bill of goods for plant ponds under their streets to separate them from the rest of the city's water supply, make them self-sustaining. Now the burb sat on the biggest cesspool in North America and paid a premium for showering and drinking water to boot.
A group of Chinese boys came up the street past him as he walked, their rainbow mowhawks filling the road in a tight phalanx. As they got closer he saw that they were pushing a heavily mod'd scooter. It had aftermarket plastic molding all over it, little logos and flashing product names stenciled in carefully ordered lines over every inch of its carbon-fiber frame. There was a fairing on it, Fed noticed disbelievingly. A stylish wind fairing on a device that could go twenty miles an hour.
A few minutes later he had followed the little blinking cursor in his eye to a tight alley off the main shopping street. The end of the alley had a car garage in it, two three foot long red plastic dragons framing the door. As Fede entered the alley the doors opened and a battered mini came roaring out at him, the cold glare of a thousand white LEDs suddenly blazing from the headlights that unfolded from its blunt nose. Fede skipped backwards and out of the way, and as the mini slowed to join the foot traffic he noticed that the alley was covered with some sort of plastic dome, and that the dome had some sort of mold on it. He pushed his goggles back as he walked into the alley, neck straining to make out the green clouds that seemed to be floating motionless above him.
"Algae tanks" a female voice informed him. "The building's owners skim off the fuel cells from the cars to feed them. But we like it for the color."
Fede lowered his head to see a Chinese girl standing against a doorway to his left, the bitter smell of burning wood riding the grey smoke wisping out of her hand. She wore olive cargo pants and imitation Russian combat boots, topped with a cropped brown shooting sweater. The rifle patch on her right shoulder had been carefully embroidered with softly glowing white thread. She was long and thin with an animal look, and her smooth belly was a caramel color that looked pleasantly edible in the green light from the algae tank overhead.
She stuck the stub of a thin hand-roll into her mouth and tightened her short pigtails. Her big eyes were heavily circled with black eye shadow, the pupils thick pools you could fall into, braer tar he'd never come back from. Fede realized he was staring. She was beautiful.
The girl took the cigarette out of her mouth and puckered her lips at Fed; let a ragged stream of smoke tumble out at him. She tossed the butt on the ground, and as she stamped out the ashes and turned to tug open the doorway Fede saw a sign overhead. "Greener Pastures," it read.
Fede pulled his goggles off his forehead and down around his neck, chewing his lip before deciding to follow the girl inside. The door was heavy, probably metal core for security, and beyond it was a short dark entranceway of stained, gray-painted cement. Matching grey steps met the edge of the real wooden floor beyond, otherwise deliriously expensive real wood from real trees scarred and dented and stained into sub-plastic value. This place was old.
Just beyond the steps sat a huge metal dentists' chair, an antique in chrome and black plastic barely containing the swollen folds of an enormously fat man. He was getting a tattoo etched on his bare pink belly. The artist, a tall, intensely black-skinned man, glanced once at Fede over the girl's shoulder as she squeezed by. The man's head was a mass of steel-capped nubs, a style Fede had heard described in newsgroups but never seen.
In the background, a twangy Thai band was playing on tinny speakers. It was a German metal song Fede had heard on the streaming music channels he listened to while coding, something that had caught the music world's ear this week. It was an angry, growling song, but the way the Thais played it the metal seemed lollipop sweet. Fede liked it. There was something about the way tonal languages interpreted guttural Germanic ones that sounded more… authentic.
He stepped onto the stairs and past the black man. He was arranging the naugahyde straps of the big silver tattooing machine over the fat man's stomach. The fat man looked nervous and sad and excited, and he stank. Fede crept by, trying not to touch either of them. The girl was gone. The walls were lined with old soda- and snack-dispensers, those 6-foot high machines you used to put real coins into and which would pop out plastic packets of food and chilled drinks from their glass covered shelves. They were full of tattooing and bodmod equipment now, and a huge assortment of ink jars filled one marked "Fanta." The place reeked of fluorochlorocarbons and bleach.
At the end of a room a hugely solid metal desk filled almost its entire width, and on the desk was a massive, ancient waldo. A big black helmet was attached to the waldo by a fat data cable, and someone had stuck a Hello Kitty logo in bright pink right on the forehead. As Fede got closer, watching the man wearing the helmet wave thick rubber sensor gloves in the empty air, he got the eerie realization that he knew him, that this guy behind the shiny black plastic must be his brother, and that his brother was miles and miles away in a little tiny space between atoms or cells or Swedish avatars or something, thinking about anything, anything but here.
"Hey, Fed" came a muffled voice from under the helmet. "Be with you in a minute."
Tony pulled off the helmet and smiled at Fed, his crooked grin bringing back 16 years of brotherhood all in a rush.
"What's up, bro?" he asked. Before Fede could answer he called out to the black man running the tattoo machine, "Hey Mil, this here's my brother! Came all the way down from the house-parks to see me."
"'Come down here to stare at Cass's ass is what he did" said Mil without turning around. He punched a button on the control box sitting next to the fat man. The machine began to hum, and the fat man groaned.
Tony steepled his fingers, his hands still encased in the thick waldo gloves. He watched Fede for a moment. Fede watched back. What do you say to your estranged brother after two years of nothing?
"Why'd you leave, Tony?" he asked, the words out of his mouth before his mind had a chance to think about them.
Tony's smiled widened. "Tonx" he said.
"What?"
"Tonx. Call me Tonx. Tony died a long time ago. I'm Tonx now. Changed the name when I left MIT."
"'Tonx'?" asked Fed, "Why Tonx?"
Tony's smile deepened. "Don't remember? When I was a kid I could never get the hang of writing a 'y'. I always wrote it as an 'x'. Teachers used to give me hell, for a while. Called me 'Tonx' to make fun of me, to try to shame me into playing by the rules. So I did, for while. Now I don't. So… Tonx."
Fede forced a laugh, his chuckle sounding fake even to his own ears. "That's cool, Tony - Tonx. That's cool."
Tonx's smile widened and he pushed a strand of greasy black hair behind one ear, a thick malachite talon arching from the lobe. He jumped out of the chair and grabbed a big black thermoelectric hoody off its back. Pulling it over his sleeveless white tee he shuffled by the edge of the scratched metal desk.
"Let's get some lunch," he said to Fed, "we've got some catching up to do."
Two hours later Fede was full of beer and stir-fry, picking little crunchy bits of fried tofu out of his teeth with the splintered remains of his disposable chopstick. He was regaling Tony - Tonx, he reminded himself - with tales of his 'sploits, explaining some of the new code he was seeing in the newsgroups these days, how cool it all was. The beer made his head swim. He'd only been drunk a few times and hadn't liked it, but his brother had ordered for them and he had been afraid of looking stupid. Tonx was listening to everything he said with the same rapt attention Fede remembered, nodding his head as he shoveled down his stir-fry.
"So then I got the idea of forcing the compile on the captured machine. I mean, where better? You're already leeching cycles off them for the scans and port postings and everything else. Everybody's got a connection to at least one or two peer-to-peer networks, and this way you can anonymously pull down the libraries you need. It adds additional routes to the data vectors they have to backtrack, and allows you to control the programming by modularizing it."
"But doesn't your initial access point have to stay open?" asked Tonx.
"No. That's the beauty of it. The compile is set to use the same memory space as the access logs. So the initial compile erases your tracks right from the start, and uses the same execution levels as your logging daemons. It reads like a port scan being logged, or firewall intrusion attempt by some clueless newbie."
"Clever" conceded Tonx. "Very clever." He belched and leaned back, folding his hands over his belly. He looked over Fed's shoulder into the middle distance and ran his tongue over his teeth, working loose a piece of sweet-n-sour pork. "Good to see you've been keeping busy."
"Busy?" asked Fed, "It's the hottest fucking virus that's ever hit the 'Nets, and I've almost completely reverse engineered it. That's more than busy, man."
Tonx put his plastic sandals on the edge of the table and wiggled his toes for a moment. "Got to get rid of these babies," he muttered to himself. He looked up at Fed, and shrugged.
"What does that mean?" asked Fed.
"What about your regular coursework?" Tonx asked.
"Oh. That's fine. It's a hassle, learning all the legacy shit, is all. I don't see the point if you're not going to use any of it. Nobody these days does their own garbage collection, and any modern language can handle all the pointer stuff for you."
"Seems kind of counterproductive spending all your free time reverse engineering viruses if what you're really after is getting a spot in a corp" said Tonx. "I mean, doesn't security development have more to do with prevention than attack?"
"That's stupid," said Fed. "Of course you have to understand the virus-writing side."
"So… ?" Tonx drawled, leaving the question hanging in the air.
Fede realized he was sitting on the edge of his chair, one elbow in a nest of napkins filthy with stir-fry and soy sauce. He jerked his arm back and slid fully onto his chair.
Tony had taught him to code, gotten him hooked on the underground newsgroups and chat rooms using their Dad's pass codes to get around the "Parental control" lock filters that came with their school-issue laptops. That was back when his Dad was still around, or as close to around as he'd ever been. Tony had steered Fed through the basic 'Net protocols, started him on his first shell scripts, gotten him involved. It was because of Tony that Fede had developed any interest in coding at all, and although Tony had ended up going for biologicals he'd never, ever, stopped pushing Fede to produce the best, tightest, cleanest code he could. And now he was asking him why.
"What are you after, Tony?" he asked.
"Tonx, Fed. And I'm just asking if you're really enjoying what you're doing, where you're going."
Fede picked up a rumpled but clean napkin from the little bamboo basket on the table next to him and wiped off his elbow.
"Of course I am. I'm even getting into some of the undergrounds at the big schools. If I can finish reversing this virus I've got a contact that'll sponsor a full nym for me. I can start posting some of my questions without being marked as a noob."
"Huh" said Tonx. A group of asian schoolgirls in uniforms from a corporate-sponsored school swirled by, giggles and yells and the rapid pattern of their talk rising then dimming in the empty air of the shop. Suddenly Tonx stood up and flashed a paycard over the reader embedded in the table. "It's on me," he said.
They walked out of the shop through battered translucent plastic slats hanging from the doorway, out into the twilight. The sky was a rich, dark blue in the gaps between buildings, and a couple of lone clouds overhead took up the yellowed color from the city lights below.
Tonx stepped down onto the street and waved a hand. "Come on, I got to get back to the shop."
Fede zipped up his jacket and followed, his eyebrows pulling together as he watched the heels of Tonx's black converse knock-offs rise and fall in front of him. After a moment he jogged forward and caught up, dodging past a pair of old ladies carrying some dead leafy thing to walk next to his brother.
"Why'd you leave?" he asked again. "Why'd you leave MIT?"
Tonx unsealed a flap on the hem of his hoody and stroked the controls for a moment. Fiber optic threads started glowing around the inside of his hood, illuminating his face in a dim red light. He pushed back an errant lock of dark hair and leaned towards Fede as they walked. "Why'd I leave MIT?
"I left because great people aren't great because to their education, or the school they went to or the toys their parents or companies or curriculum buys them. I left because people become great by doing what they love to do."
He leaned away from Fed, the red light fading as the heating elements in his hoody ramped up to full capacity.
"I love biotech, man, not school."
Fede snorted, loudly. "That's fucking stupid," he said. "You couldn't get better access to biotech than at MIT."
Tonx stopped and placed his hand on an aluminum push panel set into a door on the side of a building. The soft hum of machinery cut through the street noise and the door clicked, then shuddered.
"Okay" he said. He looked thoughtful for a moment. "How's this then: I left because I didn't need to be there anymore to do what I wanted. To achieve what I wanted to achieve."
He looked away from Fed, off down the street, his face hidden in the shadow of his hoody.
"My goals changed," he said.
He pushed into the crumbling hallway beyond, yellowed fluorescents flickering to life through metal gratings overhead.
"You coming?" he asked.