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  "All right. Go ahead" he said. A few words came through the comm, a quiet buzz against the background of the city.

  "Yes. Of course. Right away." he said, and abruptly hung up the phone. He shoved it into his coat and stood still for a moment, his hand resting against the doorway. Then he fumbled in his jacket for a cigarette, dropped his matches and knelt suddenly to retrieve them, jerked a match from the box. He paused for a moment as the match came to life, lit his cigarette against the plume of the flame, inhaled. Poulpe's eyes focused on his fingers holding the dead match. After a moment the trembling stopped. Poulpe nodded approvingly as his fingers moved smoothly to put the matchbook back in his pocket, and finished his cigarette.

  A short time later Poulpe sat quietly in his living room, staring out over the rooftops at the grey sky beyond. His gear was spread our in front of him, the needle resting tip-up, glistening. This was not proper; Poulpe never took his gear out of the windowless bathroom. But things were not as they should be.

  For three years Poulpe had been working for his sponsor, as arranged, pursuing an elusive yet - he was certain - achievable goal. He had estimated three to five years to reach that goal, but his sponsor had apparently decided to exercise a termination clause in their agreement. Poulpe had not yet reached the goals he had been told to reach, despite making great progress. He knew that his sponsor had found him profitable, albeit in a limited way. His research was of narrow scope; it was not easily applied in marketable ways. Not at present.

  Poulpe's work was expensive. His equipment was top-of-the-line. The samples he purchased from the exotic fish stores were of extremely limited quantity, and hence, very expensive. His habits, also, cost a great deal, despite being the sole reason he was able to work as he did. His fingertip traced the bruised flesh around the Teflon sleeve embedded in the crook of his arm.

  Once, a long time ago, Poulpe had been widely recognized as brilliant. A leader in his field. Later, he was recognized as being somewhat misguided, and then, as very valuable when kept under the right conditions. Now he was here, at the end of that long, bright arc, and knew that a change must be made. Either Poulpe produced, or that arc died.

  Poulpe was scared. He did not want that arc to die.

  He found his fingers preparing another hit of a very expensive and somewhat exclusive combination of drugs. It was his third in as many hours, and yet the clarity he needed had still not developed. He knew he could not do much more without losing a whole day, a day gone to the white crystalline light that would seep through the edges of his thinking until there were no more thoughts, only an aching hot understanding. He couldn't afford that. He wouldn't see his supplier for another week, and this would leave him without for three days. He couldn't not have it for three days.

  He left the hit on the table, put on his coat and walked outside. He lit a cigarette and walked down the market street and across town to the left bank of the Seine. The artist booths were there, cheap sketches by pseudo-talented students and perennial tourist leeches alike, old books, garage-sale dolls, prints from Taiwan of famed French watercolors. Off-color impressionist paintings to be crumpled on flights home, to be taken out and passed around through drink-stained fingers, "I bought this in Paris!" they would say, no-one knowing that the original artist had died of hunger or leprosy or been put to death for sodomy. "I bought this in Paris" they would say, their Euros falling through the mill of the legend of the left bank of the Seine.

  Poulpe followed the river south until he found an American selling sunglasses. The tiny stall had all manner of out-of-fashion glasses available, some more expensive than others. He paid the price of dinner for two at any fine restaurant in Paris and collected the sunglasses and a little white cigarette. He crossed the street to the small cafe there; the Mucha Cafe. He sat outside despite the cold, admiring the crowd gathered there. The view was fine. He lit his cigarette, and put on the sunglasses.

  The lasers in the glasses were a shock after using his headset for so long; they were not tuned to his particular corneal pattern and took much longer than he felt was necessary to map the back of his eyeballs. His eyes watered and he choked briefly on the harsh smoke as nausea chewed at his belly. Suddenly the sounds of the crowd around him cracked into focus; the cool touch of a tear on his cheek felt reassuring, and the cold seeping through his collar rolled sweetly across his neck. The drugs in the cigarette had kicked in. Just then a prompt appeared floating over the Seine, asking for a channel. A timer flickered into view superimposed over the table next to him, a bright pink character indicating the minutes left before his encrypted wireless connection would cease to exist. Given the lag in the timer's appearance Poulpe guessed the entire process was being tunneled out to some third-world organization.

  Poulpe reclined into his chair. He smiled broadly, and launched an email client. He began to write.

  Chapter 8

  Fede went home just before Tonx started practice. He caught the train out of downtown and made it to the housing park just as the last bus rolled out. No one was in. His Mom had left a voice memo on the fridge's comp that she was out with Bark, that he was treating her to a night on the town. He took a pizza out of the freezer, realized the ancient appliance was filthy. Knew that it had always been filthy. Once his pizza was hot he took it from the microwave and, as an afterthought, grabbed a beer from the back of the fridge. The beginning of the day seemed far away, a distant history as he rolled down the hall from the kitchen to his room.

  He fell into his chair and swiveled around. The place seemed suddenly tiny, childish. Charts of old scripting languages were tacked to the wall, yellow stickies with IP addresses for long-gone servers peppering their edges. His desk lamp leaned crooked against one corner, its spring broken, hinges splinted with duct tape. The stacks of books on the edge of his desk sat leaden, unopenable. They were all entrance exam aids. All of them.

  Fede finished his pizza and clicked off the lamp. He crawled up onto the top bunk and lay staring at the ceiling. The Beowulf cluster in the bunk below hummed quietly, the tiny red and yellow LEDs casting dim shadows against the wall across from him. Fed sighed gently and sat up before pulling off his legs. He took a jar of silicone lube from a crack between the mattress and the bed and applied it to his prosthetics' vulnerable joints, his fingers working deftly in the dark. When he was done he set them aside and massaged a tube of gel over his stumps, kneading the thickened tissue there back into pliability. There was nothing but the sound of his breathing, the hum of the fans in the machines beneath him.

  Tonx's idea was amazing, was the coolest bio hack he'd ever heard of, and Fede wanted in on it. He knew he could pull together a virus that could get them the computing power they needed, knew it like a cold hard lump inside his head. A certainty that this chance was his.

  And right there beside it was the fear; if he took this on he'd be out of school, dropped off his fast track to the big schools like a kitten from a car on the interstate. Bailing out for no good reason would be noted, his sudden absence ascribed to drugs use or, even worse, an inability to cope with the stress. Even if he came back he'd have to struggle against it.

  Fede realized he was breathing fast, stopped and pulled down some deep breaths.

  He could always claim medical problems. Say he had a growth spurt that landed him in a hospital for a while doing physical therapy to learn new legs. It had happened before and he'd always come right back.

  But this was different, he knew. They would be watching more closely, this time. But still…

  Fede finished rubbing gel into his stumps and lay back, pulling his goggles down over his eyes. Notes filled his vision, sketches of a virus that would take the DNA map Tonx was to find from some ectomorph and check it against a map of the human brain. They'd decided to go for broke; if it worked they would need some serious value to sell off the results, and knowing how to make a dog smart wasn't going to cut it. Not when you'd taken over China to find out how. Not when you'd virused the world.
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  Fede smiled, almost giggled. He pulled himself up on his elbows and flipped his goggles up, staring into the dark. In the dim light the stacks of books, the piles of notes on exams and dry half-dead languages, the trash from the last few years of his life crouched chaotically on his desk. He fell back onto the bed and laughed before yanking the goggles back on, the rubber straps catching the hairs on the back of his neck.

  He was just starting to put together some basic processing modules when they chimed, lightly. It took a minute for Fede to realize what it was, the reaching fingers of the sound pawing at his cerebellum, pulling him back from the program. He fumbled to open the session, watched the chat client come up:

  % What up, ltlman?

  $<> Working. You get something?

  % We got lucky.

  % This channel secure?

  $<> Should B. BRB, let me C yr con.

  % Ok, I use,..<@$..$>>>>>>

  Fed's hands flew over the chord as he rerouted their session through several secure servers, set up a one-time certificate to use, and re-initialized. Garbage characters flew across his retinas, randomness flooding his buffers to throw off any listeners. Their chat session connected again:

  <$CONNECTION RE-ESTABLISHED>

  $<> Looks good.

  % OK. Listen. I have a contact in France. High-end corp doing undrgrnd work on big gambit. Just got ordered to dump three years of work because he wasn't meeting their bottom line. Was told to start working on dead boring plastic-eating bacteria. Wants to sell out and get out. Will give up whole genome map for Pacific Octopus in exchange for our getting him out.

  $<> Octopus is good?

  % Highly endomorphic. Vry vry smrt; not well understood, but definitely fits. French contact has mapped and used tissue >2 yrs will supply working notes also.

  $<> LOL Fuckyah! Perfect.

  % He may know how to stop cancer's detection using squid's endomorphic tissue w/stem cell sequence; he pioneered the approach. Has same prob. as us - can't compute match for final recombinant.

  $<> Solve both prob at once. Neat.

  % We'd be stealing him from a major corp; they've got armed forces. We will have to produce fast to publicize results before they find him.

  Fede felt something catch in his throat. His eyes unfocused. Somewhere, millimeters from his cornea, tiny vibrating pieces of glass tried to force the image of a blinking cursor onto the backs of his eyeballs. This was not what they had talked about. This was dangerous, suddenly. But if they pulled this off, Fed realized, they would own patentable rights on a way to increase human intelligence. The owners of this technology would become more than human. The world would change.

  Fede sucked in a breath, hard. His heart hammered in his ears. He blinked, saw Tonx had written more:

  % Can you do it in 2 wks?

  % I guess this means no school 4 U. 8-)

  The cursor blinked in Fed's eye. Something inside him tightened, hardened, released. He could do this. He would do this.

  $<> 2 wks no prob w/out sleep.

  % Excellent. It'd be better if you were local - can you move in over here?

  The Beowulf cluster hummed beneath him, the subtle vibration an indication it had started its nightly log cleanup routines. The musty smell from the old tech in the room sat heavy in Fed's nostrils. The apartment he had known all his life sprawled still around him, lifeless. He was done here, he realized suddenly. Despite all his work there wasn't anything for him to stay for.

  $<> OK.

  % Come over tomorrow. Room will B tight; Poulpe wants 2 vst.

  $<> Poulpe?

  % Poulpe is contact; means octopus in French.

  $ He needs backdoor 2 undrgrnd tight & now. We'll disappear him. You do the data.

  $<> What r rsks?

  % LOL. many. No pain no gain, ltlman. wlcm 2 undrgrnd.

  Fede cancelled the trace; he'd already followed it when Tonx started the call. His senses filled the room, the size of this choice a weight heavy on his chest. There was no cooler task than this; it made dissecting public viruses look like a crossword puzzle. But it was dangerous. Corporate extractions were no joke. And he'd be set back a semester, easy, if he ever made it back to school at all.

  He laughed, nervous, realized that a semester of school was the least of his worries, now.

  It was a long time until he slept.

  Chapter 9

  Fede left a note on the fridge comp that he'd joined a study group for a couple months' intense prep work and would be gone a lot. Before he'd left the kitchen the fridge bonged at him and he saw a response from his Mom asking what it would cost. He keyed in that it was free in exchange for using branded materials, and shortly after she responded with an OK. That was all. Fede cleared the screen and stared at the smirking milk carton, the icon the manufacturer had chosen to represent its software. He felt sick.

  Walking back into the living room he pulled his army-navy surplus backpack over the shoulders of the hacked adjacket. Its pockets were full of cables, jacks, minidisks and various types of flash media. He was pretty sure that everything he was going to do would be software, but he didn't want to have to wait for a run to Radio Shack for lack of a cable. His bag was full, almost too full, but it still seemed strange to Fede that he was about to walk out of the room he'd spent most of his life in and didn't need more than two cubic feet of it. He'd wiped the cluster and pulled the cable so nobody could access it from the net. To Fed's eye the regular pulse of the cluster's LEDs seemed like a glaring omission, the lack of irregular flashing to indicate up/downlinks as startling as a flatline to a med student. Fede grimaced, shifted his weight. No one else would notice.

  He pushed a black knit cap down on his head, gothic print spelling out "Geek" in white lettering across his forehead. He walked out the door. As he went he flipped his goggles on and wobbled down the steps. Soon he was at the train station, then on his way downtown. The apartment grew distant; he thought of other things. Fede tracked the glyph on the little map in the corner of his vision automatically, his fingers clutching and spanning the chord as he exited the train. He was coding voraciously, line after line flowing through his fingers, precompiles whirring in the background as he pulled objects from predefined libraries, modified them, dropped them in the hopper for cross-compatibility checks. He was in the zone again, his feet finding the pavement automatically. As per Tonx's instructions he'd plotted a new route so he didn't come to the store the same way, and he followed the map overlay without thinking about it. His mind was consumed with the structure of the program he was writing, the delicate architectures of subprocesses hanging in his mind. At random intervals his chord squirted encrypted and compressed chunks of data to one of a series of secured servers according to predefined daemons he'd integrated into his development environment. Fede was zoned in, feeling the code. He flowed.

  He'd put on his backpack with both straps and his lungs emptied to vacuum when the backpack's handle was yanked backwards. His vision swam, his eyes suddenly unable to distinguish between the overlaid code and the street in front of him.

  "Pay me" a dull voice demanded. Fede looked up, the overlays fading as he focused beyond their reach. The rainbow mohawk decorating the skinny Asian youth in front of him vibrated slightly as he cocked his head at Fede and raised a thin, perforated eyebrow. Half a dozen black metal rods punctured its length, tiny OLEDs pulsing blue at their tips. Fede blinked, saw the street was mostly deserted, wondered if it had been when he'd walked into it.

  "I said pay me, man" repeated the boy. He'd had extensive muscle work done to his shoulders, but it hadn't taken in his arms. He looked as though someone had slid oversized sausages into his collarbones, huge slugs of muscle twitching under his skin. He forearms were spindly by comparison, a grotesque man-boy combination. He was wearing a muscle shirt and had thick tattoos scrawled across his biceps. The ink was mottled where the tissue had wrinkled up, the muscles there rejecting the treatment so obviously at odds with his genetics. Somebody behi
nd him said something in a language Fede didn't understand, and the boy laughed. Fede twisted and saw a couple Samoan-looking men standing behind him. They both sported various kinds of facial piercing and fat slabs of muscle work, their mowhawks looking like a child's party decoration as perched on daddy's pit bull. One of them held Fed's bag with a huge hand, smiled when Fede tried to squirm to see more of him. He twisted back, noticed that there were several more mohawk-sporting youths standing around him.

  "You want cash or credit?" the first guy asked, raising his other eyebrow as he imitated thousands of immigrant Asian workers in shops the world over, unconsciously mocking himself. Fed realized his mouth was open. He couldn't talk; all he could think of were the lines of code he'd been working on.

  One of Samoans swayed into view and gently lifted Fed's arms, carefully working the straps of his backpack off his shoulders. He smiled as he worked, ignoring Fed, and shortly after disappeared again.

  "Okay, good" said skinny. His shirt was too short and Fede noticed his belly button was an outy. It was disturbing, seeing that little lump of flesh protruding between his shirt bottom and the top of his pants.

  "Now give me the gogs and keys and we'll talk, okay? Have a nice talk."

  Fede tried to run.

  It was a bad idea. A dozen multicolored gang members grabbed hold of him and pulled him to the ground. Somebody kicked him in the stomach and he doubled over in a bright sticky flash of pain. In a moment he found himself zip-tied and on his face, his hands behind his head and his legs pulled up behind him, zip-tied to the straps on his wrists. He heaved for breath, gasped a mouthful of grit from the street as hands started running through his pockets.

  He'd just started breathing again when the hands slowed, then stopped. He became aware of a quiet, rapid conversation in a language he didn't understand taking place just beyond his field of vision. The shiny black toe-caps of a small pair of army-navy's stepped in front of his face, oversized heavy canvas cargo pants tied into their tops with expert laces. He followed the legs upwards, saw where a tight nylon turtleneck was tucked into a big leather belt, wrapped around a slim woman's torso. He followed the swell of her breasts over the taut stomach, caught her big dark eyes and the soft smile on her lips. It was Cass.